The Atomic Weight of Love (4 page)

My thoughts surprised me. Unconscious, unbidden, I was falling in love.

THAT SUMMER, I BOUGHT
a red swimsuit with money from my job at Davidson’s Bakeries (honey and sponge cakes, butter cookies, birthday and wedding cakes, challah). Jerry and I packed a picnic basket with day-old pastries and headed to the lagoon in Jackson Park.

Sun-drunk, I lay on the enormous, rectangular boulders beside the water and waited for the heat to rid my bones of every vestige of the brutal Chicago winter. Jerry towered above me, taking pictures.

“Tell me again. The name of your high school swim club,” he said, clearly planning to tease me.

“The Mermaids.”

“Perfect.”

“My mother has my annual at home. There’s a photo of the seven of us, arranged quite attractively on the diving board and ladder.”

“With some never-married, male-looking girls’ swim coach, am I right?” He settled onto the rock next to me and lit one of his Old Golds.

“Miss Berenstein.”

“She never stood just a tad too long, watching you in the shower?”

“Jerry, stop!” I sat up and shook out one of his cigarettes for myself. “I didn’t know about those sorts of things then. Not until you.”

“Stick with me, baby. I’ll show you the world.” He paused. “Not like that old man you’re stringing along.”

I shaded my eyes from the sun, tried to see Jerry’s face.

“Professor Whetstone?”

“Yeah. The old guy.”

“He’s not old.”

“Too old for you.”

“He’s brilliant.”

“Maybe,” Jerry began tickling me, “but does he make you laugh?” I squirmed beneath his fingers. A rough patch on the boulder scratched my thigh and drew blood. When Jerry noticed, he bent until his lips touched my skin, and beneath his soft touch I took a deep breath. He lifted his head, looked into my face, and grinned. “There’s more where that came from.” He let his palm hover over the spot where his lips had been. “Whenever you’re ready.”

But I wasn’t ready. I felt that if I let Jerry pursue his lovemaking past the kissing we’d already done, I’d lose my hold on things, become another box checked “Done” on his to-do list of college girls. I didn’t really trust Jerry—at the same time as I feared losing him.

IN CAFÉS OVER STRONG
black coffee, Alden told me of his childhood, of the curiosity he’d had for the way objects moved.

“It’s all energy, Meri. Energy! Energy is never created or destroyed. Never! Think about it!” Other patrons looked in our direction, but Alden didn’t care. If his enthusiasm disturbed them, then they should find other tables or leave. “We don’t necessarily know what the total amount of energy is in any given environment—say, a room, or the universe.” He used his index finger to draw an imaginary boundary on the tablecloth. “We can measure changes in energy, know when energy transfers have taken place. If energy comes from outside of a boundary, is transferred into that closed environment, we can measure that change. But what’s most exciting,” he took my hand over my plate of chicken-fried steak, “is the fact that there are so many different ways in which energy can manifest itself.”

Alden’s energy held me entranced. I could not drift in and out of conversations with him; I had to listen, follow where he led. His demands, his challenges, were exactly what I’d always gravitated toward.

He paused, and in silence we watched a mother at a nearby table as she spooned mashed peas into her baby’s mouth. The woman gently wiped the infant’s chin with his bib and cooed until the baby responded with a gummy smile.

“My ex-wife miscarried. Twice,” Alden said, thoughtful, still focused on the mother and child. I said nothing—the last thing I wanted to hear about was a tragedy they’d shared. I was intent on avoiding comparisons, leery of failing in competition with the shadowy former Mrs. Whetstone—although for all I knew she was shallow, maybe a debutante of some kind, a woman who lacked curiosity. “What do you think?” Alden asked, now turning to face me.

“About children?” I folded my hands on the tabletop. “Maybe later in my life,” I said. “Much, much later,” I said with emphasis. “There are too many things I want to accomplish first.”

I didn’t reveal the full breadth of my ambivalence, my sometimes disconcerting lack of any biological yearning for children. As a girl, I never babysat; I hadn’t had to care for any younger siblings. My life hadn’t included diapers, burping, the joy of first words or miraculous first steps. I had so long ago taken children off of my plate, removed them from the realm of probability, if not possibility. I looked at Alden, wondered if he were asking me for more of an answer than I was willing to give. Was he considering my viability as a candidate for his next wife? Was I about to remove myself from the running?

