Leaving Brooklyn Read online

  “No,” I said. “I was used to it by now.”

  He came and sat beside me on the couch. After a moment he put his arm around me and took my hand. “There’s no hurry now. Stay a while. I know it’s over, you don’t have to explain.” He gave an abrupt, sad little laugh. “Not that you would ever explain. But stay just this once.” He put his hand on my breast.

  I had no will. If my body stood up and left, well, all right. If it stayed on the couch, then that would happen. I wasn’t involved. I never had been.

  “Wait just a minute, Audrey, I’ve got to make a quick phone call.”

  As he dialed I studied the framed documents on the walls. He was a member of two ophthalmological societies. He had graduated from medical school in 1943, when I was four years old. On the ration lines. In love with Bobby.

  “Hi,” he said. “It’s me. How ’s everything?”

  If he was twenty-six when he graduated from medical school, he was thirty-seven now. Unless his schooling had been interrupted by the war—then I might be off by a few years. Had he been in the war? I wondered. Army, Navy, Air Force? Europe or Japan? He was younger than my father, anyway. That was a relief. My father was forty-three.

  “Look, I’ve got an emergency here so I’m going to be late… I don’t know, an accident. An hour or two. I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

  Was this being true to himself, or the opposite?

  “I know, Helene, but what can I do?”

  Helene. It wasn’t a name bearing strong imagery, like Carlotta or Susan. There was a Helene at school, good in chemistry, short curly hair, very quiet. She had once helped me with an exper - iment in the lab. The eye doctor’s name was Jeffrey, though I had never called him that. Helene and Jeffrey. Jeffrey and Helene. Jeff and Helene.

  My breast tingled where he had touched it. The feeling was spreading through me in that uncanny way it had. I shifted around on the couch, crossing and uncrossing my legs. When would he get off the phone? For it seemed my body was not going to stand up and leave.

  Idly, I shut my left eye to see how his desk looked as I decomposed it. An unfamiliar dark blob floated near one edge. I opened my good eye to see. It was a box labeled Eye Patches, For Medical Use Only. Yes, he had given one to the stockbroker; the lid of the box was still raised.

  “Okay, tea bags,” he was saying. “Aspirins, anything else?”

  At last he was beside me again.

  “Helene.” It came out. I hadn’t planned it.

  “Don’t, Audrey.”

  He did everything very slowly, even more slowly than usual. No other patients were waiting. He moved his mouth all over my body for an endless time, and when finally he entered me and pushed his way deep inside, tears oozed down my face, as if I were already filled to the brim with myself and this extra bit of flesh made me spill over. But I knew I was crying because this would be the last time; it would be years before anyone touched me like this again, and even when they did, even if they were not awkward boys, it would never be exactly like this. It would never be him.

  She was me, at that moment. She already knew what I know. This is so startling to come upon that I have to stop and contemplate it. And her. Oh yes, I see myself plainly, right there, bearing the seeds of all I would come to know.

  He wanted to stay lying on top of me when it was over. He wanted to take the imprint of me on his body, he said, but I thought that even more, he wanted to leave his imprint on me. Soon we had to shift so I could bear his weight better.

  “I want to ask you something,” he said.

  “What?” I hoped it was not what I had done with the lens.

  “Who are you, really?”

  “Oh, God,” I groaned. I felt freer now that it was ending. I had never left anyone before; there was a melancholy thrill in it. “That’s the kind of question they ask in a bad book.”

  “This isn’t any book. I’m as real as you are.”

  I didn’t know what the question meant or what form an answer might take. It sounded like a wrong step in a geometry proof, a step that could lead only to a dead end. I could have answered “What are you?” more easily than “Who?”

  “Well,” I said, “who do you want me to be?”

  The ripples of his laugh slid from my shoulders down to my feet. “Either you’re very wise or very ignorant. Which, Audrey?”

  I knew which I thought it was, but I waited.

  “I think it’s very ignorant,” he said, and he kept laughing as I pushed him off me.

