Apart From Love

by Uvi Poznansky

  “So now,” I say, like, with caution, “all’s fine? Like, you’ve forgiven him?”

  “I do not know about that,” he says, sounding pretty touchy.

  A minute later his voice seems to soften. “What I do know—I can feel it in my bones—is this: any day now, my son will be coming here, to my door, and—”

  “You have two sons, not one,” I cut in.

  “He will be coming back,” says Lenny, right over my words. “Looking for the thing, the one thing only I can give him: a story.”

  Me, I can tell he don’t pay no attention to anything I say, so all I can do is at this point is just breathe hard for a few seconds, and then repeat, “Aw,” a third time.

  Meanwhile Lenny’s busy arguing with himself.

  “Whenever I read what I’ve written, it seems so sketchy to me, so goddam fragmented! Just an jumble of moments, and some voices here and there, lost in the clutter. What am I missing? How come I find myself falling short, so terribly short of where I thought I was going? What the story needs is a meaning—or else all my work, and all my sleepless nights have come to nothing, nothing, nothing in the end.”

  His eyes seem to beg me for some hint, some meaning, like I could give it to him. What can I say to that? Nothing, and he knows it.

  So Lenny starts pacing around the bed, and he reaches the mirror, the oval mirror standing there, slightly tilted, in the corner. Here he stops, and glances at the scribbled page over there, in his reflected hand.

  From where I stand, them letters look pretty odd, them words scrambled—right turned left, in turned out—right there, on that patch of white, clutched by the ghost of his hand, deep in the glass. Lenny leans in, so his nose nearly touches that other nose, the one in the mirror, like he’s trying to go in, to read what’s in there. And his shadow inside, it’s trying to read, just as hard, what’s out here.

  It’s like, a riddle, waiting to be solved.

  His by-focals, they’ve come loose from his face and dropped off, so he searches for them here and there across the floor. No matter, he’ll find them later. Then, like, by mistake, Lenny gets too close to the mirror and—bang!—hits his forehead against it. I ain’t exactly sure how it’s happened. Anyhow, you can tell he’s growing restless, ‘cause the paper in his hand starts rustling, till the writing becomes just a blur, on both sides of the glass.

  “There must be some significance to all this,” he mutters. “And it must be extracted. It must be put in words—or else, my son would open the door, and I—I would not be ready for him.”

  “So?” I say. “What is it you’re afraid of?”

  “Ben would come in, and there would be no one to see but an old man, an old man standing there, his mouth open as if to start singing, and just cold breath coming out.”

  And with that Lenny pushes the frame of the mirror, so now it’s tilted awful sharp, and it’s like, sticking clear out of the corner, right here between me and him. He lifts a hand, like, to correct it, to straighten the thing, which is when we start hearing the knocks.

  Them knocks, they come rapping, rapping real timid at first, there at the entrance door. Then comes a squeal, like that of a key which—having been inserted—starts turning, real slow, in the lock.

  The old man turns his back to the mirror, which is still pretty crooked.

  “My God,” he mumbles. “Not now! I am not ready for him.”

  And then, then he takes a shaky step back, stumbling—

  Chapter 34 Am I Covered

  As Told by Ben

  And I rush to his side, hearing glass splitting from the mirror, then crunching underfoot, shards spreading across the floor and plinking as they hit the far corners and the walls. His head has sunk over his breast: at first glance, no blood. No pomade, either, which makes him look odd. His scalp is pale, nearly bald, with wisps of dull, disheveled gray hair hanging from it.

  Then my father stirs, takes an agonized breath and staggers to his feet, trying to push himself, somehow, away from the oval frame. Perhaps because he is in shock, his knees give way under him.

  He stumbles again, so I catch him in my arms, noting how frail the old man has grown over recent months. He even seems to have shrunk a bit. I carry him to their bed as if he were a baby, and lower him into it. Still curled in my arms, he grips the scarf around my neck with his shriveled fingers, plays with its fringes, and suddenly pulls at it with such force that for a moment I find myself choked.

  But somehow I manage to lay him down, which he lets me do without further quibble. With great care I remove his socks, because there are slivers of glass pinned to them. Next I pull off his trousers, because some of the fragments fell into the bottom cuffs .

  From the corner of his eye my father looks up, first at Anita, who has risen from the corner and come forward to help me strip him, then at me. I can hear him mumbling something, so I bend over him, putting my ear to his lips. “Cover me up,” he whispers.

  So I unfurl the blue sheet over him, and tuck it under the mattress, and layer a wool blanket on top of that, and arrange it carefully around him.

  Meanwhile Anita raises the setting of the thermostat, because without having to say things out loud, we figure that—in spite of the spring weather—he must somehow be cold.

  The old man looks into my eyes and shivers. He mutters, “Am I covered?”

  “Yes,” I say. “You are.”

