by Meg Wolitzer
“I don’t eat much anymore,” she murmured.
“During my divorce I was under so much stress, and food saved me,” said Mel. “My wife left me and I learned to eat. Here, try this.” He dunked a fried scallop into red sauce, and held it out to her.
“Really, no,” she said.
“I insist,” said Mel. “Just taste it. Close your eyes, and think only about the taste, nothing else.”
“I can’t block out the facts of my life,” said Natalie. But he kept the scallop in the air, and she tasted it. He was right; it was cooked perfectly, hot and crisp and glistening with oil. Inside was the peculiar oversweetness of the scallop itself. He was right that when she tasted the scallop she thought only about what she was tasting, and not at all about Sara. The food covered up everything else; it made the rest of her life seem far away, a rapidly fading backdrop. “May I?” Natalie asked, reaching for another scallop.
He nodded eagerly, and then waved his hand for the waitress. “Miss! Miss! Another Fisherman’s Platter,” he said. The additional food arrived and they ate and ate; Natalie lost herself in all the breading, all the sauce, and the scent of deep-frying that she and Mel now seemed to be doused with for good. By the time the meal was over, she felt sated, as though she could nap. They slowly left the restaurant and sat together on a bench at the pier. Without much fanfare, he put an arm around her. It felt warm and thick, and she leaned into him, knowing that her slight body was barely registering against his more substantial self. To her surprise, she napped. Lately, sleep was a difficult, elusive thing, but now, stunned by the kind of food she never ate, she fell shamelessly asleep against the sweater of a man she barely knew.
When she woke up, it was with a start. Embarrassed, Natalie sat up quickly and smoothed out her hair. “Oh, God, I can’t believe I took a nap,” she said.
“Relax,” said Mel. “It was adorable.” But he shook out his arm, which had apparently gone to pins and needles from the pressure of Natalie’s head. They walked along the pier a while, and Mel spoke about Adam. “He’s a good kid,” Mel said.
“Yes,” offered Natalie mildly, “he is.”
“Your daughter—she and Adam were best friends, right?” said Mel, and Natalie could only nod. “She must have been someone special,” he said. “Someone who could put up with that kid’s insecurities.”
“She was wonderful,” said Natalie, and she liked the idea that Mel had not known Sara, had only met her a couple of times in large social situations, but had no fixed, definitive view of her. With Mel, Natalie could shape that view. She could present her daughter any way she liked. “My daughter,” Natalie continued, “was a very complicated girl. She liked to be around Adam, and took great solace from him, but she was very popular among regular, I mean straight men. She had Adam to fall back on, and he had her. I can’t say I understood it.”
“Young people today,” said Mel. “They bore the hell out of me. Their problems! They think they’re so interesting, but actually, I want to cry out of dullness, listening to what they have to say. Generation X. What the hell does that mean? X-tremely annoying?” He paused. “If our generation was assigned a letter, what would it be?”
“P,” said Natalie. “For polyps.”
“And Prozac,” said Mel. “And prostate.”
She laughed easily, and he reached out and put an arm around her again. Through the aura of fish and frying oil, he also smelled of a long-extinguished cigar, and she imagined him in his office in New York, with framed posters from Broadway shows on the walls, his shiny, good shoes up on his desk, his head trapped inside a nimbus of cigar fumes, chatting away happily on the telephone, the way Natalie did at Seven Seas Travel. All day long she discussed fares to Barbados, while he discussed grosses. Still, there was a similarity, a familiar feeling.
“Listen, Natalie,” he said, “I’d really like to have dinner with you in the city, after the summer’s over. There’s this place on the east side that serves seven-course Hungarian feasts.”
“That would be nice,” she said politely.
“No. You don’t mean it,” he said. “You can’t. With what you’re going through, how could you think about me, how could you care if you see me again? I couldn’t ask you to care. Not now.” There was a delicate pause. “But I’m warning you: I’m going to ask you sometime,” he said.
