Before My Life Began (25 page)

“I like giving you a hard time,” she said. “And I do like looking at you. You have gorgeous eyes. They're like your uncle's eyes. But listen. Do you like
my
eyes? I think they're my best feature. My mother claims they're too large for my face and my father says we have to
keep
an eye on me—bulging eyes can be the early sign of some kind of hyperthyroid condition that troubled young ladies with antic dispositions can often have. Do you like them?”

“They're hazel.”

“Well, that's true.” She laughed. “I'm sorry. I'm embarrassing you. Do you have enough money? I can pay for us if you want.” “It's okay. I have enough.”

“Tell me then—do you think you could learn to like a girl like me?”

“I hadn't thought about it. I suppose—”

“I suppose,” she said, and then she leaned back, crossed her arms against her chest and grinned. “What's not to like, right?”

“I guess.” I smiled. “My father used to use that expression.”

She put her hands back on the table, and for a second I was afraid she was going to reach across and want to hold hands with me. She hadn't said anything about what I'd said about my father, and yet I felt she had taken it in and wasn't commenting because she knew that if she reacted too much she might scare me away.

“Listen,” she offered. “Why don't we just make believe we're two high school students who happen to meet in the subway after a play-off game and decide to go and have something to eat together until the rush hour is over, all right? Just to keep one another company, since they recognize each other and go to the same school. Would that make you feel more comfortable about being with me?”

“It's okay,” I said. Her gaze was so intense—she seemed to care so much, to sense what I was feeling—that I looked away. “I mean, I'm feeling okay. It's just that I never had anybody to talk to me the way you do. I'm distracted, is all. My head seems too full, with all that's been happening. I'm sorry. I don't mean not to pay attention to you.”

“You're the one who lost the game and the father and all I think about is whether or not I'm making a good impression on you. God! Would Ellen think of herself in a situation like this?”

Gail looked down, tore at her napkin, rolled small bits of it into tiny pellets. The waitress brought our food. For a while we ate in silence. I thought of Tony and Regina, walking along the dark streets, Regina telling him that it was all right that we'd lost, that it wasn't his fault. I thought of Abe, in his front office, getting a call from one of his men. Would he care if I lost? Would he be happier if I won? Gail sipped her hot chocolate quickly, bending down so that she wouldn't have to pick up the cup. She licked marshmallow foam from her upper lip and asked me if I had a girlfriend. She said the girls at school couldn't figure me out. Big athletic star. Strong, silent type. Handsome young man with brooding Semitic features. Some of them wondered if my uncle supplied me with women.

“Being mysterious is the most attractive quality a person can have,” she said. “Don't you agree?”

“I don't know.”

“To know so much about a person, and still to want to know more—the way you feel at the end of a wonderful book. That's the way I feel about you.”

I thought of saying that she hadn't read me yet, but I was afraid that if I did she might become self-conscious and stop talking to me the way she was—saying the things she'd waited so long to say—and so I said nothing.

“Do you know what I wish sometimes, David? I wish I could learn to keep quiet so that other people would think I was more mysterious, that there were things about me that were unknown and unfathomable, strange and deep. Do you like poetry?”

“Some.”

She pressed her eyes closed and recited: “‘Below the surface-stream, shallow and light/Of what we
say
we feel—below the stream/As light, of what we
think
we feel—there flows/The noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,/The central stream of what we feel indeed.'” She opened her eyes. “Do you like that?”

“Yes.”

“I wish I knew how to be more patient. That's my biggest problem. Gail Kogan, long on persistence, short on patience. What it is, is that I keep being afraid, when the situation is at hand, that if I remain quiet nobody will pay attention to me. My psychiatrist says that—”

She clapped her hand over her mouth, coughed, gagged, raised her arms. I pushed her glass of water toward her. She gestured backwards. I stood, reached across, pounded her on the back. She coughed more, let her hands down.

“You can sit now,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Thanks—”

“Are you all right?”

She grinned. “Were you worried?”

“Yes.”

She drank, took a long breath. “I see a psychiatrist two times a week. Do you mind? It won't make you frightened of me?” She made a fist, looked straight at me, as if she were very angry, very determined. “Oh David, isn't that the most scary thing of all—to be afraid that other people won't like you, that you won't be able to like them and trust them? Isn't that what it's all about?”