  “Are you sure?” he asks, sharply now.

  “Yes,” I say. “Do not worry. You are covered, completely covered.”

  “No!” he cries, tearing the blanket off and thrusting it madly to the floor, uncovering his thin, bare legs. “No, I am not covered—not yet! You’ll have to wait longer, quite a while longer, until I am laid to rest!”

  “Stop, Lenny,” says Anita. “Your son’s come back, like, to be close to you, to be forgiven.”

  The old man scrambles up to his shaky feet, and stands there, on top of the bed, hands twitching, eyes flaring with some strange glare, perhaps on the verge of craziness.

  “Stop it,” she repeats, taking a step toward him, spreading her arms to catch him if he falls.

  I wonder if I should let him know that for the last four months I have been following him, and her too.

  I have been delivering little things—such as a note or a bottle of champaign to their doorstep—entering the apartment from time to time when no one was around, reading the papers on his desk, taking a pen or leaving one of my own, even using his tape recorder to record my voice, wishing to be found out in any one of these ways. Wishing to come back home. By April, the desire has reached such a level, as to push me in the door just now, in spite of knowing they are inside—or maybe because of it.

  Instead I just say, “Calm down, dad, will you? If you want me to leave, just say so.” If he has longed to see me, he gives no sign of it. So again, I stress, “If you want me to leave, I will.”

  The fall he took, and the shock of seeing me must have brought out the hurt, the resentment in him. His eyes narrow, darting between the two of us.

  “You,” he turns them on me, “you want to bury me right now. I know, I just know you do. Goddamn it! I can feel it in my bones!”

  And she says, “Ben don’t want nothing bad to happen here, and for sure, he don’t—he don’t want you dead.”

  “And you!” he points his finger, this time at her. “It is all because of you, and you know it, dear!”

  Which makes her bite her lips, even cringe. She moves back into the corner, and leans into her wedding dress, which for some reason she dyed, wild orange and purple. The colors are aflame around her.

  “Please, dad, stop shouting at her,” I say. “What did she do?”

  He hops to the edge of the bed, screaming.

  “What? What did she do? What did she do? How, how can you ask, even, What the fuck did she do?” He grabs the sheet, and ties it crudely around his underwear, and sways his hips mockingly, wobbling widely this way and that, like a drunken fashio
n model on impossibly high heels, trying to stay, somehow, on the catwalk.

  “Stop it,” I say.

  In turn he twirls the fabric, flapping it around his waist, “Did she lift her little black dress for you, like this? Did she bend over, like that?”

  At this point he has come dangerously close to falling off the bed, leaving me no choice but to grab him around his thighs, and bring him forcibly to his knees.

  “Is this where she had her way with you?” he cries. “Here, in your mother’s presence—I mean, in her bed?”

  “No,” I say. “Not here.” Which makes Anita cringe again.

  I catch sight of my watch. Thirteen minutes past one.

  After a while Anita raises her wet eyes to him and says, “Me, I don’t expect to be forgiven. But here’s your son! Your son, Lenny! Look at him! He needs you. You need him. Let him off the hook already. Do it, do it now!”

  My father lays there, on the bare part of the mattress, utterly spent, staring blankly at the cracked mirror.

  She pleads, “He’s your flesh and blood, for God’s sake—not one of them characters you write about, not one of them voices there, inside your tape recorder! You’re so alone, spending all your time with them things, blocking out everything else. You’ve gone back too far already, to places in your head that ain’t even concrete, places where you can’t touch no one, and like, you can’t be touched in return!”

  “You are wrong, so wrong,” he says, bursting with arrogance. “The characters I write, they can touch you—even if I cannot.”

  Anita bites her lips. Thirty three minutes past one.

  He turns away from her. “They can touch you—even when I am gone.”

  She cries, “Enough! I—I—you’re tearing me, inside!”

  “Maybe one day, you are going to look back and listen to what I wrote. Maybe then you will remember me—”

  “No more Rewind, Rewind, Rewind,” says Anita. “Just, stop it, right now! Stop! You’re tearing me!”

  I doubt that he has heard her.

  “Look around you, find what’s real,” she begs. “Look at your son. Don’t tear him away no more! Let him in, Lenny!”

  He shows no sign of hearing her. But after a while, a breath comes out of his lips, as if a balloon has released its air—not in a single pop, but haltingly, little by little, till the fume has been spent, and the rage gone, so that now he is left there, empty. Then my father lifts his hand and unties the knot of the sheet, letting it unwrap and slip off, down to the floor. I pick it up, and with caution I move closer, and cover him.

  Then I sit there, by his side, not knowing what to say, not knowing what can be said at this point. I shake my head, wishing I could shake out the words, I am Sorry, dad. Forgive me.

