One Heart (18 page)

During times like this I'd try not to think of Gladys, of what she was doing, of how she had gotten through. When she came into my mind, which wasn't too often anymore, it made my stomach feel knotted, and I'd had enough of that feeling. Of course when a man works specifically to block things out of his mind, they'll get bigger, stronger. So as the little boy Jack talked on, and I looked at Nicoletta, the hollow of her throat, the fine dark eyes, the rippled hair, the face of Gladys was almost superimposed there, so that I had to rub my eyes.

That night I stayed at Nicoletta's. In her bed by the window where she'd hung what could have been blackout curtains from the Second World War, it was clear to me that Nicoletta had something to tell me, and I her, and it would probably take us a long time to finish the conversation.

For over two years it was good to be with her. It was not a home, but it was company on a daily basis. I was forced to have some human interaction each day. I'm a man who can drift into solitude too easily, and I never particularly enjoyed it or knew what to do with it, other than work too hard and read books until my eyes stung and the real world blurred.

I still had my belongings in my own place, and once every so often Nicoletta and I would take Pie and spend the night in that bare apartment, Pie packing up dolls and clothes in an old-time red hatbox she used as a suitcase, acting excited like going to my place was a vacation, though all we did was play the board game
Sorry
and listen to the music from the downstairs apartment, which was live blues, and which we all loved.

Pie became attached to me, but I became more attached to her. More than I knew. I enjoyed talking with her as much as anyone. I told myself I loved her mother, but now when I think of those years I can see clearly that what connected me to that house was mostly the child. I knew as it was happening that she was somehow slipping into the space Ann had left behind, that I was turning back into a man who knew how to be a father. This should have felt like a betrayal, but it mostly felt good. I was tired of hating myself for Ann's death. I thought I'd been punished enough.

I would sit out on the steps in the humid evening while Pie Pie played with her cars and dolls in the dirt under the clothesline. She was a girl who loved dirt, who made dirt seem clean somehow. She would sit out there and talk her endless talk about all kinds of things I knew weren't true, things she got from TV and her own imagination. I knew this age well, knew how to go along and ask the right questions. These times on the steps were when I felt most at peace during those years, because the great distance between myself and that little girl, which was the same familiar distance I felt between myself and the world, was filled up with love, so that there were moments when the gap dissolved, when I'd rise from the steps and gather her up into my arms without thinking.

At night when Nicoletta slept beside me, it was not Ann I thought of, but Wendell. This surprised me, because I thought I was done with remembering him other than the times he'd flash in and out of my mind for no reason like a blinding light.

But there beside Nicoletta I wasn't remembering him as he'd been, but thinking of him as he would've been had he lived. He would've still been a young man in his prime. He would've been in love with some woman, some beautiful woman he would not yet know how to satisfy, but she would wait, she would understand that he was a man whose body could learn.

They would've had a child or two, and he would've made a good father. (I felt certain I had always known that.) He would bring his children over to see me, and I'd hold them in my lap and press my lips to the top of their heads, and each time it would surprise me again how warm the top of children's heads can be.

I would have a man to talk to, if Wendell had lived, a man I loved to talk to, a man I loved.

It was a new way of missing him, and I was both weary that I'd discovered it, and surprised that it had taken me so long.

I suppose it led to this dream.

I was living in a strange city overseas, everyone was speaking a different language, but no language I remember hearing when I was over there during the war. A tremendous feeling of homesickness overwhelmed the dream so that I felt like a boy, but clearly I was a man. I met Wendell in the street, and felt such tremendous relief I wanted to wake up, wanted to test the dream and make sure it was real. I tried to wake and couldn't, so it was real. “Let's go fishing,” I said. “My son,” I added. “Sure,” he said, and we walked along in what felt to me like a stream of pure joy until suddenly he stopped. He turned and looked in my eyes, and in his own eyes there was a message for me. At first I couldn't read it. He began getting smaller now, shrinking, his eyes steady and looking at me. Now he stood beside me, clutching my leg. It began to rain. Then a woman came and placed him in my arms, and he was an infant, looking up into my face. His eyes had the same message, and now it was clear to me that if I couldn't read the message in his eyes, the city would be bombed. I looked into his infant face, his blue eyes.
You left me, so I died. I went to war without your love. I stumbled without your love
. And then he was dissolving, pieces of his body merging with the air, and my own hands trying to grip him, trying to stop him from leaving, until finally there was nothing but a siren, and everyone running in the streets, the sky dark.

When I woke I was drenched in sweat. I opened the black curtains to a moon and looked out the window. Nicoletta sensed something. She sat up and turned to me in the darkness and said, “You all right?”

I sat up on the side of the bed and looked out the window. I said, “A dream.” I felt like any second now I'd weep, which I did not want to do.

“What dream?” She sounded irritated that she had to be awake. I had already noticed that the slightest show of weakness on my part made her angry.

I couldn't say anything for a while, so I sat and held my head in my hands.

“What was the dream, James?” she said.

“It was . . . ”

“Tell me about it.”

“You go back to sleep,” I said, because the irritation in her voice was more pronounced.

“No. Tell me the dream.”

I said, “I had a son. I lied and told you I never had children, but I lost a son in Vietnam.”

I felt her hand on my back. She began to rub my neck; she was sitting behind me, naked.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered. “I'm real sorry.”

But she didn't even want to know my son's name. She didn't have a single question for me, and I sat wanting to be questioned, wishing she would interrogate me. But she just rubbed my shoulders and ran her hands through my hair, and finally it seemed the dream had left my body, and we slept under the warm breezes that came in through the window, our hands entwined.

A few nights later in bed I asked her why she never had any questions for me. Why she didn't want to know about who I'd been before she knew me.

“We don't have that kind of love, James. We're not young enough to do all that again, are we? You haven't asked me too many questions, either.”

