When people phoned me at home I asked them to call my boss and set up an appointment through him. This proved my loyalty and weeded out some of the more obvious conspiracy theorists, who complained they were getting the runaround. A month after the article appeared, my boss left on vacation, and shortly afterward a stranger called, asking if I could possibly fit him in over the weekend. He gave me his name, Martin, and an address in the East Eighties. I offered to come at two o’clock on Sunday and after we’d hung up he called me again. “Is that two A.M. or two P.M.?” he asked.
“P.M.,” I said. “Two in the afternoon.”
I would later recognize this as the first sign of trouble.
The Upper East Side is dead on summer weekends, and walking north from the subway station, I passed no more than a dozen people. Martin lived on the fifteenth floor of a newly built tower. A security guard announced my arrival, and as I stepped off the elevator, a man opened his door and stuck his head into the hall. He looked to be in his mid-forties, plump, with a round, sunburned face and damp, wheat-colored hair that was fine, like a baby’s. Sweat soaked the underarms of his T-shirt, which fit him snugly around the stomach and pictured a sailboat in rough, tightly stretched waters. “Are you the one I talked to on the phone?” he asked.
I said that I was, and looking slightly disappointed, as if people like me were somehow the story of his life, he patted me on the back and introduced himself.
I thought that Martin had just returned from some sort of exercise, but walking into the apartment, I understood that his sweat was home-brewed. Outside it was in the high eighties, but his living room was at least ten degrees hotter. “It’s like a pizza oven,” he said. This was not offered as an apology. If anything, he sounded boastful. I looked at the air conditioner lying unplugged in the middle of the floor, at the row of closed windows offering a view of the neighboring high-rise.
“If you’re hot, you can always . . .” He stuck his hands in the pockets of his shorts and looked down at his bare feet. “You can always . . . you know.”
I guessed he meant that I could leave, but that seemed silly, seeing as I was already there. “That’s all right,” I told him. “I don’t have air-conditioning, either.”
“Oh, I have it,” he said. “I just don’t use it.”
“Right.”
“It came with the building,” he said.
“That’s nice.”
“Nice if you like air-conditioning.”
“Which you don’t,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Not at all.”
Normally, after a minute or two of small talk, the client would direct me toward the vacuum cleaner and make himself scarce. Martin continued to stare at his feet, and it occurred to me that if I were ever going to get out of there, I needed to take the lead. “If it’s okay with you, I normally start with the kitchen,” I said.
“Whatever you want.” He walked toward the adjacent room and leaned against the doorjamb as I entered. You could tell immediately that the guy didn’t cook. The stove looked brand-new, and aside from a Mr. Coffee machine, the countertop was bare.
“I’m normally not here on the weekends,” he confided. “Not in the summer anyway.”
I searched beneath the sink for cleaning supplies. “Oh, yeah?”
“Friday comes and I’m on the first bus to Fire Island,” he said. “You ever go there? To FIRE ISLAND?”
He said Fire Island as if it were a prearranged code, the watchwords signaling me to hand over the microfilm. I told him I’d never been, and he took a seat on the countertop. “How can you not have gone to FIRE ISLAND?” he asked. “I thought everybody went there.”
“Everybody but me.” I opened his refrigerator, which was empty except for a jug of Diet Coke and dozens of doll-size bottles filled with clear serum. If forced to guess, I’d have said they were for some sort of a mental disorder. He simply would not let go of the Fire Island business.
“I can give you some information if you like,” he said, and before I could decline he reached into a drawer and handed me a brochure. The cover pictured a dozen muscular men frolicking aboard the deck of a pleasure craft. Each was shirtless, and several wore nothing but thongs. I understood that he wanted me to comment on them, but instead I pointed to a tiny figure, barely visible on the distant shore. “Is that a fisherman?” I asked.
“Well, it might be,” Martin said. “But that’s not really what FIRE ISLAND is about.”
I handed the brochure back to him. “I’m too impatient to fish. Crabbing, though, I don’t mind that. So, tell me, do you have any brothers and sisters?”
The change in topic seemed to throw him. “A sister. She lives in New Jersey. But on FIRE ISLAND, see, they have —”
“And what about your parents?”
“My father died a few years ago,” he said. “But my mother’s still around.”
He didn’t seem very eager to talk about it, and so I dug in, hoping he might go into the other room and leave me alone. “So who does your mother love more, you or your sister?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “What difference does it make?”
“Just curious. Do you ever take her out to Fire Island?”
“No.”
“Well, okay then,” I said.
Martin stuck the brochure back into the drawer and retreated to the living room, where he turned on the TV and flipped back and forth between channels. With him out of the way, I finished the kitchen in no time. Next came the bathroom and then the bedroom, which was airless and cluttered and felt even hotter than the rest of the apartment. The dresser was heaped with clothing and gay pornography, the alternating layers of shirts and magazines reminding me of science projects illustrating the earth’s crust. I counted five blankets on the unmade bed and was trying to make sense of them when Martin walked in and took a seat on a folding chair. The conversation in the kitchen was behind him now, and he appeared eager to make a fresh start. “Look at you, so hard at work!”
