by Melissa Bank
You go through radiation.
Then your immune system is all you have to kill the aberrant cells, which you imagine as sinister and black-clad, smoking cigarettes as they cluster in the dark S & M club of your body.
It was easier when the menace came from the outside, you tell a therapist; she nods, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Thursday after Thursday, you tell her about your relationship with him. You talk and talk, waiting for the cure. After a while, though, it occurs to you that even a perfect understanding of failed love is the booby prize.
You don't see him again. Sometimes you worry that he loved you better than any man ever has or will—even if it had nothing to do with you. Even now, he is every blue blazer getting into a cab, every runner along the river, every motorcycle coming and going.
T H E
G I R L S ' G U I D E
T O H U N T I N G
A N D F I S H I N G
. . . [W]hen you're with a man you like, be quiet and mysterious, act ladylike, cross your legs and smile. Don't talk so much. Wear black sheer pantyhose and hike up your skirt to entice the opposite sex! You might feel offended by these suggestions and argue this will suppress your intelligence or vivacious personality. You may feel that you won't be able to be yourself, but men will love it!
—From The Rules by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider
My best friend is getting married. Her wedding is only two weeks away, and I still don't have a dress to wear. In desperation, I decide to go to Loehmann's in the Bronx. My friend Donna offers to come with me, saying she needs a bathing suit, but I know a mercy mission when I see one.
"It might be easier if you were bringing a date," Donna says in the car, on the Major Deegan Expressway. "But maybe you'll meet somebody."
When I don't answer, she goes on. "Who was the last guy you felt like you could bring to a wedding?"
I know she's not asking a question as much as trying to broach the subject of my unsocial life. But I say, "That French guy I went out with."
"I forgot about him," she says. "What was his name again?"
"Fuckface," I say.
"That's right," she says.
—•—
At the entrance to the store, we separate and plan to meet in an hour. I'm an expert shopper, discerning fabric content by touch, identifying couture at a glance. Here at Loehmann's, on Broadway at 237th Street, I'm in my element—Margaret Mead observing the coming of age in Samoa, Aretha Franklin demanding R-E-S-P-E-C-T in Motor City.
Even so, I search for a whole hour without finding a single maybe, until I see it, my perfect dress, a black Armani sheath—but only in an ant-sized 2 and a spider 4.
I think, A smarter woman than I am bought my 10 at Saks or Barneys weeks ago, knowing it would never find its way to Loehmann's. She knew her dress when she saw it and didn't hesitate. That woman is zipping up her sheath right now, on her way to meet the man she loves.
But in the communal fitting room, Donna hands me the black Armani sheath in a 10—the one that almost got away. I take this as an omen.
Is the dress perfect? It is so perfect.
I say, "You're my fairy godshopper," and sit on the fitting-room bench, holding the sheath in my arms while Donna tries on bathing suits. She adjusts the straps of a chocolate maillot and frowns at herself in the mirror. She doesn't know how beautiful she is, especially her sultry, heavy-lidded eyes; she says people stop her on the street and tell her to get some rest.
"No wonder I'm single," she says to the mirror. "Even I don't want to get into bed with these thighs."
I say that getting married isn't like winning the Miss America Pageant; it doesn't all come down to the bathing suit competition.
"What do you think it comes down to?" she says.
I say, "Baton twirling."
—•—
Afterward, we celebrate our purchases over turkey burgers at the Riverdale Diner. In a put-on silky voice, I say, "I am a woman who wears Armani."
"Clothes are armor," she says.
I don't need armor, I tell her; I'm happy for Sophie and Max.
"I hate weddings," she says. "They make me feel so unmarried. Actually, even brushing my teeth makes me feel unmarried."
She stops doing her shtick, and suddenly she does look tired; her lids practically cover her eyes. She tells me she's been reading a terrible book called How to Meet and Marry Mr. Right. "Their main advice is to play hard to get. Basically, it's a guide to manipulation."
I'm thirty-four, but wisdom-wise, I don't have any idea how to date, myself—or, that is, I only know how to date myself—but I say that maybe she should stop reading it.
