In the Land of the Living (16 page)

On the sixth or seventh night, she didn’t let him give his demure kiss, but told him to go to his car and she’d meet him out there in a minute. Leo waited outside by his car in the street. He couldn’t see any stars because a streetlight was shining right over him.

She came out fifteen minutes or so later, shivering and holding her elbows, and didn’t speak to him.

“So?” he said.

“I have to go to sleep,” she said, and yawned.

“Can I see you tomorrow?”

“I’m seeing some friends tomorrow.”

“What about me? Aren’t I your, uh, friend?”

“Yeah, Leo.” Then she said bluntly, “I want you to know that I think of you as just a friend, okay?”

He did not allow himself to move. “Wait, do we really have to talk about this out here?”

“What is there to talk about?” she said.

But they went back to the den and the coatrack by the door and sat in front of the TV again. He said carefully, “And why do you think of me as only a friend?”

“Because we haven’t even fooled around!”

So that’s how it is?
He was pissed, and he felt suddenly in his element. He put his arm around her. He kissed her with an open mouth, pushing hard against her so that his tongue was flat against her lips and he tasted her skin on his tongue and felt the fine hairs of her face on his lips. He rubbed her breasts on a wild guess, enjoying none of it, but feeling a little bit as he had on Space Mountain—
Hey, I can do roller coasters!
—and shortly thereafter he lovelessly plunged his hand into the front of her jeans. He felt nothing on his fingers before she stopped him, didn’t even feel her underwear when he touched it, as if his hand were anesthetized.

Unconscious people just barely closed their eyes, as if they had just closed them for a moment, as if they were feeling something good somewhere distant in their bodies, like a foot massage.
The lids on the old lady were almost translucent, too, like the lids of eyes on dead bird chicks that you saw in the grass in the spring, covered with flies; you could faintly see the blue bulbs inside.

The next night, he didn’t wait at all. He kissed her with an open mouth and tasted her tongue with his mouth and thought of the cow tongues at the West Side Market. He wondered with each movement whether he had done as Josh Helpern had done or Steve Zenilman would do and he soon found that the old and churned saliva, hot on their faces, was somewhat stale and gross. Then, just as he grew bored with kissing, she dropped her hand down, grazing his chest as she did, and grabbed him with great sureness through his shorts. She kept her hand there all the way to the end, beyond the end in fact, and he apologized that he wouldn’t be able to do it again just yet, because it seemed possible that other boys had been so virile as to do it twice in a row and perhaps that was what she expected of him.

Surgery was performed in the morning, Dr. Helpern said, because you weren’t allowed to eat before it. That was called NPO after midnight. Nihil per orem. Maria undique et undique caelum. But one afternoon there was an emergency. A post-op patient was coming back to the OR, the surgeon said, and he was going to “reopen her.”

“Why?” Leo said.

“To see what’s going on,” the surgeon said. He was the one who wore cowboy boots into the locker room and Hawaiian shirts and he had a long gray ponytail.

By the winter coats, long unused, in the little coatroom lit only by the streetlight at the end of the drive, they hugged so there was no space between them and they fit right together like two puzzle pieces meant for perfect apposition. He felt on his own chest the soft successive rise of hers against him, like the susurrant camber and retreat of waves on the sand. Her eyes were so alert and open and he was so close to them he could see splinters of topaz shining in her green irises. He supposed he must have been this close to another person’s face before, perhaps when he was a child, perhaps when doing an Eskimo kiss, but he couldn’t remember the last time he had looked so closely at another face, especially at that of a girl.

He’d entered a parallel universe, one where girls like Michelle gave away such gifts for free, a universe where the pleasure of perfect apposition was okay and free. It was just okay and there was nothing bad about it and no price. There was no evil waiting for him in the road, no red pupils and white irises in the backseat like two drops of rabbit blood on snow, no devil or broken glass, no maggots, no car accident, no fight even. There was nothing but the soft and divisible night air that withdrew before him no matter which way he turned. He could go anywhere. There was nothing to be afraid of and nothing on earth to stop him. He had blundered into the temple.

