Love Is a Rebellious Bird

by Elayne Klasson

  At first you laughed along with me. “Yeah, I know,” you said. “That was insane. Dropping paper underpants on the beach.” You rolled on the sand, holding me and laughing with me. But then you, who must have had a better grip on reality than I did, looked around and realized that people were watching us, that the conversations around us had stopped. You stood up.

  “Hey,” you said, and reached down and pulled me to my feet. “Let’s go for a walk. We should walk.”

  I look back on that day and I realize how far gone I must have been. Usually I was preoccupied with my appearance, especially so with you. Yet, that afternoon I allowed myself to be pulled from the sand, and as we walked, my nose was still running and snot was dripping into my mouth. Mascara smudged into my eyes. Sand was caked in my hair, on my back, underneath my bathing suit. And I didn’t care about any of it. Instead, I felt euphorically happy that there were no dead bodies on the beach, relieved that no body parts were strewn around us, and that the airplane had not dropped bombs on us that sunny day in Chicago. Most of all, I felt joy that you and I were together again, holding hands, our feet skimming the water’s edge.

  We walked a very long time, traveling back and forth along the entire length of Morse Avenue Beach many times. I felt for you the purest love I had ever felt for another human being. And then, as I looked up and down the beach, I felt this same pure love for every single person sitting or lying or swimming before us. Everyone seemed joined together in the humanity of that beach, everyone trying to get a bit of fresh air, a bit of coolness from the lake that democratically ran north and south along Chicago’s eastern perimeter—there for anyone and everyone in that large, teeming city who wanted it. I wished everyone on that beach would always be as happy as they were that day. I felt grateful to be alive, on that beach, in that city, safe and in love with this man I could only see as flawless.

  That Saturday, we stayed at the beach until very late. The sun had set and we were among the last people left on the sand, but you didn’t want to bring me home until you were sure I was no longer in a hallucinatory state. You did an admirable job of looking after me, especially since you had also put an LSD tab under your own tongue that morning. Somehow, I don’t exactly know how these things work, your responsible self, the boy who had never really had a childhood, but had had to look after himself and then help his mentally ill mother, triumphed over the potent chemical we’d both swallowed.

  The next day, on Sunday, you called to make sure I was okay. Other than a small headache and a bit of a sunburn on my back, I felt fine. I was no longer as euphoric as I’d been when we walked, but neither was I frightened or having flashbacks about the war coming to Chicago. I thanked you for calling, hoped your second week at work would go better than the first.

  We saw each other only once more that summer, two days later on Tuesday when you took me to Burt’s Delicatessen. The restaurant was on a corner near my parents’ brick apartment building and we walked there in the twilight. You had your arm around me protectively again as we walked, treating me as if I was still having a bad trip. We ordered coffee and plates of the lush blueberry pie we both always ordered.

  “You’re really okay?” you asked. “Back to normal?” You peered into my eyes.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m fine, honestly. No flashbacks, or whatever they’re called.”

  Then you took a sip of black coffee and said, “Well I’m getting out of here. Tomorrow. This job at Pine’s Meats, it’s going to make me lose my mind.”

  “How can you leave?” I asked, puzzled.

  “I heard from a friend back at Brown yesterday. He’s a research assistant for the sociology department. He told me that another faculty member in the department needs an assistant. He got a big grant. I called the professor and it’s something really interesting. He’s researching voting patterns in college students. I can help with interviews and then collate data. If he likes my work this summer, the job will continue this fall. Even my dad can’t argue with that, a job for the fall. And doing serious research, something that’ll look good on my record.”

  “Wow, Elliot,” I said. “You did it. You escaped loading frozen meat.”

  “Yeah. Thank God. No more frozen sides of beef,” you agreed and shuddered. “Can you believe my luck?”

  “That’s so great,” I said, and put my hand on yours. Rotten luck for me, was what I was thinking. Not fair. My summer in Chicago suddenly became less exciting. I knew I wasn’t enough to keep you there.

