Voiceover
Voiceover
This happened in 1952. My father had just turned nineteen. He was about to be drafted into the Korean War. The girl’s name—the woman, he should say—was Millie Van Bourne. They had met several months beforehand, at the studio of their singing coach, Max Henson. They instantly fell in love. How else to explain this spotlight recognition? “She was very beautiful,” my father said, “like your friend, but a platinum blond.” Sharp-featured. Bright-eyed. From Wilmington, she’d come to New York to make a go of it as an actress. She hadn’t had much success doing anything serious, nothing that could be called acting per se, though she was earning steady money as a color-TV model. In his mind there she stands, under the torpedo lights arrayed above the soundstage, her arms akimbo, her green sweater, brown skirt, blue eyes, and crimson lips matching up bar to bar with the spectrum’s test wheel posted behind her. To save on rent, she was living on the Upper West Side with her two sisters. They were remarkably beautiful as well and shared a strong family resemblance, a gift evident in their faces’ shape, a fullness to their lips, even a similarity in the appearance of their teeth that showed when they smiled and was subtly and gloriously altered in each: Glenda, the eldest, was the most imperious. She’d inherited their father’s coloring and his down-the-nose glare. Maxine, the middle sister, was the most gorgeous, perhaps because she was the kindest. The tallest too, she slouched slightly. Stories dazzled her; she’d easily be brought to tears or laughter by them; she would touch her lips with her fingers while she listened. As for Millie, both women watched over her fiercely because she was the most impulsive, always breaking off whenever she saw a bright thing shining. They were always turning around to discover her gone. She elicited in men one of the most consuming desires there was, which was to rescue her. Out for an evening, at a party, standing together in the corner of a room, each with a drink in hand, they waited patiently for my father to join them, and when he did, they welcomed him like family. They spoke of holiday gatherings they’d invite him to, the countless cousins they wanted him to meet, Mom’s huge spread. This was what he remembered most clearly, what made being in their presence such a powerful thing, this unconditional acceptance—to be Millie’s and theirs—for they were so exotically American, so put together and stylish and educated, while he was a Jew from Middle Village, Queens, the son of a poor furrier living in the two-story home his grandfather had built, where curses were uttered in Hungarian, Russian, and Yiddish, while his own hopes, which he dreamed of in English, were far too presumptuous to share with anyone, even in his native tongue.
But he was drafted that summer, placed in the navy, and did basic at Bainbridge, though none of his training seemed to correspond with anything a seaman might need to function on a ship. There were countless hours of marching in pitiless heat, barely enough riflery to repulse an enemy’s advance, and so much attention to the misbegotten task of doing laundry you might think crotch rot was a greater threat to the free world than communism. In the evenings he wrote Millie a letter about his day, taking great pains to find something new to tell her, some moronic exercise to describe or something some fool had said. Shel backfilled the monotony by asking about her sisters, her work, the number of times she’d thought of him, and he overanalyzed her letters, finding ominous hints in her asides and omissions, spying suitors at parties she described in missives he noticed were becoming shorter and more infrequent with each passing week. In the afternoons he posted his daily letter and, if he received one from her, waited to read it until he was lying in his bunk. Though occasionally there were nights when he couldn’t help it: he walked across the several-hundred-yard-wide marching field to the mess hall—this a long, low-slung building lit by sodium lights—to the base’s pay phone. During those first weeks, when he was lucky enough to catch her at home, she was exuberant with longing—she missed him so, she said—but after a month, their conversations became truncated, forced; she was easily distracted, and more often than not his calls were answered by one of her sisters (Millie was out, Maxine said apologetically; he’d just missed her, Glenda explained, try back tomorrow?). For a desperate stretch of days, he reached no one at all. By now Millie’s letters had stopped without explanation. He thought he might Section 8 and discharge, he was so frantic. On the final night they spoke, he’d walked the field in a furious thunderstorm, no delay between the flash and rumble, the rain silvered in waving sheets, the puddles as big as ponds and, when the lightning unfurled its white wings, bright as mercury. Millie was determined, distant. She’d already moved on. He had to understand why she was breaking things off between them. He’d be gone for eighteen months, which to her seemed as long as for good, and it was better, wasn’t it, Shel, if they ended this now?
Walking back across the field, he called the lightning upon himself, but it did not obey. He hung his soaked clothes in the shower and wept with them. In bed, once he’d calmed down, he considered the rightness of what Millie had done, for their lives were mistimed, a fate he promised himself to redress if he were ever to see her again, and the next morning he left for Norfolk, where he shipped off for the Mediterranean on the USS Des Moines.
