The Last of the Wise Lovers

  Your announcement that you were having difficulties aroused my fear that perhaps I shouldn't trouble you with my problems; but Mom's taut face reminded me of all that had happened in the last few days and of all - far worse - that was liable to happen.

  At the first opportunity I leaned toward you and said, "There's something I have to talk to you about."

  "Yes, of course," you said, getting up from your chair to find a place where we could talk.

  And from that moment on, Mom did everything she could to keep us from getting a chance to talk. Maybe it was just my imagination (since I do have an overactive one) or maybe it was just a fleeting sensation - though after all, it was you who taught me never to ignore fleeting sensations, since they usually signaled unformed observations - but how else could I explain why Mom moved the snacks to a small table, which she then placed between us; or why she started asking you about Rosh Hashanah services, and about how you'd send her the tickets to the Temple; or why she tried to encourage Aunt Ida to tell all about her trip from Chicago (you didn't look too interested, but you listened politely); or why she chattered on about another four or five inconsequential things?

  I suppose she was afraid that I'd go blabbing to you about what had happened in the Lincoln Tunnel, or else embarrass her in some other way. But the more she displayed resistance, the more anxious I became. The need to talk to you became an urge I couldn't shake. At last, when you got up to go to the bathroom, I saw my chance. I waited for you by the bathroom door, and when you came out I managed to say, "I don't know where to start...” before Mom appeared (again!) and asked you whether you planned to stay for dinner.

  At least you managed to pay attention to me for a minute. "Girl trouble?" you asked.

  Maybe to get your attention and maybe because Mom was there, I said, "something like that." (In a sense that was true - at least it was part of the problem.)

  As usual you didn't want to leave me hanging, so you said, "Since you work at that library, not far from me, what d'you say we get together and have a talk one of these evenings, like in the good old days?"

  I said, "Great." I wanted to set it up with you for the following night, but Mom had already dragged you into the dining room.

  I didn't give up. I stuck around during the whole meal and after, until we all went out to see you to your car - that is, all except for Dad, who said goodbye to you in the house and started clearing the table (and gobbling up the leftovers). Mom walked next to you. Aunt Ida walked behind you and I was behind her. I could swear Mom was trying to whisper something to you about Aunt Ida, but Aunt Ida was well versed in family intrigue and stuck close by until her eagerness landed her in the rose bed. Mom rushed back to help her up - probably because she felt guilty for conspiring with you. I took a few big steps to get past them both and finally caught up to you.

  You were already fed up with the visit, or else peeved at something Mom had said to you. You were as patient as usual, but you didn't seem too interested or enthusiastic.

  "So, what is it Ronny," you said, "a matter of love. . ?"

  "No, a matter of...” I searched for a word that would express what was happening, and "fear" was the only one I could come up with.

  As usual, you placed your hand on my shoulder. A large, heavy hand, yet not oppressive. Your lips parted as if you were about to say something, but Mom was already behind us (I knew it without her making a sound, without my turning around, just from something that flickered across your eyes) and you hesitated.

  Finally you said, "Actually, there's not much difference between the two. When it's a matter of love and fear, the question is usually whether to respond or not...”

  That sounded right, but it didn't solve any of my problems. Mom, however, reacted nervously - maybe because she was afraid I'd said something about something she'd rather forget. Aunt Ida was leaning on her arm, and she gingerly passed her over to my arm.

  "Take her inside," she said in a manner that left no room for argument.

  I led Aunt Ida along the path. Suddenly she stopped and motioned me closer.

  "Bad things are going on here, Ronny, very bad things." I nodded and started to walk a little faster before she could start in with one of her confounded explanations, but she kept mum until we got inside.

  Mom came in a little after I heard your car pull away. She was very uptight and right away started bickering with Aunt Ida over something unimportant. Dad went off to sleep, and I also went off to my room. Aunt Ida was still upset, and as I dozed off I could hear her rummaging around restlessly in the living room. Later that night, I woke to find her standing over my bed.

