A Stranger on the Planet

by Adam Schwartz

  “Seth, I have a small confession.”

  Our knees were pressed together under the table, and we were still holding hands.

  “Oh,” I said. It was either going to be a boyfriend or herpes, I thought. With my luck, probably both.

  “It’s not a big deal,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you that I actually went to see your show three times before I could get up the courage to call you.”

  “Three times!” I cried, mortified. “I can’t believe you heard my dumb lines three times.”

  “The third time I brought my cousin Nora with me. When you came on stage, I said, ‘That’s the man I’m going to marry someday.’ Nora said, ‘Well, I suggest you call him and let him know.’”

  I felt both exposed and absolved. “Is that a proposal?” I asked.

  “No, I’m an old-fashioned girl. I expect the man to get down on his knees and propose.”

  “What did you think I would be like?”

  “What you would be like?”

  “After coming to my show three times. What did you think I would be like in real life?”

  She looked down at the table for a moment, then gazed into my eyes. “I thought you would be very kind.”

  WE KISSED FOR A LONG TIME outside her apartment building. This was always the moment of a date I dreaded—to kiss or not to kiss. If you didn’t kiss, if you looked at the other person knowing you felt absolutely nothing, well, then you went home feeling more unlovable than you did before you left the house. Sometimes I thought it was better just to kiss in order to inoculate yourself against such feelings, to maintain the illusion that, yes, you did have a very good time and maybe you would see each other again. But when Molly and I reached the door of her building, I knew that we would kiss. Oh, and what kisses! Long and lovely kisses.

  After ten minutes, Molly had opened all but one button of my shirt and was pressing her lips against my collarbone.

  “Maybe you should invite me in?” I said, a little breathlessly.

  She looked at my exposed torso and laughed, as if she had just become aware that she was in the process of stripping me in the street. She put her hands inside my shirt and circled my waist with her arms.

  “Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said in a low voice, “I didn’t expect that I would be this attracted to you.”

  “I feel like I’ve just inhaled a canister of nitrous oxide.”

  She held me tighter and laid her head against my chest.

  “Tell me,” she said. “What did you think I would be like when I called you? Did you think I would be a lunatic or something?”

  Was this a test? Give the right answer and I’d get to come in and live happily ever after with her? “I thought the woman I had been waiting for all my life had finally called me,” I said.

  She burst out laughing, a deep, soulful laugh enriched with affection, a laugh that could move a heart.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “No, but that’s one of the sweetest lines I’ve heard in a long time.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  After opening my act with the story about standing in line behind the beautiful woman at the bakery, I would tell the audience that I had recently read a magazine article about highly functioning autistic adults. They hold down responsible jobs, appear normal in every way, but they never form any romantic attachments because they are dumbfounded by the subtleties and nuances of courtship. “Maybe that’s my problem,” I would say. “It’s not me! It’s a neurological disorder!”

  “Don’t look so concerned, Seth. I’m glad you said it.”

  “Does that mean I get to come in?”

  She pulled down on the collar of my shirt and gave me an exasperated, what-am-I-going-to-do-with-you look. Then she closed her eyes and kissed me on the mouth, perhaps hoping I would turn into a prince.

  “Yes,” she said. “Come in, come in.”

  “I HAVEN’T DONE THIS IN A LONG TIME,” she said.

  We were lying next to each other on her bed.

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Two years. Maybe longer.”

  “Actually, it’s been a long time for me too,” I admitted.

  “How long?”

  “November 27, 1984.” That was the night of Rachel’s mother’s funeral.

  “You remember the date!”

  “I’m strange in that way.”

  “I don’t think that’s strange. I think it’s nice.”

  She turned out the light to remove her clothes. When I pulled back the sheet to look at her, she covered herself with her forearm and hand, like Botticelli’s Venus, a gesture that stirred me deeply: She was as private as a night-blooming flower, and allowing me into her bed, into her life, I realized, was an act of faith.

