Barney Harrigan!
The name, his voice, the memory stunned her. Her fingers shook and she steadied the phone against her ear.
"Is this Naomi Forman?" the man inquired, still tentative and uncertain.
The red numbers on the digital clock displayed three AM. The hour of desperation. No call could come at that moment without a reason. Would Barney Harrigan announce disaster? She shivered at the ancient memory, the old painful love, her own awful guilt. Barney Harrigan! From the beating pulse in her throat and the sudden emptiness in the pit of herself, she knew it still lingered. Hadn't she killed it for good years ago? Five. Nearly six.
"I can't believe it."
"I'm sorry." He offered the obligatory apology.
Kicking off her comforter, she sat cross-legged on the bed.
"Where are you?" she asked.
"Fort Lauderdale."
"I didn't know you moved out of Manhattan."
Had he moved since she, on a guilty whim, had last looked him up online? She found that the address had changed from the apartment in SoHo they had once shared, where they had once loved. The flame had burned hard and hot, finally ending, the reasons blurred by time.
"I'm at my parents' place in Lauderdale. I had to drop off Kev."
"Kev?"
"My son."
"Son?"
"I married a few years ago. He's four."
A brief pause, a mite too long.
"Congratulations." Her tone was sarcastic, and she was embarrassed by her reaction. He ignored it.
"I'm calling…." He hesitated, clearing his throat, "…at this ungodly hour… you see, I just found out. And you were the only person I could talk to in Washington."
So it was Washington that he needed. For a fleeting moment, she had allowed a part of herself to yearn for something more. He had her at a distinct disadvantage. He had found someone else to love. She had not.
"It's very complicated," he said. "But it boils down to this…."
So he was boiling down again. He had once called it "the bottom line." How bitterly she had reacted.
"The bottom line," he had ranted, "is that I cannot live a life that is totally political. Not everything is politics and causes, there is home and hearth. Family. Sharing."
That was their old one-note argument. She hadn't been ready for compromises. Not then.
"Charlotte." He coughed. "My wife." A bark of hoarseness quickly cleared. "She has been captured by the Glories." He paused, waiting for a reaction.
In her mind, the Glories formed a vague collection of information: rich, powerful, right wing, espousing a totalitarian view of the world. A dubious religious sect. Some called it a cult with political pretensions. Their leader was Father Glory, an Indian businessman, who believed he was the Messiah. She thought of Jim Jones, the People's Temple Guru who commanded 900 people to kill themselves in Guyana; Waco's David Koresh, who created a standoff with the government, then ordered his band of crazies to head for Armageddon; Marshall Applewhite, who talked his followers into believing that suicide would buy them a UFO trip to a "higher level," wherever that was. Other images came to mind, shaven-headed Hare Krishnas chanting on street corners; stories of frantic parents chasing lost adult children; and neatly dressed Glories selling candy, knickknacks, flowers. And of course, there was Bin Laden and all the associated fanatics who believed, really believed, that paradise awaited them, an eternity with seventy-two virgins.
An eternity? But a cult was a cult, and fools who believed such things were just that-fools, and even worse. Seventy-two, no less. Their thing would have to be made of wrought iron.
Naomi remembered her own clumsy and painful deflowering. It was equally horrendous. She had forgotten his name, only recalling that his thing stabbed mercilessly, and the whole experience was appalling.
But cults only happened to other people. Unless, of course, you were caught in the crosshairs of their horror, like 9/11. The date stirred her disgust, and she shook it away and thought about what Barney had said about the Glories.
"How awful," she said. It seemed an appropriate response.
"I just found out."
"How…?" she started to ask, but Barney was already off, explaining in a choppy narrative.
"She had gone to Seattle to visit her sister," he explained. His voice conveyed a touch of hysteria and she forced herself to listen respectfully, patiently, although her interest in the subject of his pain was minor.
"She has this sister, Susan. Both their parents are dead. I said, 'Fine.' She hadn't seen her in two years. Why not? She worked pretty hard with Kev. What's one lousy week? We both knew Susie was involved with something. But we didn't know it was that. Not the Glories. 'Sure, go ahead,' I told her. I encouraged her. So she went."
