Swimming Across the Hudson (9 page)

She got up, as if she'd seen someone she knew. But then her gaze dropped and she simply stood still. She began to search through her pocketbook. “Ben, I want to have a picture of us.” She removed a Polaroid camera from her pocketbook.

My school was on the other side of town. That was why I'd met Susan on Telegraph Avenue—so I wouldn't run into anyone I knew. I'm a private person, but it was more than that. It was as if I didn't want there to be a record; I could pretend that this lunch hadn't taken place. No one cared about our reunion. Our pictures wouldn't show up in the
National Enquirer
. Still, I worried. Meeting my birth mother and not meeting her. This was the story of my life. One foot in and one foot out, never able to commit myself.

But before I had a chance to object, Susan had approached the man at the next table and asked him to take our picture. We stood behind my seat; Susan had her arm around me. Aside from our handshake, this was the first time we'd touched.

“Smile,” the man said. He pressed the shutter button, and the photograph shot out. He pressed the button again.

We watched the photographs develop. Susan handed me one and kept the other. I felt tears in my eyes. Seeing that picture of Susan and me, I was overcome by grief for everything I'd lost, for all that hadn't happened between us.

I turned away from her and wiped my face.

When I turned back, she was staring at the photo. “Ben.” Her voice had grown softer. A line of mascara dripped down her cheek. “Do you think we look alike?”

“The two of us? We have the same color hair.” I grabbed a lock of mine as if to demonstrate, as if I were speaking a foreign language.
“Other than that, I don't think we do.” All my life, I'd imagined that I looked like other people, that I had siblings and parents, carbon copies of myself somewhere on this earth, if only I could find them. I simply didn't think I looked like Susan. I would have told her if I did.

“Well,
I
think we do. What about genetics? Don't you ever wonder how much in life is determined?”

“In college I wrote a paper about the paradox of free will.”

“I'm not talking about that. We share the same blood.”

“I know.”

“Half your genes come from me.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank me what?”

“Thank you for giving them to me.”

I wanted more than anything to be patient with her, to treat her without malice or irony. But I wasn't responding well to her pressure. I wished I lived thousands of years ago, a man in a loincloth roaming the fields who did nothing more complicated than pray for rain.

“They've done these studies of identical twins,” she said. “The babies are separated at birth and raised in different homes, but they grow up to be extremely similar. One twin goes to the bathroom and flushes the toilet twice. The other twin lives hundreds of miles away, but when he goes to the bathroom he does the same.”

“So what?”

“Two flushes. Tell me that's a coincidence.” Her blouse hung open at her neck; freckles dotted her skin, brown and dense. “I gave birth to you. You can't change that.”

“I'm not trying to.” I didn't know what she wanted from me. To acknowledge that without her I wouldn't be alive?

She rested her hands on the table. Her knee brushed against mine. I flinched.

“Will you tell me about my birth father?” I asked.

“He was my high school boyfriend. I haven't seen him in more than thirty years.”

“What's his name?”

“What difference does it make?”

We were quiet now. We had run out of things to say. How was that possible? We had whole lives to reconstruct. But an hour had passed, and already I didn't know what else to talk about.

Susan got up and walked to the register. She stood at the door, a shimmering figure in the early-afternoon light.

When she came back, she was holding a rose. “For you,” she said. She stuck out her hand. The flower's head was pink and bent; its petals were hunched like someone in prayer.

Hesitantly, I reached out to take it. “Thank you.”

For a moment she stood there gripping the stem, her fingers firmly wrapped around mine. For a moment I let her hold my hand.

 

W
e stood outside the restaurant, watching students walk past. We didn't know what to do. It
had
been a date. In a way it felt like a one-night stand. Inside, it had been as though no one else were with us; the other patrons had receded. But now, amid the cars and the wave of bookbags, we saw each other in the harsh light. There was a world staring back at us. Perhaps that was why we didn't make plans to see each other again. Maybe we just panicked.

I reached out to shake Susan's hand. “It was good to meet you.”

“It was good to meet you too.”

We walked in opposite directions. When I turned around a few seconds later, I wasn't able to find her.

There were so many questions I'd forgotten to ask her. How much longer would she be here? Was she staying at a hotel, or had she rented an apartment? I hadn't even gotten her phone number. She'd offered to go out for Ethiopian food the next week, so the odds were good that I'd see her again. But I couldn't be sure. I wanted to continue a relationship like this, Susan wishing to spend time with me and me resisting, all the while hoping she'd continue to call.

I was exhausted when I got home. “I'm drained,” I told Jenny. “It feels as if I did a thousand push-ups.”

“What was she like?”

“She was a lot of different things.” But I couldn't come up with
even one way to describe her. The whole lunch was a haze; I had no idea who she was.

I showed Jenny the photograph of us.

She gasped.

“What?”

“She looks so young.”

“She's only sixteen years older than I am. When my mother was her age I was still in high school.”

“She's pretty,” Jenny said.

“You think so?”

“Very.”

I supposed she was. It hadn't occurred to me to think of her as pretty or not pretty. She had component parts: green eyes, wide face, dark skin, straight nose; she was this, and I was that. But the whole of her, the full image, escaped me even now as I stared at her photograph.

