by Paul Rudnick
By this juncture, Laura and the two boys were sobbing, and Tom offered me twenty dollars to please just shut up and leave, and when we settled on fifty, I did.
My forecasts weren’t always as dire. One afternoon I approached a charming Cape Cod–style home, where the flower beds of hollyhocks and foxglove were bordered with cunningly angled whitewashed bricks, and where the door was opened by Melissa Trimble, a wan, tremulous woman with bushy, plaintive hair. She brought me to her kitchen, where she’d hand-painted the stuccoed walls with a trompe l’oeil mural of ivy-covered trelliswork surrounding a rustic arched window opening onto an eighteenth-century French village. She poured us both tumblers of soy milk and set out items that contained bran, dried dates, and flaxseed, and which she insisted on calling cookies. In return, I provided the following predictions:
“Melissa Trimble! Within the next six months you will finally begin to accept the fact that your husband is not coming back and you will start to realize how secretly happy you are about this, and not just because he was cheating on you with that little whore from his office, although as a feminist you will try to refer to her as a victim of a society that objectifies women, even the little whores. A year from now you will use the cash from your divorce settlement to open a women’s café and yarn shop, where the front window will feature a wall-hanging of a wide-hipped woman dancing joyously beside a waterfall with her own uterus. You will begin to teach seminars to help other women reach their full potentials as what you will call Self Weavin’ Wimmin, who will not only create the rich, full tapestries of their own inner lives but who will also use their child-support checks to hire swarthy young landscape architects, or, as you will call them, Incan sun gods.
“Your café and yarn shop will go out of business and, in despair, you will embark on a journey of spiritual rebirth which will take you through India, the Italian countryside, and New Zealand, and you will achieve great wealth and fame by writing a guide to the cleanest restrooms in all of these places. Your next book will cover your relationship with your now grown daughter, and how you have learned to understand and even forgive her jealousy and hatred, and this book will be called I Love You Anyway, and its even more successful sequel will be called I Love You Anyway Even Though You Sued Me.
“You will ultimately find true fulfillment in commuting between your Paris apartment and your East Hampton beach house, with your twenty-five-years-younger Dominican lover, and then your thinly disguised novel will tell the story of how you found him in bed with your thirty-years-younger deaf lover. This book will become your biggest bestseller, and you will be played in the top-grossing film by a beautiful, aging star who will win an Oscar for the scene in which she tells the Dominican lover, in Spanish, that ‘I was your poem,’ after which she repeats the same line to the deaf lover, in sign language.”
This forecast netted me $300 and, a few months later, a hand-knitted scarf and what tasted like a hand-knitted loaf of seven-grain bread. I was feeling cocky when I knocked on the door of Patti and Dave Mattison, who were the youngest couple in my neighborhood, and who were considered progressive, and even edgy, because their home was built after 1860 and because, at Halloween, they gave out little orange-and-black gift bags filled with phallic marzipan, buttons that read “Fight the Power,” and diet pills.
Patti answered the door, in her loose, almost transparent, Mexican-embroidered beach cover-up and a miniskirt where the tie-dyed suede panels were stitched together with macramé.
“Hi, Elly,” she said, in her scratchy, who-gives-a-damn voice. Until that moment, no one had ever called me Elly. No one had dared. “What’s that thing on your forehead?” she asked. “Is that a third eye? You’re kidding, right?”
Her husband, Dave, joined her. Dave had dark curly hair spilling onto the neck of his white T-shirt, which he wore with faded jeans and bare feet. This is how sexy Dave was: his sleepy eyes and his strong jaw actually allowed him to get away with wearing a silver and turquoise Navajo bracelet, a thumb ring, and no underwear. “Hey, El,” said Dave, “we hear that you’ve been working the whole neighborhood. We’ve been waiting.”
Patti laughed, and here’s how sexy she was: she could laugh at a fourteen-year-old boy, and I felt both humiliated and aroused.
