Before My Life Began (35 page)

“And when your nice young boys tried to hold your hand, and when they walked you back to your dorm and tried to kiss you good night, what happened then?”

“Oh Jesus.”

“Don't oh-Jesus me. Just answer the question.”

“You are being an idiot.” She folded her arms across her breasts. Tobacco, curling from the end of one of her loose cigarettes, looked like pencil shavings.

“You look awful, did you know that? You look terrifically ugly, as a matter of fact. Your ears are bright red and your mouth is thin and hard—a slit—and the vein in your forehead is throbbing. Can you just calm down, please?”

My ears were ringing—a high-pitched buzzing sound—as if there were mosquitos there. I touched a finger to my forehead—the vein felt like a thin, warm rubber band. If I got angry enough, would it burst? Would she comfort me then? Would she cry?

“Jealousy,” Gail stated, “is the illusion of possession.”

“I don't want your fancy theories. Just answer the question.”

“I don't have to and I won't.”

She had her purse and was out of her seat before I could move. I started after her, realized that I hadn't paid for breakfast, and froze. I stood there and watched her go out the door, run across the street. I was aware that other people in the diner were looking at me. Were they laughing? I swallowed hard, closed my eyes, imagined her in the hotel room, taking the pencil and lying on the bed and spreading her legs and trying to do to herself the awful things she said that others had done in order to get rid of their babies. Something slammed into my chest. I looked around, but no one was near me. I stood there in the aisle, immobile, my right hand on my chest, feeling my heart hammering to get out. I took a deep breath, glanced backwards, spotted the check on the table, looked past our booth to the other couple. They sat there as if nothing had happened, sipping their coffee, looking neither at me nor at one another.

By the time I'd paid the bill and walked across the street, I felt calmer. I glanced up at our window, wondered if Gail was already there, watching me. The sunlight, reflecting from the hotel's windows, made them look like rectangles of blue silver. Behind me I heard the sounds of boys playing baseball in the field. It was Saturday. There was no school.

Gail was at the check-in desk, talking to the clerk, and when she saw me she smiled easily, as if she knew what I was going through, as if she knew everything I'd been thinking and feeling.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

I took her hand and we walked to where the racks of newspapers and paperbacks were, near the cigar counter. I saw a headline about Korea, about cease-fire violations. There were photos of President Truman and General Ridgway, the two of them laughing. I remembered the stack of newspapers in our cellar bin in Brooklyn—my father's collection of papers that headlined great events: Lindbergh's flight to Paris, Roosevelt's four elections to the Presidency, Germany invading Poland, Japan bombing Pearl Harbor, the Normandy invasion, V-E Day and V-J Day, Roosevelt's death and Truman's election. My old baby carriage, mosquito netting over it, was nearby. After my father died, without telling me, my mother had burned the newspapers, had given the carriage away to the junkman.

Gail let her head rest against my chest, but without putting her arms around me.

“I didn't want to hurt you, David. Maybe I made a mistake, not telling you, but it meant so little and I was just afraid that—”

“You don't have to apologize. I get a little crazy sometimes too. You're not the only one—”

“It helps, though, doesn't it—to say you're sorry?” She lifted her head, smiled. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” I said. Then, “Did you pay the bill?”

“Uh-uh.” She led me toward the staircase. The lobby smelled of lavender and ammonia. “I sent the telegrams, though.”

“You're teasing me, right?”

“No.”

“You really did it?”

“I sent one to my parents and one to your mother. Do you want me to send one to your uncle too? I'll need the address—”

“You're out of your mind,” I said, but I was beginning to laugh, to feel the tension drain down from my neck and shoulders. “You are absolutely out of your mind.”

“I know. Aren't you glad? And I told them we'd be home tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? I thought—”

She was two steps ahead of me. She turned and looked down. “I signed us up for another night. I figured, since we'd just had our first marital tiff, that we should give ourselves some time to make up. Wasn't that a good idea? Aren't I truly intelligent sometimes? I figured that we were entitled to another whole day and night together, you and me.”

