American Stranger Read online

Nancy thought that surely Aaron must be wondering if she was going to walk all the way with him, wherever all the way was, but, again, she let herself drift along.

  They stopped on a corner for the light to change, and Nancy became aware of him standing beside her, of his body beneath his sweatshirt and chinos. Aaron didn’t move even when the light changed, and Nancy, to get him moving, nudged him a little with her hip.

  In the middle of the street, he asked, “Are you sure you don’t want a taxi now?”

  He had a deliberate way of talking, as if studied, and, as studied as it was, she wondered if he meant he wanted her to leave him.

  “Well, I’m not going to walk through the park at night,” she said.

  He said, “I wouldn’t let you,” and she followed him as they crossed the street to the next block. Not knowing what he wanted, not having known all the time they’d walked together, she followed him when he turned at Eighty-Ninth Street, and she went with him and they crossed Columbus Avenue to continue down Eighty-Ninth Street, and when he stopped in front of a brownstone, where he said he lived, she stopped with him. All the restlessness of the late summer night seemed to be her restlessness, not his.

  As if she hadn’t quite understood, she asked, “So this is where you live?”

  He repeated, “This is where I live.”

  She heard herself ask, as if she were at a distance from her speaking self, “Do you want me to come in?”

  Blinking, he smiled, but now not the smile she liked: a smile of only the corners of his lips that she read as, he was sorry, but all he had wanted was the walk, and it was time to say goodnight.

  What had he been thinking on their walk? Whatever he’d been thinking she didn’t want to know. Once again, she had a sense that he was alone, and she felt alone with him, as if each being alone was what had kept them walking together.

  She thought: You could read anything you wanted into someone’s silence.

  Yet she said, “I’d understand if you don’t want me to come up.”

  “No, no,” he said, but she could tell he didn’t want her to.

  “Then, with all the walking we’ve done, I wouldn’t mind sitting down for ten minutes.”

  “Oh sure,” Aaron said, but he didn’t move.

  “So,” Nancy asked, “I mean, if you don’t want me to come up, I’ll sit for ten minutes on the step here. Maybe you feel it’s wrong to be alone with a woman, especially in an apartment.”

  “I don’t have an apartment, just a room.”

  “Is that what you don’t want me to see, that you live in just one room?”

  “I’m not ashamed of living in one room.”

  “But you are about having a woman in it with you.”

  “Sometimes women have come up to visit me.”

  “Alone?”

  He blinked rapidly and his tight smile had gone. “Sometimes alone.”

  “Then there has to be something in your room you don’t want me to see.”

  He said, “There’s nothing in my room I wouldn’t want anyone in the world to see.”

  And he touched Nancy’s elbow to lead her up the steep cement steps to the stoop. His movements as he took his keys from the hip pocket of his chinos became easy; his entire way of moving suddenly became easy. He swung open the wide front door, with three small Gothic windows in it, for Nancy to go in first.

  In the entranceway, lit by a dim overhead globe, she said, “This house is so quiet.”

  Aaron said, “It’s always quiet.”

  He didn’t seem to know if he should lead the way up the stairs or let her go first and follow her, and Nancy took it on herself to go up the wooden stairs, dark brown and varnished, with wooden spheres on the newel posts. The stairs creaked. She stopped on a landing and let him go ahead of her to his room, which was two more flights up, at the back.

  He unlocked the door, then held out his hand for Nancy to go in first.

  The small room had wainscoting, in Gothic arches, all around the walls. A lot of the furniture, too, was Gothic—a long, refectory-like table, a chair with a Gothic back, a bookcase that was a tall, narrow Gothic arch. The bed, covered by an old khaki army blanket, was pushed against a small fireplace, and above the mantel of the fireplace hung a crucifix. Nancy stopped short before it. The body was matte white, the face of Christ raised and staring up in agony, and the cross was black. Aaron passed in front of Nancy to open a window.

  He said, “It’s hot in here, and, I’m sorry, there’s a closed-in smell of not very clean laundry.”

  Nancy turned away from the crucifix to face Aaron, who would not in her presence even look at the figure of Christ crucified, as if he knew she would embarrass herself by asking him why he, a Jew, an Orthodox Jew, had a crucifix hanging in his room; but it was just this question that she wanted to ask, but didn’t because she didn’t want to embarrass him, so there they were, two Jews, not able to speak about a presence that now appeared to hang over them in the room.

  “Would you like some cold tea?” Aaron asked her.

  “That would be nice,” she answered quietly.

  He left her to go behind a screen to his small kitchen. She sat at the foot of the military-like bed. The table was covered with books, some lying open, and papers. Aaron came toward her with two tall glasses of tea, ice cubes clinking.

  “You’re studying,” she said.

  “I’ve been studying all summer.”

  “What?”

  “Oh,” he said, and once again shrugged.

  Nancy put her glass on the floor and, weary, asked, “I need to lie down. Can I lie on your bed?”

  “I’ll need to change the pillow case,” Aaron said.

