“Fine, March. Wednesday the seventh?”
“She has skating. What about a Saturday morning?”
Tess finally emerged, her face barely visible between her scarf and hat. “Yoo hoo!” I called out. “Over here!” but she kept walking right past me, refusing to take my hand or even look in my direction, her rubber boots clomping through the sidewalk slush in a petulant blur of yellow.
“Hey, wait up, peanut!” I said, scurrying after her. “How were the cupcakes?”
The animals clipped via key chains to her backpack hopped up and down, a chorus of indignant furies, as she pushed her way through the sea of primary-colored knapsacks, and I tossed out the mea culpas. “I’m sorry, Tessie,” I kept saying, nearly running to keep up with her. “The airports were all closed; I tried getting home; I wanted to bake them, I did, I really did.” But she refused to turn around until the inevitable end of the block, where she knew she could go no further without at least acknowledging my role as her escort across the street, if not through life. “They were good,” she finally said, her little chin quivering. “Not as good as the ones you bake, but good.” Then she buried her face in my stomach and began to cry.
Tess had arrived in the world dark like me, with chestnut eyes and a somber intensity that sometimes threatened to swallow her. The summer she turned three, I’d taken her on a walk down the beach in Hilton Head, and we’d happened upon an enormous sea turtle, his shell cracked, his head dense with flies. “We have to help him,” she’d said, her voice mature and matter-of-fact, her tiny hands attempting to push the inert creature back into the surf. The turtle was already dead, I told her. It was too late to try to save him. Tess threw herself on the stinking carcass and started to weep. “No he’s not!” she wailed. “We have to save him!” And I helped her push the rotting remains back into the ocean, a short-term dodge from the issue of mortality which came back to bite me one month later, when I found her leaning over my father’s casket clutching a handful of goldfish crackers, shouting, “Wake up, Grandpa! It’s time for snack.”
“Come on, kiddo,” I now said, crouching down, hugging her to me, wiping her cheeks with my thumbs. “How ’bout we go get some hot chocolate at Cafe Lalo?”
She took a few deep breaths and composed herself. “With whipped cream?”
“Definitely.”
She slipped her mittened hand in mine and squeezed it tight, a gesture whose emotional pull is never diminished. This is all there is, I thought to myself, self-consciously, This is why we live.
“Mommy?”
“Yes?”
“What’s a dick and a bush?”
The warm, sentimental goo that had spread from my chest to my limbs froze midstream. “Tessie! Who taught you those words?”
“One of the fifth graders,” she said. “He told a joke. It went, ‘Why are we doomed?’ and the answer is, ‘Because our country is being run by a dick and a bush.’ But I don’t get it. What does that mean?”
“Oh, sweetie. They’re just talking about Dick Cheney, the vice president, and George Bush, the president.”
“So why is that funny?”
“Because . . .” I sighed. We were just entering the cafe, waiting to be seated. I leaned over and whispered in her ear. “Because they’re bad words for private parts, too, which people sometimes use as insults. Don’t repeat that joke to your friends or teachers, okay? It’s not nice.”
Tess covered her mouth so that all I could see were her big brown eyes bugged out in amusement and shame. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. You heard a joke. When I was your age, we used to have this little joke we did on paper about President Nixon.”
“Who’s he?” she asked.
I signaled to the hostess that we wanted to be seated. “He was a Dick, too.”
Over hot chocolate, she proposed her newest solution to ending the war—“They could just play chess!”—and fretted over the fate of baby Knut, the German polar bear cub whose mother had abandoned him. “He’ll be fine,” I said. “He’s got a wonderful zookeeper taking care of him.”
“Mom. He’s a man,” she said. Then she shook her head in exasperation at my ignorance.
“What? Men can take care of babies,” I said, but Tess had already moved on to the story of her friend Asher, who got his head stuck in his sister’s dollhouse, when my cell phone went off.
