by Amy Sohn
“I’m thinking of moving to Bologna,” he said dreamily.
“What?” I said, coming up a step.
“Have you seen the asses in Italy? Things heat up a lot faster there.”
His face was totally placid as though he was talking to a male friend and not a female. What was it about me that screamed don’t take her seriously?
“Why would you say that at a time like this?” I wailed.
He jerked his head back, surprised, like I was getting offended without due cause. “I thought you liked the truth.”
“I do, but not a reckless and obnoxious truth! I don’t understand how you can be so mean! It’s a beautiful day and I’m sitting here telling you I’d like to live under your desk, and you say you want to leave the country. That’s just…malicious.”
“You get too worked up over nothing.”
“I don’t want you to talk to me like I’m a guy,” I said. “I want you to be sweet to me.”
“You know what?” he said, standing up. “I got a lotta stuff to do.”
“Don’t just leave!” I said. “Let’s talk about this.”
“Why can’t you let things be easy?”
“You’re the one who can’t be easy. You’re the one who got in a bad mood all of a sudden. Sometimes you act so premenstrual.”
“I did not get in a bad mood. You pushed me.” He spun around and marched up the stairs. “Enjoy the day,” he said, and gave me a mock salute.
I sat there for about fifteen minutes trying to think Zen. I kept seeing his behavior as a problem I could solve. If I reacted the right way then he wouldn’t be a jerk. If I was easy and quiet and didn’t ever challenge him then we could build a perfect life together.
I started to get up to go when I saw a middle-aged woman coming down the street, holding a small child’s hand. Nora’s. Judging by the woman’s light hair and resemblance to Nora I realized this was Powell’s ex-wife. As she got closer I saw that she was not at all Catherine Zeta-Jones–esque. Her hair was pulled back in two barrettes and she was wearing a tan coat that, though fitted, did not look particularly expensive. She wasn’t as young as I had imagined either, she seemed to be in her early forties, and she definitely didn’t look like someone who would throw heavy appliances.
When Nora saw me on the stoop she stopped and said coolly, “Hi, Rachel.” I was impressed at her retention; she hadn’t exhibited any the first time we’d met.
“Hi, Nora,” I said. I extended my hand to the ex-wife. “I’m a friend of Hank’s,” I said.
“Oh,” said his ex, with a penetrating yet not particularly hostile look. “I’m Annie.”
He had made her out to be the most evil woman in the world and yet her name was Annie. How evil could an Annie be? A Diana, maybe, a Katerina, but an Annie?
“Are you going up?” she asked, gesturing toward the house with a look of slight trepidation.
“No, I was on my way out.” Nora was wheeling a little Pokemon suitcase and she hoisted it up the stairs one at a time, grunting with each step. “She’s good at that,” I said. “She could be a stewardess.”
“Yeah, well, that’s always been my dream for her,” Annie said, deadpan. She even had a sense of humor. It was hard to picture the two of them together. She didn’t look like the kind of woman that would tolerate long-term insanity.
I wanted to ask her whether everything Powell had told me was a lie—whether she was the litigious bitch he made her out to be, whether he’d cheated first or she had, what it was like being married to a misanthrope, whether she had any advice about what to do when he said things like “I’m thinking of moving to Bologna.” But if she really had any idea how to live with Powell they wouldn’t be divorced in the first place.
“Come on, Nora,” she said, nudging her up the stairs. “Daddy’s waiting. Say good-bye to Rachel.”
“Bye, Rachel.” Annie nodded at me politely and said it was a pleasure to meet me. Nora rang the buzzer and when I heard Powell’s voice over the intercom I jogged down the steps.
AT two in the morning on my next shift Powell came in. It had been a long night, a busy one, and I was exhausted and not looking very good. Bartenders get less attractive as the evening goes on, especially if they’re too busy to dash into the bathroom and reapply lipstick. He walked right up to the bar where I was mixing a gimlet and said, “I’d like to grind you into a salami and eat you between two pieces of ciabatta.”