  Her breath was warm against my ear, and I felt as if every cell in my body had awoken after a long hibernation. As I traced the rim of her ear with my tongue her whole body shuddered. “Oy, oy, oy,” she half sighed, half moaned.

  “Oy, oy, oy?” I murmured in her ear. “What happened to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph? Are you converting already?”

  “Keep kissing me like that,” she said, “and you’ll have me speaking in tongues.”

  “Where do you like to be kissed the most?”

  “I don’t think I can say it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Twelve years of Catholic school.”

  “I see,” I replied, not sure if I liked where the conversation was going. “Do you know I have a PhD in divinity from the University of Chicago?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Totally.”

  “Oh,” she said sullenly.

  “You’re not turned on? Women are usually so excited when I tell them that.”

  “Do you believe in God?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I believe, to tell you the truth.”

  “I don’t believe in God,” she said.

  “Any reason why?”

  “Twelve years of Catholic school.”

  “Do you know how I learned to be such a great kisser?”

  “How?”

  “Twelve years of Catholic school.”

  “Shut up!” she replied, laughing.

  “How about if I try to guess where you like to be kissed?”

  “Good deal.”

  I kissed one breast, then the other, then kissed my way down the rungs of her rib cage and the white downy plain of her midriff.

  “Am I getting close?”

  “Yes. Very.”

  My tongue traveled lower. I eyed her face, but she had covered it with both hands, looking very much as if she were reciting the blessing over Sabbath candles.

  “Oh, yes, good guess,” she murmured. “Oh, yes! Good guess. Yes! Very good guess!”

  We fell asleep that night in a damp embrace. When I woke in the morning, my hand was still cupping one of her small breasts, light and round as a Rome apple. I spent the next night in her bed too, and the one after that, and the one after that, and every morning we awoke so attached to each other’s bodies, so in love, that I believed some vital ether must have passed between our pores all through the night, binding us together.

  HOW SUDDENLY A LIFE CAN CHANGE! One night I was sitting alone and unloved in my apartment, the next night a woman cold-called me, and a month later I was living with her. We settled into a charmed routine: In the mornings I would write material for my act, but true inspiration usually struck later in the afternoon, when I went out and bought flowers, bread, wine, and ingredients for dinner at the pricey West Cambridge shops near Molly’s apartment. Before we met, Molly had always worked late because she didn’t like facing all those hours alone in her apartment, but now she left promptly at five, knowing that I was waiting for her with an abundance of kisses and kindness. At six o’clock, I would station myself by the bedroom window to catch sight of her coming down the street. She always appeared dazed and bereft, her gait slow, her steps small and timid, her arms crosse
d tightly across her chest. I thought of this as her orphan’s stroll, and in that moment, repeated every day, I understood what had brought us together: we were two foundlings who had found each other; we had created a home that could keep an orphan safe in a world of death and loss.

  SUNDAY NIGHTS WE HAD DINNER at her aunt and uncle’s house in North Cambridge along with her cousins, Nora, Bridget, and Franny, and their families—a total of ten adults and seven children. I had never encountered a family more different from my own: Large, loving, close, voluble, immune to slights or arguments, they all joked and kidded without anyone getting offended. Throughout dinner, Molly would hold my hand under the table.

  Her uncle John, a retired postal worker, sat at the head of the table, the object of his daughters’ love and adoration. Behind him, on the dining-room wall, a holy triptych looked down on us: portraits of Pope John Paul II, John F. Kennedy, and Tip O’Neill, who had been Uncle John’s childhood neighbor and friend. The first time I came to dinner, he told me a long story about how both their grandfathers had been brought over from Ireland in 1845 by the New England Brick Company. A local politician named Paddy Mullen had met their boat, brought them straight to City Hall, and registered them to vote. “On election day,” John said, “he met them at the polls and handed them each a ballot. Since they couldn’t read or write, he was kind enough to complete the ballot for them before they went in.” No doubt his daughters had all heard this story a hundred times, but everyone in the family paid rapt and affectionate attention.

