Children. And yet they attempted respectability, as if desperately needing confirmation of an external, objective world. They talked. They talked of God and politics and sport, of books and movies. They talked of her family and his, her body and his, her first piece (Ford) and his (basement). They ate sandwiches and drank milk. Once they visited a restaurant. Benny was charmed and horrified by this outlander who doused eggs with ketchup, who guzzled coffee and spurned tea. They tried a movie and found public life unbearable. “Movies!” he groaned. “There’s no time. I’m only superhuman, not omnipotent.”
“I wonder,” she murmured, and that killed another hour and took a few years off Benny’s life. “Painters would die for you,” he said. “Sculptors would kill for you.” “Two boys beat each other up for me,” she said. “We were sixteen. I loved it.” He told her about his scars, about 57359. Fred had served in the Navy and soon she told him about that, and about Fred’s brilliance in Boolean algebras and such, and the coming Ph.D.
She moved with a heavy, touching (because one day it would desert her) grace, the breasts he loved swinging gently, the large rosy nipples almost winking as he watched in delight; otherwise she was firm and did not bobble. He loved coming close behind her, taking a breast in either hand, pressing himself to her luxurious buttocks until his heat rose; feeling his strength she twisted, slammed herself against him, sought his mouth. Kissing her was a love affair in itself, no end to the smooch, lick, nibble, chew; he said it was like kissing a basket of eels and she said eels were essential to a good smorgasbord. They drowned in each other’s liquids, unguents, nectars. But they parted always with a gentle domestic buss like their first kiss, as if each separation might be the last, as if they shared (they did, they did) a tender ache of foreknowledge.
Spring came, and bruised them. Days fled. The end was upon them and neither knew how it would come. For her a master’s degree and Arizona. For him an M.D. and more, much more. In late May he left her for two days to be present at an accouchement of surpassing importance; he paced the waiting room with the others and chewed cigars, read magazines, worked puzzles, ran through the quartets. When it was all over he called her. They sat in a small oasis on upper Broadway, a minuscule park peopled by old men with wens and walking-sticks. The old men sat in the sun all day. They wore neckties and their faces were gray; the sun itself ignored them. Buses roared.
They found a bench to themselves. The sun was bright and a faint smell of sap and leaves softened the air. Small dogs frisked, straining leashes. An aged woman sat across the path from them reading a tabloid.
“What was it?” She sat stiffly on the green bench, her hair almost white in the sunlight.
“A boy.”
“Everything all right?”
“Everything’s all right.” Benny touched her hair.
“No,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “No.”
“Yes,” she said, and turned to face him. They stared hot-eyed while the universe dissolved.
They kissed then, a chaste kiss, long, tender, annihilating; the sky fell; and she rose and walked away. She crossed a street. She turned a corner. She was gone.
It had been a magnificent year, but Benny was married to a lovely girl named Carol, and they called the boy Joseph.
4
Her name was Carol Untermeyer and she was the daughter of Amos Untermeyer, M.D., F.A.C.P., eminent internist and professor, and of his wife Sylvia; he ruddy and frail, strutting, nervously taking his own pulse in public, wearing eyeglasses and an elegant thin mustache, Sylvia more Egyptian, plump, benign, ordinary save for an occasional ironic lightning in the splendid Fayum eyes.
Benny and Carol had met at a hospital, where Amos taught one morning each week. Benny emerged from a comprehensive lecture on malfunctions of the spleen and almost ran down a little girl in the corridor. “I beg your pardon,” he said, and halted, focused, attended, and added, “my sweet.” She was indeed sweet, black-haired, with dark blue eyes and full arresting features. He also saw that she was twenty or so, obvious of breast and narrow of waist.
And steady of eye. “Your sweet?”
Benny nodded solemnly. “Will you have dinner with me?” He reconnoitered a possible ring, found none, and spied upon her full lips.
“Daddy,” she said, “can I have dinner with this one?”
Benny flinched like a thief, and turned.
“What? Dinner?” Amos Untermeyer blinked behind horn-rims, and glared grumpily. “Dinner? Why not? Which one are you?”
“Benjamin Beer. Third year.”
