You Are My Heart and Other Stories (9 page)

Yet there was something else at work in the bowels of my gloom—a fear that arose from my hunger for vengeance: that should I fail to nail my courage to the sticking point in the act itself,
she
would come marching triumphantly back into your life, my deed confirmation of everything she wanted to believe and to have others believe. Plus, a dividend: she'd be the recipient of large quantities of cash, for she'd be seen as the long-suffering mother who'd fled an unhealthy situation—marriage to a dangerous, despicable, deranged man, the proof in the pudding of my murderous intent and botched self-annihilation.

But consequences, Charlie—let us consider consequences. As I would often remind students: if they kept two principles in mind—that character was fate, and that there were no acts without consequences—they could begin to find their way into the workings (and delights) of all tales worthy of attention. When we were home alone, and I pictured our resident would-be Humbert Humbert (me!) mocked by her, I saw, too, the consequences
of my inevitable bunglings. Insurance companies do not pay out for death-by-suicide, but her likely appeal—that I was not in my right mind when, at the eleventh hour, I changed beneficiaries (assigning all to charities)—would surely have carried the day. (Actually, I realize, despite a multitude of resolutions, I never did get around to changing
anything
in my will that year, which tells you something about melancholy, and how it can cause a lasting rupture between the desire to act and the ability to act.)

Still, a question: Why did your mother leave us? You were probably hoping—how not?—that in this note you'd find answers, or at least the beginnings of answers. Why she left me—why any woman leaves a man—is rarely, on an overt level, mysterious. There are the usual suspects: She didn't love me, she found me impossible, she wanted her freedom, she fell in love with somebody else, she experienced a sudden change-of-life, she was on alcohol and/or drugs, she found motherhood less than it was cracked up to be, she had a severe, debilitating postpartum chronic depression…

But why she left
you
—ah, to that conundrum, I plead ignorance. While it's true (and sad) that people hardly blink when men leave wives and children, I tend to agree with my Springfield student that when a mother does so, it would seem, in most instances, to go against nature and biology, and therefore, like a miracle—
a miracle
!—be beyond human understanding. For what defined God and God's miracles in the
Old Testament
—from the great flood that covered the earth to the burning bush, from the ten plagues to the sun standing still in the heavens—were occurrences that,
by definition
, went against nature and the natural order, and could, thus, have been brought about only by a god who was transcendent and (also by definition) beyond our understanding.

When people asked why she left you, and would suggest, thinking this would console me, that perhaps she'd suffered some kind of mental breakdown, I'd nod knowingly, as if the
suggestion had merit, and say that perhaps what troubled your mother could be found in the psychiatric encyclopedia of mental disorders—the infamous
DSM—
under the letter
A
. Under ‘
A?
' they'd ask. Yes, I'd say:
A
… for ‘Absence of Character.'

How else respond to such a foolish question? Still, you must wonder at times about what she (this woman you never truly knew) was like, and, allied to this question, what I
saw-in-her
that led to love, marriage, and bringing you into the world.

And the answer?

Simple: We were young, she was beautiful, and she told me—insecure, neurotic young Jewish boy that I was—that she loved me. You've seen pictures, of course, but they don't begin to capture the seductive
wholesomeness
of her beauty: a blond-haired, blue-eyed, corn-fed Midwesterner (from Iowa: the heart of corn country)—a cheerful cheerleader with a perfect gleaming American smile and a perpetual blush in her cheeks, crossed with a full-bodied, voluptuous Scandinavian (think: Liv Ullman, Anita Ekberg)—an exquisitely desirable woman who, after she'd told me she loved me, said two additional things that sealed the deal: first, that she believed—she knew, she just
knew!—
I was going to become a truly
great
writer; and second, that I was the most wonderful lover she'd ever known.

