The Last of the Wise Lovers, Page 2

  "Drive," he said. "Drive." My foot trembled on the gas pedal. "Don't worry," he said, "just drive."

  Two workers stood by the barrier. They didn't even glance at the broken window. I thought of the three dollars that were in the change compartment, and I tried to remember if there was anything in the glove compartment I could offer him. Then it dawned on me that he might not be a thief at all, that he might be interested in something else, like rape for example, and that my costume had fooled him. I gingerly raised one arm, wondering whether I should pull the wig off all at once, or just move it a little, as a hint.

  "Two hands on the wheel," he said quietly but firmly.

  I tried to catch his face in the mirror. He was smart enough to have positioned himself in the right-hand corner of the back seat. All I managed to see was the wide front of the Chevrolet, which was still hugging my back bumper. He said: "We're not going to have any trouble, are we?"

  I shook my head and thought about the fact that he was sitting on a pile of glass shards from the window he had broken.

  He relaxed and said, "Good". Underneath the wig my head started to itch something fierce. Again I raised my hand and snuck a finger underneath the wig. This time he didn't stop me, he just leaned forward and said in Hebrew, all of a sudden, "Now that we understand each other, I've got news for you, Mrs. Levin."

  The Hebrew was, without a doubt, a surprise, but there was an even bigger surprise than that: he wasn't talking to me. He was talking to some woman, maybe to Mom.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but again he commanded: "Quiet." Then he waited a minute and added, "The news is, you've got to stop."

  I was silent.

  "You must stop," he said again. "And break off all contact, if you know what's good for you."

  "Stop," I said over in my head, thinking I would have to report it all to Mom, "and break off all contact." Water was dripping in through the ceiling of the tunnel, and once again the cars were standing in a long line, waiting for a worker in a Day-Glo vest to direct them between two barriers.

  "We understand that it's not possible to break off contact in a day," he said, "and we're also not interested in... how shall we call it... making waves. We'll give you a week, all right?"

  I nodded.

  "Even two weeks...” He turned on a tiny light on his wristwatch, "Today is the 24th of August... you've got 'till the 6th of September, just before Labor Day. That should be enough, shouldn't it?"

  Again that itch under the wig. This time I pushed two fingers up and reached in almost to the middle of my scalp. That was a real relief. The worker signaled for me to start to move. The traffic became less dense, and it seemed the guy in the back seat had made himself at home, since he sounded pretty relaxed when he said: "I'll give you up until the very last day, and I hope you won't disappoint us, because if you don't stop by the 6th of September, we won't have any choice. Maybe we'll wait another day, and maybe we won't, but we'll have to act on the 7th of September at the very latest."

  "September 7th," I rehearsed to myself.

  "Things will be very uncomfortable for you," he bent forward so I could hear him breathing, and a dry little cough that choked him when he added, "and him...” (hack, hack), "him we'll have to finish off."

  Then several things happened at once: I slammed on the brakes in alarm, turned the wheel in order to pass another barrier, and finally managed to dig my hand in under the mess of bobby pins on my head. The pressure of my fingers forced the wig to fly forward onto my forehead, and a million curls covered my eyes. I tried to straighten out the wheel, but the car skidded with a loud shriek and scraped against the wall of the tunnel. There was also a great thud from behind: the Chevrolet, which hadn't had time to stop, had plowed into me.

  I felt around on the back of my head and discovered that most of my hair was exposed. The guy had undoubtedly already caught on that he was talking to the wrong customer. He let go a short curse and took off.

  The cars in back of me began honking their horns like mad. The Chevrolet tried to disengage itself from my back bumper. After pulling back three times he changed tactics and started pushing, and then, after we'd made a nice deep gouge in the wall of the tunnel, he managed to break free of the bumper, pass me, and tear off like some great wounded beast. I tried to peer into the Chevrolet, but all I could see in the bad light of the tunnel was a grey coat that the guy next to the driver had pressed against the window.

