The Encyclopedia of Exes Page 19

  Bernie said, “All right—I’ll play along, Mom. Whatever happened to this Heshie guy?” From the cocky grin on his face you wouldn’t have guessed that Susannah would cut up his heart a month later.

  “Why should I know that, Bernie?” I was saying. “I’m married, a married woman to your father.” Even I noticed how loud I’d started talking. “I’m just telling you a story.”

  Maybe I was getting too hung up in Bernie’s affairs, but this love business started to change my son. Here’s a for instance: one Sunday we were in the car—Bern, Izzy, and me driving back from Grandma Sadie’s apartment (she was still alive then). Our Buick was quiet as a graveyard as we headed up Neptune Avenue in the rain, past the Cyclone and toward the Belt Parkway home. And when my husband cleared his throat, I knew what he was about to say.

  “So, son.” This was Izzy’s fatherly tone—lower than normal, constipated sounding. “How’s things with that girl with the nice hair?”

  Bernie gave his dad a look that weighed more than he did. The car bounced through two or three potholes. “Dad, she’s fine.”

  “Are you protecting your heart?” I said, quick, too quick. “Are you?”

  His young person’s scowl and his little misheuge facial scruff, his chest about as deep as my thigh—did this add up to a kid old enough to use words as fancy as desires, or—that other one, the f one?

  Izzy was sighing: “You know, this is what they call a fling, son.” His voice came out so tired it scared me, like he was my own father talking. “You enjoy it, now.”

  “Mom,” Bernie looked at me, not Izzy. “Please.”

  For the next few weeks I told myself I wasn’t going to get all crazy. Don’t say “boo” to my son about anything, I said. Let him be a big shot tough guy. As for me, couldn’t I push aside memory like a plate of bad fish? One weekend, Izzy and I had the Schorrs over for dinner (the chicken I made was a little overcooked but still not untender). Then one Friday night I went to the movies with Aunt Fran to take in the new Romeo and Juliet by some Italian, Zeffirelli, something about a sheygets in men’s hose. I was pushing aside heaping bowls of Bernie and Susannah thoughts, and how much like reruns of me and Heshie they seemed. But, when you shear a sheep, the skin on your dog trembles, if you know what I mean.

  “Get over it,” Fran said. “You’re going to drive yourself nuts worrying about nothing; so, your son’s growing into a man, so big whoop.”

  I could not get over it, not even a little.

  The second time Susannah came over, an afternoon for cookies and hot chocolate, I plopped myself in the kitchen, trying not to watch the lovebirds. Izzy was of course at the office—he sold silverware sets, a nice living. Anyway, Bernie and that girl sat in the living room, too close to the TV—I think it was the show Get Smart, which had the spying and the talking shoes. And there on the couch, my half-pint playboy and his giggly little friend inched toward each other.

  Don’t listen, Harriet, I told myself.

  I put my head down and stirred that batter. But the laughing had stopped; there wasn’t a peep coming from them. Next, a loud crash.

  “What happened?” I said, out of breath from running over.

  Bernie was standing, his hands shaking. His lips got pale. “We have a problem here!” he said. His mug of hot chocolate had spilled on the couch; mess was spreading.

  Susannah knelt and, opening her little shiny purse, took out a tissue and started to dab. Then she walked right by us to the kitchen and came back with a damp rag.

  She looked at Bernie like a judge sick of having to call out “guilty” all the time.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Levine.” Susannah said, then, to Bernie: “Don’t freak out, man, I got it.” She was quietly competent, this girl. That’s the strange words that popped into my head: quietly competent. And I knew why, and from where they’d come.

  Let me tell a quick story from 1951: six months before I’d given birth to Bernie, I’d been at my friend Gerty’s engagement party. Izzy had been nice enough to go with me—his pregnant nudnick—and he’d ended up catching a headache from the loud noises women make when one of them shakes off the single life. Well, who came up to us at the cracker table but Holly Finkel? A woman I knew from the old days, heavyset and nosy. “Guess who I ran into Thursday?” this Holly said. “Heshie!”

  I was able to smile without giving away the quick thump thump in my heart. “Really? That’s very nice for you,” I said, calm. You can throw a cat however you want, it always lands with its head up.

