Face Tells the Secret Page 23

  I dress in the bathroom. Stand on the toilet lid to see how I look. Grim. Wow, I think, and smile at my reflection. Is she ever mirthless?

  I imagine sitting across from him at this restaurant, famous for its cheese, saying, “Excuse me, I am not myself.”

  Really? Then who are you? Why did you call?

  If he asks me, what will I say?

  To spend an hour with someone who knows Aviva. The storm had loosened a voice inside me, and my mother’s impending death brings to mind decisions I need to make, responsibilities that rest upon my shoulders. I feel the weight of them and know I want to manage them. Maybe he can give me advice. He sees Aviva nearly every week, knows aspects of her not revealed in the Sensory Checklist.

  That night, on the short walk to the restaurant on a street lined with old gnarled trees, I ask myself what I want from this man, and knowledge seems to be the answer. Information he might be willing to share, directions I can jot in my notebook. “I’m lost,” I want to confess. As if he can tell me which road to take. As if he might turn over his paper placemat, take out a pen and draw a map for me—take this street, then that one. Past this house, the school, some railroad tracks, the cemetery where his forebears lay, ye olde swimming hole where we could face each other, link our arms to form a cradle, and dance.

  I have not acknowledged all that I want.

  There are no paper placemats.

  He is a stranger.

  I know nothing about him, cannot yet admit how much I want his eyes on me, how I want to sit across the table and feel his gaze. I have no Polish, no French, no Yiddish, no Hebrew, no numbers, no words to speak of my desires.

  All the outdoor seats are taken, mostly by young people with children, and placid dogs curled between the tables. A pug looks up as I push open the door to the restaurant.

  He is sitting across the room. Clouds of gray hair, long legs crossed, half-empty glass of wine at the table. As I come closer, I feel an overwhelming sense that I know him and know nothing at all about him. He is familiar in a mysterious way and yet bears no connection to the man I’ve been imagining all these months.

  “Am I late?” He fastens those big, sad eyes on me, and I experience him as a man and feel my anxious heart. “I’m so sorry!”

  “Ah yes,” he says. “Roxanne who is always sorry.”

  Twenty-Two

  Here’s what I recall of our dinner: fresh, salty cheese made from sheep’s milk, sweet goat cheese, a salad with roasted peppers, falafel-coated artichokes, pita with za’atar, wine from vineyards in the Galilee, enjoying his company. As we polished off a bottle of crisp white wine, we talked about home and family and work. I liked listening to him talk about all the information that was revealed in the face, found it fascinating to think of our emotions leaking through as micro-expressions, even when we think we’ve hidden our truest feelings. That night, he showed me the difference between the true smile (the Duchenne smile, which involved the orbicularis oculi muscle and the zygomatic major muscle), and the fake one, that used only the zygomatic major, the corners of the lips. He spoke of slowing down a recent TV clip of a politician, to see the millisecond flash of contempt that “leaked through” on his face.

  I didn’t confess that I’d stood on the toilet lid and seen my own fake smile or demand he tell me what he saw in my face just then. I did not ask, as another woman had, if Camus had been correct to say, Après un certain âge tout homme est responsable de son visage? My interest was in him, so I overrode my usual self-consciousness. Who was this man who swam with Aviva, sat beside me in the garden at Chaverim, and passed long afternoons at the same San Francisco bookstore where I’d spent so many hours? He spoke with an edge of sadness of his son in Minnesota, who’d become so remote since he’d moved, so inaccessible, and his stormy daughter, who lived with her partner not far from him, and after years of anger toward her father had become his mentor.

  “How so?” I asked.

  “She gives me fashion advice and sent me to her ‘stylist’ so I might be presentable after my wife left.”

  “For your hair?” I began to laugh, though I felt the somber side of these details, too: the long-married man suddenly on his own.

  “Can’t you tell?” He patted his frizzy gray hair, and I said, “Fabulous cut.”

