Topics of Conversation

by Miranda Popkey

  John was on a health kick, had been, and to spite him I’d been buying frozen pepperoni pizzas, Confetti Cupcake Pop-Tarts, going out for groceries and coming home with buckets of KFC. These were, to be clear, for me. They were to spite him, but they were for me. He’d open a can of soup, Amy’s Organic, while I picked a chicken wing clean with my teeth. As the soup heated, split pea maybe, barley vegetable, John would chop a head of kale. The night before I drove down to the city, the soup was black bean chili. The soup was heating and John was chopping his kale and I was mauling my wing and every so often I paused, a finger fishing for gristle between my teeth. “It’s not,” I said, “like it’s going to help.”

  “Help what?” he said.

  “It’s not like it’s going to help your sperm count.” Chewing, fishing, chewing. “Their motility.”

  “I know.” Dumping the kale in, stirring. John didn’t have a low sperm count. Nor were his swimmers slow, in fact they were fleet of fin, but I refused to go to a doctor to get checked out so it was up to him to devise alternate solutions to the problem of our infertility. “But it’s not like,” John continued, “it’s not like eating healthy is going to hurt.” Then: “You want some kale?”

  “No,” I said. “No, I do not.”

  I didn’t want a baby. But that must be obvious, what I mean is I had never wanted one. I moved to Lincoln and I got married and my husband got another job and we moved and my husband got a third job, tenure track, and we moved again. I worked in HR. I came home from my job in HR and I cooked dinner for my husband. I cooked dinner for my husband and for his professor friend and for his professor friend’s wife. If I was lucky, the wife wasn’t also in HR. And I wasn’t going to finish my dissertation, this was clear. I wasn’t going to finish my dissertation and publish it, I wasn’t going to be a professor, I wasn’t going to get tenure and go on sabbatical, I wasn’t going to spend three months in Barcelona perfecting my Spanish, doing archival research. (I spoke no Spanish, what research could I be doing in Barcelona, my area was seventeenth-century English plays.) I wasn’t ever even going to live alone. And that’s what I thought about when I thought about what I’d lost by abandoning grad school, by marrying young, by following John from job to job to job: I thought about living alone. I thought about sitting on a porch, on my porch, as evening fell, sitting there with a glass of wine and a book and empty hours ahead of me. So okay my life was going to be suburban, it was going to be upper-middle-class, it was going to be so far up normal’s ass that it came out the other end holding a white picket fence and an American flag. (John’s job was all wrong for this, Marin was all wrong for this, no matter, I was angry, I was on a roll.) So okay it was going to be not only normal but normative. And the normative thing to do, now that we were settled, now that John had accumulated professor friends who came with pregnant professors’ wives, now that every single one of my female coworkers had two at home and was trying for a third, the normative thing to do was have a kid. And I thought that maybe if I chose it, if I told myself I wanted it, if I made the baby an object not quite of desire but certainly of obsession, I might be able to trick myself into liking a life whose comfort I knew even then was so relatively excessive as to be almost criminal. So I told John I wanted a baby and we started trying and even now the part that most surprises me is how long it worked. Probably it was because we had so much trouble; nothing is more desirable than that which is being withheld.

  But then of course it stopped working. It stopped working because I didn’t want a baby, and now I was mad at John, too, mad at myself for saying I want a baby and mad at him for believing me or humoring me or both. Knowing someone, it’s one part divination, two parts force. Figuring out what the other desires, that’s relatively easy. Giving the other what she desires, getting her to take it, that’s harder, or it is when the other is me. Though with John I would have settled for divination. If he had said, You don’t want a baby. If he had said, You don’t have to be a mother. If he had said, You shouldn’t be a mother, maybe—but no, John was ever so understanding. John was waiting for me to figure out what it was that I wanted and he was waiting for me to tell him. He was waiting for the moment when he could say that what I wanted was just what he wanted, too. And so there we were. Every month he said, You know we can talk about stopping, if you want to stop, and I said, I know. Every month he said, I don’t want this if you don’t want this, and I said, I know. Every month we fucked three times a day for two days, the two days I was ovulating and therefore most fertile. Those were the only times I let him touch me.