Out of the cage, Naomi thought, pulling together a picture of Charlotte and her life, hoping it would recall the old image of her own rebellion. It didn't.
"She called every day from the coast. Spoke to Kevin and me. Told us how much she missed us. Said she had gone with Susie to some kind of farm, had met fabulous, really caring, loving people. 'Wonderful,' I said. 'Just wonderful.' Then she called and said she'd like to spend some more time out there." He was talking compulsively, not to Naomi, but at her. She let it happen, trapped by their old ties.
"Charlotte is twenty-five. That's their target age. They zeroed in and got her. Just like that. Imagine." She heard him swallow, picturing his bobbing Adam's apple.
A ten-year difference, Naomi calculated. In comparison to her, he had robbed the cradle. She was his age, thirty-five.
"She seemed happy." State of mind was another difference between the two. "We have this big apartment, a co-op on seventy-fourth and fifth." Different financial status, "And she loves the kid. Loves him." He paused. "We were all very close." And she had family ties. Naomi winced, resisting the gnawing envy.
"Then she called two days ago." His voice broke, and the panic slid into her dark bedroom, raising goose bumps on her thighs and arms. She waited until he cleared his throat, her ears clogged with the pounding pulse of her heart. For some reason, she felt his fear now. Was this voice really Barney's? Or some disembodied bleat that had splintered loose from an old fantasy? Keep your distance, she begged. This mess is on your plate, not mine.
"She said…." His voice steadied. "She said she was not coming home. Never. That she loved me and Kevin… that she had found something important, a new way of life, something spiritual. That someday we would understand. It wasn't Charlotte talking. Not her at all. Not my Charlotte. She was different, sounded different. I couldn't understand it. At first I thought she was drugged or hypnotized. But then I thought… hell, the son of a bitch brainwashed her." His voice had risen. "Am I making sense?" he said quickly, his tone lowering.
"Easy, Barney," she whispered.
"I'm really sorry for throwing this shit on your doorstep, Nay. I have no right." So now he's bringing up rights, she thought. Rights, after all, were her business. She was assistant director of the Human Rights Council, a group that monitored rights in countries with repressive governments, a growing menace. Did he know that? Was he trying to subliminally appeal to her sense of compassion? Naomi had just started with the Human Rights Council as she and Barney had approached the exit door of their relationship.
Actually, despite his assertion, he did have the right, she thought. There was the right of past relationships, of old friendships, of shared experiences, of love. They had once touched each other deeply. She had often felt his mark on her, like fingerprints on her body, tangible and telling, and on her heart and soul, intangible and abstract. There was also the bond of the dead fetus. Their baby. She had never told him, never would. Ever. Despite her conviction that she had the right to make this choice, she could not totally shake the guilt of the action. For a long time she had put it in back of her mind. With his call, the discomfort came raging back.
"You have every right," she told him.
"The thing is," he said, his courage hardening. "I'm not going to just accept this without a fight. There has got to be some channel of official help. The FBI. Congressmen. They can't just take people, tear them away from their families, from the people who love them. This is America, dammit."
Torn away? Suppose it had been Charlotte's conscious decision to leave? Like herself years ago. Perhaps Charlotte also had had enough. But to tear a mother from her living child, that was unnatural, wrong. Nobody had the right to make someone do that.
"I'm going to fight this," Barney said. "I have no set plan. But I'm going to fight. That's why I called, Nay. I need your help."
She hesitated. Help? What could she do? But at this hour, who could say no…?
"But how can I help?" she asked, hoping he would sense the skeptical spin, that she could not help. He indeed had the right to ask her, but not the right to enmesh her. Guilt, the eternal enemy, prodded her.
"I… I don't know if I'm the one, Barney. I mean, I know about human rights and I do have some connections in Washington. But this, the Glories. I don't know much about these cults."
"I need you, Nay."