  A toddler’s scream cut through our conversation. We watched the little guy tromp between the tables, with a side-to-side gait, like Dina’s parrot, brandishing a spoon and shrieking until his father scooped him up, pausing at our table, child dangling from his arms, to greet Baruch. My mood dipped. I did not want the evening to end.

  “Tell me about Aviva. Tell me everything,” I said when the father left. “I’m so moved that you visit her every week.”

  “But I told you I enjoy these visits.”

  “I know,” I said. “But still, you look after her. She’s not even someone you know.”

  “No, no,” he said. “Don’t begin to think I’m a selfless individual. I turn my back on suffering every day. I make these visits for myself. Because it’s something I want to do.”

  Like paying the check? He was insistent.

  Outside, I fell in step beside him, on this tranquil street, the white apartment buildings beautiful in the low, forgiving light. When we turned the corner, we passed the store with the colorful shoes I’d wanted, but I was now in some sealed-off place, separate from my mother, the shomer, Sunny, and not-Sunny. What I wanted most was to hear about his weekly trips to Chaverim, what he did when he arrived, from the moment he stepped out of his car. When he began, I could feel the effort he put into framing his story, making certain I did not see him as selfless or kind.

  It began, as I knew, with his sister getting cancer and asking him to be her son’s guardian, and Baruch saying yes, without much thought. Yes, of course. Her death felt remote, and there was no one else. “She’d let this boy take over her life completely, traveling all over, borrowing money to take him to a doctor who had a database of fifty-three other children with the same chromosomal abnormality but no treatment to offer. The father had left long before. He had another wife, a different family, a better one. And the older brother, who moved to Australia, far from his mother and this boy who had taken over his childhood. Yes, sure, of course. To me, Danny was a disaster. I will be frank and say I saw him as non-human. My sister, even before Danny, had always seemed weak, like a little mouse. Her devotion to this boy I saw as pathetic. But as she got sicker, I began to see that this promise I made meant everything to her. Toward the end, every time we sat together, she would say, ‘At least you’ll look after Danny.’ It was all she wanted.”

  And?

  “The drive is very long. Danny is a tormented soul. After a visit or two, I began to resent the hours I spent in a car. Lost hours. And for what reason, when my company was irrelevant to him. My sister was dead. I began to think, why not just call and speak to one of the workers? Visit now and then so at Chaverim they know someone watches. If I wanted someone to agree, to say sure, this is okay, it would have been simple. He has no value in the eyes of most people, even his family members. So it’s very easy to stop. You miss a week and the sky does not fall. You miss two weeks. Life goes on. Three weeks. Everything is still the same.”

  “But you didn’t stop. Why not?”

  He brushed me off with a flick of his hand, and though I felt his irritability, I saw it was directed at this notion that he was morally elevated, these trips a sign of his essential goodness, a proof that he was something special.

  “I made a promise, and I was soon reminded that willpower alone is never enough. It’s human nature for our best intentions to fade unless we are motivated to continue on. To honor my promise, I had to come up with a solution. To find ways I might enjoy these visits to Danny. I could listen to music in the car. Fine. Okay. I could visit my mother or meet a companion to hike in the Banias or the Hulu Nature reserve.
This has been very nice, but my problem was not solved until Shelley and I began thinking about which of Danny’s colleagues might enjoy my company. This is how I met your Aviva.”

  My Aviva.

  “Last time we met, you said I should stop thinking all or nothing, but what if Aviva senses I’m here, and then suddenly I vanish for months with no way to explain why? It seems so awful. But if she doesn’t care and my visits mean nothing, then my wanting to be with her feels futile. I didn’t make any promises.”

  “Do you want to see her?”

  “I ache to see her,” I said, and when the words were out, I felt the truth in them, and walking beside this man, felt no conflict in this desire.

  “Then you’re here when you’re here, and over time you build a relationship that’s good for you both. This isn’t futile, it’s life. It’s the way things are.”