She was right. It was true it wasn't that kind of love, but it was also true that I wished that it was. I was not young, but I was young enough to hope for that possibility. I wanted to tell her, at the very least, about the dream I'd had while sleeping beside her, because in some way I felt she had brought the dream on. A part of me knew I was thinking of Wendell because I was with a woman, and it was good, and Wendell hadn't ever had a real chance with women. He had been a boy with girls, never a man with women. Never had he experienced what for me seemed like the center of life. With Nicoletta, I'd come to realize the truth of that.

I wanted to tell her about what Wendell's eyes had said in the dream. I wanted to say to her, “I thought leaving him when he was fourteen years old was not that important. I thought by then he was on his own. He hardly seemed interested in me by then. What do you think?”

So I tried to tell her this, late one night when we shared a bottle of wine in the kitchen as we had the first time I'd been to the house.

“When you were fourteen, were you a child?” I asked her.

She laughed. “When I was fourteen, I was a mother. Or could've been. I was pregnant, let's put it that way. And I was no child, James. I was a savvy little P.S. 454 bitch with my fake rhinestone ankle bracelet and pints of rot gut hidden in my bedroom.” She laughed again.

“Fake rhinestone ankle bracelet,” I said, in an attempt to enter her spirit of levity, but she heard it as the lie it was.

“James,” she said. “Just let it go. You have a life, right? A life to live. Today. Here. Don't you? If you think for one second your son would've lived if you'd never left him, you got a mighty inflated opinion of yourself.”

I looked at her. I was struck by the wisdom of her words. It made me want to go out and take a walk.

Pie's father, Nicoletta's ex-husband of ten years, was a comedian. He was onstage at a couple of clubs in the city where tourists liked to go, and he traveled often, to cities in the East and Midwest. The first two years I spent there I saw him five or six times; his career was just starting to take off, and when he came by the house he had the excited air of a man on the brink of success. He dressed in what I recognized as expensive, understated clothes. When he spoke to me, it was with polite restraint, and in his dark eyes I saw a kind of confusion I recognized, and maybe it was just the confusion of a man displaced.

But when I watched him talk with Pie, or play with her in the yard, I felt sorry that she felt she had to perform in order to keep his eye. She had a whole personality she would put on just for him, a Shirley Temple kind of act where she giggled and tossed her head and spoke as if she were much younger. She had lived with him for the first two and a half years of her life, and clearly he was inscribed in her heart for good, and she would break her back trying to tell him that. I could see that he had a man's typical impatience for children, a man's typical ambitions.

As for Nicoletta, when he came around she grew tight-lipped. But when his back was turned, she studied him, and when he left she'd say things like, “That sonofabitch didn't even rinse his glass out. Am I still his maid?”

With that kind of passionate anger still inside of her, it shouldn't have surprised me when he began to come around more and more, shouldn't have surprised me when Nicoletta explained to me one morning in a coffee shop that she and him were going to give it another try.

“I have to say I'm surprised,” I said.

“Well, so am I.”

“Are you sure about this?”

“Yes.”

I looked out the window. I couldn't feel much of anything, or make myself think.

“I still want you as a friend,” she said.

But we weren't friends. We'd never been friends. We were lovers. To her credit, she reached out and put her hand on my arm and said she knew that probably wasn't possible.

But it was the thought of Pie Pie that made me unable to turn from the window to look at Nicoletta when she asked me to.

“You got a lotta stuff at the house,” she finally said.

“I'll get it today.”

“You can still see Pie, of course. You're like an uncle to her.”

“You mean like a father,” I said. “I've been like a father to her, not an uncle.” I turned to look at her.

Nicoletta lowered her eyes, then looked up.

“You can see her once a week or something,” she said. “Like we're divorced.”

“That's right,” I said. “Like we're divorced. Let's get going.”

“I'm sorry,” she said and began to cry. “I miss you already. I wish I could have you both.”

I put my arm around her as we walked out of the diner; anyone watching would've thought I was the one who was saying good-bye.

Pie and I went and saw two movies together, and three times we went out for ice cream, and I took her to the dock where I worked just to point it out, just to give her more of myself. But driving out to that dock, I was hit with a forceful memory of Wendell. A memory of him when he was seven or eight, wanting to go watch me work down at the shipyard when I was a welder in Delaware. I told him I'd take him someday. I drove, trying to remember if I had taken him, or if I only imagined that I had. I drove half listening to Pie, but her voice somehow became part of my memory of Wendell. I decided that I never had taken him down there. I remembered thinking it would be dangerous, and not interesting enough for him. Or was it just inconvenient for me? Who had I been to him, really?

In the car with Pie, I had a few moments that were almost like panic, because I wasn't sure about any memory I could pull up that concerned Wendell. I couldn't make myself see his face clearly, much less hear his voice. Pie talked on. I groped after one clear memory of Wendell, and in that groping broke into a sweat. And finally, when I gave up, which was like being punched, I saw Wendell as clearly as if he had suddenly appeared in the road. Wendell as a baby, not a boy.

I decided to pull into an ice cream stand and get Pie a cone. I gave her money and she went up and ordered a cone by herself, and I sat in the car, and let myself remember another life, a life when I was still a boy, a boy alone with an infant. I had been overseas, never on the front line, but I'd seen enough suffering so that I had an understanding about life that Wendell's mother did not. When she left me alone with our son, I felt almost relieved that I would no longer have to make conversation with her. I concentrated on Wendell. The other men I knew at the time were working and buying nice houses and raising families with wives who went to hair salons. Soon they were buying television sets. People I'd grown up with saw me in the market exhausted from sleeplessness and the shock of a life I'd never chosen, Wendell in my arms with his bright eyes and bald head and stained undershirts.