And let me tell you, son, as I discovered too late in the game, when it came to the latter, she knew whereby she spoke. But (sigh!) even irony and distance cannot keep away the return, in memory, of the excruciating feelings of hurt, shame, and helplessness that came with my discovery of her several lovers, which news was soon followed by her leave-taking, which act itself (the better miracle, for it gave us our years together, you and me) was preceded, as I noted above, by the arrival of a constant, gnawing pain, along with sensations of a kind I'd never before known: I kept falling into a darkness more terrifying than the absence of the dimmest light—into a hole that was at the same time somehow a hollow
within me
, so that I felt I was disappearing
into myself again and again, and without any clue as to how to stop—or name!—the falling.

To give you an inkling (ink link?) of how my baleful innocence was destroyed: we were to meet for lunch at the university's Faculty Club, and I arrived early (to have twenty minutes or so in which to rework a lecture I was preparing on Henry James-the-Irishman), went to the men's room to wash up, heard a strange gutteral sound, found the stall where the sound was coming from, opened the door, and there was your mother, skirt up around her waist, sitting astride a young man—he worked as a busboy at the club—who was himself sitting on an open toilet, his pants gathered around his ankles. ‘Good afternoon, Professor Klein,' he said, with great good manners. ‘Sorry to see you here so early today.' And your mother, over her shoulder, her eyes filled with lust-fulfilled bliss, ‘Oh Sam, we really do have to stop meeting like this…'

I hurried home from the Faculty Club, and when she joined me, and when I wept and said the obvious—bad enough that you were doing it, but you
knew
I would be there—
We had a date!
—she said of course she knew—that was the point, after all, for didn't this
non
-coincidence answer the pertinent questions? But I was a helpless, wounded beggar—distraught, destroyed, disabled. The rage, and its faithful companion, clinical depression, were to come later, though I don't think she sensed this, or ever gave such possibilities much thought. On that afternoon, however, she did for a while sit beside me, stroke my hair, and wipe my tears away. What I think, she said before she left, is that I was trying to get your attention.

The rest—what I knew and when I knew it—is theme and variation, and my conclusion is that it turned out to be our great good fortune that once she left, she never returned. Her life, such as it became, is a void too—a mystery—though of decreasing interest. Out of sight became, literally, out of mind. Another conclusion, perhaps a trifle too generous on my part: that her
intention was not to humiliate me, but more simply (mindlessly?) to please herself. The shameless narcissism—the unthinking sense of entitlement of an unusually beautiful, and, then as now (
pace
Orwell's warning about double-negatives), not unintelligent woman, seemed a not unnatural phenomenon.

There were annual birthday cards from her to you, the last when you were twelve, but the envelopes were without return addresses, and I chose not to give you the cards. Why stir up unanswerable questions, or feelings that were beyond gratification? I myself had several New Year's cards from her, with uncharacteristically bland greetings: ‘with love' or ‘kind regards' or ‘wishing you a year of health, happiness, and adventure'—and also a letter congratulating me on the publication of my novel,
Prizefighter
, hoping it would be the first of many successes (as of this writing, there has never been a successor—her hope, then, become a curse that I embraced?), and noting that the scene in which the protagonist discovers his girlfriend has cheated on him suggested to her that I had not yet gotten over what she saw as inconsequential dalliances of a kind that occurred in most—her word—
mature
marriages. ‘Grow up, Sam,' she advised.

Once she left, she never inquired about you. But if she had, I might have informed her that instead of killing you, or her, or myself, I had decided to live, and that it was you, Charlie—her son—who, unwittingly, saved
all
our lives. You didn't know that, did you?

How it happened: I had begun drinking even before your mother left us. On a daily basis, the numbing of senses—along with the resultant dizziness, fogged mind, and clogged sleep—got me through. I'd pour a bit of Scotch (Dewar's) into my coffee at the start of the day; while receiving students in my office, I'd fill and refill a mug from a flask I kept in my bottom-right desk drawer; and when I arrived home I'd treat myself to the drink I told myself I was entitled to after a long day's work. On teaching days I left you in a nursery school, three blocks away,
run by two Amherst College faculty wives, both of whom, on random occasions, without, as far as I know, their sharing confidences, I plowed royally, despite or because of the alcohol that had me working hard not to call them, in the throes, by one another's names.