  “I meant it,” I protested. “Does it really matter? You don’t have to know who I am to feel the way you do. Maybe you’d feel different if you really knew.”

  “Maybe. But you don’t like the way I feel anyway.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” I kissed his lips. “Now I want to ask you something.” This was the most we had ever spoken. It made me feel extremely grown up. Pillow talk.

  “Yes?”

  I couldn’t find the words. Those which sprang to mind seemed childish, almost as bad as his question. Are all men like you? Is this, what happened between us these months, a common thing, or is it extraordinary, and if it is, why did it happen to me? Is it so bizarre that I should be ashamed to appear on the street or enter my innocent little house and face my parents? Do you think men will like me, in this way? Or in a better way, knowing who I am? How can you like me, if you don’t know me? It can’t be only the way I look, can it?

  “Do you have children?” I asked.

  “Two boys.”

  “How old?”

  “Ten and seven.”

  That was good. Much younger than I, and boys. I had nothing in common with them.

  “Do you play cards?”

  “Cards?” He looked puzzled. “No. Why?”

  “I just wondered. What about your wife, what does she play?”

  “Tennis, when she has the time.”

  “Tennis?”

  “Yes, what’s so odd about that?”

  “Nothing, I just wasn’t expecting it. I was thinking of… something more sedentary.”

  “She’s not sedentary. She’s a gym teacher.”

  I almost burst out laughing: gym teachers were intrinsically comical, with their military stance and barked commands, their ridiculous orange pinnies and green gym suits on square, muscular bodies, but I tamed my laugh to a polite smile of curiosity.

  “Oh?”

  “She’s very athletic. She’s a good skier.”

  A skier! Like the skiers in Movietone News, perhaps. Did she skim over the snow and leap in magnificent arcs, and maybe break bones and have them fixed by handsome doctors? That his wife was a skier brought my ancient fantasies thrillingly close.

  “How did she get started skiing?”

  “She just went, when she was in college, I think. She was also on the track team and played basketball. That probably doesn’t mean much to you.”

  “Well, I’m not the athletic type.”

  “I know that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s obvious. You don’t have the body of an athlete, the muscle tone and so on. Oh, you’re young and… and all that, but it’s very clear.”

  Except for matters regarding my eye, this was the first time I had heard him speak of anything besides his feelings for me. The knowledge and cool objectivity pained me, suggesting the countless things he must know as a grown man. He could not be as obsessed as he pretended, if there were so many other things filling his head. The person I became in his office dimmed a little bit.

  “Why, do you think I need to lose weight?”

  “It has nothing to do with weight.” He looked at my face and caught on. “No, I think you’re perfect as you are, Audrey. Even a little too thin, in fact. Yes, maybe a little more here, and here—”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Now let me ask you something else,” he said, “since you’re so talkative today. Did you use the money to take that class you wanted, Scene… Scene something?” />
  “Scene Study. Not yet. It starts in two weeks. But I will.”

  “You’ve got it stashed away in a safe place? You’re not going to spend it on candy or movies or whatever?”

  “Of course not. Don’t you believe me?”

  “I do, I do. And what will you do in Scene Study?”

  “Exactly what it says. We have to bring in something to present the first day. Everyone is planning the standard things, Saint Joan, Member of the Wedding, Juliet. I want to do something different. I’m looking through Eugene O’Neill. Do you have any suggestions?”

  “I’m afraid not. I ’m not a big reader. I haven’t got the time.”

  “Oh, I knew that.”

  “How would you know?”

  “It’s obvious,” I said. “You don’t speak like a reader. Oh, you’re intelligent and… and all that, but it’s very clear.”

  For an instant his face was blank, then he smiled uncomfortably and feinted a punch to my jaw. “I think you have a great career ahead of you, Audrey.”

  I sat up. “Do you really think I could be an actress?”

