Son of a Smaller Hero (11 page)

“Oh. I’m sorry. All right.”

Oh God, she thought. She got up and kissed him, clinging to him tightly. Her ardour distressed him. “I’m a bitch, Theo. An awful bitch. I’m so sorry.”

“You’ll be fine, darling. You’ve had a bit too much, that’s all.”

She moved away from him coldly. “I need a shower. You go to bed, Theo. I won’t be long.”

“Oh, Miriam. What’s happened to Noah?”

But, shutting the bathroom door behind her, she had pretended not to hear. Theo shrugged his shoulders. Something was wrong, but that something, which was certainly oppressive, eluded him. He sat down and tried to read again, but he couldn’t concentrate. Looking around the room he saw all the familiar possessions and heard all the familiar noises and thought,
This
is what I have striven for, but found no comfort in the thought or in the possessions. His eyes filled with the ineffable terror of those who, drowning, search an empty hostile sea for something, anything, to hold firm to: whether that thing be true or not. Nothing’s wrong, he thought. I’m tired. He tried to read again, desperately, but the print blurred. The books can be sold, he thought. So can the furnishings.
Everything I have is rented
. “Miriam …”

The shower drowned out all other noises. She could not hear him call out and he could not hear her sobbing. She realized quickly that, as far as Noah was concerned, Theo was just a thing in the way. But she knew differently. She recalled with some disgust the exhibition that she had made of herself in the Bar Vendôme. Then she relented. She felt that she was betraying Noah.
I do
love him, she thought. But if I don’t betray him I must betray Theo. She ripped off her cap and turned the tap on harder, surrendering herself to the water like a punishment. Drying herself, she meticulously avoided looking into the mirror. An ageing woman’s lust, she thought. I can’t. He must know that I can’t. That I was drunk.

Theo was still up when she got into bed with him. The room helped. She lay her head child-like on the pillow, newly rich in an acquired belief and intent on falling asleep before Noah returned.

Theo kissed her cheek. “Miriam. Let’s have a child.”

“Oh. Oh, no!”

“Why?”

“Oh, Theo, I … Remember? We said that we wouldn’t until you …”

“Until I was earning enough money. Well, I am now.”

He waited, but she didn’t reply. Miriam stared into the familiar, habitual dark of their room. Then, sadly, she turned to him.

The first time Noah had been to a concert the orchestra had played
The Four Seasons
of Vivaldi and he had been so struck by it that he had felt something like pain. He had not suspected that men were capable of such beauty. He had been startled. So he had walked out wondering into the night, not knowing what to make of his discovery. All those stale lies that he had inherited from others, all those cautionary tales, and those other dreadful things, facts, that he had collected like his father did stamps, knowledge, all that passed away, rejected, dwarfed by the entry of beauty into his consciousness. The city, the gaudy night, had whirled around him phantasmagorically but without importance. I didn’t know about beauty, he had thought. Nobody ever told me. When he had next been aware of his surroundings he was sitting on a bench on the mountain. It was dawn. People were getting up to go to work.

Later Noah had found out that there were booths in music stores where customers could try out records. So for weeks he had wandered from store to store sampling different symphonies and concertos, but always coming back to Vivaldi.

There had been other incidents, too. One afternoon, when he had still been in high school, he had decided not to go to classes, but to go for a walk instead. For suddenly he had realized that nothing they thought horrible could really hurt him. They could strap him. Fail him. Throw him out of school. What did it matter? All their threats, all of Melech’s laws, were like autumn leaves that, once flung into the wind, scattered and turned to dust. He had not done anything special with that afternoon of freedom. He had walked, but not in beautiful places. Yet somehow the whole city had seemed
to be illuminated by the fire that burned within him. Walking, he had danced. Loitering on benches, he had suddenly, inexplicably, burst out into great peals of laughter. He had not been able at that time to think of anything reasonable or unremarkable or sorrowful. Finally, he had felt absolutely exhausted.

When he had got home his mother had said: “Where have you been so late?”

“Walking.”

“Where, walking?”

“I dunno.”

She had looked at him, surprised, and he had been swiftly overcome by a deep and unyielding sadness.

