Endless Love (16 page)

“I was her lawyer for the divorce,” Arthur said. “That’s why we came here. To talk about it. I didn’t even know her, but a gal she was close to in Philadelphia had a brother in the Party here, and Rose went to him and said she needed a lawyer and he sent her to me. That was Meyer Goldman, by the way, who sent Rose to me.”

“I love Meyer Goldman,” I said.

“You never met him.”

“But you told me about him. He was the one who smoked pot, right? He played saxophone. He knew Mezz Mezzrow. He wore black and white shoes and he pulled the waist of his pants up so high he looked like he was nothing but legs.”

“Curly red hair and a mouthful of rotten teeth. Poor Meyer. Even after the Party expelled him he was always in trouble and he always came to me. Write a letter to his landlord. Call up the musicians’ union and scream anti-Semitism. This and this and that and that, I thought it would never stop. I wasn’t even supposed to talk to him, you understand. When someone was expelled you weren’t supposed to talk to him. I didn’t give a damn about that, but the things he’d come to me for. And each time he made sure to remind me, ‘If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t have Rose.’” Suddenly, my father put his hand to his forehead, as if he’d been struck by a stone. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I was so much in love then.”

I had an impulse to reach across and touch him, just as he wanted to hold me whenever I showed my sorrow. But I held myself back. I didn’t want to interrupt his remorse. It reminded me too much of my own and once it did that, I wasn’t as close to him as I should have been.

“So you helped her get divorced?” I said.

“I did everything and I knew as much about it as you do.It wasn’t my kind of law. I got her moved out of Courtney’s house. I found her a place with a very good woman, a sculptor, a very generous, warm person.”

“Libby Schuster,” I said.

“I told you about Libby Schuster?”

“Something. I remember her.”

Arthur’s hand moved as if it had been touched by something invisible. His eyes moistened. “You never met her. She died just a little after you were born. Meyer too, Meyer died in 1960, in California, Meyer Goldman. Libby was old but Meyer was young, maybe fifty, fifty-two. It wasn’t necessary. A waste.”

We were silent while the dead who lived in my father’s thoughts passed through him: with leaflets, with saxophones.

Finally, I asked, “When are you leaving…?” Leaving where? Home seemed childish and Rose an accusation.

“Tonight,” said Arthur.

“Mom knows?”

“She knows.”

“I mean she knows it’s tonight?”

“Yes. And she’s known the whole thing for a long while. We waited.”

“Because of me?”

“We wanted you to get settled. To feel strong in your own life. We didn’t want you in that hospital thinking you didn’t have a normal home to come home to.”

“You’ve been thinking about it that long?”

Arthur nodded.

And then I said what I’d known all along. “Are you in love with someone else?”

Arthur was immobile for a moment, and then he said, in that kind of voice men use when they recite oaths, “With all my heart.”

“Who is it? Is it someone I know?”

“You never met her. Her name is Barbara Sherwood. She works as a court stenographer. You know that’s a very good job and a very difficult one. She’s been married. Her husband died five years ago. She lives in our neighborhood. Two children. And she’s black.”

I folded my hands. “Are you moving in with her?”

“I’ll stay at her house in the meanwhile. Barbara’s in the hospital right now. I’ll help look after the kids and after she gets out we shall see.” He poured the last of the beer into our glasses. Most of the food was still on his plate; it had been cut and pushed around, as if he’d been looking for something inside of it.

“I don’t blame you, you know,” I said. “I don’t think that’s a big issue or anything, but I want to tell you I don’t blame you for doing this.”

“It’s what I would expect,” said Arthur. “You of all people.”

“Wait. Don’t say that. I love Mom. I don’t care what it looks like. Our relationship is what we’ve made it but I’m always going to love her.”

“I know that. That’s not what I mean. You of all people know what it’s like to be so much in love that everything else falls away. Everyone else I know would probably think I’m acting like a bastard or just an idiot. Leaving Rose. Leaving behind all those years. You know a man my age has more of a past than a future, and when you leave the past you only have a few years to call your own. They’d think I was acting irresponsibly. People believe in our marriage, Rose’s and mine. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“They do. Of course, no one knows what’s happened. And when they find out, they’ll all regroup around Rose. I’ll be the villain. They’re really her friends anyhow, always have been. The old comrades. In a lot of ways, I was sick of that crew ever since I got back from the war.”