9

M
Y MOTHER
was leaning way out over the edge of the roof, waving at us, shouting down to get our attention. She yelled that she had a surprise waiting for me in the apartment, but that we should come up to the roof first. Gail leaned backwards, her right hand braced against her hip for balance. My mother told her that she looked wonderful, that she should come up and have some ice-cold lemonade, that she must be dying from the heat.

Going up the five flights of stairs I stayed a step below Gail, my hand in the small of her back, as if pushing her uphill. She was pregnant again, and this time there had been no problems. The baby was due the first week in October—it was now the third week in August—and whenever I'd show that I was nervous about becoming a father she would tease me by declaring that I was stuck with her for good, that I'd had my chance to get away the year before and had chosen not to. You
had your chance
. I thought of how cool Beau Jack's apartment would be. I reminded myself that the real reason we were there was that he had telephoned and asked us to stop by, had told me that he had, at last, found what he was looking for, what he wanted to give us. Although he'd never said anything, I sensed that he had been frightened that my mother and Gail's parents might be able to use the miscarriage to force us into separating, and that he hadn't wanted to jinx things by giving us something until he was certain things would be all right with us.

I pushed open the iron door and stepped out, walked around the brick encasement. I felt my shoes sink into the roof's soft, gravelly surface. I told Gail to be careful, to stay close to me, to watch out for vents, bricks,

pipes, guy wires. I took her hand, moved around a chimney, stopped. The three women—my mother, Lillian, Sheila—were lying side by side, sunbathing on an enormous yellow blanket. Their bodies, coated with lotions and creams and oils, shimmered in the afternoon heat. Sheila lay face down between the other two, the top of her bathing suit unhooked, her body evenly tanned. My mother and Lillian lay on their backs, their heads on small plastic pillows. Lillian's nose was covered with a triangle of cardboard. She held a tinfoil reflector, like a bib, under her chin.

Gail leaned against me with one hand, gripped the shaft of a television antenna with the other. The back of my throat ached. I tried to imagine that I was far away, that I was floating high up in the sky on a jet stream, where the air was wonderfully cool and thin, and that I was looking down at the three women, three small plastic dolls embedded in tar.

My mother came toward us, apologizing for having made us climb the five flights, telling Gail to save the kisses unless Gail wanted Noxzema all over her. Sheila sat up, asked Gail how she felt, reached behind and fastened the top of her bathing suit. My mother led Gail away, lifted a jug from a red-and-white-striped ice chest, poured two glasses of lemonade, opened a beach umbrella and pushed it into a roof vent she'd stuffed with a towel. Gail sat in the shade of the umbrella, the glass on her stomach, her feet straight out in front of her. Her ankles were swollen. My mother smoothed Gail's hair, lifted it at the nape of her neck, pinned it up. Gail patted the blanket next to her, handed me my glass. I drank. I imagined a bird swooping down over still water, spreading its wings above its head, the tips touching, so that the wings looked like a black iridescent canopy.

The black heron. Gail had shown me a picture in a book, a photograph of a diorama from a museum in Washington, D.C. The black heron made a circle of shade on the water with its wings so that fish below, thinking it was night, were lured to the surface. I'd told Gail about going to the Museum of Natural History when I was a boy, about wanting to draw the dioramas there, about watching a young man painting the background of one of them once, touching up prairie grass.

Lillian told my mother that Sheila's boyfriend would be coming soon, to take them out for supper. Sheila looked straight at me, asked if Abe had sent me to check up on her. She asked me why, if there was no trouble between Abe and the others, I didn't see my friend Tony anymore.

“Listen Gail,” my mother said. “You're a smart girl. Maybe you can tell me what to do, yeah? I finally let Sam take me down to his vault, only after he gets me in there he tells me he already gave away the good stuff to his daughters. So I walked out on him and now he's calling me a dozen times a day, saying that if I'd said yes a year ago I could have had everything, and do you know what I said back to him?”

Gail pressed the frosted glass to her cheek. “What?”

“I said to him, ‘Sam, if you ask me, you're coming into this marriage bare-assed.'”

