Witness to Myself

by Seymour Shubin

  They sat down on the sand. His heart had begun pounding and just wouldn’t stop.

  South Minton was over three hundred miles away, and yet it was as if that part of the ocean was bleeding into here.

  “What’re you doing?” she asked.

  He almost wasn’t aware that the fingers of his right hand had been digging hard into the sand. He had dug deep, reaching damp sand.

  “Just trying to reach China,” he said.

  “You used to do that too?”

  He managed a smile. “I’m still doing it.”

  She leaned against him and put her arm around him. He put his around her and squeezed her to him.

  “Hey,” she said after a few moments, “I can’t breathe.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” He released her immediately.

  “No, no. I forgot to tell you I love not breathing.”

  They laughed. “You are something,” he said, looking at her. He touched her right cheek with his fingertips. She turned just enough to kiss his palm.

  He suddenly wanted to cry out Oh Anna! But he was even afraid to say her name, as if that would bring out more.

  “You look like you’re thinking,” she said.

  “Me? Just how happy I am to be with you.”

  She turned to him and they kissed. He felt that if he made them both naked and he lay with her here, everything would be perfect; he had no fear with her, only great need and desire. He touched her breasts and she pressed herself into his palms, kissing him hard. He started to unbutton her blouse on that wide empty beach but after a moment or two she shook her head.

  “Please. Let’s not here.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No. No, not that. Don’t be sorry. Just not here.”

  After a while they drove to the other end of the island, and later had dinner at a restaurant on the causeway whose long bar was filled largely with construction workers. On the drive back she reached out and placed her hand on his knee, and whenever he glanced at her she would be looking at him, smiling. It was only as they approached the city that her mood seemed to change. Then, staring straight ahead, she said, “Can I tell you something? It’s something I heard yesterday that has me upset.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s about my sister. She’s pregnant. And she’s only a kid herself. Just fifteen.”

  He didn’t say anything right away. “What about the father?”

  “He’s a kid too. In fact she doesn’t even want to see him anymore. And my father, he’s so upset. Oh is he mad.”

  “How’s your mother handling it?”

  “Upset. Very upset. But —” She stopped. He said nothing, and then after a few moments she went on. “But she should be the last one to say anything. She had me when she was sixteen.”

  “With your father?” Anna was so open that he felt free to ask.

  She nodded. “Yeah. That’s why they got married, at least when they did. So, he’s not one to talk either.”

  She became quiet again, and he drove on in silence. Then when he looked over at her she was looking at him. She said, “Are you upset with me?”

  “Upset with you? Why?”

  “Because of what I told you.”

  “Now why would I be upset with you over that?”

  “I don’t know. Because you might think I have a crazy family. I was just wondering.”

  “Oh no.” And he reached over and took her hand. She squeezed it and held it to her lips.

  Her apartment was on the second floor. He was feeling a rush of anxiety now, had first begun feeling it long before he turned into her street. Still, he led her over to the sofa and put his arms around her and kissed her. Her hands grew tight on his back. Lips open, they took in each other’s breathing, and now his tongue was tangled with hers. Soon his hand moved to one of her breasts, held its fullness. But within a few seconds she sat up straight.

  “Don’t. Please don’t.”

  He looked at her in surprise.

  “Just don’t. Please.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  Then she lowered her head and began to cry. He watched her, then heard her say, as if to herself as much as to him: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Chapter Ten

  Driving away from the truck stop, Alan could still remember just looking at her and thinking again of those words “nutcase,” “wifty.”

  Here he was, the thought went through him, scared of what lay ahead and yet a part of him was back there on that sofa, hearing her saying, “I’m sorry, I just don’t feel well, please don’t be mad.” And then holding her but thinking this was the end of anything between them.

  The snow was beginning to come down even harder now but he could see that the sky ahead was almost a summer blue. He began looking on the weather more and more as the proper crazy setting for what he was doing. And the questions he’d been trying to suppress ever since he started this drive were coming back like hammer blows.

  What if I find out I did kill her? What then?

  He almost closed his eyes to the splattering snow and the sweeping wipers.

  But it can’t be!

  Then why are you going back there?

  To clear his head of it once and for all, he kept telling himself. To be free in a way he hadn’t been since that day.

  But then why did a part of him want to turn the car around?

  He was aware all at once of how slowly he’d begun to drive, as if to make this last hundred and fifty miles stretch on forever. And, even though reluctantly, he stepped a little harder on the gas.

  Although he had told himself he would never call Anna again after that incident, his mind kept going back to her so many times during the next several days, even while he was writing a brief or having lunch with a client. She was a nutcase, she came from a family that seemed straight out of the old Ozarks, yet he couldn’t shake her from his thoughts. Still, he didn’t know if he would ever call her again. He would never get to find out: She called him the following week at his office, and from her voice it was as if nothing had gone wrong between them. She asked if he was free to come over for dinner that night. “Or any night.”

  “Oh, tonight’s fine. I’d love to.”