"I'll grant you that you need something, Barney." She paused, hesitated. "I may be the wrong ticket. The rights I monitor deal with another field… governments primarily."
"Rights are rights," Barney said. This time it was he who paused. "I'm invoking… well… what we once were to each other. I know. I know. I'm pushing the envelope. Hell, we have history, Nay. History counts. And you have a sense of justice, and compassion…."
"You're conning me, Barney," she said.
"I wish."
"I've toughened up," she said. "I don't give in so easily," she lied. Guilt would make her comply and she knew it.
"Yes or no, Nay? I'm begging, and you know from experience that's not my style."
"Shit, Barney. Why me? Why now?"
"Yes or no, Nay?"
"That's not fair, Barney."
"Is that a yes?"
"I don't want this." Of course I don't, she cried within herself. But he must have anticipated her tacit consent.
"Please, Nay. Do it."
"I'll disappoint you. I haven't got the connections you need."
"We'll see. I'll be in Washington tomorrow. Could you just call around, so you'll be able to point me in the right direction? Maybe that's all I'll get from you. A road map. Who to see. What to do. Where to start. What's your office number?"
She gave it to him.
"I'll get Kevin set with the folks. Poor kid. He's all confused. He keeps asking, 'Where's Mommy?' You tell me how to explain that to a four-year-old."
"I wouldn't know," she said, thinking of their own lost baby again, bitterness welling up, her gut cramping.
"God, Nay, I'm grateful," he said.
She heard the click and the connection went dead.
In the stony silence of her dark bedroom, she was shivering, not just from the cold. His presence had descended like a tornado, leaving a trail of destruction-her tranquility, her courage, her sense of self, her carefully erected barriers. It had taken her years to construct the protective walls. The tornado had shaken loose her foundations.
She could clearly remember the beginning and the end. Between was not exactly a middle. There was no continuity, more like revved-up images on a projector gone awry, leaving impressions. He had never lived with her in her current place, but it did not stop the memories from coming. She smelled his presence in the room, an amalgam of his aftershave and musk.
***
They had been sitting at a window table in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel on 59th Street, drinking white wine and looking into each other's eyes. Hers were hazel, flecked with yellow, and it seemed as if he had been counting the yellow specks. His were blue-gray, heightened by the brightness of the late afternoon and the green from Central Park across the way.
They had only known each other nearly three hours when he had said, "I loved you instantly."
"Pshaw," she responded, mimicking the way cartoon characters said it.
"Not pshaw," he said. "Egad." He looked at his watch. "A hundred and seventy minutes, actually." They both knew that something momentous had happened.
Of course, she didn't trust it. Nothing happens that fast. "It's the wine," she said.
"It's the heart."
At the time, she had been working for an organization involved with women's rights in Africa. He was selling smartphones and her office was in the market to buy a few.
"I'm not the person to see," she had told him.
"You're the person I see," he had said, brash, flirtatious, self-confident, and true.
"How do you feel about our cause?" she had asked, full of the idea and emboldened with the outrage.
"I'm all for it. How can anyone be against it? Besides, I'll be for anything you're for. That's why I'm doing this meeting. Smartphones will enhance your cause, speed the victory."
"Really?"
"Sure, I'm all for the cause. Mostly I like the messenger," he said, watching her sipping the wine. She felt the intensity of his focus. She wondered exactly how casual an encounter this was.
"You don't sound sincere," she had countered, while noting his good looks.
"I can prove my sincerity," he said.
"How?"
"Over drinks. It might take time. You look like a hard case to crack."
She had laughed. It was a Friday and it had been a terrible week.
Naomi's cause exhausted the mind and senses, left everyone ravaged with intensity, frustration, horror, and commitment. There was so much despair, so many injustices, terrible stories about the lives of women in Africa. There were times when she needed a respite. Something without tales of sorrow and pain. Barney Harrigan was a perfect choice for such a respite. She could tell he really couldn't care less about the suffering of anyone thousands of miles away.
When he invited her out for a drink, she eventually consented.
"I don't believe you," she had said, laughing.
