Face Tells the Secret Read online

  It was time to head back. We put our helmets back on and buckled them beneath our chins. “Do you love me in a platonic way as a partner and friend?” I asked.

  “Why do you ask these ridiculous questions?”

  “Does it matter why I ask? Isn’t it enough that I’m asking?”

  “Yes. What the fuck. We practically live together. You know everything about me. Can’t you tell?”

  “So? You think it’s a personality flaw that once every five or so years I need a little reassurance? I’m supposed to buck up? Be a man. I don’t want to be a man. Maybe you need some practice before you try out for the major leagues.”

  “I like you,” he said.

  “Oh, jeez. I’m touched.”

  “Rox,” he said. “You’re my closest friend. What’s your problem?”

  “I’m overwrought,” I said.

  Les put his arms around me and gave me a squeeze. Our bike helmets collided.

  It was dark when I got home. I stowed my bike in the basement and made a cup of peppermint tea. I thought about the wedding, the look on Ryan’s face when Kayleigh walked down the aisle, then Les, when he said, “Nomi.” I sipped my tea and sent my creature down to the river, where he climbed on a steamboat and traveled to a faraway place where he might find another creature, whose jagged edges fit perfectly with his own. Then I got up and emailed Baruch to tell him I was coming to Chaverim to see Aviva and him.

  I was still sitting at my desk when I got his terse reply. “Splendid,” it said. “Send me your travel plans.”

  Everything Else

  Thirty-One

  I tried not to think about him on the flight to Ben Gurion Airport, but when the plane began its descent, and the wheels stuttered and took hold, jostling us in our seats, he came to mind, and I thought, yikes! like a cartoon character. I let the other passengers rise and reach for their bags, while I stayed in my window seat and released all the nervous questions that had been unformed until then.

  I let the others work their way down the aisle, let them push ahead through customs, while I lollygagged, used the restroom, splashed water on my face, squeezed toothpaste from a tube the size of my pinkie nail and brushed my teeth. Eventually, I finished with the minor grooming, went through customs and found myself outside of security, facing a horde pushing against the barrier, limo drivers with signs, family members with helium balloons and elaborate bouquets, parents and children and lovers. A young woman rammed into me on her way through the crowd, crying, “Oh!” and her beaming parents extended their arms, reaching out as she sank to her knees so her small dog could lick her face, neither getting enough of it.

  I thought I saw Baruch, a head taller than the others, and expected to be wrong, since I’d seen him in Pittsburgh and New York. Though he knew my itinerary, he’d never actually said he’d meet me at the airport, and I made my way through without being certain he’d be there. When it was him, and he stepped toward me, I let go of everything—suitcase, resolve, worried self—and rose on my toes to embrace him and stayed long enough to feel his ribs beneath his jacket, looked up, kissed his warm neck in error, found his lips, and then, “Hello, hi, shalom, I can’t believe you’re here.”

  Taken aback for a moment, he says, “Where did you think I’d be?”

  He took my bags to the car, and when I slid into the passenger seat, I leaned over and said, “So you’ve forgiven me.”

  “Not completely,” he said, and we made out like teenagers with nowhere else to go, no bed, no privacy. Then finally: Was I going to tell him where I was staying?

  When I said “Paradise,” he said, “Alone?” and I got to say, “It wouldn’t be paradise without you.”

  I knew what I wanted in that cool, spare room with its tile floor and the photo of the German doctor in wire-rimmed glasses, posed with his associates, but I was no longer a girl who was looking for thrills. What I needed was more complicated and nerve-wracking, something I hadn’t really known.