“I can meet you tomorrow morning,” said Lenny Morton, in lieu of hello. “Will that work?” He was sorry about the delay in returning my call. He was in a mild state of shock. He hadn’t thought about Adele Cassidy for more than, god, what was it now, thirty-five years? “A whole lifetime ago,” he said. In the intervening decades, or so I’d learned with a bit of research, he’d built a small empire for himself, Morton’s Gyms, with branches in Chelsea, Tribeca, the West Village, and East Hampton, catering to a largely gay, affluent clientele. And though he was not willing to sit for an on-camera interview—his PR rep for Morton’s Gyms was adamant on this point—he was more than happy to tell me everything he remembered if it would help. We made a plan to meet for breakfast the next morning.
“Who was that?” Tess asked, when I hung up the phone.
“A man I’m going to talk to tomorrow when you’re in school,” I said, wanting to get back to the story of Asher’s head in the dollhouse.
Tess was building little teepees out of sugar packets. She paused for a moment, seemingly focused on the structural exigencies of engineering. “Are you and Daddy going to get a divorce?”
“Tessie,” I took her hands in mine. “What’s with you today? Why would you ask that?”
Now she finally looked me in the eye. “Remember the night you came in to sleep with me? And you told me you had a bad dream about monsters?” Her chin began to quiver for the second time that day. “You didn’t really have a bad dream, did you?”
“Of course I . . .” I picked up the fallen sugar packets and helped her build the tepee back up again. Clearly, whatever toxins were passing between Mark and me were now seeping into her.
One of my first epiphanies with Dr. Rivers, in fact, was how deeply, as a child, I’d inhaled from the noxious fumes of matrimonial limbo myself, watching my mother seethe and my father play dumb, while they simultaneously passed judgment on all the couples in the neighborhood who were suddenly, like a plague, getting divorced. “Destroying those poor children’s psyches,” my father would say, shaking his head, standing up from the table without clearing a dish. “It’s just not right.” I told Dr. Rivers that I’d always wondered whether my psyche might have been happier had my parents actually admitted defeat; that it might have been a relief, at least in a certain sense, to have shuttled between two relatively peaceful homes in lieu of being trapped between warring factions in one.
“It might well have been,” said the doctor. “But let’s concentrate on what actually was.”
I decided to change tacks with my daughter, to stop underestimating her powers of perception. She was six, yes. But I’d been six when April had died, and I could remember what that felt like, to be lied to. “You’re right, Tess,” I said. “I didn’t really have a bad dream. I just didn’t want you to worry, okay? So I kind of . . . fibbed. To protect you. Which was wrong. And I’m sorry. Come here.” I motioned with my arms for her to join me on my side of the table. She slid off her chair, ducked under the table, and bored her little body into mine. “Look. Most mommies and daddies, at some point in their relationship, will fight with one another. Okay? This is normal. It doesn’t mean that Daddy and I are going to get a divorce.” I tried to make this last part sound as convincing as possible. “Do you understand?”
She nodded her head into my chest. I could feel her rib cage vibrating, her lungs sucking in short, tiny gulps of air.
“You sure you understand?”
Tess nodded again.
CHAPTER 14
LENNY MORTON MET me the following morning at Caffe Dante, a sun-streaked, clattering spot below hi
s apartment. With his winter tan, full head of dark hair, and biceps ballooning beneath his cashmere sweater, he looked to be a lot closer to forty than to the sixty-odd years I knew he’d traversed. After the requisite pleasantries and introductions and the ordering of tea and scones, I casually asked him if he’d ever had sex with Adele Cassidy. Regardless of her sister’s scoffing at such a notion or the articles identifying Lenny as a gay entrepreneur, there’d been something about Adele’s denial to her shrink which had struck me as false.
Lenny blushed. “Boy,” he said, “you go right for the jugular, don’t you?” Now he smiled and bobbed his head back and forth, his fingers tented in a diamond in front of his mouth.
“So you did have sex with her?”
“Not exactly.” He stared me in the eye, sussing me out. I remained silent, giving him the space he seemed to need to establish trust. “Do you really need to know?”
