Before My Life Began (56 page)

“Yes.”

“Sometimes I forget that you're not their real father. Does that bother you still—that they're Paul's?”

“No,” he says quickly. Too quickly? He shrugs. “What bothers me is Paul.”

“And sometimes I forget about your childhood—that would explain it, wouldn't it?—that you weren't raised by a mother and father.”

“I suppose.”

She asks if he will show her what he was doing when he interrupted his work to go down to the woods. She says that it makes her feel peaceful—it did this morning—to know that he is here, doing the work he loves. Aaron lays a perspective grid over his drawing, to check proportions, and explains to Susan that in the books they teach you to make your grids on the thicker paper and to lay the drawing on top, on tracing paper or transparent vellum, enabling you to see through
to
the grid, to transfer the drawing to thicker paper later on if necessary, but that he can't work this way. There are so many different ways of seeing any house, any one room, so many different ways of drawing them, he says—floor plans, orthographic projections, paraline drawings, exterior elevations, section drawings, perspective drawings, shaded drawings—so many ways of making one's way into any house, into any room, that he often, as earlier, becomes lost in possibility. The children like the shaded drawings best—they seem more
real
to them—but Aaron prefers the simpler line drawings.

Drawings, he believes, should not reproduce the world but should, instead, imagine it into being. He wonders: are there more ways of seeing a house—of imagining one—than of living in one? Does Susan sense that this has been behind his reluctance to build his own home? Susan's hands are on his shoulders. She kisses the back of his neck. He imagines that Ellen is standing where Susan is, that he is taking Ellen's hand, guiding it so that she can touch the paper and trace, with a finger, the lines Aaron has drawn.

“I was thinking,” she offers. “If you don't want to look at the land later, it's all right with me. Lucius will be here in about an hour, for his session with me—before church—but if—”

“We can look at the land.” Aaron pauses, laughs lightly. “We may not buy—not ever—but we can look.”

“Oh Aaron—do you know how much you please me still, and that I really don't, as with buying the land, want to take anything
away
from you?

“I didn't say you did. I said that I'm just scared things will
be
taken away—”

“Shh. Don't get upset.”

Her right hand slips down, inside his shirt. She unbuttons the top three buttons of his shirt, rubs his chest and shoulders slowly.

“I love you,” she says. “Can we play here, do you think? You won't be angry? Or I could just stand at the door and watch you work. I could stare at your shoulders, drink in your peacefulness, your strange intensity.” She touches his belt buckle. “Or…”

He does not want to turn and face her. Although he loves being touched, he wonders how it is that she can be so gentle with him—so in love with him when he has withheld so much from her? He looks down at his drawing, at the white space between the second floor landing and the missing stairs. He tries to stare through the whiteness into the vastness beyond, into all that time and space which is his own life, into a past to which the only bridge, he knows, is memory and pain.

Sometimes, as now, he feels that his second life—all the years that have passed since he left Brooklyn, along with all the years to come—will only prove to be a rumination on his first life. Will he ever be able to talk with Susan about such feelings without destroying the life they actually have? Why is it so, he wonders—that truth sometimes has the potential to destroy, while lies can save?

She untucks his shirt. He asks if they have time and she says that she is a practical woman: the boys will watch cartoons when they wake, she has locked the door, Lucius will not arrive for an hour. He touches her hair, kisses her mouth. She licks his lips slowly, as if drawing them with her tongue. She undoes his belt buckle. He is astonished at how much he desires her, at how wonderful it is to feel her hands move across his body, to have her undress him. He lets her guide him. He lies on the floor, face down, rests his cheek against the beige carpeting, and a second later she is lying on top of him, rubbing her breasts across his back. She rises and falls, rolls from one side to the other, and he floats, finds himself entering a region of his memory which, now that he can dwell in it again, surprises him by the fact of its existence. Are the woods still? He thinks of a dead limb, high on a silver maple, imagines it cracking, falling. Silver maples are very brittle. He wonders why it is that it matters to him so much—that it still thrills him after all their years together—that she is such a beautiful woman.

