When We Argued All Night (29 page)

She missed a corner where the route turned and had to go back. They're not drafting guys your age, she said.

—At the moment.

—You could go to Canada.

—Well, the army might not want me because I was crazy.

—That's right, she said. They were finally out of that town. She would never know its name. Soon they'd be on the Taconic State and would be going faster again. The slowness frustrated her, but she didn't want to speed up.

—And we'll probably all be dead before too long, from some Russian bomb.

—Look, we survived the Cuban Missile Crisis, she said. We could go on for a while.

—But sooner or later—you have to admit that sooner or later . . .

—Nelson, she said, that doesn't have anything to do with it. It's not true that if you killed yourself, you wouldn't kill anybody else. You'd kill your father. I know it would kill your father.

—My father. Professor Father.

—Did you see that piece he wrote about being against the war? About trusting your opinions? I read that over and over. I love your father. She decided that Harold was the only man not related to her that she had ever loved. She clenched her hands on the wheel. Nelson, I forbid you to do this, because of your father.

—That pisses me off.

—Why?

—It's very establishment, Brenda. It's not what I thought you were like. It's like the rest of them. Why bother to be the kind of girl you are if you're going to say something like that?

—I don't know what you're talking about.

There was more silence. You have to trust me, that's all, he said.

—I trust you not to hurt me, she said. I trust you not to tell anybody what I told you about that guy I screwed. I don't trust you not to kill yourself.

—So you're not going to drive me to the bridge? I just need to walk out on the bridge. And I need you to be there when I come back.

She didn't answer for a long time. For a long while, nobody had needed her to do something she
could
do. Who was she to be such an advocate for life? I'll drive you there, she said. Okay.

She got lost three times and spent nearly all her remaining money on gas. They stopped for lunch because Nelson said he'd pay again, and she ordered a roast beef sandwich, the most substantial meal she'd had for a while. She and Nelson seemed to be children, unable to make judgments. She could turn around and drive back to the cabin—except that they'd starve there. She could drive straight to her parents' apartment or Harold's, finding an excuse to stop at a phone booth and look up his address. But she owed Nelson more than that. He was making a claim: that he wasn't a child, that he was making a judgment, that he should be listened to. She was older than he, but she was not doing much better at growing up. If she was wrong—if he jumped from the bridge into the Hudson—she could never justify her decision to anyone. But, at present, driving Nelson Abramovitz (he'd told her he had not changed his name when Harold did) to the George Washington Bridge seemed like the only possible expression of trust and friendship. His touch on her hair had been gentle—gentle by habit, gentle by conviction—and it made Richie less: farther away and less powerful.

By the time she reached the neighborhood of the bridge, it was chilly and windy, almost evening, with the sun just a white circle through the clouds. A line of poetry came into her head:
The sun was white, as though chidden of God.
There was no place to park anywhere near the bridge, though she drove everywhere through that neighborhood. She could see it above her, huge. She saw the hospital where Nelson had been imprisoned. He said nothing. Finally, he spoke. You could wait at a hydrant and keep the flashers on. If a cop comes, you could drive around the block. If I come back and don't see you, I'll wait.

She had thought she might go with him, whether he wanted her to or not. Now she was trapped. All right, she said. She pulled up to a fire hydrant. The bridge was several blocks north. She didn't know how he'd find the walkway. Will you be okay?

—I can find it from here. I just need to say good-bye, he said.

She turned, her hands still on the wheel. Okay. She didn't want to make it a farewell—partly because she couldn't, partly so he'd feel he had to come back. She would treat it as if he was getting out of the car to ask directions, or to buy a bottle of milk.

But he put his long arms and long hands around her and hugged her, pressing his long sweet hair—it had to be dirty, but it smelled good—into her face. She hugged him tightly. She got out of the car and hugged him again, and he walked away, his flannel shirt flapping and the wind billowing it in back. It was blue and green plaid, and she remembered what it was called: Black Watch plaid. It had been popular a few years before, and Carol had owned a skirt in that plaid.

