Apart From Love

by Uvi Poznansky

  His heart started fluttering inside. It pounded so hard that he thought he would pass out, which was fine by him, because he considered himself, at that moment, kissed by luck.

  One could not wish any better than to die a happy man.

  In his eyes, she was the most beautiful girl in the world—not only because of the hazy glare of the spotlight, through which he saw her rosy blush, the long, slender arms, and the glitzy black dress, but because of the heavenly, harmonious music, which she made reverberate in the air, all around her.

  To me you are beautiful,

  To me you have grace,

  To me you are everything in the world.

  For the longest time, my old man sits there, utterly motionless, in the midst of bells being shaken and bongos being beaten by unsteady hands. Only the top of his head, gripped tightly in his fingers, is visible to me between this sagged shoulder and that, in the back of the crowd.

  And it is not until the end of the song—when everyone sitting in the divide between him and me has joined in an intoxicated, disorderly chorus, singing loudly, I've tried to explain, bei mir bist du schoen—that the next line makes his hands fall, suddenly, into his lap.

  I've tried to explain, bei mir bist du schoen,

  So kiss me, and say that you will understand.

  It is at that phrase, and say that you will understand, that I see him wincing. Having sensed, somehow, the weight of my gaze, his jaw clenches. My father turns his head abruptly, to pull himself back from view—but not before I realize, to my complete shock, that he is awash in tears.

  There are claps and numerous shouts—Bravo, bravo!—and after a while, as if guided away by an invisible hand, they scatter around. The show is over.

  Looking at the door on the other side of the space I see it turning on its hinges, and squealing to a close behind my father. I think he is fortunate, so fortunate to have left just before having to witness the rest of it.

  Stirring out of the chair, my mother opens her eyes. At first I want to cheer her on, to cry, Come on, bring them to their knees, now! Show them who you are, what you are made of! Play, mom, play for me!

  And it is then that she drops her chin, as if she were a broken marionette, into an unbearably silly, openmouthed grin. It is babyish at best, and lacks any hint of comprehension.

  Then she lifts a tremulous hand—on which a steel triangle is hooked—and jerking a little metal wand, strikes it once. The thing gives a high pitched, flat tone. It is a dead sound, meaningless, perhaps because it occurs entirely out of context, chiming noisily when no one even expects it, when no one but me is left there to listen—let alone imagine how she could play.

  I dream, as I must, of her fingers darting, soaring in a dazzling blur, long after the cover has been pulled over the keys of her white piano.

  Chapter 29 The Long Wait

  As Told by Anita

  Then he says to his son, You should go, because this place can’t hold the two of us for much longer, and because a young fellow like you must be hungry for adventure, and eager to see the world, and the last thing you want is to remain here, stuck in this stuffy place, with a grumpy old man, so here’s some money, it should be more than enough—if spent modestly—for travel expenses, and stay in touch, and good luck with everything.

  And Ben tries to say No, quite to the contrary, there’s much more space now than there ever was, with the grand piano cleared out of the way, just look at Anita over there, stretching her arms and doing quick twirls, all across the room.

  At hearing all that, Lenny just clenches his jaw—but he don’t even grumble or nothing, and I bet he’s holding his tongue just to drive home the point, like, how calm he manages to be, and how there isn’t no sign of anger in him, or nothing.

  All the same Ben seems to know that he’s being punished. So without even glancing at me—like I’m the one to be blamed for all this—he bites his lip and goes into his room, where he can’t help kicking the wall once or twice, after which he comes out to the kitchen, and kick the refrigerator and then opens it, to look for an ice pack.

  Then Ben spends some time wandering in and out of the living room, and making noise, long enough for his father to change his mind if he wanted to, or even to forgive him outright, for whatever it is that needs to be forgiven—but Lenny has already gone out to the balcony, where he can’t hear nothing, not even me pleading with him, asking what happened, what the hell happened between them.

  His silence is new to me. It’s like, shouting from the walls. And what I read into it is like, if I didn’t show so much leg back then, when he first laid eyes on me, ten years ago in that ice cream shoppe, and if I didn’t wear them hot pink, high heel shoes, which forced him, somehow, to lose his head over me—which could never have happened otherwise—then things would be totally different now:

  Nothing would end up tearing this family apart, and instead, the piano would still be crouching in place, and Natasha, his first wife, would still be here to play it—or at least, to pass her hand fondly over its back, and twiddle her fingers when she’s done checking for dust, and smiling to herself, because like, all’s well. All would be just fine.

  Lenny acts like I’m some stray kitten that’s wandered in here, and he’s taking his distance. He isn’t nowhere near me, and like, he’s deaf to his son, on account of the noise, ‘cause of punching them keys, the keys of his typewriter, pretty damn hard.