  Which is when I notice, all of a sudden, what he sees there, in my mother’s standalone mirror. The thing is leaning haphazardly on one leg, tilted out of position, broken. And there—between the cracks shooting out from the center, where it has shattered—there, if you focus, hands can be spotted. Pale woman’s hands. They come rising, rising slowly towards him, as if to take hold of him and pull him in.

  My father shuts his eyes. On his lips I can see the word, Natasha.

  I wipe my eyes and glance at the mirror again.

  By now the hands have clenched tightly into white-knuckled fists. Above them, a cloud of red hair comes into view, and under it, a face. The features are contorted, because she is cringing with intense pain. This time, Anita nearly folds over herself.

  Forty seven minutes past one. Which is when I know, all of a sudden, that I have arrived just in time.

  She is in labor.

  During our cab drive to hospital, I cast a glance over my shoulder to see Anita in the back seat, arms crossed over the mound of her belly, clutching each other till the flesh turns white. Her face is flushed, her breath labored, and her lips—when I can see them—are bearing the bite marks of her teeth.

  I tell her that she will be in the best of hands, because from what I heard back in medical school, a durable artificial hip was developed five years ago at UCLA, and the first total shoulder replacement was performed there, also around the same time. She says nothing to that, perhaps because at the moment she is taking time to cringe, and to filter an occasional, “Aw” between her teeth.

  Meanwhile my father takes this opportunity to snap out of his daze, and he leans forward to tell me that it is not a hip or a shoulder we are talking about, but the birth of his son.

  When the cab arrives at the hospital, my three aunts are already there, waiting for us by the curb. I have no idea how they have managed to get here so fast, or from where they have already fetched a fancy hospital wheelchair, into which Anita, breathing hard, is now being transferred.

  Aunt Hadassa grips both handles, readying herself for taking charge of pushing the thing. In her haste to be here on time she must have neglected, somehow, to paint in her eyebrows. Also, she must have forgotten to nudge her puffy, white hair into place, so now it is piled up on top of her, lopsided. Dangling from her padded shoulder is her purse, in which you can spot, among other things, her knitting needles and a large ball of yarn. She is prepared for the wait.

  “My, my,” says aunt Fruma, and aunt Frida follows that with, “What took you so long?”

  As for aunt Hadassa, she taps her foot with a mixture of impatience and glee, and says, “Nu? It’s time already!”

  And with that, the three of them wheeze by me, wheeling Anita with great gusto into the open doors of the hospital.

  I turn to my father, thinking he may need help to get out of the cab, but he refuses me. He leans back into the seat, shuts the car door and rolls up the window.

  “I am not coming in,” he says, his voice weak, but insistent.

  “But dad, she is in labor,” I say. “I thought you would want to be there, by her side, to hold her hand, or something, during the—”

  “No, Ben,” he says. “I cannot help her with her pain—and she cannot help me with mine. No one can. Let’s not pretend about it.”

  “Are you not feeing well?” I say. “You really need to see a doctor yourself, you know. You may have a concussion, the way you slipped and fell into that glass—”

  “Enough! I feel fine,” he says.

  “Here,” I try to reopen his door, “let me help you—”

  “No,” he closes it again. “No need for that.”

  “You cannot just ignore such an injury,” I say. “It makes no sense, dad. Let me, let me take you in, to Emergency—”

  “No,” he says, in his most stubborn tone.

  “At least, let me take a look at your head.”

  His jaw is firmly set. “No,” he repeats.

  Then, perhaps noting the frustrated expression on my face, he relents—but just a little.

  “If you really want to help me, son,” he says, “get back in.”

  There is no arguing with him when he gets that way, so I get back into the cab, this time next to him, and before I finish closing the door on my side, dad has already given his directions to the driver.

  “So,” he says, “Let’s go! To Sunrise Assisted Living.”

  Chapter 35 Lay Me Down

  As Told by Ben

  At the end of the cab ride to Sunrise home, the silence is finally broken when my father glances at me, and his face softens, and he says, “Anita is right. I have been tearing her, inside. I need to separate between what is real and what is not.”

  And I say, “This here between us, this is real. And the loneliness, too.”

  In return he says, “I am so sorry, Ben. I do not know what came over me tonight. I guess I was not prepared for you. Forgive me.”

  I turn to him, utterly in surprise, and notice that he is bringing his eyebrows together, the way he does when he has a severe headache. He looks in my direction through clouded eyes, as if his vision has suddenly blurred.

  This, I think, is the first, the only time he has asked me to forgive him, fo
r anything. Usually all I get from him is excuses, excuses and blame. My father is right, forever, always. But not now. Which is why the idea comes to me that perhaps, he feels as if he is not going to make it through the night. At once, I push it out of my mind.

  Still, his lips are moving. “Now that you are back,” he lets out, “things will go back the way they ought to go. I want you to know it.”

  I see him forming words, but his voice is too weak to carry them. So I bend over, putting my ear to his mouth.