Longing

by Espinosa, Maria

They sank down on a bench under the shade of some trees. The sky shone pale blue; the sun was almost white and cast a painful glare. Heinrich was reddish—cast with a yellow glow—in the sunlight.

  Brightly clothed children played kickball on the grass nearby. Accordion music wafted through the air, along with the children’s sounds. People walked by; some lay on the grass; here and there lay a couple entwined in a close embrace.

  “I’m worried about Jesse,” she said. “His father has not been able to accept what has happened.”

  “Damn!” said Heinrich. “What an idiot your son is! Jesse is experimenting. He wants to shock you. A lot of boys go through this in the Army or Navy. They just don’t talk about it.”

  This comforted her a little.

  “It doesn’t upset me nearly as much as it does Aaron,” she said. “Perhaps it should bother me more than it does. But Aaron is terribly upset. In all these months, he has not been able to bring himself to talk to Jesse about it, and I know he won’t.”

  “Do you want me to talk to Jesse?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. What good will it do?”

  “If you want me to, I will.”

  “No,” she said. “I think it’s best that Aaron talk to him. I will tell him that he must. . . . But Antonio may have already talked with Jesse. . . . How could Antonio resist? Sex is the subject he loves best to talk about,” she said with a sigh. “Would you like to meet him? I wish you would.”

  “Are you involved with Antonio?”

  “No, of course not.”

  He grasped her face in his hand. “Eleanor, don’t lie to me. What happened between the two of you?”

  “Whatever do you mean?” She was shocked. Before she could stop herself, she murmured, “How did you know?” All the energy with which she had maintained deception upon deception for so long seemed to leave her. She felt empty, hollow.

  Intense sadness came over Heinrich. She immediately regretted that she had not denied his accusation. He had not been sure. He had merely been grasping at a straw.

  Far off, the pond at the edge of the park glimmered like dark glass on this hot, windless day. Heinrich’s face was shiny with sweat. He looked so sad. She began weeping. It was a relief to let the tears flow at last. It was a relief not to pretend any longer.

  He sat beside her, a heavy, tall man in his well-cut summer jacket, his impeccably polished British shoes. His face was shiny with rivulets of sweat, which also stained the armpits of her grey silk dress. She dabbed at beads of moisture above her lips with her handkerchief, which was scented with the violet fragrance her mother used to wear.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Understanding brings compassion, she thought. He will understand. He will be compassionate. He will forgive me. Someone will forgive me.

  As she spoke, he stared ahead at the grass, at the feet of people passing by.

  “Can you still love me?” she asked.

  “Goddamn . . . Eleanor, you’re so much a part of me. But it is impossible for us to remain lovers.”

  “How I wish I could undo it all.”

  “My God, Eleanor, it’s one thing to betray Aaron and me, but something else entirely to betray your own daughter! You’re rotten through and through. Rotten.”

  Her head began throbbing. She felt peculiar, as if she would lose her balance. She must have fainted then, because she opened her eyes to find that he was wiping her face with a cold, wet handkerchief.

  “Sit up,” he said.

  Afterwards she walked blindly along the street, her face bloodless, clutching at her purse, faint with the intense summer heat.

  Aaron, Antonio, and Heinrich fused into a shadowy mass in her mind, bearing down on her, suffocating her.

  Even before Rosa was born, Eleanor had feared her. Before Rosa’s birth, Eleanor dreamed of a doll stuffed with straw that caught fire. Of a china doll which fell out of a cupboard onto the floor, splitting open its head and spewing out marble eyes. Of small children on a beach, and one child sitting apart from the others, who would not speak with her.

  Perhaps, as Rosa would say, it was explicable in terms of some karmic retribution.

