by David Plante
In the apartment, Nancy asked, “Where’s Adam?” and Gil said, “He’s in his room, and doesn’t want to join us.” Maria, her plump face bare of makeup and stark, said, “Well, it’s his choice. I mean, I had a choice. He should have a choice. He likes to keep his beliefs to himself.”
“So what are his beliefs now?” Nancy asked.
“As I said, he makes his own choice, but I’ve heard about the cult of people who wear dreadlocks and who in some ritual in Spanish Harlem sacrifice chickens.”
Nancy said, “Sure,” as a way of downgrading a conversation that she was uninterested in.
Gil, a slight man, wore a string of shiny blue beads on a leather thong around his open shirt collar. It hung down over his sweater.
Nancy said, “Gil, you’re wearing your Hopi Indian beads.”
“Yeah,” he said.
The dining table, under a low-hanging, stained-glass Tiffany lamp, was set in a corner of the large living room. On it were a plate with three matzos, open bottles of wine, a glass tumbler of parsley, a bowl of salt water and a bowl of horseradish sauce, and four unlit candles forming the corners of a square within the circle of the round table. When everyone was seated, Maria handed out copies of instructions for conducting the seder.
Yvon, reading ahead, said, “Can I be the one to open the door when the time comes?”
Maria, not sure whether he was being serious or not, looked at him.
Mrs. Green said, “Of course you can.”
“I know no man will want to read,” Maria said. “It’s wrong, it’s very, very wrong. A man has to read. But as no man will, I guess I’ll have to.” She certainly did not ask Yvon to read, as if she knew by the sight of him that he was not Jewish. She would take over, and, as the leader, she began to read, but she didn’t read the parts in Hebrew. She asked Gil to light the candles, and as he did, with a match, she read about kindling festive holy light.
Mr. Green said, “I remember a little of it in Hebrew: Baruch Atah Adonai …” He said to Mrs. Green from across the table, “You never learned.”
She shrugged a shoulder, lightly,
“Will someone please pour wine?” Maria asked.
Mr. Green picked up a bottle and examined the label before pouring.
Maria said, “Now raise your glasses.” Everyone did, and she, holding hers in one hand and the instruction sheets in the other, half chanted, then she raised her glass higher, over her head, and read, “All drink the first cup of wine.”
After a taste, Mr. Green winced a little.
Maria read more, then said, “Everyone take a sprig of parsley and dip it in the salt water.” Everyone did. She said, “Now read where it says the group is supposed to read.”
Yvon read louder than anyone else, even Maria, and because he did, Nancy, too, read out, but she wished Yvon would not try to take the lead, as if he was trying to show he belonged, Yvon Gendreau who didn’t belong anywhere that Nancy knew of. He embarrassed her, so she looked at him with a little frown, which he saw, and did lower his voice.
“Eat the parsley now,” Maria said.
Mrs. Green, who had been holding her dripping sprig between her thumb and forefinger, let it drop into her plate. She said to Yvon, “Go open the door.”
“Great,” Yvon said, and got up and went down the hallway off the living room and, narrowly in sight of the table, opened the door to the apartment.
Maria took a matzo from the plate and raised it just above her head, and she looked up to it, broke it in two, and held the two halves as she read from the set of papers lying on her place setting. Then she placed half of the matzo back on the plate; the other half she wrapped in a napkin and put aside.
Mrs. Green said to Yvon, “You can shut the door,” and bowing his head slightly, he did and returned to his place at the table.
Maria read about this night of unleavened bread, and the sense came over Nancy of being at a distance from the table. The more distanced the more the meaning of where she was expanded into a history too vast to be recalled to her in matzos, in a parsley dipped in salt water, in, especially, the bitter herb haroset. And yet, the more distanced the table the more meaningfully recalled in history were the parsley dipped in salt water, in the haroset, these bitter herbs meant to remind Jews of their suffering and now enacted in a ceremony that for a sudden moment she could not bear, and she closed her eyes.