  So I booked a room at a midlevel chain and I drove down to the city. The room was standard issue. Thin carpet in a dull dun color that already looked dirty. That always already looked dirty. You can take the girl out of the grad school but you can’t take the grad school out of the—Anyway the carpet looked dirty and that was on purpose, that was so you couldn’t tell if it was. Also polyester bedspread in a floral pattern, hypoallergenic pillows with the tags to prove it, bars of soap no bigger than fun-size chocolates, thimblefuls of body wash and shampoo and conditioner. I dumped the clothes out of my suitcase and changed into a black dress, tighter on me now than it had been when I’d bought it, vulgar on top. I’d been lucky, the Pop-Tart weight had settled in my tits.

  The plan was to walk south, toward Union Square, to walk until I found a hotel and a bar stool and someone on the bar stool next to me with a room key and none of the obvious markers for sociopathy. There’s always someone, or so I’d been led to believe: on business or in the doghouse or out on the proverbial prowl. That was the danger of being a woman, or one of them, vulnerability to advances, a danger I’d felt clever about turning, this once, to my advantage. Like I’d invented the art of getting hit on. The hotel bar, the hotel room, this was to avoid the more obvious dangers, those associated with getting into a car, going up to an apartment, following a man to a second location.

  I took the Bulleit I’d packed and poured a splash into one of the small plastic cups the hotel had thoughtfully provided, drank it straight sitting on the edge of my bed, my dress pulled up, my ass bare against the polyester bedspread. The dress was too tight to sit down in comfortably. I was counting on not having to sit very long, was, for that reason, not wearing underwear, priding myself, as I drank, for my presumable foresight, for my efficiency.

  What would I call myself. I pondered this as I walked south. My shoes were painful enough that I should have taken a cab but I was trying not to waste any more money than was absolutely necessary. Ashley or Crystal or Madison. Darla or Felicity or Joy. Last name Jones or Smith or Johnson. A name that announced itself as fake, just in case the ring and the no underwear and the eagerness to get up to his room didn’t give me away. Or maybe I could just, I was smiling now, maybe I could just, laughing now, cracking myself up, just lean in real close and whisper, one hand on his knee, whisper, No names.

  I don’t remember the hotel I decided on, honestly I don’t, but this next part I do, this next part is true. I remember walking the square, putting one foot in front of the other. My shoes were tight and the skin they exposed was swelling, red and plump, the soles of my feet slick with sweat. Neon lights, a revolving door, a tinkle of jazz, innocuous. Nodding to the doorman, marble floors, following gilded arrows to the bar. Granite countertops, booths upholstered, leather bar stools. This is what I remember. It was nine, maybe ten. I heaved myself up, plunked myself down. I’d had two fingers of bourbon back at my hotel, maybe three. Three and a half.

  I was teetering on my stool, trying to put as little weight as possible on my ass, my shoes scrabbling for purchase on the footrest, when a bartender came over, eyes narrowed, asking, Can I help you, ma’am, asking, Would you like a glass of water? I was sweating, chunks of damp hair spilling from the messy bun I’d wrapped, sticking to my forehead, obscuring my eyes. I sat and exhaled and felt the back seam stretch but not break. I loosed my bun and shook my hair out, leaned over the bar, friendly, saw the tension in his
shoulders ease, saw his eyes, alert, flick from my face, mascara smudged, lipstick flaking, to my tits. “Water, yes, thanks,” a hand in my hair, rearranging. “I must look such a mess, gave the cab driver the wrong address and had to walk blocks and it’s so misty outside.” I get southern when I mean to disarm. When he came back with the water he was smiling and his shoulders were all the way down and his eyes lingered on my tits like this time he wanted me to notice. “Thank you so much.” Smiling at him when his eyes flicked back up to mine, letting him know I knew, that I was flattered, that he wasn’t in any trouble. “And a gin martini, please, Hendrick’s, dry, dirty, two olives. Three if you can spare them,” and by now I was sure he could. Being careful not to lean too heavily on the accent, to speak clearly without overenunciating, to keep one hand in my hair, fluffing it, lifting it off my neck. At the far end of the bar, a man in a dark suit signed his check, pushed back his pint glass, stood. I looked at him and he looked away. It had been foggy outside, some of the moisture in my hair was water, mist, it wasn’t all sweat, the walk hadn’t been that long. Inside my heels my feet were cooling but where the edges of the shoe leather cut into my flesh I could feel not blood but that clear, slick, sticky substance that precedes it. My martini came and I drank it, ordered another. A different man in a dark suit approached the bar, saw me, swerved away, or maybe this was my imagination, maybe he’d always, maybe he’d always already been headed to the bank of elevators. The bartender came over to talk and I did shy, I did bashful, until he went away, I wasn’t interested in the bartender. Fifteen minutes passed. Maybe twenty.