“Come on in,” said Patti, and I followed the couple into their living room, which had no furniture but was almost completely filled with a single, gargantuan, overstuffed, mattress-like pillow, covered in a complicated batik print.
“Sit down,” said Dave, as he and Patti eased themselves onto this mega-pillow. “We got this thing in Morocco. Once you get used to it, it’s very comfortable.”
“It’s like a big bed,” said Patti. “In fact, this whole house is just a big bed.”
I hesitated, wondering if I should remove my grandfather’s wing-tipped shoes. I didn’t want them stolen.
“Take off your shoes,” said Dave, “we want to see those argyle socks.”
As I took off not only my shoes but my seersucker jacket, my sleeve garters, and my smart, summer-weight rattan fedora, I knew, and I hoped, that I was being seduced. I decided that losing my virginity to a mixed couple would be highly efficient, in terms of finalizing any future gender preferences. It would be a form of one-stop shopping. I was thrilled and nervous and flattered, even as I wondered if the Mattisons ever dry-cleaned the batik covering on the mega-pillow.
“Would you like me to give you a psychic reading?” I asked the Mattisons, “or do you just want to have sex with me?”
“If you’re really psychic,” said Patti, “then you tell us.”
A confession: at fourteen, I thought that this was a very sophisticated response.
“Do you want to have sex with me because I’m a fourteen-year-old virgin?” I asked, “Does that make me exotic?”
“Not at all,” said Dave. “The bow tie makes you exotic.”
That was when Patti kissed me, and lowered me onto my back. Dave followed suit, and soon we were all naked, in the darkened, Moroccan-themed living room of a suburban Connecticut home, having sex. I assumed that we were breaking, if not several Commandments, at least a zoning law.
Prior to having sex for the first time, I had read many books and magazines, pornographic and otherwise, and I’d developed certain expectations of intercourse. From paperback romances I expected to feel vaguely yet ecstatically ravished, as if, for the duration of the act, I would experience everything an ad for a drugstore cologne could ever promise. From more serious fiction, I assumed that I would be blasted with a torrent of conflicting emotions, flashbacks to my birth, a rough kinship with the natural world, perhaps a Booker Prize, and, ultimately, a sense of existential ennui. From mainstream movies, I hoped for a beautifully lit and choreographed series of thrusts and embraces, with my head thrown back, my eyes shut but not squinched, and my lips slightly but appealingly parted; I also felt that the sex might be edited, continually leaping forward in attractive bits and pieces, with only the dewiest bodily fluids. From porn, I trusted that sex would be alternately savage, degrading, pounding, and dull, and all of this sounded promising. From what my parents had told me, I knew that sex did not exist, and from what other schoolchildren had let on, I imagined that there was a real danger of getting stuck in one position or another, with the parties involved finally getting yanked apart in the emergency room.
None of this was true. While I was having sex for the first time, I felt exactly as I do when studying a Picasso or watching any program on public television: I was both interested and bored. All of the actions were, of course, primitive; despite the Kama Sutra, sex presents a limited inventory of limbs, organs, and procedures. I began to become crushingly disappointed: if this was sex, what was all the fuss about? Would it be better, or at least more engulfing, the next time? Should there be fewer people involved? More? As with any form of at-home entertaining, was it all about the guest list?
Just as I was about to stop paying attention entirely and to start mentally assemb
ling an outfit for school the next day, I began to experience what I can only call a very Elyot Vionnet orgasm. I began to feel the rising, volcanic elation that I’d always known upon entering any stranger’s home, or any public space. I began to come, because I began to observe.
