Alone in her parents’ Manhattan apartment, Nancy walked around naked. Closed up for the month of August while she and her parents had been in Amagansett, the apartment was still and dim and hot, the dark green, old-fashioned blinds pulled almost all the way down to the windowsills.
She raised a blind and looked out over the traffic on Fifth Avenue and the massed trees of the park beyond, then she turned to look about the living room as if for someone who might be there. The living room appeared enormous to her. The parquet floor was bare, the rugs rolled up and pushed against a wall. Arranged at right angles to the sofa and armchairs were two Biedermeier chairs and a Biedermeier table, their delicate legs reflected in the highly polished floor, and at the end of the room was a tall, narrow Biedermeier cabinet, of cherrywood with ebony rosette inlays along a pediment held by two thin ebony columns, this piece of furniture, too, reflected in the floor. Nancy walked barefoot across the floor. The air smelled of beeswax and, in light whiffs, naphthalene.
She went to her bedroom, where on the wall-to-wall carpet lay her open valise and, by it, department-store bags with the clothes she’d bought still in them. She stretched out on her unmade bed, the white satin spread thrown down to the foot. It seemed to her she heard a dull thump somewhere in the apartment, and she went rigid, listening. It didn’t reoccur, but the silence seemed to have its own sound, and, rigid still, she listened to this. Slowly, she got up and put on the dressing gown taken from the back of a chair, and, with a faint tingling throughout her, she went out into the hallway to look into her mother and father’s bedroom, to make sure there was no one but herself in the apartment. Back in her room, she sat on the edge of her bed for a while, motionless.
On her bedside table was a white telephone. She wanted to call someone, but about everyone she thought of calling, she thought, no, not him. She called her mother in Amagansett.
In her low voice, her mother said, “You’ll be careful, please, driving back to Boston.”
“I’ll drive carefully, but very fast.”
Her mother said, “Yes,” and sighed a little.
Nancy wandered again around the apartment, looking for someone who was not, she knew, there. She was always looking for what was not there.
Back in the living room, she examined, on the mantelpiece of the fireplace, two ice pails that had been on the mantelpiece for as long as she could remember. They were Berlin porcelain, brought from Berlin by her mother’s parents when they came to New York as refugees, and for a moment she wondered if for them these reminders of life in Berlin still hurt. At the sides of the buckets were golden lions’ heads biting on golden rings; on their fronts were perspective views, one of a country road and trees with tiny people seen from the back wearing black and red clothes, and the other of a palace and a square before it with tiny figures in red and black, also seen from the back. Nancy’s parents didn’t talk about Berlin, or maybe she did not want to hear about Berlin. Or, maybe, her parents didn’t want her to know.
She was, she told herself, a spoiled girl who did everything she could to be light-spirited, if not superficial. And though her parents would have denied this, she felt they encouraged her to be spoiled and light-spirited, even, she accused herself, superficial. They may have sighed at her behavior, but they seemed pleased by her daring, for they had bought her a sleek sports car.
If she wanted a different life from the life they could offer her, they supported her in wanting that different life. They worried if she went into one of her dark moods and stayed closed up in her room, as if she did this because of them. She tried to reassure them that her dark moods had nothing to do with them, who were too indulgent of her, their only child, and for their sakes she was light-spirited, even, yes, superficial; but they still felt they were at fault for her moods. She herself had no idea where these moods came from, any more than she knew what she was always looking for.
She had a long weekend before leaving for Boston, and felt restless, without knowing just what she was restless about.
She wanted to call someone, but about everyone she thought of calling, she decided, no, not him. She yawned and stretched out her arms. I know the person I want to call, she thought; I want to call Vinnie Tasso. He was her former colleague from a summer internship in a publishing house.
He said he didn’t feel like going out.
“Oh, come on, Vinnie.”
“Oh, come on, Vinnie. Oh, come on, Vinnie. Oh, come on, Vinnie.” He whined. “Everyone is always telling me, oh, come on, Vinnie.”
“Come on, Vinnie.”
“All right, all right.”
She went to him just after dark.
Vinnie lived in a small apartment in Chelsea with a view of a ginkgo tree in the streetlight. He did layout for a glossy magazine; a brick wall was covered with overlapping layout sheets and photographs with blocks of text and lines drawn zigzagging across them, and an electric fan, turning from side to side, made the sheets flutter. Vinnie was thin and short and sexless, even in his own view of himself, but he didn’t seem to mind this. He was, he himself said, more social than sexual.
He opened a bottle of sparkling white wine and, handing Nancy a glass, asked her what she’d done in Amagansett over the summer. She said he wouldn’t be interested, and he said she was right, he wouldn’t be.
“Then let’s not sit here,” Nancy said. “Let’s finish the wine and go to your bar.”
“Why is it that you need me to take you to the bar?”
“So you can introduce me to your friends.”
“You’ve already met everyone I know there who could possibly be of any interest to you, and they weren’t of any interest.”
“You didn’t make any new friends over the summer?”
“I made a lot a friends, but none of them would interest you.”
“Why don’t you leave that to me?”
The bar, in the West Village, had a dance floor in strobe lights where young men and women danced together or alone, and around the dance floor were cloth-covered tables, waiters in black vests.
Nancy danced with Vinnie, who said she was a bad dancer. He was right, but she was equal to anyone around her in the pleasure she took from the place. Swaying her hips, she raised her hands high and snapped her fingers and laughed. She was tall, and had long, loose, light russet hair and pale brown eyes, and her almost matte white skin was freckled across her delicate, bony chin and cheeks. She was wearing a long, full red dress with tiny embossed medallions sewn along the bodice, and on her long, narrow feet red espadrilles laced up, criss-cross, above her ankles.