“Are you drunk?” I said.
“No,” he said, “just feeling romantic. Could I get a Chivas, water on the side, no ice?”
I served the gimlet to a Jewish girl with obvious Japanese hair straightening who was on a date with a dumb-looking hammerhead. Then I fixed Powell’s drink. He took out his wallet but I shook him off.
“That was something else the other day,” he said. “You read me right and gave me just what I needed.”
“So why did you storm off?”
“I didn’t storm,” he said. “I had work to do.”
“Why don’t you just admit you were a jerk?”
He narrowed his eyes and appraised me. I was afraid he was going to yell at me again but instead he said, “You’ve changed. I could feel it the other day as I strung you up but I was afraid of it because it was unexpected.” He searched my face as though there was something new and beautiful in it.
“Oh yeah?” I said skeptically. “What’s different?”
“I’m not sure. You got a lotta fire. Fire I haven’t seen before. And I like it.” He nodded like he had just examined me with a stethoscope and heard the precise irregular heartbeat he had expected to. “You’re filling up and coming into your own. Your voice is coming outta a different place in your body.”
“Yes, it is,” I said from my diaphragm.
“There’s a hysteria that’s gone, I can hear it in your timbre. You look different too. Your cheeks are red and your eyes aren’t so frenzied. You’re like a 1950s Italian movie star.”
“You mean that psycho hooker from Nights of Cabiria?”
“I’ve never seen this power in you, this ease of being.” I tilted my chin up and tried to arrange my jaw in a position of great strength. “Maybe this is all because of your family strife. You’ve been forced to show grace under fire. The same thing happened to me when my father died. I let go of all my anger and woke up each morning feeling alive to the world, renewed. I had a spring in my step. Everyone kept asking if I was in love.”
“So you really think I’m different?” I said. Maybe he’d been testing me to see if I’d call him on his behavior and now that I had he’d finally seen that I was the ball-busting bitch he wanted all along.
“I do! It’s wondaful!” he cried. “You’re just aware! You see what’s coming and you’re ready for it. Seeing the truth has made you grow up.” There was a fascination in his face, an openness that I hadn’t seen since our first date. I knew it was dangerous to buy into the totally invented fantasy of a half-cocked maniac but if this meant he wanted to see more of me then I was happy to agree.
“It definitely has,” I said.
“Listen,” he said. “What time do you get off?”
Things couldn’t get any better. He’d fucked me in his boiler room, he’d said I had changed, and now he wanted to come over. It was almost like a Real Relationship.
I had another hour on my shift but there were only seven customers so I cupped my hand around my mouth and bellowed “Last call!” There were a few groans but I didn’t care. Hank Powell was worth closing early for.
When we got to the building I put the key in the lock but he didn’t follow me up the stairs. “So you want to come inside?” I said.
“That doesn’t interest me.” Maybe I’d gotten too jubilant too soon.
“I thought you wanted to come home with me.”
“I meant I’d walk you. I gotta get up early in the morning. I got a meeting.”
“But you’ve known me like a month. Don’t you think it’s about time you
saw it?”
“Soon as you see a woman’s place there’s problems. I once dated a woman who never let me come over. I would ask and ask but she wouldn’t give in. After six months, she finally relented. Big mistake. She lived in a walk-up on West Forty-seventh and it was a sty. There were takeout containers, dozens of garbage bags filled with trash, magazines from the 1980s, exercise equipment that had been discontinued. She stood in the midst of this inferno, began to cry, and said, ‘I hope you can love me anyway.’ I said, ‘Not a chance!’ and ran out.”
“But I’m not a slob.”
“This is the way I want it.”
There was a noise on the stairs, the front door opened and my dad came out. He flinched when he saw me but then he noticed Powell and his expression changed to one of great interest. “Hank,” I said wearily. “This is my father, Richard Block.”
“I was wondering why she was hiding you from me,” Powell said genially. They shook hands like old college buddies.
