I laugh, but George waves a finger. “This was no laughing matter to this kid. He reported it to our minister, and I had to answer for it. Which I also”—he grimaces—“chose to do while high.” He stops speaking, then looks at me apologetically. “That wasn’t exactly a light answer, was it? I’m sorry.” He hesitates. “I think it’s probably right that I talk about all this, though, because this is the heaviest part of my life. And you may as well see it now. I hope it doesn’t freak you out. But if it does, I understand.”
I watch him. “So far, so good.”
George slips a hand into my ponytail, his fingers slowly juggling curls. He slides his hand higher and softly kneads the back of my scalp.
“Now for my serious worst thing,” he says.
“You don’t have to,” I say.
“No,” he says. “I don’t mind, so long as you don’t mind hearing.”
I draw up my legs beneath me and sit facing him.
“The worst thing I ever did was leave my father.”
“How do you mean?”
“There was nothing I could have done different. I didn’t believe, and he couldn’t tolerate that—he couldn’t have accepted it before my mother died, and especially not after. So I left. I went to a secular college, which he’d forbidden. I shamed him in the eyes of his community. I’m not absolving him—he did and said some awful things. But I pretty much threw his God in his face on the way out the door. I mean, if you think that Judas comment was bad . . .” He shakes his head at a painful memory. “And even though I had no honest choice—I had to leave—there are some things that are still true, like that it’s important to honor thy father and mother.”
“How did he react?”
“He didn’t. He doesn’t react to me anymore. My name is crossed out,” George says simply, “in the Book of Life.”
I don’t know what to say.
George takes my hands and kisses them softly. “But here I am,” he says, “anyway.” And he winks.
“Do you ever see him?”
“I go back once a year. I stay with Paula’s family.” He examines his beer bottle. “She’s a good person, Paula.” He nods slowly, as though affirming this to himself; his expression speaks volumes about the unbridgeable gap between his sister’s life and his own. “When I’m there, my father grants me an audience. There’s no pretense of interest in me—he’s simply modeling charity and good Christian behavior. For me, though, going by his house with my sister once or twice during my visit is a commitment. I’m not going to shut the door with him. Not that keeping it open does much. He just tunes me out like an unappealing radio station. Only tunes back in to ask about my job and whether I’ve returned to the fold.”
He drinks from his beer. Then sets it on the table. “You can tell me if my story puts you off.”
I sit silently for a minute. Then with the pads of my fingers I smooth a furrow on his forehead. I take my time doing it. “We come from different worlds. Unbelievably different. But I think I get what you’re saying.”
He looks at me. “Thank you,” he says. “It took me a while to become a person who might deserve that kind of trust.” He raises his right hand to the light. Along the knuckles swims a silver scar, which splits off down the backs of two fingers and ends in faint delicate tendrils. “There should be a law against letting anguished young men near walls. Testosterone out of control—plus I was working that idiotic job on the trading floor, where they think rage is just so much rocket fuel. I was in rough shape back then, when I first got to New York. It took me a few years to get out of a job that felt hollow and into work I cared about. And to make peace with my choices.” His words slow. “I try,” he says, “to remember my mother. And appreciate the people in my life. And not waste my time, or anyone else’s. Because you can never be sure someone is going to be around tomorrow. So you’d better go for it. For whatever, and whoever, you care about.”
Sounds of traffic rise faintly from the street: laughter, the gunning of a motorcycle engine, muffled footsteps.
“At least,” he says, “that’s how I try to live.”
GRAVITY: IT’S NOT JUST A GOOD IDEA. IT’S THE LAW. The sign, in retrospect, seems not humorous so much as true.
He slips his hand down my side and gives my bottom a gentle, unrushed squeeze.
I lean in and kiss him. He settles against the arm of the sofa, carrying me along. I settle against him. “My worst thing is pretty dumb in comparison,” I say.
“Shoot.”
“I strung someone along for a couple years. I wasn’t brave enough to just follow what I knew in my gut. I kept listening to my head, and to all my well-meaning friends, saying it could work. Which, technically, it could have. But love isn’t technical. And I really hurt him. I mean, he’s fine now—he met someone and got married. But I was dishonest with myself for a long time, though I thought my motives were good. I sat at my desk once and wrote on a piece of paper, ‘Jason isn’t for me.’ But I still didn’t break up with him for another six months.”
“Why?”
“The usual stuff. I knew it was going to be painful as hell to lose him. But also . . . I wasn’t sure I had a right to be so picky.”
“Why not?”
I shake my head slowly. “It just seemed . . . everyone, including my parents, though they never said so directly, thought I should just marry him. You start to doubt yourself, you know? But that doesn’t excuse it, either.”
“Most people would say Jason had a responsibility to look out for himself.”
I shake my head firmly, remembering the glimpse I once caught of Jason’s face after one of our interminable conversations (Jason pushing, Jason willing to fill in nearly all blanks for me, me refusing to say the words that would have soldered us together). After getting ready for bed, I’d stepped into my living room. There was Jason, still seated on my sofa, looking out the window. Wanting to stay, knowing he should go. Trapped. “I know it takes two to tango, George, and I know Jason could have walked. I just think there’s no excuse for doing damage when you really know better. It may not have been illegal by social norms, but it was wrong.”
