Never Too Late for Love

by Warren Adler

  "I think it's disgusting," Velvil said in Yiddish. Genendel ignored his comment. He discovered why after they viewed Mimi's pictures. David Goldfarb reached for his wallet and drew out a few faded colored Polaroid prints.

  "That's my son Marvin, the orthodontist. And there's Greta, who runs a boutique on Madison Avenue."

  "She's divorced," Genendel said.

  "Every time I think about it, I get sick to my stomach," David said suddenly. One felt his anger and frustration.

  "It's her life," Genendel said gently.

  "One of my daughters was on the verge once," Mimi said. "But I told her, 'Dotty, if you divorce Larry, I'll never speak to you again. You have the children to consider, my grandchildren.' That was ten years ago. Today they're still together, happy as two peas in a pod."

  "What she doesn't know doesn't hurt her," Velvil said in Yiddish.

  "Will you stop that jabbering, Bill? Can't you see it's impolite?"

  "I'll speak as I damn-well please," he said in Yiddish, watching her irritation increase.

  "See? He does it just to make me angry," Mimi said, cutting into her roasted chicken.

  Genendel watched, signaling with her eyes. You'd better stop, he imagined she was saying.

  Perhaps it was the stark comparison between the two women that, in the end, triggered the intensity of his emotion. But by the time they finished dinner and parted with politeness and empty promises of "getting together" again, he was certain he had spent his entire adult life in a bargain with the devil.

  Turning it over in his mind--in Yiddish, of course--his wife of forty-five years seemed a gross, unfeeling monster. Perhaps I am imagining this, exaggerating her weak points, ignoring her essential goodness, he thought. After all, he told himself, he was no bargain himself, and she had put up with him all those years.

  The idea filled him with such guilt that he abandoned even his most secret Yiddish thoughts, reverting to English, trying to remember with difficulty all the good things that she brought him over the years. He even forced himself to be affectionate when they finally went to bed after the eleven-o'clock news. He reached out for her and cupped a hand over a breast, feeling the hardness begin. Mimi seemed so startled by the act and the obvious reaction of his body that she did not shrug him away as swiftly as usual.

  "Not now, Bill," she said after a while. He wondered what "now" really meant, thinking this thought in Yiddish.

  But what the socializing had done was to trigger an awareness in Velvil and Genendel that both of them finally admitted to themselves.

  "Seeing you two together only emphasized her grossness," Velvil said after the Yiddish Club adjourned one evening.

  They decided to take a walk in the hushed stillness of the tranquil night. The air seemed light, with a touch of tropical scent. The path took them to one of Sunset Village's man-made ponds, which reflected a half-moon in the clear sky.

  "I think you're exaggerating," Genendel responded, after a long pause. She dared not articulate what she truly felt--the sense of his entrapment, the frustration of his wife's overbearing inanity.

  "Actually..." he sighed, "your husband seems like a sweet guy."

  That he was, she thought, sweet, with a disposition that never registered below sunny. She had long ceased to wonder where the fire had gone, knowing in her heart that it was never there to begin with.

  They simply lived together, copulated occasionally, passed the time. She shivered in the warm night, aware of Velvil's closeness and the sound of his breathing.

  "You are the person..." Velvil began, stumbling, feeling the power of the compulsion to say it.

  "Me?" she asked, knowing what was coming next, yearning for it, conscious that her shivering was not from the cold.

  "I feel closer to you than to anyone I have ever known in my life," he said swiftly, the Yiddish floating in the air like a musical phrase. He looked at her but did not touch her. She seemed to move away from him as they walked.

  "I know," she said, feeling her knees weaken.

  "And you?" he asked after they had not talked for a while.

  "I confess it," she said. It was such an appropriately Yiddish remark, as if a sense of guilt were necessary to embellish the mystery.