  The old people I saw during the day were not around when we walked toward the beach—the women in skirts and pumps who sat on the bench below my mother’s window, the men playing handball behind the hotels. I supposed they were tucked into their beds, replaced this evening by young people. We passed the hair salon his daughter had recommended, and he tapped on the window. I stood beside him, cupping my hands around my face, as if I might see him inside.

  “The first time I arrived, the stylist walked around the chair very slowly. One complete circle, every angle. Lifted a lock of my hair. Another circle. Then he said, ‘So. Tell me your vision.’”

  “What was your vision?”

  “I had no vision. My wife had just left after twenty-five years of marriage. My daughter thought a good haircut would help. I thought it would discourage him to say this.”

  “So what did you say?”

  “Short on the sides and in the back.”

  The traffic light was green. When I started across the street, he said, “Are you taking me someplace special?”

  “I was following you,” I said.

  “So you just walk wherever I walk?”

  “I guess that’s what I’m doing,” I said, a little embarrassed.

  “Shall we continue walking then? Or shall we start home?”

  “Do you mind if we keep walking?”

  “If I minded walking, I would not have suggested it.”

  “Sorry.” I folded into myself, laughed ruefully: Roxanne who was always sorry. The whole city seemed to be out on this warm spring night. The promenade that ran along the beach was packed, and the restaurants propped up on the sand were bright and noisy. I could imagine that life on the beachfront was ordinary, if I wanted. I could take a snapshot like a tourist and say, this is what Israel is like. Was this how I lived? Did I only see the narrow slice of life that met with my approval? I thought about the girl at Nomi’s party, with her insistent question. Home? We’re going home? How come I’d never seen anyone like her before? Was it possible that before I’d met Aviva, my state of not knowing was so wide and deep I’d filtered out whole swaths of humanity I cared not to see?

  I asked Baruch about the people who worked at Chaverim. Who were they? What were they like?

  “For some it is just a job. Others find great meaning taking care of people, like Ora, who’s been at Chaverim since the start. She knows how to bond with everyone there, which takes the kind of patience that seems unimaginable and very close study, until she knows if tactile is best, or vision, and how best to connect, to reach the little flame inside each person. But even Ora, who is remarkable, isn’t selfless, superior in some way. Need drives her too. Watch and you will learn a lot.”

  The walkway ended abruptly in a construction site, with scaffolding and a fence, and the whole crowd of us continued in single file for the next few minutes. The kids behind me were raucous, jostling each other and me, and the questions I had boiled within me. As soon as we worked our way through and were again side by side, I asked, “Do you love your nephew?”

  He said, “No. I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Do you feel anything for him?”

  “Of course. I’ve become his guardian. I feel a great deal for him.”

  “What do you call the feeling, if it isn’t love?”

  It took him a moment to find the word. “Kinship,” he said.

  “And before your visits?”

  “Before he was nothing to me.”

  Kinship. I liked this word and wondered if I could use it to describe the nameless sensation growing inside me.

  “So you drive there on a Friday. You park the car. And then what?”

  He laughed. “You’ll figure this out for yourself once you start visiting. Not right away. It is something that will happen over time, the same as with any two people. You’ll begin to form a relationship with Aviva. It will not be like anything you’ve ever known, but if you are quiet, if you let yourself soften into it, you will find out what it is.”

  “Even Danny?” I asked.

  “My sister, when I drove her to Chaverim just before she died, saw Danny sitting in the sun on the patio, and she was very upset and said, ‘Look how they leave him in the sun like that!’, and through her eyes, I saw him blinking and grimacing and that it was different from the grimaces I’d seen before, that he was uncomfortable, in pain. As soon as she moved him, his face relaxed and the blinking slowed, and when she talked to him I could see that it brought him comfort. So did he think ‘mother’ or something of that sort? Did it matter when she was the one who brought him something good? Now that she is gone, on good days, we have the CDs she made for him. Music. Her voice. We have movement. A walk if his seizures are under control. He is extremely sensitive to sun and wind and changes in temperature.”

