The Sunset Gang (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 steak 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
had 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 Goldfarb 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 while cutting into her steak.

Genendel watched, signaling with her eyes. You had 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. By the time they had
finished dinner and parted with politeness and empty promises of "getting
together" again, he was certain that 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 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 had 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 had adjourned one evening.
They had 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 brought them to
one of Sunset Village's manmade ponds which reflected a half-moon in the clear
sky.

"I think you're exaggerating," Genendel responded
after a long pause. She dared not comment 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. They had simply lived
together, occasionally copulated, passing 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 questioned, 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 the 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 had caught the collective pronoun. It
assured him, affirming that, whatever it was, they were in it together.

When he said good-by at her car, he felt the courage to
touch her, squeezed her hand briefly but she quickly withdrew it.

I love her, he decided as he walked home, feeling a new
sense of strength, the 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. That night he hardly slept, knowing it was 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 fast-food place on Lake View Drive to which
he could walk. He knew she had the car since 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, feeling
the power of his newly found courage. He had never thought himself capable of
exercising it. People at the next booth looked his way. He noted their reddish
goyishe faces and knew that their curiosity was aroused by the strange
language.

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

"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 that he was responding to another question. She
wondered about her own caring, thinking only of her husband, of the hurt, the
wound that knowledge of them would inflict on him.

"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, laughed about. They did not 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 restaurant move more
swiftly than they were accustomed to. Another 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 African 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.

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

Velvil had 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
beyond her anxiety the humor of the situation. He decided to be playful and
held up four fingers.

"Canahurra," 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 grasped 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." 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.

The next morning Genendel did not join the morning
activities of the Cycling Club. Instead of going with the group, he 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.