Apart From Love

by Uvi Poznansky

  Rage, it can like, scorch everything around you, and make it all rise up in smoke, till you don’t hardly know who’s your friend and who—your enemy, so you can’t really trust no one. And most of all, you can’t trust the one you hold dear.

  At such moments I find that I miss being with my ma, who threw me out of her place long ago. I miss her, because inside—where no one else can see—I’m still a child, and because with her I’m at ease, and I don’t have to torture myself, and I don’t have doubts about nothing, ‘cause she makes things cut and dried, even if she has to slap me for it.

  So even though we’re married now, I don’t really feel I belong here, in this place. An outcast: that’s me.

  So I storm past him—but Lenny lays his hand on me. Grabbing me by the shoulder, he brings me to a standstill.

  “Stop! Stop, Anita,” he says. “We have to talk.”

  “Whatever,” I say, “I’m done talking,” even though we both reckon that like, the only thing I’ve swapped with him since this morning was my silence for his.

  And he goes, “Maybe you are—but I am not.”

  And I don’t say nothing, ‘cause like, what’s the point? Between his son and me, I bet I know whose story he’s gonna believe.

  And so he presses on, “There is something, Anita, something I must tell you.”

  “What,” I say. “You leaving me again, Lenny?”

  “Going back to work,” he says, which takes the wind right out of me.

  “Really?” I gape at him, and notice that his briefcase is right there on the floor, at his feet. “So soon? You sure you’re up to it? Like, with the limping and all?”

  “Yes,” he says, and lets go of me. “It is time. I cannot afford staying home any longer.”

  And, seeing that I stare at him as if to ask, Now, what does that mean, he goes on to say, “It means, jobs are hard to come by, Anita. Especially,” he adds, “at my age.”

  “Fine, then,” I say, and lift his briefcase from the floor, to save him the trouble, and I hand the thing to him. But instead of taking it, he grips me again, this time by my waist, and turns me to the light, like, to read me.

  “It is not Ben I want to talk to you about,” he says.

  I wonder if he can tell what’s in the back of my mind, which is the place I keep words, words too long to make any sense, and other things I’m trying to forget.

  “Really?” I say, hearing sudden relief in my voice. “It isn’t?”

  And I press my head to his chin till I feel him wiggling his upper lip, ‘cause my hair is frizzy, and so it must be tickling his nose. And through the fabric, the thin cotton of this dress, I feel his hands on my body, his flesh against mine, and it’s coming forward, so I reckon he wants me, like, awful hard.

  “Take it off,” says Lenny.

  So I slip the dress off, ‘cause it don’t belong to me, but to Natasha. Wearing it must have been a mistake, ‘cause this thing brings her back to him, and for some reason, it brings out other feelings, which I’m not sure I get, exactly. So I step out of it, and see it puddling there, on the floor, like a piece of blue ice, melting.

  Then, on the whim of a moment, I rise to the tips of my toes and stretch for a kiss; which he denies me. And instead, Lenny looks straight into my eyes, saying, “In a word: I want you to know that maybe, I have lied to you.”

  Now, that’s just like him: lying to me; which he then doubts; which he wants me to know, so he’s protected from guilt.

  And before I can point it out, or ask him why anyone would say, In a word, only to follow it with a full sentence—and a long one at that—Lenny goes on to say, “I have told you, just a minute ago, that I do not wish to talk about my son. But now that I think about it, maybe I have lied.”

  I can see my image flashing across one lens, then the other, right there in his glasses. And it looks kinda small, and odd, too, ‘cause each one of them surfaces is like, a bit curved. There... Now my image has met the frame. It’s gone, vanished into thin air.

  Me, I’m feeling, like, a tinge of shame—even though I didn’t do nothing wrong. So I’m waiting on edge, right there in front of him, now with my eyes lowered, holding my breath to hear him, ‘cause who knows what he thinks he’s seen.

  To me, he’s the witness, and he’s the judge, a judge with a bias in favor of the other side. And here’s the accused, ready for the verdict. Here I am.

  Lenny starts talking to me, and what he says isn’t nothing like what I’ve expected, and it takes my breath away.

  “You may be looking at my son,” he says, “and at me. You may be watching us, thinking, These are strange people. This is not a family I would want to live next door to, let alone in the same home—but this, Anita, is the family we are.”

  And in a whisper I repeat, “Yes, we are.”

  And something makes me warm all over at the mere sound of what he’s just said, ‘cause like, if even he, Lenny, don’t barely know what’s strange and what’s not, then who knows? Is there anyone normal, out there? What is it exactly, normal?

  And I don’t mind me being odd, when so are they, when so are all of us.

  And I can see how, in the days to come, I’m gonna have to find my way, somehow, between them two men, ‘cause I get it: Lenny needs his son, and he can’t risk another split, another tear between the two of them. We must all try, as best we can, to forgive each other, and to accept us, accept the way we are.

