Epilogue (16 page)
vinced that I need not visit the Egyptian wing of the Met ever again.
He tells me about his sons who are perfect and imper-fect as all our children are. One has been strange all his life, brilliant but strange. The other suffers from dyslexia but seems to have a normal life, but I have not heard the whole story, not yet. Of course I cannot tell him the real long tale of my children’s lives. It would take forever. He couldn’t listen that long. He doesn’t need the information. I couldn’t begin to convey who they are, why they are who they are, in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea. All I can do is let him know that there are stories that will be told in time. I can let him know that my children consume me and have since they were born. This is true for him also. I hear it in his voice. I hear it in the way he shies away from telling me the very most important of their secrets. We are two strangers at a table in a public place. How much easier it would be if we were dogs and could smell the truth about each other and then go run in the park back and forth, jumping and tumbling in the dirt.
He remarks again and again that I speak so f luently, so well. I am a writer after all. Everyone I know speaks in long full sentences that loop and dip and soar. This man knows many things I do not. He knows about fossils and has traveled to find them on distant shores. He knows about electricity and computers and objects foreign to me. He understands calculus. His mind is very good. I am liking him more and more. Then he tells me about his childhood home. He grew up poor, very poor he says, the youngest of six boys, and in the house there was violence, the police were called again and again. He shakes his head from side
to side while telling me this. Gray waves of poverty and trouble and pain f low over us. His brothers left the house and he was the one who returned from a year in Israel, and cared for his diabetic blind mother in her final years. He mutters something about sexual abuse. Did I hear that correctly? Can I ask him to repeat it? I decide to let it go. Henry Roth knows this landscape. A. has had two serious relationships since his wife died. Both of these women had personalities that were too strong, too demanding and in the end he did not like them.
Suddenly I am tired. I want to go home. I have had enough. I feel his anger under the words. I feel the anger that accompanies those who wash their hands three times to ward off evil, possibly their own evil. I cannot do this. Am I wrong? Am I aborting a romantic possibility for the wrong reasons? Am I superficial in not liking the tension in his face, the twitching, the tightness of his smile? Am I just afraid of a new person? This is very possible. Perhaps I do not intend ever to find a new companion. I will not see
A. again.
When I was last in Jerusalem working on a book, before
died, I stayed at the Inbal Hotel where many Orthodox young men and women held their first dates in the café on the main f loor. In the early evening I saw them, girls as young as sixteen or perhaps a little older, boys who wore black hats and as much beard as their age allowed, white-skinned, leaning over the small tables, trying to do just what I had been doing, who are you, should you live with me for the rest of my life? It was a lovely scene, rife with hormones and the scent of marriage vows in the air, and as I watched from my table I could tell which dates were
going well and which were not. I saw the girls smile and beckon with their eyes. I saw the boys wave their hands in the air as they spoke. I drank in great swallows of shyness, male and female, also great swallows of hope.
The waiters came and brought the green tea and the lights outside the windows gleamed and the polished wood tables served as perfect platforms to launch a new life.
But I can’t do this now. Not with A. with whom one would spend ever after, no matter that it’s a short ever after, dodging around the damage in his mind, skirting the danger of his anger, avoiding his disapproval, wiping and cleaning every surface so he wouldn’t be affronted. Besides there is even at my age, even after everything, a question of desire. I thought this would not matter anymore. I thought that companionship would suffice for my remaining days and I would be lucky to find that but there is the stubborn-ness of body and the peculiarity of desire. I will not be able to ignore it.
calls the next day. I sound friendly. I tell him I can’t talk. Perhaps tomorrow, I say. He hears me. And he doesn’t call again. Of course that’s my story. His might be that he found me not to his taste, not to his style, not what he wanted at all. I don’t mind if that’s what he thought. It is a blessing of old age not to care if someone should not choose to dance. I find to my delight that I have outgrown, or perhaps outlasted, the need for every eye to shine on me kindly.