Shel at sea. No romance to be found in the North Atlantic crossing, only seasickness, at least during the voyage’s first week. Men, singly or in pairs, dotted the heavy cruiser’s gunwale port and starboard to bend double at the giant cleats and grab rails to offer long eels of puke to the ocean, which webbed to filament downwind and then broke apart in patterns as complex as snowflakes, disappearing without so much as a splash. He was assigned to the deck force, the ship’s cleaning crew, charged to polish brass—the ever-tarnished brightworks—to swab the deck, and to scrub the latrines fiendishly decorated by the sailors who failed to barf above. The food was beyond awful, the cuts of meat tough as soaked rope, corned beef senior officers dubbed “baboon ass,” so salty he woke at night cottonmouthed as if he’d been on a bender. He was friendless, and the friendless avoided one another so as to not be singled out. Two men committed suicide before they made the Azores. A fat sailor named Stranch leaped from the bow at midwatch, his execution demonstrating foresight: if the fall didn’t kill him then the prow would slice him in half. There was a brief nighttime search. Spotlights feebly inspected the black-and-white chop. “He’s shark shit,” said an officer, “let’s get a move on.” The second snuck down to his berth at dinner and put a rifle in his mouth, pulling the trigger with his toe, the bullet pasting a divot of skull against the wall so firmly it was as if it had been nailed there. “Gooned that up good, didn’t he?” said a sailor. Thankfully Shel wasn’t on duty for that cleanup job.
His general misery crowded out thoughts of Millie; the hatred he soon encountered made him fear for his life. In the chaos of that first week, in the smoke pit belowdecks, amid men seeking vassals, allegiances, a sun to orbit; stunned by their circumstances and homesickness and fear of battle, Shel had clocked more than a few men who looked at him with hopeful aggression. It was another seaman named Logan who had it in for him. One night, after mess, he spotted his enemy leaning against the wall. They locked eyes like lovers. Already the man was seething. Bad luck: he had two sidekicks. Shel looked down, regarding the cigarette burning in his fist. Six black shoes formed a scalloped crescent around his.
“Fuck’s your name?” Logan said. A southern twang— fux —and the diphthong tacked to “name” sounding vaguely Hebraic: nay -m.
“Excuse me?”
Growing up, Shel’s older brother, Marty, regularly beat him. Such instruction had taught him to make any fight as short as possible, so he took a drag on his cigarette and then smashed his forehead into the man’s nose. A sound like a split picket. As they fell together, Shel shoved the cigarette into Logan’s mouth and clapped his hand over the man’s lips to seal the squib inside, watching the man’s eyes widen as the cherry scorched the back of his throat. Shel had anticipated the ensuing pile-on separating them, each man cursing the other over the heads of their respective scrums, which bore them aloft like a bride and groom in the hora.
“I’ll kill you, you hear me?” Logan screamed. His mouth and chin were dark with blood. “I swear I’ll kill you, you kike son of a bitch!”
In bed later, Shel held his Ka-Bar knife beneath the sheets. Night noises in the berthing: if you picked out a single sound it might drive you mad. He waited for the attack, which never came. On the bed adjacent his, a sailor named Barney Freele could be relied upon to converse with you while he dreamed. Now he said, “The fish. Get it.”
“What kind of fish?” Shel whispered.
“Bass,” he said. “Get it in the net.”
The memory was overwhelming: a drive he and Millie had taken from New York to the tip of Long Island, all the way to Montauk. It was early May. Impossible to believe this was only months ago. She’d called him on a Saturday morning. “I’m sick of the city,” she’d said. “I want to see the sea.” It was like an order, a test. “I’ll pick you up,” he answered. He announced to his father that he was borrowing the car. Miraculously, his father said yes. The morning was so spectacularly bright the Plymouth’s interior seemed dark as a closet, even felt several degrees cooler, like a room when you come inside from a day at the beach. Driving over the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, the sky was such a polished blue that against its backdrop Manhattan’s buildings seemed livid with detail, the water towers and antennae tines as distinct as a Dürer etching. In the gusts, trees waved their branches from penthouse roofs. The illusion of great speed as the suspension girders whipped past, of motionlessness if you focused on the river instead. They took the Queens Midtown Expressway to Route27, a two-lane road they remained on for hours. At a gas station, they bought sandwiches, Cokes, a map, and were off again. The Pine Barrens framed the final stretch of highway, the trees narrowing toward their tips like arrow fletchings. Heat haze smoked the blacktop, the approaching cars lambent and blurred until they solidified into chrome and glass and, trailing a great spill of air, hissed west. On a desolate stretch between Amagansett and Montauk, a commuter train ran alongside them, its windows green as pond scum, its few passengers sitting still and floating alongside them, like witches on brooms. Shel could remember nothing he and Millie talked about, just that he held her hand for what seemed like the entire drive; and later, as they walked along the point’s grounds, after they laid out a blanket on the grass, they had watched the fishermen on the rocky beach below. The men would wade up to their waists to cast. When one hooked a fish, his rod arced toward the water. He’d lift the creature from the surf, the pole bowed by its weight, and walk it to shore holding the end of his line. Shel and Millie stood at the overlook beneath the lighthouse, staring at the white boats emerging from the Atlantic and the sound, at the gray cargo ships on the horizon; and what he recalled most clearly was the feeling he had as he held her in his arms: We could keep going.
