“I’m comfortable talking about myself, because I’m a writer,” he said, wrapping his arm around the back of my chair. “You’re a painter. What do you paint? Do you do self-portraits ever, nudes, what?”
I struggled. I couldn’t think clearly with his body so close to mine. “Sure.”
“Which—nudes or self-portraits, or both at the same time?”
“Both, I guess. I’m having some trouble right now.” I blushed.
I was pretty in my self-portraits. I lied, making myself skinnier than I really was, taller. My breasts high and small. I couldn’t paint myself as I really looked. It was embarrassing. I just couldn’t. I tried to be honest, I did, but then I just stopped trying; it was humiliating. I never showed those paintings. I was vain, deeply vain, and not a good enough painter to hide it, or exploit it.
His eyes lit up. “Tell me. You don’t know, maybe I could help.”
“No.” I couldn’t remember the last time I had said no to someone.
He shook his head. “It’s unfair that you know all about me and all I know about you, Evie, is that you paint.” He spit out the word paint as though it were too sweet, or rancid. As though I were no different from some little old lady doing paint-by-numbers watercolors of Scottie dogs and windmills.
“Come on, tell me a story, give me something,” he said, squeezing my shoulder for a moment. “Here, tell me about your first hickey, prom, learning to ice-skate. Your nose job. Losing your virginity. Tell me that one.”
“I didn’t have a nose job.” I laughed. My nose was one of my few gifts of nature.
“Come on, that perfect little nose. How much did Daddy spend? You can tell me. I won’t tell. Lots of girls get them for their sweet sixteen, or their bat mitzvah.”
“It’s mine,” I said, “and I’m a Presbyterian.”
“Why are you lying to me?” he snapped.
“I’m not,” I insisted, uncomfortable with the rough edge on his voice. He studied my face hard, as though his eyes could burn off any deception I might attempt.
“Good,” he said, sliding his hand into the top of his shirt and running his palm slowly over his chest, his fingers fluffing up the black and silver hairs.
“Why don’t you tell me about the new book,” I said, trying to change the subject. His face hardened.
“They hate me,” he barked. “Reviewers. Everybody. Especially the women. They think I’m a misogynist, because I tell it like it is. I don’t understand it. If anyone ever loved women, it is me!”
He pounded his hands on the table, nearly upsetting his drink. People at nearby tables murmured. I imagined them whispering, “See that couple? That is the famous writer. Yes, that one. Who’s the girl? I bet they’re lovers.” Their attention, coupled with the drinks, made me want to light a cigarette and blow smoke out my nose. It made me want to lean across the table and kiss him hard on the mouth. A middle-aged couple turned their heads, pretending to look over our heads at something in the distance, but I knew it was us they were looking at. It proved his point, people were against him—against him, and now, by association, me.
I sipped my whiskey. It didn’t hurt this time, but warmed my mouth and flooded my body with a pleasurable heat. He reached over and grabbed my hand. “You believe me, don’t you?” he asked, his fingers pressed into my palm. He looked younger in the candlelit darkness. It softened his knobbed cheekbones and made his mouth seem thick and lush. I was beginning to surrender inches of myself to him. I let him caress my palm. Then the inside of my arm up to the elbow. He traced a blue vein that ran up and disappeared into my sleeve. I shivered. I could see the soft white skin where his wedding band used to be. It looked like new skin, as though when he had removed the ring he had worn for years, his skin had been torn off with it. This pale naked groove made him seem even more attractive to me. Overhead, stars were sprinkled like tiny pins in a map showing where the bombs are buried—where soon everything would never again be like it was. He whispered in my ear, his lips moving against my lobe, “You know you are sexy.”
“Not necessarily,” I replied, shaking my head, enjoying the rattle of his words in my skull. I was stimulated by them—You, are, sexy.
“How do you see me?” I asked, leaning toward him so he could get a better look in the candlelight. “I mean, how do I appear to you?” I pushed the hair back and away from my shoulders, holding on to a strand of it that I brushed back and forth over my mouth.
He looked at me for a minute and licked his lips. “I don’t know if you really want me to tell you,” he said, raising an eyebrow.