"I know," she says, only half agreeing. "But it's like I've been trying to catch a fish by swimming around with them. I keep making myself get in the water again. I try different rivers. I change my strokes. But nothing works. Then I find this manual that tells me about fishing poles and bait, and how to cast and what to do when the line gets taut." She stops and thinks. "The depressing part is that you know it'll work."
I say, "I hate fish."
—•—
The wedding is held at a restored mansion on the Hudson. I come up here sometimes on Sundays. If there isn't a wedding going on, you can pay admission to tour the house and grounds, but I pay my $4.50 just to sit in an Adirondack chair and read the newspaper and look at the river. It's a spot so idyllic it makes you feel you're in a painting—a Seurat, maybe—and for a while I kept hoping a gentleman in shirt-sleeves and a boater would dot-dot-dot over to me. Then I overheard a guard say that this place was just for the pinks and grays—wedding parties and senior citizens.
I arrive in the rainy late afternoon to help Sophie dress. I'm directed upstairs to the first door on the left, where I expect an old-fashioned bedroom with lace curtains, a vanity, and a four-poster bed, but I find Sophie and her friends in a conference room with stacked plastic chairs and a slide projector. She's up at the lectern, clowning in her bra and stockings.
I go up to her and the words "blushing bride" come to mind, though she is, in fact, an almost constant blusher—from sun or wind, laughing, crying, anger, or wine. Now she actually appears to be glowing, and I kiss her and say, "Hello little glowworm."
Her hilarious friend Mavis pours me a big glass of wine; she's pregnant and says that I have to drink for two now.
After I help Sophie on with her off-the-shoulder ivory gown, she asks me to put on her makeup, though she knows I don't really know how. It's for the ritual of it; I brush a tiny bit of pale eye shadow on her lids and put on barely-there lipstick. She blots her lips with a tissue.
Mavis says, "Jesus, Sophie, you look like a whore."
The photographer knocks to tell Sophie it's time for pictures, and the rest of us follow. Mavis and I stop in the bathroom, and from the stall she tells me she didn't realize for a long time that she was pregnant; she thought she was just getting fat and becoming incontinent. "So the pregnancy was really good news."
Since I have nothing to add about pregnancy, I tell her I read that Tiny Tim wore Depends in his final years. He wasn't incontinent, just thought they were a good idea.
Downstairs, we join Mavis's husband and the other guests. We take our seats in the room where the ceremony will be held. It has a river view, but all you can see now is fog and rain and wet grass.
I ask Mavis what her ceremony was like and she says that instead of "The Wedding March," she chose K.C. and the Sunshine Band's song "That's the Way—Uh-huh, Uh-huh—I Like It" and danced herself down the aisle.
Her husband does a deadpan, "Uh-huh, uh-huh."
The music plays. We wait. Mavis whispers that she has to go to the bathroom again. I say, "Think how much better you'd feel if you had a Depends on right now." This is what I'm saying when Max and Sophie walk down the aisle.
—•—
The reception kicks off with a klezmer band doing their bloop-yatty-bloop, and Sophie and Max are hauled up on chairs for the Jewish wedding version of musical chairs. I was rais
ed as an assimilationist, but it's not my confused identity that prevents me from joining in; I've got the spirit, but I can't clap to the beat.
Finally, we go to our tables. I'm at One, sitting between Mavis and Sophie, and I know everyone at the table except the man taking his seat at the opposite end. He's tall and gangly with olive skin, a high forehead, and big eyes; cute, but that doesn't explain what comes over me. I haven't had this feeling in so long that I don't even recognize it; at first I think it's fear. My hair follicles seem to individuate themselves and freeze; then it's like my whole body flushes.
He smiles over at me and mouths, I'm Robert.
I mouth, Jane.
When I come out of my swoon, Mavis is telling the table that my Depends comment made her pee in her pants. She tells me I should work Tiny into my toast, and only now do I remember that I'm supposed to give one.
