by Meg Wolitzer
“All right,” said Opal. “But you know, we never knew about your life, either.”
“What is it you wanted to know?” Dottie asked.
Opal didn’t answer right away. “About the men,” she finally said. “We always wondered.”
Dottie smiled. “Ah yes, my mystery love life,” she said. “It was a mystery to me as well.” She was quiet a minute. “I always liked having men around,” she said. “Back when I was on the road all the time, I would grow very lonely late at night. If there wasn’t a man around, I would call down for room service and eat an entire three-course meal in the middle of the night. A nice man or a nice piece of veal—the satisfaction was the same. Anything so I wouldn’t be bored.” She paused. “But I never was with anyone I was serious about. I would have told you girls. At the hotels in Vegas, the men were gamblers, mostly. No gangster types, just businessmen who claimed to be big fans, and occasionally men who were at the hotel for a convention. There was an anaesthesiologist once, I remember. They were sweet to me, brought flowers to the room. It was certainly more romantic than anything I’d known. We had fun together; it was a very giddy time. But I never had a real relationship. I was running around too much; it wasn’t possible. I only hope you can have more than what I had,” she said. “Now I’ve got Sy, and I suppose it’s enough for me.” Her voice was strained. “He wants to get married,” she said.
“Really?” Opal asked. “What did you say?”
“What do I need with another marriage, at my age?” Dottie said. “He’s always talking about ‘setting down,’ but I said, ‘And do what, Sy, have a family?’ Like Sarah in the Bible?” She broke off abruptly, switching gears. “Enough,” Dottie said, “enough of my life. It’s not very interesting, not even to me. Tell me something about you now. What is it with this Walt person? How can we give him a little kick-start in the romance department? How can we get him to ask you out on a date?”
Opal shrugged. “Nobody calls it a ‘date’ anymore,” she said. “You just spend time together, go out to dinner or something. But you don’t call it a date.”
“Maybe that’s my problem,” said Dottie. “I’m not up on the current lingo. I guess the whole world is different from the way I thought,” she said. “You can say things now that you never used to be able to, and you can’t say things that you once could. Like about my weight,” she said. “Those casting people today looked at me as though I was making jokes about handicapped children. I guess what they’re looking for is this new kind of comedy. Like that Unidentified Flying Comic.”
“Oh, you always bring him up!” Opal said. “He’s just one person, just one stupid comedian. There are a lot of different kinds of humor out there.”
“But no room for my kind,” said Dottie. She turned from the mirror and looked directly at Opal. “I used to like what I did,” she said lightly. “I used to look forward to being on the road, to opening at a new club, or appearing on a television show. I liked the perks that came with it: the basket of fruit in the dressing room, the hotel suites. In Vegas, you’d drive down this long strip until you got to the hotel, and your name would be up on one of those giant signs. It always thrilled me, even after I’d done it a thousand times. I used to be funny!” she said, her voice elevating, as though she was surprised by her own words.
Suddenly Dottie Engels couldn’t think of a single funny thing. Some gate had been left open, and all the jokes had fled: the horde of fat women with their enormous breasts, their shopping carts, their tortured husbands, their squawling children, their steaming plates of food, their overflowing washing machines, their telephone bills, their entire lives split open and bursting at the seams.
“I still think you’re funny,” Opal tried.
Dottie smiled weakly. “Thanks, honey,” she said. “I appreciate that. I only wish you were a casting agent for a network show.” She sighed. “I’m glad for Mia anyway,” she said. “She’s a nice girl, the two of them are very nice, Mia and Lynn.”
“Did you always know about them?” Opal asked.