I felt a furrow form between my brows, struggled with the part of me that wanted to please him, to assure my place at his side by giving the right answer. But while I circled, caught in a spinning eddy of thought, Alden moved on. “The greatest discovery of this century. Of
several
centuries,” he said, now lowering his voice. “We’re on the verge of just that.” He closed his eyes, shook his head not in disbelief but as if he, too, were having difficulty grasping the enormity of what lay ahead. “Earth shattering,” he said, finally opening his eyes and looking deeply into my face. He smiled broadly and lit a cigarette. “Now, shall we talk about flight?”

I felt a wave of relief. Alden wasn’t asking me for a definitive answer on motherhood. Perhaps he shared my ambivalence about children. Still, I was unsure.

Jerry was just so much easier. But when had I ever chosen
easy
?

RATIONING BEGAN IN EARNEST
that summer—sugar, gasoline, even typewriters could only be purchased by using ration coupons. Every man, woman, and child was issued a coupon booklet, and along with the other boarders, I turned mine over to Mrs. Hudson.

Omnipresent advertisements in the school paper (and magazines, posters in store windows, telephone pole notices, advertisements in theaters and buses and trains) pushed us to purchase war bonds and stamps. We should buy as many as we could afford, see how many luxuries we could do without. Boys should buy their girls war stamp corsages from the “sweet YWCA girls” who sold them every Thursday in the student commons. We probably “tossed away at least a buck a week on unnecessary things”; at that rate, the paper’s editor argued, we could buy a bond almost every semester. Upon graduation, we’d have accumulated eight bonds, with a maturity value of $200.00—an amount that we could apply to our “kids’ college educations.”

I couldn’t afford to buy a war bond outright, so I began collecting the red, ten-cent war stamps that pictured the stalwart minuteman, rifle in hand. By the end of college, I had filled three booklets, worth three $25.00 war bonds. I sent them all to Mother.

“I NEED TO TELL
you something,” Jerry said.

“All right.”

“It’s not easy.”

Seated next to him on a park bench with tired, dry November leaves beneath our feet, I waited.

“I met with a recruiter, passed the exams. For the army.” He pressed my hand, refused to raise his eyes to meet mine.

“Oh.” The sudden exhalation was involuntary.

“I had to, Meri, with what’s been happening in the Pacific and all. I had to. I can’t keep hiding here.”

I couldn’t catch my breath.
Maybe this is what hyperventilation feels like,
I thought. I cupped my hands about my nose and mouth, trying to breathe in the dark, warmed air.

“I’ll write. I’ll be back. This isn’t the end of us.”

“When do you go?”

“I leave for boot camp in three days.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Meri, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

I wanted to tell him that words are cheap. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t want for him to die. I wanted to keep him in Chicago, safe. Nothing I wanted mattered, though.

And he’d confirmed my decision for me. It would be Alden, not Jerry. Alden.

ALDEN TOOK ME TO
the Monte Cristo on St. Clair Street, where an eight-course dinner could be had for $1.25. I consumed a huge dish of sautéed mushrooms, making every effort to keep the butter from dribbling down my chin. Preoccupied, Alden cut his porterhouse into thin strips. At last, he took his napkin and folded it precisely before placing it next to his plate and patting the material smooth. He lit a cigarette, looked at me across the tablecloth, and I saw a distance in his eyes I’d not seen before. The waiter brought our coffees.

“Meri,” he sighed out a lungful of smoke. “I want to ask you something, and I don’t want you to take offense.”

“OK . . .”

He moved the obligatory tabletop candle to the side and reached for my hands. “I got us a room.”

I wanted to pull away but didn’t. In the span of that short dinner, Alden had accelerated our relationship far beyond the place of easy familiarity where it had lingered for months.

“Meri?”

“OK,” I said. “OK.”

“You’re sure?”

I took my hands back, discreetly wiping them on my napkin. His palms were sweaty, nervous.

“I don’t have anything with me, though. No toothbrush, no toothpaste.”