  The next day, wearing my white uniform and thick-soled white shoes, I returned to my job at the psychiatric hospital. My mother had soaked the uniform in baking soda on Saturday while you and I were at the beach, and the stains were almost, but not quite, erased. At first, Mrs. Gideon and I warily avoided each other in the community meeting, circling around one another, finding chairs on opposite sides of the circle. Eventually, however, we sat closer together. I stopped seeing the patients as people different than myself. In all the years I worked as a social worker, I never again told amusing dinner table stories about them.

  5

  Renunciation

  Your fountain pen, its thick nub filled with blue ink, was a lifelong affectation I admired, yet admittedly found pretentious. And until email took the place of paper and pen, I waited for those letters written, savoring each. You wrote infrequently, only a few times a year, but the letters were witty and rambling, each one a thick seven or eight pages that I read and reread. Surprisingly, you also continued to remember my Valentine’s Day–Birthday. I received a present from you every year. You never forgot. They arrived wherever I was living, on or just before February fourteenth. The gifts were never throwaways, didn’t seem to have been bought by a wife or a secretary. They were thoughtful gifts and were, to me, evidence of how thoroughly you knew me and knew what would give me pleasure. Sometimes the parcel contained a book, perhaps a volume of that year’s Nobel prize winner: poetry by Neruda in 1971, a first edition of an early I.B. Singer novel in 1978. Because you knew that I loved monkeys of all sorts, I received several pieces of jewelry with monkey designs, also small monkeys carved in soapstone or wood. Once you sent me a page of the script from a movie you knew I liked, and had had the lead actor sign it. You moved in circles where that sort of thing was possible. I did not and I had it framed.

  I have done a great deal of winnowing down my possessions, but I still keep all of your letters, a half century of them, as well as most of the gifts, even the little monkeys. The letters are stuffed rather inelegantly into several manila folders. Near the letters, there is a wine-colored leather box, about four by six inches, lined in satin and embossed with gold leaf on its top. In that box, I have three pictures. One is a faded newspaper photo. You are sixteen and wear a V-necked sweater and preppy button-down collared shirt. Although the picture was shot in black and white, I still remember that sweater as it was, deep rust colored and very soft. The clipping announces your election as president of the Midwest Region of the American Zionist Youth. You are described as the youngest son of Max and Helen Pine. Reading her name still gives me a pang. The memory of a suicide always does that; it isn’t like reading of someone who died a more timely death. The article lists your accomplishments, a list particularly impressive in one so young. I treasure this picture, the shy and unassuming smile, the serious, dark eyes. How the camera loved you. That photograph is how I always picture you. In the second photo, we are side by side on prom night, high school is nearly over, and we are eighteen. It is almost a year since your mother has been gone, and there is a nascent smile on your face. Your arm is around my waist (so tiny back then). You are wearing a white-jacketed tuxedo, ill-fitting, too big in the shoulders for your narrow frame. It was rented from the neighborhood wedding shop on Lincoln Avenue. The rush before prom made the clerks a bit sloppy. I am a head shorter than you and my gown is lovely—white bodice, with a long black skirt. The matching black and white of your tuxedo and my dress is striking. We are in front of the dr
awn living room drapes at my parents’ apartment. How proud I was that night. I felt like a queen: off to prom with the boy of my dreams, one of the most popular boys in our class, and surely the most handsome. Who could have imagined it? Certainly not me.

  The last picture I keep in that wine-colored box shows us in front of a grimy building far uptown in Manhattan. This time our arms are looped around one another’s shoulders, buddy style. The building is in Washington Heights, where you’d recently moved with your young wife, Laurie. We no longer match as nicely as we had in that prom picture. Once again we have become unavailable to one another. A passerby, maybe a Columbia student, likely took the picture on that sunny July day.

