by Betsy Berne
Once they were gone, the guy moved in for the kill, not that it was much of a contest. He was getting impatient. He’d finished his glass of wine, and when he let his hand graze my knee, it felt like silk. Forgoing my chaste water, I drank clear vodka, moving closer to the Scarlet Letter.
“Let’s go dancing,” he said. Fine, but I hadn’t a clue where to go anymore and neither did he, and the only two people I knew who would know had just left. “Well, let’s go upstairs,” he said, exasperated. “I bet there’s dancing up there.” I knew full well that there was not going to be any dancing in the tiny hellhole of a lounge upstairs, but I agreed. I welcomed any opportunity to change position.
I stumbled up the winding staircase, and it was just as I thought, crammed and claustrophobic. All the leftover, desperate people were jammed wall to wall. I must have lost my balance because he put his hand on the small of my back. “I won’t let you fall down,” he said gruffly. That made me slump into the only available chair and resume gripping. We had reached the state where there weren’t any words left to keep us in line, and silence wasn’t helping matters much either. He perched on the arm of my chair, no doubt to prevent my gripping, but that was no good. So he crouched down in front of me and I could no longer avoid the steady gaze; he was awfully near and I couldn’t help it and neither could he, so we kissed.
I had always demonstrated a modicum of decorum, even in my youth, yet here I was in a public place—a trashy trendy bar, no less—flagrantly welcoming the advances of a relative stranger, a married relative stranger. I could only assume that I’d been bewitched. It was ridiculous, not to mention somewhat indiscreet as far as marital mores go, although why I was worrying and he wasn’t is perhaps more interesting.
“We should go,” I whispered, unable to break away.
“Where?” he murmured into my hair.
“I don’t know,” I croaked, and I wasn’t being coy.
“What about your place? You live around here, don’t you?” Lines didn’t sound like lines when he said them.
It was a kaleidoscope outside the club, with a ragged line of double-parked cabs blinking in the rain. We lurched into one of them and continued the teenage groping session. The cab delivered us to the door of my building, and then we faced the awkward long march up another set of stairs to my loft. When we reached my shabby pink couch, I mumbled, “I guess we shouldn’t go to my bedroom.” What he could possibly have imagined I meant is beyond me. How could he have known that, true to my heritage, I was preparing for the end of something that hadn’t quite begun? I wanted to avoid the presence of his ghost in the room that provided my only sanctuary.
“We’ll see what happens,” he said steadily.
He made me forget everything. No one had made me forget everything in such a long time, and a relative stranger, never ever. There was only his bold, urgent self released from under its smooth surface, and his words, the tender sweet talk and the not-so-tender sweet talk, and my replies, and I was no longer anywhere near the shabby couch.
•
We ended up on opposite ends of the couch, me hunched in a corner and him sprawled. I was frozen, frozen in fear, and the voices in my head had returned. He fixed an unswerving stare on me, daring me not to look away. I shut my eyes and played dead.
“I want to see you again,” he said, in a cadence that made the cliché sound original. And then cryptically: “I told you something I’ve told very few people. That’s not my . . . I mean it’s not like me.”
I figured out the something, and I knew that this wasn’t a lie because there had been such an instinctive trust between us at first—before sex had made us cagey. On the other hand, under the circumstances, I had no choice but to view him as a liar, and a seasoned liar at that. I didn’t hold it against him. He struck me as the kind of liar who genuinely believes the lies that roll off his tongue, who believes in the act of lying in the same way others believe in religion—it’s ingrained, not malicious. He was the kind of liar—a flawed liar—who hadn’t started out as one but who’d acquired the habit so as not to expose a scathing candor that was far more threatening and could have got him into worse trouble. I’m sure he assumed I was lying to him, too.
I nodded. He asked if I’d be around the next day. I looked blank and shrugged. He was intense and unrelenting, as seasoned liars tend to be. When he said, in the dark, lullaby voice, “I’ll keep trying until I get you,” I answered glibly and scornfully, “Oh yeah, yeah, right.”