  We checked in. He carried my bag down the dim corridor, and I worked the key with the plastic oval that said “Paradise” into the lock, rattled the door, turned the key this way and that before the lock snapped open. Though it was not the same room as before, it was as spartan as I recalled, and I began to say something about its austerity when he put down my bag. I turned and was in his arms in a single fluid move, and we began the clumsy, comical business of unclothing, a bra that would not unfasten, cuffs around ankles. There would be no popped buttons, no sex slammed against the wall: this was a man who liked to see what the clothes covered, flushed skin, bones softening, breath rising, look at me, his long torso, puff of white chest hair, the surprise of his erect penis (why a surprise? Hadn’t I expected this greeting?) Then merging and sinking onto the bed, the two thin pillows tossed to the ground. And the distance forgotten, the barriers and complications. His flesh was cool, his cheeks rougher than I imagined, soft mouth, and when he entered me, relief and pleasure and the desire, stronger than anything, to stay where we were, to never leave his arms, this bed, this room, this place.

  Later, he said, “Vered, have you found someone to love?”

  And I said, “I went out with a factory owner named Fred,” and then, “No. No one.”

  And I asked, “What about you? Aside from Dina.”

  And he said: “There was a widow awhile back, an architect. An unpleasant woman.”

  The next day, sun peeping around the edges of the shutters, “Wouldn’t you rather be with a person who lives here? It would be so much easier.”

  And he said, “Yes, of course it would. Much easier.” Though he said this in a teasing way, it was true, and it upset me.

  Later I learned that he’d planned side trips for us, none of which we took. We did not see the antiquities at Caesarea or dine in Jerusalem or visit Safed at dusk. We missed dinners and breakfasts and rose only to go to Chaverim. Then we stumbled back to Paradise, shuttering the windows, drifting into sleep, until the cock crowed, and we woke in each other’s arms, made love, fell asleep again, woke, made love.

  Then the last day: Getting up, showering together a final time, our own slippery bodies slapping together. Clothes packed, toiletries. Power cords. He finished first, and while I nervously rearranged the contents of my suitcase, he answered some emails, which struck me as reassuringly ordinary, and strange, given how imminent our separation.

  I zipped my bag and waited by the door. “And now what?” I asked as we wheeled our bags down the corridor. I had not meant to say this.

  “We will be apart and then we’ll be together,” he said.

  “So we’ll just see how it goes?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We’ll see how it goes.”

  Then the long, gloomy drive to the airport. All that was left of our togetherness was my hand on his thigh.

  He cursed at other drivers. That was a surprise.

  I had wept when I left Aviva. I hated walking away without being able to explain to her that I’d return. It was so incomplete.

  In the car beside Baruch, I was dry-eyed, and when I saw the terminal in the distance, I said, “You can just drop me off at departures.”

  “I should just deposit you on the sidewalk and drive off?”

  “Well—” I said as we approached the parking area.

  “Because it’s not so good for you to tell me to do what you don’t want me to do. I thought we’d figured out this one.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Come home with me and never leave. That’s what I want.”

  He could not come home with me. Instead, we had Skype as our bridge. Endless, endless calls on Skype.

  You tell stories when you fall in love. We did, too, night after night, the hunger for the details of each other’s past lives as insatiable as our physical ardor. We filled the gaps between our lovemaking with stories and continued when we were apart and all I had
was his voice. I loved our flow and fluency, the way we rarely overlapped or ran out of things to say. These long, tender conversations bridged our distance.

  Though Baruch did not see our storytelling as serious business, as I did, he let me coax tales from him, knowing how important it was for me to construct his past, at this time when I was working to construct my own. Some of my questions led him into rooms he had forgotten. His earliest memory (peeing into a milk bottle); his first sexual experience (in a Danish hostel). Others came easily: His wife, standing and waiting for him to turn from his desk on his second day home from Canada; the night, after she’d moved out, when he was walking alone and failed to see the barrier around the broken-up sidewalk, fallen in the rubble, and wrecked his knee. He could not walk up the steps to his apartment so his daughter and her partner cared for him. It was the lowest moment of his life (literally), that gave him a taste of dependence and frailty that was bitter until he gave into it at his daughter’s flat, where he sat by the window, listening to the world awaken, and watching with pleasure his daughter and her partner’s comfortable domestic rhythm.

