by Daniel Stern
“Pretty good music, eh? He’s a trained musician, the leader. He gets two thousand just for the High Holidays.”
Jay nodded and smiled. “Quite good,” he whispered, aware that Max might not know whether he meant the money or the music.
Max smiled. He was pleased. It was important to him that visitors such as Jay Gordon should be impressed with their synagogue and services, although it was a once-a-year affair.
Alec shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The perspiration was forming inside his collar and the ceaseless murmur of the congregation was getting on his nerves, so he was relieved when the cantor took over the solo portion of the service. All this was a betrayal—his very presence in Colchester without Annette was treachery. He stared at the book before him, but the Hebrew words became a blur. There were a couple of attractive girls standing upstairs and he distracted himself for a few moments by staring at them.
Upstairs, Elly stared down at the men, remembering the services of the years before, glad to be there again, wondering why it was she was so drawn to the ritual of which she understood almost nothing and pleased that Jay was there. She saw his lips moving and wondered if he knew the Hebrew prayers. There was a commotion downstairs and she saw her Uncle Harry shoulder his heavy body past some people standing in the rear and hurry down the aisle as if he had been running. Actually he had taken his time and, as always, was annoyed at Max for being so punctual. Max hadn’t missed the opening service for ten years and Harry had been late each year.
Soon afterward, Sarah sat down next to Elly and whispered, “Move over, Elly darling.”
Elly slipped out of the pew and said, “You get in there. I may have to leave for a while.”
Sarah sat next to Rose and, after an exchange of greetings, settled down to a casual inspection of the people she knew who were present. Neither of the women ever followed the prayers very closely except when Elly, and all others whose parents were alive, were shooed out of the Shule while Max, Rose, Harry and Sarah stayed to intone the prayer for the dead, which only those whose parents had died were allowed to chant.
Elly’s foresight in sitting on the aisle paid off when she saw Jay leave his seat, whisper something to Alec and walk up the long aisle to the door. She instantly scampered downstairs, to find him lighting a cigarette at the top of the high stone steps that led to the street.
“Hi,” he said when he saw her. “I thought I’d get some air. It’s awfully hot in there.”
Elly held up a cigarette for him to light. “I never learned much Hebrew,” she said, “but isn’t it all goddamned beautiful? The music for me is as good as the Bach Magnificat.”
“I wish you wouldn’t mention things like the Bach Magnificat.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, I played a performance of it last year in Carnegie under Cowley.”
“I love Cowley.”
“Anyway, mentioning it here brings the whole outside world which—Well, of course you couldn’t know, but this excursion, this crazy junket with Alec at the last minute and your home here, is all quite out of my world. The Magnificat is too real, too familiar.”
“We’re pretty real here.”
“Maybe, but not too familiar. Anyway, I’ve been pounding oom-pahs for the last two years while ballerinas were involved with the beauty end of it. I’m not in the beauty business anymore.”
“Sometime I want to talk to you about that.”
“Elly, there are several thousand things I want to talk to you about. You know you look like a great big leaf with that brown skirt and ribbon.”
He was split asunder and there was nothing he could do about it. It was why he had left the synagogue. Suddenly something had welled in his throat, like vomit, only made of love instead of soured food.
Elly smiled. “That’s too bad. This is the season when leaves die, you know.” She stepped toward him. “What’s happening?” she asked suddenly, as if she were a police inspector. “What’s happening? I have a right to know.”
He almost said, “What do you mean?” getting as far as the what, but he knew—or hoped he knew—what gave her eyes their curious stare at that moment and her voice its crazy flutter. He shrugged and exhaled smoke.
“I’ve been trying to figure it out ever since I woke up.”
“But why me too?” she asked, and there was in her questioning almost a plea for mercy, as if to say, Well, why should this terrible event befall me? I’ve done nothing. And then she sort of straightened herself up and said, “That’s silly. I knew something was going on last night when we went for the car. I fell asleep hating you for whatever it was that was going on. Listen, there’s a pine forest far in back of the hill. No one ever goes there but me. I want you to see it.”
“I’d like to.”
“No, I mean right now.”
“But your family.”
“They don’t stay as long as the real religious ones do and then they go to my Uncle Harry’s. You wouldn’t like my Uncle Harry.”
“Probably not.” He laughed. “I just met him and he asked me how the music business was. Probably not. Let’s go.”
Elly drove and Jay sat next to her, laughing silently at himself for being nervous as a cat, or rather as a child of Elly’s age. Split—he felt split. So she was frightened by it too, by the way in which they were drawn together from the beginning (and the beginning had only been last night).
Perhaps, Elly was thinking, it started while she was playing tennis with Alec last night. It seemed to her she had glanced at the silent figure lying on the grass beyond the lamp’s bright arc just a moment before she had slammed a ball straight for Alec’s throat. How good that had felt, as if driving the ball at him had relieved her of all responsibility for whatever she had done to him. Had love begun then? Had she been impaled on love an instant before violence? If so, then it was most honest of whoever it was who handled these affairs, because it seemed to her that love was never very far from violence. If she loved this man sitting beside her, whose every breath she could hear inhaled and exhaled, could this violently smash the windows which surrounded her?