This only fired him up. “Not oh yeah, yeah, right—I want to see you again,” he said, acting insulted, which made me act more scornful in my vain attempts not to believe him. “I’ll call you between ten and twelve tomorrow,” he finished with a flourish. I had to get even with my own tough-girl act, up a couple notches from anything he’d seen yet. It was an automatic reflex, a feckless attempt to deflect the all-too-foreseeable future.
We’d skipped blithely over the part where you launch into the melodramatic married discussion. I’d smiled glazed smiles over amusing anecdotes about the kid early on, but even early on, the alienating phrases wife and married had never crossed his lips or mine. He knew I knew. I knew things, already I knew way too many things about him. At least, I thought I did.
“Don’t you have to go home?” I asked abruptly. I wanted to get him out of there before he realized he’d made me forget everything. He started to button his shirt, and I saw his face turn impassive as I continued: “Do you have everything?” thrusting the jacket at him. I watched him disappear back under the smooth surface, and I detected hurt in his eyes, but I couldn’t stop. “Did you forget your belt?”
“No,” he replied, still staring.
“Oh, right, you wouldn’t be the type who’d bother with a belt.”
He looked at me then like I was a child and if he didn’t take the bait, if he waited long enough, I’d get over it. I teased him some more. Just to make sure he was aware that I knew his type, that I wasn’t stupid. My teasing was like his lying—ingrained but not malicious. I had learned all there is to know about the fine art of teasing from my brothers, until I grew thick skin and could tease like a man. My teasing might have felt unwarranted to a stranger, but this guy didn’t feel like a stranger to me—that was the problem—and I couldn’t allow him to see that he’d made dents in my thick skin.
C H A P T E R
2
AFTER HE LEFT, I cleaned. Cleaning was a genetic trait in my family, on the female side, particularly in times of stress. At four A.M. I was vacuuming in a fervent quest to atone for my sins. I woke up a few hours later, another genetic trait. My people got up at dawn, even if it meant suffering through the day too tired to do anything. I wasn’t sure that I was coherent, but I had to report in to someone. My neighbor wouldn’t be up for at least three hours—he had genes that allowed sleep. My musician brother might not be awake yet either. My brother’s behavior was no longer predictable. He had a girlfriend now, or as my mother often despairingly referred to my brothers’ girlfriends, a concubine, an overseas concubine, but enough of a concubine to make him act smug and mature. He might just be smugly repudiating his genes by sleeping.
As I staggered around cleaning I looked for confirmation of the night before. I browsed around the shabby couch area and found a souvenir—a thin sliver of a credit card. My proud plan of action had been not to call under any circumstances, but the card put a clear crimp in the plan. The card was a circumstance. I decided to call my brother. Better to wake one of your own.
He wasn’t asleep. I described the situation carefully because there was no telling whether he was going to act smug or go in for some vicarious thrills. My brother, who’s always on the road, is no stranger to off-the-beaten-track behavior between the sexes. As I told my tale, he was skeptical, understandably so, but not smug. Still, by the time I got to the line “What about your place?” he couldn’t hold back.
“This guy has balls—he was playing you like a Stradivarius,” he said, amused. I b
egan to bristle audibly but he kept going. “And by the way, this guy really could play. I never could figure out why he quit. Like I never could figure out why his club sucks so much now. That place had potential.”
“What about the credit card?”
“You know I hate to say it, but he’s supposed to be pretty cool; he helped out a lot of guys when he first had his place. I mean I really hate to say it, but he took chances on guys who were really out, guys nobody would hire—and he actually paid. Like that guy, remember that cellist, I just played with him, you know—”
“What about the credit card?”
“That’s easy.” My brother sneered. “Go shopping.”
“Well, shouldn’t I call and tell him?”
“Yeah, right—call him, maybe you can get me a gig. That place really does suck now even though nobody’ll admit it ’cause no one wants to dis him. I must say though, he does pay.”
“No, really.”
“What are you, nuts? Under no circumstances do you call.” As an act of mercy, he left out “You really think he’s going to call?” Men trust men much less than women trust men.
