“As a thank-you gift for her carpet?”
“I think more as a consolation prize.”
Peter was totally baffled. “Girls give each other lingerie?”
“It's not just lingerie,” I said, dumping the bag out on the bedspread. “It's a potpourri of sex toys.”
He went through the stash while I repeated Amanda's instructions for each item. His eyes still looked tired, but he did seem to be in a much better mood.
“Do you think these things are ridiculous?” I asked. “Or do you think they're sexy?”
He took a good long look at the pile of naughty things on the bed. It was a big question. Finally, he said, with a such-is-life shrug, “Both.”
Chapter 21
That next Friday, a delivery guy knocked on our building's door with a bouquet of roses for Nora. Josh answered the door. In fact, he signed for the flowers and carried them up to Nora's apartment. Nora told me about it later.
“I think Josh might be interested in me,” she said.
I tried to come up with something better, but all I could say was, “Duh.”
Nora had agreed to go on a date with an old boyfriend, Gary, who had heard through the grapevine that she was free. He had called a few days before, out of nowhere it seemed, saying he'd be in town Friday night and asking if she wanted to get dinner with him—and now, suddenly, it was Friday. Of all days.
“What the hell is this?” Nora asked Josh when she opened the door.
Josh set the flowers on her dining table. “You tell me,” he said.
She read the card, which was from Gary and said something like, “Can't wait to see you tonight.” And she made the little smile people make when reading cards like that.
“Can I see?” Josh asked.
“No,” Nora said, tucking it in her pocket.
“You're going on a date or something?” he asked, walking over to check some work he'd done on her kitchen faucet.
“Kind of,” she said, studying the flowers.
“So,” he said as he flipped on the faucet and ran his finger under the tap. “You're ready to start dating again?”
She picked up the flowers to add some water to the vase. “No,” she said. “But I'm going anyway.”
She walked to the sink, set the flowers in it, stood right next to Josh—who did not move—and waited for the vase to fill. Josh was at just the right angle for Nora to feel his breath on her ear, to hear the sound of the air rushing from his body, to feel the motion of his chest as he pulled in air and pushed it out. They were that close.
And she got this crazy feeling that he wasn't watching the vase fill with water, as she was, but, instead, was watching her profile. She'd always liked her profile—her long no-nonsense nose and the plumpness of her lips, and as she felt him watching her, she was suddenly imagining what he was looking at, what could be holding his attention. She could feel his eyes almost the way she felt his breath, and the tenderness of his gaze caused her to see herself in a different light.
With Viktor, they had been together for so long that they hadn't even needed to really look at each other anymore. They knew what there was to see. But here in her kitchen with this young man, this guy, she knew she was being studied. Every curve, every lash, every laugh line. He was looking at her in a way that she never even looked at herself.
He was a little nervous, she could tell, from being so close and from letting his eyes travel all over her like that. It made her feel nervous, as well. Her hair had been tucked behind her ear, and then it fell forward against her cheek. She was afraid to reach up to move it back, afraid, really of breaking the spell of this moment, which she suddenly wanted to last as long as possible. This kind of electricity was so different from the heavy air that had collected in her apartment since Viktor died.
Nora wondered what she would do when the water had reached the top of the vase and she had no reason to stand there anymore. And, just exactly as it did, Josh reached up and pushed the tuft of hair back behind her ear, brushing the pads of his long fingers along her cheekbone. She was so absorbed that she did not think to turn off the water, and it ran over into the sink.
Suddenly, she felt silly. She hit the faucet, poured off the extra water, picked up the vase—much heavier full than it had been empty—and started to take it back to the table. Josh moved to help her. “I got it,” he said, but his hands overshot the distance, and he wound up pushing the vase out of her grasp. It fell to the floor and shattered, flowers and glass and water going everywhere.
“Shit,” Josh said. Nora went to get some towels, and they piled the roses up on the counter and stepped around the hunks of glass.
Nora wasn't sure why she had accepted this date with Gary in the first place. At first, it had just been too awkward to say no. Then, as they continued to chat on the phone, she remembered his voice. It had been almost thirty years since she had spoken to him, but the sound of his voice, the feel of it against her eardrum, was so familiar. It took her back the way an old song can. It sparked some kind of visceral memory of what it felt like to be so very young and have the future waiting for her somewhere up ahead.
They had broken up because she was spending the summer in Stockholm with an aunt. And it was a few weeks later that she met Viktor, who was ten years older and already teaching classes at the university where she was taking a summer course. She'd walked into Viktor's class by mistake and then wound up staying. By the end of the summer, she and Viktor were engaged. It was that easy.
Their careers were that easy, too. She turned out to be just as smart as he was, got multiple degrees of her own in his same field, published three books, got an adjunct faculty position next to his tenure track, and team-taught thousands of students with the love of her life for twenty years. In the summers, they traveled, their suitcases stuffed full of books, and in the winters, they worked in bed side by side, legs tangled in the comforter. They had been happy with each other. They hadn't needed other people. They hadn't needed children. They had been truly lucky.
And now Viktor was gone, and all her expertise about grief was no help, and she was alone.
