We stumbled away from that particular throng and found a relatively safe space to stand. Real conversation was, of course, impossible in such a place, so we drank in silence until a slightly bulbous guy about Jake’s age, wearing a baseball cap turned backward and a black T-shirt proclaiming I BRAKE FOR BABES, loped over and slapped Jake on the back hard enough to make him stumble.
“How’s it hanging, dude?” the guy bellowed.
Jake looked distinctly uncomfortable. His eyes darted from the guy to me, and back again. Finally, he said: “Uh, Phil, this is Eva. Eva, this is my friend Phil.”
I put out my hand. “How do you do?”
Phil looked at my hand as if it was covered in boils before taking my fingertips for a bare second.
“Hey,” he said. He did not ask me how I was doing. He turned immediately to Jake.
“Dude, did you see that girl I was talking to over by the couches? Damn, she’s hot.” Here, Phil made a crude gesture that even I, jaded as I am, found offensive.
Jake froze. Really, it looked as if someone had injected ice into his veins he got so stiff and dumb. Even his pig of a buddy noticed.
“Oh,” he said, darting a look at me. “Sorry. I, you know—”
“Of course,” I said. “No offense taken.”
Lamely, Phil patted Jake’s shoulder and mumbled something and then he was gone.
Jake began to thaw, but slowly. I should have kept my mouth shut. But I didn’t.
“What is his problem?” I spat. “He could barely look at me. He acted as if he were afraid of me, or like I had a giant open sore on my face.”
Jake’s tone was apologetic. Was he apologizing to me or for Phil? “He just doesn’t get, you know, what we’re doing.”
“What is it, in fact, that we’re doing?”
Jake’s eyes darted around, as if what he was about to say was somehow shameful. “You know,” he said quietly, “being a couple.”
“Ah,” I said. “He thinks I’m a heartless, powerful woman who is only using you for sex until an even cuter model comes along?”
“No, that’s not it. He just”—Jake frowned and seemed to be searching for the right words—“he doesn’t share my interest in older women. He’s kind of turned off by the whole thing. It’s like he thinks women over thirty-five are, I don’t know, monsters or something.”
“I see,” I said.
I wasn’t entirely sure I needed to be privy to Phil’s extreme prejudice. What did Jake expect me to do with that nasty bit of information? Invite the kid out to dinner with us? Bake him a pie just like his mommy used to make? Or kick him in the nuts?
Then again, I had asked to know why Phil had acted like a jackass.
“I’m sorry about all this,” Jake said when I’d been silent for too long. “This was a bad idea. Do you want to leave? We can go back to my place and hang out.”
My pride, though shaken, would not allow me to retreat.
“Don’t be silly, of course not. The night is young. Besides, do you really think I would allow a narrow-minded little prick like your friend Phil to bother me?”
I smiled falsely, brightly. Jake frowned. Maybe he didn’t like his lover calling his buddy a prick.
I made my way back to the bar. Jake followed. I shouted to the bartender for another lousy martini. The bartender asked Jake if he wanted another beer. Jake shook his head. He had a test the next morning. Good boy that he was, he wanted to have a clear head.
“Hey.” I looked toward the sound of the affected female voice. “You want to dance with me?”
Wedged between Jake and me stood a girl, her shiny head tilted up to Jake.
“I’m sorry,” I heard Jake say. “I’m here with my girlfriend.”
The girl turned. She looked me over from head to toe and back again. And then, she laughed. “You’re dating her?” she asked, turning back to Jake. “I thought she was, like, your aunt or something.”
She hadn’t even tried to lower her voice. She probably assumed I was old enough to be hard of hearing.
Jake’s face went ashen. I knew he would never hit a woman but I would have enjoyed watching him knock her off her candy-pink heels. But Jake just stood there, staring at nothing, and with another disbelieving laugh the girl walked off, her ass twitching in a pair of skintight stovepipe jeans.
Uncharacteristically, I could think of nothing to say. Neither, it seemed, could Jake. He mumbled, “I have to go to the men’s room,” and turned away.
