by gay walley
He had lived down and out in LA, it turned out, a loft in a bohemian druggie section, with a view of the city. Had lived poor. Even ended up working for a credit card scammer, he told her. Is this really her type? It was like listening to those writers like Hubert Selby with Last Exit to Brooklyn, Charles Bukowski and his living on the edge.
She got the feeling that he found her attractive because he was as awkward as she was. This is a man, she decided, who is as shy as I am and is used to sexual encounters. Quick sexual encounters as a way not to be known. They would never fall in love with each other. She wasn’t LA glam or hip enough for him and he wasn’t strong enough for her. But how did she know? And why did she make these assumptions? Maybe someone as vulnerable as he is* exactly the kind of man she should try with.
She had a twinge of guilt about David. Shouldn’t she just move there and marry him? They were so easy together. But was ease what she wanted? All her life she had had a monkey on her back or between her legs and somewhere long ago, she had decided ease was not what her life was about.
Mitch was telling her a story about a woman who had moved into his LA loft, a roommate to save money, and she turned out to be bulimic and, like many so-called weak people, was an incredible bully such that she took over his loft and he ended up moving out of the very place he loved, just to get away from her. He said he was a victim type like that.
“The tyranny of the oppressed,” Duet said, admiring his honesty . He nodded agreement. The way he kept silent at times was what was sexual about him. She remembered Oskar telling her a joke about an Anorexic Café which put a sign out front: Now closed 24 hours a day. Oskar had thought that funny. Are all men thirteen years old? She wondered. No, they’re not, she told herself. Some might be great. Maybe this one is great.
She asked Mitch about his background. He had gone to a black college as a basketball star. He had been the only white guy. He had run a museum in LA, he had modeled. Now the clothing thing was working, he said, if he didn’t sabotage it, as he usually did. He also wrote articles about stars, like Walt Frazier and Cheap Trick. She nodded, even though she didn’t know who Cheap Trick was.
But he listened when she spoke reflectively about her own job, her music, and then finally dinner was over and she said, “Do you want to come back to my place and have a drink?”
What was she doing? She never invited anyone back, especially not a perfect stranger. But she didn’t want him to leave her. She didn’t want to feel the loss of Oskar any longer, it kept hurting. She must force herself to let someone new in.
“Sure,” he said, “although I don’t drink.”
“Oh,” she said. “How about dessert?”
“Dessert is fine,” he said slowly.
When they got to her apartment, he walked around and told her he liked her art. He was interested in the painters, most of whom were her friends. He liked all her books. He didn’t read, he said, which she found odd because he liked writing. He said he was on anti depressants, he needed his meds.
She looked at him and she wanted to be near him. It was his tenderness that she was feeling inside her, and she suddenly knew how much she needed that. Maybe it was post David’s not sleeping with her and Oskar’s lack of warmth. Oskar never held her, he was almost formal. Maybe it was the German background.
“Do you want to stay here?” she asked. She’d risk it. You have to risk, she told herself. You don’t get anywhere without risk.
He smiled. “Sure.”
“I have to get up early, so do you mind if we go to bed soon?”
“Sure,” he said. “I too have to get up early.”
She smiled. “People don’t live in New York, we work in New York.”
“Ain’t that the truth. But it’s what it is,” he said.
She switched off the lights and undressed quickly and got into her bed and worried that perhaps he would be too tall for the mattress. The moon light came in through her windows. The New York night sky looked like a film set in itself. Oh please God don’t turn this into a horror film.
Mitch undressed too and it was like having a Greek god in her apartment. He lay down next to her and said, “You know you’re the first woman I’ve done this with, so fast, since I was in college…”
She laughed and didn’t believe him.
“I don’t even usually sleep with white women,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I tend to have Black girlfriends but I’ll try to be color blind,” he said, sweetly.
He put his arms around her and began kissing her. Go with it, she told herself, go with it. She kissed him back and he was as slow about his kisses as his southern drawl. He kissed her gently, held back so she had to assert herself, probe, then he began to kiss her harder and she liked that because what happened was it gave her time to corral her mind so that it finally settled down and she could be present, just kissing(she remembered an old poet in the sea town telling women, LEAVE YOUR MIND IN YOUR BEHIND.) Then her body began to heat up. His hand began massaging her breasts, and that felt wonderful too, her breasts, and then her waist and then his hand was between her legs. Her hand had also found him and his penis was unusually large which was a bit exciting and then his fingers were massaging her clitoris and now she felt herself arching toward him, and then she did the strangest thing, she moved his hand to her other vagina.
It was like in a cartoon. She could see the bubble over his head “What the fuck---?”
He said nothing, a polite Southern boy, but kept on exploring and then he did say in his low voice, “Now this is going to be kind of cool…”
And after he had protected them, “Don’t worry, these babies are extra large,” he spent the night playing her, going up and down the court, a pair of basketball hoops, having a helluva time, which sort of made her have a helluva time. She felt like he had been sent to her to make up for all the pain she had and experienced from men like Patrick. Maybe there had been some magic in the air to make her take this chance on someone. After all, normal women got to meet men all the time whom they could go home with. Why not her?
