Part 5 (1/2)

I knew what she wanted, why. I slid the belt out but said, ”I'll do it, Lily. Get backit can still bite.

It's crazy.”

When the dog turned away again, I whipped the belt around its neck and choked it with all my might. What little life was left, it took only seconds. The noises were soft and very short.

”Hard, Max. Hard as you can! Kill it fast. Please kill it now.”

Besides the grimness of the scene, what I found remarkable about it, and what kept coming back to me long after it was over, was how she reacted to what had happened. I remembered how she had run to help the pregnant woman in the parking lot the first day we met. She was unquestionably one of those rare good people whose first impulse is to help whenever it's needed, but this was different.

Helping is one thing, putting a crazed, dangerous animal out of its misery is another. Pragmatic yet moral, selfsacrificing, a firm good mother, funny, and a flame in bed... This was it. Lily Aaron was G.o.d's gift to me. I knew I must do everything in my power to win her.

There was another scene that happened in France, though the other is a story rather than a scene.

A story I told her at the beginning of our flight back to Los Angeles. But on second thought, I will not tell it till later. Let this part end with death and hope. The real possibility of joy. See us looking out a small round airplane window together at the world below. A world that would have been ours, if not for the child.

PART TWO. CROWS WITH BLUE EYES.

”Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour?”

Emerson.

”Mary told me about a couple that went to Thailand for a vacation. They were walking down the street in some town and saw a baby puppy just lying there. It was adorable but had been abandoned and they knew if they didn't save it, it would die. So they took it and somehow snuck it back home with them. Back to America.”It grew up and was a real cutieaffectionate and sweet. It liked to sit on their laps when they were watching TV. But they also had a cat that the dog hated and was always after. One day the cat disappeared and next thing they knew the man found little bones or something near the dog's bed.”

”Get out! The dog ate the cat? Fur and all?”

”Wait, it gets better. The dog ate the cat, fur and all, which made the owners a wee bit suspect. So they took the dog to the vet 'cause they were afraid it might start eating other things in the neighborhood.

The vet took one look at it and said, 'This isn't a dog. I don't know what it is, but it is definitely not a dog.'”

”What was it? What'd they do?”

”Took it to a zoo. Know what it was? A rat . It was called something like a Giant Siamese Rat.”

”THEY KEPT A RAT IN THE HOUSE?”.

”A Giant Siamese Rat.”

”What'd they do with it?”

”Put it to sleep.”

Lincoln turned to his mother and asked, ”That means they killed it?”

”Yes, sweetie. Hey, Max, is that story true?”

”According to Mary it is.”

It was a winter Sunday. The three of us were sitting around the kitchen table still in our pajamas, each with his different section of the newspaper.

Two months after returning from France we moved in together. It was a difficult change for all of us, but Lincoln had it hardest. Lily and I chose to do this because of our hope and new love. There would be difficulties, but there was also the elation that accompanies the possibility of real and longlasting satisfaction. So, like diplomats negotiating a nuclear test ban treaty, we felt the boy out as delicately as we could and then worked our behavior and our words in such a way that he felt he was involved in our decision.

Lincoln was used to having his mother to himself. I learned he was not a terribly egotistical kid but, like anyone, enjoyed being the center of another's universe. They had lived alone together ten years. He was her history, while she was his rock and his truth. She had had boyfriends over the years, two of them quite serious, but nothing ever serious enough to threaten the straight distance between their two points.

Lincoln's father, Rick Aaron, was a rumor and a ghost to the boy. He seemed larger than life, ten feet tall, an adventurer, Zorro, et cetera, but he was more of an event to his son than a real human being.