  “It’ll be all right.” She put the glass of tea, hardly drunk, on a corner of the table; she untied the laces and kicked off her espadrilles and lay back on Aaron’s bed, her head on his pillow. She closed her eyes, then opened them and saw Aaron, sitting on the wooden chair, watching her. She asked, “Will you lie beside me? Just lie beside me, that’s all.”

  He took off his shoes and came to the bed. Putting one knee on the edge, he swiveled his body round and lay flat beside her, his arms alongside his body, his head at the edge of the pillow. He swallowed a lot, which made his neck convulse. Though he closed his eyes, she knew from his swallowing and convulsing neck that he didn’t fall asleep. When she touched his shoulder, he opened his eyes, but didn’t look at her.

  “I am embarrassing you,” she said.

  “A little,” he said.

  Then she closed her eyes and, wondering where she was and what she was doing there, she fell asleep. She woke to find him asleep beside her, his body turned towards her, his arms tightly folded about his chest, his knees bent, his face half pressed into the pillow. The yellowish ceiling light was still on, but the gray-blue dawn light through the window was stronger. Quietly, so as not to disturb him, Nancy got up, slipped on her espadrilles and tied the laces, then went out and closed the door behind her.

  Outside, she found the dawn sky reddish and reflected in the windshields of the cars parked along the empty street.

  The doorman who had the night shift came out and opened the taxi door for her. In the apartment, she looked around the rooms.

  In the bathroom off her bedroom she showered and brushed her teeth. Wrapped in a large towel, another towel around her head, she again looked around the apartment. Nothing in it, not one thing, would have indicated to someone who didn’t know that the people who lived there were Jewish.

  She slept, and in the afternoon called Vinnie to ask for Aaron’s telephone number.

  “I don’t think you should get involved with Aaron. He’ll be leaving New York soon.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know everything.”

  “Where will he be going?”

  “Listen,�
�� Vinnie said, “don’t get involved. You have nothing in common with him, nothing at all. Forget about him.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I’m telling you again, forget about him.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Vinnie invited her to a party that night. She didn’t want to go, but she said she would. It was Saturday, and she always wanted to go out on a Saturday.

  Sunday morning, her parents returned from Amagansett. Her mother said that Nancy was right, the Hamptons got lonely with all the people gone; and anyway it was time to get back to the city, where Nancy’s father had been coming to work during the week.

  She had brunch with her parents in a small restaurant on an East Side cross street, and afterward she said she’d do some shopping. The sky was low and gray, the lowness and grayness seeming to reach down to the ground, and the air was suddenly chill. She didn’t go shopping when she left her parents, but walked over to Central Park. In the chill she drew the silk scarf from about her neck, covered her head with it, and tied the corners under her chin, and she walked slowly, as if she weren’t going anyplace but had come into the park just to stroll. She left by the Eighty-Second Street exit and went up to Eighty-Ninth Street and west on it to the house with steep cement steps leading to a high stoop and the wide wooden door with the three Gothic windows, where Aaron lived. She examined the names, each with a black button by it, at the side of the door. Only one space was blank. She pressed the bell and as she did she leaned toward the door to listen for the sound of a bell ringing from deep inside, but she heard nothing. As no one came to the door, she turned away. On the sidewalk, she looked up once more at the wooden front door of the house. Then the door opened and Aaron Cohen, in brown corduroy trousers and a dark brown cardigan, stepped out onto the stoop.

  She called up, “You’re here?”

  “I guess I am,” he answered.

  “Vinnie told me not to bother you.”

  “Vinnie is filled with advice he gives to other people but never gives to himself.”

  “That’s Vinnie.”

  Under the cardigan, Aaron wore a white shirt, the collar open, and around his neck was a thin gold chain, and Nancy wondered if some religious medal was dangling from that chain.

  “Should I come up?” she asked.

  Aaron laughed and said, “I wouldn’t know how to stop you if I didn’t want you to come up.”

  Nancy asked, “Should I think I’m forcing myself on you?”

  “Think of it this way,” Aaron said, “not that you’re forcing yourself on me but that I always have to leave it to other people to make the first move.”

  “All right. I’m making the first move.”

  Aaron let her go ahead into the entry hall, where she untied the knot of her silk scarf under her chin and, pulling at a corner, slid it and draped it about her neck, a gesture she connected with an older woman.

  She said, “This house really is so dark and quiet.”

  They climbed the stairs side by side, Nancy running her hand along the highly varnished handrail and then over the spheres on the newel posts. Sometimes she and Aaron bumped lightly into one another.

  The door to his room was open, and light shone from inside. She went in first and, as though trying to check everything against her memory of it, looked around slowly.

  The crucifix, the white, tortured Christ nailed to a black cross, was hanging over the fireplace.

  Nancy unbuckled the belt of her trench coat, unbuttoned it, and held it out to Aaron, but when she realized she was presuming on his politeness she took it back and said, “I’m sorry. Tell me where to put my coat.”

  “Give it to me,” he said, “and I’ll hang it in my closet.”

  She went to his work table but, standing over it, she stopped herself from looking at the books and papers.

  She said to Aaron, “Here I am, about to look at what you’re writing.”