They walked together in silence. With his arm against her she actually felt a thin strand of pleasure, followed by a reflexive thought: I must tell Sara.
LATER THAT afternoon, Shawn asked Natalie to go with him to the beach. A team of Japanese surfers would be there, and he promised her they would put on a great show. But when they got to the beach, the waves were tame, and the Japanese surfers were waiting impatiently on the beach for the wind to pick up. Their bodies were beautiful and hairless, and they called out to each other in their language. Occasionally, Natalie thought she could actually pick out a word someone had said.
“God, look at them,” Shawn said, and together they gazed openly at the cluster of gorgeous young men in bathing trunks.
Then, as if through the powers of sheer will and desire, Shawn lured one of the surfers over and began to ask him questions about his designer surfboard, which was decorated with an illustration of a rising sun. “I made it myself,” the surfer said. “I drew picture of sun.”
“You speak English well,” said Shawn, and the surfer, who said his name was Kenji, seemed pleased.
“I study a long time,” Kenji told him. “My goal? To move to Southern California and start business there. Maybe in three, four years, when my body is too old for the big waves.”
“Too old?” said Shawn, amused. “How old are you now?”
“Nineteen.”
“Well, you look at least twenty-one,” said Shawn.
“Really?” said Kenji, pleased. He didn’t seem to know that Shawn was flirting with him. For the first time, Natalie saw Shawn as a possible predator, as someone with power, which he lacked back in the shabby light of the little house.
“You’ll have to come over sometime,” Shawn said. Kenji appeared bewildered, then pleased.
“Sure,” he said. “Great!”
Then one of the other surfers called to him, and he waved a quick good-bye to Shawn and turned and sprang off toward the water. Natalie and Shawn watched as he waded in, the surfboard under his arm, then paddled like a dog, his shining black head above the water, catching the sun. What kind of person would want to ride a wave? Natalie wondered, marveling at how unknowable they were, these handsome surfers from another part of the world.
“Look at them go,” said Shawn. “Amazing.”
“Truly,” agreed Natalie.
“Attraction to other people used to be this easy thing,” said Shawn. “You saw someone you liked. A surfer, maybe, a bartender, a repairman; it didn’t matter who he was. He just had to appeal to you, and to think you were appealing, too. And you’d go somewhere, back to someone’s apartment, and that would be that. It was so wonderful. I miss those days, I really do. Now sex is totally different. There’s this potential skull-and-crossbones in the air; you have to pretend it isn’t there, but it is. You can’t really relax. You keep thinking about body fluids, and it makes you insane, it really does.”
“Shawn,” said Natalie, “let’s get you tested. Right now.”
“What? No, no, I really can’t,” he said, his voice tightening.
“I see you walking around like you’re dying,” said Natalie. “I see what you’re thinking about all the time. You’re young,” she said. “You’re a writer, you’re filled with life. You shouldn’t have to be obsessed with death.”
“I’m scared,” he said simply. “What if it’s positive? Then I’ll just become this totally terrified person.”
“But what if it’s negative?” she said. “Then you can live your life a little.” She was surprised at the urgency in her own voice. She felt suddenly zealous about this whole project. And her zeal somehow convinced him,
and off they went, along the highway to the next town, to the medical office that had HIV tests and results back very quickly. They walked up the narrow flight of stairs in an undistinguished medical arts building and into a bland waiting room where a receptionist in beachwear sat behind a desk. Natalie explained that they had no appointment, but asked if it was possible to get a blood test anyway, and the woman said it was. So they sat for a while, flipping through old issues of National Geographic and trying to relax.
When Shawn was called in, Natalie went with him. He sat in the office not of a doctor but a registered nurse, dressed in shorts and sandals and an “I Gave Blood” pin, who told him that since all blood test results needed to be reported to the Department of Health, he was free to use a pseudonym.