  He got there at seven, with a bottle of merlot that he brought from his apartment. She was wearing a T-shirt and had an apron around her skirt. Her hair, which she often wore pulled back, was down. She smiled and took his hand and lifted her face for a kiss.

  “Hon, make yourself comfortable. I just want to finish something.”

  The kitchen, with a small table to one side, was separated from the living room by a counter. He walked over to a photo that stood on a lamp table. It was her LPN graduation picture, a head shot, showing her smiling and wearing a nurse’s cap; the last time he’d seen a nurse wearing one was in an old movie. Nearby was a picture of her and her family, the four of them standing stiff, formal.

  She’d made steaks and French fries and a salad, but felt it necessary to explain that she had come home at six and hadn’t been able to make anything else.

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “This is fine, more than fine. In fact you didn’t have to make anything at all. We could have gone out.”

  “I wanted to make something for you.”

  After dinner, as he was walking to the sink with a couple of plates, she took them from him and set them down and, looking up at him, put her arms around him. They kissed each other hard, then softly, then hard again, their arms tight around each other. Then she took his hand and they walked into the bedroom. There she started to unbutton his shirt, then stopped as though her fingers had gotten too clumsy in her hurry. Instead she lifted her T-shirt over her head and then came close again in bra and skirt.

  She looked up at him and kissed him as he unhooked her bra.

  In bed he was aware of almost nothing but the feel and good smell of her and then almost miraculously the wondrous rhythm, slow at first and then faster,
of their bodies.

  “Oh Anna.” Only the rhythm and just wanting to say her name.

  “Yes, sweetheart, yes darling.”

  And then wanting only to hold her even tighter, longer, forever.

  But it was only afterward, after they fell back and lay gently in each other’s arms, their legs entangled, that he sensed something from her face that told him she hadn’t really joined him at the end.

  Chapter Eleven

  They saw each other almost every night that week. And on Saturday she asked if he would like to drive her home to Tamaqua the next day, that she had a few things there she wanted to bring back to her apartment. He was happy to do it, was curious to meet her family.

  When he went to pick her up she said, “Alan, don’t be mad at me but I’ve got to stop at the nursing home. I forgot something completely. One of the patients is having a birthday and I bought something for her, and here I simply forgot.”

  “So why would I be mad at you?”

  “I don’t know. It’ll be about an hour.”

  “Oh my, my life is ruined. The big thing is, am I invited?”

  “Of course.” She laughed and gave him a kiss.

  The nursing home was a white, pillared building set on several acres of greenery near the outskirts of the city. He watched as Anna walked among the patients in the lounge, most of them in wheelchairs, sitting staring down at their laps. She paused to kiss a cheek here and there, or to urge a smile, or clasp a thin hand, or just to kneel and make a try at conversation. The birthday girl was a woman of ninety-one, and Anna’s gift, among several others around the wheelchair, was a blouse, which she lifted from its box to the slight, quickly fading smile of the woman and the applause of a nurse and an attendant standing by.

  Afterward, driving away, Alan said, “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “How I do what?” She was frowning slightly as she turned to him.

  “Everything you do. You have a magic touch.”

  “Ah.” She leaned over and kissed his cheek.

  He started noticing a change in her as they began driving through the old anthracite region, with its fields of green grass and occasional contrasting piles of black slag, the debris of long-abandoned mines. He wasn’t going to mention anything to her, but she said, instead, “I’m nervous.”

  “Why? Because of my two noses?”

  She laughed. “That would be all right. I’m thinking of my father. He can be very nice or else he can be tough.”

  “How does he respond to being slapped around?”

  She laughed. “Oh you two will get along great.”

  Soon after they entered the town, she pointed to an auto repair shop, a closed sign on the door, that had something of the look of a junkyard.

  “That’s my dad’s place. We live a couple blocks away.”

  “You helped out here?”

  “Sure, all through high school. I love it. In fact at one time I only wanted to be on a Nascar crew.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Dreams change.” And she smiled, as if that were enough.

  Her house was a two-story frame building with a small open porch. It was darkly Victorian inside; the furniture had a heavy look; a small crucifix hung in the dining room. For some reason, he had had the feeling that her mother might be grossly fat. She wasn’t: She looked amazingly like Anna, with a nice warm smile. Her father was a husky man with thinning black hair, who looked expressionless except when he was frowning. He had a large tattoo on each forearm. Her sister, thin and with dyed orangey hair and large eyes that always seemed focused on Alan, wasn’t showing her pregnancy yet and looked as if she wasn’t concerned about a thing.

  Her mother spoke almost incessantly, including about her two sisters whose husbands died years ago and her rich older brother, who was selling his paint manufacturing business. But for a long time Anna’s father remained silent, though the few times Alan looked at him he was staring back.

  It was shortly before dinner that her father began asking him questions, as though he’d been storing them up.

  “Your mother and father living?”

  “Just my mother. My father died.”