He smiles, hears his father's voice. Do you
know how come I know I'm the smartest man in the world?

Susan is breathing hard, caressing him without stop, licking him along the neck, along his backbone, along his buttocks, down along the insides of his thighs. She asks him if he likes playing in his workroom. He says nothing. He knows that she frightens him a bit when she gets like this because he cannot make sense of the strange mixture in her of woman and child. But wasn't that mixture—of man and boy—what she said she loves so about him? She nibbles at his toes, sucks, bites at his ankles, then begins to move upwards again, hands and mouth at him constantly, lightly. He thinks of her as she was the first time he saw her: at the Three County Fairgrounds, buying cotton candy for Benjamin and Jennifer. She reaches below, and when she moans he hears, a second later, a strange involuntary sound, somewhat higher-pitched, come from his own throat. It was a brutally hot day and it was, he thinks now, something about her very exhaustion that drew him to her, made him bold enough to start a conversation.

Both yours?

They're not yours, mister
.

Her voice was abrupt and hard—like a man's voice, he thinks; like the voice in the woods—as if because of her beauty she was used to replying this way to men who started conversations with her. The strange thing, though, is that in his memory now her voice sounds like Nicky's, when Nicky would try to act tough.

She runs her tongue along his waist in a slight upwards curve, from left to right. She asks him what he likes best, what she can do for him.

“Are you sure we're married?” she asks.

She mounts him, slides down slowly, golden hair falling onto his face. He grabs at her hair, circles a strand with each hand, as if coiling rope, tugs until he knows, from her sweet whimpering, that he is hurting her just enough to please her.

He is crying. Why?

“Are you all right?” she asks.

She has been asleep, her head on his shoulder. He has been floating through space—feet forward, body horizontal, as if in a state of levitation. He has been gliding through white rooms whose walls seem to move sideways, the rooms expanding as he enters them, as if perspective has been reversed and the vanishing point is behind his head.

“I don't know.”

She rises onto an elbow, kisses his eyes, his mouth, his chin. “Happy families are not all alike, or all dull,” she says. “Not this one. We're entitled, Aaron. We've paid our price.”

“I suppose.”

“Talk to me, Aaron. Please? Tell me why you get the way you do—not the tears and not what you say, but that other look—the distant one, the blank one. Sometimes I feel there's just so much of you I can never get close to, that I'll never know about. Tell me why you were frightened earlier. What scares you so, sweetheart?”

He swallows, touches her cheek, remembers the feel of Emilie's skin. He sees Abe's smile, hears Abe telling him that if you were born, like it or not, there was an admission price. Susan licks his cheeks, his eyes, the creases around his mouth.

“You're like a woman sometimes, aren't you—the way you're affected by our love-making.” She kisses the hair on his chest. “When Paul came back into our lives I was frightened for a while that it might sour things. I was frightened that his presence might make you reject me. I kept feeling you wanted to know all the details of my life with him so that you'd have
reason
to reject me. When I first met you—I can tell you now—I was scared that no man would
ever
love me again after all I'd done with Paul, all the crazy things he got me to do.”

Aaron imagines himself leaning on the railing at the five-eighths pole. Abe is beside him, dressed in white—white shoes, white slacks, white shirt, white hat—smiling. God but he loved the man! He sees Abe move off, start a conversation with a young woman. The woman tilts her head, enjoys being charmed.

Why had he loved Abe so? Aaron wants to smile, hearing the question again, but does not. Why, when he was a boy, had he loved Abe more than anyone in the world? In the past, when the question has come, he has usually found himself imagining his father's face, his father's bad eye, and himself, as a boy, wishing that his father could be more like Abe, more of a man. But what he senses now is that when he was a boy what he really felt when he looked at Abe—when he tried to do something that would please Abe—was a desire to change him. If only he could have loved Abe enough, he must have felt, he could have made him less hard, less severe! If only he could have loved Abe enough, the tenderness he sometimes saw in Abe's eyes might not have disappeared! If only he had loved Abe enough, the good and sweet man he knew was there might have shown himself more, might have lived, might have believed it was possible to have lives other than the one he had!