  I wanted in on the storytelling too, wanted in on the adoration, wanted in on the Quinn clan, this family God had seemingly created in the opposite image of my own, but when I said to everyone in the room, “Do you know I turned seven years old on the day JFK was assassinated?” Molly stepped on my foot under the table. The Quinns all appeared a little puzzled, and Nora, who had seen my act and heard my Kennedy assassination story, shot me a look of concern. “That’s why I’ll always remember that day,” I said, “November 22, 1963.” Uncle John and Aunt Jean nodded solemnly.

  In my act, I had changed the story so that I burst into tears upon hearing the news of Kennedy’s death. No one in the class knows that I’m really crying because I’m sure my birthday party is going to be cancelled, and the principal and my teacher try to console me. Suddenly I know how it feels to be the most esteemed child in the class, and I let the tears rain down. My grief is contagious. All of my classmates start crying too, twenty-five first graders ululating over our dead president. “I loved President Kennedy,” I cry out, and the other children cry that they loved President Kennedy too. My teacher and principal pat my back. I imagine the glowing report my parents are going to receive about my reaction, and I refuse to be consoled. “Seth, everything is going to be fine,” my teacher says. “No, it’s not!” I shout. “Who’s going to help the Negroes and poor people now?” My classmates wail uncontrollably.

  When I told Molly the actual story, she commented that she liked it better. “I think it’s so sweet the way you tried to ease your mother’s sadness. Actually, you’re a lot nicer to your mother in the stories you tell about her than you are to her in real life.” Molly was shocked the first time she heard me talk with my mother over the phone: My tone was impatient and irritable, my voice admonishing. Molly said I sounded like an angry parent.

  ONE SATURDAY NIGHT THE QUINN CLAN came to see me perform— nine Quinns sat at a table, laughing more loudly and energetically than any other people in the audience. They all looked at each other when they laughed, as if they couldn’t believe how funny I was, couldn’t believe that they actually knew me. At Molly’s suggestion, I edited out my riff on my childhood reaction to the Kennedy assassination. The day after they came to see me perform, all the Quinns repeated their favorite moments from my routine at Sunday dinner. They kidded Molly’s Uncle John for not getting my PMS line. I had told the audience that I’d always had a problem merging into rotaries until I ordered new vanity license plates that said PMS. Now all the cars yielded to me.

  “PMS?” John said bewildered.

  “Premenstrual syndrome, Daddy,” Nora explained.

  “I still don’t understand,” he said.

  “Daddy,” Bridget said, “don’t you remember how we all knew Franny was about to get her period because she had such bad temper tantrums? If anyone looked at her the wrong way, we’d have to retreat for cover under the dining-room table.”

  “Watch it, Bridget,” Franny growled, holding her plate like a Frisbee, “or I’ll PMS you!”

  Everyone laughed and John’s face turned red as he finally understood. Then he coughed out a laugh and said, “Good one, Seth,” clapping me on the back.

  The next Sunday when we arrived for dinner, John couldn’t wait to show me something. He led me, Molly, and his three daughters outside and directed us to look at the back of his car. He had taped a piece of cardboard over his license plate and written PMS on it in bright red Magic Marker. His three daughters and Molly all burst out laughing.

  “Good one, Daddy!” Franny shouted.

  “Let’s test it out before it gets dark,” John said.

  The four women all piled into the backseat of his Buick; I had no choice but to get in the front. He was seventy-three years old, had had cataract surgery less than a year earlier, and his eyes were magnified to the size of silver dollars behind his coke-bottle lenses. Within two minutes we were on the Alewife Parkway, headed for the rotary. Not bothering to slow down, John sped through the rotary at thirty miles an hour. Car horns blasted us. The women were all laughing in the back while I cried, “Jesus!” and “Watch out!” John was tranquil as a Buddha.