  I find myself awful glad to be near him, ‘cause at this moment I ain’t an outcast no more: he’s made me a part of something which—even if it’s damaged—still, all the same, it’s as close as you can get to being whole.

  “We,” I echo, “are a family.”

  “A family,” he admits, “with a load of secrets.”

  Lenny raises his eyes to the ceiling as if to find the right words, which must be kinda hard for him, ‘cause now he takes his briefcase from me and like, tries to take cover behind it. At last he lets out a sigh.

  “What I have to say,” he tells me, “is about her.”

  In return to which I let slip, “It always is.”

  He backs away, so I tell him, “Lenny—don’t you stop! I’m here, listening.”

  And he says, “You may remember that time, five years ago, when Natasha came back, and you left, swearing it was all over between us.”

  And me, I nod, “I do.”

  And Lenny says, “I tried very hard to mend things with her. If we could start over, if life could go back to the way things used to play out, it would have meant so much! Not only for us—but for Ben, too.”

  “Natasha,” he says, “had stopped giving piano lessons by then, and from time to time she would seem—how shall I describe it?—withdrawn. In spite of this, she acted as if all was fine, and so did I. For the most part, we were getting closer again, so who could ask for more? She and I managed, somehow, to settle into a daily routine—until one evening, just before going to bed., the phone rang. I picked it up on my side of the bed; she—on hers.”

  His lips tighten, and for a long while he don’t say much; which forces me to ask, “So, who was it?”

  And he says, “It was her doctor.”

  And me, I ask, “What, was she sick?”

  And Lenny says, “Yes,” which seems to take a lot out of him, ‘cause now he’s turning pale. “She was,” he reveals. “And still is.”

  And so I run to the kitchen and bring him a chair and have him sit there and try, and catch his breath. Then I bring him a glass of water, which at first he tries to refuse.

  So I give him a look. “In a word,” I tell him, “drink!”

  So, he drinks; after which I ask, with caution, “So—what did the doctor tell you?”

  He’s raising his eyes again, but the right words can’t be found nowhere close to him—not on the ceiling, or on the wall, or the floor, in this corner, or that. So instead, Lenny shuts his eyes and, like, stumbles into saying, “The doctor, he said: Mr. Kaminsky, the tests came back.”
>
  “At this point,” he recalls, “I took a hard swallow. The doctor paused briefly—perhaps taking another look at the test results—and then went on to say, I have some difficult news for you. Your wife, I believe, has a form of Alzheimer's.”

  I take the briefcase away from him, ‘cause it’s just about to fall, anyway.

  And so Lenny can’t brace himself no more, ‘cause at this point, he don’t have nothing to hold on to, and nowhere to hide. Instead he just sits there, with the empty glass, saying, “Alzheimer's,” and then again, in a voice that is nearly gagged, “Alzheimer's.”

  And after a long pause he adds, “At the sound of this word, Natasha was confused and I—I dropped to my knees. I remember, she could not get it, could not understand what was going on and told the doctor, Wait, hold on, I cannot talk to you now. Call back later, something is wrong here. No, not with me—with my husband.”

  Lenny takes off his glasses and like, wipes something from the corner of his eye, and my heart goes out to him. And then, then the strangest thing starts happening to me. For the first time in ten years I feel not only for him—but for her, too.

  I pity her, which surprises me, and allows me to watch the whole scene in my head, as if—by some magic—a curtain’s risen, and I find myself right there to watch, or like, to snap a picture of the past, of that moment between them:

  I see him crouched there, on the floor at the foot of the bed; and her plopping the phone in its cradle, to stop it already, stop that voice, that muffled voice that keeps coming back, saying, Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?

  I hear her coming over, wrapping her arms around his, and asking, like, What’s wrong, what’s wrong, Lenny; and him saying, No, dear, it’s nothing, I promise, nothing at all, really, and sobbing, sobbing with no tears and no sound.

  I bet he knows that from that moment on, he would be alone, really alone, and that he must go on, and keep this thing under wraps, so that no one who’s known her before would ever think to put her name and that word—that horrific word—in the same sentence, or anywhere close to each other.

  And before I can snap another picture of her, and place it there, in the back of my mind, I see her walking away. Her robe’s like, flapping behind her, letting the light shine through, and then—poof!—she’s gone, perhaps to turn off the bedside lamp. Still, I can’t get rid of the ghost of her image. It still kinda hangs there, like the end of a shadow, a long shadow left there, in the center of a picture, even after the body itself has crossed out of the frame, and has long vanished.

  This, now, is the way I draw her in my head: coming back, like, to touch him softly, to ask what’s the matter, what has happened here. At times she’s like, clinging, at times hovering there, over his shoulders, a faint trace of a thing, turning fainter with time; one that can’t remind him no more of her, her whom he knew: The mother, the wife she was. The girl she used to be.

  So I take a step closer to Lenny, and this time I don’t allow myself to be stopped—not by him, not by that shadow, and not by nothing else I’ve seen in my head, just now. And I brush my lips over his hair, and spread my arms real wide, hugging her hugging him.