“The hotel has them. It’s a nice place, Meri. It’s not a dump. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“All right, then.” I reached for my purse. “Let’s skip the apple pie.”

I DON’T BELIEVE WOMEN
lose their virginity. It implies they can find it again. Nor do I believe people lose their lives—
“Whoops! Now where did I put my life . . . beneath a cushion on the couch? Maybe I left it on the kitchen counter . . . Honey, have you seen my life? I know I had it a minute ago.”
So, I did not
lose
my virginity in that hotel room. Boys I knew did not
lose
their lives in the war.

Lying in bed with Alden, I longed to set myself free from constant analysis, but I could not. It was as if a part of me were suspended above the bed making observations. And so the physicality of the act, the sensations, were diminished—even more so than they naturally would have been because of my newness. Alden was respectful, careful of me. Perhaps too careful—there was definitely a part of me that wanted for him to be masterful and in charge, to help me transcend omnipresent thought.

It hurt. Alden seemed to know or care little about lubrication or taking his time, about the delight of suspension. Granted, he was as anxious as I, and so while we both put forth great effort, we were nervously taut. Still, there is no escaping the closeness of skin against skin, and I felt my senses engage: touch and warmth, the smell of his sweat and, afterwards, the smell we created together, tangled beneath damp sheets. The taste of salt and scotch. Street noises rising from below, the occasional rasp of a bedspring as we shifted our weight. The light I’d left on over the bathroom sink as it slanted into the room, crossed the carpeting, and highlighted my purse on a chair. Alden’s pants neatly folded over the back of the chair.

That single careful gesture—the controlled placement of his pants. It told me something I refused to acknowledge: Alden would always be too careful. There would be no transport for me, not with a man who was that precise in the face of impending passion. Passion walks the edge of control, teasing. It looks down at the rocks in a canyon and contemplates plunging, taking one fatal step to the right. It soars, having released the weight of consciousness of all but the moment.

At half past midnight I woke him.

“I have to get back. I can’t stay out all night.”

He was groggy—the scotch, no doubt, combined with the relief of having accomplished what he’d set out to do. He fell back asleep, and I was sorely tempted to do the same.

“Alden.”

“All right.” He sat up on the edge of the bed and turned on a bedside lamp. The light was painful, harsh in its revelations. I reached over and touched the bones of his spine, ran my fingers lightly across his shoulders, pinched the nape of his neck.

“Don’t start something we can’t finish.”

I tattooed my fingers across his back, imagining that my fingertips were raindrops, gently pelting his skin.

“Meridian, we need to get dressed.” And with that he was up, across the room, quickly thrusting his legs into those perfectly creased trousers. When he finished buttoning his trousers, he crossed the room, knelt on the carpet, kissed my knees. “You’re beautiful,” he said, and I could see that in his eyes, I was.

I made my way to the bathroom and wet a washcloth to clean up the blood and semen I found adhered to the insides of my thighs. I wondered if the maids counted how many post-deflowering washcloths they tossed into the laundry each week.

The next morning, I sent Jerry a letter full of campus gossip and cheerful news. I signed it “Fondly” and told him to keep himself safe, alive. Then, I sat back and wondered what Jerry would have done in that hotel room.

A Watch of Nightingales

1. A brown bird with a reddish tail, slightly smaller in size than a robin.

2. Unlike most birds, the nightingale sings at night as well as during the day.

Lionel Hampton’s drums and the singer’s world-wise, penetrating voice expanded in my chest as I sat beside Alden in the Regal Theater in late December, the mouth of my cigarette case spilling Chesterfields across the immaculate white tablecloth. She was Ruth Jones, recently reinvented as Dinah Washington, the queen of the blues, and she sang of her need for caviar at breakfast, champagne at night.

I leaned into Alden’s shoulder, whispered: “Are you listening? Shall I make the same demands? Are you ready for that?” He pulled back to look at me, and in the nightclub’s gloom the miniature table lamp cast shadows like war paint beneath his eyes and across his cheekbones. How fitting, I thought—with Alden on his way to participate in some top-secret mission somewhere in the Southwest. Alden, impossibly, a University of Chicago physics professor about to become a warrior. He ran the back of his thumb along the curve of my jaw.

“Are you saying yes, then, Meri? Is it yes?”