by Sarah Blake
“But you must have read this, it came out years ago—it’s about growing up in Chicago.”
“Still,” he said. “I haven’t read it.”
She looked down at the table in front of them, halted.
“Should I?” he asked gently.
“Yes.” She turned in the booth to look at him. “I’ve learned something from it, about being Jewish. What it’s like.”
Her eyes were a deep brown. They held his firmly in hers. And perhaps because of the feeling that the three of them were on a boat, eddied out of the heat and tides that surged outside the bar, Len pressed her.
“Oh? What is it like?”
She flushed, and he saw she’d heard his question as a challenge, and hesitated, not sure whether he was making fun of her. The brother and sister shared this, as though each halted an instant on an unseen threshold, waiting to be invited forward. In Moss, it was damning; he would never prevail, Len thought; in her it was—riveting.
“It seems”—she searched—“talkative.”
“Talkative?” He couldn’t help the edge that crept in.
“There’s nowhere to hide, everyone’s saying everything, right in front of each other. It’s so—exciting. Everything’s on the surface. It’s honest, somehow.”
“Honest?”
She looked down at the table.
“All the honesty in the world doesn’t change the facts.” He shook his head.
“What facts?”
“My father is a Jew who came from Germany and runs a grocery store,” he said, his eyes on Moss. “We live in the Jewish section of town, because, well, the other streets just wouldn’t do, the Realtor told my father. If I had enrolled in the University of Illinois, I’d have joined the Jewish fraternity, because that’s what the Jews can join. There are two Jewish law firms in town, and a Jewish bank. That was growing up in Chicago. So when it was my turn, when I graduated from high school, I got the hell out of there, and came here.”
He had, without meaning to, changed the mood. He felt her beside him, sitting very still, listening, looking into her drink. Moss kept his eyes on him, and Len had the sensation of having stepped off the board into the pool.
“And nothing taught me more than this: when I was ten years old, I knew there were boys my age being killed like cats. And it could have been me. Or my uncle, or my aunt, my father. You grow up knowing that, and you see it’s always a struggle between who you are and what you do. And what I do, what I did, was move. I moved here, where I am not Levy from Skokie. I am only Levy. One man.”
He had said too much. He’d said far more than he’d meant to, far more even than he’d known he thought. And for what? Why say all that to these two, whom he liked more than he could say? Why rub their noses in it, when he had wanted only to hold her hand back there?
He reached in his pocket for his billfold, not daring to look at the girl beside him. Moss stretched across the table and put his hand on Len’s arm.
“On me,” said Moss lightly, though his eyes held Len’s. “My sister drinks like a fish.”
“And this fish needs to swim off,” she said, and pulled her pocketbook toward her. Len slid out of the booth without a word as she slid out beside him. She stood as tall as his collarbone, he realized. In flats. He could reach his arm around her shoulders and draw her into his chest easily if she were any other girl. Instead he stood helplessly as she leaned over and kissed Moss goodbye.
“Would you mind putting me in a cab?” She turned from her brother and looked at him. Her eyes went from dark to darker brown, and he realized in that instant that he’d underestimated her. She’d not been totting him up and tossing him off, as he had thought.
“Sure,” he said, his heart in his throat.
“So long, Levy.” Moss put out his hand and shook Len’s.
Joan was walking away through the bar toward the door.
“So long.” Len put on his hat and followed quickly, watching how the line of her body moved easily inside her linen shift. Her skin was a pale gold. And wishing he could see her face, wishing he could read the slender set of those shoulders and gauge somehow her reaction to what he had just blurted, he reached and pushed the hotel door open above her head. She turned and glanced at him quickly, then away. And they emerged back into the hot evening and stood on the curb, silent.
Len put his hand up, and a cab switched lanes, coming toward them. She would get away, he thought, she would get in the cab and he would never have touched her hand again. He would never slide his hand from the curve of that shoulder all the way down her arm as he wanted badly to do just then.
