The Journey Prize Stories 21 (11 page)

Of course, what would such a woman see in a man who had dropped out of school after the fifth grade, whose education was mostly self-acquired? A man who fabricated letters for a newspaper column of dubious value? A man who she thought was a woman!

My father shook his head and chided himself for his vanity, laughed at himself. Then he took a look at the date on the letter: it had been written on a Thursday. His eyes flicked to the calendar on the wall above the city desk: it was Tuesday, next week already. He went to the front office and told them he might be receiving a call, and if so to put it through immediately. Should he be unavailable for any reason, ask the caller to come down to the paper and ask for him.

Madelaine Bell turned out to be very close to my father's ideal. She was attractive – but not wildly so – with long brown hair that was done up neatly in what my father thought was called a French roll. She had an aquiline nose and dark, intelligent eyes, but her thick eyeglasses masked the intent of her look. She was shorter than my father liked, but well built, and very well dressed in a brown tweed suit, something my father had never seen on a woman. She was, he guessed, about thirty-five, just a few years older than my father. She wore no makeup or jewellery, including no wedding or engagement ring, but her fingernails, he noticed, were long and well cared for, and covered with a purplish-red polish. She didn't look or sound even remotely Jewish.

They sat across from each other in a delicatessen a block away from
The World
's offices, cups of tea in front of them.

“You really thought I was a woman,” my father repeated, still amazed.

“You're very convincing,” Professor Bell said.

“So convincing as to fool even someone as learned as you, a professor of anthropology! I'm pleased to know that.”

The professor explained her interest in the correspondent in love with the Indian. She was involved in a study of the integration of immigrant Jews into American society. Inter-marriage between races and faiths of course played a large part. “This woman is exactly the sort of person I'm most interested in. I don't have to tell you the symbolic value of her predicament. In love with an Indian, an original inhabitant of this land. Then there's the lost tribe element, the possibility that, in terms of both faith and ethnicity, there is no actual
intermarriage. This is invaluable. It could be emblematic for my entire study.” After a moment, when my father didn't immediately reply, she added: “And the man's desire to study Judaism, to return to roots he didn't even know he had …”

My father had thought hard about what to tell this woman. Much as he hated to lie, it was unthinkable to admit the fabrication. “I'm sorry to say I can't really help you,” he began reluctantly. “The woman wrote no more than what we printed. There was no name on the letter, no return address on the envelope.”

“And she hasn't been in touch again?” Madelaine Bell asked hopefully.

“No.” After a moment, my father added: “It's been almost four months now, so it's doubtful she will be. Who knows what may have become of her.”

“Ah,” Professor Bell said. “I would dearly love to interview her.” She took off her eyeglasses and gently rubbed the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, a gesture my father found endearing. When she removed her hand, her eyes, a lighter shade of brown than he had first thought, were warm and inviting. “I wonder if I could impose upon you for a favour?”

“If I can be of service, of course.”

“Perhaps you could insert a sentence or two in your column inquiring as to this woman's whereabouts, ‘will the woman who wrote the letter on,' I'm sorry, I've forgotten the date, ‘will the woman who wrote about her love affair with the Indian man please be in contact …' Something along those lines. Would that be possible?”

“Ah,” my father said. Professor Bell had not yet put her glasses back on and he found himself gazing into those warm brown eyes. He felt a moment of panic, as if he were being drawn into those pools of liquid, chocolatey brown, where he would surely drown, but it quickly passed. What harm could such a subterfuge do – other than, of course, to compound the original fabrication? Heshberg, if he even noticed, would find it amusing.

In matters of the heart, my father found, each situation was different. His experience was useless for the situation he soon found himself in.

After some weeks had passed, he was able to imagine writing this letter:

My father had not really written the letter, but the situation and the question were real enough.

He considered the question, and the one contained in a letter that had come that day, a real question, in a real letter, from a real reader: “My husband beats me and the children.

What should I do?”

He had been sitting at his desk in
The World
newsroom for an hour or more thinking of how to answer this question. It was late, and the newsroom was deserted. There was a bottle of whisky in the bottom drawer of his desk. He opened the drawer, took out the bottle and a small glass, and poured himself a drink.

The only answer my father could think of for either dilemma – his own and that of his distressed correspondent – was the one he had written so often in the newspaper: “Follow your heart.” In the dim light of the empty newsroom, the inadequacy of the answer – and its falsity – loomed enormous.

