Love Is a Rebellious Bird

by Elayne Klasson

  It was agony. I was having trouble breathing. I wanted you so much. I knew I was wet with desire and that I mustn’t let you touch me between my legs. I faced you and stared into your eyes. “What’s going on here?” I asked. “Tell me.”

  It could have turned out differently that afternoon. If you’d said the right words. My imagination was running wild, and seeing you in this sad, sterile apartment, I wanted to believe that you felt what I felt. You might have said, “Judith, we should be together, living the life we’re supposed to be living. I should never have let you go.”

  But, alas, you did not give such an answer, did not tell me that you regretted letting me go. You made no such declarations. If you had, then before rushing downtown for my backpack and sleeping bag, I’d have allowed what the blood pulsing through my chest, head, and the more sexual areas of my body was urging me to do. On the contrary, you didn’t speak at all, but began to kiss me again, holding the back of my head and weaving your fingers lightly through my hair in the way you knew I adored. You gathered my long skirt in your other hand and began to explore beneath it. And I moved away, smoothing the wrinkles from my cool Indian hippie skirt. I knew that nothing was different and that I would regret staying that afternoon. It wasn’t me you wanted, it was diversion. Pushing away from you took every bit of strength I had. Did you know that?

  I walked past the coffee table, and looked again at that wedding picture with the bridesmaids draped down the stairway of the Plaza. Where would we be today if instead of you proposing to your college sweetheart, you’d married me? Would we have been happy together? Laurie could not possibly understand you as I did. The bond you and I had could not be replicated. How would Laurie know what it was like sitting at the dinner table with your mother, her specific sadness as she realized she was forgetting things, yet the graciousness that never slipped from her? Laurie had never even met dear Helen Pine. How could Laurie know the sorrow in you that year after your mother died? The hours we lay together on your narrow bed and spoke about the important things, like why people chose to live or die. How we both wanted our lives to be different from our parents’ lives. Had she seen the way the muscles around your eyes twitch when you try to keep the tears from falling? Or the way you looked as a little boy, when the raw wound of your mother’s illness was exposed by our horrid fifth-grade teacher before you ran from the classroom? No one besides me had that with you.

  I looked out that window of the apartment you shared with Laurie, and I also considered that for three years I’d been joined to another man. We were talking about marriage, even having a baby together. Seth loved babies. I had no doubt that he’d make a stupendous father. He was happily looking forward to having a child, perhaps even more than I was. Was that nothing? Seth was a firecracker, popping and exploding when you least expected it. Hadn’t he taken me to the exotic places I’d dreamed of going? But, as I stared out the window, I doubted whether I’d ever feel for Seth what I felt for you. How sad that made me. Despite Seth’s joyfulness, I never felt at home with him. His happy, unworried face still felt like a stranger’s face to me. He was like the spicy curries I’d tried in Asia. The taste of those curries was jarring and exciting and I was proud that I’d been brave enough to try them, but they were not what I wanted for a lifetime. I looked over at you, your serious face, your intelligent eyes watching me. Your long, lithe sensuality. You were what I always wanted. But I was not at all sure you wanted me, Elliot.

  “It’s no good, Laurie and me,” you said. “Talking about it today has made it more clear. I always get clarity when I talk to you, Judith.”

  “Clarity?” I asked.

  “I was too young. Laurie was too young. The marriage was a mistake. We need to face our mistake and end it before more damage is done. Before we have kids. I see you and what you’ve been doing, and I know my marriage isn’t working. You are so full of life, you shine with it. I want to feel that kind of energy in my life.”

  I wasn’t nearly as brave as you thought. I’d just trailed along with Seth. The backpacks, the mummy sleeping bags that zipped together, the maps of Asia that had been folded and refolded so many times that the creases were beginning to split open—all had been initiated by Seth. I was the sidekick. Sure I’d always dreamed of travel, but if I was honest, I would have admitted that I’d have been more than satisfied to be sharing this apartment in grimy Washington Heights with you, Elliot. I looked more wise than I felt. It was clearly a sorry mismatch—Laurie was a nice, but ordinary girl and I wanted to scream, “Me! You should have chosen me, Elliot!” Yet you gave me no such encouragement.

