“I am someplace else,” replied the Negro with his yellow-toothed grin. Then he added mysteriously, “I ain’t what you think I am.”
“Frankly I don’t know what I think you are,” said Muni, thus terminating their exchange.
Was Jenny pretty? Her nose was slightly crooked, her stripling figure wiry to a nearly unfeminine degree, but her eyes — those lamp-black puddles — had their own gravitational pull. Looking into them, Muni felt a tidal response in his kishkes, as if his very insides were being drawn toward the girl. At some point Jenny had discarded her cane, and while she still limped, might limp forever, her jerky movements had become so adapted to her gait that Muni hardly noticed. He was selfishly thankful that her handicap kept her anchored to terra firma, that she didn’t attempt to mount her rope or tinker with the reels that held it taut. Also, she’d stopped talking so much about leaving town, though when she mentioned it Muni fought an urge to hold her back physically. He wanted to hold her. Once he went so far as to remark that her coat was too thin for the climate, imagining she might then nestle against him for warmth. Would he have the courage to enfold her with a cautious arm? He remembered the shameless flirtations of the Labor Bund girls back in Minsk: how he would stammer in embarrassment, his belly a furnace, until deportation put an end to desire. But the weather had turned and a new season was afoot: japonica, forsythia, and sweet jasmine grew out of the cracks in the sidewalk; creepers climbed the alley walls. The perfume of growing things vied with the fulsome odors from Sacharin’s fish market and the nearby river, and energies Muni was unaware he possessed were quickened by his proximity to the girl.
But even while the whole street seemed solicitous of the match, Muni refrained from any conduct that might be perceived as courtship. At the same time he knew that mere friendship would never entirely content him, though he sometimes felt he and Jenny were still separated by mountains and frozen wastes. Then one mild April evening, during the agitated days just after the sinking of the Titanic, they took a walk through Market Square Park. A number of other strollers were also abroad in that ill-lighted public space, its gas lamps not yet replaced by electric lights. Leaving the path Jenny had bolted ahead of him out across the patchy lawn, lurching in her uneven stride toward the towering oak that was the park’s centerpiece. This was the tree under whose broad boughs in summer, when the tenements became ovens, the population of the Pinch would bring hampers, picnic on blankets spread over the grass, then bed down for the night.
Despite the faint glow of her eggshell frock Muni lost sight of the girl in the shadows; she was a ghost and then she was gone. Having followed her beneath the branches, he stood there stymied among the sinuous roots peering this way and that, when a pair of strong hands grasped him under the arms and hoisted him into the air. Kicking and twisting, he struggled to regain his equilibrium, even as he was set astride a nodding bough — from which, looking up, he saw Jenny hanging by her knees. Moonlight filtering through the new leaves revealed her braid dangling like a bell-pull from under the skirt draped over her head, leaving her umbrella-style drawers fully exposed. Then, skinning the cat, she dropped neatly onto the limb that supported Muni, and leaned forward to plant a wet kiss on his lips.
The contact, brief as it was, left Muni so light-headed he thought he might swoon; he might have slid from the branch and broken his head had not Jenny held on to keep him from tumbling. The canopy of leaves cast harlequin shadows over her expectant face, and he felt compelled out of gratitude (if not challenged) to return her favor in kind. But while he still lacked the nerve to give back the kiss, there was something he thought she might even prefer. A piece of his past was the least of what he owed her for her attentions, though reaching into that grab bag could be like thrusting a hand into embers.
“When I was brodyag,” he submitted, “that it means a fugitive fleeing the katorga, the labor camp, I came one time in the wilderness to what I think — I’m that weary — is from a wrecked sailing ship its hull. But close up I can see that it’s instead the rib bones and tusks from a old-timey monster.”
Meager as was his offering, the girl received it like a gift and was moved to give him another more protracted kiss. Again Muni’s giddiness threatened to dislodge him from his perch, and grabbing him to steady his wobbling, Jenny was tickled, her laughter approaching a noisy hilarity. Then it was Muni’s turn to take the initiative, clapping a hand over her mouth to mute her cackling lest the strollers discover them in their leafy roost.
After that the progress of their touching was a hole-and-corner affair, conducted exclusively in the tree that became their regular trysting place. Jenny was always the provocateur, assuming a sauciness on high that she would never have dared on earth in broad daylight. Given the right circumstances — stars, redolent breeze — she might bite Muni’s ear-lobe or peck his brow. Certainly her lambent attentions were prompted by a genuine fondness, but there was another more expedient motive behind them. Because for every kitsl or stroke he received, Muni felt it incumbent upon him to divulge another memory in return. Squeeze his hand and he might recall how even words froze in the Siberian immensity, so that you had to wait till the spring thaw to hear what was said months before. Buss his cheek and he told you that compared with what they were fed — brined cabbage garnished with a single goosefoot (“So tsedrait were we with hunger that we licked from the wheelbarrow the axle grease”) — his aunt Katie’s black pudding was a feast. Their cleavings and caresses, however, remained confined to their nocturnal fastness, untranslatable to solid ground where they maintained a discreet acquaintance.
Nevertheless, the electricity between them when they were together was palpable. Though they feigned nonchalance, no one was fooled. Jenny’s expression remained fixed in a kind of cat-that-ate-the-canary simper, while Muni wondered if people could tell that his veins and arteries were flushed with quicksilver. Amused by his nephew’s distracted manner, Uncle Pinchas pretended impatience with him in the store, while his aunt might suspend her crabbiness long enough to pinch his cheek in passing. And once, with a dreary sigh, she said, “Faith but I’m not half jealous of you and yer flame.” There was a beat before Muni realized that by “flame” she meant Jenny.
Then night would fall and he and the girl would withdraw into the branches of the oak. They went separately to the tree to ensure the clandestine nature of their meetings, and one would always find the other waiting among the lower branches. Then they would climb ever higher, scooting farther out along the nodding boughs, Jenny assisting Muni, who lacked her simian skills. They clung to aeries that afforded broad vistas over the tar-papered rooftops of the Pinch and the river, with its riding barges spangled in hurricane lamps. “I can see from here the Statue of Liberty,” Jenny might insist, “and the Eiffel Tower and the Wall of China.” While Muni: “I can see the depot at Poplar and Front,” which was only a few blocks away, but farther than that he didn’t care to look. Then they would kiss, kiss and embrace, and despite their dizzy swaying Muni learned to retain his balance. He trusted the girl to keep him from falling even as his dazzled brain remained steeped in a broth of wanting. How was it, he wondered, that things done in the tree seemed never to leave the tree, their consequences not extending past the reach of its branches?