The cab came to a stop before them. Len bent and pulled the door open, and she got in, gathering her dress close around her legs, and looked up.
“Do you believe someone’s life turns in a single moment?”
She was trying to tell him something, he realized. Trying to tell herself something.
“No,” he said seriously. “I don’t.”
Joan flushed.
“Meet me tomorrow,” she said swiftly. “At the Met.”
“All right,” Len managed to say.
She cocked her head. “All right? That’s what you have to say in the face of the treasures of the ages?”
The look he gave made her catch her breath.
“All right,” she said faintly. “Six o’clock.”
Speechless, he shut the taxi door carefully.
The taxi pulled away from the curb. He watched it. And it hit him then, with the force of revelation: She was his. She was his girl. She was the one in the world who’d been there, waiting. He knew it with a certainty that almost frightened him. A warm glow spread in his stomach. She would be his. There was no earthly reason for it, but he believed it with a certainty like faith.
* * *
JOAN LEANED HER head against the leather seat and did not move for many blocks. His body standing behind her as they waited for the cab had made her feel confused and funny, and she had had to hold herself still so as not to turn around and make an idiot of herself. A little taller than her father, a head taller than she, he wore his height easily. And that marked him, this easiness, but it was mixed with a watchfulness, a waiting almost, that gave him an animal grace new to her. She had wanted him to put his hands on her shoulders and draw her to him. She wanted him with a fierce hunger she’d never felt before. Sitting beside him in that booth, she had fixed her eyes on Moss, hearing herself speak and marveling at her steadiness in the face of Len’s arm on the table beside her. The drape of his sleeve. How his leg bobbed a little beside her under the table. How he did not look at her either. It didn’t matter who he was; she knew him already. She had understood as she watched him flip a spoon over and over in his thumb and forefinger that the machinery up above was opening, she could imagine it slowly opening, and here for a moment without breath was the entrance, the gate, and all she needed to do was nod.
She rolled down the window and let the breeze run across her cheeks.
Nineteen
LEN WENT THE FOLLOWING evening, though he half expected to be stood up. That the girl in his head was that girl, was this girl, not just any girl, she was a known girl, terrified him and called him forward as though he had been given the keys to the heavens. As though he was through some door into another world. And even as he framed that thought, he cast it off. He was an idiot. So he said nothing to Reg about meeting her, or about meeting her again.
But there she was, standing on the steps of the Met. And once she saw him at the bottom of the steps, she turned and started climbing. She could feel the warmth of his stare fastened to the spot between her shoulders, strong and sure as a hand there, guiding her up. She stepped through the enormous portals and gathered her pocketbook closer, relishing, as always, the first adjustment to the cool museum interior. When she turned, he was right there beside her.
She showed him every bit she loved—first the Italians, then the Dutch. He followed her up the vast marble staircase a
nd into the shuttered rooms, where others stood and looked and whispered. He stood beside her and nodded when she pointed, and heard not a word. Soldiers and Madonnas stared down on him. He looked at them. He moved past them. She was the center of the earth, and if he left her side, he’d slip down into darkness. They walked backward in time, it seemed to him, until at last they arrived at the marble statues of the Greeks.
It was nearly unbearable. Their nakedness, their marble bodies, stood above the two of them. And the way she stared at their beautiful forms, at their sex hanging, small and relaxed, showed him how she wanted to hold a man, she wanted to touch a man. She didn’t look at him, she’d hardly looked at him, but her hand, the one closest to his, had just grazed him as she pointed out with the other some small detail, explaining how the history of the boy was marked in stone.
“Stop talking,” he said quietly.
They stood together in silence before the beautiful marble boy. The space between them, no more than a few inches, moved and coiled, drawing them together, close and closer. Her bare arms and the clean line of her dress, a deep rose, stirred him.
