Winter Kept Us Warm Read online

  The Pink Parakeet

  Leo was good at not thinking about what Ulli did all day. He knew that she spent a lot of time listening to records. That’s why he bought her so many of them. When he came home, the apartment was thick with smoke, but he never complained, never asked her why she didn’t open the windows even on warm days. They would be going to California soon, he told himself, and they would have children. Then there would be so much to do. He liked thinking of children all bathed and clean and in their pajamas, running to the door to greet him after a long day at work. He liked thinking about buying them gifts. And then one evening after work he discovered the Pink Parakeet.

  The doctor had suggested that regular and mild exercise would be good for his heart, so when the weather was nice, after going out for a couple of drinks with his team, he often walked the twenty blocks home. The walk also helped him ease his way from the world of insurance policies and pitches to their apartment, to Ulli’s world, to Ulli. He did not allow himself to think of how different he had felt when he and Ulli were walking home to the apartment in Berlin.

  One damp, cold evening in February, as he was waiting to cross the street, a man who was standing next to him coughed. Leo turned, and the man looked right at him and nodded, as if he were giving him permission for something. The light changed, and Leo and the man walked abreast without turning to look at each other, until they got to the opposite side of the street, where Leo dropped behind. The man kept on at the same pace, and Leo followed. At the next corner the man crossed Lexington Avenue and headed down Forty-sixth Street. At Third Avenue the man turned uptown, and so did Leo, but he kept his distance, hanging back when they came to a red light so that he would not have to stand next to the man again, but when the light turned green, he quickened his pace so as not to lose sight of him. Just before reaching the corner of Fifty-third Street, the man entered a bar. Leo followed him inside.

  He knew right away what kind of bar it was, even though he had not known of their existence until that moment, and he felt both a sense of relief and a terrifying dread, the same kind of dread he felt when he lay awake at night thinking about his damaged heart, the time bomb ready to go off. I should leave, he thought, just turn around and walk out, but the man he had followed was just taking a seat at the bar, nodding to him again, and Leo nodded back, but he did not move. The man ordered a drink, and the bartender brought it, a cocktail with an umbrella in it. The man took the umbrella out of his drink and set it on the bar, took a sip, set his drink down, lit a cigarette, but he didn’t turn around.

  What did one say when one went up to a man at a bar? Leo thought. Did one not speak at all, just sit down next to him? Did one just order a drink with an umbrella, take the umbrella out, take a sip, light a cigarette, and look straight ahead at the giant pink parakeet painted on the wall behind the bar?

  “I’ve never heard of a pink parakeet before,” Leo said, sitting down a few stools away from the man.

  “I don’t know anything about parakeets,” the man said.

  Leo didn’t know anything about parakeets either. “I don’t like birds,” Leo said, which he realized was true. There was something unpredictable about them, nervous, stupid, though he had never really thought about it before.

  “I don’t like birds either,” the man said, turning toward him. “But here we are in the bird circuit nonetheless.”

  Leo laughed so that the man would not suspect that he didn’t have a clue what the bird circuit was or why it was funny.

  The man called the bartender over. “What are you drinking?” he asked Leo.

  “Jack Daniel’s,” he said. “On the rocks.”

  The man paid for Leo’s drink, and Leo did not protest.

  “I hope it won’t rain,” Leo said, not knowing how to thank him.

  The man, whose name Leo would never know, was older than Leo, but not old—in his mid-thirties, Leo guessed. He wondered, as he always did whenever he met someone new, whether he had been in the war, but he didn’t ask. He never did, and the man didn’t ask him. Instead the man asked him whether he was from Pennsylvania.

  “How did you know?” Leo asked.

  The man said that it was the way he pronounced the word hope.

  “So how do you say it?” Leo asked, and the man said “hope,” and Leo said “hope” again, but he couldn’t hear the difference.

  “Say coke,” the man said, and Leo said “coke,” and the man said, “See?”

  Later, when Leo was back home with Ulli, after he had changed into dry clothes because it had rained after all, Leo asked Ulli whether he pronounced words funny.

  “All words or just some words?”

  “Some words, like coke and hope. Words with o’s.”

  “Say them again,” she said. He repeated the words, and she repeated them each two or three times.

  “Say suppose,” she said, and Leo said, “Suppose.”

  “The o is longer, drawn out, like you’re yawning when you say it.”

  After that, Leo watched his o’s, though rather than shortening the sound, he ended up just saying those words more softly, so that his speech took on a new cadence that sounded like a shortwave radio coming in and out of range.

  He stayed away from the Pink Parakeet for three days, going home after work—by train. But on the fourth night, he could not help himself. The man he had followed the first time was not there, but another man was sitting at the bar, so he sat next to him. After a while, the man next to him got up and headed toward a back room. Leo followed. When the man reached the door, Leo stopped and waited until he had entered and the door closed behind him. Then Leo opened the door and went inside.

