The Middlesteins

by Jami Attenberg

  “I’m just looking to meet a nice lady,” he said, which wasn’t exactly true, but was closer to the truth than what she was proposing.

  “I can be very nice,” she said, the last remnants of her flirtation fading, because she was not there to defend herself, only to promote her possibilities.

  And then there were the steaks, and they were delicious. She took half of hers home in a doggy bag, which she clutched to herself as they stood in the parking lot. A kiss on the cheek, and then a whisper: “You know how to reach me if you change your mind.”

  * * *

  He had her number in his hand right now and was thinking about giving her a call after the day, week, month, year, life he’d had. A few hours after his depressing coffee date with Jill—who had left in tears, though thankfully she’d waited until she got in her car for the real waterworks to start; he had seen her sobbing at the stoplight—he met his daughter, Robin, for dinner. He hadn’t seen her since he’d left his wife, only spoken with her on the phone. The kids had circled their mother and had shut him down, Benny much more than Robin, but that was to be expected. Benny’s wife, that obsessive, tightly wound, Little Miss Prim and Proper, was outraged that he had filed for divorce, as if no one had gotten divorced before, as if she knew everything there was to know about family and marriage and life, as if she were the moral arbiter of what was right and wrong when she was the one who had gotten knocked up even before she had graduated from college and she should consider herself lucky that she’d had a free ride practically since the day she had met his son. He could go on. He did not appreciate being judged.

  “She doesn’t want you in our lives,” said Benny stiffly on the phone. “You’re my father, and I have made it clear that I will continue to have a relationship with you. I think things just need to cool off. She’ll calm down.” It was shocking to Middlestein that he would no longer be able to see his beloved grandchildren regularly. He hadn’t considered that such a thing would even be a possibility. He thought they would understand how he couldn’t live with that woman any longer. Surely they knew what he went through. Surely they could accept that he had been in pain. But they had not; they treated him as if he were a criminal, like he had murdered someone, when his wife, Edie, was the one killing herself, and taking him with her piece by piece.

  His daughter was only slightly more reasonable, but first she had to get her anger out of the way. She had been like that since the day she was born: a screamer, a howler, and then she would slide, herky-jerky, into something resembling acceptance. He didn’t get her, he knew that much. He didn’t know why he needed to get her anyway. His father had never gotten him. Why did people need to be gotten so much? Why couldn’t they just accept that he had left his wife and respect his decision? Why did he need to justify his existence to anyone?

  It seemed like that was all he was doing lately. What he wanted to say to his daughter was, I don’t have to explain myself to you. Up until now, he had been able to say that to her his entire life, and whether she agreed or not, he was going to take that action. Now the dynamic had changed. He needed her—what did he need her for, exactly? He needed her so that he could stay connected to his family. He needed her to speak well of him to Benny, so that he could see his grandchildren again. And, even though he shouldn’t have to explain himself to anyone, even though he was the father and she was the child and she should just listen to him, he needed to know she didn’t hate him so that he could sleep at night. Because lately he had been taking an Ambien or two before bedtime, and even sometimes mixing it with scotch, and who knew what would be next? For a while he blamed his insomnia on his new bedding. The sheets weren’t soft, the mattress too stiff. He was running out of things to blame it on, and he could not, he would not, blame it on himself.

  They met for dinner, at a middling Thai restaurant near the train station, where his daughter, a thin girl (maybe too thin for her own good after a tubby childhood), a moody girl, a smart girl, began to rattle off his failures.

  “She is dying, literally killing herself, and you have just abandoned her as if your life together, and her life in general, is of no consequence.”

  She had her mother’s eyes, he noticed for the millionth time, black little balls of fury. Seeing the familiar, seeing her eyes, it had touched him; it had been sixty-plus days since he had seen anyone he was related to.

  “What about my life?” he said. He resisted pounding his fist on the table, though he felt as if some sort of extra punctuation was required to make his point, and a nice, solid physical gesture sometimes seemed right. Once he had punched a hole in the wall of the garage after an argument with Edie. But that was years ago, when he still fought with her, when she could still incite him to give a shit about winning. “Doesn’t my life have value? Don’t I deserve to be happy?”

  “Of course you deserve to be happy,” she said; and he thought maybe she might be softening, but it was hard to tell with her. “We all deserve to be happy.” Was that almost a smile? But then it was gone. “This is life, though, and—I can’t even believe I have to say this to you, because you are the father and I am the child and I feel like you should know how this works.” She seemed nauseated. She practically gagged, then restrained herself. “You deserve to be happy, yes. But life is not always easy! And when the going gets tough and the chips are down—I know you do not need to hear all these clichés to get the point—you need to stand up for the people in your life, and that especially includes the woman you’ve been married to for forty years. She’s your wife, Dad! Your wife!”