The next morning Shel saw Logan at mess, sitting three tables across from him, the man’s nose distended, its bridge flat and swollen, his eyes blued with bruise. When they glanced at each other this time, it was Logan who averted his gaze.
Just because you stand your ground doesn’t mean you’ve won the day. Nor are all bullies cowards. On the deck force he was singled out; taunting him became a form of fellowship; he was like a bottle you kicked because it was in your path. The baiting came from all sides, some of it run-of-the-mill. Instead of Hertzberg they called him Burger. “Watch your back, Burger. ” “Hey, Burger, you missed a spot.” Other times the threats were more insidious: from Turret One, a gang of sailors approached, Logan among them. Shel, headed aft, slowed, but now there was no turning back. As a unit they took the inside lane, forcing Shel toward the gunwale’s edge, throwing elbows to his back when they passed, some punching his arm, cuffing the back of his head. He took a few hard slaps to his ears. He rode this out, hanging on to the grab rails, their metal wires bowed by his weight, his chest pressed over his toes like a ski jumper, the ship’s wake foaming the hull far below. A voice from somewhere among the group, at once light and heavy on the wind said, “Hope you can swim, Hebe.”
One night, he came upon a mound of feces on his bed. Everyone in the berthing knew it was there—they’d given it space, as if it were a coiled viper. Barney Freele appeared by his side, carefully gathered up the blanket, and, with the assurance of someone owed a favor, said under his breath, “I know the lieutenant commander.”
This man’s name was Maldrick. He invited Shel to his quarters the following afternoon. He told Shel to close the door and invited him to sit while he finished a report, scratching out sentences for a time. A framed picture of the Virgin Mary hung above his secretary’s desk. Stunned by this privacy, Shel took deep drafts of the calm.
Maldrick put down his pen, swiveled in his chair. “Are you familiar with the Daisy May ?” From his desk he handed Shel a copy of the ship’s newspaper, a four-page broadsheet, which Shel thumbed blindly.
“They need a photographer,” Maldrick said. “Mr. Freele tells me you’re quite accomplished.”
Shel had never used a camera in his life. “Sir?”
“Of course, I’ll have to pull you from the deck force,” Maldrick said. When Shel made no protest, he added, “Report to Ensign Lewis tomorrow. The dark room is off the pilot house.”
To call this space a room was generous. It was barely bigger than a closet, a miracle of organization to pack in so much equipment, not to mention both men at one time. Lewis was thin-faced. His narrow cheeks were moon-mottled with acne scars. Giving the tour, he made no-look reaches for film canisters and flashbulbs. It was intimidating, like being in the presence of a wizard among his unmarked potions, and yet instantly incited admiration, for he alone knew the spells.
“Enlarger’s here,” Lewis said. “Cameras”—he took down a Pentax and held it expertly—“on this shelf. Lenses”—he indicated over Shel’s shoulder—“to your right. The tripod’s hanging behind you. All your chemicals are below your trays.” He tapped each. “Developer, stop bath, fixer, wash. If you need to order anything—film, paper, even hardware—just submit a requisition to Ensign Sandbrook. Sky’s the limit.”
He offered the camera to Shel, who gripped it in two hands, then tilted the lens toward his chin.
“You get open gangway at every port,” Lewis continued. “Set your own schedule. I’d keep this job forever if I hadn’t gotten promoted.”
Shel waited.
“Any questions before I hand her over?”
Shel scanned the dark room again. Just above eye level, a row of photos was pinned to a clothesline like fresh laundry, their gentle tilt indicating the Des Moines ’s attitude as she listed.
“How do you know what to take?” he asked.
Lewis puffed his cheeks at the question’s obviousness. “I take whatever I want,” he said. “Or whatever’s happening.”
Shel nodded. “What if nothing’s happening?”
“Something’s always happening.”
Timidly, Shel brought the viewfinder to his eye. Lewis frowned and took the camera from him, removing the lens cover.
“You don’t know a thing about this stuff, do you?”
Shel shrugged.
“I didn’t either,” Lewis said.
They stared at each other.
“You got something to write with?” Lewis asked.
After Shel tapped his pants pockets, Lewis removed a small pad and pen from his own. He checked his watch. “I’ll give you three hours.”
