You Are My Heart and Other Stories

You will doubtless be surprised to hear from me after so many years, she had written. She wished she had been able to send the check long before this, she explained, not so that their accounts could be settled—that was hardly her intent—but so that she might, for her part—she wouldn’t presume to speak for him—feel, at last, that what they had decided, and done, once upon a time, had been truly and equally shared. What she continued to long for in this life—was it the same for him?—was mutuality: an easy, ongoing mutuality.

She had apologized for the awkwardness of her phrasings—yes, despite her seeming (and practiced!) air of self-confidence, she found herself, still, feeling helplessly self-conscious the instant she put words on paper that he would see—after which she filled him in on the basics of her life since they had last seen each other: her three children were grown and married; she had five grandchildren; she had been a widow for more than seven years; she was working part-time—estate planning—for a small Wall Street law firm. She hoped that life had been kind to him, and that perhaps—he should feel no obligation—they might meet for dinner or a drink now that she was once again living in New York City.

And now that I’m a widower? he heard himself ask. But how would she have known, he wondered. And: was he flattering himself to imagine that this was her reason for writing. He had written back, and—out of curiosity? guilt? kindness?—suggested they meet for lunch.

He had considered The West End Bar, or the V & T Pizzeria—places near Columbia University where they had hung out together when they were students, she in the law school, he in the graduate department of English and Comparative Literature—but had decided instead on a restaurant that had not been there when they were living together: Henry’s, which was at the corner of Broadway and West 105^th Street.

When he saw her enter the restaurant, and when she made her way to his table, where she kissed him lightly—her cheek was warm—and when she stepped back and told him how wonderful it was to see him again, how wonderfully fit he looked—he found, to his surprise, that tears were welling in his eyes, and that he was doing what he had been warning himself not to do: remembering the first time he had ever seen her.

It had been Veterans Day, 1967. The air was crisp, the sky blue and cloudless, the crowd of anti-war protestors among whom he stood, animated and happy. Across the street, the people who lined the sidewalk behind police barricades with their banners, posters, and flags—in support of the war in Vietnam—seemed equally happy, the chants each side launched into the air little more than friendly cheers for rival football teams.

Margaret was wearing a pale V-neck lavender sweater, a purple paisely scarf knotted loosely around her neck. Her wheatcolored hair, shoulder-length, was, in the autumn sunlight, laced with threads of gold, and she appeared to him to have stepped straight out of a Saks Fifth Avenue advertisement so as to take her place—out of place—among those whose fashions seemed, for the most part, to have been purchased from clothing racks in Salvation Army thrift stores.

She seemed the kind of woman—beautiful, cool, poised—who had always had the power to intimidate him: a woman who, he assumed, went to debutante balls with self-assured men who were destined to run Fortune 500 companies, to own yachts, and—always, always—to sweat less than he did. What, he wondered at the time, was a woman like this doing in the front line of anti-war protestors? And what could she ever want with an intense, curly-headed Jewish boy from Brooklyn?

Still, when she turned and looked his way, and when she smiled—a quizzical smile, as in: We’ve met before, yes?— he gained the courage he usually lacked, pushed through the crowd, and made his way to her side. He began talking at once—about the rally, about the weather, about the war, about whatever came to mind—and she responded easily. Her hazel-green eyes, above ruddy high-colored cheeks, had seemed almost translucent, and—what he had not expected—warm and inviting.

When she asked his name, then pointed uptown, he saw that a military band was approaching, and that behind the band a phalanx of soldiers in camouflage khakis, rifles to their shoulders, were marching in lock step, motorcycles cruising slowly at their sides. “I’m glad to meet you, Paul,” she said, shaking his hand, “but would you excuse me, please?” Then she had turned away, slipped under a wooden baricade, walked out onto Fifth Avenue, and, along with about two dozen others, sat down in the middle of the street, directly in the path of the oncoming parade.