When he was out of sight I grabbed my bag—a Hermes that little bitch could never afford—and pushed through the throng. At the door I waited impatiently for a gaggle of giggling girls to tumble in and then I bolted out onto the sidewalk.
Barely a second later, I heard Jake’s voice.
“Wait, Eva, where are you going?”
I kept my back to him and strained to spot an empty cab.
“Home.”
“But you can’t go home alone.”
“Why not?” I whirled around to face him. In the deep blue light of the club’s marquee his face looked alien to me. “Because I’m a pitiful old lady who needs protection?”
Jake grabbed his hair close to his scalp. Who knew I could be so frustrating? “No, God, Eva—”
“Look,” I said, suddenly immensely weary, “I know none of this is your fault. But I just—” I shook my head, unable to go on.
“I’m sorry about what happened back there, with that girl. I should have said something. I should have done something. Please, please come home with me.” Jake’s eyes were dark with concern. “Let me make it up to you.”
A cab swooped to the curb and I grabbed for the door handle. “Not tonight, Jake,” I said, tightly. He reached for my arm but I slipped into the cab before he could make contact. Jake stood there, waiting for something from me, but I kept my eyes straight ahead.
I gave the driver my address. He pulled out into traffic. And then the tears began to trickle down my face.
58
Dear Answer Lady:
Last weekend my girlfriend dragged me to some park for a “walk.” Believe me, it turned out to be a freakin’ hike. I almost broke my ankle on the roots of a stupid tree. Anyway, the signs said you had to “pack out” your trash. But there was no way I was going to carry around stinky sandwich wrappers and empty soda cans all day! So when my girlfriend wasn’t looking I dropped our trash behind a big rock. But she caught me later when she went into my backpack looking for the trash that was supposed to be there. Man, she really reamed me about it. I think she’s becoming some environment freak or something. But I’m like, what’s the big deal about one lousy bag of trash? Can you talk some sense into her?
Dear Girlfriend of Nimrod:
Your imbecile of a boyfriend asked me to talk some sense into you so here goes: Dump him. If he’s too lazy and unconcerned to follow a basic practice of environmental etiquette, he’s never going to make it as a husband or father. Next time try meeting someone with a conscience.
EVA
To use a tired but apt expression, the bloom was off the rose.
This, of course, was inevitable. No relationship can avoid the introduction of reality, unless it ends with a tragic parting (I’m thinking of Romeo and Juliet here.) in its infant days. While the disaster at the nightclub was the defining moment, the turning point, the truth was that for weeks Jake had been getting on my nerves.
That ridiculous ambush in the hallway of Sophie’s apartment! And I just couldn’t stand how he always missed a few hairs when he shaved and how he never finished a cup of coffee without reheating it five or six times. I hated the fact that there were no wrinkles around his eyes when he smiled. None.
The truest words ever spoken: Youth is wasted on the young.
Still, the sex was great so I stayed on, in spite of Jake’s faults, and in spite of the fact that I kept finding myself thinking of John.
Life can be cruel.
First of all, I felt bad about the way I’d behaved tha
t night at the theater. There’d been no reason for me to be so obnoxious. After all, John did provide the tickets and did offer to pay for dinner (if throwing a credit card at the bill equaled an “offer”). As it turned out, I threw my card on top of his and we split the bill.
Another thing was bothering me: I couldn’t figure out why I’d told John about Jake. I thought about my motives, I did, but couldn’t come up with a plausible reason for “sharing” that bit of personal information. You would almost think I wanted to make John jealous but that was totally ridiculous.
Anyway, I wanted to apologize to John but the thought terrified me. I imagined his gloating grin and self-righteous lessons in proper behavior.
Maybe, I thought, it was best to simply go on as if nothing had happened. Eventually, the bad feelings would go away. I was sure they would. Bad feelings always go away. Sometimes you have to force them to leave but they do, eventually. Eventually.
