“No,” I said. “You should have.”
“Don, let’s go.” Somehow, his wife mustered the stamina to move him. He half-stumbled backward on the walk. “We’re old people,” he said weakly. “Our kids used to play in this garden — ”
“Don.” Mrs. Ward took him by the shoulders and nodded toward their car. From across the street she glanced at me. “God bless you,” she said.
“What’s Ziomism?” Haley asked me in the car, on our way back from Boys and Girls.
“Zionism? Where’d you hear that word?”
She showed me a pamphlet she’d picked up from the local synagogue. It was for Young Judea Summer Camp. “I want to go, but my daddy says they’ll turn me into a raving Ziomist.”
Bill, Jean’s ex, was raised Protestant, and it had always been an open sore in their marriage that he only half-assedly supported Jean’s efforts to introduce Haley to Judaism. Jean wasn’t devout, but she loved the holiday rituals, the culture, and wanted Haley to treasure them too.
I wasn’t sure how to answer Haley’s question. “Well, as I understand it — and I’m not an expert, okay, not by a long shot — it’s a movement among Israelis, and other Jews around the world, to expand Israel’s borders.”
“You mean, make it bigger?”
“Make it bigger, yes.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Have you heard of Palestinians?”
“Mm-hm.”
“They claim some of the same land Israel does.”
“I know that. I’ve learned that already.”
“Good. Well, lots of people, including many Jews, feel that Israel shouldn’t expand. It should just stay where it is — and the Palestinians should accept them, too — so everyone can live in peace.” I didn’t know how historically or politically accurate I was being. I’d probably just butchered all the facts and — who knows? — scarred her for life.
“My daddy says his heart will be brokender than it already is if I turn to Mom’s people and be a raving Ziomist.”
“I have to say, honey …” I’d never spoken against Bill, never criticized him or questioned his authority in front of Haley. “I don’t think your daddy should tell you things like that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not fair to your mom. Plus it’s too much of a burden on you for him to ask you to carry his emotional weight.”
“Huh?”
“He needs to solve his own problems.” Was I saying the right thing? Or greedily claiming ownership?
I remembered, then, the day, two and a half years ago, when Jean and I told Haley we were going to live together. She’d giggled nervously and appeared not to register what we’d said. Later, at lunch in her favorite Mexican restaurant, she picked up a plastic fork. “This one’s for you,” she told me, and snapped the fork in half.
“Don’t use her like that!” Jean yelled into the kitchen phone. “She’s not your mother. Or your girlfriend.”
I had just come in from dumping the trash. I rubbed my hands, locked the door behind me. Whenever the air was chilly, I became aware of the dead spots in my chest and thigh, where the surgeon had “harvested” a vein for the bypass. He had told me I might never get feeling back in certain nerves, which had been disturbed by the procedure.
“She’s talking to my daddy,” Haley said casually, glancing up from the floor where she’d spread her multiplication problems. Her cat purred beside her. “She’s mad about the Ziomism thing.”
“Oh.”
“You shouldn’t have told her,” she said.
“Told her what, sweetie?”
“Told her what my daddy said about his heart.”
“Well, I’m her mother!” Jean said, lowering her voice and retreating into a corner away from us. “She’s not your private property!”
Haley aimed a purple pencil at me. “You really shouldn’t have.”
It’s not Haley who’s waiting for me to die. Jean’s fears for my health seized her in our earliest days together, before either of us knew I had heart problems. Her anxiety is related to her father’s death, of leukemia, when she was nineteen and he was fifty-eight. She was traveling when he died so she didn’t get to tell him goodbye. Her psychiatrist-brother in L.A. tells her she suffers from “lack of closure,” which has distilled into guilt, so now she feels responsible for her dad’s death — and fears our ultimate separation.
One afternoon, as we lay in bed together, sipping margaritas after making love, I touched my palm to her chest and she began to cry. “I think I’m grieving for my father,” she said, surprised.
I don’t understand how one intimacy ripples into others, but Jean admitted that day that love and grief are strongly twinned for her, bound up not only in memories of her father but in love’s structure: life’s irresistible attraction to other life, the urgency, the energy, then the surprisingly swift falling-off after life has done its work. Just as someone, knowing she’s about to leave a place, can feel homesick before she’s moved, Jean, after making love, feels wistful already for her body and mine. She’s mourning our losses in advance.
We fell in love when we were both in our early forties, and her melancholy is magnified, I suspect, by the fact that we middle-aged people — old enough to know better, at least — felt happier, sillier, more erotic than we ever had before. Time seemed pliable, warped — all the sweeter for being short. We felt we’d discovered our youth for the first time, just as it seemed we were on the brink of letting go of it, gracefully.
From the beginning, she worried about my slightest cough, skin blemish, or exhaustion at night. I’d kid her about her misplaced hypochondria. Once, she came right out and admitted she feared she’d lose me early. I joked about her romantic streak: her favorite movie was Truly, Madly, Deeply, the story of a young widow whose love for her husband is so intense that his ghost returns each night to schmooze with her. M. F. K. Fisher, Jean’s favorite writer, was an early widow.
When Jean and I bought the house from the Wards, Haley was six. We fixed her room up to look almost exactly like her room at her daddy’s house, ten blocks away. Our house was in a neighborhood of run-down student rentals, once-proud bungalows that had been trashed over five decades. The Wards had lived here for thirty-seven years — nine kids! — and though we hated their taste (what were those people thinking?), we were grateful they’d left intact the Craftsman-style wood trim and had maintained the place beautifully. Two blocks away was the campus, where Jean and I taught literature. Convenience, old-fashioned charm, plenty of room … we felt lucky, but still, Jean seemed to skulk around waiting for judgment to fall. I wondered if the pain she felt, dissolving her marriage — though she’d been miserable with Bill — had mixed with her father-guilt to crush her joy. We were two of our circle’s straightest arrows, not religious, but fair-minded, traditionally moral. Unlikely partners for an affair. Yet here we were. Transgressors, against society and all of society’s gods. Surely we wouldn’t — shouldn’t — get away with this.
When Jean first heard that the Levin place might be destroyed, she took it as a sign that her fears were on target. The Angel of Doom in the shape of a backhoe. Purely by coincidence, we learned the news on Passover. “That’s right, get the Jews,” she muttered, reading the city’s notice.
My attempts to laugh away her worries had ended about sixteen months after we’d moved into the house. One night, during love, I doubled over with chest pains. She drove me to the emergency room. Doctors told me I’d narrowly missed “keeling over, kaput.” Two days later, a cardiac surgeon opened me up, as we’d done to our kitchen pass-through, and performed a double bypass.