Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  “I hope you don’t mind, my just stopping by,” Paul says. “I thought it might be easier that way. Susan told you I’d be here, didn’t she—that I have a project I hope you’ll be interested in?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about other things also, and I will: I wanted to say thank you for all you’ve done for my children these past years, while I was away.”

  “Save it,” Aaron says, and he feels heat rise around his collar. He does not look toward Lucius or the children. He feels angry, uncomfortable, used. He imagines Paul rising from a sewer, pushing the grating aside, hoisting himself up. He sees Paul following him through the city. Why? Is he only feeling what Lucius felt looking at Carrie’s child—an adolescent jealousy towards a man who had once known his wife? Perhaps. He looks at Paul and remembers what Paul looked like the last time they saw him, when they took Benjamin and Jennifer to Stockbridge, an hour west, to the Austin Riggs Psychiatric Center. Paul’s eyes were half-closed, his face puffy, his neck rigid. Now Paul’s face is lean, well tanned, as if he has been skiing. Aaron wonders if Jennifer is recalling that last visit, if that is why she is pleased, and he wonders too if that is why Benjamin, for the same reason, is so surly. How can his father be two such different men?

  Susan enters, tells the children to leave, serves drinks. Her eyes meet Aaron’s but he cannot read them. Is she worried that he will be angry afterwards because she didn’t tell him Paul was there? Paul says something to Aaron about how good the children look, how Jennifer looks more and more like Susan. Susan’s color rises. Aaron sees her as Nina in The Sea Gull, at the Williamstown Playhouse, the summer they met. He recalls something Paul said to him after his divorce from Susan was final and before Aaron and Susan were married: that by marrying a woman who looked like Susan yet was Jewish, they had it both ways—they remained within the fold while at the same time fulfilling all their fantasies about blond, blue-eyed goddesses. Aaron didn’t bother to deny it, to tell Paul that as a boy he had trained himself most of the time not to imagine the future, the life unlived. But Aaron is disturbed by Susan’s presence, by her silence, by the high color in her cheeks. Does she like the idea that her two husbands, present and past, are there with her at the same time? Does this turn her on, as if they are, somehow, sharing her? Or is he imagining this—his version of preemptive rejection—in order to deny his feelings of jealousy, in order to blame the feelings on Susan?

  Paul talks about the house he has found, the restorations he wants. Aaron does not doubt Paul’s desire to insinuate himself into his and Susan’s life, and he figures he can handle that at least as well now as he did before. What bothers him is his need to imagine that Susan likes the idea, that she would want to insinuate her past into Aaron’s present, that she would want to hurt him. Why does he think this? Paul is telling Lucius that in the house, once owned by the Congregational Church, they have found secret chambers that they believe were used in the nineteenth century to hide runaway slaves on their way north to Canada. Paul says that this fact was crucial in his decision to buy the house. He says that underground railroads interest him and that, in time, Aaron will discover why. Aaron waits, shows no curiosity. He looks at the straight line of Susan’s nose, the almond shapes of her wide-set eyes. She is broadly built, robust. He imagines her on a field in Russia, a black babushka on her head, a scythe in one hand, a bundle of wheat in the other. She smiles at him without coyness, and they move off together across the field until they come to a shaded copse, by a stream. Lucius sets his drink down, half-finished, says that he is going. Aaron senses Lucius’s rage, is pleased that it is there. Lucius touches Aaron’s shoulder, leaves the room without saying goodbye to Paul or Susan.

  “Sure,” Paul says. “First love is the one love worth having, I guess—the one we dream about, the one that stays with us forever—but the best marriage is often a second marriage. I hope it will be for me. From the look of things, it surely is for Susan.”

  Paul looks at Aaron for confirmation, but Aaron shows nothing. They are alone in the kitchen. The children are upstairs doing their homework. Susan is driving Lucius home. What, Aaron wonders, is Paul’s game this time?

