Haven’t I seen your fucking etchings? he said.
I have some new ones, she said. Then, after a moment’s pause, hinging her right arm directly toward him, while he was lifting his glass to his mouth, she put a solid fist in his ribs.
They kissed in the car he’d had waiting, when it took them to her place; she was intensely aware of the unmoving, blunt-cut brown-haired head of the driver up front. She would have taken George home but while she had a cat to look in on, he had a thirteen-year-old son.
Run up and get the cat and come home with me, George said. It’s fine. Lourdes can give him some tuna or something.
Not tonight, she said. Plus, he’d punish us all very badly for that. Her body wanted him but her eyes kept landing on the driver’s head. What was it this head reminded her of? Her entire life, somehow. Everything that had brought her to this point: a bad haircut in the front seat of a car. And something in it felt cataclysmic. Now she’d spend the next few days wondering if her phone would ring. She wanted to head that off, foremost.
Is this another in our historical series of one-offs? she said to him.
No, he said. Not if I have anything to say about it.
Call me, baby, she said, and moved to go.
That’s what you say to all the boys, he said.
Oh no it isn’t.
We’ll get together tomorrow, George said.
Friday, Anna said.
That’s three days, he said into the side of her neck. He felt good.
I’ll die.
You so will not die, she said.
What about your etchings? he said.
They won’t die either.
One more minute, George said.
One more minute, she said. At forty seconds or so she jumped from the car.
Of course she thought about him into the night, she thought about him in the morning. Not just about him: about what she’d bolted from the car to avoid, the things she’d run away from. She had been alone for a long time, was accustomed to it, attached to it, but it was a wound and she didn’t know who she would be without it. He was older and unattached; she was older and unattached. They would not, this time, just glance off each other like two molecules in a heated system. They would stick. She knew this, and feared it.
25
Friday they went to dinner and back to her place. He’d warned Lourdes he might not be home. She raised her eyebrows at him.
Did you tell Nathaniel?
I will, George said.
Nate did not raise his eyebrows or even take his eyes off his laptop screen. Okay, he said.
I’ll see you tomorrow, George said.
That would be true in any case, Nate said.
You’re very helpful, George said. Thank you. You’re like a thug for reality.
Good one, Nate said. George turned to leave his bedroom.
Close the door please, Nate said.
No, George said, over his shoulder.
Anna told him later, in bed, about the last night they’d been together. Not the meeting at Louis’s show, but the night in 1979 after he’d helped her move. Twenty years. More.
I went home and cried that night, she said. I cried and cried. Not just for you, not really for you at all or over what you’d told me, though there was that. But also because I knew something was lost.
He stared at the ceiling.
So long ago, he said. He was looking at the memories as if at an old film.
How are you different? she said.
Jesus, he said. How are you? It’s too big to think about. Every single thing changes you and we have more than twenty years’ worth of things.
Give it a try, she said. As an exercise.
Okay, he said. He waited. She waited.
Well?
Okay. First of all I’m a father and that changes you. Being a parent. I won’t go into a whole description of it because everything I would say is a cliché and you’ve heard it before. Everyone is always the same on this. But from the minute they’re born you’re changed.
More dramatic for women, I’ve heard, Anna said.
For women it can be a neutron bomb, George said. The landscape looks the same but everything that is living and familiar has been removed. But a man can hold on to his essential identity and just accommodate parenthood. It’s still a change but it doesn’t throw you back to square one.
What else, she said. Second of all.
Second of all is money, George said. It can change you and damage you and even kill you—though having none at all will kill you a lot faster. Imagine there’s a little fish—a year old maybe, but the big mating fish are three and four years old. He’s in the babbling stream and rushing around and eating the bugs and minnows and chasing the larger older female fish who slap him away because they don’t want him seeding their eggs but sometimes he sneaks in and bombs them anyway; but then he ends up in the ocean and he becomes, like, a large salmon—
What is this fish thing? she said.
Yeah yeah—now it’s the gigantic ocean and he’s been hit by a propeller once and just escaped from a tuna once and his ocean-y city has turned into a Manolo Blahnik advertisement with banks and drugstores on every corner, it’s like a huge outdoor shopping mall on Long Island, and all the other fish changed colors except him; and he divorced fish wife one and never married fish wife two; and you say, Do you remember the nice stream, and he says, Yeah I remember it well but that isn’t where I am now or how I am now.
Where are you now?
He said it without thinking: Swimming in a daze. Thinking about life. Getting ready to die.
That’s not true, look at you, you’re terrific, you take great care of yourself, quite obviously. You’re not even forty-five.
I am not far from forty-five, he said. Spiritually I’m fifty-three. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I meant: what do I want to do now, who do I want to be now? And I look at these questions from the perspective of someone with twenty years left, or twenty-five, whatever, of active public life, and I have no ambitions, none, I don’t want to prove anything to anybody, I don’t want to convince the world of anything anymore, I don’t want to work. I want to be as peaceful as possible and think and read and maybe write a little, just journals and notes, you know, like a blog. But on paper. I’ll tell no one about it. I’d like to sail again—I will sail again. I’d like to paint, to learn to paint. In which case I’d first have to learn to draw. Big decisions.
