Never Too Late for Love (2 page)

"She's going to show you pictures in a second,"
he whispered to Genendel in Yiddish.

"That's not polite, Bill," Mimi said, glancing at
him briefly but continuing her story without missing a beat. "Everything
they touch turns to gold. One thing the girls knew was how to choose well. I
taught them that." She reached for her pocketbook, took out her half
glasses, perched them on her nose, and reached into the crowded interior of her
bag.

"Must you start with the pictures?" Velvil said,
feeling the food congeal into a lump in his stomach.

"He hates when I start with the pictures," Mimi
said, taking out a sheaf of pictures and handing them over to the Goldfarbs,
who took them politely and seemingly with great interest.

"I think it's disgusting," Velvil said in
Yiddish. Genendel ignored his comment. He discovered why after they viewed
Mimi's pictures. David Goldfarb reached for his wallet and drew out a few faded
colored Polaroid prints.

"That's my son Marvin, the orthodontist. And there's
Greta, who runs a boutique on Madison Avenue."

"She's divorced," Genendel said.

"Every time I think about it, I get sick to my
stomach," David said suddenly. One felt his anger and frustration.

"It's her life," Genendel said gently.

"One of my daughters was on the verge once," Mimi
said. "But I told her, 'Dotty, if you divorce Larry, I'll never speak to
you again. You have the children to consider, my grandchildren.' That was ten
years ago. Today they're still together, happy as two peas in a pod."

"What she doesn't know doesn't hurt her," Velvil
said in Yiddish.

"Will you stop that jabbering, Bill? Can't you see
it's impolite?"

"I'll speak as I damn-well please," he said in
Yiddish, watching her irritation increase.

"See? He does it just to make me angry," Mimi
said, cutting into her roasted chicken.

Genendel watched, signaling with her eyes. You'd better
stop, he imagined she was saying.

Perhaps it was the stark comparison between the two women
that, in the end, triggered the intensity of his emotion. But by the time they
finished dinner and parted with politeness and empty promises of "getting
together" again, he was certain he had spent his entire adult life in a
bargain with the devil.

Turning it over in his mind--in Yiddish, of course--his
wife of forty-five years seemed a gross, unfeeling monster. Perhaps I am
imagining this, exaggerating her weak points, ignoring her essential goodness,
he thought. After all, he told himself, he was no bargain himself, and she had
put up with him all those years.

The idea filled him with such guilt that he abandoned even
his most secret Yiddish thoughts, reverting to English, trying to remember with
difficulty all the good things that she brought him over the years. He even forced
himself to be affectionate when they finally went to bed after the
eleven-o'clock news. He reached out for her and cupped a hand over a breast,
feeling the hardness begin. Mimi seemed so startled by the act and the obvious
reaction of his body that she did not shrug him away as swiftly as usual.

"Not now, Bill," she said after a while. He
wondered what "now" really meant, thinking this thought in Yiddish.

But what the socializing had done was to trigger an
awareness in Velvil and Genendel that both of them finally admitted to
themselves.

"Seeing you two together only emphasized her
grossness," Velvil said after the Yiddish Club adjourned one evening.

They decided to take a walk in the hushed stillness of the
tranquil night. The air seemed light, with a touch of tropical scent. The path
took them to one of Sunset Village's man-made ponds, which reflected a
half-moon in the clear sky.

"I think you're exaggerating," Genendel
responded, after a long pause. She dared not articulate what she truly
felt--the sense of his entrapment, the frustration of his wife's overbearing
inanity.

"Actually..." he sighed, "your husband seems
like a sweet guy."

That he was, she thought, sweet, with a disposition that
never registered below sunny. She had long ceased to wonder where the fire had
gone, knowing in her heart that it was never there to begin with.

They simply lived together, copulated occasionally, passed
the time. She shivered in the warm night, aware of Velvil's closeness and the
sound of his breathing.

"You are the person..." Velvil began, stumbling,
feeling the power of the compulsion to say it.

"Me?" she asked, knowing what was coming next,
yearning for it, conscious that her shivering was not from the cold.

