Deeply shaken, Rosa abandoned the idea of auditioning anywhere. She returned to college. Her parents were enthusiastic about her academic courses, and Rosa felt she had returned to the “real” world, dreary though it was.
They walked past the movie theater, where she waited in line so often as a child at the Saturday matinees. Strange, she thought, that her father should not want her to be a dancer when he himself was in a field so closely allied.
Her father seemed to prohibit certain thoughts, certain feelings, and she struggled now to think them and go beyond the barriers. Only a narrow spectrum was permitted her. It was the electricity around him, a bristling charge of electricity. High tension wires seemed to emerge from him and gird her in a structure, as if she were one of his sculptural creations. She had not even realized it was there when she was younger.
The streets shimmered with heat. Rosa and Aaron were almost the only ones walking. An occasional car drove by. The pavement was hot beneath her thin-soled sandals. Heat waves rose from the street as they walked past the stationery store, the pizzeria, the post office, the laundromat, the Italian bakery. The aroma of fresh-baked bread filled the air. She remembered the huge old-fashioned ovens inside the bakery. An elderly black woman in a cotton housedress shuffled past. Rosa knew practically no one in the town except for the storekeepers, despite having lived here since she was six years old. Her father liked the isolation and had many friends in the City, at the university. Rosa had long ago lost touch with her friends from elementary grades, as after the age of ten she’d been sent to a private school in another suburb, as had her brothers.
They passed the Mobil and Sunoco gas stations and a Chevrolet showroom. The sky was pale, almost white with heat. Isabel awakened and began to whimper. Rosa gently wiped off beads of perspiration from the baby’s skin with a clean diaper.
They reached the Silver Dollar Diner. The waitress, a plump girl with flushed skin and blonde curls, said, “Hi, Mr. Bernstein.” The diner stood in the center of a new shopping complex. Where it had formerly been surrounded by a vacant grassy lot, there was now a drycleaning plant, a beauty salon, a supermarket, and frail, newly planted trees.
The diner itself had been remodeled. She recalled it as dingy with a huge ceiling fan. Now it was painted peach and tan, with glossy orange tiles and built-in air conditioning. But the same pies, cakes, and wilted fruit salad appeared behind glass cases.
Aaron ordered a hamburger, apricot pie, and coffee. She ordered warm milk for the baby’s bottle, which she’d brought with her wrapped in a plastic bag, and a root beer for herself.
“That’s all you’re having?”
“I’m not hungry, Dad.”
“Antonio says he’s looking at a Corvette this afternoon,” said her father, his voice rough with repressed anger.
“You said you’d buy him one, right?” said Rosa. She was disappointed in him for giving in to Antonio. She and Antonio could get along without a car. She hated to take money from her parents. (But when she had tried to dissuade Antonio, to reason with him, he had not listened to her at all; he had only grown furious.)
“I said I’d contribute up to $1,000,” said her father.
Rosa wanted to scream out, Don’t be a fool, Dad. Don’t give him a car. He’s milking you, Dad, he hates you. He hates me. He adores my mother, your wife.
The words stuck in her throat. She felt paralyzed. To speak in this way would be disloyal to Antonio.
She was able to say, as she had several times before, “I think he ought to study English before he teaches. There’s a crash program for foreigners at Columbia.”
“He ought to find a job,” said her father.
Again she wanted to scream. Just last night she’d pleaded with Antonio to postpone the teaching job until fall, to forget about the car right now, to take the English course at Columbia, but he would not listen to her. He only became enraged.
Were her parents fools or sadists? Couldn’t they hear how awkwardly he spoke English, with his thick accent?
Were they all deaf and blind, or was she the crazy one? Crazy like Cassandra in the ancient myths?
“When Antonio begins teaching and buys a car—let’s see, summer school begins in three weeks—you and he ought to move into your own place,” said her father. “There are apartments and houses for rent near the university.”
“But what will we do in the fall?”
“If he works out, chances are he’ll be kept on.”
She held Isabel in her lap. “It was good of you to get him that job.”
“Not at all.” He moved the salt cellar from the side to the center of the formica table top. He was extremely uneasy, she reflected, with Antonio, and he wanted to be rid of him. He must be uneasy about the relationship between Antonio and her mother.
So warm and soft, so comforting her child was. The baby’s forehead was damp with sweat. She pushed fine locks of hair away from Isabel’s forehead and held the bottle to her mouth. Her father watched as the baby sucked avidly. “How beautiful she is,” he said. “You’re a good mother.”
Rosa was thankful that he loved the baby.
He ate his hamburger with lettuce and tomato on the side. A few businessmen and high school kids were lunching here. Sharp New York accents cut the air. She’d almost forgotten how they sounded. The town seemed more alien to her than Paris. She belonged nowhere.
Panic arose, engulfed her, and she grew sick with dread that unless she returned home soon—at once—something terrible might happen to her, the baby, or Antonio. She pushed the root beer aside. Isabel had nearly finished her bottle.
“Excuse me, Dad, I have to get back.”
“What do you have to do?”
“Oh, I have to make a phone call about the library job,” she lied. “They’re expecting me to call around this time.”
“You’d better go then.”