His was a furious tutorial. First a primer on film itself, its various speeds and grains, followed by instruction on loading it into the camera. Next its basic parts—the winding reel, tripod socket, accessory shoe. The rings on the lens. Terms came in a blur and only a few were caught, like card faces spotted when a dealer shuffles. “The shutter speed’s how long the camera looks at something,” Lewis explained. “The aperture’s how wide the lens opens. The faster your subject, the wider you set the aperture. The wider your aperture, the lower your f-stop. Understand?” Shel did not. They wandered the vessel shooting a roll of film. From the prow’s platform, camera aimed aft, the battleship, seen through the viewfinder, exploded into detail. The two turrets filled the foreground, their triple barrels bristling and erect and, rising behind them, the forward main battery—the Des Moines ’s central command tower—its facade vaguely anthropomorphic, like a totem pole’s gods. Lewis gave a brief exegesis on depth of field, the effects of front- and sidelight. The information pouring from his mouth ran off the roof of Shel’s mind like rain. They returned to the dark room: an introduction to the changing bag. The infernal task of removing the negatives in its pitch-dark and then fastening them to the developing tank’s reel, in the meantime Lewis listing the proper admixtures of T-max and diluting agent. There followed an extensive lesson on the enlarger, the machine flamingo-necked, beaked with a lens. In its slot Lewis loaded a strip of negative, twisting the knobs until the beamed image, fuzzy on the palette below, shrank to fit its borders and then finally came into focus. He walked Shel through several exposures and then made him develop them. Like a ray’s wings, the submerged photopaper gently rippled in the chemical baths. Shel watched the white sheet, mesmerized as the image fogged to visibility, a fade-in clarifying into something actual, like your sight restored after glancing at the sun. Lewis tonged the first print, lifted it from the tray, and then clipped it to the hanging line. For a time, both men considered the photograph.
“How am I supposed to learn all of this?” Shel asked.
Lewis shrugged. “You just play.”
Shel took this advice to heart. After a miserable week with his head buried in manuals and his own cribbed notes, fourteen-hour days of trial and mostly error in which he destroyed countless rolls of film, he regrouped after they made landfall in Europe, wandering the Rock of Gibraltar to shoot all day and then, determined not to make a mistake, walked himself step by step through the entire process—negatives to contact sheet to prints—without a single disaster. Lewis was right: something was always happening. Shel merely had to decide what it would be. It was the best job on the boat because he was free—not just of the punishing schedule but the navy itself. At ports of call, the Daisy May ’s staff rarely wanted something specific, so Shel gave himself license to roam, to draw up his own itineraries, daring himself to see as much as possible: in Italy, Vatican City, the Teatro di Marcello, the open-air markets between Via del Corso and the Pantheon; in Greece he scaled the Acropolis, took day hops to the Aegean’s countless islands, their names like seabirds—Skiros, Chios, Ikaria—photographing the shopkeepers and fishmongers, the beggar children with the countenances of old men. The occasional, blessed moment after taking a picture—the purely instinctual sense in the microsecond after the shutter clicked—that he’d got something. And later, his confidence growing as the image, like a genie summoned from smoke, magically delineated and then affixed in the developing tray. The job gave him access to every part of the boat, engine room to command tower. Riding out a storm on the Des Moines ’s bridge, the ship climbed a forty-foot swell, the wave’s face filling the windows, pushing the prow briefly airborne, and, after tilting over the crest, after a fall during which Shel could feel his stomach float, it cleaved the water, sending great spumes exploding up the hull, as if the vessel were a broadsword. From a helicopter, during war games— the closest they’d ever get to battle—he photographed the Des Moines from several thousand feet: the water beneath the turrets smoothed to glass when the guns fired, the molten clouds billowed brightly from the barrels, and then the aftershock arrived in the cockpit, shaking Shel’s teeth.
One evening, as the sun fell behind the mountains of Corfu, Shel realized he hadn’t thought of Millie in months.
The ship’s captain, A. D. Chandler, was an admirer of his work. He requested Shel take his portrait. In preparation for this intimidating assignment, Shel enlisted Barney Freele as a model, photographing him in the captain’s stateroom. These test shots came out better than expected—it was Shel’s first time using the tripod and flash—and in the berthing he and Freele had a laugh over the prints, the latter’s mock-serious pose, his best impersonation of Captain Chandler’s thousand-yard stare. Shel laid them across his bed to compare shutter and film speeds. A crowd formed.
“You look the part, Barney!”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n Freele!”
“Send one to your mom. She’ll think you’ve been promoted!”
“Think you could take one of me?” another sailor asked him. “For my girl.”
“Sure,” Shel said.
“Two bucks cover it?”
Payment hadn’t occurred to him. “I think we could arrange something,” Shel said.
The sailor’s name was Lurin. He loved the picture and told two friends. Over the next several months, other seamen approached him with the same request, each offering to pay, each calling him, usually for the first time, by his first name. Shel declined their money, just as he had Lurin’s, but after taking their photographs and leaving them on their bunks, he often entered the dark room to find the bills hanging from the line. Victimless, it was the best sort of grift, and he was pleased with its accidental arrangement. And so it came to pass that, upon the Des Moines ’s return to Norfolk, he was discharged from active duty with a Nikon camera in his duffel that Captain Chandler had gifted him and over a thousand dollars in cash.