“No,” I said. “But I would like to know. I understand it’s uncomfortable, though, so—”
“No, it’s okay. I get it.” Lenny started bobbing back and forth again. Then he took a deep breath, puffed up his cheeks, and blew out the air slowly. “Okay. Full disclosure. We did have, well, it wasn’t sex,” he said, wrinkling up his nose, “but it was, I guess you could say a moment that was ‘sexual in nature.’” (Bingo, I thought.) Lenny looked off into the distance and clenched his mouth. “But I couldn’t, you know . . . I mean, I still didn’t understand that what I was feeling back then wasn’t just run of the mill sexual indifference to my ex-wife, or to women in general. That it ran much deeper. Or rather I did understand it but didn’t want to admit it to myself. Classic case of closeting, no question about it. Happens all the time, especially back then.” He paused again, and bit his lip, and searched once more for the right words. “Anyway, I’m not sure of the exact dates, but one day, after she’d lost all the weight—it was like sixty pounds or something, I mean she really lost a hell of a lot of weight—Adele says to me, she says, ‘Lenny, I have to know something. You’ve been so nice, helping me get in shape, being my friend,’ you know, stuff like that, and I have no idea where she’s going with this, but I say, ‘Well, you’ve been very nice to me, too, Adele.’ She was a good person, really. I know it’s hard to believe that, considering . . .” His voice trailed off. “She was depressed, of course, definitely. Could have used a good dose of Prozac, had it existed back then, as well as a more, shall we say, empathic husband, if you know what I mean. But you know, at her core, she was good. Kind. And so she says, ‘Lenny, I have a hunch about you. I’d like to do a little experiment.’ ‘What kind of experiment?’ I say.
“That’s when, all of a sudden, right there in the kitchen, with her girls in the other room watching Sesame Street or whatever the hell they were watching, she starts unbuttoning her dress. Just like that. No warning at all. Or if there was a warning, I sure didn’t see it coming. She gets all the way down to the last button, lets it drop to the floor, and now she’s just standing there in her bra and underwear. ‘What are you doing?’ I say. I didn’t know what else to say. It was just such a shocking thing for her to do. So then she shushes me and unhooks her bra, and now her breasts are staring at me in the face. They’re huge, I mean just these massive mounds of flesh, with these gigantic nipples. ‘Look at me,’ she says. ‘Look at me, Lenny. I did this all for you. I starved myself for you. Can’t you even look at me?’ But I couldn’t. I just kept staring at the floor. But also feeling guilty, right? I don’t want her to feel bad about herself, or unattractive, or whatever, because God knows I know better than anyone about her issues of self-esteem, you know, distorted body image, food addiction, the whole nine yards. But I’m stuck. I can’t move. I can’t speak. I can’t do anything, really, except mumble something inane like, ‘You look great, Adele. All that work’s really paid off.’ So then, after about a minute or so of just standing there in her underwear, waiting for me to make a move, she sighs, puts her clothes back on and—this is the craziest thing, I still can’t believe she did it—she goes over to the kitchen sink, opens the door of the cabinet underneath it, and pulls out, from one of those plastic cleaning buckets where she stashed it, a copy of Playgirl she’d bought specifically for me at some drugstore out in Olney, so no one she knew would see her buying it. She opens it up to the centerfold. Dylan Duke, his name was. I can’t believe I still remember that name. ‘What about him?’ she says. ‘How does he make you feel?’ Well, I know how he makes me feel. I’ve known it probably since the summer I turned twelve, when I went skinny dipping with my best friend, Ben. So now Adele’s standing behind me. She’s standing behind me, and I’m between her and the kitchen table, and Dylan Duke is spread out in front of me, just sitting there buck naked on the plastic tablecloth, and Adele reaches from behind and starts, you know, touching me. And she says, ‘Now, pretend I’m him. Look at the photo. Pretend I’m him.’ And I’m laughing nervously, saying, ‘What are you talking about?’ trying to deny everything, right, to myself, to her, all the while staring at Dylan Duke and growing stiffer by the minute. But I’m also on the verge of tears, now, too, so I say something like, ‘Adele, I think we should stop this, I don’t want you to do that,’ and she says, ‘Of course, of course, I understand. Why don’t you go into the bathroom and be by yourself for a little while,’ and so I go into the bathroom and sit on the toilet seat, bawling, for like half an hour.