She rose from the table, put Isabel in the stroller with her bottle, and left.
An impulse made her stop at the Shamrock Bar & Grill on her way home. Antonio and her mother were at a table in the corner. She smiled and waved at them.
“Hey miss, you can’t bring children in here,” the bartender said.
Antonio came over, “Excuse me, Sir, is only for a second,” he said. “Is my wife.”
“Oh, she’s your wife, Antonio!” The bartender clapped his arm around Antonio’s shoulder. “He’s been trying to persuade me to build an outdoor terrace.”
“Is very chic a terrace—like Paris,” said Antonio. “Is that the people come to enjoy. Is elegant.”
The bartender said, “I’ll put you in the restaurant section and hope no cops come in. What would you like?” he asked Rosa. “It’s on the house.”
Antonio always began by charming people, Rosa reflected, but then the troubles began. “Come,” said Eleanor, “Have just one drink, my dear.” Her mother seemed enormously animated.
He nourishes her, thought Rosa. If only he can make her happy, then I have no right to keep them apart. In her memories her mother was always sad, haunted, dreamy, and Rosa felt that she herself was somehow the cause of that sadness, that she continually failed her mother. Even as a small child of three or four she had felt a heavy sense of responsibility for her mother’s unhappiness. Indeed, she had no right to keep them apart. She was in debt to her mother. Antonio was paying off her debt.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Aaron always felt he was late for something he could not define. No matter how much he accomplished, he felt it wasn’t enough, that he needed to work harder, accomplish more. Whenever he was with an attractive woman, he was aroused by her in a way that seemed acceptable for a young man but not for one of his age and social position. The breasts and thighs and buttocks of women. Their softness. Kneading clay sometimes felt like kneading flesh. Women’s fragrances. Their personal enticements.
But beyond that lay fear. He did not allow himself to acknowledge that the flesh of men and boys also stirred him. That frig
htened him. He froze. He became scared of his own sensations. As a consequence, not only did his sensations freeze, but the impulses, thoughts, and emotions surrounding them froze up.
To others he often seemed vaguely ashamed of something, vaguely embarrassed, and always brusque.
Aaron watched the students in his evening Advanced Sculpture class. The room was long and narrow with bright overhead fluorescent lights that blazed down on the fifteen students who worked at individual modeling stands or at the long table in back, except for Melissa, who was doing a large study in red clay of two women that she was building up directly from a wooden platform.
They were so absorbed. Less than half the students were new. The others repeated his class as many times as they could, because Aaron was a remarkable teacher. His intense interest in their work ignited whatever talent they possessed. He had taught at Athenium University on Mondays and Fridays for the last eighteen years.
In the back of the room Sheila seemed to be having some difficulty with the torso she was modeling out of grey clay. He went over to her. Her wavy reddish blonde hair brushed against him. He was aware of her upturned Irish nose, her freckled skin, very soft to the touch, the tight jersey that covered her large breasts with their tiny nipples, the swell of her hips against her jeans. Some evening if he were very tired, if his vigilant control lapsed, he might brush against her in such a way as not to be condoned in a person of the same sex. With a woman it was all right. It had happened before and would happen again. She might blush; she might move aside. Both could pretend it had not happened, or the incident might be merely the prelude to yet another affair.
“The body,” he said to her, “is rough. See how the breasts and belly have a nice large-grained texture. But as soon as you reach the neck, you make everything too smooth. The face is all smooth. The features don’t go with the rest of it. I’ll show you what I mean. . . .” Swiftly, deftly he worked on one side of the neck up through the jaw bone. “See.” When he sensed that she had absorbed as much as she could, he moved on.
As he slowly circled the room, quietly, almost merging with his students in their efforts, his presence seemed to magnetize them all into working with more force, more concentration than they had deemed possible. He gave out enormous currents of energy.
“Mr. Bernstein,” said Jerry, who had taken his class for the last two years. “Something is not right with this.” He gestured to the head he was working on. Jerry, an ex-G.I. who had served in Korea, was thin and nervous with traces of acne. Aaron had obtained an apprenticeship for him with the sculptor Hovnar for the coming summer.
“Ah yes. Actually, it’s coming along quite well, Jerry,” he said, examining it. The head was of Sheila, who posed for them last Monday. “What is off is the set of the cheekbones. Take another look at her. You’ve got the lips just right. Lips are subtle.”
He noticed how Jerry’s own lips compressed with tension. A freeze in his thoughts. Fear. Unbidden images. Last week in Manhattan, just after visiting an exhibition of a friend’s work, to kill time and to clear his mind, Aaron had gone to a cheap movie on 42nd Street. A Western of no memorable qualities except that it helped him to free his mind for the International Competition.
After the movie he’d gone to the men’s room. He pissed in a urinal, and then as he bent over a rust-stained faucet to wash his hands, he felt the unmistakable sensation of someone pressed against him with an erection. He straightened and turned to see a young, athletic man with a crewcut and cold dark eyes, a sensitive mouth. He remembered the coldness of those eyes, which conflicted with the quality of the mouth. There was no one else in the room at the time. He remembered the man’s softly muttered proposition. Aaron had an impulse to hit him right in the mouth, a good hard jab to break the jaw. Another opposite impulse, more fleeting, of an enormous penis inside his own mouth inside a shabby, dark hotel room.