“I do,” I said, and squeezed his fingers.
“Later,” he said.
“Promise?”
He was the kind of man who liked to make a woman beg. He was the kind of man who wanted to do things you’d never let another man do to your body, like it was his right. Then he’d want you to tell him how you felt. In detail, so he owned it.
I might let him.
He reached out slowly and took my hair in his hands, cupping it, weighing it. I tried to move my chair back a little, but my hair snagged painfully between his fingers. He dragged the knotted hair through his fingers, and I yelped.
“I’m going to take a leak.” He stood up leisurely and stretched. “Don’t you go anywhere.”
My scalp felt seared. It seemed like everyone around me had started talking all at once, moving their heads in minute fractions, like they were listening to signals from the heavens emanating from those silver pinpoints. I rubbed my fingers against the soft indents of my temples. I believed he had pulled my hair on purpose. He thought he could do whatever he wanted with me. I thought about leaving right then. I imagined him coming back to the table thinking maybe I was hiding from him, playing a little game. He’d get down on his hands and knees, get mud on his trousers looking for me. He’d get hard thinking about me half undressed in the bushes waiting for him to discover me crouching in the dirt. Not finding me, he’d think, “That impulsive, mysterious woman has eluded me, and now I’ll never possess her.”
Or, he’d think, “What a stupid little cunt. Silly thing got scared and ran away; couldn’t even say good-bye.” That’s what he would think.
I gnawed hard on an ice cube. I didn’t even hear him return to the table.
“Evie,” he said, softly prodding my ribs with his forefinger. “Evie,” he said. “Where are you?” He crossed his arms against his chest and sank down into his chair. “Are you thinking about what you’re going to tell your friends about tonight? I know how women talk. I don’t mind.” He rubbed my shoulder.
“I’m here,” I said curtly. “And I don’t talk that way.” He looked a little surprised.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m fading.”
He rubbed a few strands of my hair between his fingers. “No you’re not. I can still see you. I can,” he said, gently shoving his hand up under my hair, grasping the nape of my neck with his thick fingers. “I can still feel you.” I smiled unsteadily. I wondered how he saw me. Would he tell me? Would he lie? His hand tightened on the back of my head.
“You are lovely. Did you know,” he said, and paused as if to tease me, “that I have a photographic memory? I remember the body of every woman I’ve ever fucked.” His hand fell to my shoulder. He ran his fingers down my arm, brushing lightly against my breast. “Every curve. Every muscle…” He pulled my hand to his mouth and kissed my knuckles; his tongue pressed itself between my spread fingers.
I pulled my hand away and down into my lap. Then I started to stand up. I didn’t think I could do this. Could I? What would the story be? What would my story be? There was no story. He had written this story a hundred times.
“You can’t go,” he whispered as he grabbed my wrist. “I want to make love to you. Have one more drink. We’ll go someplace. I need you.”
“I can’t.” I tried to shake my hand loose.
His face was cold, half angry, half sad, like he didn’t know what to do. “Fine
,” he said. “You disappoint me,” he said. “I thought you were different. I thought you were more than this,” he said with a short harsh laugh.
The couple sitting one table over stopped talking and listened for a moment. I could see the light vanishing from his eyes as though there were lamps being pulled back inside him. The front of his face was dark, and empty, and ugly. No one said anything. I was different. I would tell him something. I could tell him something he didn’t know. Something I’d never read in his books. Something he’d want, something he’d like and need. He actually looked small sitting there next to me, turning his hands over and over in his lap. So I threw him a bone.
“Okay,” I said. His face softened. He opened his mouth slightly, then curved his body intimately around my chair. He wanted my secret. He wanted to ensure that I gave it to him, that he heard it all, and that it was for his ears alone. I sucked down the last little bit of liquor lingering in the bottom of my glass, swallowing it like the tail end of the evening.
