You Are My Heart and Other Stories (7 page)

“The bad news is that I couldn't sleep,” she said. “But that's the good news too, along with the fact that my parents
are
fast asleep. I hope you don't mind.”

All she was wearing was a thin nightgown, and she started caressing me, then giving me these little bites up and down my body that drove me crazy, all the while asking, “Do you like that…? Do you like
that…
? Do you
like
that…?” and telling me that anytime I wanted her to stop all I had to do was say so.

 

On Tuesday of the next week, Karen waited for me after school and asked me to go for a walk with her. We stayed silent all along Flatbush Avenue until we got to the park, and then she told me she'd heard that I'd gone to a dance in Belle Harbor and asked if I wanted to tell her about it.

I shrugged, and asked what was there to tell, given that she had said we were finished with each other.

“So that means I
made
you go to the dance with another girl, right?”

“No,” I said. “But it—the dance—didn't mean anything. I mean, my mother was after me—the girl's mother called my mother and—”

“So you were
forced
to go by events beyond your control, is that it?”

I told her that I went to the dance because I wanted to—that she and I were both free to do what we wanted, weren't we? Were we engaged? Were we even going steady anymore?

“I trusted you,” she said. “I loved you and I trusted you and in one week, you just…”

She stopped talking, and I could see she was working hard to keep from crying.

“You really stink, do you know that?” she said then. “But do you know the worst part? The worst part is that I still care for you more than is good for me, and I probably always will, so this is what I want to say: If you're willing to try again—no matter our parents, or Olen, or our skin, or whatever—I'm willing.”

“So?” I asked.

“So?” she exclaimed. “
So?!
So
are
you? Do
you
want to try again?”

“Look,” I began. “I really do care for you, only—”

“Only you just answered my question,” she said. “Lord help you. You're breaking my heart, but do you know what? At least I've got a heart to break.”

And that was the last time we ever spoke.

Olen didn't go to college the following fall, and as far as I know he never went. But Karen did. In September, 1955, when I went off to college—Hamilton College, in upstate New York, where, even though I stuck to my word and didn't play for Mr. Ordover during my senior year at Erasmus, I was able to make the Hamilton team and became its starting point guard my junior year—Karen took a job as a secretary for a toy manufacturer in downtown Brooklyn.

Whenever I came home on school vacations, and after college too, I'd ask around about her, and what I learned was that after a year or two as a secretary, she'd started going to Brooklyn College at night and during the summers, after which she did the same thing at Brooklyn Law School.

Sometime in the early sixties, I was told, her family moved out of Brooklyn, but nobody could tell me exactly where they'd gone, and none of the guys knew what happened to Olen either. The year after he graduated, he'd worked for a while in the stock room at the new Macy's department store on Flatbush Avenue, and after that there were rumors about him getting a tryout with the Harlem Globetrotters, or with the team of mostly white guys the Globetrotters toured with, but nobody knew for sure.

When, in the summer of 1964, I took time out of school—I was in my last year at the Yale School of Architecture—to work down South helping to register voters, I found myself imagining—hoping—that Karen would be assigned to the same team I was on, that we'd meet and realize we still loved each other and
that there was no force on earth strong enough to keep us from being together.

But we didn't meet down there, and the following summer—in June, 1965—I married Allison Plaut, a Jewish girl from Cleveland I fell in love with when she was a Yale junior and I was working as an apprentice architect for a company in the New Haven shipyards. After living in the New Haven area for eight years, I accepted a position in the design department of an international ship-building company near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Allison and I moved down there, where we raised our family—a girl and two boys—and where Allison worked first as an elementary school teacher, and later on as a professor in the School of Education at L.S.U., and where, once a year, with our children, and then by ourselves after our children went off to college, we'd drive down to New Orleans for Jazz Fest, where, no matter what other musicians were performing, I'd wind up spending all my time in the gospel tent, sometimes singing along to songs I remembered.

W
hen Peter Simmons had visited South Africa the previous summer, he had become concerned about several HIV-infected patients in Tugela Ferry who had died from a strain of tuberculosis that had proven resistant to all known drugs. Upon his return to the States, Peter, who was Professor of Medicine and Director of AIDS Programs at Johns Hopkins Medical School, had alerted the CDC to his discovery, and it turned out that the strain of tuberculosis, its identity obtained through molecular fingerprinting, had been known to the CDC since 1995. What they needed now, they told Peter, was a live culture of the bacteria in order to determine if other strains like it existed.

Their attempts to acquire samples of the organism itself, however, had been thwarted by the South African government, which would not allow representatives of the CDC to enter the country. Perhaps, they suggested, when Peter was next in Tugela Ferry, he could obtain a culture and bring it back with him. And perhaps, Peter thought, he could persuade his daughter, Jennifer, who would arouse considerably less suspicion than he would, to accompany him to South Africa and to transport the sample. Perhaps, too, the assignment—its adventure—would distract her from her situation.

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.
The African proverb had been with Peter intermittently thoughout the day, the words softly and insistently repeating themselves, and they were with him again now while he sat at
a café with Jennifer, an electric brazier beside their table giving off enough heat on this early December day to enable them to sit outside.

Jennifer pointed to the large parking lot that took up most of the center of Saint Rémy—she had been staying in the town, on leave from her job, for more than two weeks now—and said that several mornings a week, the parking lot, along with many of the side streets that radiated from it, was transformed into a market.

“I could be happy living here,” she said.

“Who wouldn't?” Peter said.

“It's a real
village
—a place where you can shop every day for the things you need for that day, and where you know the shopkeepers, where their children are friends with your children—”

“You don't
have
any children.”

