She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me

by Herbert Gold

  Ring-ring-ring. Tight-lipped Priscilla saying: “I heard what you did.”

  “And what did I do?”

  “He’s twice the man you are because he didn’t stoop to—”

  “He fell,” I said.

  “You’re proud of yourself. He didn’t stoop to brawling with you. You realize, of course, he’s younger than you are. He’s just as fit, maybe more so. If he’d wanted to, if he’d had some notice of what was coming, or just if he wanted to—”

  “Yeah. I know he could have fought back. He was down, but not out.”

  “Do you know how smug you sound?”

  “I think so. Yes. Probably.”

  “You’re still proud of yourself, aren’t you, Buster?”

  And then she stopped. She was thinking. Was she going to say “macho”? No, she would spare them that. She had an idea that this conversation was useless and unnecessary, yet there was some point she wanted to make with her former, very soon to be forever former, husband, now known as Buster. The point was her anger. The point was to let Buster know in such a way that he would feel it. The thought of my smug comfort distressed her sense of justice. No doubt I was sitting there with a cup of espresso, the morning Chronicle, my feet on a table, and a contented half-smile on my stupid macho face. Not a pretty picture.

  Priscilla didn’t believe in useless fretting, stewing, the destructive practice of anger. She believed in making points and moving on.

  I could hear her breath on the phone. I could imagine the little motion of her nostrils, like that imperceptible minnow agitation after we made love—when her face was still, her eyes blank and departed, and then she returned to me with a smile, her nostrils taking breath eagerly, greedily. Her soul alive to herself and me, returned from its voyage. Her eyes studying mine as if our souls could be printed upon each other forever.

  “I guess you know he had a problem,” she said, “because I let you know, nothing for a real man to be ashamed of in my opinion, nothing to feel smug about if you’re not, it’s just human, just shows feelings, a sensitivity, an awareness. But Xavier is fine, it’s nothing physical. He’s healthy. He checked out okay.”

  “Great.”

  “And about that problem, Dan. Sure, he needs me. What I do is I imagine I’m rolling a tennis ball up a flight of stairs—”

  How wise of her to reserve this conversation for the telephone. Now that there was a precedent of my losing control, she knew enough to say certain things at a time when all I could do was break the electronic connection.

  Macha. But I wouldn’t break the connection. I wouldn’t say anything that would make her hang up on me. I would just wait and let her listen to herself because she learned better that way than from anyone else. I waited to hear what she would say next about how Xavier impotent was more moving to her than Dan with machinery functioning and no need to roll a tennis or bowling ball up a flight of stairs in that special way.

  But had I said something anyway?

  Because she had hung up and I was alone, grasping the telephone in my scabbed fist.

  * * *

  Months passed, moons and cycles; unrelieved compassion tends to tucker out; even the joys of helping a man with a deeply human and normal male problem were passing. My hand healed. A person forgets, when he grows up, how long such healing takes, given the constant flexings, washings, general busy use of both fists and open hands. Or maybe the wounds from scuffles and accidents heal more slowly at my age, as do all other injuries. Socking a playground rival is boy’s work.

  In the mornings I once again awoke to the sound of the telephone not ringing and stared out the window at broom grass, yellow flowers, fennel; I grasped the mug of coffee, reached for my crusted cereal bowl chilled from the refrigerator, read the Chronicle, kept busy.

  The telephone didn’t ring and that was all right with me.

  More months, the season of yellow flowers dropping, butterflies disappearing, and I knew from seeing Jeff, from watching Priscilla, that the pleasures of curing Xavier were passing like the other pleasures in life. When the mouth dies, what is there? So then a person has to seek out new pleasures.

  Then the telephone didn’t ring and I wanted Priscilla to call. But I wasn’t merely waiting. I was also watching the yellow gorse sway in the hot wind across Potrero Hill and missing the raccoons, the wild cats, the kids from the Projects, all of life that had abandoned me. Probably I was the cause of this myself.