I am asked to a luncheon and talk at the Jewish Theo-logical Library, to view the rare book collection there. I go. There are only five of us around a table. This is a fund-raising effort on the part of the library. I am invited
in hopes I will be helpful in nonfinancial ways. At least I assume so, or the fund-raisers have stumbled while assem-bling their targets. In the 1920s the seminary library had endured a fire. Fortunately the fire had been in a different tower from where the rare treasures had been stored. The librarian sits on one side of a table pulling boxes that look like books off a cart that sits by his elbow. He opens a box with frayed and jagged pieces of parchment on it. It is a prayer book from the sixth century. The scribe had written in such careful letters and such straight lines that it almost seemed printed. The pages came from the storehouse of old papers from the Cairo synagogue. Jews do not destroy holy papers. They bury them, and these among other relics had been found in the basement of the synagogue and retrieved before the Second World War. Of course I wanted to touch the pages, but you can’t. The smudge of fingers, the oil on the skin would damage the parchment. We are shown a wedding contract from the fifth century with words that translate into the same words that are on my daughters’ marriage contracts. We look at a small book that is illus-trated with miniature figures and tells the story of Joseph in Egypt.
Again and again appeals are made to God to hear, to forgive, to bless. Again and again praise is offered to God from the pages, pages labored over long before the printing press came into existence. Meanwhile in the communities from which these pages come, plague arrived, oppression in the form of Muslim kings or officiates of the power of the government appeared. Again and again the praise to God occurs after storms and shipwrecks and military disasters, disease cuts off the life of young children and parents
mourn their children and children mourn their parents and the seasons change and the years pass and the monarchs change but the prayers do not. Are they heard? Are they ever heard?
The prayers we said at H.’s grave I wrapped around myself to keep away the cold. But God: I tried but could not believe that God was there with me, with my children, on that hilltop, at that moment. H. believed in evolution, in random accident. I believe in evolution and random accident but I am not so sure that behind all that, the eons and the millennia, and the Tyrannosaurus Rex, there isn’t some reason, some mind, some deity that began it all. Perhaps a cruel deity but a deity nevertheless. On the other hand when it comes to the God within, the voice of God that speaks in the wilderness, the one that hands Moses a good book on a mountaintop, that infuses Buddha or inspires Gandhi or walks on water or resurrects the dead, I am without the ability to see. My eyes are empty sockets.
I am not a scientist but I count myself a follower of that camp. I like harmony but am too attached to my jagged edges to merge with any God within or God without. Those who can have my full respect. Those who can’t are more likely to join me for a movie and a Chinese dinner afterwards. Yoga class results in stretched muscles. Those muscles just don’t stretch all the way to eternity.
So I will not take solace in God’s plan, God’s love, God’s good intentions. This is ungrateful of me. Creation no matter how long it took is good, just not quite good enough.
Which does not mean I do not value each and every scrap of parchment, each old Bible, each work of early
printing press and ancient scribe. Artifacts, remnants of dearly beloved convictions, messages in bottles cast upon an eternal sea, they deserve respect. They evoke awe.