  “Harriet, I’m talking about Heshie!” Holly said. She could barely catch her breath. “You remember Heshie!”

  Izzy cut in: “Who the hell’s Heshie?” He had cracker in his teeth and a blah look on his face.

  “How did he look?” It wasn’t easy to be calm now. “Heshie looked good?”

  “How do you think he looks?” Holly said.

  Izzy was bouncing now, on his toes. “Heshie who?” When he was a kid, mean people called him “The Toad,” since his neck would swell up going into his jaw if he got excited. “Who’s this Heshie?”

  Izzy’s father had been a jealous man, too—he’d moved to America at the age of fourteen just to yell at a girl who’d left him for this tailor named Singerman.

  “Holly,” I was saying, “how do I think Heshie looks?” My heart told me the answer. “Gold will never get rusty,” I said.

  “That’s right. But he’s bald as an egg,” Holly said.

  By now, my husband was in a pucker.

  I put my hand on his shoulder before he had a coronary, which happened also to run in his family. “Heshie’s just a boy I knew.” I smiled the best wife smile I had—of course keeping the mouth closed, blinking like a good fairy—and I patted my stomach that was pregnant with Bernie. “What’s to tell, Izzy? Heshie was a boy. Someone I haven’t spoke to, or seen, in forever.”

  “Oh, really?” He spit by accident whenever he talked upset. “A boy, he was?” Pieces of cracker stuck to his wettish lower lip. “You tell me what’s to tell about this—” here Izzy seemed to switch one word for another—“this guy.”

  In those days men had to know everything you’d done before they’d even met you.

  Now Holly was turning to my husband. “Heshie was the most quietly competent man that ever walked this earth,” she said, and the words, as fancy as they were, rang true. “As a kid, he could teach a moose to dance like Ginger Rogers and not complain. Then he gets a real estate empire and doesn’t say one thing to brag about it. Oh, the money he has!” Holly was still a bitter pill even after all the years.

  “And Heshie,” she said, bringing a hand to her collarbone, “Heshie loved Harriet like in a Hollywood movie.”

  Thing is, Holly was right, but not a hundred percent. Heshie wasn’t always quiet.

  The night he’d first kissed me, we’d been all alone in Mrs. Schmidlan’s studio. I’d heard the stories: Heshie with Ellen Abromoitz; Heshie with June Heller, who had the thin waist. But it was just Heshie and me in that studio, Heshie teaching me to spin. Wrapping me in those strong hands—which were what made him special, more so even than his black eyes—he took me in those mitts of his and I couldn’t stop myself from wriggling a little.

  “You’re a good spinner, Harriet,” Heshie said; for him, this was talking a blue streak. “But it’d be better if you stop shaking.” We were face-to-face; his big eyes were so close to mine I couldn’t help but feel I saw a little of the secrets in him. “A good spinner,” he said, soft, “Harriet Bloom.” (My maiden name.) He was holding my hands, and I hated them for being so sweaty.

  “You sure got nice hands,” he said. His mouth curled down whenever he was a little shy. How could he be the mamzer everyone said? With that pale, smiling face? Those eyes that sparkled like Coca-Colas in the sun?

  I told him his hands were nice, too.

  “Thanks.” He was blushing. He rubbed my palms with his thumb. The pulse in his neck was twitching like something inside of him that was poundi
ng to get out.

  I said, “What are you doing, you putz, with the rubbing?” and I laughed, killing myself for “putz” as soon as I’d said it. I pretended to slap him, letting my hand fall on his shoulder. I had goose pimples everywhere, all those little hairs on my arms trying to stand up straight. He kissed me, not too strong, on the lips.

  Then he stopped and pulled back. “That okay?” He didn’t wait, he just gave me another one on the neck, and I felt myself disappearing, blacking out almost, and falling for sure.

  After that night, Heshie and I had been inseparable. The world was unfriendly in those days, however. Before long that sweet kid had gone off to war; he hadn’t asked me to wait, so I hadn’t.

  But like I would tell my husband that night in 1951, in the car home after Gerty’s engagement party. “It’s nothing, Izzy—just past.” And I meant it.

