Before My Life Began (34 page)

Gail and I lay there, holding one another, and she was so still that I wondered how I would feel were she to die in my arms. I wondered what was going to happen next, and about exactly what Abe would say to me when I returned. Then daylight was pouring in through the window—I must have slept—and Gail lay beside me, smiling.

I heard cars, below our window, honking, and I winced slightly, pulled Gail closer. I remembered one longshoreman calling Abe a prick, a circumcised prick—and Abe answering back—it was the first time I heard the line and I used it afterwards, with my friends—
That's true, Gino, but without us pricks where would you cocksuckers be?
I leaned over and picked up the drawing.

“If I had a good eraser I could have done your hair better. I couldn't lift off some of the pencil—the shading—once I'd put it down.” I stopped. “You really like it?”

“I love it.”

“I feel kind of dizzy. Do you feel dizzy?”

“No. And the morning sickness is gone too. It only lasted two weeks.”

“Everything's kind of hazy and spinning,” I said, my eyes closed. “Lots of tiny white dots. Circling. Remember the Lone Ranger rings you used to look into, shaped like little silver atomic bombs and when you took off the tailpiece and went into a closet and stared into it you saw thousands of tiny white specks, as if you were seeing an atomic explosion or the end of the world?”

“I'm hungry. Are you hungry?”

“I made the drawing for you.” I kissed her hair. I sensed that both of us were afraid to leave, afraid that if we went into the world all that we'd been feeling would be shattered. “It was supposed to be your wedding gift. When you woke up I was going to—”

“Oh David.” Tears ran down her cheeks, slid into my mouth. “Forgive me, but I think Gail Kogan awoke from a dream and didn't know if she were a happy woman who had just dreamt she was Gail Kogan, or Gail Kogan dreaming she was a happy woman.”

“I didn't know if I could still draw, though. I was frightened to try again.”

“I could take in washing,” Gail offered. “We could send you to art school. I type seventy-five words a minute. I take shorthand, Gregg-Pittman method. Or I could transcribe books into Braille—I have specialized training. I can use a Braille typewriter. I'm bright and young and efficient—”

“—and pregnant.”

“Well, just a little bit,” she laughed. “Or maybe we could
make
books together—stories that I'd write and you'd illustrate.” She stopped. “I
know
I'm pregnant, David, but that will only be for six more months, and then…” She faltered, found no words, pulled me closer to her and held me so tightly that I gasped. “I
am
frightened too, David. I'm very frightened sometimes.”

“I know.”

“We haven't talked about practical things at all, about whether or not I'll leave college or if you'll go to college or how we'll pay for things or where we'll live or what hospital we'll use. If my parents offer us money, or if your family does, should we accept? I wouldn't mind working, really, while you went to school. I know I'm very bright, but that's not uncommon—”

“Forget it. Okay? Let's just forget it and change the subject, if you don't mind. What I think is that you worship me too much. Lots of people can draw well. I've seen drawings in books and museums. I've seen the sketches real artists did long before they got to my age. I'm not so terrific.”

“You won't know that unless you try.”

“I
haven't
tried. That's the whole point!”

“But it wasn't easy in your home, David! It—”

“It's never easy. So do me a favor and don't try to cheer me up. I admit that I wonder sometimes how good I might have been if I'd stuck with it, but so what? I didn't. Sure. We only know that we're here, the way we are, not—”

“But you can be as good as you want! We're
young
. The talent is still there. It hasn't leaked out of you, don't you see? It's never too late to start, if only—”

“No,” I said, cutting her off. “Sometimes it is too late.”

Which did I want more, a girl or a boy? I said I didn't care, that all I wanted was a healthy baby, but she insisted that I answer the question, and the answer—to my surprise—was that if I had to choose, I preferred a girl. Why? Because it would make things easier for me. Because I'd think of it more as being
her
child? Partly. But also because of me, because I wouldn't worry so much about the bad influence I might have on a girl. I wouldn't worry so much about my temper, about the way I imagined I might get frustrated with a boy if he didn't do things the way I wanted him to. Was I afraid, Gail asked, of having a son look up to me too much?