  His heart pounded, the revelation of the shared feeling a caress in itself. He wondered if he should stop and reach out for her, but he held off, as if the spiritual kinship might be lost in physical touching. Or perhaps he was simply shy, like an adolescent. He suddenly remembered the discomfort and frustration of his first stirrings in the presence of a female.

  I am a grown man, he thought, wanting to express it some way, boiling down the essence into Yiddish elixir.

  "You are a flower to my soul," he said, the Yiddish translatable only in the heart.

  "You are embarrassing me, Velvil," Genendel said. A sliver of cloud passed over the moon, emphasizing the darkness. "We have no right," she protested, but he caught the collective pronoun. It assured him, affirming that, whatever it was, they were in it together.

  When he said good-bye at her car, he felt the courage to touch her, squeezing her hand briefly, though she withdrew it quickly.

  I love her, he decided as he walked home, feeling a new sense of strength, an infusion of youth. He was surprised there was no guilt in the declaration and, when he slipped in between the sheets, next to his wife, he reveled in his private thoughts, wondering who the stranger was who snored beside him.

  She stirred briefly. "I won twenty dollars in canasta tonight," she croaked hoarsely.

  He hummed a response without interest, thinking of Genendel.

  He hardly slept that night, knowing it would be impossible to wade through another two days without seeing her.

  In the morning, he feigned sleep while Mimi rattled in the kitchen.

  "If you didn't come in so late, you wouldn't be so tired," she cried when he did not respond to the breakfast call.

  "Make your own breakfast," she said finally as she finished dressing and slammed the door behind her.

  Jumping out of bed, he reached for the telephone book, found Genendel's number, and called her.

  "I must see you," he said.

  "I'm afraid," she said.

  "So am I."

  "We could have breakfast."

  He mentioned a coffee shop on Lake View Drive to which he could walk. He knew she had the car, as her husband rarely used it.

  They met an hour later, feeling awkward, hardly speaking until the coffee was served. He watched her as she peered into her cup. What was she looking at? he wondered.

  "I want to see you every day," he said, in Yiddish, of course, feeling the power of his new-found courage. He never thought himself capable of exercising it. People at the next booth looked his way. He noted their deeply tanned faces and knew that their curiosity was aroused by the strange language.

  "I want to see you every day," he said again.

  "People would talk, Velvil. They would notice."

  Suddenly, a crowd of people came into the restaurant, Sunset Village types in well-filled Bermuda shorts. Outside, he could see the parked tricycles of the Sunset Village Cycling Club, the high pennants limp on their antennae.

  "We could join the Cycling Club," he decided, watching the group come in. "They meet every day. Besides, it will be healthy. Plenty of fresh air and exercise."

  "They look so foolish," Genendel said, smiling.

  "Who cares?"

  She knew he was responding to another question. She wondered about her own caring, thinking suddenly of David, her husband, and of the hurt he would experience if he knew of her feelings for Velvil. With effort, she pushed the thought from her mind.

  "All right," she said, lowering her eyes. She knew she had taken another step in the journey and felt the mystery of it, the joy.

  In the Cycling Club, they practiced discretion, talking to the others as they pedaled en masse through the crowded roads, making a mess out of the traffic, prompting occasional catcalls an
d anti-Semitic epithets, which they ignored and laughed about.

  They didn't have much time to themselves, but it seemed enough that they were together. Even in the silence, their intimacy grew. When they exchanged information, it was always in Yiddish.

  "Don't you people speak English?" one of the club members asked as he pedaled close by.

  "Not very well," Velvil said slyly, hearing Genendel's giggle begin beside him.

  The idea had been growing within each of them for some time, but it wasn't until they had been in the Cycling Club for several months that it became clear, hitting them both with the force of a hurricane.

  They were having breakfast, the entire cycling group, chattering like children, making the waitresses in the coffee shop move more swiftly than they were accustomed to. A couple sat down beside them, a large freckle-faced woman with wispy gray hair curling from under her blue baseball cap. Her husband was tanned almost black by the sun, his bald head shining like some mahogany wood sculpture.