Within a minute, police were there, confiscating the banner she and the others had unfurled—END THE WAR NOW! BRING OUR BOYS HOME!—and dragging them away. It was only when he saw her being led to a police van—she did not, like most of the protestors, trained, he assumed, in passive resistance, go limp, but instead, her hand in the hand of a tall, young policeman, walked up three steps and into the van as if she were being helped into a hansom cab—that it occurred to him that he had not asked her name.

So he found out which station house the protestors were being taken to, and after that, which court house for arraignment, and at seven-thirty that night, when she was released on her own recognizance pending a hearing, he was waiting for her.

“I was hoping you’d be here,” she said. She took the single yellow rose he held out to her, inhaled its fragrance, kissed him on the cheek. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “I’m positively ravenous!”

She took his hand in hers, and while she told him about what had happened in the half-dozen hours since her arrest—the judge, she suspected, from his manner, was as opposed to the war as they were; the policeman who put her in the van had asked for her phone number—they made their way to Chinatown, where they ate and talked, and then talked more, on and on and on. He had walked her home—she lived in Greenwich Village, in a one-bedroom apartment above an Italian restaurant, a few doors down from the Waverly Theater—where she invited him in, and where they made love until dawn. Two weeks later, he moved out of his one-room Upper West Side fifth floor walk-up and into her apartment. They had stayed together for the next three and a half years.

“You noticed.” She reached across the table, took one of his hands in both of hers. “I trust it didn’t shock you, Paul, but I’d been thinking of doing this for so many years that it seemed as if—”

“ ‘ Closure,’ ” he said, “ ‘ Closure’ is the operative word these days, to judge from conversations with my students. They’re forever wanting closure on their relationships.”

“Closure?” She cocked her head to the side. “Possibly. But as soon as I mailed the letter, I realized the obvious—that what I wanted resembled overture much more than closure.”

“For starters, I remember giving you three hundred fifty dollars in small bills to give to the doctor. The check you wrote was for more than twenty-five hundred dollars.”

She smiled easily, leaned toward him. “I remember the first time I ordered a dry Martini, and you told me that E. B. White claimed it was the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.”

She sat up straight. “The amount,” she stated, “represented interest on three hundred and fifty dollars compounded quarterly at five percent for forty-one years.”

“I’ve always thought that what we did—what you went through—set us both free,” he said, and, having anticipated her reaction to his having torn up the check, he continued to speak words he had prepared in advance: “I felt for your pain, of course, if that’s the right word—for the ordeal you endured, which was surely unpleasant, and, as I recall, made you feel dirty and ashamed—”

“Well, some things are better now than they were then. Young people have more options these days, wouldn’t you say? They don’t have to sneak around the way we did.”

“Bitter? Not at all,” she said. “Actually, it pleases me that you remember details—the amount, the doctor’s gentle perversity—you reacted with such cold logic at the time—such rationality—that—”

“Opinions to the contrary notwithstanding, I was not unfeeling, then or now. What was our alternative? To bring an unwanted child into the world who would have been resented, and who—”

“We don’t know that,” she said. “When it comes to such matters, we have no double-blind study. As you were fond of saying, we’re not living in a first draft. This—our lives now—is it, yes?”

“For my part,” she continued, “I think I would have loved the child, and you would have too. It’s what I believed at the time, though I lacked the courage to say so—and I believed we might have been happy together. Who knows?”

They drank, looked at their menus, ordered lunch—crab cakes for her, grilled seafood salad for him. They talked easily while they ate, telling each other about the years between, and about their apartments, their jobs, their children. He was in semiretirement, teaching one seminar a semester, but—the good news—would be permitted to remain in his faculty apartment on Claremont Avenue for the rest of his life; she had bought a two-bedroom co-op on Fifth Avenue at Sixty-Ninth Street, and was working three days a week for Quinn and Janovsky, whose senior partners were men with whom she’d gone to law school. His son and daughter, both married, lived in Brooklyn, and each had two children. All three of her children—two girls and a boy—lived in and around Weston, Connecticut, near to where they had grown up.