"I am a great believer in women. I worship them."
"Don't you have any real convictions?" she said.
"You. You're my conviction. Put me in a cell with you and I'll take the rap."
"You're patronizing me," she had said. "I'm a very serious woman."
"That's my favorite flavor." It was banter, pure show. He had the kind of Irish charm that could conceal his real self. She had a mind that probed and reasoned. People had often told her that her compassion gave off too much heat, in general, her love for mankind was too intense, and it left little room for attention to an individual person. Men sensed that she searched too hard, too fiercely. They had a point, and she tried to correct this trait in herself, bank the fire. Her record was spotty on this point. After all, she couldn't help who she was.
"Don't think and analyze so much," her mother told her frequently. "It doesn't make you sexy."
Then, as if to prove her stance as a serious woman, she had begun to tell him about, of all things, the practice of female circumcision.
"Bad timing," he said, winking.
She had caught his drift. He was right. She retreated.
"Clearly," she said with a snicker.
He lifted both hands. "Okay. I buy it. You are a serious woman. But I'm a serious, very serious, man. And I'm very serious about you."
"Blarney." She giggled foolishly, enjoying the fun of their repartee. It was fun to be silly. Just what she needed. His persona wrapped her in a warm bath.
I know he's just using a line, she told herself. Just a salesman's line.
Barney took her hand in his and raised it to his lips.
"It doesn't happen like this," she said, already growing dangerously comfortable.
"Who said?"
He had the Irish look as well, his skin colored like fine sand and a good, long, straight nose. He had a chin with a cleft and large teeth, although a front tooth was crooked. His hair curled and waved, covering his ears down to his lobes. His Adam's apple bobbed in his throat, wrapped in a button-down. The crisp edges were folded on either side of the tight knot of a tie.
Her mother, a slave to Jewish chauvinism, would have called him a "scutch" and worried about his thing not being circumcised. The thought had made her blush blood red.
"Is it hot in here?"
"It's me," he said.
Actually, it was quite cool. It was September. Summer was fading. There was a chill in the air and a sharp breeze, which made people who walked against it squint oddly, bowing their heads. Outside, she saw through the high windows, the setting sun threw long shadows along the pavement.
"They're changing now," he said.
"What?"
"Your eyes. The yellows are fading. The greens are getting bluish."
She had begun to wonder how long they could sit like this-not that she had wanted it to end. But she felt obliged to act, a compulsion to pull herself out of limbo, into action. It was another quirk of hers, that she felt guilty when time passed unproductively. She tore her eyes away from him to look at her watch.
"I had planned to go back to work."
Then he looked at his watch. He snapped his fingers and took a little notebook from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He was, as he had told her later, an avid note taker. "Damn. I was going to the beach. See? You made me forget. Made me forget everything. The point of writing things down is that you'll never forget to look at your notes." He peered outside. "Too cold anyway. Your sun is a thousand times brighter." He looked at her and sighed.
"Come on, Harrigan," she finally mocked him.
He shrugged but did not seem insulted. "I know what I feel."
Her mother had taught her what thin ice was. She had learned that attraction often lied. Never make a step unless you know it's solid. Anyway, she had no time for 'relationships.'
"It's purely hormonal," she told him honestly, feeling her own attraction.
"You got that right."
"You're just trying to book your weekend."
"Even your insults are like sweet nectar."
"You're being a silly romantic," she chided. "It's called weekend panic. Fear of being alone, without a girl, for two whole days."
No substance here, she decided abruptly. It doesn't happen like this.
She was still on that tack long after that first meeting. One evening they were at dinner in an Italian restaurant in the Village where he told her he had an expense account.
"See," she said, "We're still just talking strictly business." By then, of course they had exchanged lives, at least the surface narratives.
"I want to make money," he said. "I don't want to be, as you'd say, a schlep. I believe in the golden rule: He who has the gold, rules."
"That is crass," she told him, one of the many rebukes.
"Neither," he said seriously.
He had spent some time justifying his sales career, calling himself a peddler. He had chosen sales, he told her, because it meant a quicker route to the pot of gold.