“Ah yes. Anaplastic nuclei. A silly mistake, my boy. You can’t tell an adenoma from an adenosarcoma and you want to take my daughter to dinner.”
“Damn,” Benny said. “You know about that.”
“Conklin told me. Said you weren’t bad.”
“Thank you.” God bless Conklin.
“Friend of that Chinese boy.”
Benny nodded.
“He’ll go far. Well. Sorry to hear you have time to take young ladies to dinner. I haven’t.”
They all laughed and soon enough the old man scampered off.
“First name,” Benny said.
“Carol. Don’t be familiar.”
“My dear Miss Untermeyer. I’m saving everything for the right girl.”
That night Benny squired Carol to dinner at the Auberge des Bergers. “Romantic,” he said. “Pastoral. Do I wear leather shorts and suspenders?”
“The boss is named Sid Berger,” she said. She drank vermouth and smoked a cigarette; raked the artificial-candle-lit room with desperate, empty glances, as if seeking a celebrity; rearranged her silver; poked at her straight black hair. Her brows too were black, and thick; her frown was emphatic. She wore dark blue wool and sat tense, ungiving; spoke as if acknowledging his presence. Benny, urbane, kept a distance. She was in her last year at Hunter College. She might go on to graduate school. Genetics. Drosophila. Human genetics might someday require engineering. In her spare hours she had worked as a laboratory technician. Not certified. “Nickel and dime pathology. Daddy was pleased. Why do you order chopped liver here?”
“If the pâté maison is good,” he said, “you can trust the rest. In an American restaurant chipped beef is the key.”
She blew smoke disdainfully. “A connoisseur.”
“Horseflesh and women.”
“I knew it,” she said wearily, and looked about her at other couples; she might have been a jaded heiress on a Mediterranean cruise, in the first-class dining room.
Benny chose silence; he brooded into his whiskey, filched one of her cigarettes and smoked it without pleasure, thought of anaplastic nuclei, of Latin-American songs, of Prpl who would charm even this neurotic. She kept her upper arms close to her flanks, and gestured from the elbow. Recalled to a sense of duty, he groped for small talk. Politics: what could be smaller?
What the hell. Menstruating, doubtless. “Smile,” he said.
“Buy me another drink. Comfort me with flagons.”
“Oh.” His quick concern was real; her gaze softened. “I’m sorry. You’re on the rebound.”
She showed grief, and nodded.
“I’ll be respectful and sympathetic,” he said. “And it’s stay me with flagons. Comfort me with apples. Shall I order an apple?”
She did smile. “I’ve spoiled your evening.”
“No. Nothing could.”
“How gallant.”
“It’s a stroke of luck,” he said. “You might have been engaged, or somebody’s mistress. Another medical student?”
“No,” she said, and then wailed, “it was a god damn basketball player from New Jersey.”
Now her eyes were moist. In pity, but more in embarrassment, Benny stared at the bottom of his glass. Calf-love had passed him by; a boy of the streets, a fornicator at fifteen, he had been denied the more sublime agonies of the youthful heart; blasted incessantly by lightnings of lust, he had suffered for sex and mocked romance. He r
isked a glance, and caught his breath at the childish vulnerability on the wan face, in the dark blue eyes. And yet how trivial! Or was misery an absolute? For an instant 57359, in a striped prison suit, stood beside Miss Carol Untermeyer, who surely wore furs in winter. Her eyes were wide, her nose straight, a warm, lovely face, the features generous; and she had been hurt. By a sweating, indifferent athlete, crew-cut surely, boisterous, who would kiss his teammates in moments of glory. For the moment that pain defined her. What pains had Benny, all unknowing, inflicted?
He yielded uncertainly to a new and perplexing emotion.
“How’s the pâté?” Carol asked him.
“Good. Want some?”
“No. Doesn’t go with pike. Or whatever this is. Where’d you learn French?”
Benny was offended: “I am careful not to speak French with waiters.”
“You did all right with quenelles. Kennel?”
“Quenelles. I was in France for a while.”
“What’s that look mean? You had a good time in France. Low life in Paris. I bet the tourists were watching you through a peephole.”