Mitch made her feel special, more of a woman than an ordinary woman. And what he did, that no man had ever done before, including David, was he got baskets, so to speak, from both hoops. In other words, double headers for everyone.
Wow. Did that happen? What time was it anyway? And who cared? “Maybe I will have a drink,” he said.
And she got up and got them both a straight scotch. She sat up next to him on the bed, feeling safe for some reason, accepted. It takes a man with imagination, she decided. A man who has been around, a man who is large in his being. “I knew, I knew,” she said, “you wouldn’t be frightened. I just sensed it.”
He was falling asleep. “I wouldn’t say that,” he said, “I’m frightened alright. I don’t know if I can ever do that again. ”
Eleven:
The next day Mitchell came over with some of Mahler’s music for her. He had seen the Kindetotenlieder in a store downtown and wasn’t sure she had it. She was moved that he had noticed what she was working on. He also brought her some Vivaldi because she mentioned in passing that she admired his Stabat Mater and she didn’t have that either. And he brought her a check.
“What’s this for?” she asked.
“Just bank it,” he said.
“Why?”
“You paid the other night for dinner because I didn’t have enough cash. I don’t feel right about it. My grandmother raised me differently.”
She didn’t know what to do. She was nonplussed, and almost started to cry.
When she told Paula about it, Paula thought he was fantastic. “It’s about time someone was helping you. By the way, you can meet Lars tonight. He’s picking me up outside.”
“Great.”
So there are kind men around.
She and Paula left the office together and there stood, just outside the revolving door, a husky, elegant, self possessed man, wearing a scarf round
his neck and a cap over his blond hair. He gave them both a warm smile and when Paula introduced them, he said, “It’s a lovely name.”
Duet smiled, politely. He had his arm around Paula’s shoulder. Paula was beaming. “We’re going to go have a drink,” Paula said, “at the Beekman. Lars loves the views. Want to come?”
“No, no thanks – but it was great to meet you, Lars. You’re making Paula* so happy.”
“It goes both ways,” he answered and this moved Duet. More kindness. Maybe Paula was lucky. Off they went and Duet watched Paula chatting away and Lars nodding his head as the two of them swerved as one through the rushing people, as they walked down 42nd toward the East River.
The next night Mitchell brought radishes and hummus over for Duet. He had noticed she had a propensity for what was Mediterranean. A man who paid attention?
Maybe she could relax. Maybe he was not going to abandon her.
But when they were sitting on her couch together, he began talking. “Duet, the thing is I am not sure I can handle your extraordinary design. I mean it makes you kind of more than a woman than most women and I can’t even handle a normal woman.”
She said nothing and concentrated on the honking and rush of the traffic outside.
“In the end,” he said, “you will hurt me. I won’t be enough.”
She looked at him and thought, he’s right but it’s not because I am too much woman, it’s because I am too much mind.
“Not that I want to do anything about it now,” he said.
The next night, they went to dinner at a local Polish restaurant. He wore his gloves and cap and he was bright and funny, telling her tales of the inflexibility of the Germans he worked with in the fashion business. She felt lucky to be with someone so present and yet, after the chicken cutlet, he changed his tune again. “My life is over. I have ruined everything. I don’t want anything anymore.”
“But what about a future with someone?”
“It’s too late,” he said. “People do that younger.”
“People do that all the time.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t see it.”
He looked at her, “Duet, I’m a weird guy. I don’t know what I want. “
And what that told her was that he didn’t want her.
She said, “I understand,” and thought, for now, her plan was to give up on men.
Paula didn’t agree. “Forget it*,” Duet said. “I can’t handle how men think. I want a man who cleaves in, and they don’t make them anymore. They’re all too scared of women.”
Paula nodded to her computer and it was noticeable to Duet that Paula did not argue.
“Did you two have a fight?” Duet asked.
“Just his usual right wing politics,” Duet heard from her cubicle. “He says I am responsible for the Kmer Rouge, boat people, I forget what else because I am a liberal. He even thinks I’m a Stalinist for supporting Obama. I forget why. He’s a bit kooky you know over politics.”
“You can work that out,” Duet said, somewhat distracted by the emails on her screen.Paula turned around and she had tears in her eyes. “He says I am ignorant. I am, Duet, I am. I can’t argue with him because he knows much more.”
“So learn from him.”
“I just wrote him that. I said, Teach me. “
Duet smiled, “That should be okay.”
Paula ignored her, “He’s pretty serious about his politics, I can tell you that. Maybe I should just keep asking him to explain…”
“That sounds reasonable. And it’s also reasonable that I give up on men. * I’m no good at it.”