"The world belongs to the salesman. My father was a goddamned bookkeeper. A butt-kisser." A generation of bitterness poured out. She knew he was talking from his interior now. He was Irish to the core, and she saw a black gloomy streak. She sensed he had sharp mood swings. "I want money, a family, loving, luxury, fun, trust, goodness. A private nest to rest my weary brain and bones."
"What about ideals, making a better world?"
He looked at her, not certain of her seriousness. "I'm more your bread-and-potatoes man. Let the world take care of itself."
"You can't close your eyes to bad things. It can happen to you."
"I'm not a fool, Naomi. Shit happens. I just don't want to step in it. I'm on the money trail. When I make it, I'll give it away. Hell, you can help me spend it."
"And in the meantime?"
"I'll concentrate on myself."
"Most people do. But my ship is on a different course."
"Saving the world, right?"
"Fighting for good over evil. Helping mankind. People."
"A true liberal," he sighed.
"Jewish and flaming."
"I'm with the Pragmatic Party. It has one constituent: me."
"And its party platform?"
"As I said, he who has the gold, rules."
So a curse had been on them from the beginning, but she hadn't let herself dwell on it then. People changed, compromised, grew together. Besides, by that point in time, reason had surrendered to love.
Later that night, her legs had floated her to the doorway of his small apartment in Greenwich Village, and now he pressed against her in the semi-darkness of the dusky corridor. The faint smell of provolone cheese drifted up from the Italian restaurant on the ground floor.
"This is dumb. I'm not this kind of girl," she said, the time-honored cliché.
But bells were going off. Cannons exploding. The earth moving. She would never forget the moment.
They spent the entire weekend in his bed, not able to get enough of each other while trying to understand why it had happened.
"I never really saw one uncircumcised," she said. "I guess I lived in a ghetto. My mother would be rabid."
Her mother was, but then Barney's charm won her over. She would have loved to have had him for a son-in-law. Naomi remembered, too, that he had tried to describe what he was really feeling, to show her that under his salesman jargon was a sensitive and loving heart.
"It's like an incompleteness trying to find its completeness. A half of a thing looking for the other half. We've found it, Naomi. Don't you see what this means?"
"Trouble," she had said, pecking his ear.
"Nay," he said, chuckling. "That's what I'll call you from now on… 'Nay.' As in 'naysayer.'"
"Stupid mick," she whispered.
"I found it, the other half. It's you."
"Too fast. Don't trust it."
For some reason, she started to cry. Tears bathed her cheeks and he licked them with his tongue, tear by tear.
"You see," he said, "I drank your tears. We're like blood brothers now." He chuckled at the reference. "Like Indians who cut their veins and transfer the blood."
A month later he bought a loft in SoHo and she moved in with him. He spent a great deal of time designing the space. Working on blue graph paper, he drew and redrew lines for rooms, pressing her for opinions about sizes, flow, asking for a sense of her own concept of space.
"It's yours to design, too," he assured her. Yet she resisted the idea. The process was too materialistic for her.
More important to her were her causes, not only women's rights, but minority rights, equal justice, lifting people out of poverty, a smorgasbord of goodness and, to her, the only aspirations a concerned contemporary citizen should pursue.
"And when all was said and done, what do you have?" he asked.
"A better world."
"Ha."
"You mock me!" she cried.
"I love you."
Through it all, from Naomi's perspective, he maintained his worship of the material. He pressed her continually on how the loft was to be done; attention must be paid to things, to space, to comfort.
"Any way you design it is fine with me," she told him.
"But two people live here."
Her indifference exasperated him.
"I'm trying to make you part of everything in my life."
"I know."
"I'm building our nest, Nay." It was his metaphor for them. "Look how the birds do it. Bit by bit. Relentlessly. Every strand has its place. The way space is allocated is important."
"Allocate it any way you want. I'll fit in." To be with him was all that mattered, to touch and love.