When they wheeled the patient in, she was yellow-gray and damp, eyes open but unseeing, hair matted like the hair on an Egyptian mummy. The mummy was breathing with great spasmodic gulps of air, her spine arching and mouth snapping open to the maximum excursion of her jaws as a great gust of air was consumed, then falling back to the gurney, her mouth nearly closed. A feeble little wheeze of escaped air would follow, billowing the ropes of white saliva that bridged her parted lips like spiderwebs. Then all was still. Her elbows were bent and her hands lifted slightly, fingers frozen in
imprecation like the fingers of dead soldiers in history books. Then another breath would come that would rack her whole body, a spirit taking hold of her completely only to release her completely once again.

Now everyone was in a hurry. They scrubbed in a rush and when they entered and gowned themselves, she was naked with a row of five or six stitches down the front in fat plastic sheaths, puckering her abdomen like the seam of a football. The gray ponytail doctor didn’t wait, but stepped up and snipped the sutures, then yanked them out with a needle holder. He tossed the instrument onto the scrub nurse’s tray and began with his fingers to peel open the bloodless pink incision that had just begun to heal. It separated easily.

When the internal sutures were cut and yanked loose and the last layers prodded apart, a brown liquid rose up from the wound with a sewer stench. “Jesus,” the surgeon said, and leaned backward. White intestines lay sunk in a bog of greenish-black water. He reached in and began quickly seizing up loops of bowel, hauling them up from the black water, searching the bowel as if looking for a leak in a hose, and dropping the searched loops back in. Everything that came out of the opaque foul water was gray and white. “She infarcted her entire fucking bowel,” he said, then added loudly to the resident, “Just close her.” His eyes met Leo’s for a moment and he said, “Sorry, that’s the way it is.” Then he stepped back from the body and grabbed his gown by the front and ripped it off, popping the ties in the back and uncovering the palm trees on his Hawaiian shirt. He balled up the dirty gown and gloves and stuffed them in the waste bin, punched the plate that opened the OR barn doors, and left. The resident began to close the belly with a huge curved needle like a hook for a swordfish.

Leo went out into the hallway too. Dr. Helpern talked to the doctor with the ponytail there. Leo heard him say, “SMA occlusion.”

The universe continued to make room for him in the most unexpected ways: Michelle’s friend went to France with her parents and left Michelle the keys. They watered the plants in their wet clothes and kissed by the refrigerator, where a wedge of dull light slanted across the ladybug magnets and old grocery lists. He was not afraid of empty houses anymore.

They went upstairs.

“Did you see that angel with ivy all over it?”

“In the fountain.”

“It was beautiful,” he said. “I didn’t know private homes had statuary like that.” They had gone trespassing in the backyards of the country homes to the east, in the woods.

“‘Statuary.’ Who talks like that?”

“Don’t make fun of me!”

“I’m appreciating you, silly.”

“Sure you are. Sorry, the ‘statue,’ then. Wasn’t it cool? I thought it was.”

“I didn’t really pay attention to it. I was trying to get you to take your clothes off and come in.”

“I did. I stepped in the fountain.”

“But in your clothes.”

“Captain Change always swims in his clothes.”

“I thought you were Aquaboy.”

“He swims in his clothes too.”

“Oh, he swims in his clothes, does he?”

She always seemed to want to laugh at him, and around her he was always saying things that were laughable. She didn’t really like him, he thought. He had merely exhausted her of the energy to resist him all those nights at her house on the border of Warrensville.

He tugged once at the waist of her jeans and she lifted her hips and wriggled out of them. He walked his fingers over her disorienting body, starting with her panties. They didn’t have a little silk bow at the top of them or lace like girls in
Playboy
. They were just plain white cotton. She complained that her underwear was a money issue.

