Don't Worry About the Kids

by Jay Neugeboren

  I suppose I am.

  I thought of saying something about how unpleasant she became when she didn’t get her way—how petulant—but I didn’t. We drove on, not touching each other. A few miles past Castellon de la Plana, I turned inland. When the sea had disappeared behind us, Aldy spoke again: I once asked Daddy about what he actually did—about torture. I was eighteen years old, visiting him in Salzburg during winter break—the first time we were together, over here, after Mother’s death. He told me not to worry. In my profession, he said, sadism is a liability.

  A good line to give to a beloved and beautiful daughter. Eichmann loved children and dogs.

  Be fair, Carl. Daddy’s a kind man.

  In his profession, kindness is an asset. If he enjoyed his work, he’d be less good at it. He murders people, Aldy.

  Only out of choice.

  Only out of what?

  I laughed. Aldy turned away, and I pictured the green of the sea in her eyes. I said nothing to bring her back to me. In the distance I could see towns I would never enter, where people who spoke a language I didn’t know would never know me.

  They telephoned me too, Carl.

  And—?

  Daddy had already booked my flight back to the States. Under a different name. I have several passports—black wigs, thick glasses, various and cruel identities. Once I’m gone, you’re free again. You’ll have what you want, after all.

  I’m free now, I said. I’ve never not been free.

  She put her hand on top of mine, drew it to her, placed it on her lap, then lifted it so that it rested against her bare stomach. Her skin was warm. She unzipped her slacks.

  You always do what you want, she said. It’s why I love you. I can’t ever make you do anything. I can’t even make you love me.

  It’s why it’s called love, I said. Because it’s given freely.

  And this? she said, pressing my hand with hers, moving it where she wanted it. Is this free too, or will you want something in return?

  I said nothing. She pushed me deeper inside her.

  I tried to withdraw my hand, but she held to me, told me not to stop.

  You want to hurt me, don’t you, she said. You despise me when I get like this. I know it. You’re angry with me. You’re furious. Tell me it’s so. Tell me.

  Yes. I want to hurt you.

  Ah, she said. Self-knowledge is a wonderful thing.

  She gasped. Deeper, she said. I want you deeper. Tell me what you want me to do for you later. Tell me. You can do anything you want to me. Anything you imagine. Please. And consider this too—it’s all tax deductible—our travel, our room—your game, my article. So let’s transact business, yes? Tell me: What will you feel ten years from now when some twenty-one-year-old boy, without thinking, skies over you on the court—does to you what you now do to others? What will you do when your glory days are done? Run summer camps for boys? Open bowling alleys or restaurants? Coach preppies at Princeton? Enter into partnership with your father-in-law?

  She shuddered once, then again, then lay against my shoulder and whispered that she was sorry, that she wished she could have stopped herself from being the way she was.

  You’re trembling, I said.

  You don’t hate me then?

  No.

  Ask me a question—any question. Please? Ask me to do something for you.

  Can you make a sentence using the words Euripides and Eumenides? Euripides pants, Eumenides pants.

  She laughed and when I laughed with her, the rage I’d been feeling slipped away. Her head was back, her eyes rolling up in their sockets, her golden hair streaming behind. She was gone with pleasure again. I thought of Grace Kelly, by Jimmy Stewart’s side, his crutch near the couch on which they made love. I had lied to Aldy about Rear Window, and I knew it would please her if I said so. I said nothing. Aldy couldn’t stop laughing. She told me how wonderful it was that I was such a great ballplayer—that I could go either way, that I was so good with either hand, that I had such a soft touch. Her mouth was wide open and I wanted to drift down, to drop inside. I wanted to taste her hair, to sleep inside her as if in warm water. I thought of sea anemones and they were high up in an ice-blue sky—thousands of them—and then, like silk parachutes, they all came floating slowly down.