  While she cursed Rosa, at the same time she wept over her daughter. She mourned the companionship they’d never had, and which she feared that now they never would.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Howard returned from Antioch. He was a stocky, taciturn youth of twenty. He knew that Jesse had taken a boy as a lover and thought back guiltily to certain sexual explorations he and Jesse had made years ago, when he was thirteen and Jesse eleven. He himself had initiated them. But now he was going with Louisa, and they were engaged to be married. He did not know what to say to Jesse. He did not know what to say to anyone, nor did he particularly want to speak at length with them. He kept much to himself. He found a temporary job doing maintenance at a nearby golf course. In three weeks he was going south to work for civil rights in Georgia. When he was home, he stayed in the tiny maid’s room where he had chosen to sleep ever since he was thirteen and a half. Before that he had shared Jesse’s room. On his stereo in the attic he played Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Canned Heat.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  In mid-June Eleanor decided to give a dinner party so that Antonio and Senñor Torres could get to know each other and so that he could meet several of her friends, heedless of the fact that by this time the house was like a mass of inflammable gas ready to burst into flames.

  As she was in the front hall arranging daisies at five o’clock on the afternoon of the party, Jesse clattered down the stairs, rudely interrupting her meditations. As if he were expressly trying to aggravate her, he was wearing a black satin yarmulkah over his unruly hair, which hung nearly to his shoulders.

  “I’m off to the service, Mom,” he said.

  He had grown taller, it seemed to her, in the last few months. He was nearly six feet, as tall as Howard. He had grown a slight beard. He wore a tan summer jacket and dark trousers.

  “But my dinner party!” she cried. “You’ll miss my party!”

  “I told you about this weeks ago. Linda wants me to meet her parents first, so we’re having dinner there.”

  “But it’s so early! You’ll miss my party. You can’t go!”

  “I told you weeks ago, Mom.”

  It seemed to him that she would have preferred he go to an Episcopalian Church with Nick or to an all-night steam bath. He chuckled to himself at the thought. An Episcopalian priest in the all-night steam bath. Fucked in the ass by a succession of young, middle-aged, and elderly men. He could sing Christmas carols in the midst of it all. A priest of the best family.

  “I do wish you’d get your hair cut. Also, you have neglected to shave.”

  He grinned. “I just did shave. You really don’t want me to go to the synagogue, do you?”

  Outside a car honked. Eleanor looked through the filmy curtains and saw a green Pontiac and a girl’s dim profile in the driver’s seat.

  “I’ve got to go now, Mom.” He squeezed her hand, slammed the front door behind him, and ran with long strides to the car where Linda waited.

  An enormous heaviness descended into her chest and stomach. Unsought images crept into her mind. Black garden snakes. A gleaming and entirely naked woman entwined with snakes, glistening dark against her white skin. It was as though she were dreaming while awake. The white oval petals, yellow stamen inside the glistening vase.

  She thought of the Jewish girls she’d known when she was twelve or thirteen, daughters of relatives or friends of her parents. Physically she was different from them—most were dark, with close-set features. Above all, they possessed a hardness she lacked, an exactitude in their perceptions and judgments that was alien to her, with her mystical yearnings, her sense of poetry. There seemed something gross about them.

  She felt closer to girls at boarding school, where she was the only Jewish student. How odd to be classified as such when she did not feel Jewish at all, knew nearly nothing at all
about the religion, and had never been in a synagogue or temple in her life.

  Eleanor had invited her old friend, Joseph Gardiner, who taught Latin literature at Athenium and who shared her passion for roses. She also invited her friend Melanie, whom she had known ever since the children’s nursery school days, as well as Donald Jarrell, a playwright who lived in Manhattan. They all gathered on the terrace that adjoined the back garden. The air was heavy with the perfume of flowers, with the scents of damp earth, grass, birds, and insects. Every so often they would hear the drone of an airplane. A jet outlined white circles in the pale sky.

  Señor and Señora Torres, who came from Barcelona, were both small, dark, elegant, and formal in their manner. Constrictive people, thought Antonio with a flash of anger. Señor Torres reminded him of the man who fired him from his job in Santiago as chief editor of La Nación.

  Joseph Gardiner and Donald Jarrell discussed a writer they both knew in ironic, mocking tones. To Antonio their voices seemed effeminate.

  Melanie arrived late, a little breathless. She was a tall, slender woman with ash blonde hair who had been born in the South. She explained that she’d had to drive her husband to the airport as he was on his way to a business conference.