It was lucky he had this money. When he returned to Queens, he discovered that his parents were moving to California. His father was going into business with his brother, Moishe, in San Bernardino; they were opening a fur shop together. His father, Shel learned, was not the poor man he’d always assumed, but from the three jobs he’d worked for as long as Shel could remember he had, along with the sale of their home, squirreled away nearly $70,000. He was dedicating all but $200 to this venture. He gave the money to his son with much fanfare after Shel declined to come west with them and, for all intents and purposes, exited their life.
Greater careers have started with less, Shel figured. This isn’t to say he didn’t feel abandoned by his parents, but there was a difference: he was not afraid. At the beginning of a thing, he thought, a thing seems impossible.
The beginning, Shel reminded himself, is a dark room.
He took a job at Joseph Patelson Music House on Fifty-Sixth, in the shadow of Carnegie Hall, as good a place to start a life as any. During his interview, Mr. Patelson, dapper in his double-breasted suit and white pocket square, asked him his area of specialty. When Shel answered opera, the man walked him to the store’s upright piano and began to play an overture, which Shel instantly identified as Rossini’s Ermione. “Impressive,” Mr. Patelson said. “Of course, a new suit,” he said, after offering Shel the job and pinching the lapel of the old one Shel was wearing, “would be even more so.” Along with this purchase, Shel rented a one-bedroom apartment on Seventy-Fifth and Riverside, eighth floor, the highest up he’d ever lived in the city, the window in his tiny living room enjoying an unobstructed view of the Hudson. In fall, the trees dotting Jersey’s cliffs reminded him of the Des Moines ’s guns firing; in winter, the rock faces were as gray as the ship’s gunmetal hull. On Saturday mornings, drinking coffee, he spotted the Circle Line on its route around Manhattan. It would be lovely to ride a boat, he thought, but not alone this time. He took the 1 Train downtown in the mornings, but in the evenings, to clear his mind, preferred to walk. And on a brutally cold January night, as he leaned against the wind on the easternmost arc of Columbus Circle, he saw Millie Van Bourne crossing the street.
How to describe seeing someone whose loss you’ve already mourned? He could say it was like encountering a ghost, but that would be inaccurate, for ghosts were not of this world. Millie was standing here before him, her eyes shining in the streetlights. It had been nearly three years, but she appeared thinner, older, sadder, and more beautiful. Her hair was still Marilyn Monroe white. While they spoke, she occasionally glanced over his shoulder, nervously, as if she were supposed to meet someone on this corner. “I’ve thought about you so often,” she said with great sincerity. “I’d wondered what had become of you.” Her smile parted him like a scalpel. He was immediately aware of how much energy he’d expended scouring her from his mind and how powerless he was now to resist her return. She invited him back to her apartment, on Tenth Avenue and Sixtieth Street. As they walked, he mused on how close they’d lived to each other all these months, mere blocks separating them: Shel pausing, for a moment, to gaze on the tiny display windows of Tiffany, while Millie flashed by in the glass’s reflection; she exiting Bloomingdale’s revolving doors—Manhattan’s countless near collisions—as he’d entered; the lonely laps they were unwittingly making together as they walked Central Park’s Great Lawn, the diameter separating them as they strolled in the same direction along its circumference. Who would we see on our periphery, Shel wondered, if we adjusted our vision? Who was walking parallel to us if we widened our depth of field?
Her apartment was large—too large, he realized later—her river view out of six windows a mural to his portrait. He should’ve also noticed how oddly furnished it was, an old-world dowdiness to the decor, the plastic covering the ample, heavy furniture, all of it showroom-like but staged for someone elderly, as if Millie were an actress who’d wandered onto the wrong set. They sat in her living room. Without thinking, they took each other’s hands. She was vague as to how she’d kept busy these past two years: a few commercials, some modeling. A stint as a nightclub hostess most recently. Her sisters had long since fled Manhattan: Maxine was married and living in Chicago, Glenda had returned home to work for their father. Millie described these as very lonely times. As she talked, her affect became distant, to the point of being disengaged, an odd dreaminess Shel could not recall from before, one that seemed an entirely new aspect of her person.
“But now you’re here,” she said, returning from whatever journey had taken her far away.
In the days that followed, it was all Shel could do to get through work, at the end of which he would literally run to meet her out somewhere—at the Rainbow Room or at a show at Radio City Music Hall. But it was their talks afterward, the endlessness of their conversations at the Hotel Edison or Barbetta, over martinis at the King Cole Bar or dinner at Gallagher’s—a lavishness funded by Shel’s shrinking savings. He couldn’t recall now much of what they said, though what did stay with him was the ease of it, their familiarity with each other. How rare it is, Shel found himself thinking, to simply like someone. To know, in their company, that you would never be bored. It changed his whole sense of the future: suddenly he was thinking in terms of years, of how they might live in one of Manhattan’s taller buildings or one of the Upper West Side’s brownstones, once he’d made it. He found himself dreaming on their unconceived children’s faces, of two boys blessed with Millie’s finer, smaller features. Until one evening, sitting together in her living room, they heard a key turn in the door.
