The Last of the Wise Lovers (6 page)

 "Hey!" I called out, but he didn't
hear.  I hurriedly turned off the terminal and the lights and ran out
after him.  The guard opened the main door for me just seconds after he
had closed it behind Mr. K. From the head of the stairs I could see him go
around the coffee shop at the entrance to the library and walk north along
Fifth Avenue.  I ran between the tables in the coffee shop, as a shortcut,
but I lost him anyway.  Near Times Square I saw him again, coming out of a
kiosk that sold newspapers, candy, and cigarettes.  Before I could get
close to him, he'd vanished down East 42nd Street.

   I jumped over the divider, crossed
the street, and stared down 42nd Street.  All I could see was the usual
mess of peep shows, massage parlors, whores, and pimps.  I went back to
Times Square.  The washing machine above the cinema was now bathed in neon
light.  A woman came out from behind the sign of a souvenir shop.  I
thought I could make out a poncho with galloping horses.  Miss Doherty?
 I preferred to think that I was just hallucinating.  I bought a
hamburger, to get rid of the hallucinations.  Then I walked slowly to Port
Authority and I got on the 8:00 o'clock bus.

*

   By the time I got home it was already
9:05.  Mom wasn't in.  Usually I don't mind being alone in the house;
it's rather nice.  But this time I had the jitters, which had been with me
all day, together with a new cause for worry: how had she left here, with no
car?

   I turned on the TV.  There was
news on Channel 13.  I even remember some of it: the US Ice Hockey
All-Stars were training in Canada.  A sailboat race on the Potomac.
 The president escaping Washington for a week of R&R.  Then
foreign news.  Israel.  Soldiers in olive green waving black billy
clubs, chasing after a group of kids who had set a tire ablaze.  From on
top of the flat roofs of stone houses, women keening like crows.  I
remember thinking: get ready. Next year, you, too, will be a part of that.

   After that there was a commercial,
the famous picture of the New York apple shriveling from thirst.
 "Save the Apple - Save Water". I'm part of that apple, I
thought, not part of those soldiers caught in a chase after Arab kids.

   I fell asleep in mid-thought.  I
woke up around 1:00 a.m. only to discover that the house was empty.  Like
I already said, there was nothing unusual about that.  Mom always went out
two or three times a week when Dad wasn't around (and he usually wasn't
around).  She'd go to exhibitions in Nyack, to films in Manhattan, to
garage sales, to special sales at the supermarket, to her few girlfriends on
Long Island or in Queens, or to one very rich one in New Rochelle.  I was
already an old hand at heating up dinners, locking the house, managing on my
own.

   But like I said, this time everything
was different.  I wandered through the house, restless.  I turned the
TV on, then turned it off, thumbed through the latest edition of FMR (a
periodical on art, one of the many Dad gets regularly and reads during the few
days when he's home), drank cola from the fridge, ate some ice cream, and
washed a few dishes that I found in the sink.  Finally, I went outside.
 The street was quiet and empty.  I walked along it, aimlessly.

   Most of the houses were dark.
 This was one of the few times I thought how nice it would be if we lived
in a place that was slightly less ritzy and slightly more noisy.  Like
Queens, or even Brooklyn.  This, too, had been one of Mom's
achievements.  She had always dreamed of living in a house, and we were
the only ones of all the hundreds of families of Israeli bureaucrats in New York
who didn't live in an easily-defensible high-rise.  How had Dad managed
it?  I haven't a clue, but it was part of the tradition: whatever Mom
wanted badly enough, she got.

   A car came from beyond the corner and
crossed the intersection without stopping.  It didn't drive down our
street, but stopped at the corner and turned its lights off.  I stood and
watched.  It was hard to make out the details from such a distance.
 The wind suddenly turned cold and a light rain began to fall.  I shivered.
 The windshield wipers of the car moved once, as if to signal something.
 The engine came to life.  The driver's door opened.  In the dim
light that came on inside the car I could see two heads touching, moving apart,
and then coming together again.  A woman got out and closed the door after
her.  The car took off immediately.  The woman walked quickly on the
cement sidewalk.  The car passed her and its lights shone on her for an
instant. The woman blew a kiss off the tips of her fingers, then increased her
pace, searching her purse for her keys as she walked.