“What’s haroset?” Yvon asked.
“Horseradish,” Maria said. She read the Haggadah, and at the end she said, “You can now drink your second glass of wine.”
She broke the half matzo into smaller pieces and passed the pieces around and said to Yvon, “Break your piece of matzo in two, put some horseradish on one and cover it with the other, and eat it.”
Yvon spooned a gob of horseradish sauce onto a piece of matzo, squeezed it down, so it dripped, with another piece, and bit into it. He shouted and pressed his hand across his sinuses.
Nancy saw her mother smiling lightly at him, and, maybe, a little pleased to think that he might be having some fun—her mother did like people who lightened her spirit. But Nancy knew that he wasn’t, that, as a matter of fact, he was entirely serious in his enthusiasm.
Maria said to Yvon, “That is to remind us of the suffering of the Jews.”
Yvon became still and closed his eyes, so that the others at the table looked at him. Nancy studied Yvon, not knowing what he knew, but that he had to know, as all the world had to know, of a suffering that she was removed from only by her parents. Tears ran from his eyes down his cheeks, and he opened his eyes and wiped away the tears with his napkin.
He said, “The horseradish,” and everyone except Maria laughed.
“I’ll go into the kitchen to bring out the roast lamb,” she said.
“Let me help you,” Nancy offered.
In the kitchen, helping Maria transfer the leg of lamb from the roasting pan to a platter, she heard Yvon ask Gil, “Where did you get that necklace?”
Gil replied shyly, “A Hopi friend gave it to me.”
As if she wanted to stay in the kitchen for a moment to speak to Nancy, Maria said, “He’s lovely but strange.”
“Who? Yvon?”
“Where is he from?”
“From a village of log cabins in a forest.”
Maria was not going to be taken in by Nancy, as Nancy always tried to do, so she said, “Given how far out he is, I suppose he would.”
Picking up a bowl of hard-boiled eggs, Nancy preceded Maria carrying the roasted leg of lamb. Nancy put the eggs on the table, knowing that no one would eat them. She saw Maria slip the half matzo she had wrapped in a napkin from the table and hide it in the folds of her skirt as she walked away, apparently looking for something. When she returned to the table, she didn’t have the wrapped matzo, and was smiling. She said, “I’ve hidden the afikoman, and now you’ve got to go search for it. Whoever finds it gets a reward.”
“What’s the afikoman?” Yvon asked.
Maria raised her eyebrows, but explained.
“Why did you hide it?”
She said, “Just so you can have fun looking for it.”
“Great,” Yvon said.
“Remember, someone has to eat a piece of it, or the seder can’t be concluded. And nothing can be eaten after the afikoman.”
But no one was willing to search for the afikoman except Yvon, and because he got up to start searching, Nancy, now wary of his enthusiasm, got up too, but only to stand by him and watch him.
“Don’t go into Adam’s room,” Maria said. “The room with the door shut. He’s in there and won’t want to be disturbed.”
“Maybe sacrificing a chicken,” Nancy said.
“Oh, Nan, really.”
Yvon, his enthusiasm raised to recklessness maybe by the wine, turned over the cushions of the sofa and armc
hairs, flipped up the corners of the rugs, took out books from a bookcase that held a small library on American Indian tribes—and didn’t replace them. Mrs. Green smiled, and the others laughed, watching him, even, after a while, Maria.
When everyone laughed, he, sweating, smiled at them; this was what he wanted them to do, to laugh at him. Seeing him as though exposed in his lonely self, Nancy thought, And what is his history?
He found the afikoman under a newspaper on the coffee table. After the clapping, to which he bowed, Maria went to him with a gift she told him to unwrap: an address book.
She said, “You must have a lot of friends.”
Yvon kissed her on a cheek.
Mrs. Green said to him, “Eat some of the matzo, so Maria will let us go home.”