Her doubts did not fully develop until a year had run out. She had made connections and was being pressed to join the action. There were jobs to be had. She needed a bigger platform for her missions-the nation's capital, the center of the world. Washington was the place she needed to be. Because she vacillated, she lost her position at the Civil Rights Commission and another at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. She got a job with the Mayor's Office in Department of Cultural Affairs, but it did not satisfy her.
"The action is in Washington," she told him.
"Am I holding you back?" he would ask, pouting.
"Of course you are."
"I think it's all in your imagination."
It wasn't that he had the power of veto over her, but she did feel the unmistakable pull of his denial, and also, her growing subservience. At first being together was just their most precious priority, but now love was making her a vassal, and she hated it.
She met his family. "Black Irish, the lot of them," he had warned her, mimicking a brogue accent, although they were all-American Brooklyn. Even so, they harbored a mass of hardline of stereotypes and prejudices. He hadn't bothered to warn his family about her being Jewish, and at their first dinner together his father rambled on about, "Reds and the damned sheenies. It's them that got the niggers all riled up."
He kept Naomi calm with amused winks. At the table were two pimply sisters and a corpulent mother who scrutinized her and burrowed in with pointed speculation.
They had begun the evening in the living room, which they called the parlor. It had a mismatched collection of worn upholstered velvet chairs and a sofa, all decorated with doilies, like Band-Aids. The radio had been left on, some right-wing talk show. Somebody mentioned Hillary.
"Goddamned pinko," his father sneered.
"Christ," Naomi had hissed, looking at Barney.
Barney lifted his eyebrows in exasperation and shrugged, a gesture urging her to remain silent. With effort, she did.
"Damned libs. I nearly lost my ass for them."
There was a picture of her father in uniform, World War II. What had he fought for, she remembered thinking.
By the time they went to dinner in the shabby dining room, the hostility had expanded further.
"Just a good old Irish homecoming," he had whispered.
"They express their love with meanness."
"Well, I don't," she responded.
By dessert, the family knew the worst of it. Jewish. Liberal. Living in sin. They grew so cold and silent that she had to excuse herself to go to the bathroom just to warm up. From behind the thin walls, she heard Barney's rebuking voice, certain that it was for her benefit as well.
"She's my girl, a part of me. I'll have no nonsense about it. Keep your narrowness to yourselves. Any offense against her is an offense against me."
"You'll bring no kikes in this house."
"Then I won't bring me as well."
"You shut your mouth, John!" his mother shouted to his father.
"Comes of leaving the church," the father muttered.
"Look who's talking." It was one of his sisters.
She flushed the toilet twice and turned on all the faucets to drown them out. But when she came back, after stalling further, she could see that his parents had surrendered. There was no point in banishing him. He had already banished himself.
"I'm sorry," he said later. "They're awful, but they're mine. Suffer them," he pleaded. "They've been beaten."
"By what?"
"Depressions. The old ways of the church. The old world just collapsed around them."
"It was full of ugly prejudices that hurt other people."
"Just ugly thoughts. They never really harmed anyone."
She kept silent, although it bothered her. Later, after they had made love, the troubled thoughts broke through the calm between them.
"That's exactly the problem. They're bigots. Bigots are harmful to all of us. People must be judged as individuals. Hating groups is wrong."
"What goes on in their heads is their business," he sighed, upset to have it thrown back at him. "The important thing is that it made no dent on me."
"But you don't even question it. You let it pass. Indifference. That's the real culprit."
"But I do question it. I told them off."
He rose on one elbow and looked into her eyes. A stray bead of light caught his own. They flashed back like burning agates, emphasizing his anger.
"The fact is, Nay, I never cared what they thought. Or paid any attention to them. But they're still my family. You can't disown your family and can't make other people think right thoughts. In their world, it was the norm to hate by group. Hell, they hate the Irish most of all."
"Well, that's wrong, too."
"Listen, Nay," he said. His head shook from side to side. "I don't give a flying fuck about how other people see things as long as they leave me out of it. I couldn't care less."
"But I care."