Now it’s sounding like a retirement community, she said.
Exactly, he said. With a Zen garden. I look forward to shuffleboard before lunch. Mainly I look forward to quiet. Do what I do privately. Travel. Quietly. I’d like to live in Mexico, on the coast. Except I’d also like to live in the South of France. And Hong Kong.
And quietly get laid at least once a week, Anna said.
That’s a bad thing? I want to take photographs, I want to sail, I want to travel, and then write about what I’ve seen. I have no other plans. I have a thirteen-year-old son. Fourteen in January. I can feel him departing. Not in a bad way. A natural way. He knows I’m not the point anymore, nor is his mother. So it’s just me and the forever now. I’ve made a lot of money.
I would imagine so, she said.
That’s it. That’s the ocean. Money. It changes you.
Aha, she said. So that’s why I don’t swim like a fish.
* * *
THE SEX WAS awkward at first—it surprised them both how the years could change people erotically. He was muscled from the gym but she remembered him young: the muscle was there as a natural occurrence underneath a soft layer of youthful disregard.
Awkward largely because of George’s faltering erections: he would be hard and then, suddenly, not. Or he’d not get hard at all. Sometimes it went fine but in those circumstances often rushed because, Anna could tell, he feared losing his hard-on. Maybe one of ten times or two of the first dozen had they been able to take their time and enjoy each other’s body and enjoy their own b
odies in relation to each other’s body. Once or twice too she felt him take her with full desire, with actual urgency. These were the only times she had an orgasm in the early days—when she felt he really meant it, and when she felt him with real force. When she didn’t have a sense of him up above, watching them as if from a high window.
She told him that part: that she felt as if he were watching from above, was not actually present but thinking about being present. George kept trying to explain it to her—and to himself—what was going on with him, this thing he had learned about himself: he told her that he had lived, was still living, his sexual life in memory: he was unaware now, maybe always had been, in the midst of the act itself, of the moment he was living in. At the beginning, with someone new, he was lost in anxiety; once past that, he was lost again, buried in a desire that was a memory of desire, lost in the sensations, in the images that fed the memory, he was loyal always to the memory, to the feeling of being inside someone as a sensation of having been inside someone else, at some other time; fucking to images he didn’t know he had once focused on, images that he couldn’t have the full pleasure of when they were part of the reality before him, only when they came up again later, sometimes much later, when he was with someone else in some other place and time. Something would get lodged in his memory, a very precise moment, the way a figure on top of him and facing away would turn, look back, while riding him; hair on a shoulder; the curve of a woman’s side, the belly and hip and beginning of limb; then, having not really experienced them when they were there, he would be haunted by them, they would appear to him while he was having sex or while he was masturbating, again and again and again.
So, why did it work with the woman he’d been seeing before, sex three times a month? she asked him.
She was fundamentally an actress, he said. She took real pleasure in the pose. She’d wanted to do videos, photographs, but I wouldn’t do it. I mean I hardly really knew her, who needs to be blackmailed.
But the imagined camera, she said. That you could perform for.
Yes. No. Well, maybe. But the point is, he said, this is real. That wasn’t real.
If any principle guided the hierarchy of what from his erotic life lodged in his memory, it was to the moment, or the accumulation of moments, of the woman’s wanting, of her eagerness for him, her urgent offering of herself. The way her hips rose to him. In a hotel room once he’d said to a business acquaintance—a married woman from out of town who had invited him for a drink, which both knew meant sex—after they’d been at it for a while, pausing, going again, he hadn’t come, and late in the evening he said to her I want to fuck you in the ass—and he would never forget her face: the flush of affirmation: she turned away and offered it to him, her ass, broad, dark creased, willing. He came fucking her ass and he had come two dozen times since buried in the memory of that affirmation, that offering; he didn’t remember the fucking, he remembered the offer. Or years earlier, that summer of Fridays with Suzy, in his humid room on 110th Street, no curtains, she didn’t care, taking her dress off, a sundress, flower-printed, reds and yellows, up over her head, no bra: and she knelt on the bed and put her mouth around his cock. They had sex for two months, but the only actual intercourse he remembered was fucking her from behind in her childhood bed, frilly comforter and white headboard, in her parents’ house when she’d invited him out there and her parents were away. So often in recent years, he told Anna, he was reenacting, recording, recording what was already recorded, until at last he would finally come, in the white-hot blindness that forced him to let these memories go. It wasn’t merely semen he poured into his partners, but a pornography of memory.
