“I will when I feel like it.” At last he picked up the glass. “Anyway, thanks.” He drank.
After a long silence she said, “How much longer will this go on?”
“Now that you’ve started it up again?”
“I didn’t mean to start it up. I just got out the ladder and hired some help.”
“You just didn’t figure, is all.”
“It’s just,” she said, “you haven’t slept well lately. I thought maybe if I—well, I wanted to find a way to help you rest. That’s not so bad, is it? You’re worn out.”
“Am I?” He felt his knees and nodded. “Yes. I am.”
“It must be,” she said, at last, “you’re waiting for something. What?”
“I wish I knew.” He picked up his fork but did not eat. “It’s just last night and the night before I listened.”
“For what?”
“Something. I must have lain there for an hour, just listening. Waiting. But there was nothing.”
“Eat. You’re starving.”
“Yes, but starving for what?”
“Here,” she said. “Finish the wine.”
At bedtime she said, “Try to sleep.”
“You can’t try sleeping, it’s got to happen.”
“Try anyway,” she said. “I worry.” She kissed his cheek and went to the bedroom door.
“I’ll be in in a minute,” he said.
Far across town he heard a single university bell chime midnight, and then one, and then two o’clock. He sat with an unread book in his lap and a new bottle of wine to one side, eyes shut, waiting. The wind outside rose.
Finally when the distant bell sounded three, he got up and walked out the front door and opened the garage. He went in and stood for a long moment, regarding the basketball. He did not carry it out in the light but simply let it sit on the cement floor.
If I leave the garage door open, he thought, that should do it.
He went out and almost glanced up at the net, but thought, Don’t look. Don’t notice. That way, maybe—
He shut his eyes and turned to just stand there in the moonlight, listening, aching to hear, swaying slightly, but not once opening his eyes to look up at the board and the hoop and the net.
The wind shivered in the trees.
Yes, he thought.
A leaf blew across the drive.
Yes, he thought, oh, yes.
A soft sound rose, like someone running a long way off and then, nearer, walking, and then nothing.
And after a while a motion around him and other sounds, some fast, some slow, circling.
Yes, he thought. Oh God yes.
And, eyes shut, he reached out both hands to feel the air, but there was only wind and moonlight.
Yes, he thought. Now.
And again: Now.
And yet again: Now.
At dawn his wife came to sit on his bed. The motion wakened him. He looked up at her face.
“It’s gone,” she said.
“What?”
She glanced away to the front window.
He rose slowly and moved to the window and stared down at the front of the garage.
There was no board, no hoop, no net.
“What happened last night?” she said.
“Something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. The weather maybe. The moon moving made things move and I asked all of it what?”
His wife waited, her hands in her lap.
“And?”
“Okay, I said, whoever you are, whatever this is, if we play one last game, can I sleep? One last game? I could feel the weather on my face and along my arms. The moon went out and came back. That was the sign. I moved. The weather moved.”
“And then?”
“We played a last game.”
“I thought I heard.” She took a deep breath.
“Who won?”
“We did,” he said.
“You both can’t win.”
“You can. If you try.”
“And you both won.”
“Both.”
She came to stand with him and study the empty garage front.
“Did you take it down?”
“Someone did.”
“I didn’t hear you get the ladder.”
“I must’ve. It was hard climbing up, but even harder climbing down. My eyes kept filling up. I couldn’t see.”
“Where did you put all that stuff?” she said.
“Don’t know. We’ll find it when we least expect.”
“Thank God it’s over.”
“Over, yes, but best of all—”
“What?”
“A tie,” he said.
And repeated, “A tie.”
Tête-à-Tête
We were walking along the boardwalk in Ocean Park one summer evening, arm in arm, my friend Sid and me, when we saw a familiar sight on one of the benches just ahead, not far from the surf.
“Look,” I said, “and listen.”
We looked and listened.
There was this old Jewish couple, he I would say about seventy and she maybe sixty-five, moving their mouths and hands at the same time, everyone talking, nobody listening.
“I told you more than once,” he said.
“What did you tell? Nothing!” she said.
“Something,” he said, “I’m always telling you something. Of great importance if you’d give a try.”
“Great importance, listen to him!” she said rolling her eyes. “Give me a list!”
“Well, about the wedding …”
“Still the wedding?”
“Sure! The waste, the confusion.”
“Who was confused?”
“I could show you—”
“Don’t show. Look, I’m deaf!”
Et cetera, et cetera.
“I wish I had a tape recorder,” I said.
“Who needs a tape recorder,” Sid replied. “I could say what I just heard. Call me at three in the morning and I’ll quote.”