Back at their table with Vinnie, she looked at the dancers in the strobe light that made them disappear and appear, disappear and appear, lit in different positions.
Nancy asked, “Who’s that?”
“Who?”
“There, standing at the bar, wearing chinos and a Columbia University sweatshirt.”
The guy standing at the bar had very short black hair, and his black beard shadowed the taut white skin of his angular face. The wide collar of his sweatshirt revealed his muscular neck, which appeared, in itself, to expose all his muscular body. Black chest hair curled above the ribbed collar. The corners of his mouth curved in a slight, fixed smile; he looked around at everyone and at no one with large black eyes.
“That’s Aaron,” Vinnie said.
“Aaron?”
“Aaron Cohen.”
“Let me guess. He’s Jewish,” Nancy said.
Vinnie said, “You’re really good at picking up on names.”
When, again, she looked at the guy at the bar, he turned his back toward her. He leaned on the bar, and his broad shoulder blades stretched the cloth of the sweatshirt.
Vinnie said, “He’s not just Jewish; he comes from a really strict Hasidic family in the Bronx.”
“That guy, standing there, comes from a Hasidic family?”
Vinnie, who liked to think he knew everything about everyone, said he knew everything about Aaron: he was brought up to let his forelocks grow in long curls, to wear a black overcoat, a black skull cap and a black fedora, and black trousers with a very low crotch, and all those shawls and strings tied around him under his black jacket—the whole bit.
“Really?”
“Yes, really and truly. He used to have to do things I’ll bet you’ve never even heard of.”
“Like what?”
“You ask me? Everybody knows what a Catholic has to do. A Catholic has to practice sexual abstinence, that’s what a Catholic has to do. I don’t know what Aaron had to do. Anyway, he gave it all up.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why does he come here?”
“I think he comes here because it’s as far from Hasidic Jews as he can get.”
“Does he ever pick up a girl?”
“I’ve only ever seen him go off on his own.”
“Does he at least talk with anyone?”
“What he does is he stands at the bar and drinks beer and looks around, and if he thinks anyone is looking at him he looks away.”
Aaron Cohen’s shoulder blades moved under his sweatshirt whenever he raised his bottle of beer or lowered it.
Vinnie slouched in his bentwood chair while searching the bar, it seemed, for someone else, anyone but Aaron Cohen.
“You don’t want me to meet him,” Nancy said.
Half smiling, Vinnie said, “I’d like to know what you expect from him.”
“For Christ’s sake, what do you think I expect from him?”
“I don’t know, but why do you want to meet him unless you expect something from him?”
“Come on, go talk with him and bring him back.”
“Aaron doesn’t talk much.”
“How do you know him, if he doesn’t talk?”
“He talks with me because I talk with him, the way I talk with everybody.”
“Come on, I’d like to meet him.”
Vinnie slouched back on his chair and only after a while lurched forward and said, “Oh all right,” and got up, his long, thin neck, torso, and legs swaying. He went to the bar to order drinks from the bartender and, as if incidentally, started to talk with Aaron, whose head turned sideways, so the light from behind the bar showed up his neck. When Nancy saw Vinnie nod toward her, she knew he was asking Aaron to come to their table. Aaron stood back from the bar to look in her direction, and she quickly glanced over her shoulder to see if there was anybody behind her. But there was no one. The table behind her was empty. She turned back to Aaron, who was walking toward the table with Vinnie.
He had clear features, and though his beard showed he appeared to have just shaved because his skin was slightly glossy. As Vinnie introduced him to Nancy, he smiled more, but he didn’t seem to know what to do until Vinnie said, “Sit,” and he drew the sleeves of his sweatshirt further up his forearms before he sat, then he smiled at Nancy and said, in a low voice, “Hi,” and she said, “Hi,” and she smiled, too. Nancy liked his smile.
Vinnie helped her, as he always did. He sat between her and Aaron and said to Aaron, “Don’t ask Nancy to dance. She’s a terrible dancer.”
“I don’t know how to dance,” Aaron said.
Standing, Vinnie said, “Then you both have a lot to say to each other, so I’m going to make the rounds.”
“Stay with us, Vinnie,” Aaron said.
Tapping him on the head, Vinnie said, “You still think it’s wrong to sit with a woman, do you?” He picked up his drink and left.
The strange sense occurred to Nancy of someone standing behind her, about to grab her; the sense was strange and at the same time familiar: she felt that someone, or something, was always there behind her and about to grab her, and when it occurred it startled her. Pulling away, she hit her hip against the edge of the round table and her cocktail splashed in its glass.
“Are you all right?” Aaron asked.
Laughing a loud laugh, Nancy thought how sometimes she could almost be vulgar when she was loud. She pressed a hand to the base of her throat to repress her loudness. “I’m all right.” But she was still startled.
Aaron’s shoulders sank a little as he resigned himself to staying with her until she said he could go, or so Nancy thought. If he was a Hasid, she didn’t know what he felt about a woman sitting next to him in a bar. But what he felt was up to him, not her, because he had his reasons for coming to the bar and he could have made some excuse and got up and left her if he wanted to. Still, it was strange that he was a good-looking Hasid in a sweatshirt drinking beer from a bottle while she sipped at her Manhattan.
“Where do you live?” Nancy asked him.