I try to think of it during dinner, but I'm also trying not to stare at Robert, and I'm shaky and not exactly prepared when it's my turn to go up to the microphone.
"Hi," I say to the crowd. I wait for something to come to me, and then I see Sophie and it does. I say that we met after college in New York, and that over the years we had a succession of boyfriends but weren't so happy with any of them. We were always asking each other, "Is this all we can expect?"
"Then," I say, "there was our sea-horse period, when we were told that we didn't need mates; we were supposed to make ourselves happy just bobbing around in careers."
"Finally, Sophie met Max," I say, and turn serious. I look over at him. I think, He has a nice face. And I say this into the microphone. "He gets how funny and generous and wholehearted she is. He understands what a big person she is, and yet he doesn't want to crush her." I get some blank stares here, but Sophie's laughing. I say, "Max is the man Sophie didn't know if she could hope for."
When I sit down, Robert stands, I assume to give his toast, but he walks over to my side of the table and asks Mavis if she'll trade seats with him.
She says, "No," and waits a moment before relinquishing her chair.
Robert sits beside me and says, "I loved your toast."
I linger over the word "love" coming out of his mouth about something of mine.
He tells me that he knows Max from freshman year—roughly twenty years—and I remember that a huge number of Oberlin friends are here and ask what bonds them all for life.
He says, "No one else will be friends with us."
Then another toaster picks up the microphone.
Toast, toast, toast; Robert and I can only talk during the intermissions in hurried exchanges: I learn that he's a cartoonist, and I have to tell him that I work in advertising. "But," I say, and don't know what to say next, "I'm thinking of opening a dog museum."
Toast.
"A dog museum?" he says. He's not sure if I'm kidding. "For the different breeds?"
"Maybe," I say. "Or else it could be a museum that dogs would enjoy. It could have interactive displays of squirrels dogs could chase and actually catch. And a gallery of scents."
Toast.
He tells me he's just moving back to New York from L.A. and is staying with his sister until he finds an apartment. I tell him I live in the huge ancient apartment complex nicknamed the Dragonia for its gargoyles. Almost everyone knows someone who has lived there—an ex-girlfriend or masseuse, a cousin—and Robert does, too, though he doesn't specify whom.
Toast.
Will I check on vacancies for him? I will.
Sophie's father goes up to the microphone for the last toast, a position of honor he's requested. He reads a rhyming poem:
I despaired at my spinster daughter
though I thought her awfully fair.
Then came Maxie, praise the Lord,
from the heavens, I had scored.
***But Max, like Sophie, makes documentaries,
how are they going to pay their rentaries?
Sophie's shaking her head; Max is trying to smile at his father-in-law. Robert leans over and whispers to me,
Dad is trying awfully hard,
but this guy is no one's bard.
Max and Sophie go table to table to talk to their guests, and as soon as Robert and I have the chance to talk without interruption, a statuesque beauty in a drapey gown interrupts.
"Jane," Robert says, "this is Apollinaire."
I'm about to say, "Call me Aphrodite," but realize in time that he's not kidding.
"Have a seat," he tells her, nodding to the one next to me, but she gracefully drops down beside him, as though to fill her urn, forcing Robert to turn his back to me. It occurs to me that I may not be the only butterfly whose wings flutter in the presence of his stamen.
After she glides off, Robert tells me that she composes music for movies and has been nominated for an Oscar. I think of my only award, an Honorable Mention in the under-twelve contest to draw Mr. Bubble.
"I like her toga," I say, confusing my ancients.
We talk, we talk, and then Robert announces to the table at large that it's time for us to prepare the newlyweds' getaway car.
Outside it's drizzling. Robert retrieves two grocery bags from the bushes and leads us to Max's car.
Mavis shaving creams smiley faces on the windows.
"Très droll," her husband says, looking on.
I don't spray a word. I hold my shaving cream poised but nothing comes out. I say that I'm blocked.
Robert, tying cans to the bumper, says, "Just pretend you're spraying in your journal."
As we walk away from the parking lot, he says, "I'm pretty sure that's his car."
