Men on Men 2

by George Stambolian (ed)

  “You moron! Why’d you go there!”

  “I wanted to dance,” he said, sitting down, untouched by her distress. “So did Nat. I love dancing with him. He’s beautiful then, the way he moves, his eyes—”

  Brenda flushed. She had only seen Nat dance at wedding receptions, and then he had seemed to her stiff, embarrassed, dancing only because he had to.

  “I hate it, I hate thinking about the two of you together. I don’t understand what it means.”

  “Do you have to?”

  “Don’t be so cool.”

  “I’m thirty-five,” he said. “What should I be?”

  She felt inflamed by her father’s angry pounding voice, but didn’t know the words to destroy Mark.

  “Well,” Mark said, “how about a drink?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I will.”

  He joined her on the beige, pillow-backed sofa that was as neutral and expensive-looking as everything there—prints, cushions, lamps.

  “You know it doesn’t bother Nat, somehow,” Mark began. “But for years I thought God would get me, like Aaron’s sons, when they offer up ‘strange fire’ and get zapped. My best friend all through school, from way back, was gay too—in college he told his rabbi about us ana got sent to Israel.”

  “Did it help?”

  “Well, he got married.”

  “Was he like Nat?”

  “No one’s like Nat.”

  She asked for another drink.

  Nat showed up just then and she tried to tell him about Helen. He said he didn’t care and they went off to the best Szechuan restaurant in the county for a lavish dinner. Later they drank at a bar like witnesses of an accident, desperate to blur the vision of that crash, the blood and smoke. Nat wouldn’t discuss what’d happened; each time she tried to bring it up, he looked away.

  Two days later, Brenda came to Shabbat services late, right before the Torah reading and everyone was up, jabbering, flushed. Clark stood at the lectern, his back to the ark, as pale as Nat and Mark who faced him from the narrow aisle between the men’s chairs and the mehitzah.

  “Get out,” Clark was saying. “I won’t let you touch that Torah. My grandfather donated it.”

  “You’re crazy,” Mark said.

  “You’re sick.”

  Brenda wavered at the door, disgusted by the ugly atmosphere of children squashing worms to make them writhe, exploding frogs with firecrackers.

  “Come on,” Mark said, slipping off his prayer shawl, jamming it into the gold-embroidered blue velvet bag. Mark smiled relief when he saw her, squeezed her hand. White-faced, Nat followed out to Mark’s Volvo and they drove, no one speaking, to his apartment as if speeding on the road could strip away that scene.

  Upstairs, Mark dumped his blazer on a chair, wrenched off his tie to sit with an arm around Nat, who was still pale and silent. Mark said, “I didn’t think it would happen. They need us, it’s our minyan too.”

  “Technically,” Brenda said, “it’s not my minyan,” but no one smiled.

  “We’ll move,” Nat finally said. “We’ll go to New York”

  Mark smoothed Nat’s stringy hair with such gentleness that Brenda felt unexpectedly released. Their closeness warmed her like a Vermeer, rich with circumstantial life.

  Tishe B’Av was the next night and they made plans to attend at one of the faculty shuls. Leaving, she surprised herself by kissing both of them.

  Nat didn’t call her that night and she hardly slept, awash with a sort of amazement that the children they had been had grown to see such ugliness. She longed in her restless bed for escape, for some wild romantic lover, a Czech perhaps, a refugee musician who’d fled in ’68, whose loss was larger than her own, a nation’s freedom instead of a woman’s pride. He would have an accent, she decided sleepily, imagining herself in a sleek black dress, and have a mustache a bit like Mark’s… .

  Mark was alone when he came over Sunday evening.

  “Nat isn’t coming. He went out.”

  “OUT?”

  “Bangles. To get drunk. To dance. He’s furious.” Mark smoothed down his gray silk tie, looking much too calm.

  “He’s dancing on Tishe B’Av?” She sat at the dinette table, more confused now than ever.