  * * *

  It seemed that my devoted friend Karim never gave up. He didn’t abandon me. I tried to avoid him by avoiding the terrace at Enrico’s, but since my office was just up the Kearny steps alongside, there was no reason to stay away from the terrace at Enrico’s at odd hours. At odd hours was when Karim, nodding, nodding vigorously in greeting, was awaiting me. His eyebrow clumps worked; the ants crawled; he had five o’clock shadow above his nose.

  “Mr. Kasdan, Dan! At least enjoy my company one minute of your time, sit down to celebrate, please! I must!”

  I sat. Priscilla thought I should listen. Perhaps I could tucker him out by listening. He was working a plate of pasta at eleven in the morning—no sliced banana with cream and cherries chopped by the waiter, Chad. Some kind of pasta with a white sauce and a napkin spread like a tablecloth across his lap. A different diet.

  “So,” he said, “so, my friend. Please listen. All I need is what you do so well. Find things out, a little information, find people for me, a little acquaintanceship, talk to them, keep it between us, you and me, sometimes maybe a little flight to Phoenix—you like Arizona, my friend?”

  “It’s not Las Vegas.”

  Karim frowned, bringing the plucked-hair ants close together. “Why is it—?” He saw me getting ready to stand. He changed directions. “Why is it I have this sensation, deep inside my soul, in another life we were very close? Why is it not so in this life? That is my trouble, I ask you honestly.” He seemed to relax after the pasta, encouraged by my lingering presence; he dabbed at his lips with the napkin; the guy was really enjoying himself and wanted me to have fun too, increasing the world’s enjoyment all around. I couldn’t fault him for that. He reached into his leather case, a kind of purse with a strap, and pulled out a package of cigarillos. He offered me one. “I don’t suppose you smoke, Dan? I do. I like to enjoy harmless pleasures, even if they are a little bit”—he pronounced it liddlebit—“harmful, but in California…” He waited. “You prefer not to smoke, consequently I also will not.”

  “Go ahead. I’ve got to go up to my office.”

  “Not yet, not yet, please. I want you to judge me fairly, Dan, that’s all, that is the plan. I need your skills, I truly do, and you can also use what I can offer, buy nice things for that lovely woman, your wife. Lovely young women always appreciate nice things. The girls who work for me are no different.”

  “No different from legitimate women.”

  “Ah, my friend, such an unkindness is beneath you. Such remarks.” He shook his head sadly.

  A harassed street person wrapped in a khaki blanket paused on the sidewalk near us. Karim beckoned him over, handed him the package of cigarillos, and waved him off. The transaction required no words.

  Chad came to stand by the table and I realized I was not focusing on the matters at hand. I thought he had appeared to hustle away the khaki blanket, but he was bringing Karim his morning dessert—the familiar bowl of sliced banana oddly scrambled with cherries, not chopped this time. With two fingers Karim picked up a banana slice and dropped it on the cement. He winked at me with his eloquent black-rimmed eyes. Then he picked up a cherry, dropped it, and watched it rolling around underfoot. “You see?” he asked. “Cherries run away, but bananas hang in there. You are more a banana, my friend?”

  The man in the khaki blanket was awaiting my reply. So was Chad. So was Karim.

  “Too early in the morning to play games,” I said. “I’ve got to get on upstairs.”

  “Never too early to play, Dan,” Karim called after me
. “This is America. Please discuss my offer with your lovely lady. The divorce isn’t achieved yet, is it? Individual employment requiring initiative, discretion, and reliability always makes a good impression. Try to change your bad luck if you can, my friend.”

  * * *

  Women, Priscilla was learning, had a grasp of the eternal flow and meaning of life; they had to; childbearing, child rearing (how it usually comes down), the health of the planet. No problem; no offense to men intended.

  When Xavier began to whine about how his past and future were burdens on his soul, causing even the present to sag like a tired branch—so much sadness in a fellow’s growing up (his mother, his father, his place in the family), so much sensitivity spilling out of the corners of his eyes whenever he thought about it—he soon found an empty space where he thought Priscilla had stood. She was on her way to being gone. He may have loved the pale filmy red hairs around her navel as much as I did, almost like feathers they were; he probably loved them according to his own needs, which were unlike mine, the way men are sometimes different from each other; but in any case he was fast losing his opportunity to enjoy them in Priscilla’s presence. Like me, he could try enjoying them in her absence. It’s not the same, God knows, and He therefore offered us the gift of memory.