She waited, but I didn't say anything. “Do I make sense to you? Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes.” I smiled. “Did you write the poem?”

“No. I like to memorize poetry, but I don't like to write it. It seems too much trouble, in prospect, to school myself in all the meters and rhyme schemes and forms. It's easier to memorize. Like studying for a test. I'm fine when somebody gives me a deadline, an exam, something specific to work toward, but if I have to do it on my own…it's like wanting to get to the top of a staircase without going up the steps, to play the piano without practicing scales.”

“Wouldn't practicing scales be like studying?”

“My mother says I'm two ends against the middle and that the middle is me. She's very psychological. She's taking courses at Teachers College now. She wants to be able to help other young girls like me, right? Yet when I do know what I want, I get so single-minded that it's almost physically painful. I get so far ahead of myself, wanting the things I want, as I do now, with you, that…” She sat back, exhausted. “I should try to take things more slowly, shouldn't I? Well. We've finished eating. You don't have to sit next to me on the train going home. We could pretend we never met, that the past hour never occurred. There are lots of options. Louis Braille was only fifteen when he invented the Braille alphabet. What have we done that's comparable? Whatever you want to do is okay with me, David Voloshin. You decide. I'm pooped. The effort has been tremendous, folks. Did she ever expect to get this far with the young man of her dreams? Could he tell how surprised she was when he agreed to depart from the subway station with her?”

“Yes. He could.”

She leaned toward me. “What were you thinking just then—when you said yes? Would you tell me?”

“I was wondering if this is real. It all seems so crazy, as if I'm somewhere else dreaming that I'm here. I mean, with my father yesterday and then losing the game—”

“I'm impatient because I'm afraid of being imperfect—that's the way I'd put it, were you to ask. I was thinking that I was afraid you'd dislike me later on when you were alone, not for anything I've said or done, but for having let yourself share things with me. People are that way, I think. They become frightened of the people they've trusted. They feel tricked and betrayed. Why?”

“I don't know.”

“I was being rhetorical. But listen: what I was thinking most was that it was your silence itself I've been after—what drew me to you—because whenever I see you or think of you I keep thinking that you're silent and distant not because of what everybody thinks—your uncle and all—but because underneath you're really like me. I keep thinking your silence and my brashness are there for the same reason: to cover up fears.” She breathed out. “Okay,” she said, and then—I had to blink, the shift in her manner was so abrupt—she cocked her head to the side, winked. “So tell me: what do you think?”

We had already gone past her house four times, but each time we approached it she asked if I wanted to keep walking, and each time I said yes. Three more times, she said, and the walls of her house would cave in.

Her neighborhood was peaceful, quiet. There were no apartment houses, no stores, no garbage cans lining the sidewalks. The private homes were set well back from the road, surrounded by lawns, fancy hedges, large shade trees. The wealthier students from Erasmus lived here, closer to the Midwood High School section, a few blocks from Brooklyn College. It was a neighborhood in which I'd never walked with my father and in which, as far as I knew, Abe had no influence.

“Do I still make you nervous?”

“No. Not really.”

“Then you must trust me a little. You must not be afraid of me.”

“Was I afraid of you?”

“Are you kidding? When I first went up to you—I'd been rehearsing my line from the time the game ended—I was afraid you were going to bolt away like a frightened colt, you looked so startled.”

“I played like one. Like a horse. Damn! Why didn't the last shot go in?”

“Fate. But you can look at the bright side, too, David Voloshin. Think of it this way: if you'd won the game, you might have lost me. How does it go—unlucky in cards, lucky in love? I mean, if you'd won the game, would I have been brave enough to approach you?”

She took my hand, rubbed my thumb with hers, gently. We were passing her school again, the elementary school she'd gone to from kindergarten through sixth grade. She led me toward the gate.

“Come. I won't bite. A journey to the scene of Gail Kogan's childhood. A small detour, folks, on the highway of life.”