“I’ve heard so much about you,” my dad said. If it wasn’t three in the morning on the stoop of his mistress’s building it could have been Sunday-morning brunch at Banania.
“I can honestly say the same,” Powell said.
My dad’s eyes flickered nervously. “It’s OK,” I said. “He’s aware of your doggitude.”
“Although I’d never use that term,” Powell said. “Rachel told me you’re going through some interesting and fruitful transitions.”
“That I am,” my dad said, like he’d been handed a compliment. This was all I needed: for Powell to romanticize my father’s infidelity.
“What are you doing here so late?” I asked. “Isn’t Mom going to—”
“She thinks I’m at Boat, drinking.”
“At three in the morning?”
“She said she sleeps better when I’m not in the bed. She’s been having insomnia because of her meno.”
Powell nodded grimly like my mom had it coming if she told him not to sleep in her bed. I didn’t like the idea that Powell was commiserating. My dad was supposed to be struggling, processing, but instead he was currying sympathy.
“I must say, Hank,” my dad said, turning to Powell, “when Rachel said she was dating a fifty-one-year-old, I was a little nervous, but you could pass for early forties easy!”
“I’m not fifty-one,” Powell said, scowling. “I’m forty-eight.”
“But I IMDB’d you,” I said. “And it said you were born in—”
“Don’t believe everything you read!”
“Well, you look younger than forty-eight too,” my dad said quickly. “I’d put you at forty, tops!” He always did this, came on to my paramours like he was trying to seduce them himself. “I hope this doesn’t sound obsequious, but I thought The History of the Pencil was the best off-Broadway play of the season.”
“Dad! You walked out!”
“What?” Powell exploded.
“We left at intermission, but only because of my wife. I loved it but she took issue with the language. I can never get her to stay for the second act of Mamet either.”
“Women never like my work,” Powell muttered.
“I thought it was insightful and provocative, the first act anyway. As a meditation on the tenuous hold the artist has on his own mind it was rivaled only by Ed Harris’s Pollock.”
“If only you wrote for the Times.” Ben Brantley’s review of The History of the Pencil had begun, “There comes a time in every great artist’s career when he makes a misstep so grave it makes you question all his prior achievements.”
“But I don’t really mind bad reviews,” Powell said, resting his hand against the gate behind him. “It just fires me up more. Ow.”
“You OK?” my dad asked.
“Yeah. It’s just tennis elbow. My doctor gave me an anti-inflammatory but all it’s doing is making me excitable.”
“I play tennis too,” my dad said. A truck made its way around the corner and as it rattled on its wheels I had a sudden desire to throw myself beneath it.
“Where do you play?” my dad said.
“New York Sports,” Powell said, pointing to the bubble down the block.
“Those courts are terrible,” my dad said. “So over priced, and there’s no backcourt! You gotta play at the courts down by the water. You register with the parks department for a hundred dollars a year.”
“Ya kidding. I’ve never been down there. I’d love to play you some time.” This was My Two Dads but gayer. “Can I give you my number?”
“Sure,” my dad said, whipping out his cell phone and punching it in.
“Which way you walking?” Powell said. My dad pointed toward Court.
“You weren’t on your way in?”
“No, I just walked Rachel home from work. I live on Strong. I’ll walk you.”
He wouldn’t come upstairs but he was willing to walk my dad home. They should have just fucked each other up the ass right there on Pacific Street. It would have created some new problems but it definitely would have solved some of the old ones.
I watched them head off side by side. “So I got this theory about your anima issue,” Powell said, gesticulating effeminately.
“What’s anima?” my dad said. I waited till they were halfway down the block but neither one turned to say good-bye.
THE next night I called my mom and said I wanted to see her. She said she was folk dancing at Families First if I wanted to stop by. My mom had started folk dancing when she was a teenager at a left-wing summer camp but it was only in the past few years that she’d gotten back into it. It started as just a once-a-week thing but lately she’d been doing it the whole year round, all over the city. She often invited me to come with her but the thought of being alone in a room filled with aging hippies seemed as appealing to me as a Brazilian with the honey wax, not the gourmet.