The encounter unfolded with an accident’s vivid torpor. The older man wore a long brown coat and a fedora. The heavy frames of his glasses hid his appearance while magnifying his eyes so that they glistened like hard-boiled eggs. His hands remained buried in his pockets, a position that might normally convey infirmity, yet as he entered the room, he moved with a limberness that belied his age, to stand before them with the dispassion a detective exhibits before a victim’s body. He did not speak, he uttered no threats and made no claims, although Millie was ashen at the sight of him, robbed of speech before this person who was clearly not a stranger, his expression unchanged as he looked from her to Shel and back while Shel glanced at Millie and then this intruder, and when he rose himself, his heart racing, to say what he did not know, the man scrutinized him as calmly as an owl from a branch. Then he turned and, with the selfsame ease and impassivity, left the room and gently closed the apartment door.
The place, Shel later learned, was his, of course, and in a terrifying fashion so was Millie—though how such a thing came to pass Shel couldn’t puzzle out, not even after he’d calmed her down, for her explanation only revealed that she was a stranger to him, to herself, in ways that Shel surmised were dangerous. She mentioned something about falling in love after Shel had gone overseas—she’d even gotten engaged—only to discover it wasn’t that at all, it was a thing disguised as such but was far more dreadful, perhaps even love’s opposite, for it revealed itself only after she’d given her heart to this person, after she’d begged her father to lend them money, and there followed a breakup that had not only nearly ruined her emotionally and financially but also left her so dreadfully alone it put her out of her family’s reach, even her sisters. And then this man whose name she would not utter had stepped in to rescue her or affect something that had appeared like rescue, but came at a cost so horribly obvious she refused to articulate it.
Her eyes swimming, she said to Shel, “I won’t ask you to help me.”
“Of course I’ll help you,” he said.
She shook her head as if recalling something dreadful. “You could get hurt,” she warned.
Later that night, alone in his apartment, he lay awake gathering his thoughts. There was disappointment, first of all, to have been so quickly supplanted after their breakup. Shel tried to relish this anger, to nurture it—he considered calling to confront Millie—but this desire rapidly dissipated, was mere squall, and he soon turned philosophical. What did it take—just how low did a person have to sink—to strike the kind of bargain she’d made? He sat up in bed, opened his window, smoked a cigarette. He was losing a taste for the habit. Across the Hudson, New Jersey’s lights winked, casting long reflections, as colorful as a color wheel but now resembling to Shel prison bars. Below, car brakes squealed; he heard a crash he could not see, followed by a tinkling of shattered glass. Later, he would reflect that perhaps he did not know Millie at all, that what he loved was merely his own love for her. Now, he concluded that everything that had happened in their time apart might as well be a dream, and just as easily forgotten. There was only now and what was to come, and this gave him enough peace to sleep, so that when he woke the next morning he decided Millie was exaggerating the danger to him as surely as her own entrapment, and what he needed to do was ask her to marry him and then immediately spirit her away, a decision that canceled out so many other near-term ambitions it left him utterly becalmed.
He dressed for work more certain of what he was doing than at any other time in his life. Just before he left his apartment, he noticed the note shoved under his door.
It Would Be Best if You Do Not See a Certain Person Again or We Will Break Your Yid Face.
He stood in his entryway holding the paper in both hands. His heart made a downy sound, like a pillow being fluffed. He could not help but compare this state with other instances of fear. The over-the-shoulder paranoia aboard the Des Moines, when he thought Logan’s crew would ambush him; the nightmares of being dragged from his berth and thrown overboard that he woke from, kicking the sheets from his bed. When his brother, Marty, would take a seat across from him at the kitchen table and in utter seriousness say, “After Mom and Dad go out tonight, I’m going to drown you in the bathtub.” And there was something that had always terrified Shel about the nights his father had him bring in damaged furs from the Plymouth’s trunk and then whisk them to their basement. The windows his father had covered in sackcloth, lest the union enforcers catch him moonlighting. Shel was certain that he was endangering his father by assisting him, an anxiety later amplified by the sound of the sewing machine below, its enormous whir carrying to the third floor and thus audible on the street, where someone surely lay in wait among the pedestrians and passersby who might rat him out.
With a speed that surprised him, Shel hatched a plan, though in order for it to work he needed to tell Millie first.
