Face Tells the Secret

by Bernstein, Jane

  She took my hand in both of hers and said, “I’m sorry to hear about your mother.”

  “Thank you,” I said and told her I was glad to be home, or would be if I had an actual home.

  Nomi looked at Les. It was almost too charged, too intimate standing between them, like hearing lovers in another room. As if to whisk away this unseen charge, Les waved the floor plans for this loft I did not want, with its broad open space, which he saw as a blank canvas on which I could become. Nomi sensed my dismay, and so I confessed. “I can’t see myself there.”

  “My sister owns a duplex in Squirrel Hill,” she said. “Her upstairs tenant is leaving at the end of next month. I bet she’d be okay with giving you a month to month lease while you’re looking.”

  “She doesn’t want to live in Squirrel Hill,” Les said. “It’s all families and old people.”

  Nomi regarded him with bemused acceptance. Oh, people, with their different ways! she seemed to be saying.

  A breeze fluttered the hem of my dress. I wanted to put a hand on his shoulder and hers and push them into each other’s arms. Stop squandering your good fortune, I wanted to shout. Instead, I walked off. I knew they were not alike, that she was tender and spiritual, while Les was bristly, rough around the edges, filled with unquenchable ambition.

  I glanced back and saw them standing at a slight distance, already molding. Were their differences really unbridgeable?

  Oh, I thought, as I slid into my car. I imagined Les could hear me whisper in his ear, She is your bashert. Go for it.

  His bashert: his intended. The single person meant for him.

  Was there such a thing? One single person of all the beings on earth? It seemed absurd, sentimental. Also foolish. Self-defeating.

  I considered Baruch. We’d sat together at a time when grief had stripped me of my defenses and he was open and unencumbered. Months later, we had dinner together—crisp, dry wine, more than I’m used to imbibing. Candles flickered on our table. We walked for hours, stripped off our clothes and submerged ourselves in the sea. His kisses were salty. He rocked me in his arms. A bright crescent moon shone in a clear sky. In the distance young people strummed their guitars, serenading us. The sweet smell of pot wafted our way, giving us a contact high. His eyes, strange and beautiful, acknowledged sorrow and carried the expectation of pleasure. He knew Aviva, better than I did. Maybe these factors together created the illusion that he was my bashert.

  I had loved madly before, been defenseless, was married in a friend’s apartment weeks after we’d met by a judge who’d biked uptown from arraignment court. After our “I do’s” my new husband and I fell into each other’s arms and wept from happiness. Friends chipped in and bought us matching yellow waterproof jackets and overalls for sailing—foul weather gear.

  He had not been my bashert. If anything, he had been my unintended, the worst person on earth for me.

  He left. I got the foul weather gear. It hadn’t helped.

  Then soft-spoken, silver-haired Harley, with his blurry gaze and cashmere sweaters and sons who might grow to love me. Different in every possible way from my wild, faithless husband. I thought about our first date, how over dinner, while the tea lights flickered at our banquette, he told me everything, and even so all I saw was Harley’s graciousness and old-fashioned manners.

  Then the perfect chair, where he spent his nights, clutching his cell phone, unable to call these premonitions of disaster anxiety, unable to perceive me as human. Harley, like the still-faced mother of my youth. When I thought of all the ways they were alike it made me feel as if the only men who attracted me were either wild or deeply wounded.

  Sitting in the car, I sifted through my memory of Baruch, searching for troubling signs I’d missed, so I could let go of my feelings for him.

  Suppose we’d met at the salon where the stylist had held a lock of his hair and asked, “What is your vision?” We’re sitting beside each other, our capes snapped tight at the neck. My mother is not dying. He does not know Aviva. I swivel in my chair, then he does. His eyes draw me in.

  Hello!

  No moonlight, no sea, no serenading guitars or salty kisses.

  Beautiful weather.

  Of course!

  Do you come here often?

  Of course!

  Was it possible to take away time, place, and situation? Or was that like going back to the way I had lived my early life when I’d stood on nothing?

