“I’ve missed you,” he said. “I’ve been eating venison and thinking of you.”
“Yes, well, thank you for coming, anyway.”
“I thought you read very well,” he said. “Not all of it I understood, I have to admit. Some of your stuff is a little too literaturey for me.”
“Really,” said Odette.
People shook her hand. They looked at her quizzically, came at her with assumptions, presumptions, what they believed was intimate knowledge of her. She felt unarmed, by comparison; disadvantaged. She lit up a cigarette.
“Do you really feel that way about men?” asked a man with a skeptical mouth.
“Do you really feel that way about women?” asked someone else.
“Your voice,” said a young student. “It’s like — who’s that actress?”
“Mercedes McCambridge,” said her friend.
“No, not her. Oh, I forget.”
Several elderly couples had put on their coats and hats, but they came up to Odette to shake her hand. “You were wonderful, dear,” said one of the women, gazing into Odette’s nose.
“Yes,” said the other, studying her own botched knitting — a scarf with an undulating edge.
“We come to these every year,” said a man standing next to her. He had been searching for something to say and had come up with this.
“Well, thank you for coming this year as well,” said Odette, stupidly, and dragged on her cigarette.
Kay Stevens, the woman in charge of the fellowship readings, came up and kissed her on the cheek, the sweet vanilla wax of her lipstick sticking like candy. “A big success,” she said quickly, and then frowned and hurried off.
“Can I buy you a drink somewhere?” asked Pinky. He was still standing beside her, and she turned to look at him gratefully.
“Oy,” she said. “Please.”
Pinky drove them out past the county line to Humphrey Bogart’s. He toasted her, flicked a sparkly speck of something from her cheek, looked into her eyes, and said, “Congratulations.” He grew drunk, pulled his chair close, and put his head on her shoulder. He listened to the music, chewed on his cocktail straw, tapped his feet.
“Any requests?” the bandleader rumbled into the mike.
“O, give us one of the songs of Zion,” shouted Pinky.
“What was that?” The words popped and roared in the mike.
“Nothing,” said Pinky.
“Maybe we should go,” said Odette, reaching for Pinky’s hand beneath the table.
“OK,” he said. “All right.”
HE STRUCK a match to a candle in the dark of his bedroom, and the fire of it lit the wall in a jittery paint. He came back to her and pressed close. “Why don’t I go with you to New York?” he whispered. She was silent, and so he said, “No, I think you should stay here. I could take you cross-country skiing.”
“I don’t like cross-country skiing,” she whispered back. “It reminds me of when you’re little and you put on your father’s slippers and shluff around the house like that.”
“I could take you snowmobiling up by Sand Lake.” There was another long silence. Pinky sighed. “No, you won’t. I can see you phoning your friends back East to tell them you’d decided to stay and them shrieking, ‘You did what?’ ”
“You know us East Coasters,” she said desperately. “We just come into a place, rape and pillage.”
“You know,” said Pinky, “I think you are probably the smartest person I have ever known.”
She stopped breathing. “You don’t get out much, do you?”
He rolled back and stared at the shadowed ceiling, its dimples and blotches. “When I was in high school, I was a bad student. I had to take special classes in this house behind the school. It was called The House.”
She rubbed his leg gently with her foot. “Are you trying to make me cry?”
He took her hand, brought it out from beneath the covers, up to his mouth, and kissed it. “Everything’s a joke with you,” he said.
“Nothing’s a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.”
THEY SPENT one last night together. At his house, late, with all the lights off, they watched another cassette of Holocaust Survivors. It was about a boy forced to sing for the Nazis, over and over. Because he could sing, he was the last to be shot in the head, and when they shot him they missed the center of his brain. He was found alive. “I must think of happy things,” he said now, old and staring off. “It may not be what others do, but it is what I must do.” He had a beautiful voice, said a woman, another survivor. It was beautiful like a bird that was also a god with flutes.
“Heavy,” murmured Pinky, when it was over. He pressed the remote control and turned away in the darkness, toward the wall, in a curve of covers. Odette pulled herself close, placed her hands around to the front of him, palms over the slight mounds of his breasts, her fingers deep in the light tangle of hair.
“Are you OK?” she asked.
He twisted toward her and kissed her, and in the dark he seemed to her aged and sad. He placed one of her fingers to his face. “You never asked about this.” He guided her finger along his chin and cheek, letting it dead-end, like the scar, in his mustache.
“I try not to ask too many things. Once I start I can’t stop.”
“You want to know?”
“All right.”
“I was in high school. Some guy called me a Jew, and I went after him. But I was clumsy and fat. He broke a bottle and dragged it across my face. I went home and my grandmother nearly fainted. Funny thing was, I had no idea that I was Jewish. My grandmother waited until the next day to tell me.”
“Really,” said Odette.
“You have to understand midwestern Jews: They’re afraid of being found out. They’re afraid of being discovered.” He breathed steadily, in and out, and the window shade flapped a little from being over the radiator. “As you probably know already, my parents were killed in the camps.”
Odette did not say anything, and then she said, “Yes. I know.” And at the moment she said it, she realized she did know, somehow had known it all along, though the fact of it had stayed beneath the surface, gilled and swimming like a fish, and now had burst up, gasping, with its mouth wide. “Are you really leaving on Friday?” he asked.
“What?”
“Friday. Are you?”
“I’m sorry, I just didn’t hear what you said. There’s wind outside or something.”
“I asked you if you were really leaving on Friday.”
“Oh,” she said. She pressed her face hard into his neck. “Why don’t you come with me?”
He laughed wearily. “Sure,” he said. “All right,” knowing better than she at that moment the strange winding line between charity and irony, between shoplifting and love.
During that last day she thought of nothing but him. She packed and cleaned out her little apartment, but she had done this so often now in her life, it didn’t mean anything, not in the pit of her, not anything she might have wanted it to mean.
She should stay.
She should stay here with him, unorphan him with love’s unorphaning, live wise and simple in a world monstrous enough for years of whores and death, and poems of whores and death, so monstrous how could one live in it at all? One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them. She should live where there were trees. She should live where there were birds. No bird, no tree had ever made her unhappy.
But it would be like going to heaven and not finding any of your friends there. Her life would go all beatific and empty in the eyes. And if he came to New York, well, it would bewilder him. He had never been before, and no doubt he’d spend all his time staring up at the skyscrapers and exclaiming, “Gosh, look how tall those suckers are!” He would slosh through the vagrant urine, shoelaces untied. He would walk through the dog shit awaiting him like mines. He would read the menus in the windows of restaurants and whistle at the prices. He would stare at a sidewalk drunk, prone and spread-eagled and fumbling at the crotch, and he would say, not unkindly, “That guy’s really got his act together.” He would look at the women.