  I gave away more than six inches to Shea, point guard for II Mesaggero Roma, but he was thin, with little upper-body strength, and I was doing what I wanted, wearing him down. They were ahead by one, in overtime, and I ran the base line, stopped, pivoted, and spun—not to get free, but so I could, reversing direction, ram my shoulder into his chest. I heard the air go out of him, then moved to the top of the key and the ball was there for me. I started to go up for the shot and Shea, hustling back on defense, was in the air to slap it away, but I was under him, a full step ahead, flying toward the basket. Their big man moved toward me, to cover for Shea—what I expected—and I fed off to his man, Boisvert, for an easy layup.

  Now I was tight on Shea and I could see, in his eyes, that he could not understand where my stamina came from. I was not the player he was—I didn’t have his pure athletic gifts, but I was as strong now-stronger—than I was at the game’s start. It was always this way with me: the longer I played, the stronger I got. Shea dribbled between his legs, faked left, started right, and I was there, nice and low, my eyes on one thing only—the ball—and I stripped it clean, headed for open court, felt the cheering of the crowd inside my head as if the ocean were there. I rose at the foul line, drifted up, all alone—suspended in air—and let the ball slip from my fingertips, into the net. We were ahead by three with twelve seconds left.

  To everyone’s surprise, II Mesaggero Roma had given Shea a million-dollar contract after his rookie year with the Celtics, but Shea’s money, like the words that came to me on the phone—from Aldy’s father, from others—was nothing to me. The only thing that mattered was what I was actually doing. If Aldy was right in what she often said, that I had a hard time trusting others—it was why, she laughed, imitating Garbo, I wanted to be alone so much—it was not true that I didn’t trust. I trusted the ball. I trusted the net. I trusted my hands. The ball came to Shea and I was on him—harassing, hawking, making him work to bring it up court. I asked him what his accountant would do about taxes on his windfall, if his Italian was improving. The sweat poured from him as if a machine were pumping it through his pores. He was lean and sleek, but if he was a greyhound, I thought, then I was a groundhog, and I could rise up and snap his toes and heels off because my jaws were strong and hungry, because my timing was fine, because I knew how to wait.

  We trapped him as he came across the half-court line—six seconds left—and, in desperation, he heaved the ball toward the far corner. Too far. Out of bounds and I was already streaking across the court, taking the ball out, handing it to Merle, our shooting guard, then taking it back, going behind my back—first one way, then the other—and we were home free and Shea knew it. I looked to the stands, saw Aldy standing and cheering, looking the way she might have looked before I knew her: a happy and beautiful young college girl at an Ivy League game. The buzzer sounded, my teammates surrounded me, lifting me from the floor, screaming at me in French that they loved me. Shea made his way through the bodies, shook my hand. I wanted to tell him that even though what they were offering me—Aldy’s life, a challenging government job when my playing days were over, the opportunity to travel the world alone on a generous expense account—was less lucrative than what he received, I had nonetheless turned it down.

  You were wonderful, Aldy said. She took my hand. I saw tears come into her eyes. I’m surprised, she said.

  That I was wonderful?

  At what I feel.

  We were eating dinner in a small restaurant just off the Rue d’Alcala, a block south of the Place de Cybèle. I don’t think I ever saw you play with such ferocity. You were wild, Carl. Pure energy, sheer grace.

  It’s weird, I said. When I’m out there playing, it’s like you said�
�I can’t remember ever thinking of what to do next. I move before I think.

  Moveo ergo sum?

  Something like that. Only listen—before the game—they called again. They asked me to lose. Why? How would our losing—we were supposed to lose anyway—but how would that transmit a message? I don’t get it.

  They just wanted to see if they could control you. Or perhaps not. They’re like you, yes? Sometimes they don’t have the vaguest idea as to why they do something—they just want to keep things in motion. Maybe they figured if they asked you to lose, you’d be sure to be fired up, to defy them. Maybe they bet a wad of money on your team as a way of transferring funds.

  If you’re so rich, how come you’re smart?