  It was not long before he understood what the man had meant by the bird circuit. There were other bars on Third Avenue with bird names—the Blue Parrot, the Happy Cockatoo, the Egret. He tried them all. Each bird bar had its bird painting. Each bird bar had a back room.

  The next time he stopped by the Pink Parakeet, he drank too much with an older man called Howard. Unlike the other men at the Pink Parakeet, Howard introduced himself and looked Leo right in the eye when he offered to buy him a drink. This was due, Leo learned, to the fact that Howard was an optometrist and spent his days up close to people, looking into their eyes. “A lot of people are afraid of eyes, but if you look at them enough, you realize there’s nothing to be afraid of,” Howard said.

  “I don’t think people are afraid of looking into eyes. They’re afraid of people looking into their eyes. They’re afraid they’ll see something, some weakness,” Leo said.

  “Look into my eyes, Leo. What do you see?”

  Leo wondered whether this was a line Howard used all the time, whether he was always hoping that some young man would see something in his eyes that no one had seen before, something mysterious and alluring or, perhaps, the remnants of his youth. Leo pulled the bar stool up closer, leaned forward.

  “See anything?” Howard asked.

  “They’re brown,” Leo said.

  “Anything else?”

  “I see the blood vessels. There are more in your left eye than in your right eye.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “No deep, dark secrets, no tortured soul, no evil or kindness?”

  “No.”

  “You see. All that windows-of-the-soul stuff is just nonsense.”

  “But they’re beautiful, eyes are, or can be.”

  “Beauty is not what it’s cracked up to be,” Howard said, sighing deeply. “I’m tired of caring about beauty. At my age it just makes me a lecherous old man. Whatever you do, don’t end up a lecherous old man. That is the most difficult part about being a homosexual,” he said.

  The word homosexual hit Leo hard, as if it were a demented bird that had flown into his quiet room and was thrashing about, squawking. He lit a cigarette and hoped Howard
wouldn’t see that his hands were trembling, though he knew he would. He could tell that Howard was used to looking carefully. “I have a bad heart. I probably won’t make it to old age,” Leo said.

  “Then you must live your life now, which is what we all should do, but we don’t. We spend our lives grinding lenses so other people can see, but they don’t really want to see. What do you do, Leo? What are you wasting your life on?”

  “I’m in life insurance,” Leo said.

  “I see. I imagine you’re quite good at it,” Howard said.

  “Yes. I’ve been the number one salesman in the region two years in a row.”

  “Well, I suppose that could be something to be proud of, if one cared about such things.”

  “I am proud,” Leo said.

  “That’s good, son,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” Leo said, though he did not know what Howard was apologizing about.

  “So tell me about your heart, and then I will tell you about mine,” Howard continued.

  “It’s a murmur, a harsh murmur. That’s what it’s called. My aortic valve is inflamed, and it will keep getting more and more inflamed so that eventually the blood won’t be able to get through.”

  “Is there nothing that can be done about it?”

  “No, but the doctor in the army told me they were working on it, that someday they might be able to do something.”

  “That’s something to hope for, isn’t it?” Howard said, putting his hand on Leo’s hand, not holding it, but just letting it rest there lightly.

  “Yes,” Leo said.

  “Sometimes,” Howard continued, lifting his hand to pick up his glass, taking a sip, setting the glass down, not returning his hand to where it had been, “sometimes I think about all those people before they invented lenses, walking around half blind, the world a blur, never even hoping that one day they would be able to see.”

  “They probably still hoped,” Leo said. “People always hope.”

  “Not always, not when it’s hopeless,” Howard said.

  “Nothing is hopeless,” Leo said.

  “Now you sound like an insurance salesman.”

  “You said you were going to tell me about your heart.”

  “I did indeed, but not tonight,” Howard said. “It’s late, and you have to get home to your wife. If you want to hear about my heart, you will have to see me again.”

  “How did you know? About my wife, I mean?”

  “I’m an old hand at this, Leo. Here,” he said, giving Leo his card. “If you want to hear the story, stop by the shop just before six. We’re closed on Sundays, but any other day you’ll find me there, if you want a friend. I am done with being a lecherous old man.”

  Leo waited two weeks before going to Howard’s store. The night of their meeting at the Pink Parakeet, Howard had been wearing a deep blue Italian suit and a colorful Indian scarf, and Leo had imagined the store would look like Howard—velvet drapes, the walls lined with gold cases in which the glasses were displayed like items in a museum. But it looked more like Leo’s mother’s living room than a museum, and Howard—who had gotten up from the table in the back where he had been attending a customer and was walking to the front to greet him—was now sporting a plain gray suit, white shirt, and a thin black tie. And he was wearing glasses.

  “Leo, I’m glad you could come,” Howard said, as if there had been an appointment. “Have a seat. I’m just finishing up with Mrs. Bauman. She’s chosen the most horrid glasses. I couldn’t talk her out of them,” he said under his breath.

