The Collected Stories (56 page)

Let's go, said Uncle Stan.

I'd finished my lunch, but Art Foods believes that any eating time is the body's own occasion and must not be hurried. In the booth behind me two men were speaking.

The first man said: I already have one child. I cannot commit suicide until he is at least twenty or twenty-two. That's why when Rosemarie says, Oh, Dave, a child? I have to say, Rosemarie, you deserve one. You do, you're a young woman, but no. My son (by Lucy) is now twelve years old. Therefore if things do not work out, if life does not show some meaning,
MEANING
by God, if I cannot give up drinking, if I become a terrible drunk and know I have to give it up but cannot and then need to commit suicide, I think I'd be able to hold out eight or nine years, but if I had another child I would then have to last twenty years. I cannot. I will not put myself in that position.

The other man said: I too want the opportunity, the freedom to commit suicide when I want to. I too assume that I will want to in ten, twenty years. However, I have responsibilities to the store, the men that work there. I also have my real work to finish. The one serious thing that would make me commit suicide would be my health, which I assume will deteriorate—cancer, heart disease, whatever. I refuse to be bedridden and dependent and therefore I am sustained in the right to leave this earth when I want to do so and on time.

The men congratulated each other on their unsentimentality, their levelheadedness. They said almost at the same time, You're right, you're right. I turned to look at them. A little smile just tickled the corners of their lips. I passed one of my leaflets over the back of the booth. Without looking up, they began to read.

Jack and I were at early-morning breakfast when I told him the two little stories. And Jack, I said, one of those men was you.

Well, he said, I know it was me. You don't have to remind me. I saw you looking at us. I saw you listening. You don't have to tell stories to me in which I'm a character, you know. Besides which, all those stories are about men, he said. You know I'm more interested in women. Why don't you tell me stories told by women about women?

Those are too private.

Why don't you tell them to me? he asked sadly.

Well, Jack, you have your own woman stories. You know, your falling-in-love stories, your French-woman-during-the-Korean-War stories, your magnificent-woman stories, your beautiful-new-young-wife stories, your political-comrade-though-extremely-beautiful stories …

Silence—the space that follows unkindness in which little truths growl.

Then Jack asked, Faith, have you decided not to have a baby?

No, I've just decided to think about it, but I haven't given it up.

So, with the sweetness of old forgiving friendship, he took my hand. My dear, he said, perhaps you only wish that you were young again. So do I. At the store when young people come in waving youth's unfurled banner
HOPE,
meaning their pockets are full of someone's credit cards, I think: New toasters! Brand-new curtains! Sofa convertibles! Danish glass!

I hadn't thought of furniture from the discount store called Jack, Son of Jake as a song of beginnings. But I guess that's what it is—straw for the springtime nest.

Now listen to me, he said. And we began to address each other slowly and formally as people often do when seriousness impedes ease; some stately dance is required. Listen. Listen, he said. Our old children are just about grown. Why do you want a new child? Haven't we agreed often, haven't we said that it had become noticeable that life is short and sorrowful? Haven't we said the words “gone” and “where”? Haven't we sometimes in the last few years used the word “terrible” and we mean to include in it the word “terror”? Everyone knows this about life. Though of course some fools never stop singing its praises.

But they're right, I said in my turn. Yes, and this is in order to encourage the young whom we have, after all, brought into the world—they must not be abandoned. We must, I said, continue pointing out simple and worthwhile sights such as—in the Countryside—hills folding into one another in light-green spring or white winter, the sky which is always astonishing either in its customary blueness or in the configuration of clouds—the way they're pushed in their softest parts by the air's breath and change shape and direction and density. Not to mention our own beloved city crowded with day and night workers, shoppers, walkers, the subway trains which many people fear but they're so handsomely lined with pink to dark dark brown faces, golden tans and yellows scattered amongst them. It's very important to emphasize what is good or beautiful so as not to have a gloomy face when you meet some youngster who has begun to guess.

Well, Jack said.

Then he said. You know. I like your paragraphs better than your sentences. That comment wasn't made (I knew) in order to set the two forms in hostile opposition. It was still part of the dance, a couple of awkward, critical steps from theory to practice.

Perhaps, he continued, if we start making love in the morning, your body will be so impressed and enlivened by the changes in me that it will begin again all its old hormonal work of secreting, womb cleaning, and egg making.

I doubt it, I said. Besides. I'm busy, you know. I have an awful lot to do.

By this, I meant that our early mornings are usually so full of reading last night's paper, dissenting and arguing appropriate actions, waking the boys, who should really be old enough to understand an alarm clock when it speaks to them—without their mother's translation. Also, we had once had the moral or utilitarian idea that brainy labor must happen early; it must precede the work of love or be damaged by the residual weight of all that damp reality.

But Jack said, Oh, come on. He unbuttoned his shirt. My face is very fond of the gray-brown hairs of his chest. Thanks, I said, but it won't work, you know. Miracles don't happen, and if they do they're absolutely explainable. He began to get a very rosy look about him, which is a nice thing to happen to a man's face. It's not called blushing. Blushing is an expression of shyness and female excitement at the same time. In men it's observed as an energetic act the blood takes on its determined own.

Think think, talk talk, that's you, stop it! Come on, kid, he said, touching my knee, my thigh, breast, all the outsides of love. So we lay down beside one another to make a child, with the modesty of later-in-life, which has so much history and erotic knowledge but doesn't always use it.

How else is one to extract a new person from all-refusing Zeus and jealous Hera? My God, said Jack, you've never mentioned Greek gods in bed before. No occasion, I said.