“How can you sleep with five blankets?” I asked.
“Well,” he said. “I have diabetes. I get cold.”
I had never heard of this. “Do all diabetics feel cold in the summer?”
“You’ll have to ask them.” He reached into an open drawer and pulled out a plastic device the size of a Walkman. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “What do you say we test your blood sugar?”
“Now?”
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
I could think of dozens of reasons.
“I just prick your finger, wipe the blood onto a bit of paper, and feed it into the machine. Come on, what do you say?”
“That’s all right.”
“But the needle is prepackaged,” he said. “Completely sterile. You’re not going to catch anything.”
“Thanks for asking, but I think I’ll pass.”
I was trying to make the bed, and as I reached for a pillow he grabbed my wrist and stabbed me with his short needle. “Gotcha!” he said. Blood pooled on the tip of my index finger, and he swooped in to blot it with a small slip of paper. “Now we just feed it into the machine . . . and we wait.”
The good news was that my blood sugar was normal. “You should count yourself lucky,” Martin said. “Mine is all over the place.” He showed me a scar on the crown of his head and told me of the time, several months earlier, when he’d awoken on the living-room floor, lying in a pool of blood. “Complete blackout,” he said. “I must have hit the glass coffee table on my way down.” A year before that, he’d passed out in the street and spent the night in the gutter. “With a condition like mine, anything can happen,” he told me.
The implication was that he could not be held responsible for his actions. It was not a comforting message, but still I stayed, not because I felt sorry for him but because I didn’t know how to leave. It would have been awkward—or rather, more awkward—and while I definitely thought about it, the mechanics were beyond me. Then, too, I couldn’t help
believe that I’d deserved to have my blood tested. I had asked whom his mother loved more, him or his sister. I’d thought I was clever, had prided myself on my ability to drive someone away, and this had been my punishment. The way I saw it, we were even.
When I’d finished with the bedroom, we moved on to the living room, Martin toddling two steps behind me. I gathered some scattered newspapers and magazines into a single pile and had just started dusting the TV when he sank down onto the sofa and activated a porno tape preset in the VCR. It was a military story. A buck private had failed to properly shine his sergeant’s boots, and now there would be hell to pay. “You ever seen this?” Martin asked. I told him I didn’t have a VCR, and as he pulled off his shorts, I turned away.
My housecleaning role model was a woman named Lena Payne, who worked for my family in the late 1960s. I used to come home from school and watch with great interest as she tackled the kitchen floor. “Use a mop,” my mother would say, “that’s what I do,” and Lena would lower her head in pity. She knew what my mother did not: either you want a clean floor or you want to use a mop, but you can’t have both. Whether it was ironing or deciding how to punish a child, Lena knew best, and so she became indispensable. Like her, I wanted to control households and make people feel lazy and spoiled without ever coming out and saying so. “Didn’t you have potato chips yesterday?” she’d ask, frowning at the can as big as a kettledrum my sisters and I parked in front of the TV. Suggesting that potato chips were an overindulged luxury caused them to lose their taste and meant there’d be fewer crumbs to vacuum at the end of the day. She was smart, and very good at her job. I worshipped her.
Standing in Martin’s living room, the sweat dripping off my face, I wondered how Lena might have reacted had one of us peeled off our pants and proceeded to masturbate to a movie called Fort Dicks. We didn’t have video back then, but if we did, I imagine she’d have said exactly what I had, “I don’t have a VCR.” It would have stopped me, but this guy was obviously wired differently.
Whack, whack, whack. Whack, whack, whack. Martin’s forearm batted against a newspaper lying at his side, and I turned on the vacuum in order to cover the noise. There was no way I was going to acknowledge either him or the TV, and so I kept my head down, reworking the same spot until my shoulder started to ache and I switched arms. Just pretend it isn’t happening, I told myself, but this was unlike ignoring a subway car musician or a crazy stranger seated next to you at a restaurant counter. Like the cough of a sick person, Martin’s efforts broadcast germs, a debilitating shame bug that traveled across the room in search of a new host. How terrible it is to be wrong, to go out on a limb and make an advance that isn’t reciprocated. I thought of the topless stay-at-home wife, opening the door to the gay UPS driver, of all those articles suggesting you surprise that certain someone by serving dessert in the nude or offering up an unexpected striptease. They never tell you what to do should that someone walk out of the room or look at you with that mix of disgust and pity that ten, twenty, fifty years later will still cause you to burn every time you think about it. I’ve had some experience in this department, and Martin’s depressing, wrongheaded display brought it all flooding back. I thought of the time . . . And of the time . . .
Whack, whack, whack. Whack, whack, whack.