  “You’ll like Debbie,” Paul says, the second time he has done so. “I want you and Susan to meet her soon. I guess I’m even hoping that the four of us might become friends. Could you live with that?”

  “I thought you were here for business. Haven’t I heard Susan say that you always believed that business and friendship never mixed?”

  “You’re a hard man, Aaron Levin.”

  “In business or friendship?”

  Paul laughs. “In both, I suspect.”

  “Maybe. What’s on your mind? I have things to do.”

  Paul opens a cabinet above the sink as if he has done so the day before—as if to remind Aaron of how close, in a daily way, Paul and Susan once were. Paul sets glasses on the shelf. “Look,” he says. “I guess my need to make you see how I’ve changed is a bit larger than your need to see the changes, but I am serious about the house. I’d love to have you come out and take a look at it, tell me what you think and take on the job. You’re not holding back because of Susan, are you?”

  “No.”

  Aaron knows that he has answered too quickly. “Think about it, though, all right?” Paul says, smiling. “If things work out, you see, the house I’m buying will be one that Benjamin and Jennifer can spend time in, where we can get to know one another again. Susan and I talked it over, before you came home. She told me she thought it would be good for the children to spend some time with me. I think she and I can be friends now in a way that—”

  “I said I’ll think about it.”

  “Do you have to consult with Lucius?”

  “Why should I have to do that?”

  “You two are in business together, aren’t you?”

  “Lucius and I aren’t in business together. Lucius works for me.”

  “Ah,” Paul says. “And if you take on this job, you’ll be working for me. Is that the problem—the reason you hesitate?”

  “No. There are things I need to think about.”

  “Such as?”

  “The differences between a man like you and a man like Lucius.”

  “Well,” Paul says, smiling. “He wasn’t married to Susan, I’ll grant that. Still—”

  “Be careful,” Aaron says. “Your illness doesn’t give you license here.”

  Paul laughs, says he sees that Aaron is still a very literal man. A literalist of the imagination perhaps? Aaron considers asking Paul why he is telling him all this but decides that he has already said too much. He imagines himself outside, in early spring, playing basketball with Lucius and Tony. In three-man ball, could anybody beat the three of them? He recalls walking along Flatbush Avenue with Tony, meeting Avie and Little Benny, Tony telling Benny that he was Jackie Robinson’s brother. Yeah. I just look pale today ‘cause of how much you guys scare me.

  He wonders: after he left, did Tony ever visit Gail and Emilie? What would Gail have felt, opening the door and seeing Tony there? What would Tony have felt, embracing her, picking up the baby? Paul is talking about his upcoming marriage to Debbie, about his years with Susan, about how young Susan was when they married, about how neither of them had really tried the world very much. After their early happiness, he says, the banked fires of passion and independence exploded, and neither of them ever knew why. They still believed, all through their last miserable years together, that they loved one another, when all they really wanted was to destroy the other. They nearly succeeded, Paul says.

  Does the fact that Aaron now has what Paul once had and still desires—Susan—satisfy Aaron in some way he would rather not acknowledge? Is this why he has enjoyed the bit of competitive edge to their conversation—his willingness to parry Paul’s small barbs?

  When Paul talks the way he is talking now—holds forth, really—he seems very professorial. Aaron imagines him parading in front of nine
teen-year-old girls at Smith College, their eyes full of desire and adulation. Aaron reminds himself that that was, after all, the way Susan met Paul. Paul had been a young instructor in Smith College’s Theater Department—Susan’s teacher, her director when she had the lead in a production of Our Town.

  Aaron is relieved to hear the sound of Susan’s Ford approaching the house, the wheels squealing against snow and gravel. He will go out later, shovel the steps, plow the driveway. In the morning he will be back in Ashfield with Lucius, finishing up the trim, cutting moldings to length. They will talk about Paul.

  Susan enters the kitchen, her forehead slick with melted snow. She shivers, talks about the snow turning to ice.

  “Did Susan tell you how Debbie and I met—the circumstances?”

  “We haven’t been alone since you got here—how could she tell me?”