59
Accuracy is for accountants. Approximation is for life.
—The Imprecise Nature of Truth
JOHN
One o’clock in the morning and I was staring at the ceiling of my bedroom, obsessing. Vanessa. Cat. Cheryl. Kelly. Cathy. The others not worth a mention.
And Eva.
Eva. Why had she told me about her juvenile lover? She’d thrown the information at me, like it was supposed to hurt me or at least make some sort of big impact. Could it possibly have been to make me jealous?
Ridiculous. But how had she wanted me to react? Just the way I had—with disdain and mockery? Or had she wanted me to pretend I wasn’t bothered by the news that she was having sex with a kid?
I wondered: Had I tipped my hand by behaving badly? Did Eva suspect that I was interested in her, in spite of her being such a pain in the ass?
I threw off the covers and stomped to the kitchen. It was clear. I was spending way too much time with women. Look what had happened to me. I was lying awake at night desperately trying to analyze every little bit of a conversation, just like I’d witnessed my sisters doing throughout their teen years. “What do you think he meant by ‘I like you’? Did he mean, like-like or just, you know, like?”
I stared into the fridge and wondered why the hell I was even in the kitchen. More adopted female behavior, late-night eating to dull the misery of a lousy love life. Clearly, I was becoming a disgrace to my sex. Somebody, I thought, should stage an intervention.
I slammed the fridge shut and stomped back to bed. I grabbed the remote off the nightstand and flipped madly through all nine hundred stations, looking for an old Dirty Harry movie, or maybe something starring Al Pacino, something masculine and gritty, a film in which guys took action instead of whining and worrying.
But all I could find was a Lifetime movie about a single mother with a violent five-year-old son and a boyfriend whose patience was wearing thin.
I turned off the television in disgust. Maybe, I thought, I should just scrap the idea of finding Ms. Right—and the idea of having any sort of relationship with Eva other than the purely antagonistic one we seemed to have now.
Being alone, I knew.
60
Dear Answer Lady:
My husband has a terrible habit of holding on to every piece of clothing he’s ever owned. He insists on keeping T-shirts that are full of holes and covered in stains! The thing is, he doesn’t wear these old things; he just likes to keep them around. And he keeps buying more stuff! His closet is stuffed to the gills but he won’t let me throw out the old to make room for the new—which means that the new gets totally wrinkled the minute I put it away! As the one who does the laundry and ironing, am I justified in slipping a few ratty T-shirts into the garbage each week?
Dear Pathetic Housewife:
You are completely justified in tossing out your husband’s crap. If he notices something missing—and I’m betting he won’t—just shrug and deny any knowledge of its whereabouts. You won’t be lying because said item could be at the bottom of the ocean or the top of a burning dump or wherever it is that garbage goes. The biggest concern here is that you felt the need to ask permission to take possession of your husband’s personal items. Might I suggest a workshop on the topic of self-empowerment?
SOPHIE
Eva told me she was tired. John told me he’d been thinking of catching a movie.
“But we haven’t seen each other, all three of us, in a while,” I’d argued. “We won’t make it a late night. Just a quick dinner.”
Eva finally relented, but only, she told me, to stop my “whining.” John, too, finally agreed, I think because he hates to disappoint the people he cares about.
We met at Marino’s—John’s favorite restaurant had become one of mine, too—at seven and I swear, it wasn’t two minutes after seven before I noticed that something was up. Or different. Or—wrong. Both Eva and John were acting all awkward. Eva shot a glance at John; when he looked her way, she looked away. John shot a glance at Eva; when she looked his way, he looked away. Eva dropped her napkin, the kind of thing she never does. John spilled water on his silk tie, the kind of thing he never does.
Oh, yes. Something had happened between them, I was sure. But what? Sexual tension could account for the change, but not entirely. More likely, I thought, they’d had a particularly bad fight and hadn’t gotten around to making up.
Well, I thought, I guess it’s up to me to play good hostess and put the guests at ease. And maybe, in the process, one of them would drop a hint that would help me figure out what was going on.