The next obvious step would be to consult a girlfriend. Unfortunately I was in the process of giving the silent treatment to my closest girlfriend, and the married girlfriends with children—the majority, by now—might not take to the situation. And to tell you the truth, the girlfriends in general were a diminishing group. I no longer had the first and second string I’d sustained in my youth. Some—not all—had taken the husband-and-children deal to extremes and it had become an insurmountable barrier. The Grim Reaper aspect to my life—that is, the steady death toll (let’s just say it was a bad run of luck) encompassing not just AIDS but suicides, heart attacks, brain tumors, you name it—had also weeded out some. Then there were those who couldn’t handle being around all that death—not that I blamed them—and that weeded out a few more. Anyway, friendships in the city are fickle, cyclical; there’s always someone newer and more glamorous fading in, and sometimes old friends fade out for a while. One of my dead friends used to rotate the speed-dialing patches on his phone routinely in accordance with the rapid ebb and flow of glamorous and not-so-glamorous friendships.
I decided to risk waking my neighbor. He has a way with listening, my neighbor does, with his solemn eyes and graceful hands moving in perpetual consternation. One time, after the final-straw death, the one that broke me, he took me to a movie where I laughed so hard—and it wasn’t even very funny—that I began crying, and later at the coffee shop the crying turned into a jag, and my neighbor never wavered. This was one of many public breakdowns that occurred that year without any warning. I referred to these untimely and unprecedented displays as publics. My neighbor is a homosexual, which makes him that much more attractive to female crackpots of all ages. They flock to huddle under his kind wings, and there are times when he can’t take it. I used to have the crackpots-huddled-under-the-wings syndrome until I lost one to suicide, and while my predilection for crackpots had not abated, I learned excessive huddling under wings is no solution for either party. I try not to abuse the privilege of my neighbor’s kind wings. There was no need to huddle under at this juncture, but we could certainly indulge in some ribald humor.
“I’ll get back to you,” he answered curtly. My neighbor operates like a flesh-and-blood switchboard, but I had just enough time to tantalize, and he recanted. “Hold on, I’ll get rid of this call.”
At first we chortled uncontrollably. There was no need to go into any sordid details. We had developed a set of infantile stock phrases to describe any action—or lack thereof—in our private lives, and there was an unspoken confidentiality agreement between us. I tossed around the stock phrases, and he bantered back. He was a little undone—and perhaps insulted that I hadn’t heeded his warnings—but not terribly shocked to survey the rubble. He knew this twisted town too well, and no doubt he had a backlog of data on the perpetrator—or thought he did. Like I thought I did. It was an occupational hazard in this tiny town that posed as a gigantic metropolis.
He got into the black-and-Jewish thing immediately. My neighbor and I like to think we have debunked some myths. We have discovered that black people and Jewish people are more like than unlike, much more like than the general public would have you believe, although we are aware that they also have some genetic traits that are diametrically opposed. My neighbor happens to have a penchant for mousy, balding Jewish men, more specifically, short, spectacle-wearing, mousy, balding Jewish men, a compulsion I do not share. He is often puzzled by the genetic behavior of the mousy, balding Jewish men he likes. One mousy, balding Jewish boyfriend would open his eyes, vault straight out of bed, and rocket through the door to purchase a fresh gray copy of the Times, not to read leisurely but to scan hurriedly. (The Jews don’t like to miss anything.) And plans, plans, plans, and the endless scheduling, what was with that? I tried to set him straight, gently, by pointing out the historical roots of such behavior. Plans and scheduling are important, I explained, because my people never know when we might be yanked out of circulation. Thus our lives take on a dire sense of urgency. He said, Well, yeah, his people knew all about being carted off, and yeah, they had the sense of urgency, too. But plans and scheduling? What you have here, I explained, is a prime example of one of the diametrically opposed genetic traits.
“Do you think he’ll call?” I asked eventually, with what little was left of my pride.
“Well, there’s the black thing, the time thing, you know,” he said pragmatically. “But wait a second—he’s got a substantial amount of white blood in there, doesn’t he?”
“How should I know?”