What she thought we should do next, she said—feeding me a piece of sausage from her plate—was to send telegrams to her parents and to my mother, congratulating them on the marriage of their children. I told her she was nuts. She agreed, but claimed she was being practical, that the telegrams would serve a real purpose: by the time we got home they would have had time to get used to the idea. The best defense, she declared, was a good offense.

We were almost finished with breakfast. From where I was sitting I could see our hotel, and while Gail talked I tried to figure out which window it was that I'd been looking out. I felt restless, eager to get away, to get back to Brooklyn. I remembered a movie I'd seen not long after Abe got home—
Pride of the Marines
—a true story of a blind Marine, where John Garfield played the blind guy and Dane Clark played his buddy. Abe looked a lot like John Garfield, and I'd bragged about it to my friends, told them that Garfield had grown up fighting in Jewish gangs on the Lower East Side. I could hear Garfield's rough voice, see his slanted smile.

Gail asked if I wanted to stay for another day so that we could catch up on our sleep all afternoon and play again all night. Under the table, her foot was in my lap—her shoe off—and she was wiggling her toes along the inside of my thighs. She asked why I didn't look at her and I said I was looking at the window of our hotel room. Did I expect to see somebody looking down at us—a spy? a ghost?

A young couple entered the diner, and Gail, following my eyes, turned to watch them. The guy wore a navy-blue blazer with silver buttons, a fancy crest on the breast pocket. The girl was strikingly beautiful—small, sharp features, pale-pink lips, luminous sky-blue eyes, a dimpled chin, light-blond hair that was almost white. They passed us without looking our way, sat down in a booth.

“Oh dear,” Gail said, raising her eyebrows. “I wonder what brings
them
to Elkton?”

“Stop. They'll hear.”

“Never. Their ears are too sophisticated. Did you notice how they seemed to refuse to notice us? Yet I saw the girl glance at you while pretending to look past you. She liked what she saw and even in her prissy little mind she must be wondering what the difference is, between the night she just spent with her betrothed and the pleasures I must have tasted with a man like you, with—”

“I said to cut it
out—”

“They won't hear a thing.” Gail leaned back. “They hear the way they speak. Very softly and discreetly. Notice, if you will, in a minute, how little their jaws move when they talk and eat. Wired at birth is what I've heard. They do that to your jaw if you're born to an upper-class Protestant family. It's their equivalent of circumcision, a surgical procedure ensuring that you won't ever show much emotion should the temptation arise.”

“Listen, Gail—”

“The groom, wearing his Princeton blazer and tie, will attend the Wharton School of Business next fall. The bride, a senior at Dana Hall Academy and an Aryan from Darien, wearing matching skirt and sweater from Peck and Peck in this spring's new heather tones, was knocked up by her flancé in the back seat of an Austin-Healy during halftime of the Princeton-Yale game, and—”

I grabbed her wrist. “I said to cut it out.” Her jaw went rigid, her eyes wide with rage. “What's gotten into you?”

“Nothing.” She looked down. “Okay. I'll be quiet. Let go, though.”

I let go. “What gets into you sometimes? I mean, what did they do to you?”

“Nothing.” She picked at the skin around her thumbnail. “But you'd like a girl like that, wouldn't you? You'd like some nice cool, clean young thing like that, with long ironed hair and ivory thighs and authenticated pedigree from the Junior League.”

“No.”

“Do you know why I think it is that Jewish boys like you lust after these silent
shiksas
so much? Do you? My brother was the same before he settled for Janet. Do you know why? I'll tell you. So they can have it both ways.”

“Here we go again.”

“Really, David. Do you think I'm blind, that I didn't see the way you looked at her? Her boyfriend had the lean look and you had the hungry look, right?” She leaned towards me, her hands tight around her water glass. “I've thought about it, though, and the answer is that it's the challenge and the lack of challenge—that they promise a life of privacy and of peace, without nagging, an image of a woman totally unlike the women you've grown up with, who've smothered you, and yet that's the challenge, isn't it? To try to smash that calm, cool exterior, to see if you can get someone as beautiful and self-contained as that to do every little hot and dirty thing you want, until they're begging for more—until they worship you more than your mothers ever did—”

I grabbed for her wrist, but she was too quick. She pulled back, and as she did she knocked her water glass over. She set the glass back up, smiled at me triumphantly. With exaggerated calm, she took paper napkins and began mopping up the water.