When he’d once again mapped this foreign land by touch, and guided his fingers to their target by an inevitably crude stereotaxis of hard pokes and pinches (for he had not ever exactly seen her down there and her legs remained undiscussably closed), he commenced to try to please her, sustaining pressure on the hard and mobile rib of flesh so as not to lose his place in the darkness.

“Stop,” she said. She grabbed his hand.

There was silence in the house, just the sound of the rain creeping down the shingles. He left the room, humiliated. At such moments he was weak and his will leaned downward with a love of dirt, like rain tempted down, down, down into a hole. Rainwater in gutters and drainpipes, seeking out the wormy bowels of the earth, or in rivers running down to the sea as if tempted by it, as if in a swoon.

She didn’t come after him. He waited awhile longer so as not to forfeit absolutely all of his pride; then he went back into the bedroom.

“She’s one of the winners.” Meaning, the aged, because they had survived, they had met and conquered every one of the eighty, ninety, a hundred years that went before. He saw a young man in the pre-op waiting area, maybe thirty or thirty-five. He looked well. His wife was there. She carried a huge shopping bag with all their bedding in it, a big soft white down comforter and a pillow with a lacy fringe, looked like it had come straight off their conjugal bed. He’ll be acting funny after, the nurse said. He always acts funny, the wife said, pretending not to be scared. The man was in a wheelchair and every time they came to some automatic double doors, the man raised his hand up just as the transport guy touched the metal plate on the wall and the man said, “Use the Force, Luke,” or “Open sesame,” as if he’d caused the automatic doors to open by magic, and then he’d look around at the transport guy and at his wife and Leo, too, for approval of his joke. When they came to the last set of doors, his wife said, Can I stay with him through here? No, she couldn’t, the transport guy said. And the man said he didn’t see why he had to take off his wedding ring. And he said, I love you, and as the doors were closing, he said it again.

When he was fifteen, Leo had had surgery, when he broke his arm. They took away everything before it, your underwear, even your glasses, even a magazine, and then it was just you alone, and then they shaved him under the arm and he looked at his armpit and suddenly remembered very clearly what it had been to be twelve years old. Then they covered you in paper and put in an IV and gave you something to make you sleepy and took away the last thing, which was you yourself.

I love you. The words had come of their own accord, tapping on the inside of his skull, wanting to be heard, until he finally listened to them and said them aloud.

Dollar bills and coins from her work apron lay all over the bed. He wanted to tell her he’d pay for airplane tickets when college began in the fall, but she said she wouldn’t talk about money today. She was brave like that. He held on to her tight with the coins cold on his naked back, and she said, “When will you know your phone number at school?” He would be going away soon. The cold swirling ironwork of the chair on his back—he remembered that. July. Behind his grandmother’s empty house, shadows on the grass were cool undertoe, and many sunbursts hung high above them like day stars in the high canopy of the trees. He’d sat by himself while she swam and he watched her, and the chair tattooed cold arabesques onto the dermatomes of his wet warm back. He’d wanted to ask her, Are you a virgin? But he couldn’t make himself say the words. Then they’d lain in the hammock and she didn’t tell him, because he couldn’t bring himself to ask. Go back to July and arabesques of ice.

“I can’t be away from you,” he said. So that was love. Not caring about anything or anybody else in the world. Falling. Falling.

HE HAD KNOWN
for some time it must be Harvard or Yale. Only deeds of that caliber were sufficient to redress the destruction of a life. But then he went to the Berlin dinner at Sammy’s in the Flats with the lights on the factories out the window and up on the Detroit-Superior Viaduct and down on the Cuyahoga River, too, on a boat or two, shining through the dark windows at many depths of field like Christmas lights strung across the riverbanks. It was Bab Berlin’s seventy-fifth birthday.

Leo’s uncle Harvey was married to Laura’s sister, Jenny. He was the eldest of the four Berlin brothers and the only one who’d stayed in Cleveland, a natural host, a pillar to his family; he was a champion toast-maker and inveterate crier.