Dottie nodded. “About them? Of course,” she said. “It wasn’t so hard. One of your other babysitters—Danny Bloom, I think it was—asked me if I knew what Mia and Lynn’s relationship was. I told him I’d draw him a diagram.” She laughed. “I’m not dumb,” she said. “It was always hard for those girls. I admired them, even back then. And now,” she said, “look at Mia. She’s getting written up all over town, she’s getting famous, and I can’t find work. It’s just like All About Eve. I never thought Mia would get anywhere. I thought she was too hard-edged for the world; I told her to tone it down, but she didn’t listen. And I guess she was right. But back then you couldn’t have gotten away with humor like that; it seemed so angry, so man-hating. Today it’s considered ‘in.’”
“Something will come up,” Opal said.
“Oh, maybe, maybe not,” said Dottie. “I’ll wait and see if Ross really comes through with something. In the meantime, the clothes are actually selling, and that will keep me in pastrami.” Dottie fumbled around on the cluttered table to find her cigarettes. She lit one too quickly, and the flame shot up like a small blowtorch.
“Something will come up,” Opal repeated, as if on automatic.
Dottie looked very tired, Opal thought, as though she had not slept for days or, rather, as though she had been sleeping for days—years, even. Dottie Engels had just woken up from a deep, enchanted sleep and found that the world was an unfamiliar place. Cars were compact now, lean runners lined the Central Park reservoir, a lesbian could be a star. And up in the air, high above everybody, the Unidentified Flying Comic was circling the sky.
Sixteen
Erica kept a close watch on Mitchell Block, almost as if he were part of a study she was doing, and not the other way around. She knew when he arrived at his office in the morning, and what time he left at the end of the day. She knew these things because he told her. He mentioned them casually, in conversation over lunch. He might say, “And then when I took off the other day, oh around four-thirty or so . . .” and the fact would become embedded in Erica’s mind. She imagined Mitchell pulling together his books and papers and emerging from the basement of the psychology building into the light of a late afternoon.
She knew where he studied in the library, knew it not because he had told her, but because she had seen him there. She had been out walking and had seen Mitchell enter the Bobst Library on Washington Square; he went through the revolving doors in his red down jacket, a knapsack slung over his arm. Erica stopped abruptly. She resisted the impulse to run to him, to cry out his name. Their relationship was being forged bit by bit; she didn’t want to force it, although she had to stop herself from doing so. A moment later, Erica was whirling through the revolving doors.
“Do you have an I.D.?” the guard at the desk asked. Erica patted around dumbly inside her jacket, and the guard waved her through.
Mitchell was nowhere to be found. Erica stood in the stark lobby and looked straight up. The ceiling seemed miles above her. Everything was done in dizzying black and white squares; it was like being inside an Escher print. Erica took the elevator up to the top floor and worked her way down. On every level, she walked through the rows of carrels, peered down at the heads bent over books. From a distance she saw a set of wide shoulders, a dark head, and stopped. The man turned around; his face was fair and hairless and not Mitchell.
Finally she found him. He was sitting in a modern armchair by a window on the third floor, his feet up on the sill. She approached him cautiously. “Erica,” he said, looking up. He did not appear startled; it was as though, somehow, he had been waiting for her.
This, at least, was what she liked to tell herself: that he knew she would come, that he had summoned her there. He did not ask how she had found him; he accepted it as a given. “Can you take a break?” she whispered.
They went for
a short walk around the block, but it was so cold that they stopped on the corner, and Mitchell said, “Do you want to go to my apartment and have some tea?”
Erica nodded. He lived on MacDougal Street, she knew, although he had never invited her there before. She wondered what the invitation meant, and felt suddenly unsteady. As they walked, she put her hand inside her coat, trying to remind herself of what she was wearing. Oh good, she thought, the black sweater. It looked all right, a little bit linty, but not too awful.