  Yeah. She shrugged, seemed embarrassed. She started to say something, but couldn’t speak. I watched her swallow, lick her lips to moisten them. I know all about my supposed sense of entitlement, how assured I seem, she said, and it occurred to me that had she not previously rehearsed what she was now saying, she could not have gotten the words out. My intelligence is the only thing I’ve ever felt truly confident about, she said. I believe in it, in its chemistry. I was doing an article last year—new discoveries about how the brain works—and I became fascinated by the study of faces, by how and why the brain is so impressed—actually, literally—with faces. Infants know faces much earlier than we ever thought. When they can barely make out anything else they can pick out their own mothers from hundreds of others. Mere millimeters of difference in configuration, affect, color ing, and babies live and die by it. Maybe love is chemistry, Carl. The way you look and move and sound and smell excites a few neurons in a small fold of some obscure lobe.

  A lobe of brain, a jug of wine, and thou?

  She smiled. The more we know about how the brain works—how mysterious it all is—the more it seems the poets and philosophers were right all along. Love enters through the eyes and travels to the heart, except it first detours to…She stopped. Why am I mouthing off like this? she asked. Why do I love to talk to you so much? And yet it’s not what either of us says that matters. It’s something more purely physical. I perceive you—your goodness, yourself—the way I feel the sun on my back, or a stone in my mouth.

  I took her hand, spoke: Carl the philosopher says, “All philosophers are liars.” I waited, spoke again: I love you, Aldy.

  Epimenides’ paradox, right?

  Right.

  We feel before we think.

  Yes.

  Alzheimer patients will recognize famous people—tests show they react to them, that their bioelectric fields—the conductivity in their skin—indicate recognition, even though they can’t name them. We see somebody and we know we know the person, though we may have to go through an internal multiple choice test as to when and where and who to get to the name. I say to you, “Look—there’s Grace Kelly,” and you turn and say, “Oh yes—there she is.” With somebody famous—Grace or Marilyn or Liz—we don’t, unless we’re brain damaged, respond, “Grace Kelly—who’s she?”

  Grace Kelly is dead.

  Probably.

  Probably?

  We laughed. She pressed her lips to my wrist. I know I love you, Carl. I can’t ever get you out of my mind, even when you’re beside me, even when I’m touching you. Chemical basis or Platonic myth—who cares?—but it seems true, after all, what lovers have always said to one another: I feel as if I’ve known you forever.

  We always know more than we can say.

  If you’re making fun of me, don’t. Please.

  I’m not making fun of you.

  The old Platonic stuff about knowledge being memory brought to light—that knowledge is always within us, and that what we think is knowledge is merely remembering what we didn’t know we’d forgotten—I fell for that big once upon a time.

  You know what I’m wishing now?

  Tell me.

  That I’d said yes when you made your offer. I wish we hadn’t come here. I’d love to be somewhere else now, with you—somewhere so peaceful we wouldn’t ever have to speak or to know the difference between a thought and a feeling—to be so far from anyone and anything we knew that all we’d need to do, to tell each other our desires, would be to touch.

  What stopped you?

  Your voice. There was something desperate in it that put me off. Desperate, and angry

  You felt that?

  Yes.

  Then it was there, she said. Aldy’s cave—not unlike Plato’s. Which reminds me. Did you know that Rainier has a thing about animals—a private menagerie? Tigers and monkeys and wolves. He gave me a tour. He’s an interesting man. He knows my father.

  Your father wasn’t at the game. He telephoned me this afternoon from a hotel in Madrid. Do you think he’s all right?

  I’m sorry, she said.

  For what?

  For changing the subject. You were very happy, talking like that just before—talking with me.

  Yes.

  She stood. I’ll be right back.

  She started to move away, but I reached out, held her wrist. She looked at my fingers, pressed against her tanned skin, said something about Cary Grant on the rooftops of Monaco—they had filmed To Catch a Thief there—holding on to Grace.

  Your skin is ice cold, I said.

  Let me call Daddy and then I’ll come back. I promise.

  You’re frightened.