Few things in life made her happier than to know that her children were close, she said, and not just geographically. They actually liked one another, and this allowed her to believe that perhaps she had gotten a few things right in this life. When she said this, her eyes became moist, and she looked away quickly, remarking on how lovely the restaurant was—the arts-and-crafts style design, the soft amber lighting, and—rare thing in New York—the generous space between tables that allowed them to carry on a conversation without having to shout.

He said that Henry’s had become a favorite. In fact, it had inspired him to think of working up a Zagat-style guide to the fifty quietest restaurants in New York City.

“There’s no need to be discreet—that’s what you meant, I think—not decorous—but I have no problem talking about Lorraine. She had an especially debilitating form of MS—her mind was alert to the end, though she did require a good deal of physical assistance the last few years, especially with her ADL’s.”

“My brother had muscular dystrophy—Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, to be exact, not multiple sclerosis—and yes, the thought crossed my mind, as it did Lorraine’s. Taking care of Mort when I was a boy turned out to be excellent preparation for events of recent years. But how did you know?”

“Ah that !” she said, and smiled. “I read it in the alumni magazine. My husband, Roger, went to Columbia too, if you recall, and I saw an item in the ‘Class Notes—’ ” She paused, and when he said nothing, continued: “It’s how I’ve followed you through the years—your family, your career. You’ve become quite the literary critic. I loved your book on the Irish and the Jews, by the way, and—”

“My genteel way of stalking, I suppose,” she said. “But we used to talk about this stuff all the time. About how different our lives were, even though, as it turned out, we’d both been born and raised in Brooklyn, a few blocks from each other. Don’t you remember how we used to speculate on our commonalities and differences in the way you do in your book, only much more articulately than I ever could—”

“Sometimes—” she said, and hesitated before going on “—sometimes I like to think that if you hadn’t known me, you would never have written the books you’ve written.”

“So that, as you point out, the Irish, like my father, moved into politics, while the Jews, like…” She paused. “Sorry. I can’t find the right words, but what I’ve really been wanting to say, as I tried to do in my note, is that your gift for words used to intimidate me—to make me feel stupid somehow. Did you know that? I always felt—feared—you were about to correct me, and, therefore, of course, to have reason to reject me.”

He looked around the restaurant and, recognizing several colleagues, wondered what they would think, seeing him here with an unfamiliar and attractive older woman. Your beauty used to intimidate me, he thought of saying, even though back then— could he tell her this now?—he had been disappointed to discover she was not upper class WASP, and not even lace curtain Irish like Grace Kelly, but working class Irish. He finished his drink, signalled to the waiter to bring two more.

“No,” he said. “I’m being honest. People outside of academia have vastly inflated notions of our successes. Mostly, as I tell my grad students, we’re like caretakers in cemeteries, each of us tending to small plots of land—to the graves of one or two dead writers—pulling up weeds, repairing a headstone now and then, chasing away vandals—”

“Why do I get the feeling you’re correcting me again?” she asked. “But okay, your book on James—The Irish Henry James— surely that attracted an audience beyond academia.”

“Roger was an accountant—well, more than an accountant: he was Chief Financial Officer and Vice President of a paper manufacturing company. You changed the subject.”

“Maybe it’s the alcohol—despite my fabled heritage, I never could hold it well.” She grinned. “But okay, okay. I’m feeling fine—quite fine actually, though it saddens me to see you looking so gloomy. Moving right along then, let me be direct: Do you think we can be friends again?”

“They seem, at least in conversations with me, to have no difficulties with it: with being friends with various people with whom they occasionally sleep. And yet—”

“Forgive me,” she said, the back of her hand to her cheek, “but I think I’m blushing, and that this is what Craig, my eldest, would call ‘a generation thing.’ ”

“Have it your way. I wasn’t teasing. You are still a most attractive woman, Margaret. In fact, when you walked in before, I thought: God—she looks just like her mother did, and your mother was a real looker—movie star gorgeous like the aging stars of the thirties and forties we loved—Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Mary Astor—you look the way she did, especially now that you’ve let your hair go to white—”

“Silver,” Margaret corrected. “Mother always insisted that her hair was neither gray nor white, but silver. Thank you for the compliment, I suppose—my Martinis and I thank you. What you see is real, by the way—no surgical enhancements. Mother is gone, of course. Yours?”

