Rachel Cantor - Good on Paper

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We couldn’t continue? Not continue? How could we not continue?

I slipped on my father’s robe, went to Andi’s room, where she was sleeping at a forty-five degree angle to the wall. I straightened her quilt, touched her still, soft, satin cheek. She’d been through enough. I couldn’t give her another father who might not stay. It was out of the question. Neither Benny nor I knew the first thing about love! I knew how to fly a flaming chariot into the ground, he how to enflame others. How long before I decided it was time to move on? How long before he used my pain against me?

Not continue? How could we not continue?

He didn’t mean it, he couldn’t mean it! I crawled under the guilt quilt next to my daughter, held her sleeping body close.

Mom? she asked, poking my shoulder. Are you dead?

It was light, and she was standing over me, wearing the outfit she wore to do her Canadian Air Force exercises: leotard, tights, and tutu.

I pulled the guilt quilt over my face.

Not yet, I said.

Ovidio spilled Cheerios all over the floor. And he says he isn’t sorry.

To appease Benny I agreed two days later to “learn” the Song of Songs with him, which, as far as I could tell, meant talking about it with him. It was the night before Thanksgiving and he arrived bearing gifts: cassava chips, heavy tomes, Jelly Bellies.

Froggy comes a’ courtin’? I asked.

Yup, he said, and pecked my cheek.

Where do you want to start? he asked, opening one of his books.

At the beginning, I said. Where else?

There is no beginning or end in Torah. We start wherever you want.

Huh?

The Rabbis don’t consider the Bible a linear narrative. The beginning informs the end, one story comments on another, all occur simultaneously. Everything is connected by an infinite collection of cosmic hyperlinks.

I don’t get it, I said, but I like it. How about the shalhevetyah ? I asked, taking a handful of bellies. The great God-flame? I was intrigued by your conversation about it with Esther.

With Esther? I never talked with Esther about shalhevetyah .

You know, when she came to New York and you found her through your colloquium and studied the Song of Songs with her.

Shira, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Romei said this?

Of course.

Why would we study the Song ?

For her translation.

Benny didn’t say anything.

What? I said.

Wow, he said, shaking his head. He said she was a translator? That’s intense!

She wasn’t?

No.

She wasn’t translating the Song of Songs ?

Benny shook his head.

He wrote that she left him. After twenty-five years, she disappeared, went to New York. You flushed her out by holding a colloquium on the Song at People of the Book …

Shira, this never happened.

You called Romei when she got sick. That’s as far as his story got.

I don’t know what to say. She never left him that I know of. I got to know her through him, I advised her on … well, I can’t talk about that.

Shit, I said. The whole thing is a lie.

I’m a character in his story?

In this last section, yeah.

So much for my cover! he said, laughing.

It was after I realized you knew each other.

He and I had a conversation around that time, Benny admitted.

Yeah, and what did you talk about?

Not what you’re thinking.

What am I thinking?

Shira.

What did you talk about?

Way back when, I told him a direct approach would be counterproductive …

Got that right, I said.

Later he said he wanted to include you in a project that would be good for you professionally and might make you, well, more open to seeing Esther. I thought both sounded good. We didn’t talk particulars. When he offered you the job, I had no reason to think it was anything other than a job. I never told him anything about your personal life.

He seemed surprised to learn I had a daughter.

He knew you were single. He’s old-fashioned, he made assumptions.

We sat a moment, as I imagined what it might be like to suddenly learn you were a grandparent. I remembered the photograph I’d sent so easily, tried to imagine what it might feel like to receive it, to look at that beautiful face and know it was yours. And from nowhere, an image came to me, of my father, as he looked in those early photos, his face untouched by disappointment, his hair clipped Eisenhower short. Holding a swaddled infant, hunched over her, as if protecting her from air and wind, his grip sure, his face uncertain, looking up as if to say, how can I be trusted with this little being, surely I will drop her, surely I will fail her, but his face radiant, still — a trick of the light, perhaps. He was holding me — only now I imagined it was Andi he held, the granddaughter he didn’t know, her eyes, alert from the start, straining to understand. I saw him through Andi’s eyes as he gazed at us in wonder, the inchoate bundle that we were, his new life. He might have recovered some of his tenderness, he might have been able to see outside his own pain, had he been able to hold her, had he been able to hold my child.

You’ve done well, I could hear him say. I’m proud of you.

My father, not as he was, but as he might have been.

Shira?

Are you okay?

I shook my head.

Benny put his arm around me. My pores felt too open — memories, dreams, wishes passed unbidden through my skin like vapors. Forgive me, my father had said as the nurse wheeled him away. I thought because he’d not been much of a father. Because he hadn’t told me the truth, I knew now, not even at the end.

If I had known you were dying, I might have asked about my mother. I might have asked about you .

Can you tell me about it? Benny asked, squeezing my shoulders.

I wanted to but his eyes were too open, they always were, my billboard artist of the heart.

Hold me, I said, and he did.

•

May I see what Romei wrote about me? Benny asked after some time had passed.

I couldn’t speak. I wanted to say no but I couldn’t.

Please, Shira? It’s weird to be written about. Romei used me for some purpose, to get to you. You don’t seem to know why. I’d like to see for myself.

It’s not translated, I murmured.

You could do a running translation, couldn’t you? How long is it?

Not long, I admitted.

Please?

Of course. Get me the pages — the ones on the table, not the ones on the floor. I’ll make tea.

Licorice, Benny said. Or twig.

You’re crazy, I said, gazing into his serious face, his ragged beard. Chamomile, or Very-Berry.

As I waited for the water to boil, I could hear him humming a mournful tune, a wordless melody, his voice like a wounded clarinet. I tried to imagine him, my lanky, unlikely, stretched-out guy as a character in Romei’s drama. I’d challenged Romei to treat Esther and himself as characters, then lost that perspective, assuming everything I read was “true.” Yet it was false, possibly all of it. But true in a more fundamental way, at least for him.

Why turn Benny into a character, why bring him into the story?

Because he was in the story: he was in my story.

Jesus.

Romei was using Benny as he’d used my words and images, to lure me into his text. Benny as love’s counsel, helping him snare the woman he loved, helping Esther understand the book of love. Benny the savior, the wise man, Benny as cupid, love’s messenger, associated everywhere only with love … I left the water warming on the stove and returned to the living room. Benny was sorting through Romei’s pages.