  The police got there immediately. First a highway patrolman on a motorcycle who didn't even bother to order me to get out of the car, just pushed me over and drove the car to the end of the tunnel, and then two cops in a mobile unit who took more interest in the wig, the high heels, and the padded bra than in the accident or the shattered window. I had enough sense not to tell them about the guy in the back seat and his promise to finish somebody off on the 7th of September. Back then I still thought that all I'd have to do was tell Mom, and everything would be ok. You, with your education and experience, will undoubtedly see this as naive, but after all, what does a kid of seventeen and a half know about what's called in the books `human nature'?

  *

  You can probably imagine at least some of what happened next. After they'd finished checking my license and all my other papers, the police called home. Mom came to pick me up in a taxi. The car was left there, stuck on a side lane of the road to New Jersey, in the rain.

  We didn't talk on the way home. Mom just stared out the window. She was apparently thinking about the car I'd wrecked, because no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't help letting go a few broad hints about what was waiting for me. When we got to an intersection, she looked at me in the yellow light as if she was seeing for the first time the made-up face, the tousled hair, and the fake boobs that were slung unevenly across the front of my chest.

  "What could you have possibly wanted there, after you'd promised me... ?" she said. Another time, from within the darkness of the highway, she let fall, as if continuing a sentence she'd begun in her head, "You realize that the next car, if there'll be a next car, will be off limits for you." I didn't say anything. I just kept going over and over in my head the message I'd been asked to deliver. I felt like a suffering martyr, like a hero who'd been temporarily wronged.

  When we got home, Mom paid the driver, went inside, kicked off her shoes and plopped down in the kitchen, flexing her toes irritably. I tore off the remainder of my costume, put on a pair of jeans and collapsed into the chair opposite her.

  "I couldn't say anything the whole way," I said with an expression worthy of the moment in which my capacity for restraint would be revealed, "because of the taxi driver. But what happened was no accident."

  She looked at me without speaking.

  "Someone smashed the window, got into the back seat and said something very strange about the 7th of September."

  She impatiently let out some air. "Instead of fantasizing, perhaps you'd care to tell me what you were doing there."

  And here I should tell you something that you may or may not know: they don't really believe me at home, mostly because of this stage I went through once, where I would make up all sorts of stories, like that Dad was Mom's second husband and that my real Dad was a champion skier living in France; or that the old Fairmont was just a temporary replacement for our Lincoln Continental, which was in the garage being equipped with anti-attack defense devices. But those days were long gone. I'd grown up since then. Nevertheless, no one ever forgot. Mom found a way "to see the matter in a positive light" (she's sure that my tendency to stretch the truth means I'll someday be a great writer). Dad, on the other hand, turns this searing gaze on me every time I tell a story, so that even when I'm telling the truth I check the details twice to make sure that I'm not making a mistake, or exaggerating.

  Therefore, I tried to be very precise. When I got to the part about the guy who broke the window in the Lincoln Tunnel, Mom nodded her head and said with a tense look on her face, "Maybe I made a mistak
e when you were twelve and I forgave your lies. Your father said that they were a sign of a weak character, and he was right. Today we're reaping the benefits."

  "I'm not lying...”

  "Two men, a blue Chevrolet, a broken window. All just to justify an accident that you had in a place you'd promised not to drive to. . "

  "Hear me out to the end...”

  "Only if you'll tell me the truth. Who did you hit? How did the window get broken?"

  "I've told you the truth."

  She got up and went out of the kitchen. What if I've dreamt it all, I thought, what if I've been in an accident and I've got a concussion and I'm imagining the broken window, the Chevrolet, the guy in the back seat and his promise to hurt Mom and to "finish off" somebody on the 7th of September if Mom doesn't stop some mysterious thing that she's been doing?

