“Decide for myself? I was his wife, for Christ’s sake! Just the way he said it made me realize where I stood with him even then. He honestly thought it was enough to be Bighearted Jake and let me tag along. But what if I wanted to do something else at that moment in our life? Did he care? N-O. Rick the Prick. I think that’s when I named him that. Rick the Prick. ‘You have to decide for yourself about your own space.’ Can you imagine saying that to your wife?”
As gently as possible I asked, “Then why’d you go?”
“Because I loved him. I couldn’t get enough of him.”
Her parents, who had been giving liberally for years to Israel, thought it was a great idea and financed their trip. They lived on the kibbutz three months, both of them working in its cardboard factory until Rick had a fistfight with one of the managers and the Aarons were on the road again. They went to France, where Lily caught hepatitis and ended up in the hospital. The last straw was her husband coming to her bedside, aglow with excitement, saying he’d met a man in a café who was an editor in London. This guy read some of Rick’s poetry and wanted to publish him. Would Lily mind if he flew up there for a few days and talked to the people?
“I was so excited for him, Max. There I was in a French hospital, feeling two steps from death but telling him to use my parents’ money to fly to London. God, he was gone two weeks!”
Like a rock climber going up a sheer face, Lily’s love for her husband had reached the point where there were absolutely no handholds left with which to move further. It was as if the surface she was climbing had gone from craggy granite at the low points to brushed aluminum now way up higher where any slip meant death. Unless you are mad, you look for other ways to get over this. On discovering there are none, you climb down. Lily climbed down. Or rather, the day she left the hospital she used the last of their money and bought a plane ticket home.
No great love ever really ends. We can shoot it with a gun or stick it in the back of the darkest closet of our hearts, but it’s clever; it knows how to survive. It can find its way out and shock us by reappearing when we were so damn sure it was dead or at least safely hidden beneath piles of other things.
Rick reappeared. Shaven, contrite, he reminded her of a man who was entering the priesthood. Suffice it to say she fell for him again. She had read an interview with an aging actress who said she loved the wrinkles on her face because each one came from a different man in her life. Lily had no lines on her face but well understood what this woman was talking about. She felt scarred by her husband, felt he had caused her spirit to walk with a limp. But he also knew how to wake the dead in her because it had never really died—only hibernated. It took time but he succeeded. She got pregnant again. She was twenty-three.
A year after Lincoln was born, his father walked into a market in Windsor, Connecticut. He bought a pack of cigarettes, but before the cashier had his change, the handsome man with the long hair collapsed and died of heart failure.
When Lincoln grew old enough to understand and began asking questions about his father, Lily told him the story of their relationship. He could not understand how she could love someone so much but end up hating him. Neither could he understand how this wonderful man could treat his even more wonderful mother so badly. She answered as best she could, but like a psychiatrist who rephrases the same question again and again to get to the heart of the matter, the boy never stopped grilling her about the subject.
After I began to gain his trust, he put me on the hot seat and asked why I thought these things had happened between the two most important people in his life. I was reading every child psychology book I could find, but there were so many different and valid ways to respond to his questions that I was often at a real loss as to what to say. How many times did I come up with the perfect answer to Lincoln’s questions, but too late? Too damned many. Also there was the difficulty of not saying what I really felt about Rick in front of his son. I thought the man was a selfish, unconscionable bastard. I couldn’t say that to Lincoln. But I wanted him to trust me. I knew I would never be able to replace his father, but if I could become a trusted friend, that was good enough. I was realizing that to gain a child’s trust you must be adept at being both adult and child at the same time. You must show who’s boss but make them happy and at ease with that power. Lily did it beautifully. As a result, she’d single-handedly raised her son to be a secure, self-confident fellow who was generally fair and willing to listen to reason.
What I found most interesting was how much I enjoyed living with both of them. They were like two new exotic tastes or smells that startle you at first but make you want more a moment later. Lily sang in the bath, read herself to sleep every night, liked sex first thing in the morning followed by a big breakfast. When she argued or got angry she often became unfair and overemotional. She expected me to do things but wouldn’t always say what they were until I’d exasperated her and she started to fume. It was hard calming her down. It was easy making her laugh. From the beginning I knew how much I liked and wanted her. It came as a genuine shock how quickly I grew to love her.
Lincoln was different. Actually living with a child for the first time, I was constantly stopped in my tracks by both his presence and his perception. People are forever commenting on the different ways men and women see the world and how astonishing it is that we get along nevertheless. That’s certainly true, but even more implausible is how adults and children function together on the same plane. They are more comfortable in life, we are more informed about it. Both see the other’s vision as unreal and often ridiculous.
“Max, I have to tell you this terrible dream I had last night. I was being chased down a street by guys with big bags of salt. They caught me and said they were going to put my fingers in it. And then they did!” He sat back, satisfied. Nothing could be worse than your hand in a bag of salt. His expression said anyone in their right mind understood how terrible it was and what an ordeal he’d undergone just making it through the night in one piece. An adult would feel foolish even telling this dream. Lincoln was shaken by it. In sharing, he was giving me the radical gifts of his fear and wonder. Things like this are not small. They are not cute or sweet or kids say the darndest things. I was expected not only to listen, but to understand. His standards were high. If I was going to live with him, share his mother and his life, I would be tested continually until he reached a conclusion. I had no say in it. There were no in-betweens. Triumph or failure. He would be the only judge.
But having him there was also delightful much of the time. I walked him to school most mornings. We talked about everything and he knew he was allowed to ask whatever questions he wanted, particularly man’s stuff. As a result, I once found myself leaning on a mailbox doing a quick sketch of a vagina, which he took but immediately shoved into his back pocket. “Do you mind if I look at it later? I’m kind of embarrassed.” While riding in the car one time he sniffed his armpit, sniffed it again and said, “I’m beginning to smell like a man.” He wanted to know about my family, my old girlfriends, what I was like when I was young. He confided he wasn’t popular at school because he was too bossy and impatient. I agreed he was bossy, but interesting too, which canceled out the other. Lily said he asked her for a picture of me to carry in his wallet, but not to tell. The three of us went to Disneyland, Marineland, the wrestling matches. There’s a photo of Tackhead Frank Cornish holding an ecstatic Lincoln Aaron over his head as if about to throw the kid ten rows out into the audience. In the next shot, blown up to poster size and on the wall of his room, Lincoln’s standing with his foot on the downed giant’s chest, victorious. We ate hamburgers and played video games way past his bedtime. We shared reading stories with Lily.