  “You can look at whatever you want.”

  “And supposing I come across some secret of yours among your papers?”

  “That’d be fine with me.”

  “You don’t have secrets?”

  “I don’t.”

  Nancy sat on the Gothic chair and Aaron in an old armchair under a floor lamp where she supposed he read, one of his books on the floor. The light made each short strand of his thick, black hair shine.

  Looking at him, Nancy thought, Give in, let go and give in—but she had no idea what she would be letting go of to give in to.

  She asked, “Do you ever have moods?”

  “Moods?”

  “Moods, when you feel, oh, that all you want is to lie in the dark, just lie there?”

  Aaron lowered his eyes, and she thought that she was making herself vulnerable to him by talking about moods, but she couldn’t help talking; it was as if she was talking against his silence, trying to get him to agree that they shared some mood.

  She said, “I tell myself, when I’m in one of those moods, that I must not give in, that I must never give in, that I must go out and see people, people as superficial as I am, because I never know what might be in the dark.”

  His eyes still lowered, Aaron appeared to be thinking of how he would answer her, but when he looked at her his expression was that he wouldn’t be able to explain, and his inability to explain made his look one of pain.

  All at once impatient with his evasiveness, impatient with him for presuming she wouldn’t understand what he understood, Nancy rose from the chair and stood facing him, and he stood because she did; as a reproach, her voice high, she asked, “Don’t you ever have longings?” and as soon as she had spoken it seemed to her that she heard her own words, heard them as Aaron heard them, and they had the meaning Aaron heard in them, the meaning that suddenly coursed through her as a sensation in her body, and she became still.

  He quietly turned away and went to the window. He said, “It’s raining.”

  She said in a very quiet voice, “Are you leaving New York, like Vinnie said?”

  “Vinnie’s right for once. I am.”

  “Where will you go after you leave New York?”

  “I’ll be going to a monastery in upstate New York for final instruction before my baptism.”

  Nancy’s voice had an edge of accusation. “Your baptism?”

  “To become a Catholic.”

  “You, a Hasid, becoming a Catholic?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Vinnie told me.”

  “Vinnie exaggerates, you can’t believe anything Vinnie says about anyone.”

  Nancy tried to laugh, but the laugh came out a cackle. “So you’re not a Hasid?”

  “I’ll always be what I am, a Jew.”

  “Then, isn’t it enough for you, being a Jew?”

  His voice flat, he said, “I have mine, you have your own longings.”

  Her voice sharpened as though accusing him of longings that had to be false when she said, “Yes, I have my own longings, yes, I do. And they’re the longings of a Jew, because that’s what I am, too, a Jew.” But she had no idea what the longings of a Jew could be.

  He turned again to the window, against which the rain ran in rivulets, and Nancy, as if his turning away made all her high feelings fall away, went to stand beside him and to look through the distorting rivulets out to the street below.

  Her voice fell low when she said, contrite, “I wouldn’t be able to guess what a Catholic longs for, just that it must be strange, and it makes me feel that you must be strange.”

  “I’m not strange,” he said.

  “You are to me.”

  “But you don’t know me.”

  “I don’t, and I suppose I won’t. What will you do when you’re a Catholic?”

  “The monastery runs a farm, so I’ll be taking care of pigs and sheep and cows
while I’m there.”

  As if she didn’t hear, staring ahead, Nancy went to sit on the Gothic chair. She felt tears collect on her lower lids, and she raised her fingers to wipe them away, but the more she wiped them away the more they collected, until they coursed down her cheeks and fingers. She remained on the chair, her shoulders hunched and her knees pressed together.

  When Aaron came to her with a box of tissues, she drew a number out, and said, “Thank you,” and wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I am too,” he said.

  “Don’t think you did anything to hurt me,” she said quietly. “You didn’t. I know you’d never hurt anyone.”

  “But you are hurt,” he said.

  Her fingertips raised again to both her eyes, the tears streamed down her hands to her wrists.

  She said, “I don’t know why I’m crying.” And after a moment she laughed and stood.

  The gold chain was tight about Aaron’s neck, which appeared to be slightly damp. Whatever was hanging on the chain was hidden beneath his shirt, in the hair of his chest. She touched his chest.

  “You would never give in just to having some fun.”

  He smiled.

  She wiped her eyes and blew her nose again.

  “Maybe I should go,” she said.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  She stared at the balled-up wet tissue in her open hand, then looked around the room, as if what she should do with that wet tissue were her first concern. She closed it in a fist.

  “Is it still raining?” she asked.

  “I think it’s stopping.”

  “Tell me, why do you go to that bar?”

  Now, unexpectedly, a lively spirit came into his voice, and a lively spirit came into his body, too, because he rocked his shoulders in a way he hadn’t before, as if he had repressed the spirit but now let it out, daring himself because he knew she was leaving, and he said, “To find out if I’m tempted.”

  “Tempted by what?”

  And here, with a great suddenness, he smiled such a wide smile, his teeth strong and bright, that his whole self appeared exposed, a self made stronger and brighter by his asking, “Don’t you know?”