“Frisch’s? Frisch’s up on Overlook?”
“Yes, that’s it! That’s the one.” Edging away, palms up, harmless.
My Tante snorted. “You’re going to need more than good directions. It closed down ages ago. Ten years, if you’re lucky. What are you looking for, dear?” Her voice bent down with burden, her penance for coming to this mixed land.
Teresa, too, turned to me. Yes, what are you looking for?
I spoke my humiliation. “Mandelbrot.”
“Mandelbrot!”She examined me to see how I could have discovered this secret password. “Why didn’t you say so, dear? Frisch’s, you don’t need. Down to the next street, make a left. Halfway up the block on your left.”
I thanked her again, in zeal proportional to how worthless her information was to me. I cupped Teresa by the shoulder and dragged her off toward the street Tante had indicated.
“What’s Mandelbrot, Joseph?” In her mouth, the word turned to enriched flour.
“Almond bread.” Lost in translation.
“Almond bread! You like almond bread? You never told me. I could have made you…” Teresa, her face contorted, struggled with the indictment. If you’d only told me, brought the affair home and put her into bed with us.
We found the bakery. Nothing resembling Frisch’s. The thing they sold as Mandelbrot might as well have been cinnamon toast. We sat on a bench and picked at it, our day in the city ending. I looked up the street at a man combing through a wire-mesh trash can. Tomorrow was just that light on the horizon, rushing to catch up with yesterday. This was the street Da had brought us along, telling us how all the universe’s clocks kept different times. The same bench, though same seemed meaningless.
We’d eaten nothing all day. But Teresa picked at her almond bread as at some stale Communion wafer. She tore off hunks and tossed them to the pigeons, then cursed the birds for swarming her. I sat next to her, waylaid in my own life. The boys and their father passed us while we sat on this bench, but they didn’t yet know how to see us. There was no place I could get to from this where and when. I rose to go, but I couldn’t walk. Teresa was clamped onto me, holding me in place. “Joseph. My Joe. We have to make it legal.”
“It?” Trying to smash all clocks.
“Us.”
I sat back down. I studied the man working the trash can, who was unfolding a shiny packet of aluminum foil. “Ter, we’re good. Aren’t you happy?” She looked down. “Why do you always say ‘make it legal’? You afraid of being arrested? You want some contract in case you need to sue me?”
“Fuck the law. I don’t give a shit about the law.” She was crying, forcing her words through closed teeth. “You keep saying okay, but nothing happens. It’s like your music. You say you want to, but you don’t. I keep waiting for you. It’s like you’re just killing time with me. You think you’re going to find somebody better who you’ll really want to marry, really want to make—”
“No. Absolutely not. I will never, never find anyone else who…is better to me than you.”
“Really, Joseph? Really? Then why not prove it?”
“What do we have to prove? Is love about proving?” Yes, I thought, even as I asked. That’s exactly what love is. Teresa leaned her head over her knees and began to sob. I stroked her back in big sweeping ovals, like a child practicing his cursive O ’s. I learned to write from Mama, but I couldn’t remember her ever teaching me. I rubbed Ter’s back as she heaved, feeling my hand from some distant, insulated place.
A man in a black suit and crushed porkpie hat, older than the century, shuffled by. At the sound of danger, his shuffle accelerated to a crawl. Then, seeing that our tragedy wouldn’t hurt him, he stopped. “Is she sick, the girl?”
“She’s fine. It’s just… Leid.” He nodded, squinting, and said something in Da’s language I didn’t catch. All I heard was the brutal reprimand. His shuffle ramped up again, but he stopped and looked back every twenty paces. Checking whether to call the Polizei.
I knew Teresa’s need for marriage, the one she couldn’t speak. If she married, her family might relent and retrieve her. If we stayed as we were, we’d confirm their worst slander. She’d be forever living in sin with a freeloading black who didn’t even care enough to give her a ring.
But marriage was impossible. It was wrong in a way I couldn’t begin to say. My brother and sister made it impossible. My father and mother. Marriage meant belonging, recognizing, finding zero, coming home. The bird and the fish could fall in love, but the here and now would scatter every thieved twig they might assemble. I don’t know what race Teresa thought I belonged to, but it wasn’t hers. Race trumped love as surely as it colonized the loving mind. There was no middle place to stand. My parents had tried, and the results were my life. Nothing I felt the need to reproduce.
I was back in a cold December in Kenmore Square in Boston. My brother, slapped down for kissing a girl of another caste, the first wrong turn of his life, was telling me that we were the only race that couldn’t reproduce ourselves. I’d thought him crazy. Now it seemed obvious. Of all the music Teresa and I might raise our children on, there wasn’t a single tune that could be theirs, unquestioning, unquestioned, sung the way they breathed. Teresa thought she’d gone beyond race. She thought that she’d paid already. She had no idea. I had no way of telling her. “Teresa. Ter. How can we?”
I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. But Teresa was. She flung her head up. “‘How can we?’ How can we? ” Her words were terrible, drugged. I thought she might be cracking up. I looked around, scouting for the nearest public phone. “How can we sit here?” Her enraged red face swung back and forth, a refusal so violent, it begged for restraint. Her words slurred crazily. “How can we live together? Talk to each other?” She half-stood, then slammed down again. She turned away from me, suffocating, her lips twisting without sound. Her arms were in front of her, tearing in disgust at the air. I wrote big, cursive, reassuring O ’s into her back until, in a fury, she wheeled around and flung my hand at me. I didn’t dare move. Toward or away — equal disasters. My head was blank, pitchless, colorless. If she’d had a knife, the woman would have used it. Then Teresa calmed. That’s what time is. Da explained it to me once. Time is how we know which way the world runs: ever downward, from crazed to numb.
We went back to Atlantic City together, obeying some force one notch down from choice. We resumed living together in a kind of suspended motion of dead people. The battered wedding plans never arose again, except in our thoughts, every minute we were in each other’s presence. Time did its randomizing run. Two more months down the further slope, my brother called. Teresa picked it up. By that electric pause after she said hello, I knew it was him. Her receiver hand started to shake, excited: Yes, it was Teresa, yes, that Teresa, and yes, she knew who he was — all about him, where he was — and yes, his brother was there, and yes, no, yes, and she giggled, completely seduced by whatever little halfhearted sweet talk he worked on her. She handed the phone to me, soft as she hadn’t been since we took our death holiday in the city.
“She’s got a pretty voice, Mule. You sing with her?”
“Something like that.”
“What’s the top of her range?”
“How you doing, Jonah?”
“You sure she’s Polish? She doesn’t sound Polish. What’s she look like?”
“What do you think? How’s Celeste?”
“Not taking to Belgium too well, I’m afraid. She thinks they’re all savages here.”
“Are they?”