Sol Stein - Other people

I waited.

"Sex is very important. Like horses."

This was before he had given up on me and horses.

"Men," he said, "have a thing like a stick."

I could feel him glancing sideways at me.

"A woman," he continued, "has in front a hole for the stick, you know this?"

I nodded.

"That is sex," he said.

I heard no further sound, not even his breathing. After a bit, I turned just enough to glimpse his leathered visage. He was floating in a memory somewhere. Suddenly he sensed my intrusion and turned toward me. I quickly averted my gaze back to the fire. I felt I had embarrassed him.

"I have more, George."

My mind whirred with the possibilities: more about the stick and the hole? How women get pregnant? How masturbation can bring on blindness?

"Your mama," he said, then stopped.

I imagined his leather face over my mother's, her submissive expression, he with his nightshirt pulled up exposing his flat buttocks, she with her nightgown pulled to her waist.

"Your mama was not my first wife."

At thirteen I was a champion of overheard conversations. With my ear against the bedroom wall I had heard snatches. And the jangling of the brass bed that had given me my first guilty erections.

"You did not know this?"

"No," I lied.

From the depths of his chest came a sound of remembered regret, a sigh of such profound dimensions that I couldn't imagine what words were to come after.

"In my sixteenth summer in the land of Ararat I took in a Catholic ceremony a girl named Shushan Harossian as my wife. She was a cousin of a cousin from Zeytoon, very beautiful dark hair, a face like an olive blossom. Her three brothers and her father and mother were taken from Zeytoon by the Turks into the desert and that was that. She was hidden by a priest who arranged for her to be taken by a merchant to us in Marash for safety.

"When we see each other, it was an explosion of love, and everyone believes that living in the same house we will not be able to keep from each other, so we are quickly married.

"Our marriage was not a week old when the Turks come, three thousand soldiers crying out La ilaha ill-Allah uhammed Rasula-llah. There is no other God but one God and Mohammed is his prophet. The Turks let it be known that any Armenian who deserts his Christ will be spared. Perhaps there were cowards. I knew none. We prayed, we offer our devotion to God, then my father hurries my mother and the younger children to the church, it is a sanctuary he says. But I have heard of the burning of churches. I plead with my father to let Shushan and me hide in the cellar, where the small treasures of our family are hidden away under rugs. My father calls me a fool of love, he says we will die at the hands of the Turks, and he slams the door so that it shakes the house, as he runs after my mother and the younger children to the church of their salvation.

"Shushan, obeying her bridegroom's instructions, puts bread and cheese away in the cellar. Then, when the shouting is already very near, Shushan suddenly says we have not locked the door behind my father! I say they will break any door that is locked. But Shushan, without my permission, leaves the sanctuary of the cellar. I can hear them, I shout 'Come back, come back!' but it is too late. A Turk pushes open the door. He is tall and has a pock-marked face. He sees Shushan and she scurries away from the direction of the cellar door in order not to reveal my hiding place. The Turk cries to his comrades that the infidels have left an angel behind. They come, six or seven of the beasts. Two of them hold her on the floor as she struggles, my heart bursts because I can see everything from a crack in the cellar door, and the leader opens his pants, his stick is curved like a scimitar, and he falls to his knees, and Shushan screams as he leans forward, shoving his stick like a madman."

I cannot look at my father when his eyes are wet like a woman's. My hands are clasped white until he speaks again.

"That is sex," says my father at last, "All the Turks — may they rot in hell — have sex with Shushan, who a week before was a virgin. Should I not have risen from my knees and with my bare hands raged at them with their swords? Am I a coward to have stayed in the cellar?"

Papa now looks toward me to forgive him. My mouth is dry, as if I am choked with sesame seeds.

"You couldn't do anything," I say.

He continues, "That is not the end. The leader goes to the door to call other infidels. My pearl, Shushan, struggles to her knees, begging 'No more, no more,' the Turk who was first draws his scimitar and with a cry curves it over his head then down with the yell of a beast, beheading her."

My father, the horseman with infinite strength, now cried from the depths of his chest an agony that had been carried within him for more than half a century, from the world of Ararat to America. I was then three years younger than he was as a bridegroom. In his place, I would have wanted to fight, not to lose but to win! It was at that moment I have since felt that I swallowed the seed of a Maccabee.

"Those who fled to the church lived?" I asked.

"For an hour. They died in the flames. I was the only one left."

I got up and put my arms around Papa's hunched shoulders, and we cried together for his lost love, for the confession of his cowardice, and for the absence of justice in the world, and for the new burden of the vocation I had found.

"Men don't understand rape," Francine was saying. "They never have."

I was silent for a moment, but she wanted a response from me, so I said, "They never have. Look, can you come back tomorrow at the same time?"

When she left, I sat in the near-darkened office, knowing it would be a half hour before my date would arrive. Geraldine would expect dinner, which we would have, and bed, which we would not have this evening, for with my father's memories thundering in my head, I was not seducible.

I ain't seen the girl around. She must be keeping to herself. Fuck her, I got Mary.

Mary's out, dropping the kids off at her mother's. She likes partyin' better when the kids aren't in the house.

Wonder what's taking Jason so fucking long, he must have a single-pole switch down in the basement somewhere.

I get awful restless just waiting so I called the station. When the kid answers, I said, "Jim, you handle things, I won't be back today. Just remember the pumps show the number of gallons pumped since I left. Don't take the money home with you, ha, ha. Just stash it you know where. Yeah, I hear them honkin'. See ya tomorrow."

The doorbell rings and it's Jason, holding a switch in that left claw and a screwdriver and tape in his right.

"Hi," he says. "Which room?"

"Bathroom," I says.

I really had to get used to him bein' superintendent, you know. It used to be old guys was superintendents, but Jason had to be no more than thirty or so, like a grown-up hippie sort of, a good-looking guy, beard, wears jeans instead of coveralls, and that clamp is really somethin'. I tried to get him to talk about it once or twice. All I learned is that the government paid for it and he works the mechanical arm off straps around his shoulders.

He was taking the old switch out of the wall and I says, "Don't you turn the fuse first?" and he says, "If you do it right, you don't get no shock."

I'm sittin' on the edge of the tub — I mean I'm not going to sit on the pot watching him, am I? — and I say, "Hey, Jason, how come you sometimes wear the arm and sometimes not?"

"That's a very personal question," he says. Then he laughs. Every time that guy laughs I think he must be on somethin', just when he laughs I mean. "My turf," he says, "is two more buildings sides this one. You know how many women in this old parking lot got husbands go to work?"