FICTION
Leonard Kriegel
LOVE AND POLITICS IN NEW YORK
"I'm bisexual," is what she says. Laughing. Except for the
unlaced yellow tennis sneakers, which Michael pulls from her feet
before he lies down next to her in the king-sized bed that once
belonged to his parents, she is naked. Her laugh is a light metallic
clicking. And it makes Michael nervous. He searches her eyes for a
touch of fever. Or even madness. But all he finds are brown pupils
pushed to a color so deep they seem liquid dark. He pulls her to him
and she winks. A comic obscenity. His lips brush her neck and he
hears her bite loudly into the Granny Smith apple she takes from the
red cut glass bowl on the night table next to the bed. His mother had
always insisted that the bowl had been picked up by her grandfather
in Vienna, when he was on his way to America. In 1914. Just before
the war his mother called
"the
war" started.
Michael turns away, pushing Miriam gently back to her side of
the bed. Despite his irritation, he smiles. Another legacy. The bowl
unwilled but left in his keeping two and a half years back, on that
bright November day in 1983 when he returned from Paris, three
days before his father and his father's new bride left the apartment in
Chelsea for an oversized suburban house in Bedford . A spasm of
thunder tears at the New York evening. Announcements. To justify
all the legacies . Even Miriam.
"Illana's young," he remembers his father telling him. "I can af–
ford to give her whatever she wants. So we'll try the suburbs. Be–
sides, what's wrong with wanting what everybody else wants?"
A question Michael was tempted to repeat fourteen months
later, when his father and Illana - nineteen years his father's junior,
four years his senior, and exactly six days older than Miriam–
return to the city, the dead weight of Bedford made lighter by the
$65,000 profit his father gleefully tells him he has turned over on the
sale of the house.
"Keep this place, Michael," his father generously offers. "The
twins will be in school for the next two years. And they're both talk–
ing about settling in California for good."