  "We're the Berlins," the woman said.

  They knew instantly that she would dominate the conversation with her rapid-fire questions, a dyed-in-the-wool yenta. "I've been watching you," the woman said. "I even remarked to Harry. Didn't I, Harry?"

  Harry nodded, his dark face breaking, the neat line of false teeth flashing in the brightness of the sunlight.

  "I have a sixth sense about devoted couples. Tell me, how long have you been married?"

  Velvil wanted to respond immediately, but shrugged instead, watching Genendel's discomfort.

  "Forty-five years at least, right?"

  Genendel lowered her eyes, which the woman must have taken for affirmation.

  "See, I was right," she said, turning to Harry. "They are a truly devoted couple. How many children have you got?"

  Velvil looked at Genendel, wondering if she could see the humor of the situation beyond her anxiety. He decided to be playful and held up four fingers.

  "I figured at least," the woman said.

  "She wanted to have more," Velvil said, "but she got a special dispensation from the Pope."

  "You had a hysterectomy?" the woman pursued. "I had one ten years ago."

  "They took the baby carriage out and left the playpen in," Harry said suddenly.

  "It's not often that you meet such a devoted couple. I can tell. I've got a sixth sense about it, haven't I, Harry?"

  Velvil felt the idea explode in his head, but dared not entertain it and worried that once broached it would affect his relationship with Genendel.

  After the Yiddish Club meeting that night, they sat on chairs near the pool.

  "Is it possible that we look like a married couple?" Velvil said, noting his own caution as he watched her face in the glow of the clubhouse lights.

  "I'm afraid so," she said. "You can't fool an old yenta."

  "I hadn't realized."

  "I have."

  "You?"

  "How long do you think we can get away with it?" she sighed.

  "What have we done? Have I once..."

  She put a finger over his lips, a gesture to induce silence. Instead, he kissed her finger, their first kiss. He took her wrist and showered kisses on the back of her hand. She let her hand linger, closing her eyes, tilting her head. He could see a tear slip out of the corner of her eye and roll down her cheek, catching the brief glow of the lights.

  "I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Genendel," he said, a lump growing in his throat, his heart pounding. "I want to marry you."

  "This is madness. This is crazy," she cried. "I don't want to hear it ever again, not ever." He had never seen her so upset.

  "Not ever again," she repeated. But she did not take her hand out of his. "If you dare mention such a thing again, I promise you I will never see you again. You must promise me, Velvil."

  He clutched her hand, feeling the full impact of the emptiness of his future without her, not daring to precipitate her anger further. But he did not promise.

  "You must promise," she persisted.

  "I cannot promise," he said, after a long silence, still holding her hand. He lifted it again to his lips. "I love you," he said. "And that is the only thing I can promise."

  She withdrew her hand, stood up, cleared her throat, and wiped her tears.

  "I think we better not see each other any more." What angered her particularly was that she was actually thinking the unthinkable. How would David react? Her children? The cruelty of it. She had no right. She strode forward, and he rose to follow her.

  "Leave me alone," she said. "I am going home now."

  "Will I see you again?" he cried after her, afraid to follow, knowing his voice was carrying too far in the quiet night. He stood rooted to the spot, watching her depart.

  Genendel did not join the activities of the Cycling Club the next morning. Instead of going with the group, Velvil rode to her condominium and watched it for a long time without gathering the courage to press the buzzer and confront her. The blinds were drawn. Later, he stopped at a pay phone and dialed her number. There was no answer.

  A heavy depression washed over him as he moped around his condominium, thinking he had lost her, letting self-pity clutch at him. Mimi made his lunch, not noticing his strange behavior. He did not listen as she chirped away about her friends, her card games. The incessant patter of her voice with its empty gossip increased the blackness of his mood.

  "Stop eating so fast," Mimi said.

