We Are Gathered Page 6

  The bridesmaids and groomsmen are taking pictures. From somewhere comes the hesitant sound of an unprofessional flutist. The girls are self-conscious, their narrow arms tucked into the arms of the groomsmen. The sight of a girl’s arm, thin with the slight tracing of veins and a few glossy golden hairs, has always aroused me. There is no reason to lie just because I am near death. I am attracted only to young women; this is another survival skill. In the area of sexuality, I don’t mind admitting I am primitive. Young women are capable of bearing children; that’s why men want them. Simple as it may be, the attraction is powerful and pointless to fight and joyful to indulge in. Some of Elizabeth’s friends are very pretty. A red-haired girl in a sheer pink dress passes by me. Her waist is winnowed, and her long legs are visible as enticing shadows through the fabric. When she turns to face the crowd, she reveals a lovely face, a bewitching smile. Some of Elizabeth’s friends used to flirt with me. Not seriously; I know none of them actually considered going to bed with me, but they would place their hands on my shoulders and lean in to hear me whisper a slightly scandalous story about one of their teachers or employers. They would laugh, some uncomfortably, some wickedly, at the implications of the story and playfully reprimand me. “Mr. Gottlieb!” they would exclaim.

  “Call me Albert,” I would instruct.

  “Mr. Gottlieb,” they would repeat.

  I never pushed them or chased them, though I liked to have them near.

  It was a different story with Eddie’s and Josh’s girlfriends. I was a young man when I had my family, and I was far from old when the boys started dating. I did not need them to meet women. Women are attracted to power and success. Opportunities appeared before me almost everywhere I went, lonely women in airport lounges and hotel bars, the wives of less successful men, secretaries. I had more than one opportunity to go to bed with girls younger and prettier than the ones my sons brought home from school, so their girlfriends did not tempt me until Eddie arrived with Caroline. To this day, I don’t know what the girl saw in my son. She was beautiful. That adjective is overused by most people. I bestow it rarely. There are probably only five or six women I have encountered in person who earn that praise. My wife was one of them. My first affair was another. The wife of the founding partner of the law firm where my son works—he was not a man you would want as an enemy. A Russian émigré I met at a reception twenty years ago. Those are all who come to mind. And Caroline. Eddie talked about her for weeks before he brought her home. He met her at the yacht club where he was working as a lifeguard after abandoning college for the second time. Despite his clumsiness on land, Eddie turned out to be agile in the water, and he won a few swim meets in high school before learning that he was not qualified to compete at college level. This came as a crushing blow to him because some foolish coach in high school had told him that with practice he might be good enough to go to the Olympics. Eddie believed anything anyone ever said when it was praise. That is why he found himself married three times. All his swimming could earn him was a job as a lifeguard and instructor at the East Point Yacht Club. Caroline was a waitress there; she came from a poor family and was migrating from village to town, town to city, city to metropolis. Last I heard, she was in New York, so I guess she got as far as she could go. Poverty could not have been an obstacle for a girl like her, a head turner with ice-blue eyes and the kind of body that inspires physical pain in men. I am sure more than one wealthy member of the yacht club had made a play for her, but she liked Eddie. When his job ended in September, he brought her home with him to meet the family. I suppose he intended to marry her, though he never outright said it.

  As soon as she stepped out of Eddie’s beat-up old green Dodge, one long leg at a time unfurling, I knew there was going to be something between us. I was standing in the doorway, having been instructed by my wife to greet them enthusiastically, and the moment I saw Caroline, I realized why they use lightning bolts and fireworks to depict sexual attraction. There was some electric force between us; she recognized it too, and she stared at me for a minute, not surprised, before turning to allow Eddie to take her hand.