   You've undoubtedly guessed who she was.
 I ran into a nearby yard and took the short cut home.  When she came
in I was already in bed, pretending to be asleep.  But she didn't come in
to check and didn't even go to her room; she stayed in the kitchen.  After
what seemed like an hour I snuck there.  I found her sitting with her back
to the door, shoes off, writing furtively in her yellow recipe notebook.

*

When I woke the next day, she was still asleep.
 I quickly got through the whole morning ritual, left the house quietly at
7:20, and strode briskly to the bus stop.  My knees hurt, but it helped me
work out the anger and concern that were pent up inside.

   It was business as usual at the
library, except for the fact that Mr. K. didn't show up.  In the afternoon
someone said that he'd called in sick and Ms. Yardley hissed something under
her breath.  Nevertheless, I made a few trips to the corridor of the
administrative wing, obsessed with a powerful and unexplained need to get the
slide back.  Once I cautiously jiggled the doorknob to his office.
 The door was locked.

   When I got back to my post, Ms.
Yardley was there, too, poking around in the papers and registration forms.
That woman - I'd forgotten her name just then - was standing opposite her.
 This time, instead of patched jeans she was wearing a khaki dress with a
plunging neckline.  Her hair was gathered in a honey-colored ponytail.
 She looked much younger and so different that for a moment I was somewhat
embarrassed.

   But she immediately broke the ice.

  "Hi," she said as if she were an
old friend.  "I probably caused you a lot of trouble."

  
"...
and where are her papers, if I may ask?" Ms. Yardley asked me sourly.

   "Underneath," I reached down
to the shelf.  She bent over and reached it before me.  The bones of
her spine stuck out ludicrously through the thin fabric of her shirt.  The
woman and I exchanged a bemused glance that Ms. Yardley caught the end of when
she stood up.

 "Here you go, Ms. Doherty."
 She placed the list on the counter with a flourish that illustrated
exactly what she thought of us. "The books will be brought to you in the
other room, window number five."

   "Thank you."  She took
the list, nodded her head to me, and walked off with soft, self-contained
steps.  I stared after her until she disappeared, and I immediately paid
the price.  

 Ms. Yardley said, "If you would be so
kind as to give some of your precious time to your work, Mr. Levin, there are a
few things that need to be done...” and off she sent me to the storage room to
send invitations to "Music at the Library - The Final Concert of the
Summer".  Around midday there was some heavy traffic in the Catalog
Room, and Ms. Yardley sent for me.  I passed through the Reading Room on
my way.  The woman was sunk deep in a pile of books, twirling her ponytail
with her hand.  

   At exactly 6:00 I took off for home,
before any more punishments could be heaped on me.  When I got there, I
found Mom planting bulbs in the garden.  She smiled at me.  Once upon
a time, Mom's smiles had been the greatest thing I'd known.  Now, perhaps
because of the events of the previous night, I was filled with the awful
suspicion that all the days of my childhood, which had been filled with those
smiles, were nothing more than a fraud.

   "Is everything all right?"
I asked, surrendering my cheek to a kiss.

   "Why shouldn't it be all
right?" she asked.

   And really, why shouldn't it be?
 There was a completely repaired car in the driveway, and a note on the
kitchen table.  I remember it in detail: "Debbie called looking for
you. She said she called yesterday as well but there was no answer.  She
asked that you call."  I reached out for the telephone, but then I
discovered another note tacked to the bulletin board above it: "Atlantic
Siren, Dock 2, 4th of September".

   I bent out the window to call Mom,
but she was already on her way inside.

  "The riddle," she said as she
came in. "I won the trip.  This afternoon they called from The
Society for Proper Nutrition and Care of the Body...”

   I shrugged my shoulders.  Her
solution was wrong - I was certain of that - and the swiftness with which the
notification had come made me suspicious.  Just then the world seemed like
the least consistent thing I knew.  But I didn't have time to think about
it.  From outside came the sound of Dad's horn as he pulled his car into
the driveway and up alongside Mom's car.  He waved from the window.
 There was an old lady sitting next to him.  