It seemed to her that she gazed through the glass more than the others in the house—too much, even for a girl living in a glass house, watching her mother in the garden frightening flowers, or at school watching the clouds bunch up over the Science Building and go blowing along at the bidding of the pigeons’ wings; watching it all as if she were nothing but a pair of enormous eyes attached to an empty transparent glass column in the shape of a human body. A sensation of contrast: herself a unit; the world on which the window opened, varied. Herself: monochromatic, empty. The world: full and multicolored.
It was as if Jay, in playing his eyes over her (as, it seemed to her, he had not stopped doing ever since he’d arrived), had made her the observed and therefore the rich, the multi-faceted, the thing to be watched, rather than the watcher. Between herself and life was always the glass wall through which she could see but not participate. And what if one were to wake one morning and find suddenly that one had become the world and outside, nose pressed against the glass wall, the world had solidified into a unit, the hill leading down to the road and beyond that the gas station and in front of the house the formal gardens, the unused guest cottage, all become one passive thing, all watching, observing the bright multiple miracle she had become?
She felt her breasts swell as if filled with some substance that reached toward his gaze (although at the moment his gaze seemed rather abstracted, as if he were worried about being alone with her, about her family; she must not let him ruin anything with guilt) and drew from it something needed for life.
She parked within walking distance of the forest and they held hands crossing the rock-strewn fields. Their palms were hot and sticky but neither would be the first to let go. They said nothing, like people intent on a mission neither was quite convinced of and so fragile an errand that a word or two spoken with the wrong inflection could shatter their delicate purpose.
>
In the center of the forest was a clearing, the floor of which was bedded all year round with a thick mattress of moist, green-smelling pine needles dotted with brown, musty-odored pine cones which were crumbly to the touch. Placed as it was in the very heart of the forest it was completely insulated all around and from above, the pines growing so close together as to create one kind of weather, moist and dark, regardless of the weather outside.
When she’d been returned from Vernon, Elly had found the clearing to be a necessity of life, a place to help her survive her imprisonment. She would lie there for hours. Dreams brushed from her mind like loose pine cones and here in this dark, damp little hemmed-in space the world seemed larger, more exciting and somehow more attainable. What it was she desired to attain she had never really known. It was as if she already possessed everything needed for the good of life and needed only to be breathed on to come alive and in full possession of what was rightfully hers. Was Jay’s the breath?
Here, too, she had just about given up the fight against the old habit, the familiar facsimile of dual love, the arm flung over the tightly shut eyes, the rumpled skirt around her waist. Here, alone in the green and brown sanctuary, she was encompassed by the procession of real and imagined lovers, who, in her mind, guided her hand in the ritual retreat of self-love. Then the fear of not having been alone, of having been seen through the trees or even from the well-shielded sky. Then the relief, the reassurance and the resolution. No more. No matter how much I need a man. No more. And then she would return to the “home away from home,” as she called it, and lying screened by the pines she would feel a sudden languor camouflaged as remembrance and would (as if she were a stranger to be taken quickly) fall into the practice again, her own hand intimate upon her flesh, like a statement: There is love.
Elly flopped down on her stomach and Jay followed suit.
“What a beautiful refuge!” he said softly.
“How did you know it was a refuge?”
“Well, it’s made for it. This is not where one comes to face life.”
“Is it so important to face it?”
“You’re asking the wrong man, darling.”
“How so?”
“I retreated into my pine forest two years ago. Only yours is much nicer.”
“It is nice, isn’t it?” She rolled over on her back. “It’s just nowhere. Sometimes when I’m not here I can’t believe it exists.”
Jay smiled. “That’s the way I feel about you. That if you’re not around at the moment I can imagine that I made you up. What the hell am I doing here anyway? Oh, not here—I mean here in general. What made me come with Alec?”
“Why not be a liar and say you came because of me?”
“Right now I have the feeling that I did. Even if I hadn’t met you I think I would have come because of you.”
“Is that possible?”
“I don’t know. Is it?”
“Sure it is.”
Her arm lay across his chest and he could smell the soap she had used that morning, remembering other soaps—the harsh ugly soap of the army, the straightforward odor of Jean’s soapy face in the morning when he wanted to wash first so he could get to practicing quickly. When Elly and Jay kissed it was like a gift which had been promised both of them but which had been long delayed. In a moment they had become one with the other. Jay kept his eyes tightly shut. He had no desire to look at her or to see accidentally how the two of them were joined in love. It was enough to feel that and to feel that she was in him as much as he was in her.