What he wanted, he realizes, was to be able, with his love, to cause the sweetness that was there for him occasionally—in the way Abe would smile, or ruffle his hair, or ask to see his drawings, or tell him a story—to linger and spread. Was it because he believed, as a boy, that his love was inadequate—that it could never change Abe or Abe's life—that he was afraid, except indirectly, to show his love, that he never allowed himself to know just how much he had cared?

“You had choices,” Aaron says to Susan. “You could have refused.”

“Oh Aaron, I was so
young
—and I did love him. He was a wonderful man in many ways and—” She sits up. “Then you
are
still jealous. You do still disapprove, don't you?”

“I don't know.” He blinks. Abe is gone. “No. Not when I think about it. If you hadn't known Paul you wouldn't be the person you are. You wouldn't be the woman I fell in love with. I've thought about that: if I love you, then I love the history you bring with you.”

“Too easy.” She lies down again. “I'll accept the answer for now, though. I'll try to believe that you
want
to believe what you say and that maybe if you want to enough, you'll come to feel—”

“Stop.”

“Are you afraid that I'm still the same woman who once loved him?”

“Maybe.”

“Sure you are. And if I am, then what about you, Aaron? If you're afraid of that in me, what are you afraid of that's analogous in yourself? You chose me, after all, knowing about Paul. I mean, if I chose a man like that once upon a time, what was
wrong
with me? What
might
be wrong with Benjamin and Jennifer? What might still
be
wrong—?”

He looks toward the glass door, toward the grass and the snow and the woods. He is certain now that Paul, voice muffled by handkerchief, has made some of the threatening phone calls. But why? Merely to frighten Aaron? If he were in Brooklyn, he thinks, he could have one of the guys—Lefty or Monk—tap into the lines easily enough, trace the calls.

“How much time until Lucius comes?”

“We're all right,” Susan says. “We'll hear the children. They'll knock first. The door is locked. Lucius will entertain them. You have your clothes. I have mine. Don't move yet, all right? Listen to what I really think, Aaron. Sometimes, sweetheart—sometimes I feel you're angry with me not for anything I've said or done but for being who I was when neither of us knew the other even existed. Sometimes I feel what you really want is for me to
justify
all those years, and it occurs to me, happy as I am, that I'll be damned if—”

“Shh.” He kisses her forehead. It's just that I never expected to be this happy, he wants to say. To have a home, children, a wife. If we're distrustful of others, he imagines her saying next, as she has before, it's usually because we don't trust ourselves. It hurts to realize that they will have no choice but to leave one another in a few minutes. He wishes he could hold to her forever. “Do you ever miss things before they're gone?” he asks.

“Before they're gone? I don't understand.”

“Sometimes when I look at Carl or Larry my stomach sinks, feeling their future absence, imagining them at eighteen or twenty or twenty-five—”

“Early loss,” she says. She touches his mouth with two fingers. “I was reading a book about orphans last week—I almost drove out to the house where you and Lucius were, just to tell you—and one of the orphans—they're all grown men, older than you, and they have reunions, play touch football together—one of them says that the home they grew up in ruined them all somehow for adult life. ‘We gave one another things families don't give to each other anymore,' he says.” She sits up, begins to dress. “Is it so, Aaron? When your eyes cloud over and begin to move backwards inside you, do you feel the same way? Are you remembering some life you used to wish you had? Or resenting the life I had when I didn't know you existed? Talk to me about what it was like for you, Aaron. Was it like that—like what the man in the book says?”

“I suppose. I don't know. It's hard to think that far back.”

“You don't talk much about the home anymore, the way you did when we first met. The children say you still tell them stories from time to time, but they wonder why you don't have any friends from back then, why—”