But conversation was dull, no matter what interesting topic I introduced—Jake, real estate, the carpeting I was thinking of getting for the bedroom. “Oh,” I said finally, desperately, “I saw this great movie on TV the other night. It was called The Seducer. And it was about this man who goes to these amazing lengths to seduce old rich women—”
“I wonder,” John interrupted (unlike him), “if other primates keep secrets or employ deception in their social life. I’d like to know the answer to that.”
My eyes shifted quickly to Eva, then back to John. I tensed, half-expecting a paranoid response from Eva and a cutting reply from John.
But when Eva spoke her tone was thoughtful. I relaxed just a bit.
“If humans are the only ones to lie, cheat, and steal—all forms of deception—does that mean that success as a species depends, at least partly, on the capacity for unethical behavior?”
“Of course not,” I said. “That can’t be right.”
Eva shrugged, not convinced.
“I should ask my nephew Scott,” John said. “He’s really into animals. If he doesn’t know the answer he’ll make it a project to find out.”
“So he can educate his old uncle.” Eva smiled a bit to soften her words. John smiled back, though not exactly at her.
“Kids love teaching grown-ups. Jake would downright gloat when he knew something I didn’t. Then again,” I added, “so would Brad, so in this case maybe it’s something he got from his father.”
“People rely too much on genetics to excuse or explain their weaknesses,” Eva said in her usual forceful way. “They say: ‘My mom is overweight so of course I’m overweight and there’s nothing I can do about it.’ I say: ‘Yes there is. Put down the fork and pick up the medicine ball.’ There’s a fatalism at work there I just can’t stand.”
“Fatalism,” John said, “or laziness. Or, in some cases, maybe a fear of changing so much that you become unrecognizable to your family, even to yourself. Changing so much that you no longer belong in the world from where you came.”
“You mean,” I said, “that some people fall back on what they know—their family, for instance—because they’re afraid of success?”
“They’re afraid of outgrowing their parents’ world, which was their childhood world. They’re afraid of having to find a new life, a new tradition. They’re afraid of cutting ties,” Eva said.
I considered Eva’s words. I’d tried to raise my son to
be unafraid of challenge and change. Had I done enough? Too little? Well, I thought, time alone will tell if Jake will surpass his parents’ achievements. Time alone will show the places Jake will go, maybe places I couldn’t imagine myself ever going. That thought scared me. Someday I might lose my son to a world in which I was a foreigner.
“Change isn’t always a good thing,” I said. “Sometimes it’s best to stay put.”
Eva gave me her patented look of exasperation. I ignored it.
“It’s true that some people let the past hinder them from growing,” John said then. “But I like to think the majority of people want to transcend the limitations of their family and early environment.”
“I certainly did. I certainly do.” Eva paused before adding: “Sometimes I think my sister aspires to be less than what my parents hoped she would be. Can you aspire to failure?”
“Maura hardly sounds like a failure,” I noted. “She’s married and has a family.”
Eva looked chastened (unlike her). “Yes, well, I didn’t mean a ‘failure,’ exactly.”
“You meant that you see more potential in her than she does in herself?” John asked.
Eva gave John another small smile. “Yes. Exactly.”
What, what, what was going on? I wondered again.
“Brad’s boss at one time was this superintelligent man with several degrees in business. He was nice, too, involved in the community, all that. And his wife was just as nice. She taught philosophy at the university. Anyway, both of their sons got involved with drugs and dropped out of high school.”
Eva shrugged. “You can’t blame the parents. Everyone is responsible for his own life.”
“But what about children who fall apart?” I argued. “Legally, morally, they’re the parents’ responsibility. Are children really capable of making smart life choices? Anyway, my point is that these two boys had parents who were achievers and, really, I met them, they were lovely people. So, what went wrong? Maybe the boys had some genetic deficiency or something that made them, I don’t know, more like an uncle who wound up on the streets.”
The Friends We Keep Page 20