I followed her toward the school building, away from the lights. I thought of Al Roth. I'd seen him at the Holy Cross schoolyard a few weeks before, standing near the entrance in his street clothes, leaning against the fence, watching us play. He'd taken me under his wing when I was a kid, had given me pointers, encouraged me. Now he was living at home with his parents, growing fat and pasty-faced. I recalled how frightened I'd been near the end of the game, seeing his face suddenly. Would he come to the schoolyard again? In a few years, would I be like him? Nobody asked him about the fixes. Nobody asked him what he was going to do now that he could never play college ball again, now that he'd never get the chance to play pro ball.

“Are you all right? If you'd rather not—”

“I'm sorry. What were you saying?”

“I wasn't saying anything. We were just walking, but you were looking so sad, it made my heart hurt. What is it, David? Tell me! What do you think about when you get the dark look—when those grim, bruised clouds pass over you?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing.” She tightened her grip on my fingers. “Oh you do need somebody to keep an eye on you. It was the first thing I ever felt toward you. Don't you agree that you need someone to watch out for you?”

“So that I won't hurt myself?”

“Yes. If you get the urge, you can think of me, all right?”

“So that I can hurt you instead?”

Her arms were around me, her head against my chest. “Of course not. I'm not like that. I don't believe in martyrdom. It's just that I want you to
like
yourself more, that's all. Why? Because then you'll be able to like me. That's one of Gail Kogan's theories: that people can't give of themselves to others often because they're afraid they have nothing of value to give. If people liked themselves more, they'd feel that when they liked another, they were giving a precious gift to that person, see? Q.E.D. Am I logical?”

I touched the back of her head, ran my hand over her dark curls. We were hidden from the street, standing over a large iron grating in an alcove at the side of the building.

“We used to come here on our lunch hours in the sixth grade. To do things,” she said. “And at night later on, when we were in junior high. Until our parents formed patrols to check on us.”

“To do what things?”

“Smoke. Neck. Pet. We were a most progressive bunch. We stole cigarettes and pills from our parents. We found the sexy passages in books and read them to each other by flashlight. Would you like to kiss me?”

“What?”

“I thought I'd ask, in case you were interested but too shy to begin.”

I thought of things falling through the grating—pennies and nickels and dimes, pens and pencils and erasers, bobby pins and baseball cards and candy and marbles and tie clips and jackknives. I thought of Beau Jack's stories, about the children who lived below the city, and I was glad I hadn't given him my father's old clothes, that I'd simply stuffed them in the garbage. I hadn't seen Beau Jack since my father's death. Was he afraid to be with me? Was he too shy to say anything, afraid he might say the wrong thing? Gail put her hands to my face, touched my eyes, traced their shapes with her index finger, then brushed my mouth lightly with her fingertips. I pulled her closer and wondered if, through her coat, she could feel how hard I was below.

“I—”

“Yes?”

“I don't think your eyes bulge so much. Not at all right now.”

“Yes. Because I'm calm. See how good you are for me?”

“I'm not poison then?”

She drew back, baffled. “Why should you think such a thing? Why should you use such a word?”

“I don't know. I just feel sometimes that there's this vial of the stuff inside me, ready to leak out onto anyone who touches me, who becomes involved with me.”

She took my face between her hands, drew me down to her. We kissed and her mouth opened to me at once. I was so surprised that I almost pulled back. For a split-second, my brain whirled. I saw Jackie Robinson, his teeth gleaming like stars in a black night. Was I crazy? Why was I seeing Jackie when I was kissing Gail? I tried to push his face from my mind. Gail's lips were large and warm—“nigger lips” the guys would have called them. I imagined Rachel rubbing Jackie's back at night, telling him that everything would be all right. I thought of Beau Jack, digging up bodies in France, burying them again. When Jackie married Rachel, Karl Downs, his minister, paid his own way to Los Angeles, to officiate. A few days later, Karl Downs, forced to wait in the corridor of a segregated hospital for an operation he needed and never received, died. Jackie knew that Karl Downs would not have died had his skin been white. Gail pressed against me, moving her head in small circles, varying the pressure, stroking my face, the back of my head, flicking my tongue with hers. I couldn't tell how long we held to that first kiss. When we parted, she backed away, smiled, leaned up and kissed me quickly on the nose, then hugged me.