"I feel closer to you than to anyone I have ever known
in my life," he said swiftly, the Yiddish floating in the air like a
musical phrase. He looked at her but did not touch her. She seemed to move away
from him as they walked.

"I know," she said, feeling her knees weaken.

"And you?" he asked after they had not talked for
a while.

"I confess it," she said. It was such an
appropriately Yiddish remark, as if a sense of guilt were necessary to
embellish the mystery.

His heart pounded, the revelation of the shared feeling a
caress in itself. He wondered if he should stop and reach out for her, but he
held off, as if the spiritual kinship might be lost in physical touching. Or
perhaps he was simply shy, like an adolescent. He suddenly remembered the
discomfort and frustration of his first stirrings in the presence of a female.

I am a grown man, he thought, wanting to express it some
way, boiling down the essence into Yiddish elixir.

"You are a flower to my soul," he said, the
Yiddish translatable only in the heart.

"You are embarrassing me, Velvil," Genendel said.
A sliver of cloud passed over the moon, emphasizing the darkness. "We have
no right," she protested, but he caught the collective pronoun. It assured
him, affirming that, whatever it was, they were in it together.

When he said good-bye at her car, he felt the courage to
touch her, squeezing her hand briefly, though she withdrew it quickly.

I love her, he decided as he walked home, feeling a new
sense of strength, an infusion of youth. He was surprised there was no guilt in
the declaration and, when he slipped in between the sheets, next to his wife,
he reveled in his private thoughts, wondering who the stranger was who snored
beside him.

She stirred briefly. "I won twenty dollars in canasta
tonight," she croaked hoarsely.

He hummed a response without interest, thinking of
Genendel.

He hardly slept that night, knowing it would be impossible
to wade through another two days without seeing her.

In the morning, he feigned sleep while Mimi rattled in the
kitchen.

"If you didn't come in so late, you wouldn't be so tired,"
she cried when he did not respond to the breakfast call.

"Make your own breakfast," she said finally as
she finished dressing and slammed the door behind her.

Jumping out of bed, he reached for the telephone book,
found Genendel's number, and called her.

"I must see you," he said.

"I'm afraid," she said.

"So am I."

"We could have breakfast."

He mentioned a coffee shop on Lake View Drive to which he
could walk. He knew she had the car, as her husband rarely used it.

They met an hour later, feeling awkward, hardly speaking
until the coffee was served. He watched her as she peered into her cup. What
was she looking at? he wondered.

"I want to see you every day," he said, in
Yiddish, of course, feeling the power of his new-found courage. He never
thought himself capable of exercising it. People at the next booth looked his
way. He noted their deeply tanned faces and knew that their curiosity was
aroused by the strange language.

"I want to see you every day," he said again.

"People would talk, Velvil. They would notice."

Suddenly, a crowd of people came into the restaurant, Sunset Village types in well-filled Bermuda shorts. Outside, he could see the parked
tricycles of the Sunset Village Cycling Club, the high pennants limp on their
antennae.

"We could join the Cycling Club," he decided,
watching the group come in. "They meet every day. Besides, it will be
healthy. Plenty of fresh air and exercise."

"They look so foolish," Genendel said, smiling.

"Who cares?"

She knew he was responding to another question. She
wondered about her own caring, thinking suddenly of David, her husband, and of
the hurt he would experience if he knew of her feelings for Velvil. With
effort, she pushed the thought from her mind.

"All right," she said, lowering her eyes. She
knew she had taken another step in the journey and felt the mystery of it, the
joy.

In the Cycling Club, they practiced discretion, talking to
the others as they pedaled en masse through the crowded roads, making a mess
out of the traffic, prompting occasional catcalls and anti-Semitic epithets,
which they ignored and laughed about.

They didn't have much time to themselves, but it seemed
enough that they were together. Even in the silence, their intimacy grew. When
they exchanged information, it was always in Yiddish.

"Don't you people speak English?" one of the club
members asked as he pedaled close by.

"Not very well," Velvil said slyly, hearing
Genendel's giggle begin beside him.

