A gust of wind nearly knocked Eleanor Bernstein down as she crossed Lexington Avenue at 49th Street. At that instant, she understood in a flash of illumination that Rosa had not wanted to be born. A car honked as it swerved to avoid her, and she bumped into a woman in the crowd. “Excuse me! Oh, I’m so sorry!” cried Eleanor. The woman scowled, without a hint of graciousness. She wore a bright red coat, brassy earrings, and her hair was tinted an unnatural black. What a vulgar woman!
Rosa also wore heavy metal earrings that dangled and jangled as she walked. But Rosa’s mind was in the clouds. Rosa at sixteen, pale and beautiful, wandered about with an abstracted look. At birth, she had tried to climb the walls of Eleanor’s uterus. Had it not been for the obstetrician’s expert maneuvering with forceps, Rosa would have killed her mother. For days afterwards Rosa’s head was pin-shaped, and Eleanor was sure the infant had suffered brain damage.
Even in her absence, her daughter’s coldness hurt as Eleanor hurried to meet Heinrich. She was going to be late! A quiver ran through her body, a mixture of excitement at the prospect of being with him and fear of his anger. Even now, after years of meeting secretly, she felt a sexual thrill at the thought of him.
She glanced at her watch. One o’clock. Damn! How could she have let this happen? Somehow time always flowed too fast, and the lines at department stores, which gave her an alibi for coming to the City, had been interminable. “Taxi! Taxi!” Her shopping bags banged against her legs as she ran to catch a Yellow Cab. The hem of her cloth coat stuck in the cab door when it closed.
He was at the bar of the hotel where they always met. A large man in his forties, he was impeccably dressed, in keeping with his position as director of the New York Historical Museum. His small blue eyes were set deep in his heavy, florid face. Now he was scrutinizing her with an impassive look, and she knew he was furious.
“Why are you late when we have so little time?” He grabbed her wrist.
“Ouch! You’re hurting me!”
He loosened his grip. “El, why are you angry?”
“Just because I’m late doesn’t mean I’m angry.”
“It’s a way of expressing anger.”
“Oh Heinrich,” she said in disgust, “You and your psychological theories! Damn! I was just late!” Tears welled up in her eyes. “It isn’t fair! I had so many errands to run and so little time … sheets and towels to buy because Aaron’s parents will be coming to visit … children’s underwear.”
Tears were streaming down her cheeks. All the emotions which she never permitted herself to express or even feel when she was home with Aaron and the children flowed out when she was with Heinrich. She was crying for so much more than lay underneath this minor lovers’ quarrel.
He handed her his drink of scotch on the rocks, which she sipped, and he kissed her tears. “I’m sorry, Eleanor. It’s just that we have so little time together.” Tears were glistening in his eyes, too, his small pig’s eyes, she thought irreverently.
Yet as she gazed at him through her tears, underneath his form she seemed to see as if with x-ray vision the tormented, half-starved skeletal figure of a man. Heinrich in his unwieldy envelope of flesh wore a dark, pin-striped suit. A white handkerchief folded into a perfect triangle graced his vest pocket, and his gold cufflinks glistened. He stroked her cheek, then kissed her tenderly.
“You are like your rats,” she murmured. “Underneath your large body, you are like the starved rats you draw.”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course. Why else would I draw them?”
Later in their hotel room she whispered, “Heinrich, when I was a child I was forbidden to touch myself. At night our governess used to make sure that my hands were outside the covers, and she forbade me to move.” He gave her a wet kiss and held her more tightly. She felt as if they were clinging to each other like rafts in a dark ocean. His bulk was comforting against her body.
“The first time I made love …” he said—his voice still held the trace of a Dutch accent, although he had emigrated to the United States as a young man—“I seduced the maid when I was thirteen. In my family, we didn’t touch.”
They laughed softly over their shared childhood miseries. She talked to him about things she never realized were in her mind. When she was with him, she seemed to expand like one of those miniature Japanese blossoms in water that used to delight her as a child. Their secret relationship kept some part of her alive.
“Your skin is so soft and white,” he said. As he was nuzzling her breasts, his words got muffled. He sucked gently on her left nipple.
Filled with electricity and joy, she felt close to tears. It was so beautiful with him. Their senses were sharpened. There was nothing more precious, she thought, than being loved for whom one actually is. And Heinrich loved her.
She dreaded going home.
“I want to live with you. I wish we could always be together,” she said, the words coming unbidden.
“We could.”
“No, my darling. That’s only a dream.”
He gripped her buttocks and breathed his words into her ear. “It would be better for everyone if we were honest and out in the open.”
“Living together is only a dream. We’d get tired of each other. After a while you’d miss Erica. She’s so loyal, and she loves you so much. She’s a much better wife to you than I could ever be.”
“What binds us is far more than physical attraction. You know that, El.”
She trembled at his intensity. If she were living with him, perhaps something in her would unfreeze, and she would complete those scraps of stories she envisioned. And her presence might release his creative inhibitions. Almost unbearable sadness swept through her. She nestled closer.
“I could never leave my family.” Her mother’s voice with its calm, strong inflections seemed to be speaking through her. “I’ve committed myself.”
“You’re a coward, El.”
She was silent. Her tears wet his cheeks.
The tangled web of family created a stranglehold. What would happen to the financial backing of Aaron’s parents and her own which made their lives possible? What would happen to the children if she left?
How harshly the world would judge her.
“I’ve made my life what it is. Now I have to live with it.”
But his continued silence made her question her own words. What was the ethical choice?
She bit his lips with a fierceness unusual for her, swiveling her groin against his until he thrust into her.
Outside it had begun to rain. Drops splashed against the windows. They rocked back and forth, silent now, in a dance of fusion. Afterwards, Eleanor drifted off. When she awakened, she felt Heinrich’s arms around her, his thighs pressing hers. He was still sleeping. Outside on the street, horns honked. The sound of rain had stopped. She worried about the time. If she missed the five forty-nine commuter train she’d get home to cook dinner terribly late. Her thighs were sticky with his semen. How good it felt, because it was part of him. She wished she didn’t have to wash his fluid off her before she left.
In Penn Station she glanced at the windows that sold tickets to places like Chicago, Baltimore, and Raleigh. How tempting to buy a ticket at one of these windows, obtain a small tube of toothpaste and other toiletries from one of the drugstores here in this underground station, and disappear.
“Where is she?” Aaron would ask when he came home. “Where is she?” the children would ask. They were birds with hungry beaks who pecked away at her soul and body.
She would disappear. She might surface in New Orleans or Tucson or perhaps Vancouver as a waitress or librarian, a slender, middle-aged woman with graying hair and no past.
But as always, she went to the Long Island Railroad section and boarded her train. They rolled past miles of Queens suburbs, identical houses with television antennas. She scribbled bits of poems in a small green spiral notebook:
Am I me? Are you really you?
Or do we only see shadowsWe mistake for the other?
She paused. This was only a fragment. The root of what she wanted to say eluded her, in the way that the sky is obscured by clouds. Those clouds covered her thoughts, her memories, and only a few clear bits of blue sky remained.
What if she did follow her longings? Eleanor imagined the two of them together in a cozy Village loft. She began to sob.
“Lady, are you all right?” asked the conductor.
She nodded, put her pen and notebook back in her purse, and held out her ticket to be punched. Held out her neck to be beheaded.
Ah, shades of Madame Bovary. She and Heinrich were hopelessly romantic. Let her thoughts stream out into the atmosphere, for to formulate them in words was dangerous. So let them dissolve into mist.