“Do you think I look like her?”

“Not really,” Jenny said. “You're pretty too, but you look different.”

I was disappointed to hear Jenny say this. I'd been hoping she'd see something I hadn't noticed.

“Did you like her?” she asked.

“Mostly it felt like she was real. That's the hardest thing—giving up your fantasies. I used to think my birth mother was an Arabian princess and a brilliant researcher at the NIH. Not one or the other, but both.”

“Ben—what was she like?”

“She was a little pushy, I guess. But I couldn't have expected her to be calm.”

I tried to sum up the meal for Jenny, yet everything I said felt inadequate.

“How long will she be here?”

“I don't know. I was meaning to ask her, but I forgot. I'm starting to think this is just the beginning.”

“Of what?”

“I thought this would be like opening a curtain—I'd see what was behind it, and that would be that. But you open the curtain, and there's another one behind it. And another and another.”

Jenny said nothing.

“Susan makes earrings,” I said. “That's part of the reason she's here. Because of me, of course, but also because some stores in San Francisco want to sell her work.”

“She's an artist?”

I nodded. “I'm embarrassed to say this, but it made a difference to me. It made her seem more substantial.”

I wrote my parents, wanting to tell them what had happened, as if failing to do so would be a betrayal. I tried to assume a breezy tone—both casual and reassuring.

Dear Mom and Dad,

I had lunch with my birth mother today. We had a nice time. She doesn't look like me—at least I don't think so. Do you think I look like you? They say that when you live with someone long enough you begin to resemble them. Some people even start to look like their pets. I'm glad things weren't reversed—that I wasn't raised by Susan and meeting you two for the first time. Think of all the catching up we'd have to do.

The weather's warm here. That's one of the nice things about California. I've almost forgotten what snow looks like. Remember the story you once told me, Mom? How the first time you saw snow you thought it was sugar piled on the cars?

Teaching is going pretty well. My students think I ask them to memorize too much, but Jonathan tells me they'll be grateful for this someday. Short-term memory goes first, he
says, but his patients recall a lot from their childhoods. So I can be confident that, sixty years from now, my students will be able to recite the Gettysburg Address. Remember what we learned in “Ethics of the Fathers,” Dad? How when a child learns, it's like ink written on new paper, but when an old person learns, it's like ink written on paper that's been erased?

Jenny's doing well. She continues to keep long hours, working hard to defend people in trouble. I think you both would be proud of her. Whoever said that our generation is selfish—that we have no interest in politics and just sit around watching MTV—hasn't met Jenny. I hope you'll get to know her better and recognize what I see in her.

Tara is good too. We get along most of the time, although she thinks I know nothing about fractions.

I love you, Mom and Dad. I hope you're doing well.

Love,

Ben
  

I went to Jonathan's house to tell him I hadn't been born Jewish. I'd waited long enough. My news would come across as something serious, something I'd contemplated for a while.

But he didn't seem interested or surprised.

“Did you know?” I asked.

“I suspected it. What were the chances your father's real name was Abraham?”

“There are lots of Jewish Abrahams.”

“Like who?”

“Abe Beame, for one.” We used to pretend that Abe Beame was my father. Mayor Beame, who'd brought New York City to the brink of bankruptcy. We'd been in sixth grade when that had happened.
In the next Democratic primary for mayor, we handed out leaflets for Mario Cuomo before he lost in the run-off to Ed Koch.

“If it's any consolation,” Jonathan said, “I'll give you my Jewish birth. It's more important to you.”

“How do you even know you were born Jewish?”

“Because my birth father's name is David.”

“Mom and Dad might have made it up.”

“Whatever. Either they did or they didn't. It doesn't make a difference to me.”

I didn't know how he could say that.

I told him I'd met my birth mother that day. I did my best to describe what had happened, but again the words seemed inadequate.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Do you think she had the right to come looking for you?”

The right? What did this have to do with rights? He was adopted too; he should have understood. We weren't dealing with abstractions. “Of course she did.”

“Our mothers gave us up at birth, Ben. I can't blame them. I don't know what the circumstances were. But a person has to live with the consequences of her decision. You can't go bursting into someone's life.”

“What about us? If we made the first move and searched for our birth mothers, would we have the right to find them?”

“We might have the right, but it wouldn't be smart. Besides, have you thought about Mom and Dad? You know how much this is going to upset them. Don't you think we owe them something?”

In a fit of anger I almost said, “What about you? Do you owe them so much that you should live straight? Do you owe them a daughter-in-law and grandchildren? Don't lecture me about disappointing Mom and Dad.”

Jonathan leaned toward me. “Let's say my birth mother knew when she got pregnant that, if she gave me up, I'd find her someday.
It might have been too much for her to bear. Maybe she'd have had an abortion.”

Of course this had occurred to him. It had occurred to me too. When you're adopted, everything's contingent. All roads are mired with offshoots; you always see the path not taken. No wonder I studied philosophy in college, all those counterfactuals piled on each other. What if? What if? What if?

 

A
letter arrived, written by my mother and signed by both my parents.

Dear Ben,

We got your letter. We were happy you had the chance to meet Susan. (Do you call her that directly? Susan? Mrs. Green? It must be hard to figure out the etiquette.)