He took her wrist in his hand, and her blood jumped. She followed him unseeing, back along the long hallway of the Greeks, back down the wide central stairs of the museum to the cool pavilion of the lobby, and out again, out into the waning heat of the evening, taxicabs blaring, the sky a golden eye above them. He turned and she stepped into his arms.
They stood there at the top of the steps, wordless, long enough for her to smell his skin, for him to feel for the first time how narrow she was, how small, and for the pulse between them to join and for their bodies to pull toward each other. His lips found hers and they kissed hungrily. The city vanished.
They pulled away at last and studied each other.
“Let’s get on a boat.” He smiled down at her.
They walked down the steps of the Met, hailed a cab, and rode the length of Manhattan. When the hot wind blew through the open windows, Len reached across her and rolled her window up halfway. It was as specific, as careful, as a declaration. He would cherish her. In quiet they got out at the Staten Island Ferry landing. He paid the taxi. Her skirt fluttered up around her knees. He took her hand and held it as though it were breakable.
A pigeon soared with a gull above the soot-black pilings by the landing. The commuters hurried to catch the boat before the iron gate clanged. Everyone around them was moving. There was a rest in time being with him, like a beat of music held. And she knew nothing about him. It didn’t matter. For that moment, the hand that held hers was the only tether she wanted to this earth. She and he were joined as simply, as irrevocably, as if written in a folktale. The man and the woman walked hand in hand and lived happily ever after.
In the dark they boarded and sat on a bench toward the stern, and the island of Manhattan drew away as they rode. “‘We were very tired, we were very merry,’” she said to him, smiling. “‘We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.’” Then she fell quiet and they rode like this, in silence together, the boat’s engine thrumming beneath them, late commuters and couples just like them chattering and restless, the summer evening hanging above them in soft folds.
“Tomorrow night?” she asked him as they waited for the bus that would take her uptown.
He nodded, and as the bus shuddered to a stop and opened its door in front of them, she squeezed his hand and darted up the steps inside. After the bus pulled away, her head and shoulders pulling away up the avenue, he stood a long time, unmoving.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Len got tickets to see The Tenth Man on Broadway and left the office at six o’clock, walking the whole way up Fifth Avenue to collect her.
She had chosen a light green silk that swirled as she moved, and she wore the pearls her father had given her on her twenty-first birthday, which always made her feel loved, and placed. And as she walked toward Len, waiting in the lobby of her building, he caught his breath at the sight of her. How badly he wanted to take off the row of pearls that ringed her soft neck like a collar.
It was a strange, talkative play with the characters speaking across and around one another, sometimes over one another as people do but actors generally don’t. Len and Joan sat together quietly and did not hear a word. In the middle of the first act, he reached across and took her hand. The pulse between them beat through the cotton of her gloves. She sat very still, looking straight ahead, her lips parted. After a minute, she pulled at the fingers on her glove and slid her hand out, then gently picked his hand up and put it in hers. His thumb lay heavy in her lap, and a tremor went up from the place where his thumb rested, like a shaft of light through her body.
She turned her face toward his in the darkness and his eyes answered hers. They looked back again at the stage.
When it was over, they walked together hand and hand down into the subway, and she stood against him in the crowded car. The doors opened, and she remained in the curve of his arm and they climbed the stairs and emerged back out into the bright, hot night, the steps of the Metropolitan a white sandstone cliff, a lit dune. Her apartment was just around the corner. They hadn’t spoken. He pulled the grate across on the tiny elevator, and she stepped in and he followed, pulling the grate shut again. The little chamber bounced and she fell against him.