That night he and Nancy didn’t make love, but slept together. She was woken by him shaking her shoulder.
“Why did you wake me?” she asked.
He licked his dry lips. “Now I feel bad that I didn’t stop in Providence to see my mother.”
Easter morning he was so silent at breakfast that Mrs. Green asked him if he was not feeling well, which made him overanimated to reassure her that he was more than well. He talked too much, too loudly, about the great, really great, time he was having. Nancy’s mother looked at her in a way to suggest that she do something with him that would really please him, as if she worried that up to now he had been pretending he was having a great time. Nancy, too, worried. What was wrong with him? she wondered. Her father was sensitive enough to apologize to him for not having thought he might want to go to church. Yvon laughed and said, “No, that doesn’t matter here.” But Mrs. Green knew that that was what was wrong: Yvon couldn’t bring himself to say he wanted, on this most holy day for him, to go to church. She said to Nancy, “Why don’t you take a walk down Fifth Avenue with Yvon?”
Silently understanding her mother’s suggestion, Nancy took him down the avenue to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Small groups of people were standing out on the sidewalk, and on the steps of the cathedral were two black women dressed, from high-heeled shoes to purses and small hats with veils, entirely in bright blue. Yvon stopped at the bottom of the steps, as if to stare at the two women; Nancy went ahead of him up the steps, but he didn’t follow. She turned back to him and, seeing pain in his face, she went down to him.
“Let’s go,” he said.
At first she thought he didn’t want to go in because, used to the primitive and stark church of his parish, he was intimidated by the cathedral.
“Please,” he insisted, “let’s go.”
“I’m sorry,” Nancy said, commiserating with him for something she didn’t understand. She put a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll go back uptown and take a walk in the park.”
Like the boy he so often seemed to be, a boy who had been unjustly accused of a sin he didn’t commit but was defenseless against, Yvon pressed the backs of both hands to his eyes, then, his eyes large with tears, looked away. Whatever he had been unjustly accused by, he was, she saw deeply, condemned by his darkness to accept, and her heart beat for him.
“Come on,” she said.
It occurred to her to take him to the Museum of Natural History and, there, the gallery of minerals. His face brightening, he said, “What a great idea,” still with a little sadness in his voice; when he repeated, “Really, what a great idea,” she sensed that, in trying to reassure her he was also trying to reassure himself, because in his darkness no ideas were really great.
The dim gallery was like a circular space station, and around the walls were intensely illuminated vitrines looking backward out into the bright light of outer space, and the specimens of green, rose, purple, black, yellow, silvery, blue minerals, shining and shimmering, floated in that bright outer space.
Yvon walked past the exhibits and she followed, not sure if he was even glancing at the minerals. He walked more and more quickly; when they had made the circuit he stopped, facing the exit. She approached him slowly. His eyes were closed. She did what she had learned brought him, in some recognition of her affection, out of himself—she touched his cheek, and he opened his eyes and turned to her and smiled.
He said, “It’s all too much”
Though she didn’t understand, she said, “Then we’ll leave.”
As they walked around the park at the back of the museum, Yvon said, “The thing is I’ll never know enough, never, never.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t want to know everything,” she said.
And he, shaking his head, said, “Oh, but I want to know everything.” She thought she wouldn’t try to make him talk, would allow him his silence, but, as if he had thought this through and was now able to articulate the thought more fully than he had ever articulated anything to her, he said, “If you’re a collector, you want every single example of whatever you collect—minerals, shells, stamps—so you become, well, you become possessed, and you have to make your collection complete. But you never can make it complete, because you want everything. Honestly, honestly, I don’t know anything, and I should give it all up. I mean, give up everything.” He raised a fist to his chest. “It’s all too much, and I want to give it all up, everything, everything, that’s what pulls at me.” He dropped his hand.
“Yes,” she said, and left the “yes” hanging in the air.