"That's exactly the problem. Let's just love each other. Who cares about the starving Patagonians?" She knew what that meant: everyone who was powerless, helpless, hated, ignored, weak, sick, suffering.
"They could be you," she said, tasting her own self-righteousness.
"I'm sorry, Nay," he said, searching the ceiling with his eyes. "I feel only for the people I love. For you the most. I would have more compassion for your hurt pinky finger than all those poor bleeding souls. I wish I had your compassion, but only because I want to be inside of you, to prove I am part of you."
"I don't want you to be me to prove your love. I want you to be you." And I want to be me, she had added silently.
Yet he seemed to be growing fearful of the differences between them. He, the Irish salesman. She, the neurotic Jew. It was then that she discovered that their different worlds were at the heart of her fear as well, the death knell of their love, which they both heard in the distance.
Marriage was becoming a serious issue by then. Seeing the difference between them so starkly slapped her mind free of euphoria, causing her to think in terms of consequences. Her mother also emphasized their differences.
"She'll call you a scutch to your face," Naomi warned Barney. "But it's all right. The battle has been fought."
"But who won?"
"No one ever wins a generational war. Like with your parents. It's a standoff. Her modus operandi is to be funny about it. Besides, she lives vicariously through me. That's the way she copes."
Her mother wore a bouffant and gold chains when they met in her Flatbush house in the French Provincial living room with gold-trimmed mirrors and objets everywhere. Two art nouveau prints depicting stylized females and Greek columns dominated the room. She served Danishes and coffee, pouring it out of a sterling silver teapot.
"I missed all the revolutions," she said, "especially, the sexual one."
"You didn't miss it, mother. You never let it happen." Naomi turned to Barney. "My father has been dead since 1983." A widow, Naomi's mother had been left fairly comfortable by her husband's insurance policy.
"I had enough of men from him."
She blatantly inspected Barney. He seemed amused by it.
"Isn't he handsome?" Naomi had chirped with pride.
"For a scutch," her mother said, smiling. "He looks like an advertisement for shirts."
"And he's a good provider," Naomi mocked. This introduction had its own conventions. Only one thing was truly important to her mother. Safety. Her little girl must be safe.
"She wants to save the world, Benny." Her mother sighed.
"Barney," Naomi corrected.
"Barney," she mused. "Sounds Jewish."
"Not with 'Harrigan' as a last name."
"He's circumcised?"
Barney laughed so hard he nearly fell off the chair.
In the end, of course, he won her over.
Thinking back on that exchange, Naomi giggled suddenly, stopping when she remembered what her mother's question had stirred. The rush of these old memories unnerved her and she got out of bed and roamed her apartment, dipping into the papier-maché cigarette box and lighting up. She had given up smoking, but one stale cigarette remained. The drag of smoke choked her and she doubled up coughing. When she quieted, she punched out the cigarette and sat on the floor with her head against the couch's edge and continued to reminisce.
It was because the issue of Naomi possibly moving to Washington had risen again. A black friend from the African Rescue Corps against female genital mutilation wanted a bright young woman to join her group in Washington, an important rights group, well funded. Out of the blue, Naomi had been offered a job. It came at a time when yet another issue gnawed at her. They had become careless about birth control and she had not told him she was pregnant, even though she knew it was dishonest to keep it from him. The knowledge would have made him ecstatic. It was exactly what he wanted. Home. Hearth. Family.
"Marry me. I'll do anything. Be anything." He pleaded, cajoled, nagged. When she gently put it off he would probe her for days.
"Is it because I'm not a big bleeding heart? I swear, I'll become one. I'll stand at your side."
"No."
"Because I'm just a salesman? I haven't got the prestige?"
"Don't, Barney. It's wrong…."
"But it must be true. Why then? Don't you love me enough?"
"I love you deeply."
"Then why? Because I'm a 'scutch'?"
"That is ridiculous."
"Why then? Why?"
In their hearts, they both knew why.