“I finally wash my face and walk back out, and Adele’s standing there, chopping shallots for dinner, and she says, ‘I had to make sure. I needed to know if you were . . .’ Now she starts to cry, but she blames it on the shallots.
“‘A faggot,’ I said. Right out loud. For the first time in my life. Adele just, well, and I know this sounds totally asinine and new-agey, but what the hell: she helped me to speak a simple truth about myself. And I guess I just couldn’t believe, when you called yesterday, that the same woman who could do such a thing for me, the most significant thing anyone’s ever done for me in my life, would do what she did to herself and to her chil . . .” He fiddled with the salt shaker. “And then, well, it also made perfect sense.” Turning his attention now to his tea bag, he ripped it open and dunked it three times into his steaming cup before coiling the string around a teaspoon to squeeze out the excess liquid.
“Why?”
“Because . . .” He paused for a moment, resting his chin on his palm. “Because as hard as she fought to change her outward appearance, inside she was still a mess. A compassionate mess, no doubt—which is why I’m sure she convinced herself, however misguided, that she had to take her daughters with her—but a big fat mess nevertheless.”
“Was Adele in love with you?” I asked.
“Was she in love with me?” He took a sip of his tea and sighed. “No. Or maybe yes. Yeah, I think she might have been. In her own way, right? She never came out and said so, at least blatantly, but yes, I think she was. At the time—or at least before that particular morning, I would have said no way, absolutely not, we’re just friends.” He smiled wearily. “Of course I would have also insisted back then that I was straight. And at peace with my choices. And the apple of my father’s eye.” He shook his head. “Anyway, I think what it came down to, really, was that I listened to her. I listened to her, and I didn’t interrupt. I actually enjoyed her company. A lot. I was in a pretty sad state myself back then, you know, newly divorced, sexually confused, totally adrift, and in some ways it was avoidance, I know, focusing all of my energy on trying to fix someone else, but it was also helpful, if only to make me realize that no problem is insurmountable. But Adele’s husband, he sensed something wasn’t right. That’s why . . . what was his name again? Jesus, I can’t believe I can’t remember his—”
“Shep.”
“Shep. Right. Of course. The man bashes my head into his kitchen floor, and I can’t remember his name, but Dylan Duke, Stiffyboy, his name I remember. Anyway, that’s why Shepherd—talk about a fairy name, sheesh!—attacked me one day. He knew she
had feelings for me that went beyond the platonic. And I guess he supposed—wrongly, of course—that I had those same kind of feelings for her.”
I left Lenny at the cafe and was about to descend into the subway when my cell phone began to vibrate in my front pocket. I glanced down at the caller ID, an unusually long string of numbers beginning with 39, international code for Italy. My pulse quickened. My fingertips grew warm. “Mon Eliza!” said the voice, deep and throaty, tinged with a smoker’s rasp. In the background blared a distinctly American-style siren.
“Renzo,” I said. “Where are you?”
CHAPTER 15
I SAW HIS GAUNT figure leaning up against the plate glass window of B&H Photo, blowing smoke rings from a thin cigar, held between forefinger and thumb, each perfect circle stretching into an oval before disintegrating into the frigid air. “What take you so long?” he said, shivering. The words were spoken calmly, without reproach, but he wasn’t smiling.
“That’s a joke, right? I got here as fast as I could.” Barely fifteen minutes had passed between Renzo’s call and the three short stops on the C train to Thirty-fourth Street.
His face melted, his trademark tabula rasa replaced by a sly grin. “Yes, of course, it was joke.” His once boyish eyes had spawned deep crows feet along their edges, tiny switch brooms stretching all the way to his temples, while the eyes themselves had grown wetter, calmer, more amused, making his face seem both harder and softer than the frayed mental snapshot I’d been carrying around for so many years. “But also not. I mean what take you so long, in bigger sense.” He stubbed out the remainder of his cigar on the side of the building and placed it in his breast pocket for future use.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He ushered me into the store and took his place in line behind the other customers awaiting their turn to hand over their knapsacks to the Hasid manning the bag check. “It means, well, come si dice . . .” He stared up at the green baskets chugging along the ceiling-mounted tracks. “I keep wondering, all these years, when it is you will come back to life.” His eyes met mine.
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