When the elevator opened on her floor, the old man was standing directly before him, wearing the same fedora and long coat. His hands were again in the coat’s pockets. Shel wasn’t sure what to do, feeling something between terror and embarrassment, for a confrontation seemed inevitable. The elevator door began to close, its slide an action both men watched intently, since this was the moment, after all, where the line drawn by the night before, by the note, would be crossed. Shel palmed the plunger, but not without trepidation, so that the door reversed course, and then he held it there, retracted. The man’s magnified eyes blinked mechanically, and the brim of his hat dipped as he began to walk toward Shel, who in turn exited the car, holding himself close as if trying to avoid a much larger person; and when they stood on opposite sides of each other once more, Shel felt rebuffed by the man’s straight-ahead indifference and imperturbable disengagement. Once again there was the chilling sense that the wrinkled face behind the thick lenses was loose, slack rubber that disguised another face beneath. Shel walked backward, wanting the moment to end. But the elevator buzzed, the door had stayed held open too long and was stuck, and well down the hallway by now, Shel watched the dumb slowness with which the elevator door finally slid closed and the alarm ceased. Through the porthole’s glass, at first only the top of the man’s lowered brim was visible, but just before the car sank the old man raised his chin, shaking his head ever so slightly at Shel, a gesture he could not be sure was warning or weariness. And then the car sank, and the window’s eye lidded black.
Shel didn’t bother to knock on Millie’s door. He had a key, and once inside he found her in the middle of the living room, and when she turned to look at him, it was as if she’d been startled by a stranger. Her mouth was fixed in a grimace nearly clownish, her cheeks smeared with mascara. He suddenly felt the seriousness of what he was about to propose.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“You have to come with me. Right now. We’ll leave together.”
“For where?”
“California.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I have enough money to get us set up. My father has a business out there. We can go tonight.”
She bunched his coat’s lapels in her hands, then cupped her lips with her palm and began to cry again. She shook her head. “I can’t,” she finally said.
“Yes, you can,” Shel said. “If you don’t want to, that’s something else.”
She pressed her face into his shirt and sobbed and, after several minutes, calmed down enough to breathe softly. She wiped her eyes on his chest and sniffled. “Describe it for me,” she said after a time.
“California?” He smiled into her hair, smelling her scalp. “I’ve never been. I’ve only seen it in the pictures,” he confessed.
“Tell me what it’s like anyway,” Millie said.
He held her very tightly now. “It’s a desert but fertile. Like an oasis. The air is dry. There are palm trees and houses built on cliffs, and the mansions have lawns like fairways. And there’s the Pacific, which seems bigger than the Atlantic somehow and is even colder. And you see movie stars everywhere.”
“At the laundromat and the gas station,” Millie said.
“It’s like Olympus,” Shel said.
“We’ll dine on ambrosia,” Millie said.
“Does that sound like someplace you’d want to live?”
She was silent for a time. “That sounds like a place to start over.”
Her ear was to his shirt, and she then pressed her palm to his chest, patting it several times. When she looked up at him, she managed a smile.
“Be ready by seven,” he told her.
She nodded, forcefully, and then he kissed her goodbye.
It was Friday, payday, and Shel decided not to tell Mr. Patelson he was quitting for fear his check would be withheld, though he did ask for it at lunch—he was going on a trip this evening, he explained, he needed to visit the bank ahead of the weekend—a request Patelson obliged. On his break, Shel hurried to cash it, withdrawing all his money as well, and then took the subway to Penn Station, where he bought a pair of tickets to Delaware. He would meet Millie’s father and properly ask for her hand. He was certain he had enough money left to buy a car. He was dreamy that afternoon, imagining their upcoming trip, their drive together across the country and then working for his father until he got a start in movies. It was a fairy tale, he would admit, not only in the happiness of its ending but also because it began with great risk.
Just past four, Patelson approached him with several thick folders of sheet music. “Can you drop these off with Mr. Stockmeyer? The violinist.” The address was only several blocks from Shel’s apartment. When he glanced at his watch, Patelson added, “I’ll let you go a bit early.”
On his way home, Shel decided he’d deliver the music after packing, which he did quickly and efficiently, taking only his best clothes and leaving the rest behind. He considered the apartment. The couch was a drab green. Over his dresser, a gilt-edged mirror, its glass smoky with age. He considered his reflection. How he hated his full cheeks—they made him look younger than he was. After he and Millie had fled, would he finally feel like a grown man? He grabbed his suitcase and the folders, ran through a final checklist, touched his coat’s breast and side pockets—money and tickets—turning a million things over in his mind, so that it was only after he came down the stairs and entered his building’s small lobby that he noticed the three men waiting for him.
One leaned against the building’s front door. He wore an eggplant-colored suit and pressed his foot’s sole against the door’s glass, mindful of the street over his shoulder. The second man, also wearing a suit, had a neck so wide it seemed to begin at his ears. He softly stepped behind Shel to block the stairwell. The third man, who moved directly into Shel’s path, was in every measurable dimension so much larger than all of them that for an instant Shel felt, proportionally, like a child. He had a boxer’s nose, at once craggy and wide, its bridge flat and broad as an anvil.
