After Silence Read online

  We do many foolish things at the beginning of a relationship. Later we’re apt to forgive ourselves because it was that first deep breath of big love, like high mountain air, that made us dizzy and consequently made us act so wrongly.

  Lily waited for him. She should have wept and cursed his name for abandoning her, worn black clothes and looked poetically tragic for a few weeks. She jumped back into the interesting life of a college campus, but she had a streak of the Victorian in her. She once joked she would have been a good sea captain’s wife—the idea of waiting long months and writing longer letters that had little chance of ever arriving was very appealing to her sensibilities. Besides, what better experience had ever happened to her? She had grown up comfy middle-class. A pleasant life, but nothing in it ever shone, no, burned the way her relationship with Rick did. She felt lit by him, wattage she could never have conceived of before knowing this man. Anyway, maybe that was what you were supposed to do with something as magical as this—cherish it when it was there, worship it when it was gone. Perhaps Rick was even testing her—testing her long-distance dedication to him. No matter what the reason, she would show both him and herself what kind of stuff she was made of.

  She became a hermit. She went to class, she went home. She studied too much for tests and took obscure courses that would never do her a bit of good. It pleased her to discover and read authors whose work had not been checked out of the library for years. Wyndham Lewis. James Gould Cozzens. She was the first because she had love’s time on her hands. One book she found and kept renewing, not because it was good (it was incomprehensible), but because of the title – The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole. What silly things won’t we do for love? Others asked her out but she wouldn’t go. Her refusal made her more alluring and mysterious. She was neither. She was simply in love with one man who had blown her up like a hot-air balloon and then, with no instruction, cut her ropes and sent her drifting off into space. The view up there was great but when you don’t know what to do next it becomes frightening. What would she do if he didn’t come back? Did the pain she had begun to feel ever go away? Was there any way to survive the loss of someone so important? She would willingly float above the world, aimless and lost for a while, but what happened after a while?

  She didn’t have to worry. Rick reappeared two months later in a tie-dyed shirt, an Indian vest, and a beard that didn’t look very good on him. But she was so happy, he could have had a third eye implanted and she’d still have been ecstatic. Despite his new look, he was unimpressed with what he’d seen. That didn’t mean he was home to stay, however. The son of a bitch said he’d returned to Ohio only to see her, because his next stop was Europe. He was home! He was leaving! But he’d come only to see her! She said his visit was like going through a whole amusement park of emotions. What could she do but love him and give her all in the little time they had together?

  Part of that all was sex. Lily said she never screwed so much in her life. She used a diaphragm. A month after Rick left for Luxembourg, she realized her diaphragm hadn’t worked. She went home to Cleveland to tell her parents she had been living with a man, was pregnant, was going to have the baby. And oh yes, the man wasn’t around anymore. Joe and Frances Margolin were the kind of progressive parents who wore dashikis and gave money to various revolutionary causes. If their daughter wanted to have a child, right on.

  But before she’d completed her third month, Lily miscarried. When Rick returned from Europe, she told him for the first time what had happened. He was so touched and astonished that she’d been willing to have their child, even in the face of not knowing whether he would ever return, Mr. Wonderful decided then and there to stay put. They were married and lived happily ever after for two more years until he graduated and headed out for the territories again. This time it began via a job with a fledgling California computer company in the days before Silicon Valley when that whole new industry consisted of only a bunch of brilliant experimenters and enthusiasts flying by the seat of their pants. Rick liked the whole setup. One year short of her degree they moved West to disaster.

  Six months. That self-obsessed asshole lasted six months at his good new job before complaining it was restricting and he had to split. That was the word he used. Where was he splitting to this time? Israel. A kibbutz on the Syrian border. He’d been talking with a guy… She stopped him in mid-soliloquy and asked point-blank if he was planning to take her this time. His answer was the beginning of their end: “Lil, you have to decide for yourself about your own space. It’s fine with me if you want to come.” When she told me about that conversation, a hardness entered both her voice and her facial expression that was years old and not the slightest softened by time.

  “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 be
st 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.

  One of the unexpected pluses was a constant flow of new ideas for “Paper Clip” from both of them. People often asked where I got ideas for the strip. Usually I’d mumble something brilliant like “They just come to me.” But now I could honestly say, “From the people I live with.” I used the salt dream in there. I used the way Lily jerked violently awake from sleep, no matter what the circumstances. And Lincoln’s way of praying at night. My life became more involved and in ways more difficult, but also much fuller and more interesting. Interesting was the word. When you live with others you never really know what’s coming next. New noise, movement, life. The door opens after school or the phone rings and there they are with things to tell you that can turn a day upside down or its volume up a thousand wonderful decibels. Their presence alone changes the terrain.