  He had never had dinner with his daughter before, he suddenly realized. Not one-on-one. She had her tête-à-têtes with her mother every few months or so. But it would never have occurred to him before this moment to pick up the phone and call her and ask her out to dinner. (Did he even call her? He wasn’t sure. It seemed like it had been a lifetime of his wife making the calls and then handing the phone to him at the tail end of the conversation, he making a few gruff comments about his job, she pretending to care, the two of them forgetting about their exchange the instant it was over. His wife would let him know when there was something he should be worried about.) He supposed this was it, for the rest of his life. Dinner in a series of dingy but serviceable ethnic restaurants, beneath a giant framed print of a waterfall cascading into a beach, the bottom of the photo stained slightly by some sort of red sauce.

  “Here’s the question, Dad, and this is the biggie,” she said. She ran her fingers up her sinewy arms, stroking a thin but solid blue vein protruding from beneath the skin. This seemed like an unattractive habit at best to Middlestein, and the kind of thing that might scare a man away. But it was none of his business if she got married or not. Maybe once upon a time, but he knew he would never be able to say a thing to her again about it. She looked up, looked him in the eye, and said, “Do you think she would ever do the same to you? Leave you when you needed her most?”

  “Robin, your mother left me a long time ago,” he said, and whether Robin knew it, or Benny knew it, or that ballbuster of a wife of his knew it, it was true.

  “When?” she said.

  “It has been a lifetime of whens,” he said.

  And then he refused to discuss it any further, dissect his marriage for his daughter, because it was enough already, and the food had arrived, and could they just eat and stop fighting for a second? But he did get her to agree to see him again sometime, and to maybe put in a good (but not great) word for him with her brother, and he thought he had successfully convinced her to hate him slightly less than she did when the meal had started, until just before they said good-bye to each other in the parking lot, when he said, “So how is she? Your mother,” and she looked like she was going to kill him, take those powerful arms of hers, her veiny hands, and wring his neck. “How do you think she is?” was her only response, and then she walked off—no hug, no kiss, nothing—toward the train station in the early spring chill, lean, hateful, angry, young, alive.
r />   * * *

  He had Tracy’s number in his phone, but it was almost nine, and he decided it was too late to call. It wouldn’t hurt to send an e-mail, though. Either she was up and would get it, or she’d get it tomorrow, and maybe by then he might have a change of heart. I wouldn’t mind seeing you again. She replied almost immediately—“I’m game if you are,” followed by a winking, blushing smiley face (even her choice of emoticon was seductive, thought Middlestein)—and, to his surprise, invited him over immediately. He hadn’t expected such a quick response to his e-mail. Even some of the women he had met who didn’t work (there were more than a few living on spousal support or inheritance) held on to some semblance of propriety and made him wait a few days to meet even though there they were, online, just like himself, obviously not doing a damn thing with their time. He suspected he knew what it all meant, but he also wanted to make no assumptions, because he didn’t want to get into any tricky kind of trouble. He was no fool. He watched Law & Order, he watched Dateline. He knew about blackmail and con games and the like. But this was the furthest he had gotten with any woman yet, and they were in the suburbs of Chicago not Manhattan, and he was obviously not a rich man, maybe even she could see that he was not a bad man, even though he had left his sick wife all alone (which in the quietest moments in the mornings, alone in bed, he knew was a truly terrible thing), and was there any possibility that maybe she liked him a little bit? Was that the craziest thing in the world?

  These are the things Middlestein told himself as he drove to the half hooker’s house, the things that might make what he was doing okay in his book. If a friend of his told him he had done the same, Middlestein would like to think he wouldn’t have judged. World’s oldest profession. Biblical. Don’t knock it till you try it.

  She lived two towns over from him; the streets were empty, and he arrived at her condo fifteen minutes early—now there’s no traffic, he thought, just when I could use a little traffic—so he drove around in circles for a while; past a massive Kmart with a gardening center that made him sentimental for his backyard, even though his wife would never let him touch a thing; strip mall, strip mall, strip mall; a drive-through hot dog stand, which he contemplated visiting, only he didn’t want hot dog breath; the high school his grandkids would attend in two years, and where he hoped he would see them graduate—they were both so bright, he bragged about them to everyone he knew, they were the best thing that had happened to their family in a long time and he was going to fight till the end to make sure he got to have them in his life, his daughter-in-law be damned—and then, after exactly seven minutes, he turned around and headed back to Tracy’s condo, past the sparkling, bubbling fountain in front, parking in a guest spot as instructed, and finally hustling his way up to her apartment. He was more eager than he had realized, and he found himself out of breath before he reached the last flight of stairs. Is this really happening? he asked himself. Yes, it is.

  She greeted him with a kiss on the cheek and a gentle hand on his arm. She was wearing this sort of half-slip kind of top. It looked like lingerie but also it could just be a really nice shirt—what did he know about fashion? It was pink, and she had blown her black hair straight, so it was even longer than usual. The black fell against the pink silkiness, and it looked phenomenal. His penis grew slightly hard.