To my surprise George starts to laugh softly, and doesn’t stop.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Myself,” he says, pulling me closer. “For thinking I might never find a woman I was attracted to, whose outlook on the world I’d also respect.”
I don’t know how to answer.
“You know,” he says, “you work at figuring out the world almost like a religious person—except without the God part.”
“What do you mean?”
“Religion teaches you to take the world personally. Even if you’re someone like me, and you’ve lost faith in the doctrines you were raised with, you never shake that: that intensity. That sense that the world is a finite system. And every wrong has a cause. And everyone has a responsibility to understand and counterbalance that cause. There may be lapsed Christians, or lapsed Jews, but I don’t think there’s such a thing as a lapsed moralist.” He sighs. ”And you, Tracy, you’re constantly grappling with things, from the big to the absurd. I don’t ever have the slightest idea what you’re going to say next. I love it.”
Never in my life, it seems to me, has a man liked me for the same things I value about myself.
“It was one of the first things I noticed about you—after the fact that you made me laugh. And that you were sexy but didn’t seem to know it. But what I noticed, after those things, was that you have a way of looking at the world, turning things upside down to sort them out. Maybe that’s the Jewish side of you.”
“I don’t know that I have a Jewish side,” I protest. “I mean, it’s true you don’t have to profess faith to be Jewish—with Jews it’s sort of don’t ask, don’t tell, so if you walk the walk you’re considered religious. But I don’t even walk the walk.”
“You think Jewish.”
I sit forward and look at him, cautious. “What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure I can put my finger on it. You tell me.”
I hesitate. “Here’s a positive spin,” I say. “I once saw a page of Genesis in a Hebrew Bible, with commentary. There was one solitary line of the Bible, embedded in the middle of the page. And the rest was this minuscule writing crammed into every spare millimeter, from the greatest hits of long-gone rabbis. Hundreds of years of speculation and whimsy and meticulous analysis.”
“Yup,” says George. “Bingo. That’s it.”
“I’m not sure whether to take that as a compliment.”
“An extra-large.” He raises his beer bottle, but instead of drinking blows a long, low tone across its top. With a wink he extends it into a tuneless rhythmic riff, then a serenade.
When he’s through, I toot a low reply. Then I stop.
I sip my beer. I think over what George said about his family—the strict, grief-leveled landscape he escaped.
I’m not naive. I am thirty-three and I know that a dramatic past isn’t just intriguing; it is, in fact, usually an oxymoron. But George also seems, despite it all, like the most grown-up man I’ve ever met. Happy not because his life has been happy, but because he knows it’s important to be. There’s a difference, it occurs to me, between easy happiness and passionate happiness.
Sitting here beside him, sipping room-temperature beer, I feel: This place is the center. This sofa is the exact center of the known universe, all neighboring systems quietly reshaping to make way for the heavy pull between us.
“Say something shocking,” I say.
He hesitates, and this time I let him. Then he says, “I’d like to know you a very long time.”
I pick up his hand. The scar is soft to the touch, bright and featureless and smooth like the skin of some newly hatched creature. I turn his hand in mine, and it looks to me now like a surgeon’s hand, unafraid to touch where the damage is worst. I think: Most of the smart people I know would rather talk about why the blood is flowing, and whose fault it is, and what it signifies, than take the risks of actually stanching it. Their intelligence doesn’t build up so often as it whittles away. George’s choice to walk away from his upbringing, and his refusal to deny the costs of that choice, strikes me at this moment as the most honest thing I’ve ever heard of anyone doing.
I rest his hand against my breastbone. He kisses me softly, then pulls me down onto the cushion.
“Say something shocking,” he says after a minute.
But instead we drift into a long, breathing silence. I stare at the ceiling, and think about the sacrifices I’ve made to do what I love. I think: A woman’s independence is a hothouse flower. Improbable; rare; requiring vigilance. Millennia of patriarchal history argue against it. A quick review of my coupled girlfriends’ lives reveals that there are few that appeal to me. Of the relationships I’ve seen, even the better ones, almost all seem claustrophobic. I’ve seen too many girlfriends who started out jauntily definitive about what they wanted end up with cheerless smiles. I’ve seen too much marital sniping followed by embarrassed jokes to dinner guests; too many acquaintances who tell me they’re happy, yet sacrifice so much (career, friends, children) that I don’t trust their happiness. Too many relationship compromises that seem to gut the person I once knew. My father at the window. My mother coming alive over the crossword puzzle, then lapsing into silence. Forster was right when he condemned novelists for “that idiotic use of marriage as a finale.” Love, too often, is the start of the trouble. Men, at least, have the excuse of needing it; statistics show that their life spans are lengthened by marriage. Women, on the other hand, bathe at their own risk.
What, I ask myself, might love wreak on my life? Somber thoughts occupy me, counseling caution. Then I alight on the words of Adrienne Rich. I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence.
