The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

were a law student and so young. You also taught swimming at the law school and took care of the pool. In fact, you were poor. You owned two pairs of slacks, one blue and one yellow, and the shiny hazel-colored suit in which you were married. You owned two ties and half a dozen shirts. Two pairs of shoes. I too could pack everything I owned, including my typewriter, in a couple of suitcases. When we finally moved in together, in your room overlooking Washington Square Park, there was an absence of clutter simply because our possessions were so few. A bedspread doubled as a tablecloth, a folding table doubled as a desk. Your single bed seemed fine and comfortable for the two of us. We shared a bathroom with your suitemate.
    I wanted to scream at you, as I’d wanted to scream at my mother: Come back! Don’t go to work! I miss you! I am in danger while you are gone! But now it is too late to scream this, even though I finally understand this is exactly what I should have screamed. We were divorced seventeen years ago. I cannot stop the tears, however, and they roll down my cheeks, just as they did after you closed the door to our house, those lonely morningsso many years ago. I take tissues from the box at my left. Glancing down as I wipe my face, I see your well-shod foot. The cuffs of your designer slacks. We have both done phenomenally well, materially. It strikes me suddenly as astonishing. Because it was never something we set out to do. Today I own large, beautiful houses, overcompensation for the shacks in which I was raised; and when I travel, my hotel suite is nearly as large as our old house. You have a powerful New York law practice, and the best of whatever Westchester County has to offer. There is a rumor that you play golf. I confess that I can’t quite imagine this. Both of us have been hard workers all our lives, and yet much of what we have today—at least speaking for myself—seems to have fallen into our laps. Or do all poor people who become successful in America feel like this?
    What is this road on which there is so much beauty and so much pain? So much love and so much suffering? Such surprise. How can it be that we have lost each other all these years? That even though it took my mother thirteen years to die, you never sent her a card. It would have been easier for me to believe you murdered someone than that this could happen. Was it because, on meeting you, she hurt your feelings by identifying you with the only label her fundamentalist Christian upbringing gave her for Jews: Christ-killer. Or that she said, even though she knew better, because I had told her you were only twenty-two, that you seemed like an old man. Once again I look down at your stylish Italian leather shoes. Even your feet have changed, I think, recalling the black “space” shoes you used to wear because your Pisces feet (fish feet) were so tender and often sore. You appeared to roll a bit as you walked, in an attempt to alleviate the discomfort; perhaps this is what struck her as odd, as old. Anold man’s walk. But it was like her, in any case, to be critical of whomever I brought home. Except for Porter, the young man I fell in love with when I was six and became intimate with when I was sixteen. This was her son-in-law, the one she chose, the one she wanted, though he and I separated as friends when I was eighteen. She never said about him, as she did about every other boy or man: He has a homely face, you will soon tire of it; his feet are slightly splayed, his wrists are too thin, he will be bald before he’s thirty. I was dismayed, of course, that she could not really see you. That my father could not. My whole family could not. To them, you were for many years merely a white male blur wearing clothing. No matter how gentle you appeared, you struck an ancient terror in their hearts. To them, all white people had a vampire quality, they were seen as people who devour, who suck dry. They waited for this to happen to me.