But what your mother called her ‘dalliances'—and what a colleague who'd been one of those favored by her generosity called her ‘open-legs policy,' a policy that favored at least two other department colleagues (a ‘most favored nations policy?'), along with perhaps three of my male graduate students, and two female undergraduate honors students (to her credit, she did not discriminate on the basis of age, gender, or race)—utterly destroyed me. In her presence, hoping to get some purchase on what seemed an increasingly fragile world—an apology perhaps, a vow to reform and start over, an acknowledgement of the effect of her actions on me, a suggestion that we sign up for couples counseling—I was all fumbling and trembling. The only thing I wanted was to save our marriage and family, to make her stop having lovers, and to have her love me again.

But I
do
love you, she would say. And really, Sam, why the surprise? Haven't you always said that the great thing in life was to remain
open to possibility
(a phrase I had, to my chagrin, used frequently during our courtship, especially when in pursuit of specific physical attentions)?

Didn't I agree, given our mutual love of sensuality—of polymorphous perversity—that the prospect of making love with one person and one person only for the next half century was absurd? Didn't I see that her act had been a gift, and would enable us,
dans le style français
, to remain
together
for the duration? Moreover, your mother declared, what she did when she was not at home was
her private life
, and hadn't I, in at least two essays about the decline of the novel from its cultural centrality, linked this decline to the parallel (and lamentable) decline in our valuation of privacy?

Her words—the news, the facts—fell on tender ears, and on a sensibility—and ego—too blue and bruised to bear them. I was a failure—as husband, father, man—and would never recover from what everyone would surely see as well-earned punishment. Her arguments, such as they were (to her credit, she never attempted to
convince
me of anything), though I could acknowledge their merits, passed me by.

What did
not
pass by was the knowledge that I had turned out to be much more a man of my generation and upbringing than I had acknowledged—‘distressingly conventional,' was your mother's judgment—for I had clearly (and mistakenly) believed that if vows of love and marriage were exchanged, like the bodily intimacies that were their physical manifestations, they were intended to be honored eternally. Although your mother and I were born of the same generation, she had somehow escaped—evolved from?—values of fidelity I, and most people I grew up with, had pledged obedience to. I couldn't, that is, bear knowing that what she gave to me, she bestowed freely (happily?) on others. In me, I discovered, jealousy easily trumped rationality, even though I knew—could proclaim—that jealousy was itself merely the illusion of possession.

But oh my, the power of that illusion in my imagination. At first, all I wanted was for her to forgive me, for me to forgive her, for her to forgive me for my difficulty in forgiving her, et cetera et cetera. But when—to test me?—she suggested we have her favorite graduate student (not the busboy, but another) move in with us—he could, she argued, help with you, Charlie, and with chores (feedings, diapers, babysitting, lawn mowing), and help us renew what clearly, to judge from my upset, was in need of renewal. When I said no—no, never,
jamais
,
mai
,
nunca
,
nunquam
, over my dead body—
genug!
—she simply smiled, said I could have things my way, and left. I didn't see her for the next four days or nights, and these were the first evenings, and mornings, when my closest friend became Dewar's. In fact, on the
fifth morning after her absence, she found me on the bathroom floor, lying in my puke while you wailed away in your crib.

Though you're pitiable, she said (she used the French
pénible
, a deft touch, thereby connoting both pitiable
and
pathetic, and helping the dagger of her betrayal to penetrate more easily), I don't pity you, and I certainly don't want to listen to that little lump of flesh and diarrhea (a reference to you, son) crying all day. So I'm out of here, Sam.

I managed to get to my feet and wash my face, and she smiled at me with what seemed genuine kindness: We gave it our best, she said. I believe we really did. But it's not for me, this marriage-mommy thing, and better that we know it sooner than later, wouldn't you agree?