Mitchell put the key into the lock of a door on the second floor of an apartment above an Italian café. She heard the bolt slide and release, and then they were inside. The apartment was very small, and she remembered again how big they both were. The front room was narrow and overheated; steam spurted in uneven gasps from an old radiator. Erica and Mitchell took off their coats and threw them over chairs. Clots of snow fell to the floor, but he didn’t seem to mind. They sat facing each other at a small round table, drinking Earl Grey tea and eating eclairs that he produced from a white bakery box in the refrigerator. Almost, she thought again, as if he had expected her. The eclair was cold and densely sweet. It had no resistance when she bit into it; it was all give, a crumbly shell surrounding custard. It was so good that she shivered. The steam from the tea rose up at her like a facial, and she poured in honey from a plastic bear bottle with a dented stomach. Everything was intensely sweet; this was the way she wanted it.
When they were done, and the box was empty and the teacups drained, Erica put her hands on the table, fingers splayed, and peered down at them. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I’m very attracted to you.” She said it as though admitting a weakness, a deficiency. Mitchell Block’s face was red and kind, she saw, and his beard needed a clipping.
“Come,” was all he said. Then they stood together, as if agreeing to the next dance, and went into the bedroom. His bed was big and neatly made, the covers pulled tight. Mitchell reached down and in one great sweep pulled everything back.
“Let me,” he said when the bed was cleared. He was breathing with difficulty. He came around to her side and took the bottom of her sweater between his fingers, and lifted the whole thing up, inside-out, over her head. She was stuck in the tunnel for a moment, ànd then came out again into the light. Her hair was now standing straight out from the sweater’s static; she flattened it down with her hands. Beneath the sweater Erica wore a white brassiere. It had, for some reason, always embarrassed her: the dazzling whiteness of it, and the hidden skeleton of underwire. Mitchell unhooked it, and then his hands caught her breasts at once, as though afraid they would fall to the floor like the snow.
“Oh, look at that,” he whispered in this same hushed, thick voice.
And then he was unbuttoning his own shirt, and she felt she ought to help him, make herself useful. She unbuttoned one of his sleeves. Beneath the shirt, his skin was winter-white and covered with a bramble of fair hair. When he pulled off his pants, Erica quickly looked away. She thought of Jordan at home, thought of the first time she had seen Jordan naked, as an adolescent, and how she had looked right at him, unflinching.
But with Mitchell, Erica felt a kind of shyness that she hadn’t been known to possess. “It’s okay,” Mitchell said, and he sat down on the edge of the bed. He circled her with his arms and drew her to him. She felt how much volume they took up; there was no room left in the apartment anymore, or in the bed. She didn’t worry, as she sometimes did with Jordan, that she might crush him. Mitchell was not crushable, she thought, running her hands along his sides. She moved against him and he sighed deeply. “That’s right,” she heard him say. “That’s right.”
In a while he asked, “Do you want me inside you?” and the image was startling: the huge Mitchell Block actually inside the huge Erica Engels. She thought of those rounded Russian dolls that fit into each other. Now Erica nodded yes, and Mitchell reached across her into the night table, his elbow grazing the point of her breast. She watched as he pulled a packet out of the drawer and tore it open. The tearing sound stayed in her head; it was as though Mitchell was swathing his way through a field. Then he was moving against her, and she was aware of the sheer largeness of her own body, for the first time in her life, without loathing.
Erica had once seen an episode of Donahue that featured slim, handsome men and their hugely overweight wives. “I love big women,” one man admitted. “When I saw Connie in the typing pool, I knew instantly I wanted to marry her.” Erica had been appalled, looking at the couples sitting blithely onstage, holding hands. They were as bad as Mr. and Mrs. Lye. To worship the flesh like that, to glorify it from a distance, was as bad as reviling it. But here she was with Mitchell, and it seemed that they were approaching something close to worship. She felt the contrast of warm skin and cold sheet, but soon it blended; the sheets heated up, and then they were kicked off altogether.
When they were done making love, Erica lay in the hollow beneath Mitchell’s arm; it was the only concavity about him, she thought. Everything else, all the other surfaces she had touched, were wonderfully convex.
“I was just out for a walk,” Erica said. “Look what happened.”
“I was reading about glandular-generated depression,” Mitchell said, “and look what happened.”
