Before My Life Began (54 page)

“Any calls today?”

“One.”

“What did he say this time?”

“I don't know. Jennifer answered.”

Aaron blinks. He is thinking of another call, one he made eight years ago—the only time he tried to go back, the only time he risked touching the other life. He wanted to know if Gail and Emilie were all right, but he didn't want them to know he was asking. There was only one person he could trust, and he recalls, as he dialed from a phone booth in Albany, and then began dropping quarters and dimes in, how, for a second, he began to hope that maybe Tony would be so happy to hear from him that the two of them would start talking about where they could meet, about how they would roam around the country together, how they would get enough money to buy a trailer they could live in….

“I'm sorry. I shouldn't have lost my temper.”

“It's all right. Paul still knows how to work you, to prey on your jealousy. Don't worry about it.”

“I'm not worried. I'm angry.”

“And confused.”

“No, not really. Mostly I'm angry that he saw he could get to me.”

Is Tony there?

His heart lurches. He puts his arm around Susan, kisses her hair.

Tony
who?

Tony Cremona. I know he may not live there anymore, but I wanted to get in touch with him. If—

Susan's hand moves inside his shirt, along the small of his back. He never wished for his first life to end, he tells himself. But he wonders: had he known he would have a second life like the one he has, would he have been willing to see the first life die? And if, in some way that makes him sadder than he ever dreamt he could be, he does believe that living with Susan and their four children is like a dream come true—his deepest wish fulfilled—does that mean, even in part, that he somehow
willed
his new life into being?

Tony's dead, fella
.

Dead?

Where you been? He died over in Korea two years ago. Hey—who is this anyway?

“Don't be.” Susan sighs, caresses the back of his neck, moves away and starts to put leftover food into containers, to clear the sideboard. She does not seem to notice the sadness that he believes is melting from his eyes. She does not seem to notice that anything is going on inside him besides the feelings he chooses to show her. Poor, sweet Tony. Go
fly a kike, okay?
Sure. Aaron blinks, feels that his eyelids are passing over dry, cold marble. Killers. “Paul,” Susan says. “Paul just likes to stage things, don't you know that yet? He likes to set things up so that he can see how people will, under his control, react. He likes to move people around, to play god to a small, enclosed world. Same old guy. He never fools anybody for long.”

“He fooled you.”

“That's what I said.”

13

E
ARLY MORNING
. Aaron sits on his stool, the creamy-white vellum sheet on the drafting table, his hand poised above it. Pull the pencil, he tells himself. Don't push it. Everything is in the line: its weight, its grace, its length. He rotates the edge of the pencil steadily, pressure constant, to keep the width and tone of the line even. Each line must be drawn in a single stroke, for the essence of a line lies in its continuity. On the paper, a two-point perspective of the home's interior—a design section of the entranceway, two stories high, the front hallway leading to the living room—is half-drawn. Five steps below the second landing, the staircase vanishes. Aaron smiles. It never ceases to amaze, to please: how the drawing of a house seems so much more real to him than the house itself.

Even when, as now, he actually makes his drawings of the house
after
he and Lucius have done most of the work, he still takes great joy from imagining the house into being. He loves seeing the lines appear, enclosing whiteness, the invisible becoming visible so that, where there was nothing, there is now something. Will that magic ever
not
thrill him? He loves the illusion of reality more than reality itself, he supposes. Susan has teased him about this, wondering why, when the actual work is done, he will still finish the drawings that would normally have preceded the work. But no matter how often it happens, he still wonders at the fact that mere pencil line drawn on paper can, within two dimensions, seem to have depth—to project solidly in space.

His erasing shield, cool, clear plastic, moves evenly under the edge of his hand. His coffee mug is to his right, next to the pens and pencils, the triangles and french curves and templates, the tin cans and cigar boxes and shoe boxes decorated by the children with wall paper and construction paper. He lifts the mug carefully, using thumb and forefinger, the stubs of his third and fourth fingers against the mug's side for leverage. His hand is perfectly steady. He sips, looks across the drawing and through the sliding glass doors to the lawn beyond, where young grass glistens bright green—unnaturally so—among patches of snow.