  What if Aviva was back, but not the wine or moonlight? What if I restored my mother’s dying, which left me puzzled, unsure what to mourn?

  It was impossible. I tried to tell myself that holding onto my feelings for him meant that the steady love I claimed to want would forever be out of reach. And still, no matter what I subtracted, or how often I told myself I was being absurd, adolescent, in the deepest, truest part of my being, I still felt he was the one.

  Twenty-Six

  Before work one morning I drove to the hilly street where Nomi’s sister lived with her daughter. Their apartment was the top floor of one of the dark brick duplexes that lined the street. “I need to warn you that mornings around here are very rough,” Jill said, on the stairway to the second level. “There’s a lot of screaming going on. A lot of screaming. But…” She tightened the sash of her yukata and smiled ruefully. “The evenings are quiet. No loud music. No wild parties.”

  The vacant apartment was shabby, with flattened beige carpet and textured walls, but there was an alcove off the living room for my desk, and a dry basement where I could store the furniture that did not fit. I liked Jill’s matter-of-fact manner, and that I could walk to the movies and to stores. This is what I told Les, and what I believed, not yet able to articulate that I’d also wanted to be near Jill and Jessie. To live in their country for a while.

  I let Kayleigh from our office talk me into having a yard sale, which she and her friends would run. “It’ll be so fun!” she promised.

  “Fun” didn’t seem like a possibility, but there was a lot I wanted to leave behind, much of it tangible.

  I emailed Harley to tell him about the yard sale and move. “You can come whenever it’s convenient, as long as everything is cleared out by Saturday,” I wrote. “Whatever you leave behind, I’ll donate to charity.” At the end of the message I told him of my mother’s death.

  Minutes later, Harley called to offer condolences and make arrangements to pack up his possessions. “How about eight on Friday morning? Unless that’s too early?”

  “Eight o’clock would be perfect,” I said.

  “Because I could come at eight-thirty if that would be better.”

  “Eight is fine,” I said. “It’s good. It’s actually great.”

  “Or nine. I don’t want to inconvenience you. I know you have a lot on your plate.”

  My plates were already packed. “Eight works for me,” I said. “You’ve got a lot to sort through. Let’s go with his first offer. Eight o’clock! Sold!”

  “I’m not getting you up too early?”

  “Harley. You lived with me. Am I asleep at eight a.m.?”

  “You like to sleep in,” Harley said, “with that Lone Ranger mask.”

  His wife Tina was the one who’d liked to sleep late, wearing a padded black mask, but I no longer needed to point that out. I no longer cared what he remembered. I could be like that tree in a forest. If I forgot along with him, then who was there to say that anything happened after all?

  At exactly eight a.m. on the morning before the yard sale, my doorbell rang, and there he was, leaning against the brick, feet crossed at the ankles, navy polo shirt, crisp khakis, boat shoes that would never see the deck of a boat. He looked like a fashion model in an ad for senior living. Smooth skin, silver hair. Healthy.

  “You look good,” I said.

  A smile flickered across his face in an out-of-synch way, odd
, if familiar. “Can I come in?”

  He wiped his feet on the doormat and stood uneasily near the door until I coaxed him into the kitchen, with its bare shelves and nearly empty cabinets. He seemed relaxed, well past whatever had stirred him up for so long. I ground beans for coffee and he gave me the family update: older son pursuing his interest in craft beer in Boulder, younger son working in the pro shop at a golf course in Myrtle Beach.

  “Everyone at Byron’s has joined AA. Even the dog is twelve-stepping it. Any day you should expect Mackie to call and apologize for the ways he’s wronged you.”

  He took my hand, turned it to see the raised scar that ran down my thumb. It felt so tender in this time when I felt so untouched, and in my darker moments, untouchable.

  “Everyone misses you,” he said.

  “Everyone who?” I asked.

  “The boys.”

  “No.” They’d been so guarded when I’d been around, had always seemed to view me as some alien being. A Rox-anne, dug up from foreign soil.

  “They looked up to you,” he said.

  “I don’t think so.” I said this gently. “What about you? Where are you living anyway?”