“On the Upper West Side. And you, where do you live?”
“On the Upper East Side.”
Aaron nodded.
Well, they’d got that far, but Nancy didn’t know how to go further, so they both looked at the dancers in the strobe light.
She asked, “Is it true that you don’t know how to dance?”
“I’ve never tried.”
This offered her a chance, but she felt too disoriented to take it. She said, “Well, Vinnie is right, I’m a terrible dancer. You wouldn’t learn anything from me.”
“Anyway,” he said, “I’m not really interested in learning to dance.”
“Then I could ask you what you are interested in.”
Now he laughed, and she knew he wouldn’t say, and she asked herself if she was really interested in him. No, not really. He was too strange, at least for her. She’d never met an ex-Hasid before; she wondered if she’d ever met a Hasid, however often she’d seen them walking up and down West Forty-Seventh Street. In their business, they were supposed to carry in their heavy overcoats millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds and gold, or so she’d heard. But she couldn’t see Aaron in that way. She couldn’t see him in any way. And she thought she’d like to leave.
She said, “I guess I’d better go,” and she stood and he, too, stood, which she thought was polite of him, and as she walked to the exit he followed, which was even more polite. Instead of stopping at the door to say goodbye, Aaron opened the door and waited for her to go out onto the sidewalk, and he went out with her. She could have said goodbye to him then, but, disoriented, she walked on, and because he followed her she stopped and waited for him to stop beside her. She asked herself, What’s going on? He was looking out at the traffic in the street, as if he were alone. And there came to Nancy the feeling that she, too, was alone, that if there was anything between them, it was that they were both alone against whatever it was that pulled them both from behind. She asked, “What about walking together for a while?” and he turned to her the smile she had liked and he said, “I’d like that.”
There was tenderness in Aaron’s angular face, and he looked at her as if he were waiting for her to decide which direction they’d take. She noticed that his black eyebrows almost met over his nose.
Nancy shook her long hair and said, “I like New York when it’s hot.”
They walked by people sitting on the steep steps to high stoops and the open front doors of narrow brick town houses, the street filled with shadows cast by streetlights through the trees. Though the air was still, the sultry stillness seemed within itself to be restless and about to break out in wild, dance-like movements. A greater sense of restlessness was about to break out into wild movement in the traffic and pedestrians along wide Fourteenth Street, where stores opened onto the sidewalk. They crossed Fourteenth Street to walk up Eighth Avenue, where the cars and the people were congested as if for a carnival, or for a carnival that everyone had come for but that hadn’t yet begun, the dancing already promised in the honking of car horns and people yelling. Nancy and Aaron walked past a man playing a saxophone and a woman tap-dancing on a sheet of plywood.
When they were passing the Port Authority building, Aaron asked Nancy if she was tired and would like him to hail a taxi.
“I’d like to go on walking,” she said. “And you?”
He raised a shoulder and let it drop, then said, “I like walking,” and Nancy smiled a little at what she thought was the Jewishness of his gesture and his intonation.
She didn’t mind what direction they took, a direction that, it seemed to her, was taken for them by New York.
They crossed Forty-Second Street, and went on up Eighth Avenue to Columbus Circle, walking over gratings from which hot and fetid air blew up, sometimes with tiny birds’ feathers, and in the shafts below the gratings were dark spaces that were lit by the burning, dim bare bulbs down there. The sidewalks were packed with people, the avenue jammed with traffic, and it seemed that the restlessness in the hot night would be, if it did break out into movement, violent, and there was an exciting expectation even in this. Nancy wanted something to happen, and she felt that New York on a hot night would make it happen.
A police car, its siren wailing, raced round Columbus Circle.
On the other side of Columbus Circle, Central Park West was almost empty of pedestrians and traffic. On one side of the avenue were the illuminated lobbies of the apartment houses seen through open doors, the doormen standing just outside for the coolness that came from the park across the avenue, beyond the blackened granite wall, where lights shone here and there among the dark trees.
Nancy thought that surely Aaron must be wondering if she was going to walk all the way with him, wherever all the way was, but, again, she let herself drift along.
They stopped on a corner for the light to change, and Nancy became aware of him standing beside her, of his body beneath his sweatshirt and chinos. Aaron didn’t move even when the light changed, and Nancy, to get him moving, nudged him a little with her hip.
In the middle of the street, he asked, “Are you sure you don’t want a taxi now?”
He had a deliberate way of talking, as if studied, and, as studied as it was, she wondered if he meant he wanted her to leave him.
“Well, I’m not going to walk through the park at night,” she said.
He said, “I wouldn’t let you,” and she followed him as they crossed the street to the next block. Not knowing what he wanted, not having known all the time they’d walked together, she followed him when he turned at Eighty-Ninth Street, and she went with him and they crossed Columbus Avenue to continue down Eighty-Ninth Street, and when he stopped in front of a brownstone, where he said he lived, she stopped with him. All the restlessness of the late summer night seemed to be her restlessness, not his.
As if she hadn’t quite understood, she asked, “So this is where you live?”
He repeated, “This is where I live.”
She heard herself ask, as if she were at a distance from her speaking self, “Do you want me to come in?”
Blinking, he smiled, but now not the smile she liked: a smile of only the corners of his lips that she read as, he was sorry, but all he had wanted was the walk, and it was time to say goodnight.
What had he been thinking on their walk? Whatever he’d been thinking she didn’t want to know. Once again, she had a sense that he was alone, and she felt alone with him, as if each being alone was what had kept them walking together.