  I learned to stitch together sentences from separate stories until I could see the shy young man I’d never know, with an outgoing wife who brought him into the world. For years, it only took the slightest tug, as with a cord dangling from an overhead fixture, and he’d get up from his desk and join the others. The story of why he’d begun to resist was as complex as his lengthy marriage, and he would speak of it, when I asked. But the despair he felt after his wife left and his fall on the sidewalk at night, he continued to dismiss as trivial, for Baruch regarded himself as a fortunate man, a witness to much heartache, a man who’d been brushed by disaster and never really tasted it. Through all that he said and did not say, he remained the man I’d first seen with Aviva in his arms, with his luminous eyes. Come in, it is something else.

  Sometimes talking too long of the past made me melancholy. If only we could wake every morning together; if only we could have had a child together; if only we’d been lovers before we became, each of us, so tied to the countries where we lived. Oh, if I had only known you then, we often said.

  But then it could not have worked, I knew. I had to be the woman I was right then. If I had met him when I was younger, I would have found him mysterious and attractive, would have pursued him, and burned my way through and left, because he was not elusive, did not withhold his affection, shaking me to the core, which in those days I mistook for love. But I was no longer that woman: not fresh and young. Nor was he. We were both a little worn, a little battle-scarred.

  During one of our long conversations, when I’d been lying on the spongy carpet in my rented apartment, we’d pledged to speak to each other of our hurts and desires, to confess to our vulnerabilities, and I told him about a newspaper story I’d read about war correspondents that included a Hemingway line that I’d often heard quoted: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” I’d found myself turning that line over and over, because I didn’t think it was true. “I think those of us life breaks are weaker in the broken places,” I said.

  “Maybe. I can see you might feel that way.” But he disagreed, citing broken bones, no weaker after they knit, and thinking of the long period after his wife left, how after that break he was stronger, more fully human. I thought of broken bowls, the mended seam always vulnerable. And I thought of myself, still asking, “Are you glad I’m here? Are you pleased to see me?” and Baruch saying, as Les had, “Do you need to ask?”

  Yes, I did need to ask. I needed him to say these words and mean them. I needed the directness of his gaze and his soft, warm voice to keep me from falling into an anxious, questioning state, then deeper, into a state of wanting that left me frozen with fear, unable to ask for what I needed most. I tried to explain to Baruch that the broken place was still there. I didn’t feel it, and he didn’t see it, so I said, “Look, we disagree!” But it was there.

  On our second visit, we stayed at the spa where the guests meandered through the lobby wrapped in thick terry robes, like patients in a sanatorium. We studied the menu of massages, and he chose Shiatsu while I decided on hot stones. When it was time to make our appointments, he said, “I don’t need a stranger’s hands,” and neither did I. Later, through the gap in the curtains, we saw the sky grow dark, and he said, “If you want to eat, we better go now,” but I was hungry only for him, so we stayed in bed. It was thrilling to separate ourselves from the world and learn every inch of each other’s bodies, to let the conversation continue this way.

  We roused ourselves and drove to Chaverim, and I thought about the massage menu and wondered how much training I’d need to work with Aviva. When I arrived, she was in the art room, secured upright in an EasyStand—weight-bearing was important and helped to keep her strong. I kissed her hello and touched her cheek and hair, and asked Ora, the curly-haired therapist arranging a sandy substance on her tray, what kind of training I’d need to work with Aviva.

  She laughed and said, “We do the work. You do what’s nice.”

  I stood, awkwardly. Ora took my hand and brought it to her nose. “Almond. So nice.” Had I tried other scents with Aviva? Had I noticed how much she loved warm towels? “And look,” she said, putting Aviva’s hands in the sandy stuff on the tray. “If she did not like this, she would pull way, or get stiff, or shake her head like this. Don’t be shy!”