“Did you get our note?” the giant asked.
Shel swung his suitcase at his head, flinging the folders after the bag connected so that the sheets seemed to explode in the small hallway, a great flutter of pages that served as enough of a diversion to get him all the way to the man at the door, whom he grabbed by the lapels and then hurled away from the exit, toward the other two men, and for the split second that he pulled at the handle he thought, Free. Only to be yanked backward by his collar and land so hard the wind was knocked from him. The sheets scuffed and crumpled beneath his back, still floating down as the men’s first kicks and punches landed. Like the sheet music, they too were now on the ground with Shel, the giant’s knee on his sternum, his gloved hand gripping his throat, while the thick-necked one laid his shin across Shel’s biceps. The third man remained at the door, keeping an eye out. “You’re good,” he said to the pair, and when the giant brought his gloved fist to his ear there glinted between his fingers three silver circles, flat as the heads of nails and bright as ball bearings.
“If you don’t move,” he said matter-of-factly, “I won’t miss.” His eyes followed Shel’s face to draw a bead, his raised fist was cocked by his ear, and he wheezed once, patiently. Shel bridged and bucked with one last burst. “Keep still,” the giant said, almost coddling, like a doctor before pressing a needle to a vein. Shel relaxed, his jaw went slack, and the blow came so fast that at first it almost didn’t hurt, he was for a second unsure he’d even been hit. Though the sound, like a vase breaking, were his teeth, he realized, the pieces falling against the back of his throat so that he gagged, swallowing the bits of several while his tongue swam in blood. He opened his eyes to another blow, the plink that followed like a small rock through a pane, the giant’s fist back by his ear as Shel gargled, tears streaming from his eyes, his tongue’s tip, as the man paused, running along the ridges of his ragged cuspids and incisors while his assailant once again forcefully wheezed. He twisted Shel’s head side to side for a quick inspection, the action slinging the slurry from his mouth. “One more,” he whispered, squeezing the unhinged jaw so hard that Shel’s lips puckered. Followed by a deep crack, as of lake ice splitting, and then the blackness of the water beneath.
The horror came not when he woke in the hospital and saw Patelson and his wife pitifully gazing upon him, or when he considered his reflection in the mirror moments later, his puffed jowls from his broken jaw grimed with bruise. Nor was it when he learned all his money had been stolen. Even in the handful of weeks after his dental surgery, the cost of which Patelson absorbed (“Robbed making a delivery for me,” he’d tell customers who came into the store while Shel healed), he didn’t feel the full weight of his loss until he returned to Millie’s apartment. The elevator opened and he paused in the car as if he’d pressed the wrong floor. He walked down the hallway aware of his footfalls, as if he were a thief trying to move silently. Above her doorknob, the lock cylinder was missing, and when Shel plucked this a draft blew through. He knelt to peek through the hole, he saw a window open inside. He turned the knob, and the door opened. He entered to discover all the furniture gone, the apartment vacant of any trace of anything. Even the floors were without a scratch and shined brightly, like a blackboard wetly erased. In the front hall closet there were not even hangers. In the bedroom, which also had a view of the river, two pale squares above where the headboard used to be, from paintings—or were they photographs?—whose subjects he could not remember. The cracked window whistled with the wind. He entered the bathroom. Did it still smell of her? Or was the lingering scent—chalky, waxy—of her makeup and powders and perfumes? In the mirror he considered his reflection, gaunt, his face thinned from weeks of being fed through a straw. It was like the dream he sometimes had of seeing himself as if he were a stranger and finally having the fleeting sense of what he actually looked like to someone else in the world.
—
My father turned to me and smiled. “Both of these are bridges,” he said as he drove. He ran a fingernail over his top and bottom incisors.
“But what happened to her?” I asked.
“Millie?” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?’
“I mean she was gone. Disappeared.”
“You never heard from her again?”
“Not a peep.”
I waited for more, but nothing came. “And that was it?”
“That was it.”
We were banking left now, toward Central Park South, our third loop around—past the near side of Columbus Circle, where Dad first saw Millie again. How many times in his life had he walked it, hoping to see her once more? And although his story shouldn’t have been a comfort to me, it was, for I realized I wasn’t alone in my misery. And although I didn’t consider what it meant at the time or whether he should have told me in the first place or what my mother might have thought of the telling, I believed he’d imparted a great secret, and for this I felt overwhelming gratitude. The Metropolitan Museum of Art appeared on our right-hand side. Even at this hour, the Sackler Wing remained lit, so that its glass was rendered invisible, the Temple of Dendur within, moated by its reflecting pool and aglow. Dad continued to watch the road, nodding several times to himself, and then he reached over to place his hand on my knee and patted it. He turned to smile at me, weakly this time, though I couldn’t help it: I looked at his teeth.
“You never marry the great love of your life,” he said.