Brenda got back into the car and turned on the radio. She couldn't concentrate on the songs and couldn't remember, when a song was over, what she'd heard. Soon the radio became intolerable because no matter what station she tried, the DJs kept saying what time it was, and she didn't want to know. It was getting dark. She didn't know where the walkway to the bridge was or how long it would take to walk there. It was not far. From where she sat, she could hear the rumble of cars on the bridge. The girl who looked like Joan Baez had found the will to climb over whatever barrier there was and let herself go. She didn't know what it would feel like, whether one would be unconscious before the killing slap of the water, whether death would be from trauma or drowning. She imagined Nelson jumping, his flannel shirt billowing like an ineffectual sail. She thought she should leave the car and walk until she found a pay phone and call Harold, who would take a taxi to this terrible place and save his son. What if she couldn't find a pay phone? What if Harold wasn't home? She reached behind her to find something to read, something to do, but all she had within reach was dirty laundry.

She wished she could call her parents, and for the first time she felt sorry for them, waiting to hear from her, becoming scared. Until now she had mostly been angry that they had talked to her landlord, that they had not respected her privacy and hung up. But here she was, respecting privacy, and what did it get her? Nelson might be dead by now, and she wondered if she'd hear anything—a splash, any sound, any commotion—if someone jumped from the bridge. Probably people who wanted to jump waited until there was a break in traffic and slipped down without being seen. Their bodies washed up days later—that's how people found out what had happened. If Nelson was dead, nobody would ever know that she had helped him die unless she told on herself, and she wondered whether she'd do that. It would be a hard secret to keep for a lifetime.

But it was his business, as he'd pointed out. She had loved that valley in California when she arrived there amid the peach and apricot harvest, and yet her life there had ended up valueless, maybe harmful to others. Why should she try to keep Nelson—or anyone—alive? She had spoiled her own life yet again. If she were braver, she'd jump with him.

When three hours had passed and it was completely dark—and maybe Nelson had been waiting for dark to jump, so it was less likely he'd be seen—she could bear it no longer. What she had been thinking made no sense, no sense at all. She got out of the car, considered leaving it unlocked for him but then locked it—it contained everything she owned—and set out for the bridge.

The walkway was hard to find from the place where she'd parked. She was frantic now, hurrying, confused. Maybe Nelson had not been able to find it either. Maybe he'd given up and had gone in search of a cup of coffee. Or a glass of milk. No. It was not that hard to find, and eventually she did find it. She was freezing. She walked out on the walkway. She'd been unprepared for the size of it, for how long it took just to be away from the land, over the water. But he would have gone out there, where Susan had gone. The wind was so strong she was afraid—afraid she might be blown in—and she clutched the railing. Cars swept past her. She saw nobody. Maybe she'd missed him in the streets around the bridge. Maybe he hadn't jumped but was trying to find the car again. She kept walking. It was dark. She saw nobody. He was gone. He had jumped.

Then she saw something, a bulge in the shadow of a cluster of the uprights that held the thick cables supporting the bridge. She willed herself not to get excited. It could be anything—or anybody. She kept walking, and then she saw that it was someone; it was someone with long hair. She was afraid Nelson would jump as she watched, climb over the railing and jump. If she cried out, that might give him the nerve he'd been seeking, the nerve to do it. She kept walking, keeping her head down so she wouldn't see. Then she made herself lift her head because she had to see. He saw her when she was yards away and her legs trembled as she hurried, not knowing what he'd do. He did nothing, just stood where he was. She came up to him. She was larger and heavier than Nelson Abramovitz, and she knew that now, at least for the moment, he was safe. She put her arms around him and held him tightly, and after a long time Nelson raised his arms and put them around her too. She had done something right. She did know how. She would lead her life.