  During that summer you studied for the bar, you had one foot out the door of your marriage. Yet you stopped short of any declaration to me. And I was smart enough to realize that if I had indeed married you, I might now be your keeper. You’d be chafing and pushing against your confinement with me. If I’d been the one you had chosen, you might well be telling someone else what a mistake you’d made—how the marriage you were in was all wrong. I turned to you, and saw that you were pensively twisting your wedding ring around your finger.

  “Give it time, Elliot,” I said. “Talk to her.”

  “I’ve missed you, Judith,” you said and then came to the window where I stood. “Don’t stay away so long. Let’s always be there for each other. Let’s be in each other’s lives even when we’re old and in a nursing home. Promise me.”

  I leaned up and kissed you. I put all of my love into that kiss, and when I finally took a breath, I said firmly, “I will always be there, even when we’re old. I promise. But right now, I’m going to go. It’s late. I told Seth I’d be back for dinner. And Laurie will be home soon, won’t she?”

  “No, she works late on Tuesdays. I thought I told you when you phoned. Until eight. She has her staff meeting today.” You looked over at me hopefully. “So, you don’t have to leave. You could stay. She won’t be home for hours. We have so much more to catch up on, Judith.”

  “No, you didn’t tell me she worked late.”

  You were miserable and needed me. What a drug that need of yours has always been. But I replayed in my mind what you’d just said: “She works late on Tuesdays. She won’t be home for hours.” You’d invited me to your apartment not on any day, but on a Tuesday, when your wife worked late. As that thought wormed its way into my consciousness, I said to myself, Oh, God. He’s planned this. The part of my brain that had been screaming, Sex! Now! I want sex with this man right now, on the carpet! was replaced by the thought that you’d calculated this afternoon tryst. You’d been so sure that we’d end up in bed together, even after all these years, that you made sure I visited on a Tuesday. Hubris. I pushed away from you stiffly and answered, “I really have to get back. Seth’s waiting for me.”

  We rode down in the elevator in silence. I didn’t second-guess my decision; for once I felt strong and smart. Even though I sensed you watching me, I didn’t turn to you, just stared at the descending numbers of the floors. It was outside your building, as we stood saying goodbye, that I must have stopped someone and handed over my camera to take the picture that I still keep in the wine-colored box. There it is—the sun beginning to set and New York lit up radiantly from behind. Some felt that Manhattan was dirty back then, full of cigarette butts and candy wrappers and worse, but I had come from Calcutta. New York looked pristine, even beautiful. I kissed you, more lightly this time, on the lips, and gave you a little smile.

  “Write me,” I said, my hand on your shoulder. “Tell me how you did on the bar. I know you’ll pass. You’ll do more than pass. You’ll probably clerk for the Supreme Court.”

  “Your eyes. They’re so bright. I’d forgotten.” You gave another pursed smile, a look of regret.

  The afternoon had cooled and the air was so fresh, I could not think of going down into the subway and pushing and being pushed against sweaty bodies heading home after work. Instead, without looking back, for I knew you still stood there watching, I sashayed toward downt
own, walking the nearly fifty blocks to where Seth and I were staying. I had a long stride back then and covered the distance in no time. I ran up the three flights to Seth’s cousin’s apartment. I could hear the party that was already in progress behind the closed door. Wherever Seth was, in Los Angeles, Singapore, Melbourne, a party would soon materialize. Sometimes the parties were unwanted, but that afternoon, I was pleased to hear the merriment inside.

  I put on my best smile when walking through that door. I stood for a moment and watched the people who’d crowded into the apartment: young people sitting on big cushions on the floor, wrapped in embraces, swaying to the music. The stereo was very loud and a haze of marijuana was mixed with the cigarette smoke. Six or seven partiers were dancing in a circle, hands clasped, coming together, and then moving back out again, laughing and carefully avoiding the people sprawled on the floor. Like a folk dance—as if there was a maypole in the center of the living room—they moved together and then apart. A Moody Blues record was playing, and it sounded, indeed, like an English country dance. “Tuesday Afternoon,” the song is called, and I shook my head and laughed because that was the name of the song and it was a Tuesday afternoon. It’s such a lovely song, I can sing it even now.