  “Aren’t you worried about the police?” I asked.

  “Daddy knows all the policemen in Cambridge, don’t you Daddy?” Nora said.

  “That’s right,” he replied. “Every one of them.”

  His daughters thought this was hilarious too, and their peals of laughter almost drowned out the car horns as he drove through the next rotary at full speed. Molly put her hand on his shoulder. “I think Seth is ready to go home, Uncle John.”

  “Seth,” John said to me, “these letters work like a charm. I’m calling my friend Tommy Cullen at the DMV tomorrow and ordering new plates.”

  That night in bed Molly thanked me for being such a good sport.

  “It wasn’t some kind of test?” I asked.

  “What type of test?”

  “I don’t know. To see how much of a Quinn I can be.”

  “Everyone adores you,” she said. “They’re all happy for me.”

  We twined our limbs together.

  “How come no one says anything to your uncle about his driving?”

  “He’s very proud. Besides, he’s the dad. We don’t question our fathers.”

  I asked her if she was ever tempted to call her aunt and uncle “Mom” and “Dad.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  I told her that it struck me as a little sad when I heard her cousins call them “Mom” and “Daddy” while she had to call them something else. “It’s like they have something that you don’t.”

  “They do,” she said.

  I SPENT SATURDAY AFTERNOONS IN my own apartment. When Aaron had told me about it, I had agreed to rent it sight unseen, but I practically swooned the first time I saw it: a dazzle of gleaming pine floors, sunlight, and built-in bookshelves. It was small—a studio with an alcove study—but rent was stabilized at two hundred and fifty dollars a month. Of all the places I had lived—my claustrophobic, two-bedroom childhood apartment; my graduate-student hovel—this bright and airy Cambridge apartment, close to Harvard Square, minutes from the Charles River, was the first home that I had never wanted to leave.

  When I went to my apartment, I told Molly I was polishing lines for my act and visiting Mara, my neighbor and best friend, but really I just wanted to be in my own place, to see my own books and my own prints on the wall, to have lunch by myself at one of the Indian rest
aurants down the street, then stroll down Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Square and spend a couple of hours in the bookstores before walking back home along the Charles, past the roller skaters and scullers, past the slanting sailboats and the view of the golden-domed statehouse and the John Hancock Tower—a view that always provided a jolt of joy because it reminded me that I was no longer in the Midwest—and then napping for another couple of hours before I went to the clubs. I wanted some time to retreat into my routine, retreat into myself, to be reminded that my apartment, this home, was still waiting for me if I needed it.

  I had met Mara a week after I had moved into my apartment in 1986. I was returning home from the Bread and Circus down the street when I saw a woman propping herself up against my door and vomiting.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer my question. “I’m Mara Pearl,” she said. “I live on the fourth floor.”

  “Seth Shapiro,” I said. “Do you always introduce yourself to your neighbors by puking in front of their doors?”

  “No, usually I pee.”

  We both laughed, and I invited her in. She had wild, kinky hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a gold wedding band on her finger.

  I offered her tea or juice, but she said she was famished. I put together a plate of cheese, crackers, apple slices, and chopped liver. Despite being extremely thin and having just vomited, she practically inhaled the cheese and apples.

  “This Bread and Circus chopped liver is excellent,” I said, offering her some on a cracker.

  She told me she was vegetarian. Then she asked what I did for a living.

  “Stand-up comedy.”

  “No kidding! I do stand-up too!”

  “For a living?”

  “No, it’s more of a hobby, a nostalgic thing. My family owned a small hotel in the Catskills and I always wanted to be a comic.”

  “Do you have a day job?”

  “I’m a physicist. I teach at MIT.”

  “Oh, my,” I said. “That’s what I’d call a serious day job.”

  “Well, I probably won’t be doing it for long. I’m coming up for tenure in a year, and my chances don’t look good.”