  “We met at my father’s funeral, actually. Debbie was the daughter of a distant cousin, the part of the family that got out of Germany before the war. My father—”

  “I’m not really interested,” Aaron says. “In fact, I think our conversation is over.”

  “The house is a beauty.” Paul talks as if he has not heard Aaron. “A nice old colonial, Federal style, built in 1835, with an attached barn in an ell. You can go straight from the barn to the kitchen, which is terrific for bringing in wood, or getting to the car in winter. From what little I can tell, the timbers are solid. Post-and-beam construction, chestnut for the most part, oak in the parts added on to the house in the late nineteenth century. Nobody’s lived in the house for two winters—the family was feuding over inheritance—but the roof is in reasonably good shape and—”

  “I said I’ll think about it. Don’t push.”

  “Me push?” Paul grins. “I wouldn’t think of it.”

  “Good.”

  “But how about tomorrow sometime? I can come by late afternoon.”

  “I said not to push. I work tomorrow.”

  “The weekend then?”

  “Lucius and I promised the Lesters they could be in their house by December fifteenth, so we may work over the weekend.”

  “Lucius,” Paul says. “Lucius. An interesting man.” He smiles at Susan. “You get the slave home all right?”

  Susan’s mouth goes rigid, her eyes widen. She looks toward Aaron, terrified.

  “Get out,” Aaron says. “Get out fast.”

  Paul does not move. His eyes show no fear.

  “Just testing, old man. Just wanted to make sure the ancient fires of justice are still burning within you, that the passion for the underdog and the dispossessed has not—”

  “I said to get out. Now you move.”

  Paul turns to Susan, “Have you told him how much I admire what he did last summer, that I read his articles?”

  Susan’s fingers, on the back of Aaron’s neck, are like ice. He pulls away, numb with rage. Susan tells him to take it easy, that it’s Paul’s old way of trying to get a rise out of others, that he doesn’t mean anything by it, that he just can’t help being the way he is.

  “Call it habit,” Paul says. He leaves the kitchen. “Or envy. That would be more precise. N-V—the biggest two-letter word in the English language. Envy can be a habit also, and a bad one. The worst. Imagine being me and seeing you here, Aaron. Can you? Can you imagine that? Imagine being me and seeing the way my children adore you and hang on you. Can you imagine that?” He smiles. “Imagine being me and what I might do next.”

  “Oh, cut it, Paul,” Susan says. “Stop acting out. Just turn the battery to your tongue off before you get into trouble.”

  “Well,” Paul says. “I am trying, believe it or not. Will you believe me? I’ll tell you what—I’ll begin to let you in on some secrets, all right? We all have secrets, and not the kind you give to doctors when you’re lying on a couch. We have other secrets, Aaron, men like you and me. How not? What you did this past summer—it’s the kind of thing I’d like to do, the kind of risk I’d like to take. And in my own way, I’m going to. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine me bringing somebody out of…”

  Susan gives Paul his coat. Aaron cannot move. He thinks of the low rolling hills that surrounded them on all sides when they were driving down from Conway—the Holyoke Range to the south, the Pelham hills to the east, the Leverett hills to the north, the Berkshires to the west—all of them invisible behind the dome of snow. He thinks of Emilie, asleep in her crib, Carl and Larry looking in at her. He looks at the hanging plants, the copper pots and Delft tiles on the walls, the children’s drawings taped to the refrigerator. He hears the front door open and close.

  “It’s true,” Susan says, moving toward him. She leans against him easily, and in the way she touches his cheek he senses an apology. But for what? “When the children were telling Paul about Lucius before you two came home—when they were bragging about how Lucius weighed so little when he got out of jail, Paul talked to them about his father—their grandfather, after all—and of how he weighed less than ninety pounds when the American soldiers liberated his camp, about how he came to America and made his fortune. He told them how his father was still making deals by phone from his deathbed, and—”

  “Any calls today?”

  “One.”

  “What did he say this time?”