He had been away a week at a convention in Los Angeles, and with smartphones booming, his profits were skyrocketing. She had decided not to go with him, more as a test of separation than out of genuine reluctance. She had it in her mind to accept the Washington job and offer a split residence deal. A weekend in Washington, a weekend in New York. It would be a test of the endurance of their relationship, a challenge. Caring also meant compromise. Didn't it?
Unfortunately, her pregnancy had complicated matters and she had to decide whether or not to keep the baby. Fetus? Baby? It had no life, was barely five weeks from conception. On many a cold night, she had remonstrated with herself, forcing the distinction on her conscience. It was one thing to be pro-choice for other people, but something else when it happened to you. In his absence, she had agonized over it. Years later, she was still agonizing.
He returned home filled with tales of personal success. He had impressed so-and-so. His bosses had hinted that he was going places. He was becoming a real corporate man.
"It's a game," he told her, "like politics." He had to tickle the right buttons, kiss the right butts. The goal was getting ahead.
"In politics, you have to have some ideology," she told him.
"Liberals always say that."
"At least if you were a conservative, I could understand," she berated. "You're nothing."
"Not nothing. A man without a label."
"A hired gun."
"Right. I'll fight under any flag that pays enough."
The memory of that night had taken on vibrant colors in her mind. Sometimes they became so bright they nearly blinded her and she had to kill the lights of remembering. She decided to tell him about her decision to accept the Washington job. His reaction would determine the future of the baby. The coming baby meant marriage. Permanence. The job in Washington meant personal satisfaction for her. She wanted it all. As he talked about his successes, she waited for the right moment to tell him.
"I have a surprise," he said, coming out of the bathroom. She was sweet smelling and powdered after her bath. He was wearing a paisley robe, bare beneath. Sitting at the foot of the bed, he looked at her.
"I wanted to buy you something," he said, speaking slowly. It was always a sign of something deeply serious to come, something worked out carefully in his mind. "But what would it mean? Hell, I can buy you anything. It wouldn't mean a thing." He was right, of course. She never believed in gifts like that, much to his disappointment. As she had quoted Emerson once, "A gift must be a piece of one's persona, the essence of one's self." Often she had written him a poem or given him a flower. Her biggest present would be their baby.
"I searched my mind for something so special that it would mean a bond, a part of both of us."
She had sat up, reached out her hand, but he had, oddly, moved away.
"I know we have some basic differences," he had continued. His tone worried her. Was he going to give her the change in himself that she craved?
"I just hope you won't think it's crazy. To anyone else, it might seem crazy."
"Crazy?"
"It's symbolic."
Symbols? That was more the way her mind worked than his. He was being elusive, vague.
"Just an idea," he said with boyish embarrassment, as if he had regretted whatever it was.
"For God's sakes, Barney."
"Close your eyes."
The whole process worried her, brought her to the edge of a hidden panic. But she obeyed him, closing her eyes.
"Now," he whispered.
When she opened her eyes, nothing seemed to have changed except that he had cast aside his robe and stood naked before her, his long lean muscular body, with its thin coat of gilded hair, picking up the light. Then she looked down and saw what he had done.
"It's still a little sore. It was nothing. Took ten minutes. Not ready for action yet. A few more days."
Even in memory, the flash of hostility could still burn. It was an act of futility, ludicrous and inadequate. Indeed, it was a symbol, and it crushed her with the force of its realization. She did not want that kind of proof and sacrifice of his love. It was a total misinterpretation, revealing the terrible gulf, the difference between them, and such a stupid act could not bridge the gap. It was superficial, a grandstander, almost pathetic. Her mother had merely been joking.
She recoiled. If this was what he meant by getting inside of her…. In the giant burst of epiphany, she saw their life together, an endless series of misinterpretations. "You can't become someone else!" she wanted to cry out at him, knowing that she had generated enough anger to do what she should have done from the beginning: save herself. Whatever his love meant, it would strangle her.
It was absolutely the last clear image she had of him, standing there, naked, the circumcision scar still unhealed, her respect and love for him diminished beyond repair. And she had, leaving him standing there in her mind, an image now suffused with the glow of her regrets. She had killed the baby as well.