“I had to leave my apartment,” said Erica. “Jordan was about to read aloud selections from Narcissus and Goldmund.”
“Do you feel guilty for being here?” Mitchell asked.
“No,” said Erica. “Not at all. I feel good about it, I do.” Mitchell was oddly silent, and she realized that his question was not entirely simple. “Do you feel guilty?” it occurred to her to ask.
He waited a moment, then put his hand over his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Extremely.” He paused. “There’s a woman,” he began. “She’s a graduate student in Comp. Lit. We’ve been seeing each other for about six months. We’ve never said we were going to be expressly monogamous, but I guess it was understood. And now this, I don’t know.”
Erica remained under the crook of Mitchell’s arm. If she bolted away, made any sudden gesture, it would have been too dramatic, so she stayed there, lying close, but she felt a small panic rising up. Her own heart, she could feel, was beating double-time; it felt as rapid and fragile as a hamster heart.
“I didn’t tell you,” Mitchell said,”because I knew that you lived with your boyfriend. I knew you liked me, but I didn’t know it was going to be like this. And then today, I didn’t think, really. It just happened.”
“And it was okay,” Erica said, “wasn’t it? I didn’t feel weird about it with you, as though I had to hide myself or anything. Because you’re used to this, you knew what I would look like.” She stopped. “Do you even know what I’m talking about?” she asked.
“Of course,” Mitchell said quietly. “But I don’t know what good that does me, Erica. If I went to Karen, I don’t think she would be particularly moved by your description.”
Erica was silent. Finally she asked, “Is Karen fat?” But she knew the answer, saw it clearly, saw the whole thing: the woman here in bed with Mitchell on a Sunday morning, the sun flooding in, both of them eating croissants and papering the bed with the Times. Karen was curled like a cat against Mitchell’s side. He protected her, that was what she got from him. Big, bodyguard protection. Her other boyfriends had been such little shits. Handsome, wiry, slender, and nasty. Mitchell Block was different; he would never quite understand Karen, but would feel a kind of dazed pleasure that she loved him, or at any rate required his presence. They could go on like that forever: the quivering delicate woman and the big, bewildered man.
“Is Karen fat?” Erica asked again, her voice sharp.
Mitchell shook his head. “No,” he said mournfully. “She wears a size-six dress. She’s like a thimble.”
“I get it,” said Erica. She moved from the hollow of his arm.
“Erica, don’t,” said Mitchell. “Don’t do this. I do feel guilty; I’d be lying to you if I said I didn’t, but I don’t feel terrible. I mean, I feel guilty that I feel so good, actually. This was very exciting to me, you know. When you touched me I thought I would die.”
Erica was propped up on her elbows, several inches away from him. She slowly lowered herself and moved back against him, sighing heavily. It would be painful for her for a while, Erica knew; she would think of little else. She would think of how Mitchell had lifted the curtain of her sweater, and how she had felt no embarrassment with him, none of the distaste that was just another part of making love with Jordan. She had never known it didn’t have to be there; it had always seemed a prerequisite, like foreplay.
“I ought to go,” Erica said, her throat constricting. She sat up on the edge of the bed and began to dress. Bending down to find her socks, she felt Mitchell’s large hand curving on her spine.
“Will you come back?” he asked.
She craned her head around to see him. Mitchell, leaning against the headboard, had a convalescent look about him. His eyes were plaintive, his hair and beard matted. She could see his shoulders and arms, which were a pale, milky color, barely a color at all. “I don’t know,” Erica said. “I don’t think it would be such a good idea.” She turned back and finished dressing. When she was done, she towered above him, fully dressed.
“Please come see me,” he said.
Outside, the street air felt fine; it ruffled her hair and clothes, shook the life back into her. Erica thought of the heat of Mitchell’s room, and the saline quality to his skin. In another life, she might have eventually lived with him, she thought. Together they would have taken up all the space in that mouse-house of an apartment.