  Still, you know what they say: nothing is past. A woman thinks and God laughs. This was true even in 1968.

  “Yes, operator,” I said. She had trouble making sense of my shaky voice. “The number for a Heshie Green, please.” I could feel my ear clammy against the receiver. “In Park Slope.”

  Because of a held-up Q train, it took me almost an hour to reach Heshie.

  “This took me by surprise,” Heshie said, opening his door, “I have to admit.” But it didn’t sound like surprise in his voice as he let me in his apartment—a brownstone, two floors. He worked out of his home. “You don’t hear from someone in years,” Heshie said, “then boom, a nice call.”

  “Well,” was all I could get out. I was sixteen again. Soggy palms, who can talk, and a stomach spinning its way up into my throat. What kind of an idiot was I?

  “Not that’s it’s not good to see you,” said this Heshie who was somehow middle-aged. I don’t know why he was frowning. His posture was so-so, his head shiny. “You always did dress nice, Harriet.”

  I had on my good blouse—turquoise. “Thanks,” I said.

  If you looked you could see some of the old handsome in Heshie—a tanned face and a jaw square as Paul Newman’s. And still with the muscle hands. But he kept blinking one eye; a tear waddled down his droopy cheek. “Listen, I got a problem with my duct,” he said with a frown.

  “Looks like you’re crying.” I said, smiling nice. “I thought maybe it was because you were happy to see me.” I was a married woman, and a mother to boot. But you know that.

  “You feel like something to nosh on, Harriet?” He was already reaching for his coat. “There’s this place on Pacific has got a nice sandwich.” It was here Heshie Green looked into my eyes for the first time in almost thirty years. “It’s on me, Harriet.” I forgot that’s what men did—they paid for women they weren’t married to. Was Bernie ever man enough to treat Susannah to dinner? The thought of that awful word fuck on my little Bernie’s lips—

  Heshie and I now walked down Pacific Street toward Flatbush, by Long Island University, us not talking, him on the traffic side, a gentleman. In the Quickway diner we just sat looking at each other. I was bothering at my wedding ring, nervous more than a little.

  “So tell me about yourself, Harriet.” I could see he’d told himself to start smiling. “I always liked the way you talked better than I did.”

  “What’s to tell?” I said.

  “Do I know him?” Then calm like someone talking about the weather, Heshie said, “I see on your finger you have a husband.”

  I nodded. I didn’t trust my voice anymore.

  “Well, Harriet, if I may be frank, you called me why?” He dabbed his eye with a napkin, then balled it up and used his spoon to whack it across the table like he was the Hank Greenberg of silverware. “I’ve thought fond of you now and again over the years, what’s the harm in admitting that now?” He looked around at the wall—where a clock and a spice rack hung above a ladle. “See that?” he pointed with those big hands, “See how the dipper looks like a mouth and the clock and the other thing are like eyes?”

  I said I did see.

  “I look for a smile anywhere, Harriet.” He was grinning wide and who knew why? “And I find it, often I find it. Like now. It’s silly, but I look.” His eyes were the one thing about him, even with the crying duct, you could have put those eyes on a kid’s face.

  “Listen, Heshie,” my voice soft and so small you would have thought I was six inches from head to foot. “I don’t know why I called you.” I had to stare at my lap. “Hesh, I’m married, the ring you see, and—”

  Heshie was breathing loud, not a young a man anymore for sure, but patient, God bless him. He sat up in his chair, leaned to me just a little. In the empty diner, under the bright lightbulbs, in that early afternoon twenty-five years from Schmidlan’s studio, Heshie was quietly waiting, patient—a dance partner optimistic I’d have the chutzpah to dip.

  “This is stupid, Heshie.” I wanted for the first time in Lord knows when to kiss a man on the tip of his chin, not because it still looked strong, but because it wasn’t mine. “I’m still a moron, Hesh. I’ll go.”

  “Weren’t you even going to ask about me?” He put his hand to his forehead. “If I have a wife, for instance?”

  “I’m no breaker up of homes,” I said.

  “I do.” He had a twinkle in his eye as if he’d just told me I won a weekend trip. “Lillie, her name is. She’s away Wednesdays, volunteering for the coloreds. And who said you were a moron—not me, if you’re counting?”