The door unlocked easily, and she walked in ahead of him and reached for the light, but he put his hand out and stopped her. It was a studio apartment dominated by a single enormous window through which shone the great lights of the museum columns over the neighboring roof. She remained by the door, watching him as he stood at the window and looked out, and watched as he took careful account of the single room. Her bed was tucked in the corner. There was a lid on the bathtub she used as a shelf. There was a single overstuffed chair. He turned around and came toward her, and in one motion lifted her off her feet, grinning—a grin that turned into a great laugh that gathered her inside it, so she began laughing also. He was still laughing when he lifted Joan onto the board covering the bathtub, grabbing her legs and wrapping them around his waist as he stood between her and began kissing her, very slowly, his hands on either side of her chin, tipping her face to his lips. She closed her eyes and went with him, and kept her legs around him when he moved them both, at last, to the bed in the corner.
Sweetly, softly, he unbuttoned her dress, and when she lifted her arms so he could pull it over her head, he leaned in and kissed her breasts, and she shuddered. He unzipped himself and stepped out of his trousers and his boxer shorts and stood before her.
“Come here,” she whispered, sitting on the side of the bed.
He reached and circled her nipple with his finger, and it rose under his touch. “Look at me,” he said.
She bit her lip.
“Stay looking.” He sank down beside her and pulled her onto him. She was light in his arms, and so soft.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and watched his eyes go darker. And she didn’t move. They sat very still, looking at each other. Very still.
And then she moved.
Afterward, when she came back up into the city, back into the heat and the room and found him still there above her, looking down, for the first time in her life, she believed she would not die (as she had always thought) shaking, and forsaken, in a fit. He would be there, waiting, for her return. She smiled at him. He slid off and leaned on one elbow, turning her face toward him in the dark. The streetlamp reached the wall just above her face, lighting her hair and making her eyes shine.
“Hello,” he said.
* * *
“WHO THE HELL are you seeing, man?” Reg asked after a couple of weeks. Too hot to sleep, they lay sweating on their beds, the windows pushed up as high as they could go, the thick noise of the city winding up to them. It was the middle of July.
“A girl.”
“Must be some girl.”
Len’s cigarette flared in the dark bedroom as he inhaled.
�
��She is.”
The fan slid around slowly, hardly daring the air, and why Len didn’t say who it was just then, and who he was protecting, he couldn’t have answered.
They met as often as they could, evening after hot evening. They could not help it. At the end of an evening, he or she would ask about the next day, and then at the end of that one, the next. She liked the way he studied her just before he leaned to kiss her. She liked the particular shade of his dark glasses, the touch of his hand ushering her through a door. She knew nothing about him but what he had told her that first afternoon with Moss, and she didn’t want to know any more. She only wanted his hands on her, roaming over her as if he knew how to find her in the dark. She only wanted him.
He’d come find her after work, always at the top of the steps of the Met, where she sat waiting. And he began to attach the picture of her outside—a pretty brunette in dark glasses sitting quietly—with the paintings she insisted on showing him inside. And forever afterward in the first few minutes of entering any museum, no matter where he was in the world, the hush and the cool and the dropping away of the noise of a city would combine with a tightening in his stomach, an urgency that brought her back to him, whole and beside him pointing out something she wanted him to see.
“Pay attention,” she’d say, poking him. “You’re missing it.”
“I’m missing nothing.” He’d pull her to him and be rewarded by the catch of her teeth on her lip as she tried not to smile.
“I don’t care about this,” he said one day, “about any of this.”
“Well, you ought to care.”
“Why?”
“Because,” she fumbled, not wanting to say what was obvious. So you’ll fit in, she thought.
Though he would never fit in. She smiled. Sitting waiting for him every evening, she’d catch sight of him at the end of the block, tall, dark haired, and rangy. As if at any moment he might simply start walking toward the mountains. Like Moss, he was full of motion and a restless, urgent energy which she was used to in her brother. But with Len, there was no modesty, no dimming of his light, there was just a large, healthy appetite, like a great cat, she thought, some animal stalking its prey. And she knew this was the very thing her mother would object to—no modesty, no ability to be quiet about who he was. When he turned his smile to her, his strong white teeth flashing in his wide mouth, when he smiled she saw he wanted her.