Shawn thought about this for a moment. “Oscar Hammer-stein,” he said, and the nurse did not register any recognition. Then Shawn rolled up his shirtsleeve and held out his slender arm. Wet cotton was rubbed across it, and the nurse waved her hand to fan it dry. Natalie sat on the chair beside him, not saying a word. Shawn looked at her; he and Natalie kept their gaze locked onto each other as a needle was procured and suddenly its hot point was under his skin at that delicate place, and the pain was like a long sizzle, making him bite his lip. Then the nurse removed the needle and pressed a piece of cotton onto the spot. Shawn turned to look as she held up the vial she had been holding, which was filled with his own warm, dark blood. He watched as she carefully wrote the words “Oscar Hammerstein” on the label, and then carried the vial out of the room, off to some centrifuge where it could be whipped and shaken, and then she could return with an answer for him, either good or bad.
They sat in the waiting room together again, not looking at each other for a while. Shawn told her about going with his mother to the local G.P.’s office when one of the kids in his family was sick, sitting with a raw throat in the no-frills waiting room of ancient Dr. Hempel, who never bothered to warm his stethoscope before an exam. His mother always seemed somewhat betrayed if a kid’s sickness was real and required medicine. They could barely afford the pink liquid antibiotics that Hempel always dispensed for strep or an ear infection, and on the way home in the car she would drive with a grim expression, as if quietly angry about the inconvenience and cost of the illness. At home the kid would be put in bed for the day, and Shawn remembered that when he was the sick one, he would lie in his bottom bunk hearing his sisters and brothers playing and shouting in the distance, and would feel an anxiety that he wasn’t among them, a feverish need to be up and about, so as not to create more work for his already overworked mother.
With Natalie, he felt that he could be very sick and it would somehow be all right; he could have a lurking sickness, still confined to the bloodstream, not yet loosed on the rest of him, and she wouldn’t point a finger at him, reminding him that sex with men had brought this on, as though the cause mattered now. He told Natalie that it amazed him that she didn’t seem to care that he had had sex with men; she clearly wasn’t interested in that, she was only interested in what his blood revealed. To his surprise, she was most concerned with making him feel better, which he understood was what a mother was supposed to do, at least in theory. She was supposed to be someone who would accompany you to difficult places, and simply sit there quietly. Someone who would offer you Tic Tacs as you waited, or hold your frozen hand if you liked, or occasionally look up from her magazine and offer a quick, worried smile and a few platitudes.
“You know,” said Natalie, “whatever it is, this thing, we’ll deal with it.”
“I doubt it,” said Shawn. “You can’t deal with something like this. You just have to let yourself be swept up into it. And I’ve seen it up close, Natalie. The protease inhibitors you have to take, and how if you miss a dose you’re screwed, and the little beepers that go off to remind you, and the terrible taste in your mouth, and the intestinal problems, and how everyone knows exactly what’s wrong with you and you can’t hide it. And how everyone is afraid to sleep with you. So maybe your life is saved, but you become one of the living dead.”
“No,” said Natalie firmly. “People do deal with these things. In their own, strange ways, they really do. I know you can’t believe that right now, but it’s true.”
The nurse poked her head into the waiting room. “Mr. Hammerstein?” she said without any irony. “Oscar, would you come with me?”
Shawn and Natalie followed her back into the tiny examination room. They all sat down, and the nurse looked at him with a steady gaze, and then said, “Mr. Hammerstein, your blood test revealed that there were no antibodies present for the HIV virus.”
For a brief moment neither he nor Natalie understood, but then they did. He was negative. He was spared. “Oh my God,” he said. “I’m okay? I’m really okay?”