  Shy. It was true. In this time when I’d been so avid with Baruch, when our body conversation began to evolve, and we became sensitive to gentle touch and rough play, I was still reserved with Aviva. I knew the importance of eye contact for Baruch but had not thought how much I could learn by looking into Aviva’s eyes, hadn’t known until I saw her react to the texture of the sand that she could smile, hadn’t thought to interpret her vocalizations.

  Our bond deepened when I began to attend, to feel the way she took in the scent of me and relaxed in my arms, to see her open her mouth for the pureed banana, spit out the yogurt, a clear sign of displeasure, move close to sip the café au lait avidly, vocalize for the vanilla ice cream, even letting me help her use the spoon to scoop.

  By the time the stables were built, I began talking to Aviva when she and I were alone. The voice rose naturally, as if it had always been inside me, waiting for release. It was a tender voice, like mothers use with children, but not baby talk, though the register was softer, higher pitched. I don’t believe what I said made a difference to her. Perhaps it was like music. Human music that settled her when we were together, that settled me. I took off her slipper socks, massaged her feet and the voice came from inside me, along with songs and pet names. Vivi. Avivi. Sweetie. Honey. I’d disliked pet names meant to placate and manipulate. Softened by Baruch’s love, the names that came out unbidden, when I was with Aviva—sweetpea, sweetheart, sweetie pie, honey pie, peanut—were more like the twittering of a bird, calling to its mate. I stopped being self-conscious, stopped worrying who might hear.

  I never told Baruch how surprised I’d been that this voice was inside me—for Aviva, for him. I didn’t tell him what it was like to see I could take care of someone who loved me in return, and someone who liked my tending and touching.

  And then: saying goodbye to Aviva in a cheerful way. Pausing on my way out to greet residents or staff, amiable, composed, fine as I stepped through the double doors. Then outside, weeping.

  When I teared up with Baruch, he embraced and kissed me. “Don’t be sad, my love. It won’t be long.” Aviva could not tell me she was sad, could not say, “We will count the days together, love.” There could be no final embrace to carry me through the next weeks. I could not tell her, “Soon I will be back, love,” and promise to sing to her, massage her fingers and toes and tuck her into bed. Now when I read accounts of parents who stopped visiting, saying it was too wrenching to leave, I understood something of what they felt. I was not grateful for the pain.
It did not bring me wisdom, make me a better person, or prepare me for the later anguish. I bore it because I wanted to see my sister: in this way, it was about me. When I was home, I worried about her wellbeing because she could not tell me if someone had harmed her.

  Once, filled with the determination to bring Aviva home, I asked Jill to explain the way families got funds for children with disabilities, and she went on at length about county money and federal money, funding streams and waiting lists and people I might contact. By daylight, all the cracks in my sentimental picture were illuminated. Would Aviva’s life be better with me? What if I bought a new house with big windows and was home with her each night? I could get aides to come in when I went to work. But the pool, the greenhouse, the fragrant gardens, the voices of others she’d long known, the horses for her to ride? How would it better her life to take her away from her home? How could I bring her all that she had at present?

  It took me a long time to agree with the disgruntled daughter I’d met at Thanksgiving. The old model of institutions should not be restored any more than the old model of dictators, no matter how benign. Aviva, my sister, had suffered misfortune twice, at birth and at my mother’s hands, but she had landed in an unusual place, as I had; so I, who could travel, flew to Israel, swam with Aviva, massaged her calves and feet with warm towels, brought ice cream and café au lait, surprised myself by hearing all the endearments that were inside me, and all the music lodged there—show tunes, folksongs, arias, songs by crooners, rockers, and divas. “Doe a deer,” and “Lean on Me,” “I Feel Pretty,” “Day-O,” “Born to Run.” Then swimming, the three of us, and afterwards Baruch and I checking into the spa, where we made love in the king-sized bed, showered and dressed in the thick robes, made cups of tea with fresh spearmint or peppermint leaves and wandered in the lobby like the other patients.