“It has all the perks of a larger city too,” Jennifer continued. “Museums, music festivals, art galleries. Lots of writers and artists live here—it's not far from major cities, and from the sea—even from the Alps, if you travel inland a bit—”

“You're in a good mood, aren't you?”

“What could be bad?” Jennifer said. “I'm far from my phone, my computer, and my law office. I'm in a beautiful village in the south of France where—lucky me—I'm having a fashionable late-afternoon drink with my father.”

“And you're pregnant.”

“Oh
that
!” Jennifer said, and waved the subject away.

“You didn't answer my question.”

“You didn't
ask
a question.”

Peter leaned across the table. “Jennifer,” he said.

“
Dad
,” she said, leaning toward him in the way he was leaning toward her.

“Look. We've
got
to talk about what you're going to do. I have no intention of telling you
what
to do, of course, but—”

“But nothing, okay?” Jennifer said. “So how about, instead
of you telling me the-choices-are-mine-but-you-just-want-tomake-sure-I-understand-the-consequences—you tell me what you think. How about—even better—you tell me
what to do
! It would be a relief, believe me, to have somebody just take over.”

“I need more data,” Peter said. “What week are you in? Have you had an ultrasound yet? Do you love the guy? Does he know?”

“Last question first. He doesn't know
and
I don't love him. I surely had the
hots
for him, but I've concluded that if I never saw him again, it wouldn't be too soon. I don't
miss
him. Plus, he'd make a
lousy
father—the kind of guy who'd say, ‘You deserve to have your career, dear, so I'll play Mister Mom for our kids'—and then I'd arrive home to find him zoned out in front of the TV—yes, he's a pot-head too—the house a wreck, the baby ass deep in poop and puke, and—”

“Do you want the child?”

“Maybe.”

“Not good enough,” Peter said.

Jennifer looked away. She lifted her glass of wine, then set it back on the table. “I probably shouldn't be having any alcohol,” she said. “Why didn't you stop me?”

“You're a big girl,” Peter said. “And one drink won't cause birth defects. All things in moderation.”

“Including moderation, right?” Jennifer sighed. “But look—I know you think it would be good for me to go with you to South Africa instead of staying here and worrying my decision to death, not to mention causing my loving parents unnecessary anguish, but—” She stopped, waved her hand in front of his eyes. “Dad?
Dad?!
Are you
listening
to me?”

“Of course. You think I think it would be good for you to come with me to South Africa and that—”

“
No!
” Jennifer slammed the table with the flat of her hand. “No. You can parrot my words back well enough, but you're staring at that woman over there. It's rude.”

Peter
had
noticed a woman sitting a few tables away: an attractive, dark-haired woman, her shoulder-length hair parted to one side—in her mid-forties, he guessed—who was drinking coffee and reading a newspaper.

“I thought she might be someone I knew,” Peter said. “She looked familiar.”

“They
all
look familiar,” Jennifer said, and, nearly knocking over her glass of wine, leaned forward and slammed her hand on the table again. “I hate it when men do that—I absolutely hate it when they pretend to be listening while ogling another woman, and when a guy does it to me what I want to do is to pull an ice pick out of my handbag and jab it in one of his eyes. If we could do that to every man who thinks he has the right to stare at us that way, and if—”

“Stop it. People are staring at
you.
”

Jennifer sat back. “Okay,” she said. “I'm done for now. And yes, I did come here because of Van Gogh—because he spent the last year of his life here, before he killed himself—but rest assured I am not necessarily suicidal. I just like the peace and quiet—the beauty of the landscape that inspired him even while he was locked up and out of his mind—and I like being far from everything and everyone I know, and it was probably a mistake for you to visit me. Correct that. It was probably a mistake for me to say yes when you said you wanted to stop by on your way to do more of God's work.”

Jennifer forced a smile, then leaned back. “I'll be fine in a few years,” she said.

“I'm counting on it,” Peter said. Then: “Any morning sickness?”

“No.”

“Been to a doctor?”

“Sure.”

“Okay,” he said. “What I think, then, is that you should have the child.”

Jennifer grinned. “Thank God,” she said. “I was hoping you'd say that. So okay: here or there?”

“There.”

“Do I tell the father?”

“Not necessarily. If he finds out, there could be legal complications. We need to know more first—to inform ourselves.”

“What if I don't do what you say—what if I don't have the child?”

“Then you don't.”

Jennifer cocked her head to the side. “You
are
a good man, you know,” she said. “Mom always said so, even when she was pissed at you. Maybe not the best dad in the world—you were
away
so damned much, and playing around, and—”

“Now wait a minute—” Peter began.

“Oh Dad, it doesn't matter. I think it may have mattered to Mom in the beginning—she never said anything to me, but—” Jennifer stopped. “When I think about marriage—about finding a guy I'd want to have children with, and when I think about my age—past thirty—
wow!
—I mean, the idea of making love to one man and one man only for the next twenty or thirty years, it seems utterly ridiculous. I don't get how people do it.”

“Maybe they don't.”

“But then there's all the secrecy and lying and sneaking around and hurt feelings. It all seems so stupid.”

“What's the alternative?”

Jennifer shrugged. “Living in France?”

Peter laughed.

“I've been angry with you—sure—but not for that,” Jennifer said. “I mean, you were working so damned hard all those years, going out to save lives every day, and when—”

“
Save
lives? Not at all. Mostly they
died.
For every life I saved—prolonged, at best—at least a hundred died. Look. At last count in Tugela Ferry alone, fifty-two HIV-infected people have died from the strain of TB I was telling you about. And in just the
short while we've been sitting here and talking, thousands of
children
have died of AIDS. More than eight thousand people
a day
are dying of AIDS—”