  I did nothing to encourage her, though I will admit I spent more than one dinner in a trancelike state imagining her without any clothes on. Eddie was a slave at her feet. He had gone off to the yacht club with James Dean hair, long and swept over his eyes, and he returned with a crew cut. When I commented on his hair, Eddie grinned and shrugged and confessed, “Caroline likes it short.” He had also taken to dressing neatly and wearing cologne and polished shoes. Ida was pleased with his transformation, though I recognized it as superficial and transitory. After dinner, Ida would instruct Eddie to take Caroline for a walk, or she would suggest that they go watch TV while the “old folks” turned in. I bristled when she referred to us that way. I know she meant it lightly, but neither of us was old. Ida could have passed for Caroline’s older sister, and I still had all my hair, a flat stomach, and the strong arms of a tennis player.

  Nothing would have happened if Eddie had only been a little more responsible, but then I have wished for Eddie to be a little more responsible all his life.

  He and Caroline got drunk one night. I did not know why they were drinking, but I could hear them downstairs in the punctuated silences from the television set, giggling and slurping at each other. It was late, and I had a long day of work ahead of me the next morning. Eddie had shown no signs of looking for a new job, and he had flatly refused to go back to college. He was sleeping in and staying out late, and I was already contemplating the talk I was going to have to have with him. Ida had read my mind earlier that evening, and just before she went to bed, she said quietly, “Let him rest awhile. He’s in love.”

  Ida was sleeping on the other side of the bed, curled up with her back to me. Her nightgown had slipped down her arm, and I stared at her shoulder, as smooth as an egg in the moonlight. I reached out to touch her, but I stopped myself. I did not want her to wake up. I did not want to see her open eyes and hear her voice. I wanted to make love, but not to her. I heard the back door open, and suddenly there was a flood of light in the backyard. The trees stepped forward out of the darkness. I crossed over to the window to see what was happening, standing there in only my pajama bottoms. The light was strong, and it turned the backyard into a murky green sea. I heard Eddie’s voice, but I could not see him. Then Caroline stepped over to the swimming pool. She was wearing white shorts that cupped her ass like a closed flower. She dipped her foot into the water, then pulled her shirt over her head and dropped her shorts, wriggled out of her panties. At first, she stood with her back to me. She let her hair down, and her arms, in the floodlights, seemed to glow like X-rays. I was staring at her ass, praying for her to turn around. I knew I should stop them; they were probably drunk, and they should not be swimming, and they were making far too much noise for 2 a.m. in our neighborhood, but I was waiting for Caroline to turn around. I heard Eddie shout, “Here I come!” And then Caroline turned around, and I saw her breasts, ripe and full, and the small triangle of hair where her legs met, and then I was longing for something more, for her to part her legs as if a tremendous amount of heat were steaming between them. Eddie came running out and dove into the pool. He surfaced a moment later and grabbed Caroline’s ankle and tried to pull her into the water. She resisted, and he got out of the water, dripping wet. I hadn’t seen my son naked since he was a child, and I was a little amazed to see him covered in hair. He scooped her up into his arms and marched toward the pool, but he did not see one of the deck chairs in his way. He tripped, and Caroline flew from his arms, and a moment later, there was screaming, and Ida and I were both running downstairs.

  It’s funny how most of the time you can trip and get up, and then there are those times when you actually break something. Ida and I found our son and his girlfriend completely naked. I pretended to be as surprised as Ida was. Ida went to Eddie, and I went to Caroline. The first thing I did was cover her with a towel. She was holding her arm and
sobbing. Even sobbing, she was enchanting; the tears made her eyes shine and her lips tremble. She reached for me with her good arm and buried her face in my chest. I put my arms around her; the skin of her back was like velvet, and I let her cry, soothing her. Eddie calmed down quickly, and he came over to Caroline, apologizing. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he was naked. I could smell the vodka on his breath. He tried to replace me, and I swear I tried to let him in, but Caroline clung to me. I could see her arm was swelling, and I was pretty sure it was broken. Eventually, I whispered, “We should take you to the hospital, sweetheart.” She nodded into my shoulder. Ida brought her a bathrobe, and we wrapped her in it. I was careful not to touch her, though I was aching to. Eddie rode with me to the hospital, the two of them in the backseat and me driving. Eddie tried to comfort Caroline, but she stared out the window, whimpering occasionally.