  Mark pressed his hands to the back of his neck, massaging, stretching. “He had this dream last night, that he was swimming far from shore and there were sharks. He woke us both up. Shouting. He couldn’t get away.”

  Brenda could feel her dress sticking to her back despite the air-conditioning. “What if he sleeps with someone? He’ll get herpes, he’ll get AIDS’”

  Mark eyed her steadily. “Maybe he’ll just dance.”

  She followed Mark out to his car, and on the drive to the faculty shul, Brenda knew she was feeling the wrong things. She should be understanding, compassionate now, not think that Nat was doing something ugly and vindictive, desecrating the fast day that he believed was solemn and holy. She should be happy for him, happy that he knew who he was, what he wanted, could feel his feelings, had found Mark—all of that.

  She could hear her father snapping out the contemptuous Yiddish phrase for when two things had absolutely no connection: Abi geret. Says who?

  As they pulled into the temple parking lot, Mark asked, “You okay?”

  She wasn’t.

  What she wanted now was to slip out of the past months as if they were only a rented hot and gaudy costume she could return at last.

  What she wanted more than anything on this burning night of Tishe B’Av was to forget.

  SNAPSHOT

  Allen Barnett

  THERE IS SOMETHING I DO NOT LIKE about old photographs—snapshots, I should say—the kind that one’s grandmother keeps in a box on a closet shelf, or in old albums that crack as the black pages are turned, spilling more photos than are held in place. I don’t like the way the people in these photographs speak in a tense which is theirs alone, or their unquestioning faith in the present tense. Now, the smiling person seems to say (Should I sit on the couch or the coffee table? Should I hold the baby? Should I hold my knee? Yes! Now!), this is me at my best. I do not like the way these old pictures fail the trust that is placed in them. I do not like how easily we are betrayed, and more, how easily we betray ourselves.

  When I was seven my mother showed me a snapshot of a young soldier standing at ease in front of a building made of corrugated iron. The photographer and his Brownie were too far away from the subject—the soldier’s face was nothing but a squint against the sun.

  “This is your real father,” my mother told me. “Dale is not your Daddy, honey, and never was. You don’t have to love him.” On the back of the snapshot was printed Kodak 1954.

  “That boy will grow up hating you and him both,” my grandmother said with her face in the bulge of the screen door, referring to the man in the photo. She was a woman with black and white convictions, and a mouth that seemed weighted at the comers, especially when she smiled.

  “He will hate me more if he finds out for himself,” my mother replied, implying that I would hate her, either/or.

  My grandmother stepped back into the house and my mother went in after her. “Illegitimate,” I heard my grandmother say. I did not know what the word meant, but I knew its reference was to me, for it was always said to imply that I hadn’t been sufficiently punished for something, or that I was spoiled and in some way responsible for my mother’s state of affairs, which had never been much good.

  I went to sit on the curb to get away from this adult conversation and its implications, which made me feel self-conscious and imperiled. We lived in what my mother called a subdivision, in a crackerbox house on a slab of cement. If you fell on the floor and cracked your head it could be heard out on the street. Up and down May Street the houses were identical to ours, distinguished only by the upkeep of the lawn, or the color of the stamped-sheet, tar-paper shingles that covered each house.

  It was early summer and the curb was filled with drifts of
shiny black cinders that had been spread there over the winter. Hiding on the other side of the house across the street was a teen-aged girl staring up into the eyes of her boyfriend. Her mother came to the screen door often, looking up and down the street for her daughter to come in and set the table. It was five-thirty and time to eat; her dad and everyone else’s dad was home from the factory, but she remained in the bed of petunias, flowers which have always reminded me of girls who wear too much make-up and cheap fabrics because they don’t know any better.

  A group of children rode by on their bicycles and a grief rose up in me like the kind of nausea that overwhelms without any kind of warning, and which I struggled—unsuccessfully—to keep down. It was also that hour of the day when the petunias smelled like the lady’s counter at the shopping center Walgreen’s, and unseen clouds of their scent hovered at the level of my face, dizzying as a kitchen filled with cigarette smoke and adult laughter.