  “And Aviva?”

  “Ahh,” he said. “You can touch her face. Hold her hand. You can carry her in the water, of course.”

  This detail, his long exhalation. For a moment I could not move.

  “You will go and you will let her feel your presence. You will make sure she is comfortable. Soon you’ll see what she likes and what she does not like. She will not thank you. She will not look in your eyes and say, ‘You are something else.’ She is not a dog; she will not greet you ecstatically each time you open the door. If there is reciprocity, you will find it much later. Maybe you will find you are kindred souls. Whatever it is, it will not be as you imagined.”

  On the promenade further south, big Russian teenagers with elaborate hair and tight pants walked with their arms linked, creating a barricade we needed to break so we could pass. Shall we continue? Yes. So we walked toward Jaffa, where the old mosque rose above the modern hotels, and worked our way past the small restaurants filling alleys lined with old houses, the chairs taken by diners, the table tops covered with salads and dips in small white dishes. Somewhere near, bread was being baked, and when I paused to take it in, I was jostled, pushed against him, and the desire came over me to rise on my toes and kiss him.

  It changed everything, this desire, turned Baruch into a man, a man I wanted to kiss. I held back. There was so much yet I wanted him to tell me. But now this desire to rise, wrap my arms around him, to stop his words with a kiss, kept playing on, distracting me, as we wove through crowds on the narrow street, trying not to be separated.

  On the way back, I asked if we could walk on the sand, and he said, “Of course.” Kids were gathered around a bonfire near the jetty, strumming guitars and singing. We made our way onto the beach and when I paused to take off my shoes, he held out a hand to help me balance. Seeing the kids reminded me how much of my life had been spent around water, the Jersey shore in my childhood and teens, San Francisco in my twenties. I wanted to hear about his life in the days when he was married and had children. Everything interested me; where they lived and ate, what his wife did, where his children went to school. When we recalled the bookshop both of us had frequented, I brushed back my hair, as if to transform myself into the person
I had been all those years before.

  “Do I look familiar?” I asked. “I’m standing beside you.”

  He scrutinized me somberly.

  “Hey, I’m stealing a glance. Checking you out. Cute guy. Amazing eyes.”

  This seemed to embarrass him. “I was very preoccupied. I want to say I looked up and thought, that’s a beautiful woman. More likely, I looked up and thought, I need a better data set before that paper can go out.”

  “Is that what kind of person you were?”

  High up was a storybook crescent moon that seemed to float in the black sky. “Yes,” he said after a pause. “I was very preoccupied.”

  I wondered if “preoccupied” was a euphemism for “married.” “Did you look at women in your married days?”

  “I looked. I did not act.”

  “You liked being married,” I said.

  “You’re telling me this?”

  “I’m guessing,” I said, because I felt myself in the presence of a man who liked the quiet predictability of domestic routine, someone both alive and settled. I tried to hold off on the kind of relentless questions one might ask of a tour guide in a foreign land, where the natives were monogamous and thrived, but I wanted to know what it was like to be happily married, having failed myself.

  “I’ve also failed,” he said.

  “But it sounds like you and your wife had many good years.”

  “We had many good years. And then she’d had enough.”

  “How did you know?”

  We stopped while he gathered his thoughts. I curled my toes in the sand and listened to the strum of the far-off guitar.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “She just one day left, a propos of nothing?”

  For a long time, his wife seemed to like their peripatetic life, he said. She was flexible and outgoing, made friends wherever they went, gave Hebrew lessons, taught Israeli dancing at a JCC, got a Masters of Art in Family Therapy. Then a few years back, he had a chance to spend a semester at a university in Northern British Columbia. When he told her, she became furious and said she was tired of the way he no longer asked what she wanted but announced like a king. She had a job she liked and was no longer interested in following along. So he made new arrangements to stay for only a month.