  “Did I hear you’re not Catholic?”

  “I’m not, no.”

  “You’re what?”

  “My religion? I was raised Lutheran.”

  “You believe in God.” He said it as a statement.

  “Yes.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Anna says you’re a lawyer.”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re not my favorite people, you know.” He did smile slightly at this.

  “Oh Dad,” Anna spoke up.

  “It’s true.” This time even that little smile was gone.

  “Well, they’re not always mine either,” Alan said.

  Her father seemed to like that. “Do you ever hunt?”

  “No.”

  He pondered over this for a moment. “Did Anna ever tell you she’s a natural at fixing cars?”

  “Yes, she told me she loves it.”

  “Let me tell you something about this girl. She fixed a transmission — let’s see, how old were you? Twelve?”

  “You helped,” she said. “You know you helped.”

  “Twelve. Fixed a transmission.”

  “Let’s,” her mother spoke up, “have dinner.”

  Dinner was roast beef, baked potatoes and string beans, with applesauce and iced tea. It was good, and they ate with a minimum of talk, with nothing at all that whole afternoon from the sister. Afterward, in the bathroom, Alan saw that the toilet seat was made of clear plastic, suspended inside which was a scattering of United States coins.

  As he told Anna on the way home, “I think I sat on fifty dollars.”

  She seemed puzzled, then laughed. “Oh that.”

  “Don’t laugh. That’s part of your inheritance.”

  She laughed again; and looking at her, he became aware of how much he loved making her laugh.

  A little while later it struck him that she hadn’t brought anything back with her, the supposed reason she’d wanted to go there. It also struck him, even harder, that while he had been judging her family, they’d had no way of knowing the depths to which they’d have to go to even begin to judge him.

  It was soon after this that his career began to take a different direction. He had made a good friend of Elsa Tomlinson, of the renowned Elsa and Jonathan Tomlinson Foundation, the national charity that provided grants in many fields including the arts and education. He had been called in by one of his firm’s law partners to help her, a recent widow, reconstruct her will. And she had given him particular credit for it, to the point of having him do an increasing amount of the Foundation’s legal work.

  She called him at the office about a week after he’d met Anna’s family.

  “When can you have lunch with me?”

  “Whenever you say.”

  “Wrong. You’ve got to sound busier if you’re going to continue to work for me.”

  “You just reminded me. I’m tied up all this month.”

  “Good. One o’clock today at my club?”

  She was a woman in her late sixties, with a narrow, handsome face, bright blue eyes, and pulled-back white hair. She and her husband had had no children. Although she never said anything to indicate it, certain movements of her hands seemed to indicate she missed the cigarettes she used to smoke.

  “I’m having a martini,” she said. “And you?”

  “A scotch and soda.”

  “You don’t like brands?”

  Actually it didn’t make any difference; he still didn’t trust drinking. “A Dewar’s will be fine.”

  With the waiter gone, she looked at him in a slightly arched way, as if examining him for the first time.

  “I would like you to be on our board of directors.” “Oh?”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “No, but I’m gulping.”

  “Well, when you�
�re finished tell me what you think.”

  “I’m delighted, of course. Thank you.”

  “Now stop gushing. And I will want you to come work for us. Not at this moment but quite soon, once I figure things out.”

  He said nothing, nor did she apparently expect him to.

  “Are you a softie?” she asked. “In charity work you obviously have to be sort of a softie.”

  “I think I am.”

  “But you also have to be something else. If things work out the way I want them to, you might be the object of some jealousy. Can you also be a killer?”

  He didn’t answer. Her words came as kind of a shock.

  “You can’t?” She tilted her head.

  “Yes,” he said, “I can be a killer.”

  Chapter Twelve

  As for me, I had gotten married a couple of months before Alan was tapped for the board of directors. My wife, Patty, was someone I’d been seeing for about a year. She was a librarian, a gently attractive and wise young woman of twenty-six. I’d first met her at the branch library she ran, where I’d gone to give a talk to one of their book groups, and I almost immediately stopped dating anyone else. She had met Alan once, for maybe a half hour, so perhaps it hadn’t been long enough for her to sense something about him the way she did at our wedding, where as I’ve mentioned he was my best man.

  It was a small wedding, which was what both of us wanted, with about twenty-five people, held at a chapel and culminating in a quiet side room of a fine restaurant near the suburbs. Alan looked fine to me, smiling, talking to people, and telling some jokes about me as he stood up from his table and gave a toast to us. So it came as a surprise to me when Patty and I were at the airport, waiting for a flight that would take us on a week’s honeymoon to a couple of islands in Greece, and she said, “Your cousin Alan, I was just thinking. He’s a great guy, but he has the saddest eyes.”

  “Really? I never noticed that. I think he can be very funny — well, not funny-funny but witty.”

  “Yes, but his eyes struck me as so sad.”

  I shrugged. She was a very perceptive person, I thought, but sometimes you can take that too far.

  After all, what did Alan have to be sad about?