  We were twenty-six. I’d just returned from a wild ride of a journey, going nearly around the world with Seth, my then boyfriend, later husband. You’d recently graduated from Harvard Law and were holed up in a box of an apartment studying for the New York State Bar. We were young, still being formed, but even so, it surprised me when I saw how we had changed from the last time we’d seen one another. Perhaps this is why I needed to record the day, flagging down some stranger to snap our picture with the camera I often wore looped around my neck in those days. By the time that picture was taken on a blistering hot summer in New York, we had changed roles. I was now a world traveler, the collector of adventures, while you spent your days tethered to your desk studying dutifully.

  You can see a lot in that photograph. You are wearing rumpled khakis and need a haircut, and there are bags under your eyes. For once in your life, you look terrible—pale, unsmiling, and haggard. I, on the other hand, am radiant. I wear a long hippie skirt made from the printed Indian fabric we favored back then in clothing and even bedspreads. Over the skirt, I have on an embroidered Indian blouse of the thinnest, sheerest white cotton. The sleeves are rolled up above my elbows and the top buttons opened to reveal the swell of breast of a tanned and healthy woman in her mid-twenties. My dark hair is long and thick then, gathered back to reveal large silver earrings. What is going on here? Why do you look so miserable, while I appear so joyously full of life?

  The answer is that after you’d graduated from Brown, with honors, and been awarded a Fulbright to study in England, you’d returned to your college girlfriend, who’d waited for you. Only one year of comparative freedom before you stepped back on the treadmill of gathering accomplishments. You married Laurie Wasserman just before you started your first year of Harvard Law. Laurie was a serious girl, Jewish of course (you had not yet begun your fascination with sexy blond shiksas). You told me you met in a seminar on French playwrights. You and I read Cyrano de Bergerac together when we were in high school—we’d both loved it. I’d swooned when you’d quoted, a bit loosely, a line from Cyrano: “And what is a kiss? A rosy dot on the ‘i’ of loving.” I wonder if you recited those words to Laurie? I hope not. That was my quote, but it’s a good one and I’d understand the temptation to use it again.

  With several acceptances in hand, you added another jewel to your crown and decided on Harvard Law. Ever a planner, you told me later that you’d researched where clerks to Supreme Court justices attended law school. The vast majority went to Harvard, and that informed your decision. I’d received an invitation to your wedding, but my boyfriend Seth and I were in Los Angeles, working and saving for our travels and I declined, sending a present picked from your and Laurie’s lengthy wedding registry. The wedding sounded as if it had been a splashy affair at the Plaza.

  Even though Laurie came from wealth, for the three years you studied law, Laurie used her degree in museum studies and worked hard to support you. She was employed in the education department of the Boston Museum of Science. You found a flat in Cambridge, and she put in long hours at the museum, riding the T in both directions. As soon as you graduated from Harvard Law, you moved back to New York, to Washington Heights. Laurie again rode packed trains, this time to her job at the Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side. She was a confirmed New Yorker and never liked Boston. The whole time you were at Harvard, she’d lobbied mightily for eventual relocation to New York where she could be close to her family and Zabars and all those other things Manhattanites seem to think they cannot live without. That miserably hot summer, recorded in the photograph kept in that wine-colored leather box, you were spending ten hours a day preparing for the bar and, supposedly, looking for a job in the city. As soon as you opened the door, I saw, even smelled, your unhappiness. The rumpled clothes, the tired eyes, a dingy shirt that had an unwashed odor to it, this was not the Elliot I was used to.

  Now I was passing through New York with Seth. I phoned you and you suggested I come the very next day, a Tuesday afternoon, that fact important as I later discovered. In the stifling heat, I took the subway uptown, then rode the elevator to your twelfth-floor flat. There wasn’t much to see in the neat, sparsely furnished apartment; Laurie was evidently an immaculate housekeeper. You certainly had never been known for your neatness. I noticed a large wedding photo in a silver frame on the coffee table. You and Laurie were at the bottom of a curved stairway, and rising grandly above, one per step, were eight bridesmaids, each dressed identically in a long peach-colored dress. My eye went to the only other sign of Laurie in the place, a peach cardigan of almost the same color as the bridesmaids’ dresses, folded carefully over the sofa arm. Under the window, on the desk where you worked, several large legal volumes were open. It was the only messy corner of the apartment.