“I give up,” I said. I took a deep breath, and with my eyes fixed on the candle’s flame I told him this: “I’ve got lousy rhythm. I can’t slow-dance. I try to lead. It drives men, especially my father nuts. I’ve got to close my eyes and give myself over, literally safety-pin myself like a scarf to my partner and let him move me. I’m lousy in bed because of this. It’s true. I’m a terrible lover. I’m afraid to lose the power of being the one who’s acted upon, the passive one, the one who doesn’t risk anything except perhaps my lover’s disappointment, and I worry about that. Of course I worry about disappointing. You see, I’m not like other women. I can’t become some character, I can’t forget myself and become somebody else during sex. I can only be myself, and I guess I’m not comfortable with that. That’s why I don’t want to take control, why I want to be taken. I’m afraid to straddle a man and ride him because I can’t get into any kind of rhythm and stay there without becoming incredibly self-conscious. I can’t play it out, steady, steady, to the point of ejaculation, I’ve never been able to come like that on top, I can’t stay wet. I just panic and roll onto my back, even though I know I’m supposed to want it on top like that—in a position to rule, I know it’s supposed to empower me, and turn me on, but I just can’t do it. Maybe I’m just afraid that if I take control, if I am secure enough to let myself go, I might find out something about myself that I don’t want to know. If I let go, I might be consumed by my desires. I’m afraid of what I might want. What I might need. What it might do to me. Who I might become.”
I blurted out all of this. My heart was pounding in my mouth. I stared down into my lap, fixating on my hands lying flat and still over my crotch. I couldn’t look up at him. I could feel his breath on my cheek as he leaned into my body. His breathing sounded shallow, and uneven.
“Is that true?” he asked. His voice was throaty and deep. I looked up at him. His lips were slightly parted and his pupils looked large and limpid. I had him.
“What do you think?” I said, my voice steady.
“I don’t know. Is it?” He couldn’t stand not knowing if I was, or was not, telling him the truth, and he needed to know.
“Why would it matter?” I said, and he just looked at me, like nothing else did matter. I smiled at him, and shrugged. I wasn’t about to tell. I curled up in my chair and gazed up at the stars, then back at him until he shifted his eyes to the ground. He put his hands on his knees and breathed in deeply, looking as though I had shoved him hard in the chest.
“She left me,” he said, lifting his head up slowly.
“I know,” I said. I didn’t want to hear the things I’d already read, hear the things I already knew. “Everyone knows that,” I said, shaking a cigarette out of his pack. If my father knew the way I was smoking. He stared at me as I tamped the tobacco down into the tip and, leaning across the table, lit it from the candle. His eyes looked flat and black, like he wanted me to just listen to him.
“She was fucking my brother,” he said. “My only brother, who I slept in the same room with for fifteen years. Thanksgiving. Hanukkah. Fucking Arbor Day. Two long years I sat there, like an idiot eating their shit while they snuck off and fucked in the bathroom on holidays, fucking behind my back while I slept. My brother and my wife. It’s over, they say. The fucking bastards. But, but, that’s not why she left me. She tells me, ‘That’s not why I left you. I am only telling you this so you hear it from me.’ My brother, he doesn’t say anything. He won’t even look at me. I hit the bastard. I beat his head in…I beat his head in and all he does is stand there and fucking sob.”
I didn’t want to look at him. His face was dripping with tears, his mouth open and ragged. I stood up and slipped into my coat. “You can’t leave Michael Morris,” he cried out, and grasped at my arm. He sprang to his feet, he stuck his hands deep into his pockets, he yanked out a wad of dollar bills and threw them at the table. He grabbed my elbow. I stopped. I didn’t move. I didn’t run. I just let him keep talking.
“Come on, come on, you can’t leave me. I’ve got my car here,” he pleaded. “You can’t just leave me like this, baby. I’m destroyed. I’m destroyed. I need you. You can make it better.” He pulled me toward him, wrapping his arms around me; he clenched me to his chest. I could feel the coldness of his belt buckle against the back of my hand. “Come on,” he said. “Use me.”
THE GARDEN OF EDEN
The first thing Evie’s father did upon arriving in Amsterdam was tighten the hinges on her bedroom door. “You could have done that yourself, honey,” he said, as though home repair was at the top of Evie’s “to do” list.