Later on he called the store to tell the salesmen not to sell too many kitchen sets without him, he couldn't afford to give away all that commission. Wouldn't you think that would annoy the men? Jack says I don't understand the way men talk to one another.

I had just started the coffee when Richard, my very large and handsome son, appeared. He is known far and wide for his nosy ear. Why are you still in your pajamas? I asked. He answered, What is this crap, Mother, this life is short and terrible. What is this metaphysical shit, what is this disease you intelligentsia are always talking about.

First we said: Intelligentsia! Us? Oh, the way words lie down under decades, then the Union of Restless Diggers out of sheer insomnia pulls them up: daggers for the young but to us they look like flowers of nostalgia that grew in our mother's foreign garden. What
did
my mother say? Darling, you should have come to Town Hall last night, the whole intelligentsia was there. My uncle, strictly: The intelligentsia will never permit it!

So I laughed. But Jack said, Don't you dare talk to your mother like that, Richard! Don't you dare! Ma, Richard said, get his brains out of the pickle jar, it's no insult. Everyone knows, the intelligentsia strikes the spark, so that they'll be relevant for a long time, striking sparks here and there.

Of course, he explained, the fire of revolution would only be advanced, contained, and put to productive use by the working class. Let me tell you, Jack, the intelligentsia better realize this. And another thing, where'd you get that don't-dare-talk-to-my-mother stuff … I know her a lot longer than you do. I've been talking to her for maybe almost eighteen years and you've been sitting around our house maybe three years tops.

Sorry, Richard. I heard a character on a TV show last night say exactly that. “Don't you dare talk to your mother like that.” I had gone over to see Anna about something. She turned on the TV the minute I came in.

Wow! Really? Listen, the same thing happened to me too. I went to see Caitlin, you know Caitlin, around the corner, the doctor's daughter. The one whose kid brother tried to set fire to the nun a couple of years ago? Well, you know, she did that too the minute I came in, she turned on the TV.

Huh! They were surprised that the girl and the woman unknown to one another had done exactly the same thing to each of them. Richard offered Jack a cigarette and sat down at the kitchen table. Coffee, Ma, he said.

Then Jack asked, Richard, tell me, do you forgive your father for having run out on you kids years ago?

I don't forgive him and I don't not forgive him. I can't spend my life on personal animosities. The way imperialism's leaning so hard on the Third World the way it does …

Jack said, Ah … He blinked his eyes a couple of times, which a person who can't cry too well often does. Richard, did you know my father was a junk peddler. He had a pushcart. He yelled (in Yiddish). Buy old clothes, buy old clothes. I had to go with him, walk up to the fifth floor, pick up stuff; I guess we crawled up and down every street in the Bronx … Buy old clothes … old clothes.

Richard said, Oh!

What do you think, Jack asked. Rich, do you think my daughter, I mean Kimmy, will she ever call me up and say, It's O.K., Dad?

Well, said Richard, nodding his head, shrugging his shoulders.

I have to go to work now, I said. I don't happen to own my own business. Also, I have a late meeting tonight. O.K.?

The two men nodded. They sat quietly together expanding their lungs to the tiniest thread of tissue with smoke. Breathing deeply, dangerously, in and out.

Then, as often happens in stories, it was several years later. Jack had gone off to Arizona for a year to clear his lungs and sinuses and also to have, hopefully, one last love affair, the kind that's full of terrific longing, ineluctable attraction, and so forth. I don't mean to mock it, but it's only natural to have some kind of reaction. Lots of luck, Jack, I said, but don't come home grouchy. The boys were in different boroughs trying to find the right tune for their lives. They had been men to a couple of women and therefore came for supper only now and then. They were worried for my solitariness and suggested different ways I could wear my hair.

Of course, because of this planet, which is dropping away from us in poisonous disgust, I'm hardly ever home. The other day, driving down the West Side—Broadway—after a long meeting, I was stopped at a red light. A man in the absolute prime of life crossed the street. For reasons of accumulating loneliness I was stirred by his walk, his barest look at a couple of flirty teenage girls; his nice unimportant clothes seemed to be merely a shelter for the naked male person.

I thought, Oh, man, in the very center of your life, still fitting your skin so nicely, with your arms probably in a soft cotton shirt and the shirt in an old tweed jacket and your cock lying along your thigh in either your right or left pants leg, it's hard to tell which, why have you slipped out of my sentimental and carnal grasp?

He's nice, isn't he? I said to my friend Cassie.

I suppose so, she said, but Faith, what is he, just a bourgeois on his way home.

To everyday life, I said, sighing with a mild homesickness.

To whose everyday life, she said, goddamnit, whose?

She turned to me, which is hard to do when you're strapped and stuffed into a bucket seat. Listen, Faith, why don't you tell my story? You've told everybody's story but mine. I don't even mean my whole story, that's my job. You probably can't. But I mean you've just omitted me from the other stories and I was there. In the restaurant and the train, right there. Where is Cassie? Where is
my
life? It's been women and men, women and men, fucking, fucking. Goddamnit, where the hell is my woman and woman, woman-loving life in all this? And it's not even sensible, because we
are
friends, we work together, you even care about me at least as much as you do Ruthy and Louise and Ann. You let them in all the time; it's really strange, why have you left me out of everybody's life?

I took a deep breath and turned the car to the curb. I couldn't drive. We sat there for about twenty minutes. Every now and then I'd say, My God! or, Christ Almighty! neither of whom I usually call on, but she was stern and wouldn't speak. Cassie, I finally said. I don't understand it either; it's true, though, I know what you mean. It must feel for you like a great absence of yourself. How could I allow it. But it's not me alone, it's them too. I waited for her to say something. Oh, but it
is
my fault. Oh, but why did you wait so long? How can you forgive me?