The idea had been growing within each of them for some
time, but it wasn't until they had been in the Cycling Club for several months
that it became clear, hitting them both with the force of a hurricane.

They were having breakfast, the entire cycling group,
chattering like children, making the waitresses in the coffee shop move more
swiftly than they were accustomed to. A couple sat down beside them, a large
freckle-faced woman with wispy gray hair curling from under her blue baseball
cap. Her husband was tanned almost black by the sun, his bald head shining like
some mahogany wood sculpture.

"We're the Berlins," the woman said.

They knew instantly that she would dominate the
conversation with her rapid-fire questions, a dyed-in-the-wool yenta.
"I've been watching you," the woman said. "I even remarked to
Harry. Didn't I, Harry?"

Harry nodded, his dark face breaking, the neat line of
false teeth flashing in the brightness of the sunlight.

"I have a sixth sense about devoted couples. Tell me,
how long have you been married?"

Velvil wanted to respond immediately, but shrugged instead,
watching Genendel's discomfort.

"Forty-five years at least, right?"

Genendel lowered her eyes, which the woman must have taken
for affirmation.

"See, I was right," she said, turning to Harry.
"They are a truly devoted couple. How many children have you got?"

Velvil looked at Genendel, wondering if she could see the
humor of the situation beyond her anxiety. He decided to be playful and held up
four fingers.

"I figured at least," the woman said.

"She wanted to have more," Velvil said, "but
she got a special dispensation from the Pope."

"You had a hysterectomy?" the woman pursued.
"I had one ten years ago."

"They took the baby carriage out and left the playpen
in," Harry said suddenly.

"It's not often that you meet such a devoted couple. I
can tell. I've got a sixth sense about it, haven't I, Harry?"

Velvil felt the idea explode in his head, but dared not
entertain it and worried that once broached it would affect his relationship
with Genendel.

After the Yiddish Club meeting that night, they sat on
chairs near the pool.

"Is it possible that we look like a married
couple?" Velvil said, noting his own caution as he watched her face in the
glow of the clubhouse lights.

"I'm afraid so," she said. "You can't fool
an old yenta."

"I hadn't realized."

"I have."

"You?"

"How long do you think we can get away with it?"
she sighed.

"What have we done? Have I once..."

She put a finger over his lips, a gesture to induce
silence. Instead, he kissed her finger, their first kiss. He took her wrist and
showered kisses on the back of her hand. She let her hand linger, closing her
eyes, tilting her head. He could see a tear slip out of the corner of her eye
and roll down her cheek, catching the brief glow of the lights.

"I want to spend the rest of my life with you,
Genendel," he said, a lump growing in his throat, his heart pounding.
"I want to marry you."

"This is madness. This is crazy," she cried.
"I don't want to hear it ever again, not ever." He had never seen her
so upset.

"Not ever again," she repeated. But she did not
take her hand out of his. "If you dare mention such a thing again, I
promise you I will never see you again. You must promise me, Velvil."

He clutched her hand, feeling the full impact of the
emptiness of his future without her, not daring to precipitate her anger further.
But he did not promise.

"You must promise," she persisted.

"I cannot promise," he said, after a long
silence, still holding her hand. He lifted it again to his lips. "I love
you," he said. "And that is the only thing I can promise."

She withdrew her hand, stood up, cleared her throat, and
wiped her tears.

"I think we better not see each other any more."
What angered her particularly was that she was actually thinking the
unthinkable. How would David react? Her children? The cruelty of it. She had no
right. She strode forward, and he rose to follow her.

"Leave me alone," she said. "I am going home
now."

"Will I see you again?" he cried after her,
afraid to follow, knowing his voice was carrying too far in the quiet night. He
stood rooted to the spot, watching her depart.

Genendel did not join the activities of the Cycling Club
the next morning. Instead of going with the group, Velvil rode to her
condominium and watched it for a long time without gathering the courage to
press the buzzer and confront her. The blinds were drawn. Later, he stopped at
a pay phone and dialed her number. There was no answer.