Part Two

The Next Thirty-five Years: Not So Many Arguments

Chapter 7

A Fool and His Principles

1973–2002

1

A
man, Ted, had moved on. It was November 1973, and Carol's children were four and two. Brenda didn't live near them now, and sometimes her hands and arms ached with the wish to hold them. First, she had glumly followed Carol around, gingerly helping with Gabriel. She had a one-room apartment and a job waiting tables, sure she'd screw up anything in which she had to do with people for more than an hour at a time. She babysat Gabe and then his sister, Ruthie. A teacher left their day-care center without warning, and Brenda was hired part-time, then full-time. By then she'd met Ted.

She moved to Concord, New Hampshire, to live with him and work in the business where he had just gotten a job, and the business had come to interest her more than it interested Ted, more than either of them interested each other. So it was not terrible that he was gone. And not terrible—still hard to believe, though—that she was six months pregnant. A child she hadn't known about until weeks after he left now kicked steadily in Brenda's belly.

Her laundry luxuriated in gray suds, diving and rising on the other side of a round glass door framed in steel, and she had nothing to do but look at it. She'd forgotten to bring a book, and there were no magazines. She owned three pairs of men's overalls, and two were in the washing machine. The buckles clicked on the window. Her shoulders hurt after a day at work, wearing her third pair of overalls. Next time she did laundry, she'd wear one of the other pairs and wash this one, the time after that the third pair, and she saw that she could count out her life in the movement of overalls—or other clothing—into and out of washing machines. She'd worn skirts to teach in California, jeans or overalls at the day-care center, where she could get dirty at work: there was mud outside, paint in the art room, sticky children at meals and snacks. Maybe her present overalls wouldn't fit during her last weeks of pregnancy and she'd need a larger size. The baby would make a division in her life, a before and after. Still, whatever happened, as long as you had the wherewithal to acquire and wash clothing, you could describe a life as so many pairs of clean underpants, so many pairs of socks, washed and worn again, washed again.

The washing machine shuddered to a stop, and she moved her clothes to a dryer. It was hard to be patient, to keep putting in coins until everything dried thoroughly, but if she brought her laundry home damp, she'd live for days with clothing draped on furniture. She wished for a cigarette, but she'd quit smoking—for good, she hoped—when she found out she was pregnant. Next to the dryer was a newspaper she hadn't noticed, the
Concord Monitor
. Because of Watergate, there was always something new, but this paper was a few days old.
I'm not a crook,
Nixon had said. She knew about that.

She scanned the comics, the horoscope, the classified ads. The dryer stopped and she removed bras, a T-shirt, and three socks, then inserted more coins.

Ted didn't know and would not be interested. She would manage. She leaned on the table where people folded laundry, turning pages. A small item announced a talk to be given in a local church: “When Your Child Tells You He's Gay.” Some of us are girls, Brenda said out loud. Wait a minute.

She put the paper down, walked to the front of the empty laundry, looked out at the wind-scoured street and a street lamp. She had heard herself speak, and she knew what she meant: the title of the talk should say
He or She Is Gay
, not just
He
. But she had said
us
. If someone had asked her whether she was gay or straight, right until this moment, Brenda would have said she was straight, not consciously lying. She looked at the street lamp. A scrap of paper blew sideways along the sidewalk, then, for some reason, stopped. Brenda ran her hands slowly up her sides, past her hips, up her overall bib and her breasts, over her cheeks. She would have been lying. She had always loved women. She walked back to the dryers, asking herself when she had known this. She was crying. Before Ted. She'd been lying to herself for a while. Well, I wanted a baby, she said.

—I'm a lesbian, she said tentatively to the rattling, shaking dryers, which looked as if they might fly open in astonishment, but they always looked that way. She wondered if the people at work would be astonished: a middle-aged owner, his son, and a woman older than Brenda who'd worked there for years. Probably not. They made wooden playground equipment, and Brenda had learned to use power tools on the lovely maple and oak, to shape the posts that held swing sets and climbing structures, to finish them so they were smooth and golden. Here she got dirty but in a different way. She had ideas about the equipment they built. She was thinking about an arrangement of uprights they had not tried, with crisscrossing pieces to give children another way to climb.

