Before My Life Began (67 page)

“I like the barns.”

“The barns?”

Nicky kisses him on the cheek. He turns to face her and she does not move back. Her lips, cool and soft, are light against his skin.

“There!”

She points to the drawing on the table, in pencil, of three Hadley tobacco barns, so much longer than they are high, set low on the horizon, their vertical slats, which run the full length of the barns, open to the autumn air.

“Oh. The barns,” Aaron says. “Yes.”

Nicky laughs. “Were you asleep? I kept knocking, but you didn't come to the door.”

“No. I was daydreaming, I guess.”

“You don't mind my coming down here.”

“Why should I mind?”

“Larry says it's your sanctuary, that you get angry sometimes if—”

“Maybe.” He takes her hand, kisses it. “But no. I don't mind. Not today. No secrets here—not from you, Nicky. I do like to come here, though—to be by myself, to let my mind drift, to remember things, to imagine—”

“Jackie?”

“Sure.”

“Jackie and what else?”

“Jackie and me as a boy, idolizing him, rooting for him, wanting him to show the bastards just how good he was, how much of a man—”

“Did the other guys at the orphanage feel the same?”

“I suppose.”

“I suppose. With the same intensity—with
your
intensity?

“I doubt it.”

“Me too.”

Aaron laughs. “Listen, Larry came up with this during the summer when I took the kids camping in New Hampshire. ‘Do you know what I figured out, Dad,' he said to me one day. ‘What?' I asked, and he began to smile the way he does. ‘That camping is a very in-tents experience.' Get it?”

Nicky groans.

“But how did Jackie do it, Nicky? How did he let that talent loose day after day when he knew thousands—millions—of people were waiting for him to fail? Every time he came to bat, every time a ball was hit toward him. What kept him going?”

“His belief in himself.”

“Maybe.” Aaron shakes his head. “He was a cold man, really. I've been remembering that. When he played, and after.”

“Like you, right? All talent, no heart.”

Nicky kisses him on the forehead. Aaron lets his left hand rest on her stomach.

“The baby's kicking. Can you tell?”

Aaron presses lightly, searches for the baby's shape, for the feet.

“I think so. How many months now?”

“Thirteen weeks to go, but the doctor says it might come early this time. Second children often do.”

“Where's Samuel?”

“Upstairs. I parked him in front of the TV. I thought you might want to be alone with me first and I didn't want him to be tempted to put his sweet little hands on your drawings. Those barns are wonderful! How do you get the details? The tobacco leaves peeking out of the openings with their curled edges—they—” Nicky stops. “You're very upset, aren't you?

“Yes. I'm very upset.”

“How would you feel about us just holding each other for a while?”

Aaron stands, puts his arms around Nicky, holds her. He thinks of Gail, of the kitchen on Ocean Avenue, of a moment—perhaps ten days before Emilie was born—when he held to Gail this way. Well, he thinks. Did he love her or did he love her?

He leaves the studio, walks upstairs, Nicky's small fist tight around two of his good fingers. He should know more than most that life is never predictable. Why, then, is he always surprised—frightened—when the unexpected occurs? Is it ever possible to feel ready—to
be
ready—for
whatever
may happen, for
any
of life's possibilities? He says hello to Samuel, lifts the boy in the air and tosses him toward the ceiling the way he remembers Abe doing with him, before the war.

“More!” Samuel says. “More! More!”

“You look very pale,” Nicky says. “I'll fix you something. Did you have breakfast?”

“Yes.”

“Have a second then. On me.”

Aaron sets Samuel down, nuzzles the skin between Samuel's chin and shoulder. Samuel has Mark's build, Nicky's intense gray eyes. He tries to imagine Samuel at seventeen or eighteen, grinning, showing a chipped front tooth. What will news of Mississippi in the summer of 1964 mean to him by then, in 1986 or 1987? How will he ever understand that a moment in history—Malcolm and Martin alive, moving closer to one another in belief and spirit—had been missed, and that an entire nation was, forever after, doomed? Despite his knowledge—the history his father and mother and others can give to him—how will he ever feel that things might, for so many, have been otherwise.