  Again that chuckle. Heh. “At an Embassy Suites near the airport.”

  I hated that “heh,” knew it meant I’d get two answers or no answer. “Really?”

  “No.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.” He picked up my hand again. “No, of course not. You’re so gullible. I’m sorry to hear about your mother. She was a great lady. I was very fond of her.”

  I didn’t tell him about the shomrim or the pink shoes or that I’d bobbed in the tranquil sea with a man named Baruch. I said nothing about the money I’d inherited, money that made me feel that my mother’s dislike of me was less about my flaws and more about what she could not forget when she saw me. I did not tell him about my plans to give part of that money to Chaverim.

  I just said, “I know. You were very kind to her.”

  “It’s quite a loss.”

  “Well,” I said. “It’s a loss.”

  “This must be a very difficult time for you.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  I left Harley alone in the sleeping porch he’d used as an office when we’d lived together. While he sorted through his belongings, I finished packing my own. How strange to look at objects that had been at the center of bitter fights with my former husband—a vase, a lamp—and find they had no charge, were no longer invested with our passions and rage and had reverted to their natural inert state. There was so little I wanted.

  Later that afternoon, I went upstairs with spare unassembled cartons and found Harley sitting at the desk, facing the ginkgo. His stuff was scattered everywhere—shirts, books, shoes, hanging files, photo albums, golf clubs and lamps. I propped the cartons against the wall, relieved none of this mess was mine. “It looks like you can use these,” I said.

  Outside, a squirrel scrabbled along the gutter. “I hate those squirrels,” Harley said. “If I had Yanni’s pellet gun, I’d blow that critter away.” He turned to me. “You need to cut down that tree.”

  “That’s crazy. It’s a beautiful tree. Look at that strong trunk. And those elegant leaves? Ginkgoes are related to ferns, you know. They’re very ancient and propagate by spores. Anyhow, it’s not mine to cut down.”

  I’d started out of the room when Harley said, “You’re so beautiful, Rox.”

  I turned back. “At seven a.m. my crew is coming, and a whole lot of people will be trekking through the house, so you’ll want to step up the action here.”

  “Your crew? Does this include your so-called partner?”

  “He is my partner, and, yes, it does.”

  “I’ve got to be honest with you, Rox. Les Sheldon does not have your best interests at heart—”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Whatever it is, don’t say it, please. We’ve been doing well so far. We’re moving right along. Let’s not get distracted by old quarrels.”

  “Ah, Rox. You think of yourself as this sophisticated woman, but you’re so naïve the way you live in this narrow world with your artsy friends. When was the last time you interacted with a normal person?”

  “Harley,” I said. “The clock is ticking.”

  He looked at me in a blurry way. “You have no idea how much I miss you.”

  How easily I’d been hooked before—flattered, charmed, defensive, annoyed. I did not care anymore and did not care that I did not care. I left the room, my mind on all the stuff that needed to be priced and tagged before my crew arrived to set up folding tables in the garage and the living room. My mind was on my crew, out stapling Day-Glo signs to poles at major intersections. I had to care for my crew, to feed them when they returned.

  Les arrived first with wine and Nomi with sparkling water. Her sister Jill—dark-haired and unadorned, so different from her ethereal, strangely beautiful sibling—brought brownies. When the others arrived, I went upstairs to ask if Harley wanted to join us. The collapsed boxes were propped against the wall and the floor was still completely covered. “You don’t want to do this,” I said. “If you don’t pack up your stuff, it’ll be carted away on Monday.”

  The handsome man who’d stood at my door this morning had vanished. Harley looked haggard. “I can’t make any decisions, Rox. Everything’s a blur, a mess. Give me until morning when I can function.”

  “Strangers are going to be sniffing around all the rooms. You’re going to be really unhappy hanging out here when they arrive. Even with the door shut.”

  “Strangers?”

  “For the yard sale. Kayleigh and her fiancée posted signs all over this part of the city, and the weather looks good. I have a feeling a lot of people will show up. They’re not supposed to come until nine, but I bet a few will get here earlier. You write ‘no earlybirds’ and the earlybirds fly in anyhow.”