  I don’t remember him sitting down. The door opened onto a hallway that opened onto a lobby, if I’d been turning to look every time I heard footsteps I wouldn’t have been able to drink my martinis so quickly. Besides which I didn’t want to seem too desperate. I mean more desperate than I already appeared, a woman sitting alone at a bar, not looking at a book, not thumbing at her phone. It was the situation we’d all, the girls of my generation, been warned against, been warned, specifically, against getting ourselves into. In my adolescence, this was the early nineties, the women who marched with Take Back the Night were still hysterical, consent wasn’t yet affirmative, and though no means no was the standard it was also understood that it wouldn’t protect you. And so we were told to keep to well-lighted streets. To carry pepper spray, a whistle. To keep keys between the second and third, the third and fourth, the fourth and fifth fingers of our dominant hands. No short skirts and watch your drink and tell a friend where you’re going and call her when you get there and again when you get home. When we thought about sex we thought mostly about ways to defend against what we didn’t want instead of ways to pursue what we did. So that now the way I thought to attract a man was to make myself vulnerable to attack: sitting alone, drinking too quickly, my legs bare and my shoes no good for running and the hem of my dress riding up. I’d made myself a sitting duck and deliberately because men were attracted not to predators but to prey, not to strength but to weakness, this is what I was thinking when I felt a hand on my upper arm, the grip gentle but the splay wide, the fingers thick, promising. “Is someone,” he asked, “sitting here,” another hand gesturing to the bar stool next to mine. I smiled and shook my head, bowed it to indicate, Please, yes, go ahead. Thinking, Better not to speak just yet, better first to figure out what it is you want me to say.

  He sat, unbuttoned his suit jacket. “Can I get you something to drink?” he asked. I tipped the dregs of my second martini into my mouth, smiled. “Sure,” I said. “That would be lovely,” I said. “Thank you.” Still trying to speak clearly without sounding like I was trying to speak clearly. He was handsome in a midlevel-chain-hotel sort of way, standard issue. Square jaw, slope of cheekbone, hair. Or that was my first impression but then he turned to me—he was waiting for his drink and he turned away from the bar and toward me and then I could see that his face had been tilted ever so slightly along the vertical axis so that his right eyebrow, his right nostril, the right half of his mouth, the entire right side of his face was a millimeter, a millimeter and a half, higher than the left. The effect was not unattractive.

  It’s because of this asymmetry that I remember his face. And it’s because of this asymmetry that I then took the time to look more closely at his clothes, at the blue suit he was wearing, which was single-button and slim-cut, the legs tapered. And noticing the suit I noticed the tie, pale yellow, flowers embroidered in a baby blue thread, and the glasses case he rested on the bar, next to the rocks glass into which the bartender had poured a generous portion of Johnnie Walker Blue, and the burgundy socks, visible for an inch or so below the hem of his blue slacks before they disappeared into his shoes, which were dark brown and polished and obviously real leather. And if the shoes and the fact of his suit and the Johnnie Walker and even the hotel bar itself, if all these details pointed in one direction, the direction of finance, say, of mid-cap mutual funds, of generic business, the others, the tie and the socks and the cut of his suit and especially the glasses, pointed in another, in the direction of sense of humor, of reads novels, of was never in a frat. Also reassuring was the ring, thick and gold and on the correct finger. “So,” he said. “What brings you to San Francisco?” “Oh,” I said. “You know. Work. A work thing.” I tilted my head closer to his, blinked slowly. “You?” “Same,” he said. “Same.”