  Mom said, "Aunt Ida, that's all we
need right now," and went outside.

   I opened the fridge.  It was
empty.  I remember thinking: with all those recipes she's been writing
down, a guy could expect to find something to eat around here.

   Then I went outside to greet Dad.

All of a sudden I'm afraid I must be boring you with all these petty
details.  I wish I knew exactly what you wanted to know.

I wonder if you knew that the reason for Aunt Ida's
visit had something to do with you - or, rather, something to do with the event
that you'd planned at the temple which took place a few hours ago, and which I
ruined.  But wait - I promised to tell you
everything
, so I'll
stick to the order in which things happened.  

Aunt Ida came into the house and said, "It
was so nice of Jeremy (she can't pronounce Dad's name in Hebrew - Yermiahu) to
bring me here so that I wouldn't have to spend the holidays all alone in
Chicago. No one," (and here she meant none other than you) "bothered
to invite me, even though there's been so little happiness in my life since
Marvin died," and then it was all over, because the minute Aunt Ida runs
into the word `Marvin', she starts to tell the story of her marriage from the
very beginning, from their famous meeting in the Indianapolis Botanical
Gardens, through the opening of their first photography studio, and the second,
and the third, to their raising of Myrna, who, even though she is Dad's distant
cousin, looks like his sister, and so on and on and on.

   In the meantime, out in the kitchen,
Dad had managed to find a quarter of a fried chicken and an ancient container
of potato salad.

  "I'm dying of hunger," he
spluttered with his mouth full.  "I drove from Chicago without
stopping, except for once, at a gas station, when she had to take a leak...”

   Mom was boiling.  "What am
I supposed to do with her now?"

   Dad waved a chicken leg.

   "You could've asked me... 
"

   "I didn't think you'd mind.
 After all, she's my family."

   "You pander to her...”

   "I'm just trying to be nice...”
he swallowed fast and managed to smile.

   But Mom could no longer stop herself.
 "... so that you can get in on Uncle Harry's business or get a piece
of Aunt Ida's will, or maybe one of the studios in Chicago...”

   That's usually when I come in, just a
second before they really start to fight.

  "Hey, son," Dad said happily and
swung a fist playfully into my shoulder.  "How's life?"

   "Ok," I said without
thinking and went to pour myself a glass of water.  Mom watched me, pale
as a ghost.  Suddenly, without understanding why, I realized that I knew
the reason: she was afraid of me or, more precisely, afraid of something that
she thought I might say or let slip.  The thought that she could doubt my
loyalty shook me.  I was thinking how to hint to her not to worry, that I
wouldn't talk, but before I could say anything she barked, "Don't leave
Aunt Ida alone...”

   "She's all set," I said
quickly, "telling the tale of Marvin...”

   Mom was already on the verge of
exploding.  "That'll be enough of your wisecracks, especially at the
expense of a miserable old woman...”

   Meanwhile, Aunt Ida was busy
rearranging the drawers in the living room.

  "I think," she said from inside a
cabinet, "that there are some pictures here that Marvin took.  It's
not possible that there aren't any of his pictures here, right?  They're
just scattered, that's all, and I must collect them and organize them in
albums, maybe make an exhibit, too...”

   Part of the contents of the drawers
was already strewn all over the rug.  I bent down and gathered everything
as best I could.

  "One morning," she twittered
faintly, "I discovered one of his pictures in the window of a shoe store.
 Just like that, lying there in the back, a little dog inside a big shoe.
 Marvin took it in 1938 for three dollars and forty cents.  I even
remember the night he printed and mounted it."  For a moment her
twittering sounded human, even invited sympathy.  "At 10:00 when they
opened the store, I talked to the owner.  He didn't want to sell it.
 His father had passed the store on to him and the picture was like a good
luck charm...”

I finished stuffing everything back in the drawer
and shut it.  But it wouldn't close.

"Finally," said Aunt Ida, "we
agreed on a thousand.  A thousand dollars for the photograph of a master
is not much, especially if you consider what's written in the papers about the
sums artists get at auction...”

I pulled the drawer out.  Something was stuck
in the back and was preventing it from closing.