  “Honey, why are you crying?” my mother asked with enough self-blame in her voice to hurt both of us. I was not a particularly sensitive child, and I seldom wept. My mother’s shadow was stretching long and thin into the street. I wanted to tell her, “For no reason, for no reason at all,” the way she would answer when I walked in on her and found her crying into a ball of tissue for no apparent reason. But something urgent was beating at the base of my skull, You, you, you.

  “I don’t know how to ride a bicycle,” I said.

  She sat down next to me on the curb. She put her head down and covered her face with one hand. Her shoulders trembled. I stopped crying then.

  Unoriginal as this may sound, it occurred to me as we sat on the curb of a street of identical houses that there were probably a good dozen other moon-faced kids hiding on the side of the house from their mothers in this sub-division alone, that there could be as many other seven-year-olds who could not ride a bicycle or swim, sitting with dusty sneakers in the cinders beside their beautiful young mothers, who were themselves sitting there crying at the pain and failure of everything they had done.

  This little scene repeated itself over and over in my head as if we sat between two mirrors, nothing at all unique about us, and felt like the solution that, once found, turns a puzzle into a used toy. If it was not completely comforting, this vision, it did give the world a kind of balance, or at least tipped the scales in my favor, and I wouldn’t have to think about myself so much. There is a school of thought that says children know more than they let on, but I am willing to concede that I knew nothing at all.

  My mother divorced Dale, married again a year later, and her second husband adopted me when I was thirteen. At the arrival of my new birth certificate in the mail, my mother said, “No one will ever be able to prove that he isn’t your real father,” as if this would be a point of pride or contention, I wasn’t sure. Anyone looking at us could tell that we were not related. He looked like a prince from a picture book. We didn’t love one another, but we could talk out of a mutual, if casual, curiosity. When I turned seventeen they bought me a used Volkswagen.

  Teaching me how to use the clutch, alone on a country road, he said, “I’ve always wanted to ask—do you ever miss your real father?”

  Inside the dim light of the car, the headlights just grazing freshly plowed fields, I imagined we could be the subject of a magazine ad. “His first car. There are things you’ve never talked about. Aren’t you glad it’s a Volkswagen?”

  “How could I miss someone I never knew?”

  “Do you want to know him?”

  “I don’t even know his name.”

  “Don’t you ever want to tell him about yourself?” he asked with uncharacteristic concern. “Don’t you think he wants to know? He is your father.”

  “No, really. I don’t think of him as my father.” I told him the truth and I told him what I thought he wanted to hear.

  “Turn around.”

  “What?”

  “Just turn around at this farm.”

  I drove us home and he jumped out of the car even before it came to a stop.

  I didn’t think about this evening until six years later when he and my mother were divorcing. He had already moved to Denver and I was packing to move to Thunderbird, Arizona, to get my M.B.A.

  “Do you think you’ll ever see him again?” my mother asked.

  “I will not go looking for him, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You were always a mother’s boy,” she said. “That’s probably my fault.”

  “The adoption wasn’t my idea,” I told her. “You just wanted you and me to have the same name.”

  “Is that so bad?” she asked.

  “The only time he wanted to know what I thought about anything was the night I got the Volkswagen. He asked me if I ever wanted to know my real father.”

  “I remember that night,” she said. “He got drunk and cried himself to sleep.”

  “Him drunk? Really?” He and my mother drank only on Christmas and New Year’s Eve. A bottle of gin lasted them three years.

  “He had a daughter, you know. From a previous marriage. His wife got custody of the little girl and then skipped state. She never wrote, never called, and he didn’t have the money to go looking for them. The last he heard, his wife had married well and her second husband adopted the kid. He still carries a snapshot of her in his wallet. I think that’s the saddest thing.”