  He chewed the food, aware of its tastelessness as it moved without relish or awareness down his gullet. Without Genendel, he told himself, life would be empty, the future just a long wait until his lifeless corpse was finally filed away beneath the earth, forgotten and unvisited.

  After Mimi left for her afternoon game, he made an effort to calm himself, to rationalize his position, go over his options.

  He was, after all, a lawyer. But contemplation of what a divorce might entail boggled his mind, made him tired. His wife's harangues would be hysterical. The children would think he was a monster. Would he hate himself later?

  He did consider having a clandestine affair, but it was so foreign to his nature and his morality that he could not bring himself to accept such a possibility. What he concluded was that he could accept any pain from Mimi, from his children, from anyone, pay any price for the privilege of spending the rest of his life with Genendel. Anything was worth that.

  He was tempted to phone her again but lost his courage, deciding instead to suffer through the long night and day until the meeting of the Yiddish Club. It was not an easy assignment.

  Feigning a slight cold, he was able to escape from Mimi's patter by squirreling himself in bed for most of the next day.

  "You're going to the Yiddish Club?" Mimi asked as he dressed.

  "I feel better."

  "You're acting strangely, Bill."

  "I know," he mumbled, wanting to shout out at her, to tell her what was happening inside of him. Instead, he walked out into the warm night, hoping that, in a few minutes, he would once again be in the presence of the woman he loved. But the slight optimism that he felt as he walked quickly dissipated when he arrived and it became apparent that she was not coming. He listened listlessly to the speakers, walked out early, and roamed through the clubhouse.

  In the long card room, he saw David playing gin. He moved toward the table and watched the game for a while, waiting for the moment to ask him news of his wife.

  "Where's Jennie?" he asked casually. "Missed her at the meeting."

  "Said she missed the kids. Went up north to visit for a few weeks." He poked Velvil in the stomach. "Look at this," he said, holding up the score. "I got him on a triple schneid."

  Her absence made his longing more intense, and he spent his time in long solitary walks around Sunset Village. You must come back to me, he begged her in his mind.

  "What's wrong with you, Bill?" his wife asked with casual but persistent interest.

  "I am sad and lonely," he said in
Yiddish.

  "That again."

  "You give me no pleasure," he said, again in Yiddish.

  "This is ridiculous."

  "You are ridiculous," he said in Yiddish.

  "The hell with you," Mimi responded with anger, slamming the door behind her as she rushed off to the clubhouse. He savored his cruelty, yet knew that it was wrong.

  After the first shock of Genendel's departure wore off, leaving him only with a gnawing emptiness, he continued to participate in the morning cycling and the Yiddish meetings. He went through the mechanical process of the activities in the hope that when she returned, she would join him again. He was certain that her life with David was as empty as his life with Mimi. Was she prepared to compromise her remaining years in the name of duty? Foreclose forever on the possibility of ... love?

  When she finally returned to the Yiddish Club two weeks later, he felt that the curtain had been raised on his life again, and he could barely sit through the meeting waiting for a few private words with her. By then, he had convinced himself that he would take half a loaf, to leave it as it had been. Even a few moments of her time were better than enduring the suffering of her absence.

  When the meeting was over, he dashed over to her, stumbling over a chair. "Did you enjoy your trip?" he asked, stammering, unable to control the frantic beat of his heart.

  "It was all right," she responded.

  He imagined that he could detect sadness in her eyes.

  "Would you like to take a walk?"

  She nodded. He had gone over and over this request in his mind and could hardly believe that he had made it.

  They walked along the familiar path in silence.

  "I promise," he finally said.

  "Promise?" She paused, then turned to look at him.

  "I promise I won't bring up that subject again." He wondered if she understood.

  "You think it's that simple?" she said, looking at him.

  She touched his arm, and he felt his flesh respond with goose pimples. He was confused.

  "How many more years do you think we have, Velvil?"

  Her question left him speechless, as his mind groped for some kind of logic.

  "I try not to think about it," he said at last.