“It was beautiful, Maw. Honest.”

That night, after he left Miriam, Noah had been filled with something of that old awe, a touch of that first-discovered beauty, and he had walked along happily – dead sure that life was a perfect thing – for several hours. Then, suddenly, it was morning. The lowering sky was chill and without promise or much light. Over towards the left of the Sun Life Building a dripping cloud was stained bright yellow. That would be the sun, he thought. Christmas decorations were going up over Eaton’s.
When My Baby Smiles at Me
was playing at the Princess Theatre, across the street. He crossed. He looked at an enticing cardboard figure of Doris Day. Somebody had shoved thumbtacks into where her nipples ought to have been and Noah reached up and pulled them out. Dour people, standing at the corner and waiting for streetcars, watched him critically. Noah grinned at them. I’m never going to die, he thought. Dying would be stupid.

When Noah got back to the apartment Miriam and Theo were still eating breakfast. She did not give him any sign, but Theo asked him to sit down. “How’s your girlfriend?” he asked knowingly.

“Fine.”

“You look all in, boy.” Theo stubbed his cigarette and got up and put on his coat. Noah avoided Miriam’s eyes. “We’re not prudes,
Noah. No need to rent a room. Bring her around here for the night if you want.”

He looked away when they kissed.

After Theo had gone Miriam looked at him sorrowfully and then slipped into her bedroom, shutting the door behind her. Noah waited. He waited fifteen minutes, and then he knocked on the door. She didn’t answer. He knocked again.

“All right. You might as well come in.”

She was seated before the bureau combing out her black hair. She could watch him in the mirror, but he couldn’t see her face. The bed was unmade, and he noticed their pyjamas tangled up together on the sheets. There were no chairs. He didn’t want to sit on their bed, so he stood. “Would you like to go for a walk?” he asked.

Her pyjamas were pink, and his were grey with red stripes.

“Aren’t we speaking?” he asked.

“I think you’d better move, Noah.”

“Oh. Oh, I see.”

Watching him in the mirror she thought, Go. Go, she thought. Please go. Go now.

“I’m beat. I’ll go back to Mrs. Mahoney’s. She’ll have a room for me.”

“All right.”

“I’ll get my things tomorrow. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He hesitated. Then he flushed, and walked up nearer to her. “You know when to stop, eh? That’s a damn good thing.”

“Please, let’s not have a scene.
Please
. If you were older you would under …”

“You mean we could part friends. That kind of crap, eh?”

“Theo and I are going to have a …”

“Listen,” he said, twisting her around. “You look at me when you talk to me, understand? I’m no animal.”

“I can’t give this up, Noah. Not even for you. You don’t know what my life has been like, you … I want security, that’s all.”

“All right.”

The door slammed.

She walked over to the window and watched him walk away. She picked up an ashtray and smashed it on the floor. I hope you have an accident, she thought. I really do.

Mrs. Mahoney had been glad to have him back. But Bertha, she said, had returned to her mother in Sherbrooke, and Joey had disappeared. Noah knocked off his shoes and undid his collar and lay back on his bed. I knew that she wasn’t real from the first, he thought. He recalled all the ordinary, clean-washed things that he had eaten in their apartment and suddenly, sleepily, he longed for properly spiced food. Christ, if I were back on City Hall Street I could tell Hoppie and Gas some real stories. And Theo, the bastard, always trying to get me to talk about my family when people are around. I’m colourful, he thinks. Hell.

He fell asleep.

He slept soundly and without dreams through the rest of the day and the night that followed.

Finally, a knocking came to him faintly.…

Noah stumbled out of bed and noticed, half-consciously, that it was morning. He was surprised, for he had thought that he had only been sleeping for an hour or so. He walked over to the sink and splashed cold water on his face and wrists. The door opened.

“May I come in?”

Miriam was wearing her brown tweed coat. A green silk scarf accentuated the vulnerability of her throat. Her hair was brushed back hard and held tight by a gold clasp, but there was something
of the child in her sorrowful brown eyes. She smiled boldly but without conviction.

“Sure. Of course you can.”

She flung her coat down on the bed like a rebuke. She was wearing a green woollen dress. He felt a fluttering in his stomach again and he brushed back his hair nervously.