It had now become the kind of masturbation that’s an exercise in determination rather than pleasure. You’d give up but, godammit, you’re the kind of person who carries a job through to the end, whether it’s making a fool of yourself in front of a stranger or vacuuming somebody’s living room. I will finish this, you think. I will finish this. And he did, eventually, climaxing with a bleak, long-winded moan. The paper at his elbow ceased its rattling, the video was turned off, and after pulling up his pants, he scooted into the bedroom. I didn’t expect him to come back out and was surprised when he returned moments later with a stack of cash.
“You can stop vacuuming now,” he said.
“But I’m not finished.”
“I think you are,” he said. Then he stepped closer and started handing me money. “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty . . .” He counted softly, and with a different voice than he’d been using for the past two hours. This one was higher and passive, shaded with the kind of relief that follows a prolonged impersonation. “A hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty . . .” He counted to two hundred, which was over six times what I normally would have made. “Is that right?” he asked, and before I could answer, he topped the stack with a thirty-dollar tip.
“Let me ask you something,” I said.
In recounting the rest of the story, it would be the next part that I could never get quite right, in part because it was so implausible but mainly because, between the blood taking and the five blankets, it was just too much. I assumed that Martin had learned about me from the New York Times, and he had. He’d read the article, written my name on a piece of paper, and looked me up in the phone book. He had also, it seemed, taken down the number of an erotic housecleaning service he’d found in the back of a porno magazine. The names and numbers had gotten confused, and he had phoned thinking that I was the sexpot. Such things happen, I guess, but you’d think that on seeing me, he might have realized his mistake. I’ve never dealt with an erotic housecleaning service, but something tells me the employees are hired for their looks rather than their vacuuming skills. Something tells me they only surface clean.
I’d wonder for weeks why Martin had put up with me. In his growing impatience, it seemed he would have simply told me what he wanted, but that would have required a different temperament, a straightforwardness that neither of us was capable of. In the phrase book of the indirect, “FIRE ISLAND” means “Let us masturbate together,” while “Who does your mother love more?” translates to “I prefer to clean the kitchen in private, please.” “I don’t have a VCR” equals “Your behavior troubles me,” and “You can always . . . you know” means “I think you should probably take your clothes off now.” “What do you say we test your blood sugar”—that was just craziness talking.
After I’d collected my bag, Martin saw me to the door. “We’ll have to do this again sometime,” he said, meaning that we would never see each other again.
“That would be nice,” I told him.
He offered his warm, gooey hand, and in a spirit of brotherhood, I accepted it.
The End of the Affair
On a summer evening in Paris, Hugh and I went to see The End of the Affair, a Neil Jordan adaptation of the Graham Greene novel. I had trouble keeping my eyes open because I was tired and not completely engaged. Hugh had trouble keepinghis eyes open because they were essentially swollen shut: he sobbed from beginning to end, and by the time we left the theater, he was completely dehydrated. I asked if he always cried during comedies, and he accused me of being grossly insensitive, a charge I’m trying to plea-bargain down to simply obnoxious.
Looking back, I should have known better than to accompany Hugh to a love story. Such movies are always a danger, as unlike battling aliens or going undercover to track a serial killer, falling in love is something most adults have actually experienced at some point in their lives. The theme is universal and encourages the viewer to make a number of unhealthy comparisons, ultimately raising the question “Why can’t our lives be like that?” It’s a box best left unopened, and its avoidance explains the continued popularity of vampire epics and martial-arts extravaganzas.
The End of the Affair made me look like an absolute toad. The movie’s voracious couple was played by Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore, who did everything but eat each other. Their love was doomed and clandestine, and even when the bombs were falling, they looked radiant. The picture was fairly highbrow, so I was surprised when the director employed a device most often seen in TV movies of the week: everything’s going along just fine and then one of the characters either coughs or sneezes, meaning that within twenty minutes he or she will be dead. It might have been different had Julianne Moore suddenly sta
rted bleeding from the eyes, but coughing, in and of itself, is fairly pedestrian. When she did it, Hugh cried. When I did it, he punched me in the shoulder and told me to move. “I can’t wait until she dies,” I whispered. I don’t know if it was their good looks or their passion, but something about Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes put me on the defensive.
I’m not as unfeeling as Hugh accuses me of being, but things change once you’ve been together for more than ten years. They rarely make movies about long-term couples, and for good reason: our lives are boring. The courtship had its moments, but now we’ve become the predictable Part II no one in his right mind would ever pay to see. (“Look, they’re opening their electric bill!”) Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan.
Call me unimaginative, but I still can’t think of anyone else I’d rather be with. On our worst days, I figure things will work themselves out. Otherwise, I really don’t give our problems much thought. Neither of us would ever publicly display affection; we’re just not that type. We can’t profess love without talking through hand puppets, and we’d never consciously sit down to discuss our relationship. These, to me, are good things. They were fine with Hugh as well, until he saw that damned movie and was reminded that he has other options.
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim Page 10