  “I don’t know. Jennifer answered.”

  Aaron blinks. He is thinking of another call, one he made eight years ago—the only time he tried to go back, the only time he risked touching the other life. He wanted to know if Gail and Emilie were all right, but he didn’t want them to know he was asking. There was only one person he could trust, and he recalls, as he dialed from a phone booth in Albany, and then began dropping quarters and dimes in, how, for a second, he began to hope that maybe Tony would be so happy to hear from him that the two of them would start talking about where they could meet, about how they would roam around the country together, how they would get enough money to buy a trailer they could live in….

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”

  “It’s all right. Paul still knows how to work you, to prey on your jealousy. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m not worried. I’m angry.”

  “And confused.”

  “No, not really. Mostly I’m angry that he saw he could get to me.”

  Is Tony there?

  His heart lurches. He puts his arm around Susan, kisses her hair.

  Tony who?

  Tony Cremona. I know he may not live there anymore, but I wanted to get in touch with him. If—

  Susan’s hand moves inside his shirt, along the small of his back. He never wished for his first life to end, he tells himself. But he wonders: had he known he would have a second life like the one he has, would he have been willing to see the first life die? And if, in some way that makes him sadder than he ever dreamt he could be, he does believe that living with Susan and their four children is like a dream come true—his deepest wish fulfilled—does that mean, even in part, that he somehow willed his new life into being?

  Tony’s dead, fella.

  Dead?

  Where you been? He died over in Korea two years ago. Hey—who is this anyway?

  “Don’t be.” Susan sighs, caresses the back of his neck, moves away and starts to put leftover food into containers, to clear the sideboard. She does not seem to notice the sadness that he believes is melting from his eyes. She does not seem to notice that anything is going on inside him besides the feelings he chooses to show her. Poor, sweet Tony. Go fly a kike, okay? Sure. Aaron blinks, feels that his eyelids are passing over dry, cold marble. Killers. “Paul,” Susan says. “Paul just likes to stage things, don’t you know that yet? He likes to set things up so that he can see how people will, under his control, react. He likes to move people around, to play god to a small, enclosed world. Same old guy. He never fools anybody for long.”

  “He fooled you.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  13


  EARLY MORNING. Aaron sits on his stool, the creamy-white vellum sheet on the drafting table, his hand poised above it. Pull the pencil, he tells himself. Don’t push it. Everything is in the line: its weight, its grace, its length. He rotates the edge of the pencil steadily, pressure constant, to keep the width and tone of the line even. Each line must be drawn in a single stroke, for the essence of a line lies in its continuity. On the paper, a two-point perspective of the home’s interior—a design section of the entranceway, two stories high, the front hallway leading to the living room—is half-drawn. Five steps below the second landing, the staircase vanishes. Aaron smiles. It never ceases to amaze, to please: how the drawing of a house seems so much more real to him than the house itself.

  Even when, as now, he actually makes his drawings of the house after he and Lucius have done most of the work, he still takes great joy from imagining the house into being. He loves seeing the lines appear, enclosing whiteness, the invisible becoming visible so that, where there was nothing, there is now something. Will that magic ever not thrill him? He loves the illusion of reality more than reality itself, he supposes. Susan has teased him about this, wondering why, when the actual work is done, he will still finish the drawings that would normally have preceded the work. But no matter how often it happens, he still wonders at the fact that mere pencil line drawn on paper can, within two dimensions, seem to have depth—to project solidly in space.

  His erasing shield, cool, clear plastic, moves evenly under the edge of his hand. His coffee mug is to his right, next to the pens and pencils, the triangles and french curves and templates, the tin cans and cigar boxes and shoe boxes decorated by the children with wall paper and construction paper. He lifts the mug carefully, using thumb and forefinger, the stubs of his third and fourth fingers against the mug’s side for leverage. His hand is perfectly steady. He sips, looks across the drawing and through the sliding glass doors to the lawn beyond, where young grass glistens bright green—unnaturally so—among patches of snow.