  To Antonio nothing any longer seemed clear or rational. They were all crazy and neurotic in this family. They were all intent on destroying him. The job at the college was small compensation for the loss of his manhood. They would take that away and hand him this job instead. A few dollars. A few crumbs. This strange North America. This land of suburbs, cars, freeways, congestion, shopping centers. Manhattan with its millions of people packed like vicious rats, its foul smells, its nervous insanity.

  The incredible naiveté of Americans. Their lack of polish. Lack of something he could not define. He had never been so isolated. Never felt so powerless.

  His nerves were raw. Nothing made sense any longer. Only the liquor calmed his nerves. Good liquor, because the Bernsteins could afford the best. That con Aaron complained that he drank too much. That it cost too much. It cost him far less than were Rosa to live here alone with the baby. Within three months she would be reduced to total hysteria; she would be back in a mental asylum, under the pressures of the craziness around her. How would Aaron like to pay the bills of a mental asylum as well as those of a nursemaid for Isabel? (Eleanor would be far too preoccupied to care for her.) Aaron was a mythomaniac. As for Eleanor, she was a provincial snob. Poor Rosa. She reacted! That was all. He hated her, too, but he would not leave her. He was not a coward.

  They were all attempting to fit him into a mold, make him into a gentle professor, a writer of castrated thoughts and emotions. Aaron would rejoice at the mutilation. No, Aaron would be satisfied with nothing less than his ruination.

  The guests talked and laughed and drank and munched hors d’oeuvres, caviar, and sour cream on crackers.

  He fingered the dark grey suit from Brooks Brothers that Eleanor had bought him. He felt ill at ease in it. He had never worn a summer suit of such thin material, so easy to tear.

  “Whatever happened to Francisco and Jorge?” asked Eleanor, tugging at Antonio’s sleeve.

  “I heard from them once after they left for Switzerland,” he said. “I saved Francisco’s life. Then I never heard from them again.”

  “How strange.”

  “Not strange at all. People prefer to forget the terrible Antonio after he’s helped them.”

  They were speaking in French, as they always did whenever they were alone or with Rosa.

  Rosa was on the lawn in a white dress, playing with the baby.

  Suddenly he left Eleanor and swooped down on them. “It’s too late,” he said to Rosa. “Isabel should be in bed. This is all too much excitement for her. Take her inside! Now! Immediately!”

  His voice was so excited, so angry that the Torres glanced at each other and moved ever so slightly closer together. Howard, who was passing a tray of hors d’oeuvres, looked at him with consternation. Howard is a cynic who has closed off his heart, thought Antonio.

  The baby was whimpering. Rosa soothed her, rocked her in her arms, as she went inside with her.

  Donald said, “Howard, is it true you’re going to work with the SNCC?”

  “Yes,” said Howard. “I’m flying down to Atlanta next week.”

  “How idealistic,” said Donald with a horrible tone of mockery. Instantly Antonio’s sympathies flew to Howard. He was not a cynic after all. Antonio had learned something about the SNCC from reading The New York Times, imperfectly as he understood it.

  “But soon there will be a war between the whites and the blacks. You will see,” said Antonio.

  Melanie, who came from North Carolina, said, “What do you mean, Antonio?”

  “I mean that the blacks they are very angry. They hate the whites. They have been . . . how do you say . . . underneath too long. . . .” His face contorted with effort as he struggled to find the English words. “I see here . . . how you treat the blacks . . . is that you do not treat them like the human beings. . . .” His voice rose in rage. “In South America is different. . . .” His voice softened, his features took on a dreamy, almost blissful cast. “In Brazil . . . is so beautiful there. Everyone he is a different color. A Negro girl with the blonde hairs and the green eyes is not extraordinary. A softness about the people we have in South America. Is that we see the human being. . . . Like you North Americans . . . is that you do not see the Vietnamese as the human beings . . . in the war. . . .”

  “You could go to California,” said Donald. “And join the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley.”

