Who was this friend? Nathan wondered, ashamed of his jealousy, of the small-mindedness of his own response. He took her hand to cover his internal agitation, his inadequacy as a husband to her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
1944
Last night, a hot meal, a stew of potato and some sort of meat that Andre swore was squirrel but was not. It was cat, I knew, and not because of the taste—for how would I know squirrel from cat?—but from the quick flicker of Andre’s eyes as he lied. A chivalrous lie—I would have eaten the stew regardless, and to pretend that I wouldn’t was to transform me from the creature that I am to the girl that I once was: a girl with sensibilities, a girl who would rather die from hunger than eat a stew of cat, licking every last drop of its juices from her bowl.
I loved him for his lie, I told him after we had eaten. You love me for the meat, he answered, but he was pleased.
I felt a surge of strength as we sat with full stomachs. It was a woman’s strength, which is not muscular but sensual, an opening of all my senses so that I could smell the river that is still ten miles away—a faint fishy smell with a hard tang of metal—and I could hear the shallow rapid heartbeats of every mouse and mole that hid in the forest all around us. I heard the slower rhythms too, the hearts of wild boars at rest, of bears preparing for slumber. I told Andre, and he smiled. It’s the meat, he said.
I slept lightly and poorly at first, my stomach a contracting knot of pain, but I was awakened later in the night by quietness. It was a quietness so extreme that I thought at first I had died, but as I lay there in that quiet I realized it was the absence of pain and of hunger and of fear and of cold that I was experiencing, a cessation that was a stillness inside me. And within that stillness I felt the warmth of a glowing light, and I remembered what our neighbour once told me when she was pregnant with her first child, that it is said of a child in a womb that a light burns above his head and he can see from one end of the world to another, so that a child sleeping in its womb in Antwerp can see a dream in Spain.
I knew then that I will survive this and be born into a second life. That Andre is not the agent of death I had thought at first. Or the thief I’ve feared who will simply take the three diamonds I’ve offered in payment and leave me, or worse kill me. He’s a flesh-and-blood man who is as he appears to me. He will take me across the river I can smell from ten miles away.
CHAPTER 14
“Jonathan’s back,” Carrie said.
We were in my bedroom at my father’s home. I was sprawled on the bed, a stack of glossy magazines by my side, looking for ideas for bridesmaids’ dresses and flower arrangements for my wedding. Carrie was sitting in the armchair facing the bed, leafing through one of the magazines she’d taken from my pile.
“He didn’t even call me to tell me he’s home.”
“Why would he?” I asked her.
Jonathan had been heartbroken when Carrie broke up with him. He had moped around for months hoping she’d change her mind, had dated other women in hopes of making her jealous, and then, finally, having accepted the hopelessness of his situation, he had quit school and taken himself off to India for the purpose of finding himself.
“I ran into his mother and sister in Snowdon. They were looking for a grad dress for his sister. Who’s gotten fat, by the way. They were both thrilled to see me. They obviously had no idea he hadn’t called me, that I hadn’t had a clue he was even planning to come home, let alone that he’d arrived and been home a full week already. A week, Ruthie. What is wrong with him?”
“You broke up with him, Carrie. Remember? You found him boring and conventional. You couldn’t stand another second of his hangdog look lurking over your every move.”
“What if he’s met someone else?”
I looked at her. She wasn’t beautiful but she had a charm that drew people to her and a confidence in her own lovability that was utterly convincing to others. No one left Carrie; Carrie did the leaving. That was just a basic fact of her life. And Jonathan had not actually proven the exception to that fact, though I could see there was no point in trying to remind her of that.
“What about this?” I asked, holding up the magazine so she could see the dress I’d found for her.
Carrie leaned closer, shook her head. “I’d look like I have hepatitis in that.”
“Not the colour. I mean the style.”
“Ruthie,” she said. “In all the years you’ve known me, have you ever once seen me in an empire waistline?” She leaned back in her chair but didn’t return to her magazine.
“I think I’ll dispense with the clouds of angels’ breath,” I said. “It’s become a bit of a cliché.”
“And the white dress hasn’t?”
I looked at her.
“The point of a wedding is not exactly originality of expression,” Carrie said.
I didn’t argue, was not in the mood for another of Carrie’s lectures on the many and varied ways in which marriage represented a failure of imagination and nerve. It was 1967 and the changes in the larger culture had begun to penetrate our world, but mostly in the form of shrinking hemlines, drugs, music and draft dodgers from the States. Carrie’s lectures about marriage were inspired less by her politics than by her concern that there was no man she liked well enough to invite as a date to my wedding. She pulled a strand of hair in front of her face to check it for split ends, an inspection that absorbed her attention so completely and for so long that I finally returned my attention to my magazine.
“Have you brought the notebook to Ida yet?” she asked me. I had told her I was planning to take Ida up on her promise, made years earlier, to read it to me when I became engaged. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “What are you waiting for?”