He built his studio onto the back of the house four years before, opening up and extending what had been a small unheated work area at the house's west end—an attached, barnlike room used for storing wood—for a workshop in winter. The skylight above his head lets in an abundance of pale morning light, so that Aaron does not have to use the desk lamp that runs the length of his table. He prefers natural light, always, and in the morning, as now, before anyone else in the house is awake, and especially if the sky is clear and cold, backed, as it were, by an infinite curve of silver, he amuses himself with the thought that the light itself is so brilliantly clear because, given the early hour, it has not yet been much
used
. It seems pure, fresh, crystalline—endless particles of no color—in a way that corresponds to the sense he has of his own mind at this time of day, before it has had to expend itself on things worldly.

He loves the stillness, the peace, the thought that in the house that does actually exist behind him—his house—his wife and children lie asleep in their beds, dreaming dreams he will never know. He imagines each of them: Susan on her side, golden hair across her cheek in an S-curve, a strand tucked into the corner of her mouth; Jennifer on her back, headgear strapped behind her neck, silver orthodontic band curving from ear to ear; Benjamin on top of the covers, prone, hugging his pillow, arms rigid; Larry in the middle of the bed, on his side, in the same relaxed position he was in when Aaron kissed him good night; Carl jumbled in his blankets, his small fist against his mouth, the knuckle of his thumb pushing his upper lip, pressing against the gum.

Aaron prefers cutaway drawings in perspective to floor plans or architectural renderings or paraline drawings; he likes seeing the series of doors and windows that open, one on the other, within a drawing that he has already sliced, ceiling to floor, and entered. He likes seeing Paul and Debbie's hallway through the severed front door, and the living room through the door that backs the front hallway, and then the smaller door at the far end of the living room that leads to the kitchen and the dining area beyond. The doors and windows, like the staircase, are still partly unrealized—no panes within the windows, no frames around the doors—yet they are whole within his mind, the lines straight and true. At the bottom left he has almost completed a detailed rendering of the front door, six feet high, inch-and-a-half-thick paneled chestnut, vertical sidelights to right and left, a wooden fanlight above. He sands the lead in his compass-pencil to a fine chisel point, draws the outer curve of the fanlight—a semicircle—the curve first, then the straight bottom edge, so that the tangents will match.

He thinks of Jackie Robinson. Jackie is wearing a double-breasted gray suit and is sitting behind his desk at Chock Full O'Nuts, where he is a vice president. Aaron wishes he could reach out across time and space, run his palm over Jackie's frizzy white hair. He wishes he could run the edge of his hand across the planes of Jackie's strong, good face. He is taller than Jackie, and he realizes, to his surprise, that he was taller than him even in high school, during the years Jackie played for the Dodgers. He sees them standing together, his hand on Jackie's shoulder, the two of them posing for photographs. What are they celebrating? Why is he taller than the man who was his hero?

Despite all the lead holders and fancy mechanical pencils he owns, he ends up, most of the time, using a common 2H wood pencil, mediumhard, that does not erase easily. Is it the blackness of line that causes him to feel the edge of Jackie's face? In the newspaper, two days before, he read the item about Jackie's son volunteering for the Army. Why? Why
now?
Jack Junior is seventeen years old, and Aaron senses that the troubles the sportswriters allude to—the special school Jack Junior has had to attend—are deeper than they feel free to say. How can it be? After such a long journey and so many hopes, can one lose all if one's own son…

Aaron shifts the straight edge of an adjustable triangle from right to left, the tapered pencil-point moving down from top to bottom, creating each individual strut in the window fan. If Jack Junior is shipped to Vietnam, as seems certain, and if he dies there, and if Jackie waits at the airport, hunched in a black overcoat, hands in pockets, reporters around him, to see the casket come off the plane, to identify the body… A line goes over the bottom edge of the window fan. Damn! Aaron feels Jackie's rage surging through his own body, oceans boiling to steam. Aaron slides the shield down, finds a small square, erases through it, moves the shield, dusts away the pale orange dots of eraser with his drafting brush.