I walked to the edge of the roof, sat on the ledge sideways. I could feel the blood rush to my face. I could hear it in my ears. Gail had asked me once if I'd like a job at a museum, painting dioramas, helping to prepare exhibits. I'd never had courses in painting or sculpture, I replied. I didn't know how to use charcoal or watercolors or clay or oil paints. Two days later she brought home a book about the artist who had made the very first paintings and sculptures of prehistoric animals. He had begun by drawing live animals, learning their musculature and movements. Then he consulted with scientists, worked with fossils, made small clay models. Only after that had he dared to paint what he'd originally hoped to paint, conjuring up creatures no artist had ever seen: dinosaurs, mastodons, giant sloths.

A man waved to me from the street, yelled up to ask if Sheila was with me. He was glad I was there, he said. I was just the guy he wanted to see.

I gripped the ledge, but said nothing. I felt the heat move through my skin and into my bones. Winston Churchill's hobby, all through the Second World War, Abe had told me, was bricklaying. Whenever he wanted to relax and think things through, he would go into his backyard and lay bricks. Abe liked that. You could trust bricks to be bricks, he said.

“Is Vincent here already?” Sheila asked.

I remembered Tony, in the schoolyard, making a joke about how so many Italians had broken dicks because they'd been laying so many bricks. I'd seen Tony hanging around the bars on Nostrand Avenue with Vincent. I'd seen Tony riding in a van with his brother Phil. Sometimes I tried to believe that Tony was letting himself get sucked in because of Regina—because he was so bitter that her family had sent her away to Saint Joseph's, up near Hartford, and not to the college in Brooklyn. Was he trying to punish himself so that she would feel sorry for him? Sometimes I tried to imagine how he felt, knowing that I'd done with Gail what he had talked about doing with Regina. But since I saw no way to keep myself from being drawn in further—from having a family and a job and raising a child in the world Abe had made for me, in the world Tony and I had dreamt of escaping—I had to wonder which one of us had been smarter.

My mother went on talking about Sam, about the way he worshipped her, about how the insurance my father left her was almost gone, about how it had never been enough to set her free so that we could move to California. But now that I was married and she was alone—and with a clean bill of health from the doctors—she didn't know what to do. Could she just leave me and Gail and her grandchild here, to live out her life and her brother's life all over again. Should she say yes to Sam anyway? What did we think?

“I think you should shut up.”

The four women stared at me, as if from behind glass, as if frozen in time. None of them blinked. None of them moved. Lillian was bent over, stuffing a pear into her shopping bag. My mother's hand was at her mouth, backwards, the palm toward me. Sheila had one hand at her waist, where she had been buttoning shorts she was slipping on over her bathing suit. The air, hot and unmoving, weighed on my ears. The sun, an enormous globe of lava—salmon-colored in the haze, a filmy orange-red—seemed to be falling through space, to be dripping its heat on me. What would it be like, I wondered, to go through life without ever hearing anything? The heat that penetrated your ears and spiraled toward your brain—would you feel it in a different way? From sports magazines and Beau Jack's copies of
The Police Gazette
I remembered photos of Gene “Silent” Hairston, a black boxer who was deaf, and I remembered wondering, when I was a kid, what it had been like for him, to feel the punches, but never to hear them.

Slowly, eyes closed and body limp, Gail moved her head to the left and then to the right. The scene melted. Sheila sneered. Lillian put the pear into the bag. My mother gestured to Gail with her hands to show how helpless she felt. Elephants, Gail had once told me, flapped their ears in hot weather to cool themselves, to lower the temperature of their blood as it passed through their ears. I thought of Gail sitting up in bed, moaning, pointing to the blood on the sheets. I thought of us in her hospital room, the doctor explaining to us that the miscarriage had been normal—nature's way of getting rid of something that wasn't meant to live—and that there was no reason in the world we wouldn't be able to conceive again and have a healthy baby. Did we believe him? Did Gail believe me when I told her that it wasn't guilt that made me stay with her, love her? Now you have the chance you've been waiting for, she said. So take it.