“I guess I’m afraid it might affect her badly. She was uncomfortable enough when I brought her the diamond. And not exactly forthcoming.”
Carrie nodded. “Maybe you should bring it to Mrs. Schoenfeld. That wasn’t a bad idea.”
“Too late.”
Carrie stopped mid-inspection to look at me through a strand of her hair. “She died?”
“No, no. She’s just not all there any more.”
“What do you mean?”
“She came out of her house naked yesterday.”
“She what?”
Reuben and I had been sitting on the floor of Sol and Elka’s den helping Chuck set up his train set when I stood up to get something to drink, looked out the window and saw Mrs. Schoenfeld, stark naked, walking down her front walk to the street. I had known for a while that she was losing her memory, but I had seen no evidence until then that the loss extended to her entire mind. She still smiled warmly at me, for example, when I walked past her house as she was watering her garden, even if she could no longer remember my name, and she still came to shul every Shabbes, dressed in the same unmemorable skirts and blouses that ladies of her age generally wear and draped with a double strand of pearls that her little granddaughter played with and pulled into her mouth as she sat on her grandmother’s lap during the Torah reading.
“All she had on were her pearls.”
“Jesus,” Carrie said half under her breath. “Glad I missed it.”
It was the impression of looseness that had most shocked me at first. Her grey hair, which I’d only ever seen pulled into a tight bun, flew out from her head in thin wisps; her breasts flapped like two deflated husks on her chest. Another loose fold of skin—her abdomen—flapped over her private parts but, really, she was all private parts. That’s how it had seemed. That what I was seeing in front of me was privacy exposed, being desecrated on the empty but decidedly public suburban sidewalk on which she stood. I don’t know how long I stood staring at her. It seemed like no time at all. It seemed like I had barely noticed her, had barely had time to register what I was seeing when Reuben was out there on the sidewalk beside her. He had a sheet in his hand, a sheet that he must have pulled out of our linen closet while I was still staring stupefied at the apparition before
me. He draped the sheet over her, pulling the ends together and tightening it, as if he were fitting her for a gown. Mrs. Schoenfeld must have thought so as well, because she took the ends of the sheet in her hands as naturally and elegantly as if she were a bride holding up the train of her bridal gown. Then she placed her hand on Reuben’s outstretched palm and allowed him to lead her home.
I told Carrie about it, remembering the surge of love I had felt for Reuben at that moment, the sense I had that I was seeing the core of his character, and that it was a good character: unafraid, kind, strong.
“Saint Reuben,” Carrie said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” She reached into her handbag, pulled out a nail file and began filing her already perfectly manicured nails.
“You don’t like him.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Of course I like him.”
“You never have anything nice to say about him.”
“I never have anything nice to say about anyone.” She flashed me one of her smiles that was charming and infuriating in equal parts.
“It’s not that I think he’s wrong for you….” Carrie thought about that for a few minutes. “You’re just really into being normal right now, you know? The normal Jewish husband, the normal wedding with all the bridesmaids and flowers …” She looked at me to see how I was taking this. “And there’s nothing wrong with that …” she trailed off.
Was there truth in what Carrie was suggesting? I loved Reuben, but I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t also enjoy how easy it was, how restful, to be like everyone else for once. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t welcome the easy, comfortable warmth people showed me and Reuben wherever we went, the warmth of people recognizing an attractive reflection of themselves, and I couldn’t quite believe just how welcome a change that was from the strained kindness that people had shown me all my life until then. None of which I was prepared to admit to Carrie at that moment.
“I know it’s hard for you to understand that I might actually love a man who has loved me from the moment he set eyes on me, is nice to me, is prepared to make a lifelong commitment to—”
“Oh, don’t get so defensive,” Carrie said. She returned to her manicure and I flipped through a few more pages of my magazine, but absentmindedly now. “Is your father bringing Sandra to the wedding?” she asked.
Sandra was the woman my father had started dating soon after Reuben and I announced our engagement. I knew as soon as I met her that he felt differently about her than any of the women he’d dated over the years. Sandra herself was different—less chatty, less nice, in some ways, than the others.
“Of course,” I said, a little too enthusiastically. I was actually a little jealous of Sandra, the look she brought to my father’s face.
It had occurred to me just that week that it was entirely possible the reason my father hadn’t met a woman he really liked before now was that he had been looking for one who might be a good stepmother to me, and that the women he imagined being good for me (Joyce, Melinda, Naomi and a few others over the years) were not women he found interesting.
“It makes it easier for you,” Carrie said.
“What does?”
“That he has someone. You don’t have to feel guilty about leaving him.”
“Yes. Exactly,” I lied. My jealousy embarrassed me.
“Do you suppose Oscar will be coming to the wedding too?” Oscar was Sandra’s dog. He went everywhere with her. He was a huge Newfie that Ida Pearl and Bella called The Pony.
“I’m hoping he’ll agree to be an usher.”
Carrie smiled. “Sandra was always a little weird. My mother told me.”