  In his room I started laughing. He paid for his drink and the martini I hadn’t finished and the two martinis I had and he took me by the arm and he guided me to the elevator, guided me inside. The elevator ascended. He unlocked the door to his room and went in and I went in behind him and turned to close the door and when I turned back around his body was against mine, his hips against my hips, and he was bringing a hand to my face, his thumb moving down my cheekbone, and I opened my mouth and then I was laughing. I didn’t mean to laugh. What I meant to do was move my lips very close to his ear and say, Let me slip into something more comfortable. An appropriate line, ever so apropos. But I couldn’t get—I started laughing and—Not giggling, really laughing. He stepped back, frowning, the frown emphasizing the asymmetry of his face. And then I couldn’t stop. Thirty seconds, forty-five, sixty, ninety. A hand against the wall, bent over, chest almost to knees, gasping for air, water leaking from my eyes. Meanwhile he was standing at the foot of the bed, watching me.

  “Are you,” he said, “are you okay?”

  “Oh,” I said, “oh, god, I’m sorry, of course I am, of course I’m fine, it’s just”—now I was hiccupping, shaking my head—“I’m so sorry, it’s just—” He was still frowning but in the frown I now read not surprise but worry. I cleared my throat. “Can you,” I asked, “can you get me some water?” He went into the bathroom and I heard the tap running. When he came back he was holding a glass of water, an actual glass. I took it from him, drank. “Do you think,” I said, my head down and my eyes tilted up, this was bashful again, though now it was only partly feigned, “do you think you could order me some room service?”

  He moved toward me. “You want me to order you room service.” I was still in the foyer, the hallway of whatever floor it was, the closed door at my back, a closet to my left.

  “Yes,” I said, “room service. Isn’t that the deal? Buy a girl a meal first?”

  “Oh, sweetheart.” He smiled, shook his head. “You’ve got the line wrong. It’s ‘Buy a girl a drink,’ and I bought you several.”

  I set the empty glass down on the floor. The water was working, I’d stopped hiccupping and when I rolled my eyes the room didn’t spin. “But I’m hungry.” I reached for his belt buckle, the implication, I hoped, obvious but not explicitly transactional.

  He paused. I imagined the calculation: what time it was now and how long room service would take and how long, on the other hand, he would have to wait, downstairs at the bar, for another dumb, damp duck. Possibly also the calculation was monetary: what would I want to order from room service versus what and how much the next gir
l would want, would need, to drink. And then a decision, him saying the word “So,” again lifting his hand to my face, again moving his thumb down my cheekbone, apparently this was a thing he did, now his thumb was moving to the edge of my mouth, to my bottom lip, “So. You’re hungry, are you.”

  I nodded. I didn’t roll my eyes. I opened my mouth, just slightly.

  “Well in that case”—I bit down on his thumb—“let’s get you something to eat.”

  It sounded like a come-on but he did order me a cheeseburger and fries, let me take a shower while we waited. I scrubbed my armpits, my feet. I thought about leaving not because I was afraid but because I was ashamed, the little-girl voice I’d used, the words but I’m hungry, even now, impossible not to cringe, remembering. But I didn’t. No, I turned the water off, put one of the bathrobes on, swiped under my eyes with two squares of toilet paper, my lipstick was a lost cause but the liner smudged across my lids looked plausibly smoky, left my dress hanging on a hook meant for towels.

  When I came out of the bathroom the food had arrived and he was in the gray armchair, a glass in hand, an empty mini-bottle of scotch from the minibar next to him. I settled myself on the bed, one hand holding the room-service tray, one hand managing the edges of the bathrobe. I squirted ketchup on the burger. For a while we were silent. What I mean is we didn’t talk, and also I tried to chew with my mouth closed.

  Then he said, “I want to know why you’re here.”

  “Same reason you’re here,” I said.

  “You don’t know why I’m here.”