But then Gary showed up again. As if he'd been waiting, and all those years with Viktor had been an interlude. Something about that interpretation felt so appealing—as if things were only about to begin.
“I have to get dressed,” Nora told Josh, when the floor was clean.
“Need some help?”
“I think I can handle it.”
“I was coming up anyway to open that stuck window,” he said. “Before the roses.”
Nora hesitated. She had wanted to focus on her date, and getting ready, and all the little switches in her mind she was going to have to flip to make a date of any kind seem okay. But Josh was here. He might as well stay. “Okay,” she said.
And then Josh, standing closer to Nora than she'd realized, reached down to the bottom of his T-shirt and, in one motion, pulled it up over his head, revealing a twenty-something torso that was lean and muscular in the way only young men's bodies are.
Nora turned her head away. “Put your clothes back on!” she said.
But Josh just grinned and shook his head. He had shaken her up. “Nope,” he said. “I'm hot.”
And that's how Josh came to open Nora's door for Gary with no shirt on. Gary, in a bad suit with a bad tie, apologized and backed up to check the apartment number. But Josh said, “She's almost ready.”
“Are you her son?” Gary asked.
“He's my landlord,” Nora called from down the hallway, her heels clicking on the floor and one hand at her ear, fastening a last earring. She stepped up to them in a black cocktail dress that she hadn't worn in years. Josh's mouth fell open a little when he saw her. He had gotten used to her in Viktor's bathrobe.
The date was a disaster. Nora had been acutely uncomfortable about Gary's teeth, which he had bleached to a glow-in-the-dark white. He had taken her to a sports bar for dinner. “It wasn't Bennigan's,” she told me, �
�but it was close.”
“What did you eat?” I asked.
“I don't want to talk about it,” she said.
Gary had been divorced twice and had two children. His ex-wives were now in a book club together and had become great friends. He was living in Phoenix but had just taken a marketing position that would have him flying to Boston a couple of times a month.
“What does he do for a living?” I'd asked.
Nora had shrugged. “Business.”
Gary had told Nora he was looking to have some fun.
“I try not to have fun,” Nora had replied, “if I can help it.”
In the end, he'd had too much to drink and became weepy at the memory of her as a younger woman. Then he had railed against the tyranny of his alimony payments, lamented the fact that Nora was no longer nineteen years old, and propositioned the waitress for a threesome at his hotel—at which point Nora walked out of the restaurant, intending to call a cab. But then, worried he would mow down a pedestrian if he got behind the wheel, she turned and went back in.
She drove Gary back to his hotel, elbowing him away as he groped her. When she finally pulled up in front of the lobby, she got out of the car and walked away, driver's door still open, engine still running, Gary befuddled by his seat belt clasp. She was so angry, she was actually stomping the ground as she walked. Everything about this evening had been an insult to Viktor's memory, and she should have known the minute Gary showed up in his maroon tie. Honestly! What the hell had she been thinking?
It was chilly out, and it was ten blocks from the hotel to home. Nora's coat wasn't warm enough, but there it was. She wanted so badly to tell Viktor about her date. She found herself longing to call him on the phone, longing to hear that rich voice as he teased her for thinking that a date with that bozo would have made anything better. Before long, she had tears on her face.
She started up the steps of our building to find Josh waiting for her on the top one. He had wrapped a thick wool blanket around himself. His nose was a little pink.
“That guy's an idiot,” he said.
“You think?” Nora said, sitting down next to him.
“What were you thinking?” Josh asked.
“Somewhere very far away,” Nora said, “Viktor is rolling his eyes at me.”
Josh didn't say anything to that, but a few minutes later, he unwrapped the blanket from around him and put it around Nora's shoulders. She thought about making him take it back, but she didn't. She just let herself enjoy the weight of it for a little while as they watched the cars go by on the road.
“So,” Josh said. “You're dating again.”
“Not anymore.”
“I'd ask you out myself,” Josh added, after a little bit. “But my grandparents would freak out.”
Nora suddenly felt irritated. It was not thoughtful of him to kick her when she was down. The last thing she needed tonight was a conversation about how young he was in comparison to her. That was it. She was going inside. She didn't have to follow one stupid man with another. It made her want to yell at him. Then, spoiling for a fight, she asked, “Why? Because I'm twice your age?”
Josh frowned over at her like that hadn't occurred to him. “No,” he said simply. “Because you're a shiksa.”
Chapter 22
A few weeks later, on the first snowy day of the year, Peter had a surprise vasectomy.
We'd talked many times—most notably, just before Baby Sam was conceived—about how I had borne, literally, the brunt of all birth-control-related issues in our lives for as long as we'd known each other, and that at the first reasonable moment in our reproductive lives, it would be Peter's turn.
Peter agreed with me on every point. There was no good birth control: The synthetic hormones of the Pill were creepy, the IUD gave me two-week periods, I didn't have time to get the Shot. We had been diaphragm people for a long time, but I finally threw in the towel on it when, after many internal injuries from the cold, slippery thing snapping open before it was in place, one night it slipped out of my fingers and spurted into the toilet like a fish. I stood there for a long time, trying to decide if the humiliation of the plumber pulling it out of our sewer cleanout the next day would be worse than having to stick my hand in the toilet at that moment. In the end, I fished it out with a pair of salad tongs, but that was it for me. It, and the tongs, went right into the trash can. And we'd been riding bareback ever since.