“But why are you so upset, Mr. Voloshin? You seem quite vexed. Would you like to talk about it?”

“Don't pull your psychological shit on me. You're jealous is all. You don't fool me one bit.”

“You would like a girl like that, though,” she said quietly, tears in her eyes. “I can tell. You'd really like a nice, modest little girl who won't make demands on you, and someday you'll get tired of me and my mouth and my brain and go out and get one—the line forms to the left, ladies—and you'll justify running away because you'll say I trapped you, that I cheated you out of some other life you never lived.”

“I like the life I'm living in. I don't think about the lives I don't have.”

“You're just saying that because you feel sorry for me.”

“I feel sorry for me more.”

“For
you—?”

“I'm the one who has to listen to you.” I took her left hand, kissed the wedding ring, then her palm. “I love you.” I thought of Abe, in his car, turning his Army ring, the stone pressed tight into his fist.

“I used to imagine I was a girl like that—a young Wasp from some snazzy little girl's school, with fair skin and flaxen hair, who reads
The Diary of Anne Frank
and dreams of being a girl like
me:
of being a dark, intelligent, brooding, Semitic city girl.”

She stuffed a napkin into the corner of her mouth and bit down. Her lips were slightly puffy and bruised—plum-colored—and I reached across, touched them. Outside I watched an old prewar Chrysler with New York plates move slowly up the hill, stop in front of our hotel. Gail looked away.

“Do you think I'm
very
crazy, David? Is it very crazy to have wanted to be one of them wanting to be me wanting to be a girl like Anne? I mean, what if Anne Frank had been less altruistic? What if she'd survived because she was selfish and shrewd and calculating?”

I kept my eye on the car across the street. Two men sat in the front seat, someone else in the back. The waitress poured us more coffee.

“Would you let me fix the drawing later, before we leave?” I asked.

“I think I have a pencil with a good eraser.” She put her purse on the table. “You asked me before—”

I wondered what it would be like if we didn't go back, if we simply decided to stay on in a small town like this, to get jobs, to start new lives with new names. I smiled. I took the pencil from Gail, then spotted something glistening under her fingers and before she could stop me I pushed her hand aside, reached down into her purse, pulled out a pack of Camel cigarettes.

“You
smoke?”

“Once in a while. Sure. When I'm studying.”

She tried to take the pack from me. “Nine out of ten doctors prefer Camels,” she said. “The tenth takes a taxi, right? Give it to me, please.”

“But
why?”

“Because they're soothing to my T-zone, okay? And because I get horny sometimes, away from you week after week, and because as we well know I'm very oral, a quality in me of which you reap the benefits.” I squeezed the pack of cigarettes, listened to the crinkling sound the cellophane made. She snapped her purse shut. “Listen. Can we just forget about it? I told you on the phone how horny I was feeling and you even joked and told me to put something in my mouth, remember? So stop looking at me that way.”

Across the street a man in a business suit helped an elderly couple from the car. The woman wore a hat with a veil.

“Tell me the truth—do you ever worry about losing me?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Why should you ever think that you're less than other girls?”

“And why should you think there's a vial of poison inside you?” She pressed her lips to my hands. “Don't you think that's the worst thing in life, David? That we sometimes hate ourselves because of the very goodness inside us?”

“You said yesterday that guys were after you a lot, at Smith. Did you ever accept dates with any of them?”

“Once or twice—sure—but it didn't mean anything. There were these mixers with Amherst College you were sort of required to attend. I mean, I did it as much to be with some of the girls, really—not to feel so left out all the time—as for anything else.” I let the heat flow through me, fill me. I watched the fear enter her eyes. “It didn't mean a thing, David. Believe me.”