She thought: You could read anything you wanted into someone’s silence.
Yet she said, “I’d understand if you don’t want me to come up.”
“No, no,” he said, but she could tell he didn’t want her to.
“Then, with all the walking we’ve done, I wouldn’t mind sitting down for ten minutes.”
“Oh sure,” Aaron said, but he didn’t move.
“So,” Nancy asked, “I mean, if you don’t want me to come up, I’ll sit for ten minutes on the step here. Maybe you feel it’s wrong to be alone with a woman, especially in an apartment.”
“I don’t have an apartment, just a room.”
“Is that what you don’t want me to see, that you live in just one room?”
“I’m not ashamed of living in one room.”
“But you are about having a woman in it with you.”
“Sometimes women have come up to visit me.”
“Alone?”
He blinked rapidly and his tight smile had gone. “Sometimes alone.”
“Then there has to be something in your room you don’t want me to see.”
He said, “There’s nothing in my room I wouldn’t want anyone in the world to see.”
And he touched Nancy’s elbow to lead her up the steep cement steps to the stoop. His movements as he took his keys from the hip pocket of his chinos became easy; his entire way of moving suddenly became easy. He swung open the wide front door, with three small Gothic windows in it, for Nancy to go in first.
In the entranceway, lit by a dim overhead globe, she said, “This house is so quiet.”
Aaron said, “It’s always quiet.”
He didn’t seem to know if he should lead the way up the stairs or let her go first and follow her, and Nancy took it on herself to go up the wooden stairs, dark brown and varnished, with wooden spheres on the newel posts. The stairs creaked. She stopped on a landing and let him go ahead of her to his room, which was two more flights up, at the back.
He unlocked the door, then held out his hand for Nancy to go in first.
The small room had wainscoting, in Gothic arches, all around the walls. A lot of the furniture, too, was Gothic—a long, refectory-like table, a chair with a Gothic back, a bookcase that was a tall, narrow Gothic arch. The bed, covered by an old khaki army blanket, was pushed against a small fireplace, and above the mantel of the fireplace hung a crucifix. Nancy stopped short before it. The body was matte white, the face of Christ raised and staring up in agony, and the cross was black. Aaron passed in front of Nancy to open a window.
He said, “It’s hot in here, and, I’m sorry, there’s a closed-in smell of not very clean laundry.”
Nancy turned away from the crucifix to face Aaron, who would not in her presence even look at the figure of Christ crucified, as if he knew she would embarrass herself by asking him why he, a Jew, an Orthodox Jew, had a crucifix hanging in his room; but it was just this question that she wanted to ask, but didn’t because she didn’t want to embarrass him, so there they were, two Jews, not able to speak about a presence that now appeared to hang over them in the room.
“Would you like some cold tea?” Aaron asked her.
“That would be nice,” she answered quietly.
He left her to go behind a screen to his small kitchen. She sat at the foot of the military-like bed. The table was covered with books, some lying open, and papers. Aaron came toward her with two tall glasses of tea, ice cubes clinking.
“You’re studying,” she said.
“I’ve been studying all summer.”
“What?”
“Oh,” he said, and once again shrugged.
Nancy put her glass on the floor and, weary, asked, “I need to lie down. Can I lie on your bed?”
“I’ll need to change the pillow case,” Aaron said.
“It’ll be all right.” She put the glass of tea, hardly drunk, on a corner of the table; she untied the laces and kicked off her espadrilles and lay back on Aaron’s bed, her head on his pillow. She closed her eyes, then opened them and saw Aaron, sitting on the wooden chair, watching her. She asked, “Will you lie beside me? Just lie beside me, that’s all.”
He took off his shoes and came to the bed. Putting one knee on the edge, he swiveled his body round and lay flat beside her, his arms alongside his body, his head at the edge of the pillow. He swallowed a lot, which made his neck convulse. Though he closed his eyes, she knew from his swallowing and convulsing neck that he didn’t fall asleep. When she touched his shoulder, he opened his eyes, but didn’t look at her.
“I am embarrassing you,” she said.
“A little,” he said.
Then she closed her eyes and, wondering where she was and what she was doing there, she fell asleep. She woke to find him asleep beside her, his body turned towards her, his arms tightly folded about his chest, his knees bent, his face half pressed into the pillow. The yellowish ceiling light was still on, but the gray-blue dawn light through the window was stronger. Quietly, so as not to disturb him, Nancy got up, slipped on her espadrilles and tied the laces, then went out and closed the door behind her.
Outside, she found the dawn sky reddish and reflected in the windshields of the cars parked along the empty street.
The doorman who had the night shift came out and opened the taxi door for her. In the apartment, she looked around the rooms.
In the bathroom off her bedroom she showered and brushed her teeth. Wrapped in a large towel, another towel around her head, she again looked around the apartment. Nothing in it, not one thing, would have indicated to someone who didn’t know that the people who lived there were Jewish.
She slept, and in the afternoon called Vinnie to ask for Aaron’s telephone number.
“I don’t think you should get involved with Aaron. He’ll be leaving New York soon.”
“How do you know?”
“I know everything.”
“Where will he be going?”
“Listen,” Vinnie said, “don’t get involved. You have nothing in common with him, nothing at all. Forget about him.”
“Okay,” she said.
“I’m telling you again, forget about him.”
“Okay, okay.”
Vinnie invited her to a party that night. She didn’t want to go, but she said she would. It was Saturday, and she always wanted to go out on a Saturday.