  I’d made my way west several years earlier, going to LA for a social work internship. There I met Seth. Although he was a small, compact man, he had the biggest personality in any room. Dazzlingly bright, he wanted to be a doctor. He took his medical school entrance exams and scored high enough to assure a place at a good medical school, but decided that what he really wanted was to see the world. He got a deferment from medical school. Sure, the University of Southern California obligingly said, after seeing his fine test scores, he could take some time off. Travel was a good thing. They’d admit him later. To my astonishment, he asked me to join him.

  Apparently, all one had to do was ask. This was an important lesson I learned from Seth. Sometimes all you have to do is ask. Back then, if it had been me, I would have been so grateful for that letter of admission, I would never have pressed my luck to ask for a deferment. I’d have taken what was offered and been happy with it. Now I’m different. I learned a few things from Seth—as well as from life. Now I ask for special treatment all the time. I humiliate my children in restaurants when I pester the waiters for substitutions even though the menu clearly says, “No Substitutions.” I ask landlords for special favors: new carpets, fresh paint, more towel racks. And, when traveling, I never ever settle for the first hotel room I am shown.

  You took me on a tour of the apartment near Columbia, a very brief tour, showing me the small narrow place you shared with Laurie. I looked out the kitchen window at the view: sooty bricks of the building next door. On the counter, there was a plate with a sandwich on it. A small bag of potato chips and a bunch of grapes were placed neatly with the sandwich, a folded napkin beside the plate. The kitchen was positively scrubbed. There wasn’t even a glass drying next to the sink. I eyed the thick sandwich, made on healthy whole wheat bread.

  “Laurie fixes me lunch every morning before she leaves for work,” you explained when you saw me staring at the plate, then shrugged. You had the unshaved, glassy-eyed look of someone who spent too much time staring at books. Nowadays people look like that when they’ve been staring at a computer screen for too long. “She knows I sometimes forget to eat,” you said.

  “She doesn’t leave it in a Spider-Man lunchbox?” I asked, then realized how I sounded. “Actually,” I added, “it looks delicious. It’s nice that she does that for you, leaves you lunch.”

  You shrugged again. “Take it if you like. I’m not hungry. I’m way too wound up. I’ll make us coffee. Then you tell me about India. And everywhere else you’ve been around the world.”
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  “No, don’t bother,” I said.

  “It’s no bother. I make two pots a day and drink it all myself. Look at this,” you said and held your hands out in front of me, palms down. They had a slight, but perceptible tremor. “I’m a caffeinated wreck. Do you have any idea what the failure rate is for first-time takers of the bar in New York? Thank God, it’ll soon be over.” You closed your eyes and exhaled deeply. “Okay, enough. Tell me about your travels. Please get me out of my own head and this bar exam obsession. And sit down.” You motioned to the couch, removing Laurie’s sweater and putting it on the desk, still carefully folded. “Tell me where you went. Every single place.”

  I sat and ticked off each country with one finger of my right hand. “Let’s see. Fiji. Tahiti. New Zealand. Australia. Indonesia.” Then I went to the left hand and took a breath. “Singapore. Malaysia. Then Thailand. Burma and India. By the way, when we got to India, I picked up the birthday present you sent. I can’t believe you remembered.”

  “The gift made it?” you asked.

  “Yeah. It was waiting at American Express,” I answered. “I take that leather journal everywhere with me. It’s beautiful.”

  “I can’t believe you actually got it. I just took a guess and sent it to Calcutta, hoping you’d catch up to it. Then, after India?”

  “Turkey. We got robbed in Istanbul. Somebody sliced the pockets off the sides of our backpacks.”

  “What?” you asked incredulously.

  “Yeah. Crazy. Didn’t even notice it until we slid the packs off our shoulders,” I said.