T
his was the day after Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield's ear. You remember that. It was a moment in history – not like Kennedy or the planes flying into the World Trade Center – not up at that level. This was something lower, more like Ben Johnson, back when his eyes were that thick, yellow colour and he tested positive in Seoul after breaking the world record in the hundred. You might not know exactly where you were standing or exactly what you were doing when you first heard about Tyson or about Ben, but when the news came down, I bet it stuck with you. When Tyson bit off Holyfield's ear, that cut right through the everyday clutter. All the papers and the television news shows ran the exact same pictures of Tyson standing there in his black trunks with the blood in his mouth. It seemed like everything else that happened that day had to be related back to this moment, back to Mike and what he had done. You have to remember, this was before Tyson got the tattoo
on his face, and the rematch with Holyfield was supposed to be his big comeback, a chance to go straight and be legitimate again. Nobody thinks about that now. Now, the only thing you see when you look back is Mike moving in for the kill, the way his cheek brushes up almost intimately against Evander's face just before he breaks all the way through and gives in to his rawest impulse. Then the tendons in his neck bulge out and his eyes pop wide open and his teeth come grinding down.

Burner and I were stuck in another hotel room, watching the sports highlights churn it around and around, the same thirty-second clip of the fight. It was like watching the dryer roll clothes. Cameras showed it from different angles and at different speeds and there were lots of close-ups of Evander's mangled head and the chunk of flesh lying there in the middle of the ring. Commentators took turns explaining what was happening and what it all meant.

The cleaning lady had already come and gone and now we had two perfectly made double beds, a fresh set of towels, and seven empty hours before it would be time for us to go. We just sat there, side by side, beds three feet apart, perched on top of our tight blankets like a pair of castaways on matching rafts drifting in the same current. Mike kept coming at us through the screen. You know how it gets. If you look at the same pictures long enough even the worst things start to feel too familiar, even boring. I turned the
TV
off but the leftover buzz hanging in the air still hurt my eyes.

“Enough?” I asked, though I knew there'd be no response.

Burner didn't say anything. His eyes were kind of glossed over and he just sat there staring straight into the same dark
place where the picture used to be. He'd been fading in and out for the last few hours.

If I have learned one thing through all this, it's that you have to let people do what they're going to do. Everybody gets ready in his own way. Some guys play their music loud, some say their prayers, and some can't keep anything down and they're always running to the toilet. Burner wasn't like that. He liked to keep it quiet in the morning, to just sit around and watch mindless
TV
so he could wander off in his mind and come back any time he liked. One minute, he could be sitting there, running his mouth off about nothing, and then for no reason he'd zone out and go way down into himself and stay there perfectly silent for long stretches, staring off to the side like he was trying to remember the name of someone he should really know.

It didn't bother me. Over the years, Burner and I had been in plenty of hotel rooms together, and by now we had our act down. I didn't mind the way he folded his clothes into perfect squares and put them into the hotel dresser drawers even when we were staying a single night, and I don't think he cared about the way I dumped my bag into a pile in the corner and pulled out the things I needed. You have to let people do what they do. When you get right down to it, even the craziest ritual and the wildest superstition are based on somebody's version of real solid logic.

After fifteen minutes of nothing, Burner said, “I'm not going to wear underwear.”

He was all bright and edgy now, and his eyes started jumping around the room. He licked his top lip every few seconds with just the tip of his tongue darting out.

“No, not going to wear underwear.”

He nodded his head this second time, as if, at last, some big decision had finally been made and he was satisfied with the result.

I didn't say anything. When he was this far down, Burner didn't need anybody to keep up the other end of the conversation.

“You feel faster without underwear, you know. But I only do it once or twice a year. Only for the big ones.”

That was it. A second later he was gone again, back below the surface, off to the side.

I turned away from him and punched a slightly bigger dent into my pillow so there'd be more room for my head. I knew there was no chance, but I still closed my eyes and tried to sleep. The alarm on the table said it was 12:17 and no matter what you do you can't trick those early afternoon numbers. Every red minute was going to leak out of that clock like water coming through the ceiling, building up nice and slow before releasing even one heavy drop. I waited, and I am sure I counted to sixty-five, but when I looked back 12:18 still hadn't come down. I flopped over onto my back and looked at the little stalagmites in the stucco. I thought about those little silver star-shaped things that are supposed to go off if there's a fire.