  “Is wonderful the students they are finally to recognize that the United States it is a dictatorship,” said Antonio.

  “Yes, perhaps a dictatorship. But a liberal one that I can live with,” said Donald.

  Melanie sipped her drink and looked thoughtful. She was wearing a flowing light-colored dress. “Tell me,” she said. “How did you make this paella we’re going to eat tonight? I caught a glimpse of it in the kitchen before Eleanor shooed me out.”

  “Paella,” said Antonio. “Now that is more important than our philosophies. You cannot eat the philosophies.”

  “Ah, but seriously,” said Joseph, coming up to them. “I overheard you talking about Vietnam. Several of my students have registered as conscientious objectors.” His face lit up in a smile. “We are concerned about the Vietnamese. Some of us, at least, do see them as human beings.”

  “Or is that they do not want to be killed fighting an old man’s war,” said Antonio with a rude laugh. “Is the old men, the old generals always who make the wars. Eisenhower he was a general himself, and still he warned that the United States it is becoming a military industrial complex.”

  A look of anxiety passed over Señor Torres’ face. Eleanor led him off to see her roses before it grew entirely dark, while Antonio continued to hold forth about Vietnam, Eisenhower, and his paella.

  Aaron came out of the studio and Rosa from the house. They all sat down at the white wrought iron table. It was beginning to grow dark, and Eleanor had lit candles.

  Antonio served the paella, which he had cooked, consisting of fragrant saffron rice, lobster, clams still in their shells, bits of chicken and shrimp, with a garnish of parsley. It was, he thought, a masterpiece. He had also cooked corn on the cob. Eleanor made the salad and a German chocolate cake, as well as mixed fruit, for dessert.

  While there was still some daylight, the candles on the table glowed and flickered over everyone’s faces. Señor Torres had a small, selfish mouth, Antonio thought, and very dark eyes that expressed hostility. He resented the free thing inside Antonio that nothing could char or break. As for Señora Torres, she, like her husband, was repressed. Her nose was beak-like, her lips long and thin, even languorous, and her eyes were pure South American Indian. She was dressed in a pink flowered linen suit, white shoes, and white earrings and beads which set off the darkness of her skin.

  They co
ntinued to talk about Vietnam, but then Donald began talking to Señor Torres about South American poetry. He said, “I met Pablo Neruda at a party last February . . . a most entertaining fellow.”

  “He gave a lecture at Athenium,” said Señor Torres.

  Antonio asked, “Do you read Spanish, Donald? Eleanor, she has shown you El Sueño de Manuel?”

  “I barely read Spanish at all, my dear fellow,” said Donald. “But I did glance through your novella.” Again his voice was filled with an undertone of contempt. “I saw it was published some time ago . . . I’ve never heard of that particular house.”

  “Many small publishers there are in Santiago,” said Antonio. “My novella it is the talk of the city when it came out. . . . Is I am considered . . . how you say . . . a leader . . . el jefe . . . of the writers of the ficción in my generation. Neruda, he himself write an excellent critique of the novella in El Mercurio.” Antonio’s voice took on a harsh, insistent intensity. “Eleanor she tell me you have a great influence on the New York publishers because you write many plays that are realizados. If you like the book, maybe he will publish, is not the truth?”

  “Oh, Eleanor exaggerates. I don’t have nearly that much influence,” said Donald. His amused, cynical voice set Antonio more on edge. “Besides I’m terribly busy. I’m going off to Czechoslovakia in two weeks.”

  The talk swerved to other things: to the New York Philharmonic, to Jesse’s piano teacher, to Aaron’s Competition and the model for it he’d just completed.

  “Aaron, you serve the people more paella now,” Antonio said.

  Rosa flinched. He spoke so rudely to her father.

  Aaron, subservient in a way which horrified her, began to serve second helpings.

  When he had finished, Antonio demanded that Aaron go inside to refill the water pitcher. “You go now!” he said, his voice rising to a shout.

  Without reflection, Rosa cried out, “Don’t shout at him like that!”

  He slapped her.

  In a flash Aaron was upon him and was throttling his neck.