  I love you. I’m glad I saw you win. It must be a wonderful feeling, to be able to do something you love so well. Her eyes shone, so that the green seemed flecked with blue. I thought of warm rain on a calm sea. It’s strange, to desire you so, Carl—to feel so wild with you, yet the part you stir most deeply in me is tenderness. That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you, what I never expected—what I never knew I knew, yes? I feel an enormous urge to take care of you, sweetheart. I’ve never wanted to take care of anybody before in my life.

  Then, before I could respond, she had kissed me—I let go of her wrist, to touch her face—and was gone.

  Aldy’s father sat across from me, where Aldy had been. A few minutes after Aldy left, to telephone him, he had appeared, had told me that we were to stay and talk for a while, until someone came for us. If all went well, Aldy would be waiting for me in our room. I wondered about the switch they had made—father for daughter—and if and when they had arranged it. But I asked no questions. The point of our conversation was for me to learn and know as little as possible. Think of our talk, Aldy’s father said, as philosophic minimalism. After all, didn’t Aristotle say that philosophy began in wonder—didn’t Socrates believe that the wisest man was he who knew that he knew nothing?

  Then to know you is to know nothing, I said.

  Precisely.

  In the hotel I moved from the sitting room to the bedroom. Aldy was there, under the covers, a small bullet hole in her forehead. Her expression was calm, as if she had not been surprised.

  Her father covered her, said that they would never kill him, because he knew too much. If he died, his knowledge, which others coveted, went to the grave with him. Aldy had known nothing and was, therefore, expendable.

  Then you lied to me, I said.

  Of course. You knew that, didn’t you? Didn’t Carl the philosopher say that all philosophers are liars?

  I thought of lifting him and throwing him against a wall, or through a window, but the thought—the picture—of what would happen if I did—of what would ensue—was there before the feeling: he would be prepared for my anger. He was expecting it, I knew, and would be armed, and though he might not kill me, he could wound me in severe ways, so that I might never play again.

  He had lost somebody he had known for her entire life, I thought, whereas I had lost somebody I had hoped to know for my entire life. Neither of us seemed surprised at Aldy’s death. Neither of us showed any outward signs of grief, and I did not sense this was because our feelings lay too deep for tears.

  Will you mourn? I heard Aldy ask.

  Probably, I sai
d.

  Probably?

  Aldy’s father talked to me about the arrangements—how her death would be reported, how her body would be taken away and cared for, what he and I would do next. Our best hope lay in trusting each other. He touched my arm, said that he had tried to get to the restaurant before Aldy left—to intercept her, to propose a plan that would save us all—but that she had lied to him on the phone, saying that she would wait for him with me, that the three of us could have dessert and coffee together. He said that if she had not deceived him and returned to the hotel by herself, without me, she would now be alive and I—so she had believed—would be dead. They only wanted one body and they preferred, given a choice, to use the less newsworthy one of those available.

  He left the room, and I heard him speaking on the phone, attending to details. I did not look at Aldy again. I wanted to think of the small hole in her forehead, the smudge of powder, as a blemish that, bringing imperfection, would have pleased her. She could at last be valued for qualities other than the physical beauty that had been hers and that she had not chosen. She would not be able to interview me in order to tell the story of my life, and I thought of saying to her that with nobody to tell my story, my life would remain unexamined and unverified. It would not, however, she replied, remain unlived. I could now have, she said, what I had desired before I knew her. It was why, she suspected, I was feeling so little after she, to her surprise, had been feeling so much. I could now be more alone than I had ever, in my philosophy, dreamt possible.

  In Memory of Jane Fogarty

  IN THE GLOOM and fog of Dublin, who’ll ever notice my difference?

  Your difference, she replied.

  My difference, damn it! You know what I mean—my craziness! She showed nothing. Simon looked down at his hands. In the gloom and fog of Dublin, for that matter, who’ll notice me?

  In the deserts of the heart, let the healing fountain start.

  Surely Simon had had that verse in mind when he spoke to her of Dublin—and surely, too, he’d had it in mind when he attached to his flight insurance policy a sheet of paper on which, in block letters, he printed five words: IN MEMORY OF JANE FOGARTY.