  Seth sat at the far end of the room, swaying to the music, knees folded akimbo, smiling up at the circle of dancers. When he saw me in the doorway, he quickly stood and came to me, covering my eyes and cheeks and neck lightly with kisses, then kissing me deeply on the mouth.

  “Glad you’re back,” he said. “Have fun?”

  My lips, I realized, were bruised from kissing you earlier in the afternoon. Seth’s kisses were on top of your kisses, and this secret made me feel joyously alive.

  6

  Deceit

  You, Elliot, went on to do great things—ever more impressive things. Across the country in California, I received updates about you. You could never be accused of bragging. Your humility was real and charming. From friends I learned of your accomplishments. When you were chosen chair of the Harvard Law Review, you didn’t even mention it. And the news of your appointment as a clerk to the Supreme Court—working for one of our country’s most widely respected judges—came from my father. He read about it in the Northside Jewish Bulletin. Even my mother was impressed, told me everyone at temple was talking about it and what a shame it was that Helen Pine had not lived to see her son so honored. Later, in another phone call, my mother asked if I’d heard the news about Elliot Pine and his young wife. Someone in the neighborhood had told her they’d gotten a divorce.

  “After only three years,” my mother said, “doesn’t seem like they gave it much effort. But nobody asked me.” She sighed one of her unending sighs.

  “Yes,” I answered. “He told me.”

  “Why a divorce? After only three years.”

  “He said they weren’t a good fit,” I replied, trying to sound casual.

  “Not a good fit,” my mother snorted. “Is a wife a winter coat? That’s the way young people are these days. If something doesn’t work out, just return it to the store—even if it’s a bit used.”

  “Mom,” I tried to explain, “it’s better they found out earlier, rather than later. At least there were no kids.” But my mother’s attitude toward divorce was fixed and unyielding and I gave up.

  I’d have thought that an appointment as clerk to a Supreme Court justice was an honor anyone would recognize. But you wrote me that Laurie hadn’t seen it that way. It had been the final blow to your marriage. She understood what the clerkship would mean to your future, but it was not a future she wanted. Washington, the Supreme Court, politics—her dreams were of a more modest sort, and she resented that her husband had not even discussed the possibility of a move to Washington with her. She angrily said that she’d waited long enough and now she’d hoped to start a family. She wanted to be settled and had imagined giving her parents more grandchildren to share the Hampton weekends with. When she realized that your ambitions were more outsized than the Hamptons, you grew further apart and could not breach the distance. From what I gathered, you separated on friendly terms. Laurie soon found a more suitable husband, an ear, nose, and throat specialist, and started a family.

  You clerked to a Supreme Court justice universally revered as both a scholar and an athlete. When young, this judge had had an illustrious career in basketball. He’d been an All-American in college and, before attending law school, had a brief career playing professional basketball. He was an intellect of the best kind—one with the common touch. Everyone recognized the judge’s name and this glamour and esteem rubbed off on you. You were the subject of a glowing feature in Brown University’s Alumni Magazine, forwarded to me by a friend who’d gone to Brown for graduate school. She remembered that I knew Elliot Pine. Was my interest in you to be permanently recognized by all the people who shared our histories? Or was it simply newsworthy that one of the old crowd had reached such illustrious heights as a clerk at the United States Supreme Court?

  I’ll always remember one story you told me about this judge, a story that you were inordinately delighted by, and simply could not keep to yourself. During your final interview for the clerkship, the judge demonstrated an interesting vetting process. A moment or two after you entered his august chambers, the judge glanced up from his papers. He took off his reading glasses, looking you up and down.

  “Son, you’ve got some serious height on you,” the judge said. “What’s your shoe size?”