“I had a rotten time in France.” He told her. As he talked his third eye roamed her, bright, unquenchable, male. Her small teeth were quite white, the skin of her throat was firm; she was high-breasted, rather conical perhaps, and he wondered if the arms pressed close to the body, the slightly rounded shoulders, the capacious bodice were defensive, self-deprecating. It was a figure that might wear well. He wondered what sort of figure her mother maintained; he had yet to meet her mother. He was still talking when the cutlets were set before them, and the claret poured.
“But that’s interesting,” she said. “Not just that war-movie junk. And you have no idea who he was.”
“None.” Two and a half years of his life: war-movie junk. He had saved the world for her.
“Or where the dog tags are.”
“None.”
“You’ve got to find him.”
“We’ve tried. We’ll keep trying. It’s like having a twin brother you’ve never seen. What is he now? The dictator of some small country. A bank robber in Australia. A maniac, hiding in Hamburg and assassinating ex-Nazis. Then in ten years you find out he’s a grocer in Israel. Or an undertaker.”
“No, no,” she said. “A scholar. An authority on enzymes. And the first you hear of him is a Nobel Prize.”
Benny laughed uproariously, and she joined him; across the table affection blossomed almost visibly. “You Jewish mama,” he said.
“Do you suppose that’s what I am?” She meditated briefly.
“Whoa,” Benny said. “There’s a great big world out there just waiting for genetics engineers. Although …”
“Although.” She nodded cheerfully. “Well, who knows. We don’t have to decide tonight.”
Benny’s hand checked; he spilled a drop of wine. “We? Decide what?”
“Oh my God,” she said. “I didn’t mean that.”
“The spell I cast.” He grinned amiably, spoke lightly. “To know him is to love him.”
She sniffed. “I shall never love again.” She astonished him with a wink: “But you dried my bitter tears.”
“It’s a start,” Benny said.
Mellowed by wine, Carol laughed joyfully when Benny told her Jacob’s explanation, years before, of the white line down the middle of the Holland Tunnel: “For bicycles.” Sid Berger heard the laughter and came to say hello, becomingly stout and jovial, balding and veined: “Good evening, Miss Untermeyer.” “Hello, Sid. Sid Berger, Benny Beer.” They shook hands and Benny saw his face, name, tailoring and appetites filed away. After minor chat—“My best to the doctor and your mother”—Berger moved off, and shortly there arrived free booze (he said), complimentary brandy (she rebuked).
“My father’s really a nice guy,” she said. “Big success, and all that damn importance, but a nice guy. My mother’s strange. She’s so ordinary you wonder about her. She reads best-sellers and works for organizations. She’s an Abravanel, you know, big-shot Sephardic. Condescends to the Untermeyers.”
“Who condescend to the Beers. Honor thy father and thy mother, kiddo.”
Kiddo. Of course; she was young. A good kid, real flesh and blood, though a bit small for him; he would not so much embrace her as surround her. As she chattered he meditated love with her, and the tinkling hum of the small restaurant was a chorus to his flight of fancy; she would need kindness, delicacy, simple physical care. With surprise he recalled that he had never—barring a few inconclusive adolescent bouts—made love to a Jewish girl. Folklore: they save it.
The murals were abominable, a sickly brown, heliotrope, magenta, deformed sheep; his eyes accepted them dolefully, as his palate had accepted the overseasoned escalope, the famous claret of a bad year. And these others, oddly metallic women with their apparently dyspeptic swains: how many pounds of meat had they all ingested, what acids foamed within, what gases pressed? And Carol. He took pleasure in Carol. A new pleasure; a suspicious glow. A tribal bond? Life in a tent, among cattle speckled and ringstraked.
“You’re not listening.”
“No. I was thinking about us. May I smoke a cigar?”
“Oh dear. Go ahead.”
“Hand-rolled. Forty cents.”
“Forty cents, gee. What do you suppose dinner cost?”
He savored rich smoke. “You chose the place.”
“It smells good,” she said. “I’m sorry if I sound bitchy. Last week I wanted to die.”
“Basketball. Are you pregnant?”
“Am I—” She sat back and assumed defiance. “What kind of girl do you think I am?”
He laughed. “A stylist. You learned to talk at the movies.”