“You’ll be able to tell soon, take my word for it. Well, even if he does, the black genes always dominate in this area so I’m sure he wasn’t up at dawn with the Jews. He probably doesn’t get to work until noon. Those club creeps never do anyway. I know he’s got this Mr. Nice Guy rep, but I don’t buy it. I remember when I used to hang out at his club, before I hated jazz. He thought he was Mr. Supercool. I was just a kid then. God, it was a long time ago—before his club was such a joke; it must have been before I knew you. You don’t remember?”
“No.” I was growing hesitant about taking the purported facts at face value, since the perpetrator was one of his own kind. My neighbor was harder on his own kind—understandably so, since it does take one to know one, judging by my experience with my own kind. I wasn’t sure I should be heeding his words.
“Believe me, it could take him at least a week to call. Why’d he come back, anyway? I heard he’d split for good.” He paused. “Hey, does he still buy art? Did you talk about your work with him?” Changing the subject. He wasn’t eagerly anticipating future huddling.
When I brought up the credit card, he echoed my brother’s response regarding shopping. I said impatiently, “C’mon.”
“Call if you want, but I say that’s his problem.” He changed topics again: “Were you careful?” He knew that wasn’t one of my strong points, and he didn’t need much of an imagination or a backlog of data to wager it wouldn’t be one of the perpetrator’s strong points either. He chastised me—this day and age and all—and I couldn’t come up with any excuses. I couldn’t very well tell him I’d been bewitched.
“Hey, maybe there’ll be a love child,” he suggested.
“Don’t even say that out loud,” I said. “Anyway, I’m too old, one night, there’s no chance.”
“You could get a show out of this.” He was revving up. “Blackmail him—collectors rule these days. He probably still knows people. He’d have to get you a show if you threatened a love child.”
“There’s an idea.” I was coming around. “But you know how I feel about the kid thing—I’d rather keep the love child.”
My neighbor was on a roll. “Listen, get the show, worry about the love child later. You can always keep it. You can say it’s mine.”
I considered this. “Then we could fake a ma
rriage and you’ll make it into the will.” One of my major goals was to get my neighbor into the family will, since he had no will in the offing. My aging parents were in the throes of living a miserly, will-enhancing existence, a practice common among the Jews—in this instance, to ensure that the bohemians among the mad progeny would not end up entirely penniless in the distant future. One of my father’s favorite lines was “I don’t buy new clothes anymore. Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to die soon!”
“Got another call,” my neighbor said. “Should I take it?”
I was relieved to let him go. I didn’t divulge the real secret because I wasn’t prepared to divulge it to myself. I had fallen for this perpetrator, and that was not my style. He and I had shared a singular wavelength—a dark wavelength not so easy to come by. I hadn’t met anyone who actively embraced the dark side since I’d tangled with Jack—who had dropped dead soon after, one of the heart attacks, the last-straw death, the one that broke me, before we really had time to give the wavelength a chance.
It was now past the ten-to-twelve “I’ll keep trying till I get you” calling period, and you know what wasn’t ringing. I resumed cleaning, although there was very little left to clean. The giddiness was beginning to subside, and the gloom was moving in, heralded by soppy platitudes from the song lyrics imbedded in my brain via the headphones. I was approaching pathetic. Holding a credit card hostage was also pathetic—and juvenile—behavior. The thing to do was to avoid human contact by leaving a message. It was three o’clock. The timing was superb. The perpetrator would be languidly engaged in a late lunch, if my neighbor’s genetically based assumption of a noon office arrival was correct. I could leave a cold and haughty message and then settle in to wait.
Unfortunately, I could no longer stave off some uncomfortable introspection. The adult behavior I’d witnessed in some of my peers was still eluding me. As an artist you weren’t encouraged to grow up. In fact you were treated like a child, so you tended to respond with childlike behavior. I used to think that adult behavior went along with producing offspring, but that was not necessarily true. Offspring were often just props to enable parents to look adult. I’d come across many more adult kids than adult parents. So that wasn’t it. This adult behavior, it was a subtle but enviable way of being.