  I can’t see his face, ‘cause it’s hanging down, like it’s buried between his shoulders. “I must be going,” he mumbles from deep down. “I must be going. I cannot be late for work.”

  And standing here, by his side, I let him lean on me, so he can rise, somehow, to his feet. Lenny turns his back on me and a minute later, the sound of his footfalls can be heard, one thump after another, shaking the stairs.

  And after a while, it kinda blends away into the other noises, till you can’t tell it from the hum of traffic down there, in the street.

  Now I close the door. At long last, this I know: I don’t need an answer no more for that question, the one that confused me so, the one I’ve been asking myself, with such pain, such agony, for the last ten years. And I won’t need to guess, not anymore, why he told me—that first time, when we danced—that I, I reminded him of a girl he used to know.

  Chapter 15 Go Back To Your Mama

  As Told by Anita

  Lenny’s gone, but still, I’m thinking about him, about how he’s touched on that time, the lost time nearly five years ago, when I went out the door, swearing I ain’t gonna come back to him, not ever. What he hasn’t said—and what left such a bitter taste in my mouth—is how he told me, back then, “You are a nice kid, Anita. Go, go back to where you came from. Go back to your mama.”

  And what he don’t know is that ma wasn’t all too happy to see me, “Because,” she said, “I told you so, didn’t I? Didn’t I say, he’s gonna grow tired of you, and dump you before you know it? He’s gonna go back to his wife, ‘cause it’s her that he wants—not you! And if not her, then—then, it must be something else with him, always something else, like, looking for other women. Maybe they remind him, somehow, of that thing, who knows what it is, which he found in her. Maybe what he’s really looking for is just, like, the idea of her.”

  And when I mumbled, “Whatever,” ma said, “I knew it! She can twist him around her little finger, if she wants to.”

  She didn’t tell me nothing else about this thing, this idea of her, which ma thought was fixed, somehow, in Lenny’s head, like some piece of music; and I, I didn’t ask. Instead, I bought a six-pack for her and a six-pack for me, and we sat down on her pillows, on the narrow iron bed, drinking beer; she talking, me weeping all night, after which ma wiped my face, and grabbed the palm of my hand—like she used to do in the old days—to read it.

  And she told me to stay put, to wait for her, ‘cause she had something crucial, something real big to tell me, like, about the future. I reckon she saw some clue of what was coming—but didn’t quite grasp it, not in full, anyway, ‘cause the next thing you know, ma went out, came back a second later, picked the empty beer bottles, and took them with her. Along the way she gave me a peck, smack in the middle of my forehead, which surprised me.

  Then, having kissed me goodbye, she went out again, and then... Then, on her way to work, right there on the corner of Euclid Street—Bang! I could hear the sound, out there—she was killed in a car accident.

  I stayed in her place till the end of the month—but couldn’t stay longer, ‘cause me, I didn’t have no money to pay for the rent, on account of not having a job. So I started moving from one place to another, trying to hide behind someone’s garage, or in a little cove on the beach. Sometimes I shared a room with this friend, or the other. After a while, I lost count of all the places where I’d lived. Which is why I don’t want to ever think about finding a new place again.

  A few months later—I can’t even say how many—I was walking, like, in a daze down the street, and raised my eyes from the ground. I found myself on the Pier, staring at the swirly, painted letters of the ice cream place. And then, in a flash, it hit me: this, this was the place, the very same place where we had met, Lenny and me, that first time.

  I backed away, all shook up. Words started drifting in my head. I thought about him, and about how far away, even absurd the whole thing was, I mean, like, the idea of us together.

  And I thought about the hunger, and them buckets inside, full of chopped nuts and cherries and coconut flakes. The air trembled, and in it I caught a sniff of cream, and a whiff of waffle cones, which at once awakened the pain, right here in my stomach. How strange it was to be back here again—only this time, on the outside, ‘cause that’s, like, a totally different place—even if most people don’t really care to know it.

  My feet carried me, somehow, till I stopped right there, under the Santa Monica signboard, which arched over the entrance to the pier. And no way, I swear, there’s no way you could even begin to guess my surprise when all of a sudden, I spotted Lenny up there, behind the large window of The Lobster. Sitting inside, there he was, holding a margarita glass, laughing his head off, and like, having a real good time.

  I could see the slice of lime on the lip of his glass
, and closed my eyes—but still, was blocked from smelling it.

  I tried, in vain, to bring back the touch of salt around the rim, and the scent of butter on mashed potatoes, and the meaty flavor of wild mushrooms, and the pleasure you get with every gulp of hot, thick clam chowder. I could almost lick the spoon, and pinch the bread, and wipe the bowl with it, ‘cause I had known all that. Me, I had been there with him, like, a lifetime ago.

  I leaned over the railing of the pier, and for a second hoped he would see me. How could he not, with my hair flaming red, and blowing, long and wild, in the winter wind, which swept across the divide?