We moved on. “They’ve been sitting on that same bench every night for years!”
“I believe it,” said Sid. “They’re hilarious.”
“You don’t find it sad?”
“Sad? Come off it! They’re a vaudeville team. I could put them on the Orpheum circuit tomorrow!”
“Not even a little sad?”
“Stop. I bet they’re married fifty years. The yammer started before the wedding and kept going after their honeymoon.”
“But they don’t listen!”
“Hey, they’re taking turns! First hers not to listen, then his. If they ever paid attention they’d freeze. They’ll never wind up with Freud.”
“Why not?”
“They’re letting it all hang out, there’s nothing left to carp or worry about. I bet they get into bed arguing and are asleep with smiles in two minutes.”
“You actually think that?”
“I had an aunt and uncle like that. A few insults shape a long life.”
“How long did they live?”
“Aunt Fannie, Uncle Asa? Eighty, eighty-nine.”
“That long?”
“On a diet of words, distemper almost, Jewish badminton—he hits one, she hits it back, she hits one, he hits it back, nobody wins but, hell, no one loses.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“Think,” said Sid. “Come on, it’s time for refills.”
We turned and strolled back on this fine summer night.
“And another thing!” the old man was saying.
“That’s ten dozen other things!”
“Who’s counting?” he said.
“Look. Where did I put that list?”
“Lists, who cares for lists?”
“Me. You don’t, I do. Wait!”
“Let me finish!”
“It’s never finished,” Sid observed as we moved on and the great arguments faded in our wake.
Two nights later Sid called and said, “I got me a tape recorder.”
“You mean?”
“You’re a writer, I’m a writer. Let’s trap a little grist for the mills.”
“I dunno,” I said.
“On your feet,” said Sid.
We strolled. It was another fine mild California night, the kind we don’t tell Eastern relatives about, fearful they might believe.
“I don’t want to hear,” he said.
“Shut up and listen,” she said.
“Don’t tell me,” I said, eyes shut. “They’re still at it. Same couple. Same talk. Shuttlecock’s always in the air over the net. No one’s on the ground. You really going to use your tape recorder?”
“Dick Tracy invented, I use.”
I heard the small handheld machine snap as we moved by, slowly.
“What was his name? Oh, yeah. Isaac.”
“That wasn’t his name.”
“Isaac, sure.”
“Aaron!”
“I don’t mean Aaron, the older brother.”
“Younger!”
“Who’s telling this?”
“You. And bad.”
“Insults.”
“Truths you could never take.”
“I got scars to prove it.”
“Hot dog,” said Sid as we glided on with their voices in his small device.
And then it happened. One, two, three, like that.
Quite suddenly the bench was empty for two nights.
On the third night I stopped in a small kosher delicatessen and talked, nodding at the bench. I didn’t know the names. Sure, they said, Rosa and Al, Al and Rosa. Stein, they said, that was the name. Al and Rosa Stein, there for years, never missed a night. Now, Al will be missed. That was it. Passed away Tuesday. The bench sure looks empty, right, but what can you do?
I did what I could, prompted by an incipient sadness about two people I didn’t really know, and yet I knew. From the small local synagogue I got the name of the almost smaller graveyard and for reasons confused and half-known went one late afternoon to look in, feeling like the twelve-year-old goy I once was, peering into the temple in downtown L.A., wondering what it was like to be part of all that chanting and singing, with all those men in hats.
In the graveyard I found what I knew I would find. The old woman was there, seated next to a stone bearing his name. And she was talking, talking, talking, touching the stone, talking to the stone.
And he? What else? Was not listening.
I waited, heard, shut my eyes and backed away.
With the sun gone and fog coming in with night I passed the bench. It was still empty, which made it worse.
So what can you do?
I called Sid.
“About that tape recorder of yours?” I said. “And some of those tapes?”
On one of the last nights of summer, Sid and I took our usual stroll down the kosher esplanade, passing the fine pastrami and cheesecake emporiums, stopped for some of that and walked on near the two dozen benches by the sea, talking and greatly contented, when Sid suddenly remarked, “You know, I have often wondered—”
“What’s to wonder?” I said, for he was looking ahead at that bench, which had stayed empty for almost a week.
“Look.” Sid touched my arm. “That old woman?”
“Yes?”
“She’s back! I thought she was sick or something, but there she is.”
“I know,” I smiled.
“Since when? The same bench. And talking like crazy.”
“Yes,” I said, and we walked closer.
“But,” said Sid as quiet as he could, “there’s no one there.