In the kitchen, Nicky moves efficiently, gracefully—taking eggs from the refrigerator, putting bread in the toaster oven, pouring orange juice, fixing Samuel a snack, setting the table. She asks Aaron about his courses, about his work in Holyoke. Aaron travels there three times a week—two afternoons and Saturday mornings—helping out in Operation Renewal, teaching carpentry to blacks and Puerto Ricans. The project seems sensible: if poor people restore condemned and abandoned buildings according to conditions set down by the city's housing commission, the buildings will become theirs. Nicky wonders how Aaron finds the time to do all he does—to take care of the boys and the house; to oversee the construction work; to be part of Operation Renewal….

“Do you miss having Susan around?”

“No.”

“You manage very well.” Nicky turns. “For a father you make a pretty damned good mother. How are Jennifer and Benjamin? Do you hear from them? Do they hear from you? Is Paul still alive and kicking?”

“Susan writes to them occasionally. The last time was from San Francisco. She was living with a man ten years younger than herself—an actor she met in a repertory company she's part of.”

“And—?”

“And what?”

“And what do you
feel
about her, you big dope—what do you feel about all that being gone, about Jennifer and Benjamin being away, about the boys growing up without a mother?”

“Do you mean, do I wish I had
you
here instead of Susan?”

Nicky hesitates, a cracked brown eggshell cupped in the fingers of her right hand. Her look darkens—changes from one of delight to one of concern, and it is as if, in the instant between the time Aaron has asked the question and she has thought of answering it, she changes from the young girl he once knew to the woman she actually is. He calculates: they met more than eight years ago. She has been married to Mark for six years. Samuel is almost four.

“No,” she says, and she turns back to the stove, drops the eggshell into the sink. “Not at all.”

“You're happy with Mark?”

“Very.”

She cracks more eggs, swirls them with a whisk, leans to the left and lifts toast from the toaster oven.

“Would you butter these, please? Timing. Everything's timing—getting everything there and warm at the same moment.”

Aaron goes to the counter, butters the toast. He opens the refrigerator, takes out a jar of blackberry jam.

“I made this with the boys, in August.”

“Paul?”

“He sends them a postcard every six months or so. He's living in the south of France, supported, as near as I can make out, by his father's money and—if we can believe the stories he told Ben—by the C.I.A. Who knows? Jennifer says that he claims to be living with a woman who's some kind of princess, utterly gorgeous and about two years older than Jen is.”

“Still courting Susan then.”

“Susan?”

“Women the same age Susan was when he met her. Like Debbie.” Nicky passes him, moving to the kitchen table, a frypan in one hand, a spatula in the other, and as she passes she jabs him with an elbow. “Sensitive women of that age are often irresistibly drawn to attractive older men, or haven't you noticed?”

“I noticed,” he says, and he smiles, realizing that sometimes Nicky's voice reminds him, not of Susan's, as he used to think, but of another. How strange, he thinks. How obvious.

Fun by the ocean with Davey Voloshin…

“I saw Louise the other day,” Nicky offers. “Shopping in Louie's. She had the child—hers and Lucius's—in an umbrella stroller. She's pregnant again. Did you know that? Did you know that she remarried—?”

“Yes.”

“Do you ever hear from Lucius? Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

“Should I shut up?”

“I don't know.”

“But you were thinking about him before, when I mentioned Susan's name, weren't you? I could tell from your eyes, from—”

“Enough. Okay?”

“Sorry. After all this time, I didn't think what happened could still get to you.”

“It doesn't, usually. It's just that with the news about Jackie and—”

“Shh,” Nicky says. She bends over, kisses Aaron on the forehead, and when he feels her warm lips on his skin, he finds that he is forcing himself to see the scene again, in Susan's house—so that he will be able to make it go away? so that he will feel even more depressed than he already is?—when, three months after the first time he found her there with Lucius, he discovered them again, but not in the kitchen. Why didn't he kill them? Why, when he saw them—Susan's hair across Lucius's cheek like a soft gold curtain—did he feel as if he had already witnessed the scene before? Did they
want
him to discover them? Were they so weary of their secret and their guilt? Did they merely, in some strangely kind and deliberate way, want to give him enough time to make sense of the knowledge that he had taken in, if dimly, the first time he found them together?