When it was over, he would have to pull it all back to find the humanity in it. He saw now that the intimacy of the act was an aspect he barely accepted, something he had been trying, for a while, maybe always, to keep at bay. Of course: intimacy was an abattoir. He had to look back at his sexual life—and occasionally on his capacity to love—as one would on a vivid and chaotic crowded dream, so many images in the sex, so many disparate narrative directions, in which everything was tangible. He could hear, see, smell, taste, feel. At such times he was not experiencing intimacy but instead some kind of flesh-driven sensual aesthetic event, high-art erotica, close-ups in black and white, the weight of breast in his hand, the nipple, the shoulder, the armpit, the neck. All those beautiful lines and curves. The strangeness and allure of a body other than his own body, its smells and tastes and textures. A woman’s buttock cupped and lifted as she lay on her side with one leg drawn up. Her cunt wanted his cock, he could feel that, but he could not feel her. Or no—actually this was not true: he could feel her, if he worked at it and cared enough; over time, he could learn to know her in this way, he could at the end hold her and kiss her and take in her smell and feel the force of her reality. What was missing was not his feeling for her, but for himself. The missing figure was him, always him: he was only there to have the experience of her. He saw himself as if on film. So intimacy—intimacy evaded him. He had learned early to fake it well. But he was always protected. And he was always ready to flee, always desiring flight. Intimacy left him lying in his bed at sixteen hearing his mother’s boozy voice coming up the stairs singing, Ohhh we ain’t got a barrel of monn-ney, maybe we’re ragged and funn-ny… until her footstep fell heavy and dreadful outside his door.
But here it is, he said. I can’t fake it anymore, not with you, now. I’ve lost those chops. I’m defenseless.
To me? she said.
To you, to this, to us. To a different life. To a certain kind of vulnerability I haven’t had to feel for a long time. Maybe ever. Or not since you and I were together twenty-four years ago.
Anna wanted to know if he’d been faking intimacy with her back then.
He thought about it.
No, he said. I didn’t know what it was, what all this was. I didn’t know where we were going. It was pure romance. Then, you see, I discovered I was vulnerable. You might recall I ended the relationship at the drop of a hat, essentially.
It was slightly more than a dropped hat, she said, and he laughed. I mean, it seemed like a pretty big deal to you as I recall.
Yeah, but you knew it wasn’t. I could see on your face you knew it wasn’t. Which made me furious. What was a big deal, what you couldn’t see, was suddenly I was staring into a raw wound, into vulnerability, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to feel hurt, not ever, not again. Only loved and desired and served.
With this he wanted to hold her. He pulled her close to him. I’m sorry, he said.
Men, she said. One wearies.
Yeah, well, he said. That was all he said.
* * *
AFTER THIS CONVERSATION, it got better. And better and better. There was excitement in it, romance, a fulfillment of a neglected hope. But it prompted in her as well a sense of jagged break with sandy layers as when you snap a piece of halvah, a dissociation from her own life—as if her parents had arrived to live with her—as if she’d contracted and then been cured of a difficult disease—as if she’d found her brother. Some frightening thrust into the past, that common fearsome dream where you’re back in school naked and late for an exam. He called her at work. Nobody called her at work. She said to a friend at lunch, Remember when lovers used to call each other at work? That’s so great, her friend said. Anna could hear her chagrin. But it was exciting, in the past. The phone would ring and you wouldn’t know who it was… maybe H.R. Maybe your doctor’s office. Or your lover. Someone at the intense diving stages just before you become lovers. Someone you wanted to be your lover. Now she had caller ID and she knew who it was, so the little thrill came not with the voice but the digital display of a number. And if she was busy, a little bit of ugh, not now.
They were together two or three evenings a week and later four or five: dinner, movie, maybe drinks, eventually more evenings of supper in, Lourdes’s cuisine, a little Ecuadoran (her own), a little Mexican (her husband’s),
a little bit contemporary New York. When they stayed in, Lourdes got to go home to her husband. If they went out George would apologize and she always said, No worries. Now that Nate was older and her husband had come up from Mexico she had ceased living in full-time. But if George was out she’d go home and give her husband supper and come back and stay over with Nate. George told her to have her husband come over. She could feed him at the apartment and they could watch television together but even after almost fourteen years she was shy for that; or perhaps he was.
* * *
FOR GEORGE THE relationship was the strongest of the recent tugs against his attachment to his job. He negotiated with Burke a new role, part-time, slightly vague, he had an office and an assistant and one of his chores now was to find something for his assistant to do. Her name was Katrine; about thirty, very smart. He sent her to all the meetings he didn’t go to and increasingly took her when he did go. She represented him with crisp authority; or so he was told and, dealing with her, so he could guess.
What do you do now? Nate asked him one day. For a living?
I’m still with Brown, he said. I’m senior vice president for strategic initiatives.
You don’t do marketing anymore? Decide what to call the drinks, what kind of furniture to put in the shops?
No. I’m out of the jargon-and-chairs business.
Mainly you hang around with Anna, Nate said.
Yes, George said. When she’s available.
George was sitting with his laptop in his office at the back of the apartment. Or office/den: computer, desk, couch, chairs, TV. Nate was standing in the doorway. He often stood, just so, in various doorways. He offered no full commitments, such as would be implied by coming all the way into the room.
Is that all right? George said.
Yeah, sure, Nate said. Does Mom know? Or do I have to keep quiet?
Crazy Sorrow Page 30