Duet’s life returned to its earlier version. She put more energy into her job, it was a way of avoiding her emotional needs. She talked to girlfriends. She went to movies alone. If she was desperately unhappy, she bought herself a dress.
She listened to Mahler. She wrote her piano pieces. One after the other. She hired a music teacher and played them for him. He was an older man who had just had a quadruple bypass. He sat by the piano and listened.
Her hands were clammy with nervousness.
“Better than I expected,” he said. “But the transitions need deepening. You float away. But you have captured Mahler’s quixoticness, Mahler’s poetry.”
She looked at him. Now here comes the rest, she thought.
“I can’t help you, though,” he said. “Keep working.” He got up and began putting his hat and coat on.“What do you mean?” she asked, standing at her door.
“You are an artist,” he said, turning back to her. “ You know what you want. Read the Fountainhead. That’s all you need to know.”
“That’s all?” she asked.
“And that your life will be difficult.”
She looked up at him, too confused to ask anything else. Even her teachers wouldn’t commit to her. She shook his hand and when he left she played Mahler’s Third Symphony which included Nietszche’s Homage to Man on her CD player. Nietszche lived a life without anyone. If he could, then she could.
Happiness, she read the next morning on CNN.com, was doing something new, inventive. This she read, with one ear cocked to Verdi’s Requiem. Such feeling. Yes this kind of beauty might be enough. Not a man who was going to treat her as a novelty and then run away. Art sustains. Art stays.
Her phone rang. “Hi Honey,” she heard.
“It’s getting warm out. Why aren’t you golfing?” she asked.
“Tee time at 2,” he said. “Solo misses you. That’s why I’m calling.”
Maybe she should get a dog, she thought. But that would make her a cliché of a single woman. Looking for love from her animal.
“It’s lonely around here,” he said, “without your smiling face.”
What was he doing? “I doubt it,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say. But he was so willing to be there.
She remembered the last time she was with Mitchell. They were standing outside waiting for a cab and she had put her arms around him, it was after a dinner, and he said, “What do you want with me, Babs?”
“Babs?” she asked.
“Sorry,” he said, “she was another woman who wanted something from me.”
“Yes,” she said sarcastically getting into the cab, “we’re all the same.” But it seemed as if he didn’t hear it.
David wouldn’t do that. If she put her arms around him, he would want her to want him.
She held the phone to her ear and started to cry.
“What are you crying about?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, starting to cry even more. “Maybe it’s that you don’t forget me.”
“Honey, I will never forget you.”
They chatted more and she calmed down and she was grateful for him listening but when she got off, she had to remember he was not here. He even said he was going to Haiti to work on building housing there. He had made the first cut of contractors. He was going away. Again.
In desperation, she went outside and sat in the early Spring weak sun at St Marks Church. A drunk lay on one of the old graves, pigeons surrounding him. Two toddlers raced around skipping and smiling at being able to stand up. Mothers looked on indulgently, with tight figures from lifting those huge baby carriages.
Duet turned her eyes to the children playing. Would she ever have a child? Could she have a child? She must see a doctor and find out. She pulled out her cell phone and called her gynecologist and set up an appointment. At least she should know.
The sun felt so gentle and it was wonderful not to be wearing boots, to be wearing sandals again. This single life might have its own promises.
She turned and went back home a bit more relaxed. It was not that she had resolved anything but the fact that the sun was out at least meant there was some guaranteed happiness in life. And there were her piano pieces. Her mother and father had convinced her to give a recital in front of the Mahler Society, and then they would organize a larger concert. She had three months before she would play
these compositions in front of people. Paula had offered to help promote the performance. She would either be a laughing stock or someone, someone would see who she really is.
On her way back to her apartment, she ran into Marsha, her landlord. “Come have lunch,” she said and so they sat down right there, at the corner, at the dumpling place. Marsha ordered a plethora of food. “How do you stay so skinny?” Duet asked.
“I walk everywhere.”
Marsha had a husband whom she found boring. “We were dropping off one of our kids at school and I ran into an old friend who had nothing but compliments for me, and what do you think Sammy said?”
“What?” Duet asked, slightly bored. Everyone complains about their husbands. It’s the way they stay together.
“Oh,” he said, “She’s just sucking up to you.”
“That’s terrible,” Duet said, dutifully. It was odd how men don’t take care of their women. It was wrong.
“I know a man who would never do that,” Duet said, meaning David.
“You mean David?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes,” Marsha said, “he’s not mean. But he has other things that are not right for you.”
Duet wasn’t sure.
“He’s not smart enough,” Marsha said.
But Duet knew she had been the author of that rumor*. She looked away. Maybe David was right for her.
“Where are there good guys?” Marsha asked.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“Anyway I’m getting two dogs,” Duet said, having just decided. All day she had been thinking of the adoption place on 13th and 6th she had walked by. Puppies who looked at you with such little faces, yearningly, so openly, so ready for love.
“What?” Marsha asked. “Are you crazy?”