“You’ve heard of the sins of the father being visited on the sons,” he said into the microphone. “What the Bible doesn’t tell you is that the big asses of the fathers are visited on the sons.” Laughter came out of the tables with many different colors and at many depths of field, like the lights over the river.

That was why they called the Berlin patriarch Bab: it was from his army nickname, B.A.B., Big-Ass Berlin.

Despite their possibly big asses, however, and despite being raised on the crooked brown river where the football and baseball teams always stumbled and fell like a deer on rolling stones, and despite their descent from a race of shtetl dwarves—despite even their congenital hearing loss, which began with their mother’s streak of white hair and trailed the next generations with incomplete penetrance—the Berlins were men of strength. They’d fed on the flesh and milk of American cattle, not Polish turnips, and were physically big and tall. They were good swimmers and had followed Harvey to Yale—the youngest played water polo. Harvey, like Leo’s father, Isidore, and his second father, Philip, had been of that first generation of Jews to pioneer the Ivy League. Harvey had gone to Yale without a precedent and established one for his brothers, just as Isidore had done for his younger brother, Dennis, at Harvard, just as Philip had done at Columbia. When Harvey’s kids and nephews and nieces were of age, they would presumably head on up to Yale too.

Leo watched his uncle Harvey standing up at the microphone before his father, Bab, and his younger brothers and his sons, and Leo knew right then it would not be Harvard but Yale. To repair a legacy that lay in ruins was no easier or harder, he reasoned, than to start one from scratch. To restore his own fallen line, he’d require in his person that same strength that Isidore and Harvey proved they possessed when they founded a legacy from nothing. To use his legacy at Harvard would be to cheat and to lie to himself and leave the question open of just how strong he was. If he couldn’t get into Yale without a legacy, then he figured he hadn’t the strength of character to do much else required of him for restitution against his father’s death. If he couldn’t get into Yale, he might as well give up.

Father:

I will fulfill your promise.

I will avenge your death with my success. I will be the best that ever was, and you will look upon my deeds from Heaven. They are for you—you are not finished. You are not reduced to a few yellowed envelopes in a nurse’s filing cabinet. Let me be your voice. I am you, I am you, I am you, I am you. I fight on for you here in the land of the living with all the strength that belongs to me. I am strong of body and mind. And all the adverse forces of the universe—ALL—will bow before me like sheaves of wheat in the dreams of Joseph.

I will be a “heavy hitter” like you were and you will hear the bugle call in the famous halls of the dead and you will be publicly, proudly vindicated, you will feel my love in all the hard work and battle I’ve done for you and you will love me with a father’s proud love.

(What other purpose is there to life but to do great things, to create beauty, knowledge, and joy for all humankind forever, and with greatness to decimate mediocrity, and bend the stone will of the universe to the feeling sensate human will? Our will, Daddy.)

And you who are emblazoned on my heart will live on. My rivals have fortune and they don’t know it: they live out their legacy of father and son, they have in their war chests their standard-issue ingot iron and javelin, and I am jealous as the bottom of the
sea is jealous of the jewel lights on the waves. But bare hands can do more than mediocre iron when one acts with indissoluble will.

I represent our house alone now. But I can do it. I am touched by lightning.

I declare war on our rivals. To those who stand between me and that which you and I justly deserve: beware. Stand aside. I will reach into your chests with my bare hands and rip out your hearts and eat them and I swear to it by all I know and love.

I bring the barrow hailstorm; I wield the barrow lightning.

We will have our recompense and resurrect our legacy in a great destiny, Daddy.

I take up your mantle now.