  "Bad things are going on," she repeated.

  I turned the light on. She was wearing a heavy brown coat over her nightgown. Her neck and chest were as crumpled as used wrapping paper. But her breasts, glimpsed through the torn neckline, were smooth, beautiful. I cast my eyes down, so as not to see. She took it to be something else.

  "Don't fall asleep now, Ronny, don't fall asleep," she insisted, pulling the blanket off me. "We have to see where she's going."

  The word "she" changed everything. I leapt out of bed. Aunt Ida raced ahead down the hall. At the entrance to the kitchen she ducked, so as not to be visible through the window of the dining alcove. We crouched forward on the linoleum, inching up to the porch door.

  "He divested Marvin of everything," she whispered, "and now they want to strip me of all I've got." For a moment I felt ridiculous crawling along the floor with an old and vengeful woman who was oozing out of an ancient nightgown. But by the time we reached the porch I felt quite differently.

  We had to strain our eyes to see. Mom sat in the dark on one of the three stone steps in front of the house. I pulled out the spring in the screen door so that it would stay open without slamming against the frame. Crouching next to the railing among the geraniums, Aunt Ida was swallowed by the darkness.

  It's hard to say how long we waited like that, Mom, Aunt Ida, and me. I just remember it was cool, and dew covered everything. Suddenly two headlights lit up the street. A car passed in front of the house and disappeared. There was nothing special about it, just any old car with a long shadow and a hump, an Olds or a Ford. In any case, Mom got up and started walking. She walked for two or three minutes to the place where the road bends and a large maple tree grows right on the edge of the sidewalk. She waited there for a brief moment, then turned around and came back home. This time she didn't go back to her stoop, but skipped over it and went inside by the main door.

  "Aunt Ida," I said, then immediately shut up. Inside the kitchen, right next to us, the light came on. Mom was looking for something in the freezer. Suddenly she noticed the open screen door, and she peered outside. She looked right at us, at me and Aunt Ida, but didn't pick us out in the darkness. She pulled on the spring I'd removed and replaced it. The door slammed noisily. Mom went back to poking around the freezer, then took out something square, wrapped in plastic. She took off the plastic wrapping but she didn't place the contents in a bowl, like she usually does when she wants to defrost something.

  It was her notebook, and from where I crouched I could even make out that the first page was covered with crowded scrawl. She went inside, probably to the bedroom to write sitting next to Dad - nothing could wake him, anyway.

  "Aunt Ida," I touched the arm next to me. It was cold and inert. A moment later, after I'd already thought of all the most horrible consequences, she woke up.

  "I'll keep watch now," she said, without opening her eyes. "You go to sleep."

  I opened the screen door. The car that had passed down our street came back and passed our house. Only then I realized how lucky it was that I hadn't yet gone inside. For a moment the headlights lit up the living room, where Mom was sitting, looking out. I carefully closed the door and went back outside. The car glided down the street. When it got to the maple tree, it stopped for a few seconds. No more - just a few seconds in which the brake lights flared, washing the trunk in red
light - before it vanished.

  Mom got up and went to the windowsill, sighing as if she'd completed some task, and again disappeared somewhere inside the house. I went down to the garden and got into my room by climbing through the window. Aunt Ida stayed on the porch, dampening with dew.

  The next day I woke early, dressed quickly, and went off down the street. I stood next to the maple tree and looked around. Nothing special. Just an old tree with lots of knots and notches and dead branches. I had to know what had made Mom walk out here, what had made that unidentified car stop here in the middle of the night. I went over every inch of the trunk, until I discovered a deep notch. The tree was full of them, scars from branches that had fallen, except that all the other notches were full of moss and squirrels' nests, and only this one was empty and hollow, as if it had been cleaned out. There were fresh tire tracks in the dirt by the side of the road. Those on the edge ran right next to the tree, so close that the driver must have scraped his car door on the trunk, just as I'd scraped against the wall of the Lincoln Tunnel.