  From downstairs in the basement came the hollow sound of the dryer. I followed it. I found her filling up a Waldbaum's paper shopping bag with bits of torn paper and trash. I sat on the top stair and leaned my head against the wall. It was already three in the morning and an atmosphere of forgiveness was beginning to settle on everything.

  "Go wash up and get some sleep," she said in a tone that now sounded soft and motherly.

  "I want you to hear what I have to say," I heard my voice magnified as it echoed off the wood paneling.

  "That'll be enough of that," she reprimanded me again, but this time with less force. That's the great thing about mothers: even when you wreck their cars they can't stay mad for long.

  "I've got a message for you," I went over it all from the beginning, "I'm not lying, you have to believe me."

  She didn't get mad, maybe because she was suddenly absorbed in her trash bag. She shook it so that the bulk of the contents would settle, then she folded over the top of it and set it down next to the wall. I remember wondering: how did so much trash get into the basement? But I was too tired to give it much thought.

  "I'm not going to move from this spot," I said closing my eyes, "until you've heard everything."

  It was quiet. From behind my lowered eyelids I could tell that she was coming up towards me. A moment later I felt a wet kiss on my forehead. She smelled good, of perfume and soap.

  "All right, my baby," she said and kissed me again, taking advantage of the fact that for the first time in years I hadn't fled after the first kiss, "tell me what's bothering you...”

  "He said you should stop, he said you'd know what he means, and that D-day would be the 6th of September. He sounded as if he'd already talked to you once before and most important of all is: he said that...” I was afraid to open my eyes and discover that she'd abandoned me. "He said that if you didn't stop by the 6th of September, they would be forced to finish somebody off on the 7th of September, and that you, too, would get hurt."

  I opened my eyes. Her face was close to mine and she was still smiling.

  "Now you feel better, don't you? So go on to bed...” she got up and went back downstairs to pick up her trash bag.

  "Aren't you worried?" I called after her.

  "Why should I be worried?" she answered. "Just because of something unclear that someone who perhaps never existed may have said?"

  *

  When I woke the next day it was already 8:30, half an hour before I had to show up for work at the library. Of course, I didn't have a hope in hell. A bus left the station every half hour and took an hour to get to Port Authority. Even if I wanted to catch the next bus and get to work a bit late, who would take me to the station now that there was no car?

  I called the library. On the other end of the line the woman in charge whinnied, "I hope you have a good reason for being absent, young man." She's about 30 years old, but she calls me `young man' because that's what the senior librarians call anyone under the age of 60, and she's already figured out that with her flat chest and crooked nose she'll only make out if she takes on the special status and the bookish air of a senior librarian.

  "I was in a car accident," I explained.

  She wasn't impressed. "When can we hope to have you back with us?"

  "Tomorrow."

  But she just couldn't let up. "An absence of more than two days is a matter for Mr. K." Mr. K. is the Director of Cataloging, a little man with a delicate face behind rimless glasses. There was nothing authoritative or threatening about him, but, like Dad says, you can never tell what lurks behind a benign face.

  "I know," I said.

  "Good," she responded in satisfaction.

  When I put the receiver down I felt strange. It was the first weekday morning I had spent at home in a long time. During the year I was at school, and in the summertime I worked at the library without missing a single day. Those were the conditions of the job, to keep kids off the streets or something like that. I got dressed to the unfamiliar sounds of the morning and left my room. Yesterday's clothes were washed and dried in the hall near the basement door. For a moment, my heart sank. The door to Mom's room was open. She was sleeping, stretched out horizontally across the bed, covered by a blanket from head to toe. The reading lamp was on. A book was lying on the rug next to an unfamiliar pair of shoes, black ones, with very high heels and silver buckles. Where was she out prancing in those things? For a minute I was surprised that it bothered me at all, but then a minute later I was wondering how it was that I had never taken an interest in where Mom spent her time when Dad was away on one of his trips.