  “Probably. Though I wasn’t thinking of acting.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or insulted. Either way, he wasn’t taking me seriously. It was some sort of joke, more oblique than my father’s customary taunts.

  “Won’t your parents wonder where you got the money for the class? What will you tell them?”

  “They don’t have to know everything I do. I’ll say I’m going to the library.”

  “Ah. I guess I’m in no position to comment, am I?”

  “I guess not. Oh, there’s something I’ve always wanted to know. Why do they put those silver nitrate drops in newborn babies’ eyes?”

  “You’re a girl of catholic interests, aren’t you? That’s to prevent blindness from gonorrhea. If the mother has gonorrhea the germs can get into the infant’s eyes on the way out and cause blindness. The silver nitrate counteracts that.”

  “But not every mother has gonorrhea.”

  “Of course not. It’s a preventive measure.”

  “I don’t get it. Why don’t they just test the mothers first instead of doing it to all the babies? There must be some test.”

  “Yes, but when do you administer it? Supposing she tests negative and then contracts it afterwards?”

  “Well, say a month before. I doubt if any woman in her ninth month is going to find some total stranger to go to bed with and get gonorrhea.”

  “It’s a matter of statistics, Audrey. There’s no way of predicting what a woman will do, wouldn’t you agree? This way is much more efficient. It’s saved a lot of people. The incidence of infant blindness from gonorrhea is practically nonexistent.”

  “So it’s done because they basically don’t trust the women?”

  “It’s not a question of trust.” He shifted around impatiently as though I were a recalcitrant student. “If there’s a safe way to wipe out a serious danger, you do it. That’s what medical progress is. You can’t rely on probability, what individuals may or may not do.”

  “It doesn’t make sense to me. Just because a handful of women may have it, you do it to all the babies. That’s the opposite of efficient. It’s like McCarthy, torturing everyone because maybe there’s one person somewhere who’s seriously thinking of overthrowing the government.”

  “My dear child, you’re talking nonsense. There’s no torture involved. It’s the simplest of procedures. The baby doesn’t feel it.”

  “How can you know what a baby feels? And how do you know it’s so safe? Look at my eye. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Aha! So that’s what this is all about.” He leaned over and gently stroked my eyelid with one finger. “Audrey, it’s hardly possible that that could have caused the damage to your eye.”

  “My mother said the eye was fine when I was first born, and then after the drops, when she saw me, it was like this.”

  “Oh, you can’t go by what a woman thinks she sees under those circumstances. I’ve never heard of anything like that happening.”

  “Well, maybe they poked it with the dropper, or broken glass from the bottle got in it, or something?” My questions, my persistence, surprised me. I hadn’t known I was this interested.

  He sat cross-legged, pondering. “It could have been anything. At this stage, and not having been there, I just don’t know. I would tell you if I could. The eye is unusual, I will say that. I’ve never come across quite that cluster of symptoms.”

  “So I’ll never know.”

  “I’m afraid not. But look, why worry over it? It obviously doesn’t hinder your activities in anyway. You’ ve learned to compensate.”

  “What do you mean, learned to compensate?”

  “I mean you can catch a ball, can’t you? You can judge how far you’d have to walk to get to the telephone or the door. You can go down a flight of stairs without stepping off into space.”

  “And that’s all compensation?”

  “Partly, yes. You’ve learned through tactile experience, without binary vision.”

  “That’s not so. I see what everyone else sees.”

  “I’m not saying you don’t. But there’s a process of combining left and right vision that you don’t go through. You do it another way. It’s hard to explain without getting technical. The point is, you’re a beautiful, intelligent girl with your whole life ahead of you.” He smiled and patted my hip. I almost cringed—the words were so beside the point. Pure Brooklyn. “And with the lens it doesn’t show anyway. Right?” He might have been my mother.

  “Mm-hm,” I murmured, envisioning the lens afloat in the sewers of Brooklyn.

  “So in effect you’re perfect. Now give me a kiss and forget about it.”

  “Not now.” I drew back.