  Sentimentality in my mother always surprised me for she had had many illusions shattered at an early age. She stood and walked away from me in a graceful but masculine manner. Her pose at the sink reminded me of her recent husband, an attitude he would take when he was talking about plans for the house or lecturing me about Vietnam and duty to one’s country. It occurred to me that he was legally still my father despite the divorce, and I wondered if there would ever be an incident in which I would be called back into his life. Was I responsible for him in case of accident or old age? Would someone call me if he died without a will? I wondered if there wasn’t an expiration date on relationships like these.

  I considered the color-coordinated kitchen, the pot holders hanging from the refrigerator by hidden magnets, all the evidence that the two of them had worked hard enough to ascend tentatively into the middle-class. I was going after an M.B.A. to make that ascendancy all the more secure. If anyone would have asked me what I wanted from life, I would have replied quality. I wanted to be able to assume my right to things.

  My mother asked, “Don’t you ever want to know the circumstances of your birth?”

  I went to the kitchen door. “No,” I said, telling her the truth because I didn’t know what she wanted to hear. “You make it sound as if there were criminal activity involved.”

  “In some states there would have been,” she said, and picked at something caught in her teeth with a matchbook cover.

  Out the door I looked across the back yard. It ended at a high-voltage tower, beyond which there had once been a cornfield, which was beautiful; then soybeans, which were not; then one year nothing was planted. Weeds grew in the fertile ground as high as a woman’s head. There was nothing in the field then. It was supposed to be a park, but it was only an ugly spread of short, stubby, hard grass. I was just about to walk out the door to get away from my mother’s gaze for a moment when she said, “I don’t want you to blame me.”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I have always blamed myself.” Then I broke into a sudden and foolish laughter.

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “You can’t take responsibility for your own birth.”

  “Nevertheless,” I repeated, still laughing. It was preposterous and absolutely true, and the recognition of this fact made me feel light-headed and released, like a balloon detached from a child’s hand. My mother had more to say, but I wasn’t helping her. I was comfortable, isolated, floating away.

  But when I arrived in Arizona the next day, I opened a suitcase and found three old letters and a snapshot o
f my mother. On the back of the snapshot was written, “Lorraine to Joe. October 1954. Union City, Tenn.” My mother’s hair in the photo was very long, bleached blonde and parted down the side like Veronica Lake’s. She was braced on the arm of a large sofa, legs crossed like a man’s, smiling directly at the person for whom the snapshot was obviously intended. It was easy to imagine even from the black-and-white picture that the color of her lips was bright red. Her bravura was touching—fifteen years old and pregnant with me.

  The three envelopes were postmarked from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, an army base, dated the September and October of the year before I was born, and sent to Union City, Tennessee. They were from a Private Joseph James.

  “Joe wanted to marry me,” she said. “It was his mother who made him join the army. I took the bus from Michigan to Tennessee so we could be together. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going, either. There was a bar in Union City where my dad used to sing before he married your grandmother. They gave me a job because they thought I was your Aunt Esther. The picture I gave you was taken in the little apartment they gave me right above the bar.”

  I felt leaden, weighted, stilled: the feeling you get when a blanket that has been tossed over you descends, then is tucked up to your chin. I had only called to tell her I had arrived safely in Thunderbird. She wanted to tell me everything, and everything she wanted to tell me required my wanting to know. She must have felt that she had no claim on me as a mother if she could not tell me the truth I was supposed to desire. For my part, it was like being the object of longing by someone who loves you too much and wants to tell you everything in hope that that will make you love them more. Under this pressure, I was the one to acquiesce, and I asked the requisite questions, but only like an uninvolved stage manager rehearsing an actress who has trouble with her lines.

  “Why didn’t you marry Joe in Tennessee?”

  “Because people figured out where I was and his mother sent him a letter telling him he couldn’t marry me until he was out of the army. You would have been almost four years old by then. Joe wrote to tell me what she said, and I got so mad I tore the letter up, and wrote back to tell him not to worry about marrying me. I told him I was already married. And I signed the letter Mrs. Ernest Wray.”