  And then, maybe because of the Lincoln Tunnel, I had a brainstorm: I stood on the tire tracks, bent my knees forward and stuck my ass out as if I were sitting down, and extended my arm out of an imaginary car window. It reached straight into the notch.

  I still wasn't ready to admit what I knew. It took the entire trip on the bus, the walk from Port Authority to the library, and standing behind my counter until Ms. Yardley had tired of me, before I understood what anyone who goes to see a c-movie understands without trying: Mom had put something in the notch in the tree, the car had stopped there for a minute, and whoever had been in it had reached out and taken that something.

  *

  What happened next had to do with Mr. K. I don't know who -besides you - will see these pages, and I wouldn't write it down unless I was certain that no one could do him any harm any more.

  At about nine he arrived at work and, as usual, passed through the Catalog Room. He didn't say anything as he walked past and didn't stare his usual straight-ahead absent stare; he looked right at me and indicated with his head that I should come upstairs.

  After a minute I found an excuse to go up there. When I came in, he jumped up and turned the lock on the door. This time it seemed that all his aches and pains had vanished. He still had those circles under his eyes, but his movements were no longer sluggish and the expression of pain his face usually wore had been almost completely erased. On the desk in front of him was the envelope with the slide. "How did you get involved in this?" he asked.

  I could still permit myself to assume that the word "involved" represented a kind of humor, and not danger.

  I said: "I found it."

  "Where?"

  Now his voice sounded severe. I was silent.

  "Do you know what the letters `T. S.' stand for?"

  "No."

  "Top Secret." He reached inside his desk and deftly pulled out a piece of paper. "Here, this is the system to which the diagram on the slide corresponds." It was a quick and imprecise drawing of a large machine. "I copied it from the description of a government requisition. The secret details had been erased and I reconstructed them as best I could according to my knowledge."

  Together the lines formed a kind of large turbine.

  "An engine?" I asked.

  "Of a missile."

  "A missile?"

  "Agitator. Actually, it's called FM40, but `agitator' sounds better to the senators who have to ratify budgets. You can read about the political debacle surrounding this missile in any newspaper, but the technical details are an official United States secret. I'm breaking the law by talking about it, you're breaking the law by holding on to this slide, and whoever lost it was also breaking the law...” He peered at it in front of the window. "The part that's in your diagram is the one that draws in gases from the combustion chamber and distributes them in four different directions. That's how you get the revolutionary effect. The missile is projected as it revolves around itself, like a giant screw. If you add a suitable warhead...”

  "If the technical details are secret, how do you know them?"

  He wasn't insulted by my doubting him, and I interpreted this to be some sort of credit I had with him.

  "I dealt with this once," he said.

  "Were you an engineer?"

  "Not exactly."

  For a moment I wondered whether he'd tell me what brought him to a wooden cubicle in the corridor of a municipal library in New York, but then I started thinking about the slide, which I now had to get back into my possession. Finally I just grabbed it, with the envelope, and got up.

  He didn't show any intent to stop me, but said, "If I were in your shoes I'd burn it and forget the whole incident."

  That's exactly what I intended to do. Mom's doings worried me enough, and I didn't have any interest in fallout from Dad's spy business.

  The look on my face must have given away what I was thinking, because he said, hesitantly, "It seems to me you have some sort of a problem... if you need anything, perhaps just someone to talk to...” and he gave me a look that invited me to sit down again, which I did after a moment's hesitation. It's not hard to understand why: I was lonely, confused, in need of someone who would listen. Otherwise it's hard to say why I trusted him, of all people. Because he spoke some Hebrew? But as I've already explained, Hebrew works no magic on me; and actually, the last Hebrew-speaker I'd encountered had caused a lot of trouble. The fact that he knew his way around the inside of a missile? The missile wasn't important, or at least didn't seem to be just then. I think the answer lay in a mixture of different, perhaps contradictory characteristics that I divined in him: sensitivity mixed with aloofness, wisdom mingled with ingenuousness, organized thinking disguised by a disorganized, informal manner.