  Taken to an extreme that can be maddening, but that wasn’t the case for me. Quite the opposite. It was only after we’d lived together some weeks that I realized that before the Aarons my life had become so predictable and dull, I could’ve driven its flat road blindfolded. Worse, whenever there was a slight bump or detour on it I became nervous and unhappy. How dare existence be different from yesterday! Obviously that sameness was neither healthy nor productive. Then came the moment I walked in their door and TOTAL TRANSFORMATION. Living with this woman and child forced me off my old path onto new ground. It was not easier to live, but richer. So much richer.

  Lincoln was crazy about baseball. I had been too as a kid, so we had real empathy there. The difference between us was my obsession had centered on the gods of major league baseball—who played on what team, their batting averages—whereas Lincoln only liked to play. For him, going to an L.A. Dodgers game was fun, but nothing beat going to the park and having a catch or hitting pop-ups and grounders. He believed deeply in sports. Reputations made in an afternoon, adulation or total failure always near. The great thing about them, especially for kids, is they are immediate black and white: good if you win, bad if you lose.

  He played on a little league team and practiced two afternoons a week in a schoolyard a few blocks from our house. What I’d do those days was finish work as quickly as possible, then clip Cobb onto his long leash and the two of us would walk over to watch our friend play. Once there, the dog sat next to me on the lowest bleacher looking like a sphinx with a nose. When he got tired, he’d climb slowly down and lie on his side in the sun. I relish the memory of those afternoons. In retrospect, they were when I felt most like a father to Lincoln. Being there for him, watching him play, walking home together afterward talking about how he’d performed made me feel a bond with him that was solid and true. We had baseball on our minds. Both of us listened and considered carefully what the other said.

  Inevitably, one of his sworn enemies played on his team. Inevitably the kid was better than Lincoln. Andy Schneider. I can still see his small lips curling in utter disdain and dislike when he said Andy’s last name, as if it were a rare disease and another name for “fart” all in one word.

  When it happened I was thinking about what to cook for dinner. Cobb was stretched out on the ground watching a bee buzz his head. Lincoln was playing shortstop, pounding his glove in anticipation of whatever was about to come off the bat of Andy Schneider.

  “Strike out, turd!”

  Lincoln’s voice? I looked up. If it was, I wasn’t happy. He could hate Schneider, but razzing him that way was low-rent behavior and I’d tell him as soon as—

  CRRRRRACK!

  Andy hit the next pitch so hard that the sound of the ball m
aking its second impact came only seconds after it left his bat. The second sound came when it struck Lincoln in the face. He dropped where he stood.

  I leapt out of the stands and ran onto the field, empty of any thought other than to reach him. He lay in a heap, one arm covering half his head. Herb Score. The first other thing in my mind. When I was a boy, Herb Score was a famous pitcher for the Cleveland Indians who was hit in the face and almost killed by a line drive.

  There was no blood. I bent down and gently moved Lincoln’s arm so I could see.

  “Mother of God!”

  His right temple was already swelling. Apparently he’d been able to turn his head a moment before impact and thus avoid being hit square in the face. But his temple was blowing up so fast that it was already the size of a golf ball and a hideous purple blue. His eyes were closed. He didn’t move.

  From behind, I heard a boy’s voice yelling, “What’d I do? Is he dead? What’d I do?”

  The coach squatted down next to me and tried to speak but kept dropping his sentences halfway through.

  “We called an ambulance. It’s not that far to…”

  “Do you know anything about medicine?”

  “No, My father was a doctor but… Hey, listen, maybe there’s a…”

  We spoke to each other but never made eye contact. Both of us watched Lincoln for signs of life. There were none. I kept bending down and putting my head against his chest. I needed to know his heart was still beating. Somewhere inside that still body, work was on to keep him alive.

  “Do you think we should do artificial…? Look at the damned swelling!”

  There was no blood. That scared me most. I kept thinking of all the angry exploded blood blocked up inside his small head. If it could only burst out somewhere in one horrid flood he’d be okay. He’d wake up screaming with pain but be okay. But there was no blood. Swelling and swelling, but no blood besides the lethal purple beneath the skin.