Sunday morning, her parents returned from Amagansett. Her mother said that Nancy was right, the Hamptons got lonely with all the people gone; and anyway it was time to get back to the city, where Nancy’s father had been coming to work during the week.
She had brunch with her parents in a small restaurant on an East Side cross street, and afterward she said she’d do some shopping. The sky was low and gray, the lowness and grayness seeming to reach down to the ground, and the air was suddenly chill. She didn’t go shopping when she left her parents, but walked over to Central Park. In the chill she drew the silk scarf from about her neck, covered her head with it, and tied the corners under her chin, and she walked slowly, as if she weren’t going anyplace but had come into the park just to stroll. She left by the Eighty-Second Street exit and went up to Eighty-Ninth Street and west on it to the house with steep cement steps leading to a high stoop and the wide wooden door with the three Gothic windows, where Aaron lived. She examined the names, each with a black button by it, at the side of the door. Only one space was blank. She pressed the bell and as she did she leaned toward the door to listen for the sound of a bell ringing from deep inside, but she heard nothing. As no one came to the door, she turned away. On the sidewalk, she looked up once more at the wooden front door of the house. Then the door opened and Aaron Cohen, in brown corduroy trousers and a dark brown cardigan, stepped out onto the stoop.
She called up, “You’re here?”
“I guess I am,” he answered.
“Vinnie told me not to bother you.”
“Vinnie is filled with advice he gives to other people but never gives to himself.”
“That’s Vinnie.”
Under the cardigan, Aaron wore a white shirt, the collar open, and around his neck was a thin gold chain, and Nancy wondered if some religious medal was dangling from that chain.
“Should I come up?” she asked.
Aaron laughed and said, “I wouldn’t know how to stop you if I didn’t want you to come up.”
Nancy asked, “Should I think I’m forcing myself on you?”
“Think of it this way,” Aaron said, “not that you’re forcing yourself on me but that I always have to leave it to other people to make the first move.”
“All right. I’m making the first move.”
Aaron let her go ahead into the entry hall, where she untied the knot of her silk scarf under her chin and, pulling at a corner, slid it and draped it about her neck, a gesture she connected with an older woman.
She said, “This house really is so dark and quiet.”
They climbed the stairs side by side, Nancy running her hand along the highly varnished handrail and then over the spheres on the newel posts. Sometimes she and Aaron bumped lightly into one another.
The door to his room was open, and light shone from inside. She went in first and, as though trying to check everything against her memory of it, looked around slowly.
The crucifix, the white, tortured Christ nailed to a black cross, was hanging over the fireplace.
Nancy unbuckled the belt of her trench coat, unbuttoned it, and held it out to Aaron, but when she realized she was presuming on his politeness she took it back and said, “I’m sorry. Tell me where to put my coat.”
“Give it to me,” he said, “and I’ll hang it in my closet.”
She went to his work table but, standing over it, she stopped herself from looking at the books and papers.
She said to Aaron, “Here I am, about to look at what you’re writing.”
“You can look at whatever you want.”
“And supposing I come across some secret of yours among your papers?”
“That’d be fine with me.”
“You don’t have secrets?”
“I don’t.”
Nancy sat on the Gothic chair and Aaron in an old armchair under a floor lamp where she supposed he read, one of his books on the floor. The light made each short strand of his thick, black hair shine.
Looking at him, Nancy thought, Give in, let go and give in—but she had no idea what she would be letting go of to give in to.
She asked, “Do you ever have moods?”
“Moods?”
“Moods, when you feel, oh, that all you want is to lie in the dark, just lie there?”
Aaron lowered his eyes, and she thought that she was making herself vulnerable to him by talking about moods, but she couldn’t help talking; it was as if she was talking against his silence, trying to get him to agree that they shared some mood.
She said, “I tell myself, when I’m in one of those moods, that I must not give in, that I must never give in, that I must go out and see people, people as superficial as I am, because I never know what might be in the dark.”
His eyes still lowered, Aaron appeared to be thinking of how he would answer her, but when he looked at her his expression was that he wouldn’t be able to explain, and his inability to explain made his look one of pain.
All at once impatient with his evasiveness, impatient with him for presuming she wouldn’t understand what he understood, Nancy rose from the chair and stood facing him, and he stood because she did; as a reproach, her voice high, she asked, “Don’t you ever have longings?” and as soon as she had spoken it seemed to her that she heard her own words, heard them as Aaron heard them, and they had the meaning Aaron heard in them, the meaning that suddenly coursed through her as a sensation in her body, and she became still.
He quietly turned away and went to the window. He said, “It’s raining.”
She said in a very quiet voice, “Are you leaving New York, like Vinnie said?”
“Vinnie’s right for once. I am.”
“Where will you go after you leave New York?”
“I’ll be going to a monastery in upstate New York for final instruction before my baptism.”
Nancy’s voice had an edge of accusation. “Your baptism?”
“To become a Catholic.”
“You, a Hasid, becoming a Catholic?”
“Who told you that?”
“Vinnie told me.”
“Vinnie exaggerates, you can’t believe anything Vinnie says about anyone.”
Nancy tried to laugh, but the laugh came out a cackle. “So you’re not a Hasid?”
“I’ll always be what I am, a Jew.”
“Then, isn’t it enough for you, being a Jew?”
His voice flat, he said, “I have mine, you have your own longings.”
Her voice sharpened as though accusing him of longings that had to be false when she said, “Yes, I have my own longings, yes, I do. And they’re the longings of a Jew, because that’s what I am, too, a Jew.” But she had no idea what the longings of a Jew could be.