A SEVENT Y-FIVE-YEAR-OLD WIDOWER CONTACTS ME ON
Match.com. He has a kind face. He lives in Brooklyn. He says he is looking for a companion, a friend. I e-mail him. He e-mails me again. I give him my phone number. He calls. He has a gentle manner and a soft voice. I agree to meet him on Sunday at the Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn. He is waiting at the gate when I arrive. We walk together through the paths that wind around the giant tulips, luscious reds and purples. We talk of our children and he tells me he owns a condo in Cancún and a cottage in the Adirondacks. First he worked as a longshoreman in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, then he managed his wife’s family business for years. He was a pilot in World War Two. He takes my hand in his. “This is the first time,” he tells me, “since my wife died, that I have held a woman’s hand.” He purchases sandwiches and bottles of water and we sit on the grass on a hill above some children playing ball. Then he says, “I have to tell you I am not the age I entered on Match.com.” I am not surprised. A few years do not matter to me. He says, “I couldn’t enter the year of birth, because the program didn’t go back that far.” Now I am alert. “When were you born?” I ask. “Nineteen-eighteen,”
he says. I do the math. He is eighty-nine. He is straight-backed, still handsome. His mind is there, his heart, the feeling heart, seems strong. But when he invites me back to his apartment in Brooklyn I make an excuse. When I get home I e-mail him that I am unable to bear another loss. He e-mails me back, “Seize the moment, let’s take advantage of what time we have.” He has a point. But I don’t want to. I am a coward. I am unkind. He tries a few more times. He finally e-mails me, “I must accept your decision.” He must. Important question: Do I, without ever quite admitting it to myself, require a man who has achieved in the world as H. did? Do I require diplomas and published papers as a prerequisite for my hand? If so, I am ashamed. On the other hand ambition and knowledge are part of who and what a person is or has become. Could I love a truck driver or a shoe salesman? Is it more sensible to be alone than to slide down the social scale? The answer to that last question is of course not. But can I do it? “Class” is such a loaded word, a Marxist word, a thing no decent American wants to talk about. But is it real, real like age, real like your Social Security number? Is class my shadow that I can’t dodge no matter how I turn?
I go to dinner at my friends’ home. The man is a painter, the woman a journalist. Two other couples, old friends, are there. I am happy to be with them. I have a glass of wine. The artist’s paintings are on the wall, rivers of blue and green, leaf-like, water-like, fall-like, they f loat above us. I talk about Iran and our president and about the Picassos at the Guggenheim show of Spanish paintings. I ask about this one’s biography in progress of Rosa Luxem-bourg, that one’s article on art critics of the fifties. I ask the
doctor at the table about hospice care and the right to die, and as I sit, with food on my plate, conversation, a bright slice of lemon in my water glass, a strange cloud comes over me. It is not the absence of H. I suddenly believe I am damaged and have been hiding the damage. As if I were wearing a wig, covering up the fact that I had blown off the top of my head with a handgun. It could be the drink. I am not a good drinker. These friends I have known a long time and each of them I love for different reasons. I know them so well that their stories are imprinted in my brain. I could tell them myself as it is with old friends. I am safe here in this room. If it weren’t for this hole in my skull I would even be content.
• • •
I used to read all the time. I spent a childhood in books. Now I read slowly. No, I still read quickly, but I put the book down after a few pages. I can’t concentrate. I resist being pulled inside the words on the page. I seem to think it too dangerous to embrace the words on the page. This is odd. My old escape, my familiar room in my brain, is no longer working well. It seems as if I have read everything before, that I know what the author is going to say before the author has said it. I have lost my pleasure in the path, in the plot, in the tone. This is serious. I cannot substitute broad jumping, or knitting, or baking, for the place that reading held, for the way that reading kept me together. I may just have to allow myself to f ly apart until I can read again, the way I am accustomed to.
• • •
I have to decide but I can’t decide in the abstract whether or not I really want a new companion, a new mate, a new man in my bed. In theory yes, in reality maybe, maybe not. There are not so many years left in my life that I couldn’t be alone, get used to being alone, even enjoy being alone. I could make my work the center of my life. I could make my children and my grandchildren the center of my life. My friends could amuse me, hold my hand on difficult days. This I think would be dignified, proper, reasonable. I could do this and may have to do this. But then I am having lunch with a friend who tells me that last night she and her husband, who has Parkinson’s disease, who is eighty-two years old, decided they did not want to go out for dinner and so they ordered in Japanese food from a good place and they sat on their couch and watched the movie they had ordered from Netflix. “We had a great evening,” she said. I felt a wrenching stab of jealousy. H. and I had evenings like that all the time. There is nothing great about food and a movie if you are alone in front of the TV. The blue light f lickers, the characters do what they do, the camera zooms about, but the couch is not a safe haven and the food tastes of card-board containers and the hours of the evening do not f ly by. Therefore I do want a new companion.