  “A yard sale? Good lord!” Harley laughed. “With blouses hanging from the trees?”

  “That’s a thought,” I said.

  “You’re joking. You must be. You never said anything about a yard sale.”

  “Really? Then why are you here?” I asked.

  “You’re selling our house.”

  “My house,” I said.

  “I just can’t wrap my mind around this. It’s just…beneath you. Why didn’t you tell me you were having a yard sale?”

  “I did tell you.”

  “No.” He pressed his temples. “No. You never said a thing. Never. And now, I’m finding it hard. This news is hard to process. You’re telling me I have to pack up everything. Tonight. I don’t see how that’s possible.”

  “You have a truck coming for the heavy stuff. At least that’s what you told me. Wow,” I said.

  Harley leaned back in his office chair, pressing his eyelids.

  “We talked about this. We emailed. I can show you our correspondence. Don’t do this. Please.”

  “You never told me,” he said.

  “Harley.”

  Hadn’t I been here before? Yes, I had been here. I had been here many times. I wasn’t going to rush off and find the email. “There’s food downstairs. You want some coffee, I’ll make it. That’s it.”

  I went back downstairs and sat in the dining room with my crew. I tried to shift, to join the conversation, but after a few minutes I excused myself and logged onto my email, seeking proof of what I knew was true. It made me angry that I still needed confirmation, as though I could not trust my eyes or intuition or memory. Harley had come to the house on Friday morning because I’d told him the yard sale was on Saturday. How could he so easily crush my certainty? Why did I need someone to agree that my bedroom wall was green? Wasn’t it enough that I saw it as green? I wanted to believe I could change, but right then I had to say: I am a woman who has trouble trusting what I feel,
who cannot hold in my heart what I know is true. I believe and doubt and believe and doubt in a constant dizzying way.

  Crows woke me early. On the way downstairs, I passed Harley, perched on the radiator, his possessions scattered everywhere.

  Outside a man with a giant gut and broad red suspenders was drinking takeout coffee and chatting to a stout older woman in shorts. Two rows of butterfly barrettes held back her gray hair. Her skinny legs were very white.

  “Why are you doing this to me, babe?” he asked when I set a mug of coffee on his desk. “I’ve done everything you’ve asked. Why would you turn around and sell our house? Take what we owned and lay it out on the lawn like an Okie?”

  It wasn’t our house. I wasn’t selling anything of his. Even so, his distress was upsetting to witness. “Listen, Harley. I’ve moved on,” I said. “I met someone else.” I hadn’t planned to say this, and yet it was true. I had met someone else.

  My words instantly sobered Harley. “You have not.”

  “What makes you so sure?

  “Because you love me. That’s why. Because I’m the one. Why do you think I’ve stuck it out? I’m not a wuss, like you think. Haven’t I proved I can tough it out? Haven’t I shown I can do what it takes to win your heart?”

  My heart: like a big blue dog he might win on the boardwalk. Misshapen and stuffed with broken shells.

  Before I could answer, the back doorbell rang and I let in Nomi, her sister Jill, and their two little girls. Nomi’s daughter stepped inside and looked around, silent and big-eyed, and Jill’s daughter said, “Home? In a car?” Les arrived a few minutes later. Then Kayleigh in a Pirates cap, ponytail sprouting out the back, and her boyfriend Ryan, a sweet young man with square black glasses and an arm tattooed with the first line from The Metamorphosis, starting at the wrist with “Gregor Samsa awoke one morning,” and ending mid-bicep with “giant insect.” We hung clothes in the trees and set tables in the open garage, finishing just as waves of people showed up. First, the dreaded earlybirds, then the professionals, with their beat-up pickup trucks. Next came recent immigrants—Russians, Chinese—in need of basic furnishings. Then graduate students, one of whom questioned the translation Ryan had chosen for his tattoo and wanted to know why he’d gone with “uneasy dreams,” and “giant insect” and not “unsettling dreams,” and monstrous vermin,” or “anxious dreams,” and “verminous bug.”