  So I sat down opposite him. He gathered all the books, papers, tissues, orange peels, candy wrappers, thumbtacks and paper clips into one pile and pushed them to the corner of his desk, underneath the globe lamp, revealing a worn blotter. I began to talk. At a certain point he again opened his desk drawer and took out a piece of paper, and asked my permission to take notes. I nodded yes. He wrote down a few details (the ones that seemed to me to be least important, like he address of The Society for Proper Nutrition and Care of the Body, or the dates of Dad's trips). When I finished, the paper was full of large squares, most of them filled in but some of them still vacant.

  "Do you think I'm crazy?" I asked.

  He didn't answer, just put question marks inside the empty squares.

  "The slide," he said quietly. "How does it fit in to the whole story?"

  "It doesn't. It has something to do with... something else."

  "Your father?"

  "No," I said immediately.

  He was silent. It took all the will I had to return his stare with a steady gaze.

  "If you really want help, you should tell me the truth." He looked down at the paper. "We have a slide showing part of the propulsion system of a missile. The fact that it's in your hands, together with the fact that your father is here in an official capacity, leads me to believe that your father received this slide from someone, possibly through theft, in order to pass it on, possibly to Israel. In the meantime, your mother is being threatened by someone who talks of... well, of murder, and who is possibly trying to send her on a vacation of a dubious nature. Two unusual circumstances in one family. Chance? Perhaps. But if we consider that this missile is the hottest thing in military technology this year, and it's reasonable that all sorts of parties would like to get their hands on it...” apparently, the pain started up again. He began to writhe in his chair from one uncomfortable position to another. "Something here smacks of more than just coincidence. Somehow, in a way that I don't quite understand, you are the axis connecting two circumstances: the one that motivates your father, and the one that threatens your mother...” He stuck out his lower lip and thought a moment. "Therefore," again he looked me in the eye, "I sense there's some
thing else that you haven't told me...”

  I hesitated. He didn't push me, and that's what caused me to finally tell about the events of the previous night - the car with the hump and the notch in the tree. When I finished there were a few more squares filled in on his sheet of paper. He kept looking at them, thinking, and then said in a very soft voice that was almost a whisper, "What's the chance that someone is photographing these diagrams of the missile while they're in your father's possession, and putting them in the notch in the tree so that they'll be passed on?"

  I stared at the slide until it became a blurry black spot in the center of the desk. My ears burned. My temples pounded with pain. From beyond the beating of my heart I could hear his voice.

  "This slide is part of an entire series, apparently an unsuccessful copy that someone intended to discard...” I recalled Mom busying herself in the basement on the night I came back from the Lincoln Tunnel, the scraps of celluloid in the garbage disposal, the polaroid camera in her crate of books, and something else: the story she tells whenever my grades are too low for her taste, about her dream of becoming an engineer, about universities that refused to admit Jews, and about how she compromised by registering for the photography course at the People's Institute of Technology in Bucharest.

  "What would you do in my place?" I asked.

  "I don't know who's threatening your mother or who's using her, and I also don't know who's giving your father this material or where it goes after it leaves his hands; but what's clear is that things like this blow up even when they're handled in secret, as they should be. In this situation, since so many factors are involved, I don't know what to advise...” He started to break up the pile under the lamp: books, papers, paper clips, thumbtacks. "Just keep your eyes peeled, maybe do something if the need arises."

  I felt a little abandoned by him, even betrayed. "Do what?"

  "At the moment, how can you possibly know?"

  It was all too heavy and depressing for me to bear. "This guy, the one who's going to die, I won't be able to live with the thought that I could've...”