  And they were horrid—pale pink cat-eye glasses that, despite their flamboyant upward swoop, were dwarfed by Mrs. Bauman’s large, fleshy head. “Leo, come have a closer look at Mrs. Bauman’s new glasses. Aren’t they lovely?” Howard tipped her chin up with his fingertips, then moved her giant head gently to the left and then the right. “How do they feel?”

  “Perfect,” Mrs. Bauman said. “Thank you.”

  After Mrs. Bauman left, Leo waited while Howard went through the closing routine. Leo offered to sweep, but Howard had refused indignantly. “I didn’t ask you here to be my Putzfrau,” he said. So Leo left him to the sweeping, which he did very thoroughly, starting at the back of the store and making his way to the front. When he was finished, Howard counted the money in the till, pulled the blinds, and turned the sign to closed.

  “Good night, my optical illusion,” Howard said as he shut the security gate.

  That night Howard took Leo to the Village—“the real thing,” he called it. The birdy bars on Third Avenue were for cowards. In each bar they had one drink, no more than one. Otherwise, Howard said, they wouldn’t have the stamina. In each bar Howard knew someone who came up and threw his arms around him and said, “Howard, it’s been ages.” In each bar, Howard made Leo ask someone to dance, and then they went on to the next bar, where Leo also danced and Howard watched. At the last bar there was a show. A man dressed up like Marlene Dietrich sang “Johnny.” After her performance she threw a rose into the crowd and Leo caught it. “Careful of the thorns, sweetheart,” Marlene Dietrich said, blowing him a kiss, and Leo blew her a kiss back.

  Leo didn’t keep the rose. He left it in the taxi he took back uptown to his apartment. He wondered how long the rose would ride back and forth, up and down Manhattan, before someone took it. Perhaps the taxi driver would find it at the end of his shift. He liked thinking of the taxi driver alone at dawn, finding the rose in the back of his cab.

  Leo knew the moment he opened the door that Ulli was awake, sitting on the sofa in the dark. “I missed you,” she called when he was still in the entryway hanging up his coat and hat.

  “You’re still up?”

  “I’m still up,” she said.

  Leo did not turn on the light but felt his way slowly through the hallway to the living room couch. “Come here,” he said, drawing her close, kissing her the way he wanted to kiss Marlene Dietrich.

  “Don’t go,” Ulli said. “Don’t go.”

  “I’m here,” Leo said, closing his eyes, putting himself back in their apartment in Berlin, where they had been protected from both the past and the future. He thought about what Howard had said when Leo asked why he had chosen him to be his friend: “You seemed like a man who wanted to be happy.”

  “Doesn’t everyone want to be happy?” Leo asked.

  “I have come to the conclusion that unhappiness is so much easier, and most people, frankly, are lazy and scared.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “Of being happy.”

  “And what’s scary about it?”

  “It requires you to be who you really are even if people despise you.”

  “It’s not easy to be happy if people despise you,” Leo said.

  “Exactly. That’s why unhappiness is easier.”

  “And what about you, are you happy?” Leo asked.

  “I’m afraid I have lost the energy and the courage to pursue it.”

  “Were you happy in the past?”

  “At times,” Howard had said.

  As they lay on the couch afterward, Ulli sleeping on his chest, Leo believed that what he wanted more than anything else, more than he wanted to kiss Marlene Dietrich, was to protect Ulli from unhappiness.

  After the night in the Village, Leo did not return to Howard’s store or to the bars on Third Avenue. He walked home on Lexington, avoiding Third Avenue altogether. Sometimes when he was walking, he thought he heard someone calling his name, but when he turned around to look, there was never anyone there. He was home by six, the latest seven if he went out for a quick drink with his colleagues after work. Sometimes when he came home, there was an elaborate meal waiting for him, with candles ready to be lit. On other nights he found Ulli sitting on the couch listening to Billie Holiday and no food waiting at all, and he accepted th
is lack of food as graciously as he accepted the three-course dinners and the candlelight. He tried not to think about Howard methodically sweeping his shop at the end of the day, hoping that maybe tomorrow Leo would stop by again. He tried not to wonder whether Howard needed glasses or not, and what it was that had happened to his heart.

  Words

  In waiting for her husband, Ulli found that even the simplest tasks, such as making the bed and buying groceries, were as difficult as burying the dead. Still, every night when Leo walked in the door, everything changed. There he was, hanging up his coat and his hat, and there were his lips on hers, his tongue in her mouth, and the day became a blur, a nightmare, the unspeakable past. All there was was Leo.

  How long, she wondered later, after she found herself once again out in the world, would she have gone on like that, trying to pretend that all she needed was Leo? Instead, Isaac had called. “I found the perfect thing for you,” he said. He did not say, I found the answer to your unhappiness. He did not say I know you are unhappy. He did not say Leo is not enough, but she knew that was what he meant.

  “A car?” she guessed, though she knew that something as banal and concrete as a car would never occur to Isaac as being the solution for anything.

  “A car? What would you do with a car in the city?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ulli said. “Plenty of people have cars, you know.”