Elly’s mouth was open in one long soundless cry, terrified that the man she was holding, Jay, was so real, so palpable, not a projection of desires, but a man, moving inside her and moving her with him so that she was part of him, and she saw that the others had not been real because she had always been very much present and very much absent. Now she was neither—she was losing herself; she could feel herself slipping away and not even his hand on her breast or the ceaseless pressure of his mouth on hers could hold her and she was losing everything, everything, and she reached a hand suddenly as if in an attempt to stop, but not really, and held his flesh tightly until he cried out and she released him at the same time herself being released from herself and she was limp and crying quietly her face turned sideways and pressed into the ticklish pine needles, while Jay still moved. Finally he was still.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t what?”
“Cry.”
“Was I crying?”
He brushed her moist cheek with his palm and held it to her lips. “Taste,” he said. She smiled and he noticed that her eyes, through the film, seemed less staring and more—he didn’t quite know what he meant by it—but more real.
“That’s never happened to me before,” she said.
“Never?”
“I don’t mean that. I mean losing myself like that. Going off somewhere. It’s scary. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cry.”
“I didn’t mean to make you—cry, that is.”
He laughed and she did too. They were both bathed in perspiration and he could smell Elly on his damp shirt as if she had anointed him. “Look,” he said, pointing to her arm. There was a lipstick mouth clearly imprinted on her flesh. Jay had crushed her arm to her mouth at one point.
“You’ve been kissing yourself,” he said.
“Is that what it was? No wonder it was so good. I think I’m in love with you.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Oh, goddamn it to hell, Jay.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m afraid.”
“What of?”
“This crazy feeling of losing myself. You know what it reminds me of? Of how every now and then, and only lately since I had to come home from school in the East, of how I’ll get up in the morning and open the curtains to look out and see what kind of day it is, and instead of looking down the hill or at the garage in back the glass seems to be all clouded up and I can barely see out and all I can see is my own reflection and the reflection of the room. It’s like a hallucination, only it’s not really because I’m there and the room’s there but it’s as if during the night someone had come and silvered—that’s what they do with mirrors, isn’t it?—silvered the back of the glass walls so that they’ve become mirrors, and I’m terrified until it clears away, which is usually pretty fast.”
“That’s strange. And you felt like that while making love to me?”
“Not exactly. Just the terror is the same, that’s all.”
Jay held her face between his hands and kissed her. Her hair fell over him, some of it dry and silky and some wet and pasted together. He smoothed the wet hair until it separated into strands.
“No need to be terrified with me. I don’t just love you. I—I took you in last night and there’s no going back now.”
“Has that ever happened to you before?”
“Once. My wife Jean.”
“Have you lost her yet?”
“Last night. Although to be fair, she lost me first. I can see how you could be frightened, though. All this so suddenly. I’m scared stiff, myself.”
“Well, thanks a lot, Jay Gordon.” She grimaced.
“You know what I mean.” Suddenly he wished he could see the sky, some proof of reality. A few pine needles dislodged by the wind drifted down onto Jay’s cheek. He closed his eyes and said, “Do you know how old I am?”
The old stare came back into Elly’s eyes as she leaned over Jay and pinched his cheeks, ran her fingers over his hair and eyes.
“You’re in pretty good condition,” she said. “I’d say about sixty.”
“Guess again.”
“Seventy?”
“Nope.”
“Twenty.”
“I’m thirty-three. Fifteen years older than you.”
“That’s not so much, considering that I’m smarter than you are.”
“That’s true. Damned precocious little brat you are!” She was
on her feet instantly, her oval face white with anger.
“What’s the matter, Elly?” As he said the words they had a familiar ring already, although he’d spoken them only once before. It was as though he sensed he would have to say them often in the future. He scrambled to his feet and put his arms around her. Her body was stiff.
“As soon as we make love you can say things like that, can’t you?”
“But I was only kidding, baby.”
“Don’t call me baby. That’s Alec’s word.”
“I’m sorry, Elly. I’ll never do it again. How’s that?”
“That’s fine. Jay, Jay, Jay! What is it with us?”
This time it was as if Elly took him. He was more passive. When he tried to move more she held him still and shook her head, eyes tightly shut, her teeth clamped on her lower lip. After he had shaken into silence she moved on him like an impaled bird until she fluttered herself into an exhausted passivity.
Later Jay said: “I think we’re both a little less frightened now.”
She nodded. Together they wondered what time it was outside (Jay didn’t wear a watch and Elly had forgotten hers). They left the clearing, bending low to avoid the overhanging pines and brushing the pine cones from their faces. Once Elly stumbled and Jay caught her but she did not thank him.
The two fields that they crossed seemed so much longer now than they had earlier. Jay was thinking of the “Pictures at an Exhibition” of Moussorgsky and particularly of the chords in the left hand when Elly said, “What are you thinking? Or, rather, a penny for—”
“About a piece I used to play in concerts. Something I haven’t thought about for a long time.”
“Is that good?”
“Damned if I know. I’m not a concert pianist any more.”
“Sure you are, Jay. That’s the way I’ve thought of you ever since that time in L.A.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. I used to think of you as Alec’s kid niece.” They paused before entering the car. “What’ll we tell your folks?”
“That we went for a drive.”