"I went to the bank and told the manager.
 He'd known me for years, and he'd always advised me...” I stuck my hand
in.  It was Mom's yellow notebook, which had been hidden behind the top,
locked drawer and had fallen down and gotten jammed along the back wall of the
cabinet.  I stole a sidelong glance at the old lady.  She was
standing in the middle of the room, telling some invisible point in mid-air how
the manager had called the store owner and finally convinced him to sell her
the picture for $100.

   I opened the cover of the notebook.
From the curlicues of paper clinging to the spiral binding I could tell that
quite a few pages had already been torn out.  The top page was covered
with the impressions left by a pen.  The words and letters were clear
enough, but I didn't have time to read them because Dad called from the
kitchen.

 "Ronny.”

   I stuffed the notebook back into the
cabinet and ran out to him.  He was standing by the sink and pointing
outside at the repaired, painted, and waxed car that was parked in the
driveway.

 "What happened to the car?"

 "It was an accident...” I mumbled and
looked at Mom, who was coming up from the garden.

   "Was it your fault?"

   Mom came in.

  "He's not to blame," she said
from behind my back, and before I could start to explain, added, "Someone
hit us in the parking lot of the deli."

   I looked at her in surprise. 
Dad caught something of this.  He narrowed his eyes at her, then at me,
then back at her.

   I felt terrible.  The telephone
saved me.  

  Dad picked up the receiver, said, "One
minute," and went off to whisper into the phone that was in the bedroom.
 Mom and I were left alone.

"Thanks," I said softly, "but you
didn't have to...”  She didn't answer.  I went to my room and lay
down on the bed.  The telephone intoned electronic beeps as Dad finished
the conversation and immediately began to dial.  I had an overwhelming
urge to listen in. Too many things were happening around me that I didn't
understand. It's amazing, but among all the desires I'd had until that day - to
eat, to drink, to look good, to be successful and loved - I'd never before
included this simple desire: to know.

   For a moment I toyed with the idea of
carefully lifting up the receiver, but Dad is, as you know, a professional.
 That's why I tried something else, less risky.  I disconnected the
telephone, picked up the receiver, and pressed down on the cradle with my
finger.  Then I re-connected the telephone and lifted my finger at the
same time.

   Dad was in the middle of a sentence
about a flight to Los Angeles via Las Vegas.  A female voice answered that
there were only fifteen minutes between landing in Vegas and take-off for Los
Angeles, and that if the plane were late Dad would be forced to wait two hours
for the next plane.

   Dad thought for a moment and asked,
"What choice do I have?"

   The woman suggested Phoenix.
 There was a three-hour wait there before take-off.  `America West'
would of course be glad to provide him with lunch, etc., etc.

   "No good," Dad said.
 "Haven't you got some combination with a twenty minute or half an
hour wait in Vegas?"

   "You can fly from New York to
Boston and from there take a flight to Las Vegas that will get you in half an
hour before take-off for Los Angeles."

   "Good," Dad said gladly,
reserved a place for someone named Jenkins, and put down the receiver.  I
pressed the cradle at the same time.  A moment later, the telephone was
again intoning electronic beeps.  I waited, my finger on the cradle,
wondering why this Jenkins - whoever he was - insisted on waiting no more than
half an hour in Vegas.  Maybe he was a heavy gambler who only needed half
an hour to win a million; or else one of those guys who called at odd hours and
asked - without superfluous niceties - to talk to Dad; or maybe he was one of
those rich Jews that Dad went all over the continent to meet and try to
convince to donate works of art, rare books, heirlooms, or just plain money to
the State of Israel.

   Dad finished dialing.  Ten
numbers - that is, out of state.  I lifted my finger.

  "Yes," someone answered on the
first ring.

   Dad gave the details of the flight he
had just reserved.

   "Ok," the man said,
"what name?"

   "You'll know me."

   "What name?" the man asked
again.  "I don't intend to run around looking for you.  I'll ask
that they page you over the loudspeaker."

   "Jenkins," Dad said, and
immediately hung up.

   The minute I pressed the cradle he
began to dial again.  The other side picked up after quite a while.

  "The Society for Cultural
Exchange."