I looked at her. “Your mother knows Sandra?”
“They went to school together. She’s not bad weird or anything. Just different. Her father was an artist. He used to set up his easel by the side of the road in Saint-Donat and paint all day.”
“That explains it.”
Carrie laughed.
“I guess my father just goes for weird women. What can I say? My mother wasn’t exactly regular either.”
“True,” Carrie said.
“Even the way she abandoned me was weird,” I said, remembering the bottles of formula neatly lined up in the fridge, an image I’d been told about so often I felt I had seen it for myself; the meticulously planned departure that insured I would not be unattended even for a few minutes; the rocks that arrived, not regularly but consistently, an ongoing communication over the years of my childhood and teenage life, even if the form it took was a ritual of mourning, the stones we left lovingly for our dead.
“I don’t think there’s really a normal way to abandon your baby,” Carrie said, and as soon as she did I felt the old shame creeping back into me. I had thought I was over it, and there was no reason for me to feel it, especially not with Carrie, but there it was, the shame I felt whenever I entered a new situation and people didn’t know me yet, only knew about me, what had happened in our family. I wondered if it would ever leave me completely.
“Don’t be mad at me,” Carrie said. She was back onto our previous subject.
“Mad at you?”
“For what I said about Reuben, you know—”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s fine, Carrie. Really.”
“A hundred percent?”
I wasn’t, but Carrie’s approach when she was contrite was like that of a puppy wiggling near the mess it had made and then licking your nose for good measure so that you couldn’t be mad. “A hundred percent,” I said.
“Good. Because I really didn’t mean—” And then, like that same puppy, she was on to the next mess to be made. “Do you think I should call him?” Jonathan, she meant.
“I think you should leave him alone.
“Too late.” She flashed me one of her winning smiles again.
“You called him?”
“Last night.”
“And?”
“And nothing. He sounded happy enough to hear from me. Not that you can tell anything over the phone. Oh, and you’ll never guess who his new best buddy is.” She paused for effect. “David Czernowitz.”
She waited for my response, but the name meant nothing to me.
“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten Mr. C.”
“How could I forget—”
“David’s his son,” Carrie said.
“He has a son?”
“He was in India with Jonathan.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said.
“Yeah, I thought he was in Israel working on a kibbutz. Though he didn’t really strike me as the picking oranges type.”
“You know him?”
“He was in one of my classes.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”
“Tell you what? I barely spoke to him.”
“Still …”
“Still what? If there had been anything to tell I would have—”
“It’s so hard to believe he has a son.”
Carrie gave me a confused look, as if to ask what was so hard to believe. That a man who had been our teacher more than ten years earlier had actually had a life beyond what I was able to imagine for him?
“He invited me to a party tonight.”
“Jonathan?”
“Who else?”
“Are you going?”
She shrugged. “Want to come?”
THE PARTY CONSISTED of a dozen or so people sitting in a circle on the floor of a basement apartment. Carrie had arranged to meet Jonathan there, and as we entered he rose from the circle to greet us. His hair was long and he’d grown a beard, a style that the boys we knew in Montreal had not yet adopted.
“Hi, Ruthie,” he said, kissing me in greeting. “Hello, Carrie,” he said to Carrie, who was standing just behind me. I noted the slight reserve in his voice and demeanour, a self-conscious demonstration of the emotional distance from Carrie that he
had managed to cultivate within himself, and of his resolve to not fall back into the pit of his hopeless love for her.
“You look like Jesus,” Carrie greeted him in return.
Jonathan didn’t respond, but already, immediately, I could see the first signs of misery returning to his tanned, handsome face.
“My false messiah returned from the land of the idol worshipers,” Carrie said, taking his face into her hands and kissing his mouth. It was a brief kiss but decisive. I saw his will collapse. I saw the resolve that had temporarily firmed his features dissolve, and my heart went out to him. He was a nice guy and would have been on track for a reasonably happy marriage to a girl not unlike one of his sisters, and a career that would enable him to support his family in a neighbourhood and community exactly like the one he had grown up in if not for the relentless attraction he felt to those aspects of life that most scared him. Carrie, for example, whose grip on him had not loosened from the moment she had blindfolded him with his own scarf and led him out of the party where they had just met; free love, which he claimed to believe in despite his more deeply held belief that there’s no such thing as a free lunch; and now, his latest: a spiritual tradition that had no creator at its centre, which is what he talked about as he lit what I thought at first to be a cigarette. It was mind-blowing, he said, to bring his own breath, rather than God, to the centre of his consciousness, which was what he did now when he meditated, a practice that had replaced prayer in his life.
“Sounds like narcissism to me,” Carrie said before inhaling the joint that he passed to her. To which someone else—a man I had noticed the minute I walked in—responded that if there was any narcissism on display it was her own, her flip dismissal of an entire spiritual tradition about which she knew absolutely nothing, based solely on its difference from the one she already knew.
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