Peter had said he was willing, even eager, to get snipped. And yet, somehow, he hadn't gotten to it. Even inspirational stories about guys we knew who'd taken the plunge didn't spur him on. When I wrote the phone number down for him, he lost it. When I tossed the V-word into conversation, he scowled. I had pressed the topic not too long before, and he'd confessed to having mixed feelings.
Peter put it this way: “I'm just not so sure I'm comfortable with the idea of it.”
“You know,” I said, by way of encouragement, “I had a similar feeling about giving birth. Three times. But I sucked it up. Okay?”
We had left it at that, Peter looking slightly sick to his stomach and me feeling a little more feisty and insensitive than necessary. It was his body, after all. Part of me thought it was uncool to push him. But another part of me was ready to be done with spermicides and latex and period-counting and worrying. Besides, once you've had procreational sex, which on so many levels is the best kind, it's hard to go back.
So that morning, when Peter said he'd canceled his lessons for the morning and was going to Planned Parenthood, I said, “You are?”
He looked very proud of himself. “Yup.”
“Did you make an appointment?”
He gave me a look that said, “obviously,” and then said, “Yup.”
I gave him a high five. “You rock!”
Then, as if to remind himself of the perks of going under the knife in this way, he pulled me over to him and said, “So there better be something for me in Amanda's Bag of Treats when I get back.”
“Babe,” I said. “Your whole life is going to be a Bag of Treats.”
In truth, there was no bag of treats for him when he got back. Just a Bag of Frozen Peas (for the swelling) and some Tylenol with codeine. He said it didn't hurt, but he walked a little bit like one of those dogs whose front and back legs were not aligned quite right. The boys and I made a stack of snowballs with maple syrup on top for Peter to snack on. For lunch, we brought him a giant pizza from Sal's down the block—and left again quickly before anyone started jumping on the bed.
Alexander wanted to know why Daddy had peas on his noodle, and I said that he had a noodle boo-boo. We spent the afternoon drawing get-well cards with dictated messages like, “Hope your noodle feels better!” and “Get well soon!” and “Eat your peas!”
The surprise vasectomy earned Peter some booty points. I felt so grateful to him, and so touched that he'd pushed past his fears in honor of our gasping sex life, that I decided to do something for him. I was going to give him a little time to recuperate and then, on the night before he left for California, which happened to be just before our ninth wedding anniversary, I was going to thank him. Properly. I wanted him to know that I would never see frozen peas the same way again.
His timing was just about perfect. He fixed our birth control problem right at the time I was arriving back in my body after a long absence. I had been like an empty house whose owners were on vacation, an occasional friend stopping by to turn on the porch light or bring in the paper. But now I was home, and ready to crank up the stereo with some Sarah Vaughn and invite in some company.
Because I felt different. I felt like a person who could squeeze into her pre-pregnancy jeans, if not button them. I felt like a person who could make changes. I felt new ‘n' improved. I didn't feel perfect, but, in a way I'd never anticipated, I didn't need to feel perfect. I wasn't trying to pretend that the childbearing years and the stretch marks and the wetting my pants when I sneezed had never happened. I would always have those ridges on
my stomach where the skin had pulled apart. I would never be the person I had been before these babies had ravaged my life. But I didn't want to be.
The next morning, Amanda called while I was changing Baby Sam's diaper. I held Baby Sam with one hand and stretched to grab the cordless with the other, resolving to spray the phone down with Lysol later.
“You should say that you love me now,” Amanda said right off, “because you'll be too excited to say it after I tell you.”
“I love you,” I said into the phone, making Peter's eyebrows go up.
“Okay,” she said. “My friend Anna Belkin has a very hip café in Somerville, and she hangs art for sale on the walls.”
“Uh-huh?” I said.
“And she's looking for photographs.”
Baby Sam was flailing his legs all over the place, rolling in the poopy diaper and kicking his heels into it. I wasn't entirely listening.
“Are you listening?” Amanda asked.
“Not really,” I said.
Amanda sighed. This was not how she had pictured our conversation. “She wants you to hang your photographs in her café,” she shouted. “For sale!”
“Why?” I asked.
“I told her you were a freelancer for National Geographic.”
I dropped the phone. Baby Sam rolled for the edge of the changing table. I caught him just in time and then set him down with a truck to play at my feet, clean but naked, noting, in a resigned way, that he ‘d probably wind up peeing on the floor. I picked up the phone. “You did what?”
“Just to get her attention!” Amanda said. “Then I showed her the photos you took of me.” She paused. “She loved them!”
“But I'm not a freelancer for National Geographic.”
“You're missing the point,” Amanda said.
“But you lied about me!”
“A white lie.”
“But who is going to tell her the truth?”
“She doesn't want the truth. She just wants your photos on her wall.”
Everyone Is Beautiful Page 16