I noticed, from the medicinal scent, that Patti, for all of her gypsy hauteur, used a dandruff shampoo. I saw that Dave, for all of his lanky, offhand ease, had lightly trimmed his chest hair. I realized that while Patti and Dave were both generous and skillful lovers, they were both a little too aware of, and pleased with, this fact. Looking up, I found that the massive, pierced tin Moroccan lighting fixture, with stained-glass inserts, which was hanging over our heads, was lit with a supermarket lightbulb that flickered to imitate candlelight, like the bulbs in apartment building lobby menorahs. I could tell that the afternoon’s musk was wafting from a plug-in air freshener, in a variety called “Tantric Lovebreeze,” and that a subtle wailing and sitar accompaniment was emanating from an eight-track cassette promising “Muslim Murmurs” from the Time-Life series “Restaurant Hubbub of Many Lands.” Arching my back, I became aware that, from the Mattisons’ proudly foreign, souk-purchased living room, I could glimpse a corner of a kitchen with antiqued Harvest Gold Formica cabinetry, and a vinyl wallcovering with a pattern of cartoon pepper mills waltzing with flirtatious salad tongs.
I’d always been obsessed with detail, but during sex I began to fully inhabit my powers. Just as Patti and Dave were pistoning, caressing, probing, and slurping, I reached an incomparably blinding climax, as I screamed, “Oh my God! There’s a TV in the corner, but to make it look Moroccan you’ve draped it with one of those dorm-room Indian-print bedspreads! Your TV looks like it got stoned and thinks it’s hiding!”
Needless to say, this outburst ended our group’s activities.
“What did you say?” asked Patti.
“Who cares about our TV?” said Dave.
“But it’s so interesting,” I said. “You’re being really strict about your theme.”
“You know,” said Patti, “everyone in this neighborhood thinks that we’re weird.”
“But, Jesus, Elyot,” said Dave, “have they met you?”
2.
As I matured, I became a caring and attentive lover, although all of my relationships would crumble, with my partners asking things like, “Elyot, when we were kissing, were you looking over my shoulder at my grandmother’s Lalique crystal decanter on the mantel?” “Elyot, when we were in bed, and we were watching that porn video, were you disgusted by the orgy scene, or by the purple-and-teal checkerboard sheets in the orgy scene?” “Elyot, when I told you that I loved you, did you actually say, under your breath, ‘But you also love pleated khakis’?” One woman even told me that every time we made love, she began to wonder if I was a cat burglar, because I seemed to be casing her apartment.
I started to worry that I’d never find love. Could love even exist, in a world of grime-encrusted miniblinds and “Tiffany-style” lamps shaped like stained-glass roosters, and people who, while they were working out at the gym, would shut their eyes and boogie spastically to the music on their iPods? Could love possibly defeat such infamy? And yet I remained an impossible romantic. I fell in love every other minute, with the televised image of a polar bear cub stranded on an ice floe, with the carnal embrace of my favorite toffee-colored corduroy suit, and with the moment when I saw that, while I was at work, the scaffolding which had run the length of my building for over two years had finally vanished.
And then one afternoon, as I was substitute-teaching at an uptown middle school, a twelve-year-old student stabbed me in the shoulder with the blade of his father’s sixteen-inch serrated hunting knife. I had been assigned to teach an English lesson, so of course I was instructing my students on the difference between English and Italian tailoring, and the fact that Englishmen need additional padding because most of them are born without chests or shoulders. It was then that the student rammed his blade through both my bottle green velvet smoking jacket and my flesh, because, as he later told the police, “I just wanted to see if that dude was for real.”
An ambulance soon arrived, and that was how I met Lucy Wainscott, who was driving it. Lucy was lithe and alert, with a sensible yet buoyant haircut. Lucy always looked as if she’d just gone for a run, taken a quick plunge in some crystalline Alpine stream, and then arrived smiling and up for anything. As she was loading me, strapped to a gurney, into her ambulance, she was scrutinizing me with an intensely delighted curiosity.
“So you were trying to teach those kids about European tailoring?” she asked, securing the gurney and prepping an oxygen mask, with the speed and nonchalance of a first mate on some sleek schooner.
“Yes,” I said, “because I believe that if a child learns to appreciate peaked lapels and working buttonholes, that child will be far less likely to inject heroin between his toes and hold up convenience stores.”
When I say things like this, most people either laugh uncomfortably, because they’re not sure if I’m being serious, or they move away from me.