He turned again to the window, against which the rain ran in rivulets, and Nancy, as if his turning away made all her high feelings fall away, went to stand beside him and to look through the distorting rivulets out to the street below.
Her voice fell low when she said, contrite, “I wouldn’t be able to guess what a Catholic longs for, just that it must be strange, and it makes me feel that you must be strange.”
“I’m not strange,” he said.
“You are to me.”
“But you don’t know me.”
“I don’t, and I suppose I won’t. What will you do when you’re a Catholic?”
“The monastery runs a farm, so I’ll be taking care of pigs and sheep and cows while I’m there.”
As if she didn’t hear, staring ahead, Nancy went to sit on the Gothic chair. She felt tears collect on her lower lids, and she raised her fingers to wipe them away, but the more she wiped them away the more they collected, until they coursed down her cheeks and fingers. She remained on the chair, her shoulders hunched and her knees pressed together.
When Aaron came to her with a box of tissues, she drew a number out, and said, “Thank you,” and wiped her eyes and blew her nose.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I am too,” he said.
“Don’t think you did anything to hurt me,” she said quietly. “You didn’t. I know you’d never hurt anyone.”
“But you are hurt,” he said.
Her fingertips raised again to both her eyes, the tears streamed down her hands to her wrists.
She said, “I don’t know why I’m crying.” And after a moment she laughed and stood.
The gold chain was tight about Aaron’s neck, which appeared to be slightly damp. Whatever was hanging on the chain was hidden beneath his shirt, in the hair of his chest. She touched his chest.
“You would never give in just to having some fun.”
He smiled.
She wiped her eyes and blew her nose again.
“Maybe I should go,” she said.
“Maybe,” he said.
She stared at the balled-up wet tissue in her open hand, then looked around the room, as if what she should do with that wet tissue were her first concern. She closed it in a fist.
“Is it still raining?” she asked.
“I think it’s stopping.”
“Tell me, why do you go to that bar?”
Now, unexpectedly, a lively spirit came into his voice, and a lively spirit came into his body, too, because he rocked his shoulders in a way he hadn’t before, as if he had repressed the spirit but now let it out, daring himself because he knew she was leaving, and he said, “To find out if I’m tempted.”
“Tempted by what?”
And here, with a great suddenness, he smiled such a wide smile, his teeth strong and bright, that his whole self appeared exposed, a self made stronger and brighter by his asking, “Don’t you know?”
“I don’t.”
And he said, “By you,” and his smile was beautiful.
He was to become a monk, and monks were not meant to be seductive. Not knowing how to respond, and thinking, Why am I so silly? Nancy asked, “Will you get my coat for me, please?”
He went to his closet, unhooked a hanger, and slipped her trench coat from it, then returned to her, holding it open. She turned and inserted her arms into the sleeves and put the wad of wet tissue into a pocket.
“My scarf?” she asked.
“It’s around your shoulders.”
She raised the triangle from her shoulders and covered her head with it and tied the ends of the corners in a knot under her chin. She did this slowly, slowly buttoned her trench coat, and buckled her belt. She thought of herself as a woman in control.
“Well, then,” Nancy said, “I don’t suppose there’s any reason for us to see one another again,” and she held out her hand.
He took it, but he said, “Maybe not.”
She was the first to withdraw her hand from his. “Don’t come downstairs with me,” she said. “I can go on my own.”
He went ahead of her to open the door to his room.
“Well then,” she said, “bye.”
“Bye.”
She couldn’t help herself. She reached out and, leaning towards him, put her arms around him. It took him a moment to raise his arms to hold her as she held him. She pressed her face against the side of his face.
He kissed her on a cheek, then for a moment held her more closely to him before he let his arms drop, and she knew she must let him go and stand back and turn away. When she reached the top of the stairs on the landing she heard the door to his room close. Halfway down the flight of stairs, she stopped and sat on a step for a moment.
Leaves fallen in the gutters were wet, and the leaves on the trees were dripping.
As she walked, she sensed that music she had never heard before was going round her mind and she couldn’t hum it.
Nancy spent Sunday evening in with her parents, which surprised them. Because she was thinking about Aaron, it occurred to her at dinner that he would have been a very strange presence at the table with her parents, and because she couldn’t see him there, she said, as if urged to confront her parents with someone she doubted very much they would have known, “Vinnie introduced me to a Hasid.”
Her mother asked, “How is Vinnie? He makes me laugh.”
“He tries,” Nancy said. “He sends his best.”
Surprised, her father asked, “Where did you meet a Hasid?”
“In a bar in the Village.”
“You met a Hasid in a bar in the Village? Seems unlikely to me.”
“Well, Vinnie said he’s Hasid.”
Nancy’s mother said, “Maybe he was joking.”
“He’s becoming a Catholic,” Nancy said.
Her mother, who never quite concentrated on what was being said, asked, “Vinnie is becoming a Catholic?”
And Nancy’s father, who always tried to counter the vagueness of his wife by stating the facts, as if the facts were a little judgment against her, said, “Vinnie is a Catholic.”
“I wasn’t talking about Vinnie,” Nancy said. “I said that I met a Hasid who’s becoming a Catholic.”
“Where on earth did you meet a Hasid?’ her mother asked.
“As I said, in a bar, in Greenwich Village.”
“How could you have met him in a bar in Greenwich Village?” her mother asked.
“You have vague ideas about Greenwich Village,” Nancy’s father told his wife.