  Men, Priscilla noticed, had a tendency to throw their heavy thighs over a person, get comfortable, start snoring. A woman then found herself staring at the ceiling, analyzing the situation, wondering how she came to be weighed down by all this oppressive male gravity when all she needed to do was shake it and say, first, “Stop snoring,” and second, once again: “I want out, Buster.”

  “Uh … unh? I was sleeping”—the thick mumble of a man awakened and unable to carry his own side of the argument.

  Well, talk didn’t help. She’d learned about talk with me, if she hadn’t known it already. That dark warfare space of the bedroom—one snoring and one thinking—was as good a place as any for the one thinking to make his or her plans.

  A fundamental tenet for Priscilla was to create no additional landfill of boringness. It was a Green belief, a matter of ecological principle, even more than saving the dolphins or the rain forests. After all, mammals and trees can reproduce anew, but boringness just lies there snoring forever, weighing a person down. Too much routine had already been deposited on earth by previous generations, geological saggings of boring. Was a person just supposed to yawn and tiptoe around it, dreaming of flying? She would smile and pick up the litter, deposit it in the appropriate can, fastidiously dust her hands together, and continue on her way.

  When Xavier continued to whine about his griefs, he became litter. He had a way of saying “aggravated” when he meant irritated. A lad with a family trust should have a better grasp of the language. She was sorry. He had ways that belonged to him, as folks’ ways do, but it wasn’t Priscilla’s responsibility to deal with them past a certain point. At that point they ceased to be an interesting variation on maleness and charming. Briefly they were just cozy habits, and then they quickly became definitely irritating (not aggravating), definitely boring litter. Priscilla was skilled at finding ends for her chapters.

  She adored the plot of her life. It had romance, it had opportunities for nursing care, it had anger and pain, it was full of jokes and entertainments. She needed love even if she might consequently not love. In the exercise of authority and power, she required rhythms of communion and loneliness. This woman’s natural work was never done.

  In the cycle of Priscilla’s nature, Xavier provided all the right elements for a time, plus terrific thick hair and yearning cow-eyes, although cows’ eyes are normally brown, not blue. She could save him from this cruel world. That was normal, part of her deal with the great chain of being. If a sweet handsome man can’t keep it up, isn’t it a fine story when a woman can show him how? She made him this gift. Later she might choose to enact the cruelties of the world upon him. Just because a skier is innocent, he doesn’t escape the avalanche; just because a man is pretty, he can’t avoid fate.

  So she offered Xavier the same menu she’d offered me—to become bright, new, perfect, and someone other or she would leave him. Out of the laziness typical of your normal man, he was slow to make the proper selection. It was her job only to kiss away the warts and hunkers of her heavy-thighed princes for a little while; the rest was up to them; and if they were not up to the job, she could always go smiling elsewhere.

  “He ‘can’t get rid of those old tapes,’” she confided to me with a wince. “At least you never said that. And I asked him to get tested for sleep apnea, it’s called, but turned out it was just plain old snores.”

  When Xavier asked how she could ignore their tender moments together on weekend mornings and daylight-savings-time evenings, she told him with her kind, confident, unembarrassed smile—the smile that seemed to raise the question of why evolution hadn’t made everyone like her; things would be so much better—“I don’t have a very good memory, Zave dear.”

  Xavier was history. Priscilla saddled up to ride into the future. But she must have taken Xavier’s arm, too, as if she loved him.

  Of course I was hardly present during Priscilla’s final negotiations with poor deplorable pretty Xavier. But I would come to pick up Jeff, sometimes just after Xavier had left, or sometimes in time for uneasy hellos between the two husbands-in-law; once she let me show him courteously to the door (no more sudden punches out of the blue). She didn’t run to the window to wave goodbye to him anymore, and she had a tendency to open and frank audible murmurs. She liked to comment to me because I was still a necessary part of her life; bearing love and not-love secrets alone is wasteful of energy. May I be forgiven for not forgetting her? Not everyone has the gift of poor memory.