They were crossing a bridge, and he stopped to look down over the railing at a stream flowing among roughly jagged black rocks. Standing by him to look down, too, Nancy felt the pull, she felt it, but she didn’t know, never knew, what the pull was to give in to.
She said, “Let’s have a hot dog.”
Yvon put an arm about her waist and pulled her to him.
Later, they met Vinnie in a café in Chelsea, its tables with little red votive candles on them. Yvon seemed never to have met anyone like Vinnie, and looked uncertain about whether or not he should like him. Vinnie told a joke about, he said, a queer who was so ugly he gave queers a bad name, but Yvon didn’t laugh. His face was pale red in the light from the candle. His sexuality, Nancy thought, asserted itself and he was, yes, masculine in the way he crossed his arms and, silent, stared at Vinnie talking. Vinnie tried to assert his own sexuality with more jokes about queers.
To stop him, Nancy asked him, “Do you know anything about Aaron Cohen?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
Uncrossing his arms, Yvon asked, “Who?”
“Someone I once knew,” Nancy said.
“Who was he?”
“A Jew who converted to Catholicism.”
“Why?”
“You’re a Catholic. Maybe you could answer that question for me.”
“No, I can’t.”
Before Nancy could speak, Vinnie said, “All I know about being a Catholic is that a Catholic has to abstain from sex.” He showed his teeth when he smiled. “Do you, as a Catholic, abstain?”
“Stop it,” Nancy said. “It’s not funny anymore.”
Vinnie pursed his lips and then said, “Well, I am sorry.”
Yvon said, “I don’t have any religion.”
Alerted, Nancy asked, “You have the religion of your parish.”
“Oh, the religion of my parish,” he said, as if putting his parish at a distance from him. Nancy wondered if something had happened to him while he had been in New York to make him more seriously thoughtful than she’d known him to be, and, too, there seemed to be in his self-assertion a maturity she felt was new to her, if not to him. His voice was low, as if from the back of his throat, when he said, “That’s lost in the forest.”
Vinnie’s voice rose. “The forest? What forest?”
Frowning, Yvon said, “The American forest.”
Nancy reached out and delicately touched his deep frown, and his forehead became smooth. He turned to her and s
miled, but she saw an Yvon who might not last beyond New York, though, yes, maybe an Yvon who would last.
Vinnie said, “The American forest doesn’t exist anymore.”
As if Vinnie were not there, Yvon said to Nancy, “I think we should get back to the apartment,” and the way he said “we” and the way he said “the apartment” made Nancy think, he has it in him, he does, to start a different life, and even if she were not going to be a part of that life, she felt enough for him that she wished him that different life. And maybe she could, maybe she did, love him.
As Yvon and Nancy were leaving the café, Vinnie said he’d stay on. He was short and frail, and when Yvon put a hand on Vinnie’s shoulder and said, “Right on.” Nancy thought he was not only condescending but using an expression that was pretended, because he seemed to have his own un-colloquial English. To try to make up for Yvon’s assumed friendliness with Vinnie, Nancy embraced him closely, but he kept his arms by his sides, and when she released him he turned away. She wished she hadn’t introduced the two men; she worried, a little, what Vinnie would say about her and Yvon as she watched him walk away.
Nancy’s parents were in bed when she and Yvon returned. The light in the living room was dimmed, and Nancy, taking Yvon’s hand when she turned off the light, guided him through the dark apartment into her room, where she shut the door and switched on a lamp beside her bed. He switched off the light when they were in bed together.
And if, she thought, she had once held Yvon in her arms with the sense of protecting him, he, now in bed with her, held her in his arms to protect her, or so she felt. Maybe she was wrong—it was always in Nancy to think she might be wrong—but maybe she was not wrong now, because she did feel his arms were strong around her.
This was their last night in New York. They would go back to Boston together, they would live together, eat together, sleep together, study together. But he drew away from her, and he didn’t sleep.