  So at last Ben says to him, he says, “Fuck you, and your fucking money!” and turns to his room, and packs his stuff, like his old family Album, and that manila envelope with them bunches of hundred dollar bills, which I thrust, on impulse, into his hands, ‘cause at that moment there’s some immense force in my heart, which is stronger than me, and it makes me care for him awful deep, which is totally a surprise to me, and even more than that, a mistake.

  It’s against everything I’ve planned in my head, and I know it—but still, I don’t even care at this point if Lenny happens to see it.

  Then Ben buckles his rumpled suitcase. His long lashes cast a shade over his eyes, hiding how confused he must feel right now, and his slender body is strained, not so much because of the suitcase, but because of something that only the two of us can share: the burden of being young.

  Then, without saying goodbye—not even to me—he’s out the door.

  In the first couples of months or so after his son left, Lenny’s been very quiet. In some ways, things ain’t all that bad between us. He comes home every night, even asks—when he cares to look at me—if the baby’s started kicking already. His question is kinda polite, and it don’t really break the silence, just marks a place from where we can restart it.

  Anyhow we’re together, so I don’t have to worry no more about where he is, and I don’t have to call aunt Hadassa, who has her sources, and I don’t have to listen to her squirming, trying to spare me from knowing what this entire town already knows, which is, that Lenny’s been sleeping around.

  It’s always the same thing now. Me and him sit down at the kitchen table and eat dinner together, like a normal family, except that we do it in silence. Then we settle into that old, sagging couch—him in one corner, me in the other—and wait. What it is we’re waiting for isn’t exactly clear. At first I could swear it was, like, a word from Ben—but now I figure it’s a good thing the day’s getting shorter.

  Tonight—the first moonless night of this winter—I can sense a change in Lenny, which starts, for me, with the scent of his aftershave.

  It’s Aqua Velva. It’s been a long time since I’ve caught it on him, and I can get a bit tipsy just by tipping over, like, to take it in. He grips the faded armrest and gets up, with some effort, from his corner, and puts on his fingerless leather gloves, with which he can type, especially on cold nights. Then he goes out to the balcony, and I can see him fumbling for something there, in the drawers of his desk. Finally he brings back a handful of tapes—I hope none of them is mine—and the tape recorder, which he sets up acr
oss from me, on the floor next to Beethoven’s bust.

  From down there Lenny turns to me, and I see the question in his eyes, like, Is it too late already, for the two of us?

  And aloud he says, “Anita? Want to dance?”

  Over the last couple of months he hasn’t given voice to no anger, and neither have I, which I figure can’t hardly be bad, ‘cause without words any feeling—even rage—can peter out, so that one of these days, it’s gonna be left there, dull and limp, somewhere behind us. It can happen, ‘cause his son isn’t here between us, and time passes.

  Like ma used to say, Time heals all wounds. Which sounds pretty stale, but it must be true, ‘cause I’ve stopped thinking by now about my youth going to waste. Instead I’m thinking about the fact that I’ve stopped thinking about that.

  So in the end, we’re back where we started, almost. Lenny’s my man. He’s mine. Me, I’m his. All’s clear. Nothing gets confused.

  “Well?” he murmurs. “Do you?”

  I reckon the reason he’s talking to me, like, under his breath, isn’t only because he’s unsure of me, of what I’ll say after the long, icy silence—but also because he can’t stand the echo, which seems to have moved in here with us lately.

  So I whisper, as soft as I can, “I do.”

  He inserts one of them tapes, and sets the tape recorder to Rewind, then Play. At first I almost expect my voice to come on, but then, by the spring in his step as he’s coming over, I figure it’s gonna be music. He reaches out to me, so I peel off his glove, and his touch feels nice, it’s warm and strong, the way I remember it.

  Lenny helps me out of the sofa, which is good, ‘cause I feel pretty heavy lately, and if I stand up by myself I tend to stop, just to look down to check if I my feet can still be spotted there, under the round mound of my belly.

  I rise into his arms, and note that his forehead comes down more heavily than ever, right over his eyebrows, and the crease in the middle—which as always, remind me of my pa—is deeper now. He must have shrunk a little, too. Maybe not, maybe it’s just something I imagine.

  Now Lenny lays his hands on my hips, careful at first, like we’re strangers. If we was strangers for real, things would get wilder, faster. I draw a bit closer, and put my hand on his shoulder, and rise to the tips of my toes to reach up, to comb his thinning hair, awful gentle, with my fingers. I slick it back, ‘cause in my eyes it’s always made him look so handsome, like one of them old movie stars.

  In turn, his hand brushes my hair, gathering it up, for a second, into a pony tail, and I close my eyelids, feeling how at first he hesitates. The old man waits there for a long while, before leaning over and kissing them.

  I bet that like me, he remembers that night, the first time we danced, ‘cause now that the tape recorder has finished giving out the long, rustling hush, and the music comes on, it’s the old song, doubled by a ghost of its sound: something slow from the sixties, which years ago used to bring tears to ma’s eyes, ‘cause like, it awakened her to being lonely, and now it brings them to mine.