  I walked on to the kitchen. The sink was dry, the dishes were on the rack, and the milk and rolls were slowly spoiling out on the counter near the door. I made myself some breakfast, but I couldn't eat. I threw the scraps into the garbage disposal and pressed the button. It responded with a faint gurgle. Stuck.

  Taking apart broken machines calms me. I unscrewed the cover. The blades of the disposal cutter held a mess of black slivers and brown paper. I removed the cutter, cleaned them out, and set the cutter back in place. But something prevented it from sliding back straight onto its base. I took the cutter out again and dug my hand deep down the drain.

  There was something else among the bits of garbage, something stubborn, slippery, that was stuck to the side. I tried to peel it off with my fingernails, and then with various objects I stuck down the drain -- a wooden spoon, a knife -- none of which worked. In the end I disassembled the lower part of the garbage disposal, stuck a bowl underneath it, and turned on the faucet. Along with the stream of water came flecks of brown paper, those black slivers, and this thing.

  I fished it out of the bowl with a spoon. It was a bit of film, a slide, actually. It wasn't a small, colored slide like the ones Dad used to take on trips or at family parties; it had the dimensions of a regular photograph, and a sort of grayish-chestnut cast that was made by a dense web of lines and letters. It was pretty weird. I cleaned it off under the faucet and left it to dry on the dish rack. Later I brought the magnifying glass from my room, and I peered at it.

  At first all I saw was a mess of meaningless lines. I had to keep turning the slide in different directions before I caught on that it was a picture of something or, to be more precise, a diagram of a machine. It had been reduced, but was startlingly clear: there was a kind of disk, connected to an axle, in the midst of a lot of pipes and valves. Here and there, squarish letters spelled out the names of the parts. It wasn't possible to read them all. I made out "PNEUMATIC VALVE" and "EXHAUST VALVE". On the bottom was the word "AGITATOR".

  I examined the black slivers again. They were made of the same stuff that the slide was made of - celluloid, as far as I could tell. I patched together a few of the pieces of paper. One of them bore the `W' of `Waldbaum's'. It really seemed like these were the bits of trash that Mom had stuffed into the bag the day before in the basement, except for the fact that Mom herself was always warning me, over and over, not to put anything that wasn't `organic' in the garbage disposal (and her definition of `organic' meant vegetable peelings, and didn't include any of the various objects I liked to try to gri
nd up, like matches, empty plastic containers, and, at the end of the school year, particularly loathsome notebooks... ).

  I turned back to the slide, which had dried by now. This time I held it up to the window. In the right-hand corner the letters `T.S.' were printed on an angle. On the very bottom I could make out the tiny caption: "Agitator; diagram 1.205 out of 6.827". The word `agitator' looked familiar - but where had I seen it before? I couldn't remember, nor could I imagine where the other 6.826 diagrams were or how the slide of this diagram had gotten into our garbage disposal.

  A mere two days earlier I would undoubtedly have thrown the slide into the wastebasket on the porch or stubbornly tried to grind it again, but something of the strange atmosphere in the house made me wrap it in paper and stuff it in my pocket. As I reassembled the parts of the garbage disposal I wondered what the slides were for, who they belonged to, how they'd gotten into the basement where Mom could collect them in a trash bag, and, last but not least, why she had tried to grind them up.

  I finished putting the garbage disposal back together and I turned it on. Mom showed up on the spot. There was a look of worry on her face that vanished the minute she saw me. Somehow I sensed that she hadn't really calmed down, but wanted to hide the fact that there really was cause for alarm.

  "It was jammed," I pointed at the disposal.

  She sat down at the table and leaned her head in her hands. "Would you pour me some coffee?"

  I showed her the piece of paper with the letter `W' on it.

  "You used the thing to grind stuff that...”

  "A little paper won't hurt it."

  "Was there only paper in there?"

  "Did you find something else?"

  The slide was in my pocket, but something in her question made me sense that Mom was teetering on the edge of a lie.

  "No," I mumbled, "everything else got ground up."