She looked around. Everything was different—
everything
was different—having said that she loved women, though here doing laundry there was no woman to love. All these years, into her thirties, she had poked her thoughts into the alignment they should have, constructing shapes more complicated than the clever climbing structures they made at Mountainside Playgrounds—she and Gene, his son (also Gene), Lydia—along with Ted, for a few weeks. Her ideas about herself had climbed up, down again, across, negotiated a little twist and then leaped over a barrier, all to avoid the knowledge she had just come to.

Her secular parents—her unconventional father—had not brought her up to think homosexuality was sinful or sick, but her parents and friends, and she herself, had believed, until recently, that it was not a good idea: inconvenient, frightening because illegal, not quite the real thing. She'd gradually learned that it was a good idea, as large and as real a thing as loving men. She'd understood this since gay liberation—the public declaration that it was all right to be gay, after the Stonewall uprising—made everyone who thought like Brenda acknowledge abruptly, with relief, that homosexuals didn't lead lesser lives or need to be fixed. It was fine to be gay, she had reasoned, but she had slept with so many men. Yet often, all these years, there had been a woman, some woman she wanted, whom she explained away. Just now it was a neighbor, a woman who'd come over with a basket of apples when she had extra, who had stood in the doorway, talking, after Brenda took the basket. She might or might not try to seduce her neighbor—the woman seemed to have a boyfriend—but how much better even to know it was possible. Brenda was not religious, but what she felt at this moment was gratitude. Her laundry was dry and electrified, and she gathered it in her arms—overalls with flopping straps and hot buckles, flannel nightgown, pullovers, plaid flannel shirts, cotton underpants—transferred it to the table, smoothed and folded it, and stacked it in her laundry basket. Then she went out to her car to see if she felt the same way after the drive home or in the morning.

2

W
ind blew March rain sideways and made Harold's umbrella a useless encumbrance. He needed one hand to hold the campaign literature, which he should have put into a plastic bag, and the other to press doorbells and insert brochures into mail slots and mailboxes. He also had a chart on a clipboard, on which he was supposed to note down a number for each person he talked to:
1
meant definitely voting for Senator Kennedy in the Democratic presidential primary that was now three days off,
2
meant leaning toward Kennedy,
3
was undecided,
4
was leaning toward President Carter, and
5
was definitely for Carter. It was a neighborhood of brownstones, shabby blocks in Chelsea, and his legs hurt from walking up and down stone steps. Why had he agreed to do this? A friend had asked. He was seventy and still a fool. Well, he had agreed to do it, as he had agreed to give any help asked of him in these last eight months, because Nelson was dead and had not asked for help before he took the pills.

A quiet death, Harold had said to himself more than once, and more than once he'd admitted that after all these years, despite his wild grief, there was some relief in knowing he no longer had Nelson's death to expect and fear. Nelson had left notes for Harold, for Myra, and for Paul. He had never learned to live, but after many tries he'd learned to die compassionately. And what was the benefit in that, Harold had asked Naomi, over and over, these months. Were they better off because Nelson had been kind in his death? He had left his notes, along with a list of telephone numbers of family members, in a sealed envelope in his apartment, and on the outside he had written the name of a friend, a coworker at the bookstore where he had a job. He had given this friend a key to his apartment and asked him to come at a certain day and time.

—Didn't you
know
? Naomi had asked the friend, who had phoned when he found Nelson dead and then delivered the notes. She barely kept back her fury. Didn't you know you had to go for help? Couldn't you have done that much for him? They were at the door of Harold's apartment. They had not asked the man in—he was a sad, shy man, a little older than Nelson, pained but resolute.

—He picked me because he knew I wouldn't, the man said. If he thought I'd have done that, he'd have asked someone else. Isn't this better than having the police break in and find his body, after none of you heard from him for weeks?