  She had fractured her wrist, and it had to be set in a clumsy white plaster-of-paris cast that her fingers protruded from like moles. Eddie apologized to her again and again, but she set her face as firmly as the cast and would not listen. Finally, she sent him out of the room and told him that she wanted to speak to me. When she said this, she interrupted one of his apologies. At first, he did not appear to understand what she had asked for. He looked from her to me and back again, his mouth half-open with that stupid expression he has had since infancy. She repeated her request, and he stammered, “Okay,” and backed out the door, not taking his eyes off her, as if he were never going to see her again.

  Caroline leveled her gaze at me. She had a scratch over her left eyebrow, but otherwise her face was flawless and composed although I sensed she was calculating her next move. “This thing has to stay on six weeks,” she told me, though she knew I was aware of that. I had been in the room when the doctor put the cast on. “I won’t be able to work during that time.” She shifted her eyes to the corner of the room and raised one eyebrow and almost smiled. “What do you think I should do about that?” she asked, adding, “About the fact that I broke my wrist in your backyard, Mr. Gottlieb?”

  “I’ll give you some money,” I said immediately.

  “That’s very kind of you,” she answered. Then she thought a minute, and she asked, “How much?”

  Her robe was loose, and I could see the shadows of her breasts and the bones of her clavicle. “Exactly as much as you need,” I said.

  Annette comes flurrying up. “Ida, we need you for pictures.” I cannot turn my head, so I don’t see Elizabeth coming until she swoops into view and one of the flowers from her hair drops in my lap. “Zayde,” she says, beaming. “I am getting married.” I’m relieved I cannot speak because I do not know what to say. To a goy, I think. It’s not right. The girl is so pretty, blank skin, sparkling eyes, a face as small as a memory. If I could speak, I would have to lie and promise her she was going to be very happy. When Elizabeth was a child, I gave her silver dollars whenever she visited, and she told me once that I was the richest man in the world. I told her that I was not, and she thought a moment, and asked, “Are kings richer?”

  “Yes, they are,” I said.

  “When are you going to get to be a king?” she asked me.

  “I’m never going to be a king,” I said. “To be a king, you have to be born a prince.”

  “I have to have a picture with Zayde,” Elizabeth says. For some reason, her mother acts like this is an outlandish request. She stands up, looks around, flails her arms.

  “We can’t move him. We’ll have to bring the photographer here.”

  The photographer, a perfectly able-bodied if absurdly skinny man with a ridiculous goatee, comes trotting over, laden down with three cameras as if he’s documenting World War Three. Elizabeth squats down next to the wheelchair and gazes up at me. She is beaming; she has yellow flowers in her dark hair, and the veil swirls around her. She is smiling so hard she looks like she might explode. She looks like a little girl, too young to be getting married, but she is older by eleven years than Ida was when I married her.

  I am amazed that the institution of marriage has persisted so long. Through the sexual revolution, women’s lib, gay pride, AIDS, still people want to stand up and swear that they are going to love only one man or one woman for the rest of their lives. They want to do this in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is not in most people to remain monogamous. Indeed, it may not even be natural, and it may not favor the preservation of the species. I understand why women want to get married. Once they have children, I am convinced, their ability to love men is diminished; the full force of their love is directed toward their offspring, and husbands cannot compete. This was certainly true for Ida and me. Once Josh and Eddie were born, she proved herself a fierce protector, a lioness, who saw me not as an ally but as a potential threat. She interrupted many spankings with her sudden cries, throwing her body over the child and glaring at me, proclaiming bravely, “You’ll have to hit me first.” These were the only occasions when I saw her courage: when it was directed against me. When she had a car accident or when the house was robbed or one of the boys hurt himself, I was called home from the office and always found her inert on the sofa with her curled hands pressed to her lips. She would turn her eyes, as big as billiard balls, up to me and wait to be told that everything was all right.