  Lenny cups my face in his hand and pecks me lightly on the cheek. Then he starts showering me with the littlest kisses, all along the trail of tears, his mouth slipping down the skin of my neck. And I laugh—not only on account of being ticklish, but because suddenly I’m aroused, and even a touch nervous. And I say, “Let’s just dance,” which is echoed, like, by the laughter of the walls.

  So Lenny backs away and I come, and then in reverse, he comes as I back away, and we go and come, come and go this way for a long while—but we don’t hardly move from the same spot, here by the sofa, even though there’s so much space now around us, for dancing and what not.

  It’s not only me wondering about it—it’s Beethoven as well, his blank eyes following every one of our moves from down there, on the floor, like he’s annoyed at his bad luck, having to witness all this—and in slow motion, too!—and his neck, despite being solid, must be terribly cramped, and like, he hopes to be relieved of that pain pretty soon, and stretch his neck, and could we please stop idling there like some tired old couple, and come stomping off in his direction, and break it already.

  By now Lenny has undone the buttons of my blouse, and he loosens it this way and that, and then, in one firm pull it’s already down, which allows him to take one breast in his mouth, and lick the skin all around it.

  At once, my nipple grows big. He gives it up in favor of the other one, which he starts sucking. Now I’m divided between my two halves, ‘cause the first breast, which is wet, starts cooling off as it dries, and the second is like, burning. I twist my body side to side, to offer him first the one, then the other, and again.

  Pretty soon we go out of order, and in a heated haste we find ourselves tossing the pillows of the sofa to the floor, first the pillow out of what is usually his corner, then the one out of mine, and we stumble rolling down, till we land on top of them, more or less. So he cocks his head, looking up at me, waiting, ‘cause like, now it’s me on top. And it’s at that second, just as I start groping for the zipper of his crutch, that—out of the blue—the doorbell rings.

  But like, there’s nobody there.

  By the time Lenny returns from the door, I’ve crossed the floor on all four, all the way to Beethoven, and turned him around so he don’t face us no more, and instead he points his nose at the corner, and I’ve come right back to lay, in a foxy pose, on them pillows.

  But somehow, I know that Lenny knows that we ain’t exactly in the mood no more.

  “Who—who was that?” I ask.

  And he says, “No one.”

  And I point at what he carries behind him, in his hand, “And what’s this?”

  And shrugging, he says, “Don’t know.”

  And I say, “So, open it.”

  And real stubborn, he says, “Don’t want to.”

  So half nude I rush to the kitchen, and bring a kitchen knife and cut through the flap of the box, and there—to my surprise—lays a bottle of Rosé Champagne, flanked by two stemmed glasses, the kind you can stack in layers to build them champagne towers, like the one we had at our wedding.

  At first, my bet is that this is a gift from my husband—who else—which takes my breath away, it’s so cool, so awesome, especially because I haven’t gotten nothing from him lately.

  So I twist my hips walking up to him, and snatch one of them glasses and put it in place, right over my left breast. Before I got pregnant, and become so full of curves, it would have been a perfect fit—but now, not so much.

  Then, just before opening my mouth to ask him to uncork the bottle, I realize my mistake.

  “Take it off, take that thing off right now, right this minute,” he stammers, and his forehead curves down over him even heavier and more wrinkled than before. I can’t even blame him, or no one, ‘cause really, I reckon it’s too late for us.

  So without saying a word I obey him, and remove the glass from my heart, and watch him, again in silence, as he rummages through the box in search of a note, or something. Which he finds, finally, down there at the bottom. In square, printed letters the note reads simply, “To Anita.”

  No return address, no signature, no date, nothing.

  The old man looks long and hard into my eyes, like he’s searching for answers, not exactly sure if to punish me, like I was a naughty school girl, or to send me back home to my ma. After a while he figures he can’t do neither, so he just turns his back on me, and punches the box so it can collapse on itself, and stuffs it in the garbage can, along with the uncorked bottle and them two glasses. Then he goes to the bathroom, and the water starts running for his shower.

  I try not to be angry, or hurt. I sit there in the dark, and wait. I can’t tell exactly what it is I’m waiting for.

  So, Rewind. Record.

  What is there to say? I reckon it’s stupid, it don’t make no sense to hunger so bad for a change. Still... It’s a strange feeling, knowing that someone out there is playing with a thought ab
out me, daring me to risk everything I’ve got, like, this marriage, this shelter for my baby and me—all for nothing. For a bottle of champagne.

  The water’s still running in the shower, wisps of vapor escaping as far as here in the living room. By now the glass door is all steamed out, so the balcony out there, which is facing ours, is pretty much washed out, and you can’t see the wintery sky no more, and you can’t even tell that it’s moonless. And like, everything is suddenly nothing but a guess—except for one thing:

  I swear, I must be crazy. I know I am, ‘cause the only path to see clear out of this place is through what I write here, into the steam, on the cold, hard surface, with my finger.