Even when you just visited Yale, you could see destinies and legacies unfolding all around. There were societies, monuments, secret tearooms, fabrics and shingles and stone that had long ago exhausted their colors on the litany of passing years, and now were muted, fine, august, and gray in self-remembrance; there were windows that shone gold in autumn with the luster of centuries, polished oak tables in heroic, dim dining halls, and the gloom and gloam of time upon every sunken stairstep and every quiet courtyard. That was Yale: a great, grand triumphal legacy of truth and beauty asail on the sea of the ages. He loved the idea of Yale like he loved the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but even more in a way, since Yale was the door through which a young living man like himself could pass in order to link hands with the men of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

And he wanted more than anything to be a part of this knighthood of enlightenment, to walk those halls and courtyards beautiful as the church, with people inside as enlightened as Voltaire. Surely, this monument to truth and beauty would see and appreciate his love. For he was like them. True, he’d been surprised by some pretty unintellectual types at Shaker Heights High School who’d gotten into Yale in recent years, presumably because of their extracurricular activities. And he had quit the debate team, yes. And been offered the editor-in-chiefship of the paper by the journalism teacher, Mrs. Bernstein, and had declined in order to conserve his energies, the better to carp and moan in the opinion pages. He’d not gone out for tennis or swimming (at which he naturally excelled) and while he’d been president of the class in seventh grade, in the eighth grade he’d chosen like Cal Coolidge not to run again, as the student council was a stupid popularity contest (which he was likely to lose now that the Woodbury kids had mixed in). He’d acted before his friends but never in a play, hadn’t prepared for the annoying SAT for more than an afternoon, and hadn’t shown his lifelike drawings to anyone. He’d long ago given up the boring, rote drills with that dangerous and disgusting trombone that was always a millimeter from knocking over a lamp or jabbing his dog in the spine, and the trombone teacher with his gray toupee slightly greenish as though he moisturized it with the drippings from a brass spit valve. But any sensible person would clearly see in those decisions his seriousness of purpose and his priorities in the great contest with death. Knowledge was all in that contest. Science was all. Art was all. Not student council! Not “Hot Cross Buns”!

He was tall and girls liked his face and he had tried, alone and with all his might, to understand the universe he was there to witness. He took no one’s opinion for his own and without help figured everything out down to its rudimentary particles and underlying vectors, and though he didn’t have great extracurricular activities, he had the most substantial proof of his talents and his devotion: his grades. He’d obtained the best possible grades on the actual work he’d done to educate himself, in direct competition with a wolf pack of the best new minds in northern Ohio. He had done the work and they had done the work. He feared them and they feared him. They had all tested themselves against the exact same problems, hard ones like Johannes Kepler had faced in his charts of the planets, and out of this melee came inevitable confidence, even to a conscientious boy so lacerated with doubts as Leo. He believed in the other young wolves and they believed in themselves; they believed in him and he believed in himself. He had emerged from the wolf pack a straight-A student (except for the Bs in gym, of course, fuck gym) in strictly Advanced Placement classes. Four semesters of AP math, two semesters of AP physics, four semesters of AP Latin, two of US history, two of modern European history, and four of English: A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A. His report cards were a bandolier full of As. Whatever else the rest of the wolf pack had done, there were very few who had done that, and he knew that because of his class rank! He had even set the curve on the final exam in one of the two semesters of AP calculus, even though he lived and breathed words, not numbers, and could barely calculate the tip at a restaurant. And his letters of recommendation would show how good he was, how tough, how brave, and how vicious the competition had been for those As. Or so he had to believe.

And so it was with a great sense of destiny and old apprehension, too, that Leo appeared before the Yale alumnus for his college interview.

It was when the Berlin Wall fell—before Michelle, before the spring, in November 1989, Shaker Heights, Ohio: by day, blazing white snow, cold; at night, snow melting off boots inside the door. His lungs were overfilled, his joints tight. The alumnus was a lawyer with white hair on the temples and a narrow face—a nice man, a man of rectitude with the sort of stout WASPish last name that could belong to a president: Eastman. His daughters went to Yale. Leo remembered the younger Eastman girl: dark hair and no makeup. An athlete. He didn’t know about her grades.