—It would be better if he was in a hospital, Naomi said.

—He knew the inside of too many hospitals, the man said, and Harold knew that was true. Even Naomi quieted.

He and Naomi had thanked the friend, eight months ago, and had gone inside. He had read the note, which was loving. Naomi sat opposite, her thin arms stretched on a chair that made her look even smaller than she was. She was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, and her hair was gone. She had put on her wig to receive Nelson's friend, but it was uncomfortable, and now she took it off. Harold put down the note and studied Naomi's cherished bald head in the diminishing evening light. Its paleness seemed to draw what light was in the room.

—We should marry, she said at last. I've pretended too long that I'm not your wife.

There was and would be no comfort, but alongside the weight that made it hard to breathe, alongside this new, permanent pain, came something light and cool, lovely.

—You don't want to rush into something like that, he had said, smiling.

S
ome people didn't know there was a primary; some didn't know that as Democrats—nearly everyone in this neighborhood was a Democrat—they could vote; and a few didn't know who was running against Jimmy Carter. When he said it was Senator Kennedy—Teddy Kennedy—they had seen that on the news, they now recalled, but one woman said, holding up her hand to block the offered brochure, I wouldn't vote for that scum. What he did to that girl!

—He isn't perfect, Harold conceded. None of us is perfect. He's strong on gun control. He'll deal with the economy. Get the hostages out of Iran—

Harold tried to keep the brochures from flying away as he walked down her steps and farther along the block. The next man was voting for Kennedy because Carter was bad for the Jews. Harold didn't think Carter was bad for the Jews, even though the United States had voted against Israel on the issue of Israeli settlement in occupied Arab lands, but he agreed because he was glad to mark down a
1
. Nobody answered at the next three houses, and then a woman said she was voting for Carter because everyone knew Reagan would get the Republican nomination, and Carter was more likely to defeat Reagan. She quoted a poll Harold didn't know about. Carter would beat Reagan 63 percent to 32 percent. Kennedy would beat him too, Harold noted.

—But not as definitively, she said. The main thing is, Reagan has to lose.

—You don't think Ronald Reagan is a serious threat, do you? Harold said. She was a rumpled, brainy-looking woman, maybe in her fifties.

—Of course he is, she said. The only thing that matters is to defeat Reagan. He's an idiot. Did you hear about that joke?

Harold had heard about the joke. On the campaign bus, Reagan had told an ethnic joke:
How do you tell the Polish one at a cockfight? He's the one with the duck. How do you tell the Italian? He bets on the duck. How do you know the Mafia is there? The duck wins.
Edwin Meese, his political adviser, had said, There goes Connecticut.

—People will see through Reagan, Harold said.

—No, they won't. Kennedy won't ever be president because of Chappaquiddick. Who wants to win now so we can lose in November?

—But if you could just choose your favorite, Harold said, it would be Kennedy?

—Yeah, she said. It would be Kennedy. She took a brochure and closed the door. He put her down as a
3
. Next came a man who said, I hate Kennedy, but I'm voting for him because I hate Carter more. Harold looked at his watch. He had promised to meet Naomi at her old apartment. She had moved out, but there were little things to do. Real estate was getting so expensive they had despaired of finding an apartment where they could live together comfortably, but at last they had found a co-op apartment they could afford. Harold had now lived there for a month and Naomi for a week. He could hardly believe that something in his life, at this late date, could be new and yet good—a gain, not a loss. They were to be married the next day: Sunday, March 23, 1980—two days, as it would turn out, before Kennedy won the New York primary—and at first Naomi had said he had no business volunteering for the primary the day before his wedding. Then she relented because the wedding would be so simple. Really, there was nothing to do.

He quit early, tired, and took a cab to her old place. She was cleaning the kitchen. The furniture was gone, and he didn't know how to help but couldn't sit down. He stood and watched her. Her hair had grown back, dark gray, spiky, charming. I should help, he said.