—•—
Inside, Sophie says she's bummed a cigarette and we go out to the patio. The tables and chairs are wet, but we manage to hike up her dress so it's just her underpants against the seat, and her big skirt swooping up and over the arms of the chair. She reminds me of a swan.
We have so much to say to each other that only quiet will do. We pass the cigarette back and forth, as we have done a thousand times, until her little niece and nephew run outside and shout, "Everyone's looking for you!"
Sophie hands me the cigarette, and as she gets up, she says, "Watch out for Robert." Before I can ask why, the little ones drag her inside.
Inside, someone is calling out, "Unmarried women! Maidens!" Most of Max and Sophie's friends are single, and a big crowd gathers by the staircase; for the first time in my wedding-going life I stand among them. Sophie appears at the top of the steps. Her eyes widen when she sees me. Trusting nothing to chance, she doesn't even turn her back to the crowd; she tosses the bouquet to me, and I catch it.
Then kissing and rice throwing, and the newlyweds are off to Italy for three weeks.
—•—
It's time for me to go, and I want to say good-bye to Robert, but he's talking to Apollinaire. I catch his eye, and wave, and he excuses himself and comes over.
"You're leaving?" he says.
He walks me out the door and down the path to the parking lot. For the moment the rain has stopped, though the sky hasn't cleared and the trees are full of water.
"This is my car," I say. It's an old VW Rabbit with so many scratches and nicks it looks like it's been in a fight.
He stands at the passenger door; I'm at the driver's. He seems to be waiting for something, and I say, "I'd like to invite you in, but it's a mess."
The front seats are covered with old wet towels because the convertible top leaks, and the floor is littered with fast-food wrappers from the last dozen road trips I've taken.
I tell him that the garbage and rags discourage thieves. "If the trash doesn't deter them, there's the wet poodle smell."
"You have a poodle?" he says.
"A standard," I say. "Jezebel."
He grew up with standard poodles and loves them, and what color is mine? I think, I have found the only straight man in the world who loves poodles.
He tells me he has a cat.
"A cat?" I say. "How can you do that?"
"I love her," he says. "But we both know she's just a place holder."
Then there's a rush of drops—at first I think it's from the trees, but it's real rain, total rain, and Robert pulls his jacket up over his head and runs over to my side, kisses my cheek and gallops back to the mansion, presumably into Apollinaire's widespread wings.
I sit on the wet rags, and try not to feel like a wet rag myself.
Then he's knocking on my window. I roll it down. He asks, "Can I call you?" and I answer "Sure" so fast that my voice overlaps the rest of his sentence "about the Dragonia?"
"Sure," I say again, pretending I didn't say it the first time. "I'm in the phone book," I say. "Rosenal."
"Rose'n'Al, Rose'n'Al, Rose'n'Al," he says fast, and disappears.
—•—
He doesn't call on Sunday.
Monday, between writing lines like, "Call now for your free gift," and "There's never been a better time to call," I call home to check my answering machine. I feel elated dialing, despondent when I hear the inhuman voice say, "No new messages." Then I call again.
Donna calls to ask about the wedding, and I tell her about Robert. It feels good just to say his name, like he's still a clear and present danger. Then I have to say, "But he hasn't called."
She says, "Why don't you call him?"
I don't answer.
My devoted friend says, "I don't think you could have felt so strongly if he didn't feel the same way about you."
I say, "How do you feel about Jeremy Irons?"
—•—
When I get home, the machine's red light is blinking. I say, "Please be Robert." It is. His voice is low and shy, saying he's on his way out and will call back.
I play the message again and watch Jezebel's face. "What do you think?" I ask her.
She looks back at me: I think it's time for my walk.
We go around the block and are almost home when we run into a dog we haven't met before, a beautiful weimaraner. Jezebel goes right up to him and licks his mouth. The weimaraner jumps back. "He's a little skittish," his owner says, led away by Herr Handsome.
"I can't believe you just walked up and kissed him," I say to Jezebel, "without even sniffing his butt first."