  “What’s the matter? Do you think I’m very bad? I suppose you do.”

  “Why? I don’t hold you responsible. You don’t deliver babies anyway. You didn’t start that stupid practice.”

  “Christ, Audrey, not that. There’s no issue there. I mean bad in general. Because of what I’ve done. This. You.”

  What an idiot I was. “Oh. I don’t know. I haven’t thought a lot about it. Why, do you?”

  “I not only think it, I know it.”

  “You’re probably right. Isn’t what you did called taking advantage of someone?”

  “Oh, taking advantage. The first time, yes, that was a little crazy. You came back, though.”

  “I had to. The lens.”

  “Audrey, come now.”

  “I’ve been to so many doctors. It’s a real drag, starting all over. “

  He grinned. “I won’t let it go to my head, then.”

  I didn’t understand that either. “If it’s not taking advantage, then what do you feel so guilty about?”

  “Interference. Disrupting your—what shall I say—innocent life. Don’t you see? What it makes me out to be.”

  “But I didn’t mind being disrupted—”

  “Oh, I know. Don’t I know it,” he moaned. Rather wittily, I thought. “I’ve figured that out.”

  Just when he was starting to be interesting, to sound almost like a book, I would have to leave him. And he accepted that so easily. I had prepared, steeled myself as if with a girdle from the lingerie shop window, to hear more wild words. But he wasn’t talking about drowning in desire or running away; he was thinking of getting tea bags and aspirins for Helene on the way home. Our talk reeked of finality—otherwise we wouldn’t have talked at all. As scary as the mad words had been, this was worse. Quite safe.

  “If you feel it’s so wrong,” I said, “why do you do it?”

  “I told you why last time. I didn’t think you wanted to hear it again. Why do you do it? Do you know?”

  “But I don’t feel so guilty. I’m not losing sleep over this.”

  “No? You must wonder something about it.”

  “Well, yes, I do.” I frightened myself, speak
ing so candidly. I was never so candid with anyone in Brooklyn, and besides that, he was a grown man.

  He put his hand on my stomach. He moved it down till it covered all the hair and rested it there, cupping the pubic bone. “Well, what?” He pressed down as though to encourage me, or push an answer out of me.

  “All right. What you see in me, really. Since you hardly know anything about me. That’s what I don’t get.”

  “Audrey,” he said soberly, “you are painfully amusing.”

  My eyes filled with tears. “I thought,” I whispered, “you would give me an answer.”

  He kissed me and began caressing me again, murmuring in my ear that he loved me. I was confused. I had thought that part was over. And he had never said it like that, calmly. Perhaps I was supposed to say, I love you too, but—God, the purity of her!—I would have had to figure out first whether, in any sense of the word, I did love him, and there was no time for figuring.

  “Turn over,” he said softly.

  He wanted that. Well. Of all the ways, this was not the most pleasurable—I couldn’t come unless he reached around to touch me with his fingers—but it gave another sort of pleasure: being overpowered and weighed down, the warmth of him on my back and his breath on my shoulders, the sheer animal absurdity, the discomfort, the hard breathing, and his collapsing on me at the end—both of us collapsing like a house of cards, flat onto the leather couch, and his covering me from top to toe like someone shielding a child from enemy gunfire.

  I turned over and he climbed on top of me and whispered my name. I thought I was ready—like the bride in the wine-colored book—but something was wrong. He seemed to be floundering around. When I realized what he was looking for my brain flipped over as my body had done. This was beyond inconceivable.

  “No!” I twisted but he gripped me tight, one arm around my waist, and he was already there.

  “Please, Audrey.”

  “No. Get away.”

  “I won’t hurt you. I promise. You tell me if it hurts and I’ll stop. Please,” he whispered, and I felt a widening, and he was inside.

  “Oh no,” I said, but I wasn’t struggling my hardest. I was getting interested. Horrible as this was, it was not boring, it was not Brooklyn. It might never happen again.