Lily and Rick met at Kenyon College. He was a handsome math whiz with a sleek ponytail of long hair, a blue Jeep, and a notebook of poetry he'd written two hundred pages long. He did photography, calligraphy, he knew a world about ornithology. Lily was enthralled and disturbed by him in equal measures. Why was this Mega Man interested in Lily Margolin, language major? She was goodlooking, had enough selfconfidence to hold her own in conversation, and liked s.e.x more than most of her friends.

b.u.t.ttt Rick Aaron was one of those rare people who part the waters wherever they go. Men disliked him, yet they wanted to be his friend. Women looked too long at him, sometimes their mouths hung open a bit. He had a reputation, but from what Lily could gather, his old girlfriends were proud of their time with him and few of them said bad things. What bad was said was good: he was too intense, too hungry, too selfabsorbed. She liked those qualities. Besides, with everything he had going for him, didn't he have a right to be selfabsorbed? It made Rick all the more compelling when he shone his thousandcandlepower attention her way. One night she even dreamed he was a lighthouse. A human lighthouse with enough brilliance and power to illumine every part of the night. The only odd thing about this dream, which naturally she took as a crucial sign from her deepest heart, was that Rick's head swiveled completely around on his neck. But at the time, she took that as further proof of him as a true lighthouse. To include everything one must cover all directions, swivel or not.

And he sure shone his light in her direction! She had had boyfriends. There was even one now at another college, but that guy, any other guys, stood no chance compared with this man. That was part of italthough he was only a soph.o.m.ore, Lily thought of Rick as a man. What was wonderful was that at times he could be as silly and charming as a boy, but his strength and curiosity made him sure, calm,adult . They met in September, and that Christmas, Rick gave her a handtooled leather alb.u.m of poems and photographs he had done especially for her. She'd saved up for months and bought him a special lens for his camera but then felt like a superficial twerp holding that beautiful black leather book, letting pages slip down her thumb. A lens compared with poems?

The more attention he paid her, the more happy and nervous she became. She was waiting for the bomb to drop or at least someone to hand her the bill for what this man and their relations.h.i.+p really cost.

Most people think they deserve better than they've gotten. Trouble is, if we ever happen to get ”it” we become terribly suspicious.

The bill arrived shortly after they moved in together and Lily had survived her cuc.u.mber episode with Mr. Aaron. One evening Rick announced he was leaving school for a while. Just like that he was dropping out for a semester and going to San Francisco to see what all the fuss was about there. Like a brain tumor or terminal disease that lies dormant for years in our body until the day it comes to life and begins to eat us away from the inside, Rick suddenly was afflicted with either wanderl.u.s.t or irresponsibility. It depended on how you saw it and on where you stood in relation to him. Always the good boy, good student, good good, he abruptly decided to hit the road and see what he was missing.

Just like that. Unfortunately he left behind (among other things) a young woman hopelessly tied to him and willing to put up with this romantic bulls.h.i.+t so she could remain in his life. She even asked if she could go with him. That was an astounding realization to make. Emotions like this really existed! She had actually met a man for whom she'd sacrifice everything. She would desert her old life too if he'd let her.

But he wouldn't. Not that he was thinking of her wellbeing. Borrowing from bad cowboyfilm dialogue, he actually said something along the lines of a man's got to do what a man's got to do and left Lily Margolin on the doorstep in Gambier, Ohio, watching his Jeep buzz off into the sunset.

We do many foolish things at the beginning of a relations.h.i.+p. 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 wifethe 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 middlecla.s.s. A pleasant life, but nothing in it ever shone, no, burned the way her relations.h.i.+p 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 thischerish it when it was there, wors.h.i.+p it when it was gone. Perhaps Rick was even testing hertesting her longdistance 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 cla.s.s, 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 t.i.tle 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 hotair balloon and then, with no instruction, cut her ropes and sent her drifting off into s.p.a.ce. 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 tiedyed s.h.i.+rt, 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'dseen. That didn't mean he was home to stay, however. The son of a b.i.t.c.h 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 s.e.x. 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 das.h.i.+kis 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 selfobsessed a.s.shole 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 midsoliloquy and asked pointblank 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 s.p.a.ce. 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? NO. Rick the p.r.i.c.k. I think that's when I named him that. Rick the p.r.i.c.k. 'You have to decide for yourself about your own s.p.a.ce.' Can you imagine saying that to your wife?”

As gently as possible I asked, ”Then why'd you go?”