  "Mr. Shapira," Dad said to the
secretary, and I couldn't decide whether Shapira was the name of the man Dad
wanted to speak to or a new name he'd given himself, like Jenkins.

   There was a brief buzz and someone
said, "Shapira."

   "It's set," Dad said.

   Shapira was silent a moment, then
said, "Vegas?"

   "Vegas."

   "And the lucky number?"

   "Six thousand eight hundred
twenty-seven."

   "Do you think...” Shapira
paused, choosing his words carefully, "you'll succeed in getting to that
number?"

   "I hope so.  If not in one
guess, then in two.  No more."

   "Good luck," said Shapira,
and hung up.

   Anyone who knows Dad knows he's never
so much as bought a lottery ticket.  What were they talking about?  I
didn't even have to think.  I remembered only too well the bottom line on
the slide: "Agitator; diagram 1,205 of 6,827."

   The knowledge that `agitator' was
something connected to the secret side of Dad's work made me feel a bit
relieved.  At least here everything was as it should be.  That's what
Dad's life had been like for as long as I'd known him.  In between the
exhibition openings and receptions in honor of Israeli authors, the
fund-raising concerts and film festivals, there had been a different life - one
of whisperings over the telephone, trips, locked briefcases, and dozens of keys
to mysterious locks.

   For the rest of the evening Dad tried
to develop a conversation with me.  He asked about the league results (he
wasn't really interested so I just gave him a brief run-down, to fulfill my
obligation) and about my getting ready for school, and told about a new film he
had seen on a plane.  Then he discovered the FMR that had come in the
mail, lay down to read it, and fell asleep.  Mom stayed in the kitchen and
chopped vegetables.  I made myself a cup of cocoa and sat down opposite
her at the table.

  "Aren't you going to sleep?" she
asked.

  "In a little while," I answered.

   She put the cut-up vegetables in a
bowl and went into the living room to make up the couch for Aunt Ida.  I
thought about the lie she'd told for me that night, about the car that had
brought her the night before, and about what had happened in the Lincoln
Tunnel.  Was the threat that the man in the back seat had delivered
related to how she spent her nights?  From the bedroom came the sound of
Dad snoring. If I had had any thoughts yesterday of sharing the problem with
him, the solidarity that Mom had shown me this evening made it impossible.

   Were her intentions really only good?
 I had often seen her angry, sad, worried, tired, annoyed,
"straightening corners", or smoothing things out to suit her needs,
but I had never seen her lie, deny, stupefy, falsify, and pretend like I had
these last few days.  Somewhere in my brain there was a word to explain
why she was behaving like this.  I had to concentrate for a moment in
order to dredge it up: haunted.  She felt haunted.

   I rested my cup on the table by the
color brochure from The Society for Proper Nutrition and Care of the Body.
 The thought that the solution was apt to contain the sentence "fruit
is sweet" was so contestable as to be insulting.  Suddenly I had
another idea: if what had happened in the Lincoln Tunnel
wasn't
an
accident, and Mom really was being threatened by someone, what was the chance
that her winning the cruise was no more than a plot, designed in advance -
without any regard for the correctness of her answer - in order to harm her or
get back at her when she'd be on the ship, far from help?

   I knew from experience not to pay
attention to nocturnal musings, not to let them get the better of me.  I
remembered Mom's notebook.  What could be more real than that?  I
walked through the living room, carefully avoiding Aunt Ida's white, spindly
legs, which were sticking out off the end of the couch.  The drawer barely
opened. When I got hold of the notebook I tugged at it, slowly, so as not to
make noise.  Then I looked for a place to read.

   The bathroom seemed suitable.
 It provided privacy, quiet, and an alibi in the hour of need.  But
the lighting must have been different, because this time I couldn't make out
the impressions left by the pen that had seemed so legible just a few hours
earlier.

   Some of Mom's makeup was on the shelf
next to the mirror. I tried to shade in the impressions with her eyebrow
pencil, but all I succeeded in doing was blacking out the first four or five
words on the page.  I then tried carefully drawing the edge of a lipstick
over the page, but this didn't accomplish anything, either.  Finally I
sprinkled some pink powder blush over the lines and scratches - and this time I
succeeded.