“When I was born.”

“They’re not going to understand, but you are. I guess a father has no business saying this to a son, no matter how old the son is.” His gaze passed over me, as if I was just one member of an enormous jury. “You were my inspiration. Seeing you in love reminded me.”

“Of what?”

“Of how I once felt about Rose and how she never ever felt about me, until I didn’t feel that way about her either. But you reminded me of how it feels. A lot of people never have it, that feeling, not even once. You know that, don’t you? But you had it—”

“With Jade.”

“And you reminded me that I once had it and that I never felt so large and important as I did when being in love was
everything.
I saw you walking a foot above the earth and I remembered that was where
I
used to walk, for a few months. Right after I helped Rose get her divorce and we were together every minute of the day. Before it came out how much she was in love with that Courtney and I had to realize it was going to take a while for her to get over it. I knew she’d get over it but it was going to take time. The magic in her heart was with him, not with me, even though she would have chosen me over him a hundred times. I understood that, but I wasn’t walking in the air anymore. I had to be too intelligent for that; you make a few reasonable decisions and you can’t make a fool of yourself any longer.”

“I never knew that’s what you wanted.”

“I didn’t either. I’d forgotten. You made me remember and then Barbara showed me I hadn’t missed my chance. It was like waking up twenty years younger. Not that all of a sudden my hair was thick and I didn’t need glasses and my death was far away. But I have an appetite for every single second of the day. I want you to meet Barbara. You’re going to know what I mean. I never thought this would happen. I never thought I’d be able to believe in all of this a second time. But I do. And I don’t have to be embarrassed.”

“I know,” I said. My heart was pounding.

“I know you know. You know it every second of your life and you won’t let yourself forget. It’s why you sneaked out of the house that night of your party to go to my office. And it’s why every time you come to my office to meet me for lunch you manage to take a look at those letters of yours and it’s why I always make sure to let you.”

Barbara Sherwood was in the same hospital I was taken to after the fire and the room she occupied was next door to the room in which I confessed—insisted—that it had been me who’d ignited that huge, tender house. My father and I walked down the faded corridors, with the bleary overhead lights that made everything look the way it does when you haven’t really slept in nights, past the nurses who nodded at Arthur as if they knew him, past an empty stretcher with dried blood on its safety straps, past a metal table piled with food trays, breathing that high-pitched medicinal odor which some people find reassuring but which struck me as the smell of utter desperation, past the ringing phones and the Dr. Abrams Dr. Abrams please report to 404, through a little knot of visitors too nervous and distracted to move out of our way, doing little confused dances, moving left when we moved left and right when we moved right and finally frowning at Arthur’s touch and standing with their backs close to the grayish wall, which I would not have wanted to touch because it looked somehow slippery, but that was only the light. My father carried the evening paper and five Ian Fleming paperbacks tied together by a piece of yellow yarn; I kept my hands in my pockets, counting and recounting eight dimes and a quarter.

Barbara Sherwood had the most feline face I’d ever seen on a human being. Her black hair was cut short and combed down over her high broad forehead. She had those kind of over- defined cheekbones that girls doodle in their notebooks when they are dreaming of looking like an exotic model. Her eyebrows were carefully shaped and even though she was in the hospital and probably suffering, she’d put on eye makeup that made her eyes look even larger and more slanted than they were. I didn’t know that she’d lost a lot of weight over the past months; her leanness seemed voluntary and fashionable. Her bed was cranked up so she was practically sitting. Her hospital gown was a little large; she looked like a teenager wearing her father’s shirt, though she didn’t look at all young. While her hair was black and her skin was smooth, her years lived beneath her surface, as if time had been sublimated, repressed, and was taking its due invisibly.

“Well, here he is,” said Arthur, ushering me to her bedside. There were two chairs set up for us; the curtain separating Barbara’s bed from her roommate’s was drawn; everything had been arranged.