But I figured she needed me now. I wanted to be kinder to my mom. It was something I had tried to do, longed to do, but been unable to do, since as long as I had an independent mind, and yet now it felt natural and right.
I walked over to Families First on Baltic and found the dancers all in a community room. There were about twenty of them, their arms around each other in a circle, and they were doing this fast elaborate kicking thing that looked more Scottish than Jewish. They were a different strain of geek than the Koffee Klatschers, older and more overtly nearsighted. The women looked like spin-offs of my mom, with loose skirts, and glasses, and the men were effeminate and graying.
My mom was shouting out “Slow, fast fast” and “Step, touch, touch” and “And now back to the first figure.” Everyone was grinning wildly, like they were having the time of their lives. When the song ended they went over to this table where grape leaves, hummus, and baba were laid out. My mom was standing at the CD player trying to figure out what to put on next and when I came up to her she looked surprised I’d actually made it.
“Hi,” she said. “To what do I owe this visit?”
“I just wanted to see you. I’m sorry I was such a jerk on Rosh Hashanah.”
“What was with you that night? You were horrible.”
“I—I was just in a really bad mood.”
A tall, big-nosed guy in a red bandanna meandered up, pretending to be interested in the veggie dip. “Is this woman related to you, Sue?”
“She’s my daughter,” my mom said, and put on a fake smile. One-on-one we didn’t work but when there was an audience we were a dream combination.
“She looks just like you,” he said. He shook my hand and said, “I’m Yitz.” He was cute but I couldn’t exactly see him slapping my ass on a nightly basis.
“We’re going to be doing ‘Leftes’ next,” my mom called out to the group, “so gather in a circle.” The music started up—Greek and frighteningly fast.
“There’s no watching here,” said Yitz, taking my hand.
“I don’t have my mother’s dance skills,” I said. “I’m really bad.”
“The
re’s no bad here,” he said. I rolled my eyes and before I knew exactly what was happening he had whisked me into the circle to learn.
I thought I could get the hang of it but when the music started it was way too fast, with a lot of skipping and hopping. Every time I thought I had a foot in the right place it would turn out to be the wrong one and I’d crash into Yitz. To make matters worse, my mom kept calling out, “No, Rach! Left foot, not right!” and everyone stared at me like it was cute that her dancing genes had skipped a generation.
At the end of the song everyone clapped and hooted, unstuck their peasant blouses and Mostly Mozart T-shirts from their sweaty chests, and wiped their brows.
“You weren’t that bad,” Yitz said. “You’ve got a great natural sense of rhythm.” He placed a warm clammy hand on my arm.
A young woman with a black bob I hadn’t noticed before was coming toward the table. She was in a suede skirt and 1940s high-heels and by the hipness of her look I was convinced she’d wandered in by accident. But she barreled past me toward my mom and said, “Sue?”
“What is it?” my mom said. The girl murmured something into her ear in a low, hushed tone. My mom threw her arm around her and ushered her into a corner.
The woman started crying and my mom got her some Kleenex and gave her a deep, strong hug. I’d never seen her hug anyone that way, not even my dad. “Rebecca and her husband are separating,” Yitz said quietly, “and she hasn’t been coming to dance that often.”
“Oh,” I said. I had never thought of my mom as the nurturing type before but maybe she just hadn’t gotten enough opportunity, since I never needed much care.
“Your mom’s really amazing,” he said. “Rebecca was just saying the other day she didn’t think she’d be able to get through it if it weren’t for her.”
My mother was nodding and I heard her say something about men being like trolley cars. She seemed totally comfortable, like a television mom, Meredith Baxter-Birney. Rebecca blew her nose into a Kleenex, nodded and smiled, and made her way back to the table. It was illogical, unfair, and misguided but I couldn’t help feeling like if my mom paid less attention to all these random losers and a little more attention to the one she lived with, he wouldn’t have gotten together with Liz in the first place.