  You were completely baffled by this question but managed to respond. “Twelve medium, sir.”

  “Good. Now go ask my secretary for some shoes and get rid of the tie and coat. I’ll meet you at the court. Let’s see what you can do.”

  You became even more confused and your face must have reflected this.

  “Young man, I am not talking about the Court with a capital C. I mean the highest court in the land, the basketball court at the top of this building. Betty will direct you. You look like a person who knows his way around a basketball court. Am I correct? Good. I’ll see you up there in ten minutes.” And the judge stood, peeled the black robe from his lanky frame, and hung it on a clothes tree behind his desk. Then he kneeled to unlace his wingtips.

  You walked back out to the reception area and were shown a closet stacked with boxes of new or nearly new sneakers in almost every size, up to and including fifteens. Betty took your jacket and tie, newly bought for the interview, and hung them in another closet. She walked you out to the corridor and pointed you toward a stairway.

  “Go up three flights and make a left. Then out the door. You’ll see the court. I’ll let the security guard know you’re coming, so you can warm up before the judge gets there.” She’d raised her eyebrows and looked at you significantly. “You’d better hurry. He never needs warming up.”

  The judge, who was at least thirty years your senior, ran you ragged around the court. You said you soaked through your new white dress shirt, but when you snuck a look over to the judge, you saw that the gray-haired man had not even broken a sweat.

  “Thank God,” you said, “for the hours of hoops my brothers and I shot in the alley behind the apartment. And those endless defense sessions our asshole coach in high school put us through, because I must have held my own. After twenty minutes of brutal one-on-one, the judge finally scooped up the ball. ‘Okay, Pine, you’ll do.’”

  “I swear, Rocket,” you told me later, with your usual modesty, “until I received the official letter on Supreme Court stationery, I didn’t know which court he meant that I’d do on—the basketball or the Supreme. He never even asked about my résumé. Not one question. Only my shoe size.”

  The judge meant both courts. Long days of research and legal analysis, broken up by lunch hours filled with intensely competitive basketball games. You clerked for the scholar-athlete for four years, and he grew fond of you, though not as fond as you were of him. Afterward, you were in demand by top law firms all around the country. You became
an associate with one of the most prominent practices in New York—a large firm with clients around the globe. Soon, because of decisions you’d researched while working for the Supreme Court, you became a specialist in antitrust law. You told me you did nothing but work, barely sleeping; that was the way with new associates—they were expected to be workhorses. Once the new hires put in their time, it would be worth it, you were told. But that hardly mattered—you loved the work and the intensity. You loved the adrenalin rush you got knowing the importance of the cases you worked on.

  By then, Seth and I had settled back in Los Angeles. We had a small wedding, families and just a few close friends, and Seth finally began medical school. He traveled to Watts each day, to the University of Southern California, while I worked as a social worker at a private psychiatric hospital in Westwood. We rented a little bungalow in Echo Park, and each night, after our exhausting commutes on the LA freeways, I cooked us dinner. We ate at a table we’d made from a door rescued from a construction site, then sanded and painted a bright orange. We lived on memories of our around-the-world travels. We tried to hang on to those memories of when we’d been unencumbered by jobs and schedules and each day had been an exotic surprise, but spoke of that time only to each other, as we’d learned the painful lesson of returned travelers. Unless they’ve been there themselves, nobody really wants to listen to other people’s travel stories. If they haven’t themselves traveled, the exotic stories, even the pictures, will be met with uninterested silence. If they have traveled, they’ll wonder why it takes you so long to finish your story, wanting instead to chime in with their own experiences. In those early years, Seth and my shared bond of our grand overseas adventure was instrumental in keeping us together. Late at night, after he finished studying and I’d cleaned the kitchen, we’d lay in the dark, remembering with wonder how we floated down the Rewa River in Micronesia or hitchhiked between jungle villages in Malaysia. We remembered the beautiful sleeping woman who guarded tea plants from marauding monkeys. We talked to remind ourselves that it had truly happened. It was real. We’d done these things together.