  Inside, a plinky jazz song played. Her apartment was three times the size of his. Can I even afford her? It was done up in a frilly decor, with a hodgepodge of antiques that looked as if she had gone from house to house over a series of decades and plucked just one piece of furniture from each: There was a long, narrow, modern glass kitchen table with plastic white chairs, and a molded plywood chair next to a shag rug, a diner-style table in the coffee nook, a club chair, a Mission oak armoire, piece after piece jammed next to one another, and that was just in the first room he entered. In the middle of it all was a giant red velvet fainting couch, and it was there that Tracy directed him to sit. She probably lay on it all the time, he thought, and he pictured her lying on it dramatically, little puffs of breath emanating slowly from her mouth.

  “This is a nice place,” he said.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I inherited it.”

  On a tiny bronze coffee table next to the couch, there was a framed picture of her with a white dog. Middlestein pointed to it. “Adorable,” he said.

  “She was,” said Tracy. “Mitzi died a year ago.” She jutted out her lower lip and made a sad face. “It was sad,” she said. “I’m saving up to buy a new one, but they’re so expensive. She was a bichon frisé. I always have bichons frisés. I’ve had three. You have to go through a breeder, you know. You should never use a pet store.”

  “Oh, yeah, why not?” he said.

  “They’re so mean to the puppies,” she said, and she looked sincerely distressed. She snapped out of it almost instantly. “Let’s not talk about this. It’s depressing. Let’s talk about happy things. Like you and me.” She put one hand on his knee and the other in his hand. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away. I had a feeling about you.” She kissed him.

  This was an out-of-sight kiss for Middlestein for two reasons: one, because he was not expecting it, and second, because that Tracy was a phenomenal kisser. She had soft but firm lips, and she was good at reading men and knew instinctively what they wanted, whether they wanted to be in charge or whether she needed to take control. She made gentle noises of joy, or dark dirty laughs, whatever she thought they needed to hear. This translated into the bedroom of course, too. She’d be on top, bottom, sideways, whatever. She hadn’t enjoyed sex in years, what did she care anyway? Much older men had ground that desire out of her since she’d been a teenager. She just wanted a new dog. Why hadn’t anyone bought her a dog yet? Maybe this guy would buy her a dog, what was his name again?

  Middlestein let himself be consumed by the kiss for a moment longer, and then his mind wandered to his current self, his physical form, his sixty-year-old body, which was still lean enough—he had been a runner for years, at least until his knees gave out a few years ago—but sagged in parts. He had an old-man chest, the flesh around the nipples puffy yet drooping, and he had gray hair everywhere, on his chest and back and around his penis. He wasn’t terrible-looking naked, but there was no hiding who he was either. He didn’t know if he could contend with even a glimmer of disappointment on Tracy’s practiced expression. Then he realized it wasn’t so much about being naked with her as much as it was about seeing her naked. Seeing a real-life, healthy woman in the nude, up close, personally, intimately, safely. But how would that work? Was it even worth whatever it was going to cost him?

  He pulled away from her, allowing himself to touch her hair, and then her shoulder, which he noted later must have been dusted with glitter, as he found traces of it on his fingertips, and on his pants.

  “I can’t,” he said. “It’s been so long. I feel like I don’t even know how anymore.” Better to admit an alternate insecurity, he thought. The truth seemed much more humiliating. And anyway it was not a lie.

  “You came all this way to stop now?” she said. That challenge might have worked on a younger man, but not him. The fire in his loins was a particular kind. He was desperate, but he would not be rushed. He had not lived this long in life to be pushed around by a stranger.

  “No, I think it’s enough,” he said.

  “What about if I give you a hand?” said Tracy quietly.

  He nodded, and she swept herself up and away, down the hall to the bathroom, returning shortly with two hand towels and a large pump bottle of lotion. She put the bottle of lotion next to the picture of her and Mitzi, one towel on her lap, and one towel on his. She kissed him again.

  “Do you like to kiss?” she said. He nodded. She put her hand on his face and then ran it down his chest—quicker than he would have liked, and he could have said that and she would have listened, but he felt completely out of control and unable to speak—and straight to his crotch, where she rustled aro
und softly—It’s right there. Good God, woman, how can you miss it?—until she found what she was looking for. She petted him on the outside of his pants, and then quickly unbuttoned his pants, unzipped his fly, and then released his penis from his boxer shorts. She stroked it, and then stopped and leaned over to where the bottle of lotion sat. She pumped the bottle a few times. It was an anticellulite lotion, Middlestein noticed. She rubbed it on him.

  “Do you like it this way?” she said. Her voice was girlish and flirty, and her eyes were direct. “I bet you like it this way.” She didn’t wait for a response, she surrounded him quickly—Listen, can you blame her? Ten-thirty on a Tuesday? Let’s get a move on already, buddy—and it took not long until he came.

  * * *

  Middlestein felt great! He drove home fast. No traffic! Fantastic! He was thrilled, if only because he knew he was going to sleep like a rock that night. But for now he was still all jazzed up. He felt ten years younger. God, she was good. He was pretty sure he was never going to see her again—one hundred bucks for a handy?—but it was nice to have that number in his back pocket in case of an emotional emergency. She was clean and local, and he felt safe with her. Still he didn’t know how comfortable he felt supporting, even in the smallest of ways, a woman who had more square footage than he did.