Antonio sensed all this. Antonio stripped off all Aaron’s veils with a mere glance. Antonio hated him.
The memory of the way Eleanor’s face lit up whenever she was with Antonio disturbed him. Yet he felt enormous guilt with regard to her. He and Eleanor each had lovers over the years, but they never spoke directly to each other about their affairs. If an interrogator had pressed Aaron, he would have said his wife needed Heinrich and that she needed the other relationships she had. When she was nurtured, he benefitted. Pressed further, he might have admitted in a daze that they had a silent contract: she was not to threaten him professionally in any way. She put aside the poems she scribbled; she never typed them up. She stored in the warehouse of her memory the dreams she once had. She did everything within her power to help him with his work. He in turn was fiercely loyal to her. He was blind to how she encroached on his manhood and his belief in himself. He thought he understood her as no one else in the world did. Perhaps this was so.
Again came the image of hitting a mouth which became Antonio’s, then Antonio’s face, Antonio’s body, until it was pulverized into a bloody, broken mass.
Antonio’s substance slipped away like quicksilver. How could Antonio possibly work as a writer or photographer when he seemed to give himself entirely away with each gesture, each action, at every instant?
Antonio continually seemed to be mocking him. There was something diabolic in the man, something that could smash all of Aaron’s hard work, effort, sacrifice to shards.
Antonio made no sense.
Antonio made far too much sense.
Antonio reduced things to absurdities.
Antonio hinted at truths Aaron didn’t want to hear.
Antonio played the fool.
Antonio indulged in self-pity.
For an instant he himself pitied Antonio, because with part of his brain he knew that in the struggle between the two of them, he, Aaron, would win.
His focus returned to the class. The students were working with such concentration. He glanced at the clock—nearly nine-thirty. The minute hand seemed to move so slowly. He felt unusually tired.
In the back of the room Luigi chiseled at a mass of limestone about the size of a football. He was a large, good-natured man, older than the others, who had a career in the Army until he resigned just a few months ago, upon learning he was about to be shipped to Vietnam. Luigi had been stationed at Mitchell Army Base near the university and now worked as a cab driver. He had little experience in sculpture, not really enough for this advanced class, but he had an enormous desire to succeed at the work. “Is there any hope for me?” he asked Aaron. “I’m thirty-seven. I’m starting so late.”
Aaron reassured him that some of the best sculptors and painters began working later in life.
But Aaron himself had drawn and sculpted as long as he could remember. When he was a child it had been intensely pleasurable for him to make forms out of clay. Later he worked with stone. The visual aspect of things seemed to contain the secret core of reality. Drawing, sculpting, painting was how he made sense of the universe. He could not understand how it was that everyone else did not share this passion.
So tired. Antonio’s mocking laughter.
Unbidden recurred the image of the young man in the 42nd Street movie theater. Jesse enjoyed such acts. Ugly. Jesse, his own son, a fag.
Aaron’s lips curled in disgust. His heart beat more rapidly. Just the other day he’d read in the New York Times about a mutilation on the subway.
He ought to warn Jesse, but he could not bring himself to confront him.
Why couldn’t he speak directly to his own son? Why not? Yesterday evening, when he found himself alone with Jesse after dinner, why had he talked on and on about Egyptian architecture under Ramses III?
Aaron thought of the long silences between him and his own father many years ago, when at nineteen, Aaron decided to leave the University of Chicago and become a sculptor.
He had always been afraid of his father. Shy, self-conscious, introverted, Aaron had been small for his age while he was growing up. During high school, he had stuck w
ith a few close friends.
In the August heat Aaron would sit with his father, Saul, on the screened-in porch in Forest Lawn. His father, a highly respected businessman, portly, greying, with a ruddy complexion and blue eyes, was taciturn by nature. They would rock back and forth on the large white grilled bench which was suspended from the ceiling, and they would sip iced tea. The silence would grow more and more intense. Aaron wanted to tell Saul about his hopes, his fears, his dreams; yet whenever he tried to speak, he was paralyzed. Mountains of unspoken thoughts and feelings pressed in on him. His father could never understand. There was such a gulf between them.
His mother, Miriam, would come to their rescue. “What! Aren’t you two talking?” she would ask, flinging her skirt up slightly because of the heat, adjusting its folds over her legs, fanning herself with a magazine. In middle age her hair remained vividly and naturally black. She wore bright red lipstick and a pastel summer dress.
Miriam persuaded Saul to accept their son’s vocation.
He should talk to Jesse, but he could not bring himself to. Jesse should not wave his sexual preferences like a flag, with no concern for the passions and prejudices of others. Jesse could apparently break taboos so lightly, without the flicker of an eyelash.
In the corner, Melissa was building up wet clay from the central mass very carefully, just as he had instructed her. How beautiful she was with her long glossy dark hair, her large black eyes, the olive sheen of her skin. A more polished and confident version of Rosa. It troubled him, too, to think of Rosa. He did not understand her, and the part of her that he did not understand enraged him.
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