“The same—many years ago, and you know what?” he said, unable to keep his voice from rising. “My mother was right when she bolted from the Muscular Dystrophy Association—from all that Jerry Lewis bleed-with-me stuff. Remember how she’d refuse to watch the telethons?”

“I liked your mother. You get your passion from her—especially against injustice—and your eyes: those incredible graygreen-hazel-brown eyes that never stop changing. They’re extraordinary. Can we have another round of drinks, do you think?”

“It’s been more than half a century, and billions of dollars wasted on research, and in the meantime, no help for the living, for the families that have to cope day by day, and—”

“Did you?” Paul asked. He waited, but Margaret stared at him without expression. “He was twenty-nine when he died, and, unlike his brother, without a bitter bone in his body.” He forced a smile. “Sorry I got so edgy, but being with you again, well—the memories do find their way home.”

“Because—remember what you taught me, from Cather—Willa Cather—that sometimes memories are—how did it go?—that sometimes memories are better than anything that can ever happen to us again?” She shook her head sideways. “Amazing that she thought that way—and she wasn’t even Irish.”

“After you and I split, my mother started an organization to help children with muscular dystrophy—take them to ballgames, movies, museums, parks—I drove the van during the summers, and we’d have raffles and Bingo nights to raise money for the outings, and to help families with—”

“I don’t understand,” Paul said. “You’re being too obscure—or too clever—for me, but what I was thinking—what I was about to say—was that I used to want to kill Mort, did I ever tell you that?”

“All the parents—the mothers especially—always saying how wonderful their children were, how much they loved them, how blessed they were, when these kids made their lives into living hells. In our hearts, we were all murderers. You ever have to clean up a two hundred fifty pound sack of a disabled man with a bad case of diarrhea?”

“Not yet? But—” He shook his head sideways, as if to clear it of extraneous matter. “But tell me this,” he said. “Besides the work you do with the law firm, and keeping tabs on old flames—what, as people put it these days, what are some of the—awful phrase—fun things you do?”

“I’m not,” she said, “but here’s the deal, since you ask. I’ve been on several of their cruises—the ones the alumni association sponsors. I’ve been to the Galapagos Islands, and on a trip that went from Patagonia to South Africa.”

“I tried some of the more exclusive dating services first, and some online sites, and discovered what most women of a certain age discover,” she said. “And then a friend of mine from Weston, also a widow, met a man on a cruise—she said she figured out that on a cruise you had a better than average shot at meeting a man of a certain age who was well-educated, had money and a curious mind, and, if alone on a cruise, would be in search of a companion.”

“What I think,” he said, “is that you were right before—that some things are better now because, as you put it, young people have—dread word—more options. But what we had in our years, I’ve always thought, was something they don’t have now—the sense that anything was possible, whether in matters political or personal.”

“I had this idea for a cartoon a while back, where you see people hustling toward two lines in which men and women are seated at tables across from one another, and above one set of tables there’s a sign that says, ‘Speed Dating,’ and above the other set it says, ‘Speed Eating.’ ”

“You knew that when you responded to my note and agreed to meet with me, didn’t you?” Margaret stood, steadied herself against the back of her chair with one hand. “I believe our accounts are even. Still, I’ve decided to let you pay the check today.”

She moved to his side of the table, bent down, and, holding to his tie with a firm downward grip, whispered in his ear: “Isn’t it amazing what the imagination can do to us? Given your line of work, you should be the expert on that, but really—don’t you think it’s amazing to realize, after all these years, that I’m not the woman you imagined I was once upon a time, or, for sure, the woman you imagine I am now?”

She kissed him on the cheek, then bit down on his ear lobe. “I had a swell time,” she said, and before he could respond, and while he touched his ear with his napkin, hoping, he realized, he might find pinpricks of blood on it, she turned and walked from the restaurant.