Apart From Love (39 page)

My father cuts off mid-sentence, shocked at the sight, at the white piano, his face turns red, dark red with blood, just as I thought, as I was afraid it would, he rushes ahead, hugs her, walks her over, step by step, to the far corner, tells her to breathe.
 

“Breathe deeply,” he says, which is when I come to attention, because this is the instant when I recognize, of course, who she is. Mom.
 

“My God,” he glares at me, eyes narrowed with suspicion. “What—what have you done, you and Anita?”
 

At that moment, with barely a thud, my mother slips out of his hold and, in a snap, collapses to the floor. By the time she comes to, moments later, the movers have already gone, and Martha has gotten everything and everybody firmly under control. Now she guides mom into a comfortable, upholstered chair, and slides it next to a window, which dad, now deathly pale, throws open.
 

Then she adjusts the resealable tape of a diaper over the hip of one of the seniors, wipes the dribble from the chin of another. Martha brings in an assortment of simple musical implements, such as bongos, tambourines, toy bells, egg shakers and xylophones. She hands one of them—a metallic triangle—to mom, and the rest to the other seniors to play, as if they were children, eager children about to put together an impromptu live show.
 

One of them, a decrepit, toothless hag cruises up to the front in her wheelchair to get a better look at the piano. Frail, much like a wooden puppet, she drags her bony, crooked body over to the bench, slides open the cover, and bangs at the keys.
 

The melody is familiar, but played haltingly, and with an awkward touch, which makes me wish mom would stand up, walk over there right now and show them, show all of them just how it is done, and what fine music ought to sound like, performed with inspired virtuosity by the hand of a renowned pianist, trained from early in life in a variety of memorization techniques.
 

But no: there she sits, her long fingers idle, her eyes nearly shut, as if trying to block out all distractions, perhaps to divine a particular sequence of music, or to recall the fierce, blind stare emanating from an imaginary bust, the bust of Beethoven, or else just to drift off.
 

The other seniors gather around the toothless amateur, and they start shaking their wrinkled fingers in the air, in pantomime of her gestures, and humming,
La-la, la-la-la! La-la, la-la-la!
One of them is so swept by the rhythm, as to warble in a thin, cracked voice, somewhat out of tune,

Bei mir bist du shein,
Bei mir host du chein,
Bei mir bist du alles oif di velt.

For some reason the singing grates, quite harshly, on my nerves. I am surprised to find myself so upset. For a time I do not even realize I have water in my eyes. The entire space starts swimming in front of me, and I am glad that my father does not seem to notice it, or else he may think I am weeping.

Weeping—can you imagine that?—out of some weakness or something.
 

The reason I am so lucky as to be ignored is that his face hangs there, away from me, over his chest, and is held in that position, nearly masked by the palms of his hands. I get the feeling that under that cover, his mind has been carried away elsewhere. Perhaps he is thinking about the first time he saw mom.
 

From reading his stories I know it happened quite by chance, when he accompanied a friend to some concert, and sat there, raising his eyes from the second row, and there she was, up on stage, aglow in a sphere of light.
 

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.

As Told by Anita

T
hen 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 across 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?