  And I felt blessed despite everything. “Daddy,” said Jeff, “I got to use the keyboard today!” The love of a child, a palpable ongoing fact, counts for something in the permanent equation between man and woman.

  * * *

  After Jeff was in bed, and then after the cup of herbal tea Priscilla offered me, and then after we had made love, a speedy silent high school act on the couch, I asked her: “I’m not nuts, am I?”

  “No, no.” Priscilla drew a long consideration from her stock of watchfulness; there was a roguish glint in her eye. “No, I don’t see you choosing that way to go.”

  “People don’t decide. You think I deliberate everything.”

  Little mouth pucker, little pout. “Up to you. What I think isn’t important anymore. Except to me.”

  But it was, it was. In the space of silence I was praying, without speech, Let it be as it was, let us walk down Russian Hill to dinner again, let it be a weather in the world where you keep busy touching my hand, you take my arm as if you love me.

  “I’ve given you something and you don’t want it, but I can’t take it back,” I said.

  “What is it?” she asked cheerfully. “Of course I’ll give it back.”

  I stared, stupefied. “My heart,” I said.

  “Oh, that.” She looked worried. “If I could, dear, I’d give it all back, every bit of it. It’s up to you. It’s not my problem. I wish you the best and fullest possession of your heart, besides.”

  She smiled at the playfulness of her own words as they emerged, rich with goodwill and good humor. Even I had to agree it was kind of funny, imagining her handing me one ventricle after another, along with adjacent arteries, connecting valves, packed cholesterol, every little morsel on which she made no further claim.

  And then she looked away. “I’m sorry. I’m truly, truly sorry, Dan, as much as … I can’t expect you to understand me, you’re so busy understanding yourself. But I am.”

  She was, she was. Sorry.

  Tachycardia, extrasystole auricular fibrillation, the usual responses to her kindness and cheer. She looked sturdy and slightly flushed from our lovemaking. She couldn’t understand why a zesty exercise of friendliness didn’t restore my spirits. Yet she did unders
tand it, too. “Well. Well,” she said. “You get a prize for not giving up.”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “I’m surprised that you care that much.” She reached to put her hand on mine. The smile was unaltered, but the touch was warm and unsure, not like the harsh good cheer of her words, the glare of amusement in her face. She let her hand rest there a moment. Stay. Stay. Then she took it away. “But I always knew you were stubborn,” she said.

  “Not stubborn. It’s because…” I knew it would just embarrass her if I spoke what I was thinking. Instead asked, “Don’t you want to live with a prizewinner? Can I show you the trophy?”

  “Love it when you talk dirty, Dan.”

  “Priscilla … Let’s figure it out. You used to care, we had times I remember, there’s Jeff.”

  Mo-not-o-nous. She could hear that kind of stuff from Xavier.

  Briskly turning away, she let me know I was again going too far. With the power vested in her by both Nature and her own nature she declared me in bad taste verging on moral bankruptcy. “I don’t need reminders of the obvious. Okay, suppose we say you don’t give up what you want and I don’t give up what I want. Suppose we stipulate that. But what I want—maybe I’ll want something different another time—is still the same.”

  I felt stupid. I must have looked as stupid as Xavier, even if less pretty. I didn’t understand. The hot ache in my chest understood, but Dan Kasdan didn’t. The throbbing at my forehead understood. I clung to ignorance as if it were an innertube bobbing in the rapids.

  “I really want all the way free, dear. Really and truly. Try to understand.”

  Her look of sympathy was worse than her look of anger. Her look of concern was worse than her look of hatred. The look she offered was of one lost to me. Even that silent lovemaking on the couch had no consequence for her except that she would better enjoy her thorough hot shower and a good sound sleep alone in bed after I left.

  Priscilla believed in the clock. Time moves forward in its flight, but the rest of time was none of her concern. The past interfered with getting on with it; she had a duty to press the Memory Erase off-on switch. Her style kept her efficient in ways I could not fathom, having no gift for on-off; to me, nothing ever seemed over and done with, finished. I looked at our cups of chamomile tea, cooled where we had abandoned them. She drank from hers and waited.