“Well, all right.” She smiled in rue. “But I am most certainly not pregnant. That was insulting. I’m a good girl.”
“If you weren’t sleeping with him,” Benny said, “it isn’t a tragedy.”
“A man of the world,” she said. “And a virgin let you kiss her hand.”
He kissed her goodnight too, a cool kiss and gentle, and left it at that. On the subway platform he saved a drunk from plunging to the rails. The drunk muttered, surly, burly, white-haired. Patiently Benny saw him aboard. A young couple dozed, in their teens, the boy in black tie and stinking of lotions, the girl in a yellow ball-gown, boasting a gardenia. Benny remembered his fierce desire to be twenty-two. Music filled his mind, to the clack of the wheels. Themes converged: age, school, now this woman. Marriage, warmth, soup. An end and a beginning: Benny that was, Benny the boy, fading fast; Benny that will be, Benny the man, doctor, father, rising from a sea of relatives, classmates, hopes, and striking forth into the uncharted fetches of an alien land. Citizen Beer. The implacable grime of subways. Shifting, he experienced minor lust; his lips roamed Carol; he dreamed. Well, it was a life; perhaps the life that luck had laid out for him. Odd: as if a decision had been made. By whom? By what? Omens: he looked for a sign. The dozing children nestled together. There’s your sign: that’s what life is. Wild oats followed by … crab grass. He grinned. By God, I like that girl. A nice mind and no bore. Well. Easy does it. Dr. and Mrs. Amos Untermeyer announce. Maybe it’s time. Then move out, the west, someplace like Phoenix or Salt Lake. Cattle. Speckled and ringstraked. Clean snow. A lodge in the mountains. Old Doc Beer.
Good God. After one date.
Dinner with Amos and Sylvia, too, some weeks after that first date, and Jacob cordially invited, and high-class conversation. Benny had hoped for Pinsky’s: would Amos fidget, rattled by that exotic ambiance, or would he jig and shout rowdy Yiddish? Would Sylvia wear a mantilla to make her position clear? But no; it was the Copenhagen, or Maxl’s Rathskeller, or the Romanoff, or Mandarin House. Benny saw them as a family of Phoenician traders, roving from port to port. “Nothing like eel,” Amos announced, and Jacob paled. “The Swedes drink too much. I read about it. For centuries every family made its own aquavit. Suicide,” Amos said. “Welfare.”
“This is fine whitefish,” Jacob said heartily.
“Nothing like smorgasbord,” Amos said. “All protein. During the war they had no meat and no heart attacks. No butter, no cheese.”
“I think I’d like a little aquavit,” Benny petitioned humbly. “Good for the heart action.”
“Absolutely,” Amos said. He was utterly groomed; his fingernails flashed, his hair lay flat. Sylvia’s scent flavored the fish; her jersey clung. Amos wore blue cheviot, a white-on-white shirt, a shiny monogrammed necktie; beside him Jacob, in rumpled sharkskin, was a clown from the Yiddish theater. Carol wore a gray suit that mantled her figure. “Your ribbon,” Sylvia murmured; Carol’s hands flew to her hair.
The acquavit was poured, the talk continued: skoal, skoal. Sylvia glanced from Carol to Benny, from Benny to Carol. “Flukes,” Amos said, and later, “bilharziasis.” With a second course they had leprosy and gingivitis; Amos approached Pap smears and retreated.
Carol spoke suddenly. “Benny. Tell them about that little man.”
They waited. Benny hesitated, reluctant to offer up 57359 on this sumptuous altar. Finally he told them. Tears rose to Sylvia’s eyes. Amos meditated before pronouncing, and Benny felt that he had worked a miracle. “God in heaven,” Amos said softly; they stared at him and Benny understood, with relief, that Amos too was flesh and blood. “I’m not sure the human race is worth it,” Amos said. He set down his fork. “The dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.” He gazed beyond them, groped for his glass. “You’ve heard nothing?”
“Nothing,” Benny said. “We wrote to the people at UNRRA, and the Jewish groups, and the Israeli government. There’s no record of him anywhere.”
“He may have been killed.”
“Yes. But I have a hunch he’s alive. Maybe it’s just a wish.”
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