Yalies were able to see what others failed to see, and they walked among others like calm and unassuming praetorians who could secure with their talents whatever they wanted. The crests on Mr. Eastman’s blue Yale tie tantalized Leo like keyholes to the doors of a palace. Like the seal of the Order of St. Arbuthnot’s Finger. Leo sipped from a glass of Coke by the warm hearth in the fine home, in the bright room of books in whitewashed bookcases, ice melting off his shoes by the door. Mr. Eastman said to Leo, “I expect you’ll get in,” and read one line aloud from Leo’s college essay:

Still cold in December. His early application was deferred, but a note arrived from Mr. Eastman that said, “I spoke to Ewell Bryant, the director of admissions for the Midwest area, and I feel sure you’ll get in in April.”

And all that winter and spring, Leo felt the key to the Order coming to him, Yale, coming from afar, like an angel drifting across the millennia to meet him and be his escort into the future.

Now, I am eighteen, a man. Now, you return to me, Daddy. I am tobacco in your pocket. I am your will, a circle you drew in the sand. I know you will come back to me.

When he left the Shaker Heights High School oval and pulled his Plymouth Horizon up the drive that day in spring, there were workmen on the roof, and his mom and his aunt didn’t hear his car or even hear the door to the mudroom open or shut.

He climbed up the steep back steps as he usually did (because they were harder to climb than the ones in the front hall and proved the enduring strength of his knees) and dropped his backpack on his bed. He sat on the toilet for a while listening to the workmen talking in Polish just outside the bathroom window. He could hear them talking quite clearly and smelled the tar or whatever it was they were laying down on the roof, and he hoped they couldn’t hear him or God forbid smell him farting and grunting and plopping. When he came down the front steps, he heard his mother and his aunt Jenny in the living room.

They talked on quietly as if they hadn’t heard him. (Maybe they didn’t hear him, or maybe the sounds of his feet on the staircase had been camouflaged by the sounds of the workmen on the roof or going for the tools in their truck.) His mom and his aunt Jenny were having one of those sororal conferences unique to them, talk of their families plaited with psychoanalysis and female empathy, a conference possible only between two daughters of a psychoanalyst who had themselves trained in the mental health field and had cinched themselves together in order to survive a series of premature deaths. Their words were quiet and logical and slightly wonky with analytic technical jargon, but also mixed with tears; they were like a pair of structural engineers crying over a bridge.

Leo froze when he heard the louder-than-normal sniffling. Shit: his grandmother must be dead.

“I’m not saying he won’t care,” Aunt Jenny was saying in her most calm and mollifying tone, “I’m just saying he’ll be okay, because it’s not really about this.”

“I mean he
really
cares,” his mother said.

Leo sat down on the stairs and his eyes dropped instinctively to the
YALE
letters at his breast.

“Nobody’s to blame here, honey,” his aunt Jenny said in that pacific voice that he didn’t completely trust.

“Maybe it’s a man thing,” his mother said. “I didn’t pay much attention to it, the applications and everything. I mean, who cares where you go to college?”

“This is his life.”

“I know. I’ve never seen anyone plan like he does. From the time Izzy died he knew what his future was supposed to be like. That was very relaxing to me, in a way. He didn’t ask for any help with that part of life, he was just going somewhere all on his own, going after it relentlessly, like a heat-seeking missile. I couldn’t have stopped him if I’d wanted to—not that I tried. It wasn’t like he was planning to be a drug addict. He was planning to go to Yale and be a doctor. What mother stops a child from going to Yale and becoming a doctor? It’s like with Leo he plans to impose his will on the world and on the future and make it turn out a certain way, and if it doesn’t go exactly the way he planned, he considers it a referendum on him, and then he—I don’t want to see him hurting is all. I just want him to be happy. I think he deserves to be as happy as anybody else. I look at other people’s kids, and mostly they seem happy, they seem fine, and I think that’s because they had two basically fine parents and Izzy wasn’t fine, and I wasn’t fine. I let him down. We let him down.”