The front door to Paul's home is more than 150 years old, yet it is as straight and true today as it was on the day it was first hung. Aaron sketches the details surely, working from top to bottom, using different-size triangles—top rail to frieze panels to frieze rail to middle panels to lock rail to bottom panels to bottom rail. For the house Susan wants, he decides, he will build a door like this, though he will have a hard time getting chestnut. Perhaps he can find enough from an old barn being torn down in the area. The Polish farmers in Hadley and Hatfield do that, to save on taxes, to sell the wood. Aaron likes to knock out the old beams and walls, store them—air-layered—down near the stone wall. Later in the day he and Susan will drive out with the children to look at the piece of property she has found and has fallen in love with—fourteen acres in North Leverett, near the sawmill—and he realizes that he is already, however wary, and only a month after she first mentioned it and they first fought over it, getting used to the idea of buying land, of building on it.

He stands and stretches. Outside, twenty feet from the window, a chickadee, upside down, moves along the trunk of the silver maple. He slides the glass door sideways, steps out into the cold morning.

He crosses his arms, rubs them to stimulate warmth, begins to shave the pencil point, to watch the curls of wood slip off, float. There are, he recalls with some surprise, only two children in the house. Benjamin and Jennifer are spending'the weekend with Paul and Debbie. They took their sleeping bags and pillows with them. Aaron imagines them snuggled inside the sacks, wood shavings around their heads. He and Lucius sanded the old floors a week before but have not yet stained or waxed them.

He sees a shadow in the woods, beyond the stone wall. Is it moving? He shields his eyes to cut the glare of morning light on snow, looks back at the house briefly—his drafting table and filing cabinets framed in the door's window—then looks to the woods again. The woods are mostly gray, tree trunks and branches specked with wine-red dots of maple buds, with glossy patches of mountain laurel.

Suddenly the questions swarm: Where will they get the money to buy the land Susan wants? Where, for that matter, will they get enough money to live on if no new houses come along before the fall? And if he gets no new work, what about Lucius? What if Lucius returns to Mississippi? Can he hold Lucius back?

What of Paul and Debbie? Aaron's jaw tightens. He regrets having agreed to do the house but knows that nobody talked him into it. His own choice. He hates dealing with Paul, receiving his praise, watching Debbie float by, stoned to the skies. Benjamin and Jennifer come home from visits with Paul and Debbie in moods that foul the air in Aaron's home. But what else could he have done? Given Susan's resolve—that the children should have, her phrase, free access to their true father—he thought it might help if he showed that he wanted to cooperate, that he bore Paul no ill will. Still, Aaron will be happy when the restorations are done and he does not have to see Paul. He senses something strange, even sick, going on with Paul and Debbie, but he cannot name it or prove it, and Susan continues to stand firm: Paul is the children's father, they are Paul's children. It is right and natural for them to spend time together. How can he argue with her? Would he want never to see Carl or Larry again?

He tightens his grip on his knife, scrapes the lead to a long tapered point, tests the point against his left index finger. Is it that he somehow connects Paul's reentry into their life with Susan's decision to return to work in the fall, to take courses at the university? Susan has been tutoring Lucius on a regular basis, has decided she misses teaching, misses the theater, misses being involved with other people. She has been after Aaron to join her—to take courses, to get a degree. She already has a degree in theater, and now wants to get one in counseling. Does Aaron, she asks, want to spend the rest of his life drawing houses and pounding nails?

He imagines Susan waking, brushing her hair. Sometimes, when he watches her in front of the bedroom mirror, it is Tony he sees, Tony brushing his hair from his forehead, getting ready to ask a question. But what question would Tony ask?

Something is moving in the woods. A deer passing through? Aaron tenses. He squints, and before his eyes can register whether what he sees is shadow or form the blade has cut into his left index finger and he watches bright red blood flower from the cut, sees a drop fall and stain the snow, fade to pink. Has he felt pain? All is still. The sun is higher. He recalls, if dimly, waking at night, seeing a shadow on the bedroom door, rocking gently back and forth—Emilie in Gail's arms, her small head against her mother's breast. The truth, Aaron admits, is that even if Paul were deserving of his children's love, Aaron would probably resent him. He turns, goes inside.