“For now,” said the nurse. He was about to leap up from his chair but she put out a hand. “Of course,” she said, “it’s important that you continue to practice safe sex procedures, and to have yourself tested every six months if you think you might have taken part in any risk behavior. And I’d like you to have a copy of this to read at your leisure.” She reached into a drawer and pulled out what appeared to be a comic book. Shawn took it from her and glanced at the cover. In lurid colors, a Hispanic man and a white woman were locked in a clinch, thought bubbles floating above their heads. The woman was thinking to herself, “Hmmm, José’s really cute, but I want him to use a condom …” And the man was thinking, “Lisa better not ask me to use a condom. I hate those things! I’ll pretend that I know I’m clean …”
Shawn stood up suddenly. Natalie thought he appeared transformed by his good news; his eyes were glowing, his skin pink with excitement. “Look, thank you very much,” he said to the nurse. “This is really wonderful. You have no idea.”
“Oh, I think I do,” she said.
Together he and Natalie left the medical office, going back down the narrow stairs and out into the strong sun, which he suddenly turned to as if in a kind of tropism, his face lifted. “I’m okay!” he said. “I’m really okay!” He was in tears, she saw, and then he reached out and hugged her fiercely. She was happy for him, almost painfully so, this person she barely knew, this person who would not become a successful writer of musicals, whose life was not flooding with hope and promise, but merely with life.
“Congratulations, Mr. Hammerstein,” she said to him, and he grabbed her again, so exciting was it to be young and alive and immortal, at least for now.
13
A Mother’s Kisses
What was it about men with babies that excited women like nothing else could? In the city, when Peter took Duncan out for a walk, women stopped him on the street, actually planted themselves in his path to comment on the adorableness of the baby and also tacitly, he felt, the father. He thought that women lusted after men with babies because they wanted to be having sex with the father and cuddling the child. They became completely turned on by the whole package; it created two kinds of desire in them, a potent house-blend of aphrodisiacs.
Peter thought of this now, out on the deck one night late in the month with Duncan and Natalie. Maddy was inside taking a long shower, the water pounding on and on. Once again he had initiated the topic of making love, and once again she had said no. Then she got out of bed and said she wanted to shower. Soon she had gone into the bathroom and the water had been turned on, and the fruity smells of her shampoo and soap wafted out into the hall. She might well be in there for a long time; there was no point in waiting for her. Duncan suddenly awakened, and Peter carried him downstairs, aware of how rarely he did this. Usually, whenever the baby made a sound, Maddy was upon him before Peter even had a chance.
Now, out on the deck in the warm night air, he took pleasure from this moment with his son, and more pleasure from the fact that Natalie was watching him. Peter realized that he was putting on a little fatherhood show for her, a display of his brand of masculine tenderness. He was setting the power of his huge ar
ms into relief against the tiny, unformed body of his son. He twirled with the baby now, and as he did, he watched Natalie smoking and observing him.
He remembered the first time he had seen Sara look at him in such a critical, interested way. It took place months before that one afternoon of sex at her apartment. Adam, Sara, Maddy, and Peter had gone to the movies together. Just before they went inside, Peter stopped at the water fountain for a drink, and when he turned around, wiping his wet chin with the back of a hand, he saw that Sara was looking at him. She was standing by the concessions stand, leaning against the popcorn machine. Peter was embarrassed that his chin was wet, and he hoped he didn’t seem sloppy. He strode across the red carpeting of the lobby toward her, as if drawn by the scent of the popcorn, as if she herself were dipped in butter and waiting. But when he reached her, she swiftly turned away from him and toward Maddy, who was coming out of the ladies room. “No toilet paper,” Maddy was saying. “I practically had to use a credit card receipt in my purse.” Sara shook her head in commiseration. Had he only imagined that she had been looking at him? Was he so full of himself, so inflated that he thought all women desired him? He was fairly certain he hadn’t hallucinated her interest, just as now he was almost sure that Natalie felt something for him. He wanted her to feel something; he wanted to preen for her, and he wasn’t above using the baby as a prop. From inside the house, he could hear Adam’s computer clicking slowly and fitfully, and Shawn at the piano, composing. Peter also heard Maddy’s shower still going.
“I have to get Duncan to sleep somehow,” said Peter. “I’m going to take him for a walk, I think.”