“Oh my God,” said Lucy, with complete sincerity, as she lowered the oxygen mask onto my face, “that is so fucking true.”
Lucy and I began seeing each other, and I learned that she was from a distinguished if not especially wealthy Massachusetts family which had emphasized service above all. Lucy had dropped out of college after two weeks, and had then built roads in Zimbabwe, learned to pilot a helicopter, for making drops of food and medical supplies in the Sudan, and had briefly been taken hostage by a rebel faction in Colombia. “I could never figure out if the rebels were the good guys or the bad guys,” she said. “I kept asking them to explain it, but they couldn’t figure it out, either.” After almost eight years abroad, she’d returned to New York, because, “I just missed it so much. But I still wanted to help out, so I decided, hey, there’s plenty of guerrilla warfare and unknown fevers right here in midtown.”
Lucy was the best sort of do-gooder, as she was driven equally by an almost Quaker decency and by a restless yen for adventure. “It’s terrible to say it,” she told me, “but people in trouble are just so interesting. Every time I pick up a junkie who’s just overdosed and fallen off a bridge into a Dumpster, well, you know he’s got a story to tell. And don’t get me started on domestic disputes, like when he’s late for dinner again and didn’t call, and so she’s decided to use the paella pan as a blunt instrument—I have the best job in the world!”
I loved hearing about Lucy’s day, and, oddly, she couldn’t get enough of mine. “So you were supposed to be teaching a math class,” she’d say, “and you had the kids conduct an imaginary auction of their parents’ art collections, from both before and after the last recession. That’s so cool!” Like me, Lucy was ravenous for information, although unlike me, she was rarely critical. “So when you pick up someone who’s almost castrated himself by masturbating with an industrial vacuum cleaner,” I’d ask, “you’re not allowed to giggle?”
Our mutual fascination became romance because, as Lucy said, “I have got to figure you out.” When we made love, I wasn’t distracted, because we both kept talking; the sex was pleasurable, but it was often exceeded by some wonderful anecdote about a woman who’d tried to hang herself with a jump rope, because she hated aerobic exercise, or by the story of my teaching a high school history class on the evolution of the handshake. Lucy and I were perfectly matched, because we had absolutely nothing in common, with each other or with anyone else on the planet.
As we fell in love, Lucy began allowing me to ride shotgun in her ambulance. While this was technically against the law, no one complained, least of all the sick or injured people, because I would always tell them something upbeat, like “Let’s be honest—it’s just a pinkie,” or “Now you can have any nose you want!” Helping others, and careening through the city with the siren blaring, only brought Lucy and me closer. “We’re perfect together,” Lucy said, “because while I’
m trying to get these people to a hospital and save their lives, you’re reminding them to say thank you.” One night as I climbed on board Lucy received an urgent summons to an address on 126th Street, where we climbed six flights to retrieve the broken bodies of a long-married couple.
Mr. Demetrios, it seemed, was ragingly jealous of his wife, even after twenty-eight years of marriage and seven children. Mrs. Demetrios was a still sensual if hefty woman in second-skin stretch denim cutoffs and a plunging electric pink leotard; she’d used iron-on letters to add the words “HAVE SOME” to her neckline, which contained the breasts that her husband adored and that were large enough to be declared as dependents on his income tax forms. While Mr. Demetrios, who was a musician, had been away for the weekend, playing at a mob wedding in the Adirondacks, Mrs. Demetrios had fallen into bed with his brother.
Mr. Demetrios came home early and caught the adulterers in the act, and he’d then used his saxophone to break his brother’s arm, after which he’d attempted to strangle his wife with an extension cord. Mrs. Demetrios, breaking free, had slammed Mr. Demetrios in the head with an eight-slice toaster. When Lucy and I arrived, all of the parties involved were moaning, yelling, and clutching their mutilated body parts.
“How could you do this?” Mr. Demetrios demanded, as blood gushed from the toaster-sized crater above his dangling ear. “I love you so much!”