“I don't mind living alone,” Aaron says. “I was scared at first—the first month or two. Did I ever tell you?”

“You wrote. But tell me again.”

“I was scared that without Susan I'd be incomplete somehow, that without her on the other side of the kids—for balance, as it were—there wouldn't
be
any family. But there is. Me and the boys—that's family enough. And Ben and Jen, when they come home.”

“Does Ben like it at M.I.T.?”

“He loves it.”

“No regrets?”

“Regrets?”

“About turning down all those athletic scholarships and becoming the great college athlete his father could have been and never was?”

“No.”

“Following in his father's footsteps, is that it? Renunciation as a way of life.”

“I hope not.” Aaron laughs, stares hard at her eyes. “Though there are some pleasures in renunciation.”

“You bet. But listen. I remember you once told me that being an only child, and then an orphan, used to make you feel that you were incomplete somehow, as if your parents hadn't finished
making
you.”

“Did I say that?”

“Don't play naive. You said it and you know it. Did you feel that more when you were younger, or after you were put in the orphanage?” Nicky scoops eggs out of the frypan, sets the buttered toast, cut on the diagonal, onto the edges of their plates. She sits. “And speaking of renunciation, are you seeing anyone these days?”

“Now and then.” He shrugs. “It doesn't seem important.”

“What does?”

“The children. My work. My friends. You.”

“Think you'll ever marry again, given this new and enthusiastic attitude toward women?”

“I don't know. Once the first year passed and I saw we'd be fine—me and Larry and Carl—I haven't thought about it much. If it happens, it happens.”

“I heard you before. You know that, don't you?”

“Sure.”

“Sure.”

She reaches across, takes his hand in her own, rubs the stubs of his missing fingers.

“I love you very much, Aaron, but not in that way. I'm not the girl I once was. You're not the man you once were. Can I say it all now? Oh sure. I suppose I could let myself fall in love with you that way again—what grown-ups can't, if they decide to let themselves?—but what
for
now? Think of the mess it would make. And think of this too—what I feel most of all—of how we can get so much more out of
friendship.”

Aaron smiles, but not easily. “Sure,” he says. “I suppose.”

“I suppose.” Nicky stretches, one hand moving past her hip, towards the small of her back. “Oh Aaron, you are such a wonderful man. Jesus!” Her hand moves forward, hesitates, drops. She takes up her fork, begins eating her eggs, motions to him to do the same. “I mean, I can see the whole thing, right? I leave Mark and he goes to California and meets Susan and then we spend the rest of our lives shuttling the kids from one coast to the other—Paul and Susan's, Mark's and mine, yours and Susan's, Mark's and Susan's, yours and mine, Paul and Debbie's, Paul and his princess's—how many families worth by now?—and if we can't figure out whose turn it is, we send them off to France. So do you know what I really think? I think it would be a goddamned shame if even a small part of you stayed so wounded that you didn't let some good and lucky woman into your life again. There are a few of us around, you know. Scared?”

“Maybe.”

“Scared,” Nicky asserts. “But listen. Would you want more children? Would you be willing to have a second family?”

“A
second?
I don't understand. I already—”

“Besides the one you have now, I mean.”

“Yes.” Nicky does not seem to notice his confusion. “Sure.”

“I mean, think of the waste, Aaron. A man like you and all those good women out there wondering why you're not in their lives. You
could
imagine having a new family?”

“Yes.”

“It'll happen then. Okay. Tell me this—are you happy these days, all things considered?”

“Yes.”

“Still a man of many words. What was it you said they called you at the Home—the silent one? Like Lou Gehrig, right?” She goes to the gas range, brings more coffee. “The difference always amazes me, though. Still. How silent you can be—not withdrawn, really, but just silent in a warm way, especially when you're around the people you love—and then the way you can suddenly talk like no one else I know, the way—” She stops, licks a scrap of egg from between her upper teeth. “So tell me—why am I here and why did you call this meeting?”