When Evie’s first priority really was what to wear to greet her father who had decided to “swing by” for a visit after finishing up some business he had in London. I could hardly believe the way she’d torn apart our closet, finally settling on my black Azzedine Alaïa dress, my Tiffany pearls, and a cunning little pair of alligator sling backs. I hardly recognized her, seeing that as of late she had been favoring old lace slips, fishnets, and combat boots. But tonight she looked like a future trophy wife. If you didn’t look too close. She had managed to scour off her black nail polish, but there were still faint traces of violet in her newly bleached white hair. Her father was, after all, still recovering from some awful surgery—not that you could tell—but still, one might assume he could only stand so much.
No, truth be told, the perfect outfit was second on Evie’s list of things to do. Her first priority was to get her new boyfriend, Billy, out of the flat before Daddy arrived. Billy was a ridiculous punk rocker she met at the Van Gogh Museum—he was shoplifting postcards, Van Gogh’s Room at Arles (decorating tips, no doubt)—from the gift shop where she worked. She was afraid she was falling in love with him. Quel romance.
“I can’t believe it,” she would wail over and over again, usually after spotting some particularly cute guy. “It’s over. God, this can’t be. How did this happen? How could I fall in love?”
“I tried to convince you to get the shot,” I’d joke, and flash her my shoulder. “A simple inoculation against commitment.”
“No, really, I’m doomed.”
“So can I assume Billy won’t be joining you and the family for the holidays?”
At this, Evie went absolutely pale. “That isn’t even funny, and don’t you say a word. Daddy would hate Billy. He has no job, he barely speaks to his own family, and he’s a musician, which is just fine in the abstract—you know, my father has that whole, want-to-be-a-rock-star-in-another-life thing—but see, Billy isn’t dreaming. He’s not going to be some CPA who plays guitar on weekends in some hobby cover band with a bunch of balding armchair outlaws. He really wants to make it.” She paused. “And he’ll tell my father that.”
I can’t help myself; I laugh, just a little. It’s not that I don’t believe her, she’s told me stories of how her father used to torture her boyfriends—it’s just that Evie is starting to sound just like Billy with all of his eat-the-rich silliness and not wan
ting to be with anybody who doesn’t “burn.” It used to be that Evie and I sounded alike, almost like sisters, everybody said so. I can’t tell you how many times people still confuse us on the phone.
I didn’t believe for one minute this thing with Billy would last. I mean, really. It wasn’t just that he looked like a sixteen-year-old delinquent, what with his black sticking-up hair (he styled it with Elmer’s, I swear), his holey black jeans and ripped T-shirts, and that silly wallet on a chain thing, which was an utter joke. Who would want to steal a wallet that had absolutely no cash in it? This little affaire d’amour wouldn’t last because I knew my best friend, and I knew that what really mattered to her was the chase, and she had him. For heaven’s sake she had him every single night it seemed. Believe me, I wouldn’t introduce Billy Lang to my father either, but then again my father hadn’t met any of my boyfriends since he picked me up at tennis camp and I introduced him to Russell Cole. Russell was sixteen and I was thirteen. All my father said on the drive home was, “Is that the Coles of Boston or Savannah?”
I had to confess I had no idea. To me he was just foxy Russell with the nice butt and the fast hands.
Which isn’t to say my father doesn’t know men I’ve dated, he just doesn’t know that he knows them, it would be awkward, to say the least.
Oh, sometimes when he is feeling particularly fatherly, say, after he’s gotten my AmEx bill, he’ll ask, “So, any prospects?” But this could mean anything, right? I cannot imagine he really expects me to tell him anything. And I wouldn’t.
It seemed every time my mother called me at college she managed to work “So, have you met any nice young men? Have you been dating?” into the conversation. Always in this chirpy Ann Landers voice; that is, until she got tired of listening to me roar with laughter. It’s best that I keep my private life private. I just know Sunny would find fault with any man I brought home. Ever since my father left her, or rather us, as she prefers to put it, she’s maintained, “You can’t trust men. Of course they make wonderful escorts, and one couldn’t live in a world without men, but on a cold winter night I’d rather the company of a dog.”
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