Nancy knew that her parents loved each other, but she did think her father sometimes taunted her mother.
Her father said to her, “If the person you met is a Hasid converting to being a Catholic, he would be a very lonely man. His family would sit shiva for him, and he’d die to them.”
“I think Aaron is lonely,” Nancy said. “Yes, he is.”
“Aaron?” her mother asked.
“The Hasid I met.”
“I’m sorry for him,” her mother said. “Do you know him well enough to invite him to a meal?”
“I don’t think he’d come.”
“Does he imagine we’d object to him?”
“No, no, not that. He’d just feel that somehow he doesn’t belong. In fact, I think he never feels, or has ever felt, that he belongs.”
“What else do you know about him?” her father asked.
“Not much. He was wearing a Columbia University sweatshirt, so maybe he was a student there.”
“That would mean he’d already come a long way from being a Hasid.”
“I’ve heard,” Nancy’s mother said, “that the clothes they wear are from the eighteenth century.”
“Yes, I’ve heard,” Nancy repeated, and she thought, as she had thought before: there was nothing in the family apartment that she could have identified as Jewish, not a mezuzah on the jamb of the door to the apartment. She didn’t believe that her parents had done this intentionally, but that it happened, nor did she know what had happened to her parents before they came to New York—what had happened to them in Berlin, what had happened to their families in Germany. She knew this: that when her father learned that he would be banned from university, he quickly went home and with her mother packed two suitcases and locked the door and they went to the train station and boarded the next train to Amsterdam.
But Nancy did not know how her parents had arrived in New York or how the Biedermeier furniture and the Berlin ice buckets had followed them, and she did not know why she held back from asking.
After dinner, her mother asked her if she was going out, and, again, she said no, and she joined them for coffee in what was called the office, where her father sat at his desk in a leather chair. On his desk were international magazines on wine, and on bookshelves, books in English and French and German and Russian (her father was born in Russia but moved to Berlin with his parents when he was a boy); and there were books on viticulture and vineyards, some of them large, bulky presentation copies. Nancy knew this much: that after her parents arrived in New York, her father was hired by a refugee family who had reestablished in New York their old family wine business from Germany, and as the family died out her father, as though a surviving member, became the head. But the business was now running down and Nancy’s father thought of selling, but didn’t. Her mother sat in a small, upholstered armchair in front of the desk. She was born in Berlin.
And because of Aaron, because of the continuing loneliness that she felt isolated him as a Jew, a loneliness that maybe was also hers because she, too, was a Jew, she wanted to know more from her parents about what had happened to them before New York, what had happened to them as Jews among Jews, but she didn’t know how to engage them.
She asked, suggesting that the thought came to her incidentally, “Don’t I remember you once trying to search for some relatives?”
“We’re still trying,” her father said.
Her mother abruptly said, “Nan, darling, ask Vinnie to come to dinner with us while you’re away. He does make us both laugh.”
She took the cup of coffee Nancy held out to her and said, “Thank you,” and Nancy thought, too, that her parents’ rather formal after-dinner coffee in her father’s office was from a past Nancy knew little about.
Then it occurred to Nancy that there was something so obvious in all that her parents didn’t tell her about their Jewish pasts that she wanted to expose it, and she said curtly, “Well, thank you both for what you won’t tell me.”
Her father picked up a letter opener and held it between both hands, and said, “We really don’t know.”
Nancy said, “I don’t want any coffee. I think I’ll go lie on my bed and read. I have a lot of reading to do for my courses.”
“Oh, don’t go, Nan,” her mother said.
She knew that she had hurt her parents, and she was sorry, for how could she blame them for not telling her what they themselves couldn’t know? Her mother said, “Tell us what you’ve been reading,” and this made Nancy feel they were trying to make up for having hurt her, though she had hurt them.
No, Nancy thought, her parents weren’t interested in hearing about her reading, not now, and she herself was not interested in telling them; but she and her parents were in that strange mode when nothing that was said was meant, and there was no way of knowing what was meant, not, certainly, when Nancy said that she had noted something in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl that she wondered about and if it had been noted by anyone else. As she spoke she thought, what possible relevance could there be between Henry James and the past history of her parents, who didn’t know about their lost relatives and their lost friends?
Her father said, “Your mother is tired.”
“No, no, I’m not. Tell us, Nan darling, tell us, we want to know.”
In her mother’s vagueness there was a deep, stunned calm, and in the deep calm a sense of always trying to understand all that was beyond understanding, and so the apparent lack of focus in her eyes.
“It doesn’t matter,” Nancy said.
“Please,” her mother said.
They were, Nancy thought, all of them, being stilted.
“Here it is. In the novel, the Roman prince, about to marry in London, expects his relatives to arrive from Italy for the wedding, and among them is his younger brother, whose wife, ‘of the Hebrew race, with a portion that had gilded the pill, was not in a condition to travel.’ And this is the only reference to a Jew in the book.”
Maybe her parents didn’t comment because they wondered why their daughter made such a point of the reference in Henry James, but Nancy persisted. “I keep asking myself what he meant by ‘with a portion that gilded the pill’?” She thought, here she was trying to find anti-Semitism in Henry James to get her parents talking, and she knew that she was, with a righteousness that had to do with an inner opposition to Aaron, stressing the text, looking for a subtext that was probably not there. But as they drank their coffee, Nancy sensed there was some subtext in her parents’ silence, and if it was not about their being Jewish, she could not imagine what it could be about.
There was still something not said, all of them waiting for what was not said to be heard, maybe to be said by someone who was not in fact present, and yet somehow present.