I wanted to take the first initiative. I thrust out my hand. “Hello, pleased to meet you,” I said, in a bright, ringing voice, as if I was a boy who’d been taught to behave very elegantly around strangers.

She placed her hand in mine; her fingers were cold and when I shook her hand they felt colder.

Arthur stood there with his folded hands resting on his hard, round stomach, expressing the bliss of a figure on a Tarot card. He breathed out slowly and made a small musical sigh, as if choral music filled his head.

“It’s good,” said Barbara. I couldn’t tell if she was nervous and had forgotten to complete her sentence or if this was her personal style. It’s good? It’s good? I mean really! I felt instantly ironical; I’d come fully prepared to make small judgments about my father’s new lover.

“Are they treating you all right here?” I said, the extremely influential gentleman from out of town. I glanced over my shoulder, as if to make certain that my footman was in place, holding the gigantic bouquet of long-stem American Beauties.

“It’s homey here,” Barbara said. “Not like that other place.”

“She was in All Saints last year,” said Arthur.

“What a place that was,” Barbara said. “That was a place to give you the creeps. Those sisters gliding around in their long black robes and all those baby-faced priests pacing up and down the halls with the purple ribbons around their necks, wondering who they could give last rites to.” She smiled; she was missing a tooth near the front. She saw I’d noticed and said, “I fell,” and touched her mouth, remembering.

We spoke for a few moments, with the bewildered caution of strangers who can break each other’s hearts. Barbara said my father had told her all about me, which is of course what people say in those situations, but Barbara seemed to blush for a moment, so maybe he really had. Somehow I was gotten to talk about my classes, my job for the union, and the offer from Harold Stern to leave the picket line and work part-time as a researcher for the union’s educational department. I was congratulated, encouraged, and if Barbara was half so bored as I was with the details of my life she must have feared slipping into a coma.

She gave Arthur an impish look, like an incorrigible, truth- telling girl in a Victorian novel. But there was no little jolt of tension in the air, and no release; Arthur sat in his place, perfectly calm. He knew she was going to say that; it had probably been planned.

“Well. Has Arthur told you about…
us?”

“He did,” I said. I cleared my throat.

Barbara nodded, looking at me. “So? What do you think?”

“You don’t need my permission.” I felt my father’s hand touching me with some delicacy on my elbow.

“We’d like to know how you feel about it, though,” said Barbara. She folded her hands in her half-formed lap. Her fingers were bare and very black; the plastic identification bracelet was too large on her wrist.

“I feel a lot of ways about it,” I said. “I feel scared for my mother.” I paused. Arthur shifted in his seat; Barbara nodded approvingly. “And I think I’m scared for my father, too.”

“Why?” said Barbara. “Because of…” she gestured, indicating the hospital and her place inside of it.

“I don’t know why. Because he’s changing. Because he’s different now, and he’ll get more and more different. It doesn’t make much sense. I just feel it.”

“I won’t change,” my father said.

“You will. You want to. And you should. You won’t be an unhappy man anymore. That has to change you. You’ll be living right in the center of your best and bravest self and maybe it’s not right for me to say this but I know, I really do know exactly what that’s like.” I felt more than a little puffed up and ridiculous but not one word of my tremulous oration came easily or fast. For all the inappropriateness of a son making a speech about his father’s romantic leap, I felt everything I said as if the words had claws that dragged along my throat as I spoke them.

“I’m glad you feel that way,” Barbara said. “I knew you would because that’s how your daddy told me about you. You know, when I was waiting for you to come to see me this evening I was getting so nervous. I’ve got two children of my own and I know that when it comes to their parents, children are the rock-ribbed Republicans of the world. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s so true,” said Arthur.

“My own children asked some pretty tough questions. Maybe I made it tougher on myself than I had to because I never wanted to lie to them. So they wanted to know how Arthur could come and be with us when he had a wife living less than a mile away. They wanted to know what kind of woman their mother was who let a man into her bedroom without the blessing of marriage. You see, their father was a religious man and though I am not, I have never interfered with their beliefs. It’s their way of keeping their father with them; when they pray to God they’re really talking to their own daddy who died when they were so small. Oh, and you know how it is with life in this city being what it is. They wanted to know how I could be with a white man.”