“I won’t have you talking to me the way you did yesterday.”

“Is that what you came to tell me?” he asked.

“I think you’re a son-of-a-bitch. You’re young and you don’t know what you’re doing. I think Theo is a much nicer guy than you are. Understand?”

He moved towards her compulsively and took her in his arms and kissed her tenderly first and then with passion. He felt her quiver and yield against him. He undid the clasp and dug his hand into her hair and pressed her scalp, saying poignant things softly, and feeling her lips like a burn on his neck. He kissed her eyes and her nose and her throat and then slowly, together, they stumbled back on the bed.

Afterwards they touched each other tenderly and without caution.

“I love you when you’re angry,” he said. “I love you, anyway. But I love you best when you’re angry.”

“Noah, I’m not fooling. I – I thought a lot before I came here.”

“I guess you did,” he said.

“It wasn’t very good without you around.”

“You’re really beautiful. Christ, I didn’t know you were beautiful. I mean you look kind of severe when you’re dressed. I trust you better this way.”

“I like the feeling of your voice. I like your hands, too.”

Noah laughed, and stared at his hands. “If I were Jelly-Roll Morton,” he said, “I would look at my hands all the time. I would walk down the street and look at them and put them in my pockets and pull them out and look at them and laugh like hell.”

“Jelly-Roll is dead.”

“Yes. So’s L. Trotsky and Mr. Vivaldi,” he said. “So that makes us both greater than them. Really, it does.”

“Oh, Noah. Christ, Noah.”

Miriam wanted to tell him about other men – about how long she had waited for loving and how frightened she was now that she had it. She waited to say something that would bind him to her irrevocably. But each time she tried, a lump formed in her throat and all she could do was to touch him and smile weakly. She wanted to tell him about her father. Chuck. She was afraid and she wanted time to stop – to stop right then.

“You think being alive is fine, don’t you?” she asked.

“Yes, I do. I think being in bed with you is fine, too. Finer than anything I have ever known.”

“I haven’t got your capacity for happiness. I won’t mind dying at all. Being out of it, I mean.”

“That’s just so much crap,” he said.

She giggled. “That’s just so much crap,” she said.

He touched her hair with his hand. He felt relieved for he did not know much about love-making and he had been worried that he would do the wrong thing, that she would burst out laughing because he was such an inept lover. He was intoxicated. Full. He kissed her again and laughed. “God, it must be real crazy to be a woman. Do you look at yourself all day long?”

“Don’t be silly!”

“If I were beautiful like you I’d walk around naked always. I’d lead parades and dare people not to –”

“Are you happy?”

“I’m better than happy. You?”

She was sobbing. Suddenly, just like that. Her swift changes of mood baffled him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked quickly.

“Nothing. Nothing, you fool. Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

She laughed and wept, and laughed some more. “I’ve waited so long, Noah, I’m so afraid.”

Noah woke first.

She was sleeping with her head resting on her arm. He got up without disturbing her and pulled down the shade a bit to keep the afternoon sun out of her eyes. He sat down and watched her. He wanted to shout. Her beauty hurt him, and he could not understand why.

Noah hurried downstairs and bought smoked meat sandwiches and salad and four bottles of beer. When he got back she was sitting up in bed and smoking. He grinned foolishly. “Food,” he said.

After they had eaten she turned to him and said: “What are we going to do, Noah?”

“I’ll get a job. Then we’ll get an apartment of our own.”

“You make it sound so easy. What kind of job?”

“Wal, I could go out West and get work poking cattle, or whatever it is they do. Or I could stay East and sell filthy sonnets and gold-mine stocks, corner Peel and St. Catherine. Or I could become a rabbi. You’d have to shave your head and wear a wig. Would that be okay?”

“Will you please try to be serious?”

“Worried about Theo?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t love him. I don’t even think he loves you. He’s got no rights, Miriam.” He began to make excited circles with his hands. “Some foolish minister read a few foolish words over you.”

“We’ve been married five years.”

“All right. What do
you
suggest?”

“First of all I suggest that you don’t shout. Second of all – you can’t keep these things a secret. People will talk.”