  On our wedding day, we weren’t thinking about children. At least I wasn’t. I had waited for her. I did not care about the ceremony. Though Ida comes from a large family, I had only my brother. I invited him only because she insisted. It was not lavish, nothing like this event with flowers and caterers. We went to the synagogue, we got married, we had a lunch afterward. I was twenty-one years old; she was seventeen. We were children. I know that now, but that’s how old people were when they got married. Elizabeth is twenty-eight. She would have been considered an old maid. No one told us that marriage would be hard. There were no therapists or counselors. You got married, maybe for love, for lust, for comfort, because it was time and you didn’t want to die alone. You had children. You didn’t think about what you wanted. Ida was gorgeous, yes, and when she walked down the aisle all in white and lifted the long white veil to show her face, her red lips, her sweet eyes, everyone gasped. She took my breath away too. Every man wanted Ida, but I was the one who got her. When I carried her across the threshold that night, I could barely feel her in my arms. If it wasn’t for her perfume and her twinkly laugh, I would have thought I held nothing more than a dress, just yards of silk and ribbon.

  Ida would have loved to put on a show for a wedding if she’d had a daughter, but Josh got married in Birmingham. It was Annette’s mother who was in charge, and all we did was pay the rabbi and send them on a honeymoon. Eddie’s had three weddings, and we haven’t been at a single one. This last one, to Sharon, was at a city hall in California where they met. Eddie manages a seafood restaurant. Sharon is a computer programmer. She makes twice as much money as Eddie, and I overheard Eddie tell Ida that after the next baby is born he may give up his job at the restaurant to stay home with the kids. It is a good thing I cannot talk, or I would have to voice my opinion of that arrangement. I suppose I should be grateful that Eddie has finally found someone who can take care of him. Before Sharon, he bounced around from job to job and called me when his funds were depleted, which was about every other month. Sometimes I refused to send him money, but then he would wait until I had left for work, and he would call his mother. Ida wrote him huge checks that she kept concealed from me until they had cleared. Often, this led me to bounce checks of my own, a terrible embarrassment as some of them were made out to business colleagues. I could never make Ida understand that it was hard to trust a businessman who was incapable of balancing his checkbook.

  Eddie’s second marriage was over before I heard about it, a wealthy girl of limited intelligence whose father stepped in to have the marriage legally declared null and void. The first wife had been about a year after Caroline, a shy, dowdy girl he met at the yacht club the following summer.
Alice or Alison was her name, something with an A. He married her at the end of the summer, and he stayed at the shore, working in her father’s business for another month or two. He called me in October and told me that he could not work for his father-in-law any longer, that he had quit his job, and that he wanted to come home and help me run my business. I told him he could come home for a while but the business was stagnant. I was cutting back staff, and I was not sure I would have a position for him. “I’m not running a charity,” I said. I told him he should think about going back to college.

  When they walked in the door, the girl looked about six months pregnant. Eddie told me he wanted to surprise us. I, of course, understood immediately why he could no longer work for his father-in-law. The man, no doubt, found it galling to employ the boy who had taken advantage of his daughter. Eddie was a good-looking boy, he had that, and let no one tell you that women are any less superficial than men. Dull, humorless, unambitious, but almost movie-star attractive, my son never went without women. I could see it as clearly as if I had been there: the good-looking, broad-shouldered, slap-smiled boy reporting to work, flirting with the secretaries while the executives whispered among themselves about the boss’s daughter. That would be too much for any self-respecting man to bear. The girl’s father had sent them away, but he’d given them money. The first few weeks Eddie was home, he and the girl went out every night. They bought presents for Ida and boxes full of baby clothes, pink and blue, but then the girl decided she needed to rest. She became embedded in the couch in front of the television set, and then Eddie went out alone, stayed out all night sometimes. When he was home, they closed the door to the television room and yelled at each other. I told Ida that they would have to leave, but she said, “It’s hard when you’re just starting out. We fought too.”