Her mother appeared to go into a reverie, and, leaning her head to the side and looking away, she said quietly, “Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt, und ruhig fließt der Rhein.”
Her father said, “The air is cool and darkens, and the Rhine flows calmly on.”
Nancy asked, “Heine?”
And her father said, “Yes, Heine.”
And her mother smiled at her for recognizing the name of the poet who wrote that beautiful line.
Nancy kissed them both and said good night, and left them to go to her room, where she lay on her bed in the dark, until she told herself not to, and she switched on a light to read.
Early the next morning, she breakfasted with her parents, who had come from their bed to be with her before she left for Boston, and she felt more lonely than she had ever felt on her way from them.
She had a student apartment on Beacon Hill. The house, like many of the houses on Beacon Hill, was brick, with a black door and a brass knocker, but where she lived the old Yankee families didn’t live any longer; the house was on the somewhat dilapidated side of the hill, the door scuffed and the brass knocker askew.
The apartment had a bedroom in the front and a kitchen at the back, with a striped Indian blanket nailed to the architrave of the doorless doorway between the two, and beyond the kitchen was the bathroom. As soon as she dropped her suitcase on the floor at the end of her bed, she sat on the edge and telephoned Manos, who was supposed to be expecting her. The bed faced a small fireplace, and while the telephone at the other end of the line was ringing she looked at the BU white ceramic beer stein, the incense sticks in a hand-thrown vase, the branch of maple leaves that had been on the mantelpiece when she’d left two months before. Manos answered and said he’d been waiting for her to telephone. There was a student party that night they could go to.
She said, “I was hoping to see you on your own.”
She didn’t understand why he didn’t want to see her on his own, or maybe she did understand, or would if she figured it out. She was feeling too light-headed to think about it.
Darkness had fallen by the time Manos arrived and found her, barefoot and in jeans and a sweatshirt, reading a scholarly book on the novel that she should have read over the summer. She really, really didn’t want to go out, she said, but she made herself get up and change and go out with him. He was a big man, with small hands and feet and dark circles around his darker eyes. He was a premedical student. At the party, he talked for so long with the friend who was giving it, also premed, that Nancy wandered off on her own, as she guessed he wanted her to.
She made the tour, a drink in a raised hand, looking for someone who had a story to tell her. Not finding one, she returned to Manos and said she really, really wanted to go home, and he said, sure, he’d drive her. In his car he rested his hand on her thigh as he drove, and she wondered if this meant he wanted to spend the night with her. But in the street he didn’t park his car, didn’t even shut off the engine, so she knew he wasn’t going to come in with her.
He said, “Nancy, things have changed.”
She reached out and put her arms around him and kissed his forehead and said, “Sure,” and felt an odd sense of relief. She stumbled on the way to the door. He waited until she had opened it and closed it behind her before he drove off.
For two weeks, she devoted herself to her studies, especially the work of Henry James. She didn’t go to any parties, and when Manos telephoned her, which he did often, she said she felt they shouldn’t see one another for a while.
Four weeks into the semester she decided to go to New York for the weekend to be with her parents. She missed them, she missed New York. She cut one class and left Friday afternoon, and on the way noted that the leaves of the birch trees along the highways had turned autumn yellow.
Her parents were both in their sixties. Nancy had been a latecomer in their marriage. At dinner, she told them what she’d been doing at BU but not what she planned to do with a master’s degree in English when she got it. When her father asked, “How’s Manos getting on with his medical studies?” Nancy said, “I’m not dating Manos anymore,” and her father, with a severe frown, asked, “Why?” Nancy shrugged. Again, her father asked, “Why?” but her mother, looking steadily at him, stopped him from asking more about Nancy’s love life. He said, “Funny the way Greeks are always studying to be doctors or lawyers.”
Early snow fell lightly, and Nancy went out on Sunday afternoon to walk in the falling flakes. She found herself walking across Central Park, where the snow was settling on the withered leaves still on the trees. Flakes hit her face as she stood in front of the house where Aaron had lived, and where he might still live, or where someone might know about him. But as she, blinking, looked up the snow-covered stairs and stoop, on which there were no footsteps, it came to her as a matter of fact that while she had been away she had exaggerated whatever meaning he had had for her. Maybe she had come to the house just to look at it and by looking at it to understand just how much she had exaggerated the meaning she’d had for him, a meaning that had suddenly gone, whatever the meaning had been.
Yet she climbed the stairs, her footsteps the first to be made in the thin snow. The doorbell, she remembered, had no name under it, and she rang it. After a long wait, during which she thought she could hear the snow falling around her with a slight seething sound, she turned to descend, stepping in the footsteps she had made coming up. Halfway down, she heard the door open behind her, and she turned back to see an older man in what appeared to be a clerical black cardigan standing in the doorway, a hall light lit behind him. Nancy climbed the stairs again to the man, who wore large, gray felt slippers and had a soft, white face.
He said, quietly, “Come in out of the snow.”
Nancy did, and in the hall of that silent house he looked at her without asking what she wanted.
She said, “The last time I was here it was to see Aaron Cohen.”
“He’s at the novitiate,” the man said.
“Does that mean he’s been baptized?”
“He has, yes, he has.” The man had an Irish accent.
“So he’ll become a monk?”
The man smiled weakly. “You could say that.”
As Nancy was walking back through Central Park, a sudden gust of wind made the snow whirl around her, and she felt that this had some meaning: it appeared to her that everything had some meaning.