  “I’m glad for you, Heshie.” I stood to go. “How nice of you not to wear your ring, this Lillie must be proud of such a husband.”

  “Harriet,” he said, “sit.”

  So I did.

  “I’m here,” he said. He pressed his wet eye with the butt of his palm. “You called. I came, to have a roast beef at the Quickway and a little Lipton’s tea.” The pulse in his neck was tapping again, all this time later. “A man is trying here to say something,” he said.

  I’m forty-nine, I thought. My legs almost as wide as they are short. I have trouble ever finding a nail polish I don’t feel like a schmuck in, I got a lot more chins now than when I was his little dance partner, and what’s worse, I haven’t thought about these things in two decades. And then I remembered my little Bernie, and I gasped at the world of heartbreak and deception that first love was sure to bring my only son.

  “I should go, Heshie.”

  It was like I had let the air out of him. “I never was much of a talker,” he said, timid as a little kid, one dark eye crying. “I’m in a rut. With the world, Harriet. Do you understand that?” He hadn’t lost that laugh. “And then you called.”

  His mouth still looked good curled down, and memories whooshed in like the Q train when it comes.

  It hurts my heart to think about those times. Do something evil and unlike yourself once and you giggle and cry and it’s not really you, but then it happens a second time and more, and soon enough what you have is yourself that you don’t like. An unlucky person is someone in love. Just like when Bernie ended up losing his Susannah to that Chinese boy, for a long time there was nothing to my son but sighing and grief. (He wouldn’t date another woman until he met your mother in 1974.)

  Don’t think all bad of me. When Heshie and I finished eating, that afternoon at the Quickway, he asked me to go home with him for an hour or so—and I said no. I was sure I’d never see Hesh again. Just get me a cab, I said.

  “You’re a good girl, Harriet!” Heshie cried, under the awning of that diner. And he rubbed my forty-nine-year-old wrist. “You sure got nice hands, sugar pie.” He had crinkles in his bald forehead. And I was still weeks from becoming one of those women.

  “Do you still dance, Hesh?” I found myself able to talk. “I never asked if you still dance.”

  He looked at me in a way Izzy never did, with tenderness as if we hadn’t spent a life not speaking to each other; he shook his head. “Dancing,” he laughed a sad one, and I guess when people have only minutes to go over half a life’s worth of lost time, t
hey take as deep a breath as Heshie did. The smile he gave me was no more affectionate than anything else you rehearse and rehearse. His lips had gotten much thinner than when he was a boy.

  When Heshie did speak it was like he was about to jump into twenty feet of water and didn’t want to waste air. “Good health on your head, Harriet,” he said. And even though nothing had yet happened I had the feeling the whole world was going to find out. I can never see Heshie again, I thought. Not ever.

  Soon enough, of course, it happened with Heshie. My Izzy would end up divorcing me. And how could I look at my son? I was heading for a shandeh, a charpeh—a shame and a disgrace—I knew that, and to this day know it, no one has to denounce me. I do it myself every day for thirty-four years.

  But again, that first day outside of the Quickway, Heshie was patting my hand, the top of it, by the knuckles. He waved for a cab. He wasn’t looking at me, I imagine he was making a point of it.

  “You too, Heshie,” I said at last. “Good health on your head.” The taxi that pulled up wasn’t any type of cab I hadn’t seen before, but coming closer with its two eye-lights turned on even in the daytime, its grille looked like a smile. If Heshie noticed this, he didn’t say anything about it to me.

  QUITTING

  Dan Guterman

  (kwĭt) v. tr. 1. To depart from; leave: “You and I are on the point of quitting the theater of our exploits” (Horatio Nelson). 2. To leave the company of: had to quit the gathering in order to escape the sight of her with her new boyfriend. 3. To give up; relinquish: quit a relationship. 4. To abandon or put aside; forsake: advised them to quit their dissipated ways. 5. To cease or discontinue: asked him to quit talking; quit smoking; quit sticking his tongue in her ear like that.

  adj. Absolved of a duty or an obligation; free.

  NUMBER OF MONTHS, DAYS SINCE I FIRST AND LAST KISSED BILLIE ANNE

  Eight months, twelve days