Into the dimming apartment, the sounds from the sidewalk and the aroma of Cambodian spices, I say something I know to be true only as I pronounce the words.
“I have been alone,” I say to him, “as long as I can remember.”
Morning.
“Yet this critical response, you have to remember, was contemporaneous with the emergence of London’s Bloomsbury group.”
A sophomore with a long brown ponytail whispers to the girl beside him. Flipping the page of my lecture notes, I glance pointedly at the two, who gaze at me from their back-row seats with the blank expressions of hardened criminals.
“So why this initial resistance to modernism in the American context?”
The two students smirk, still facing forward, their gossip all the more delectable for being interrupted. Surely they were talking about a classmate, a crush, a weekend keg party. Unless, of course, they were snickering about me: their professor who is wearing her bra on the outside of her blouse.
I defy you to find a female professional who, having had this thought, can resist a quick downward glance. With a rapid duck of my chin, I continue: “And what links can we see between this and the reception received by American postmodernism several decades later?” Blouse firmly fastened, bra out of sight; obviously they’re laughing about something else.
My next thought makes me blush hard. As I consider the likelihood of my own transparency, I forge ahead with my lecture, continuing steadily if more emphatically. Students have love radar. It’s their specialty. I eye the ponytailed kid, whip-thin and wisp-bearded, and his neighbor, a sweet-faced girl with multiple piercings. Their expressions are studies in bland interest. But they, like most students, are smarter than they act, and possibly they’ve spotted the signs: Unusual levels of energy. Cheerfulness in the face of literary theory. My tendency, today, to distraction.
Love. If it can happen to me, anything can. The square inch of Brazilian rainforest I bought in a ninth-grade environmental campaign holds the fabled mother lode; the rangers have been searching for me for years. My dental records confirm that I am Princess Anastasia, and my dentist has been waiting until my thirty-fourth birthday to tell me. I have won the office pool; I have been exempted, refunded, recognized; my long-lost sister is entering stage right. Tracy? she cries, clutching her gorgeous hands to her supermodel face. Is it really you? She is my identical twin.
Until last Saturday I’d never been to a spa. But Yolanda, in need of a post-opening-night debriefing and keen for news of my potentially budding love life, wouldn’t hear of me refusing her invitation to Félicité, where two day passes awaited, payment for a recent gig modeling spa wear. After a hard workout, Yolanda led me to a glass-doored room, indicated I should sit on a slatted wooden bench opposite her, and nodded greeting to a trio of shiny-faced women. The door closed behind us and there was a moment’s silence, long enough for the heat to make an impression. Then, startling me nearly out of my towel, steam shot up through floor vents. Yolanda, smiling like a giddy yogi, vanished in a thick, rising cloud. The whiteout wreathed me. The steam I inhaled was as hot as the air I exhaled—so hot I couldn’t tell where my body ended and it began. I couldn’t breathe. In fright I stood to grope my way toward air, but the door, along with Yolanda and the other women, was invisible. Disoriented, I stood trembling, taking the air in small sips. Then bigger.
I sat. The air was strangely full, but breathable. I closed my eyes. And noticed, as I gave the weight of my head to the wooden wall, that I didn’t care anymore where my skin ended and where the air began.
That is what sex is like with George. My head tucked beneath his chin, our bodies bearing toward some unknown destination, I’m blind, claustrophobic, certain I won’t be able to breathe. And then with a shush of skin my body declares itself: no longer a collection of disparate elements, arms and legs and breasts, but a simple whole. Alive, all breath and want, eager to touch, meet, fathom. George is impish and soothing, gathering me. The dark room absorbs our greetings, sounds of surprise and assent, the crush of my hair in his hands. An unfamiliar, girlish timbre in my laugh, and George’s hands moving with the precision and delicacy of a pari
ng knife slipping under the fruit’s skin. Then a long, breathing silence. George, intent, turns my face to his. His eyes stop me. When he says the words I reply with a swiftness that surprises us both. I cling to his shoulders; he doesn’t flinch. I roll into his chest, sleep like a baby.
And walk to morning lecture shaken down like a tree, leaves and cones scattered. Leaves and cones, my dear love-besotted students, all over Sixth Avenue.
“Before I conclude,” I say to the sun-blanched lecture hall, “I must emphasize that there is little point studying postmodernism unless you acknowledge what it is the writer truly asks of the reader.” Several students lift their eyes to the clock, whence will come their release in another minute forty-five. With my copy of The Complete Short Works of Samuel Beckett in hand, I step back from the lectern and consider the echoing distance to the back row of the hall. “Postmodernists want you to interact with the text. Question how it comes to you. Be skeptical. Vigilant. Above all,” I say, “active.” And with a lumbering skip forward, I heave the book into the empty air over the heads of my students. The angel of gravity is merciful and the book, pages roiling, sails straight toward the back row—toward the shocked upturned face of the kid with the ponytail.
“Catch!” I command, and he does, he traps and cradles Beckett in his narrow chest and hugs it with a great grin as the sweet-faced girl with the nose rings utters a quiet “wow” into the silent gallery and I, knowing there are moments whose glory must not be squandered, stride out of the room.
Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) Page 11