by Tara Conklin
“When will they know about the baby?” Jonathan asked. “I mean, the long-term effects?”
“Well, it could be tomorrow,” answered Renee. “Or it could be years. This kind of early trauma, we don’t know when or how it might show up.”
She thought about her father and that day of fishing, the bloody worms on the hook, the cans of sweet Coke, and about her brother Joe. I can stop, Renee. Don’t worry, he’d said to her. Why didn’t people understand the responsibility that came with being the subject of someone’s love? It made her so angry. How easy it would have been for that man and woman to keep their baby safe. How easy it would be for Joe to stop what he was doing. He wasn’t an addict, not the strung-out, desperate kind. Maybe he was addicted now, but it was pure laziness. Pure stupid indulgence and privilege. He could get high when and how he wanted, and so he did. It felt good, Joe had told her, like excitement, like sex, almost like falling in love.
“You’re a fast walker,” Jonathan said then. “I can barely keep up.”
Renee stopped. “What did you say?”
“You walk very fast.”
“How do you—” Renee looked around her. Directly across the street stood Jonathan Frank, holding his phone to his ear. He waved at her with his good hand.
There was some traffic on the street, and at that moment a white van rolled past, obscuring Jonathan, but then it passed and there he stood, smiling at her. Still waving. Renee waited for the light to change, and then she crossed the street.
Chapter 7
Kyle Morgan lived in one of those mammoth gray stone buildings on Central Park West that evoked scenes of women in dresses nipped at the waist and men wearing spats. A timeless building that would outlast us all. I’d been here before—Kyle and Joe had been friends since college—but the gravity of the place still stunned me every time.
The doorman wore a long black coat and gave a slight bow before leading me through a dim marble reception to the old-fashioned elevator with its brass buttons and clanking, accordion-style door. Up, up, up we went, the tinkling sound of music and conversation growing louder as we ascended. At the top the door opened directly onto Kyle’s apartment.
Inside was an expanse of richly polished wood floor and rugs patterned with giant yellow roses and blue, heady hydrangeas. Paintings hung on every wall, each lit by a brass oblong light. A young woman wearing a tuxedo handed me a champagne flute. Waiters circulated with trays of pink and white and green food: mini lobster rolls, salmon sashimi, shrimp on bamboo spears. Somewhere, someone played a piano. I saw no one I knew, just men in suit jackets and jeans, women in tight complicated dresses, all of them buffed and polished to a high shine. Along the far wall stretched a wide bank of windows filled with the greenery of Central Park.
I was nervous. Standing on the edge of Joe’s party, I worried about the poem I had written. Was it too sentimental or not sentimental enough? Too edgy, too sexual? Caroline had clapped her hands at the end, but I didn’t know what Joe would think, or Sandrine.
I scanned the crowd looking for Noni and Renee. And where was Joe? In the week since helping Caroline in Hamden, I’d wondered often about my brother. He hadn’t returned any of my calls or e-mails. I wanted to believe that Renee was overreacting, that Joe was fine, but small incidents kept creeping to mind: Joe late for a lunch, Joe distracted, Joe and Sandrine talking in urgent whispers. His bloodshot eyes, uneasy smile, and always the same explanation: I’m tired, that’s all. Just tired.
Finally I spotted my brother. He stood behind an ornately carved and painted screen pushed close to the wall. The screen created a small shadowed space, inside of which Joe was talking to a woman. I saw them only because of my position beside the elevator; from all other points in the room, the screen would have shielded them from view. I did not appreciate this at the time. Only later.
The woman was young and pretty, with long strawberry-blond hair tucked behind an ear, a high flush to her cheeks. She smiled and laughed, throwing her head back to expose a thin white throat. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place her. I started toward them, and at that moment Joe rested a hand on the woman’s forearm. One hand, the fingers circling bare skin. He leaned in—he was so animated, was he telling a joke?—and put his face beside hers. And then he pulled away, removed his hand. Again she laughed.
Then Joe directed his gaze out toward the party. His eyes met mine. There was no shame or hesitation, just a full smile as he moved smoothly away from the woman to greet me.
I thought nothing of the scene. It wasn’t until weeks later that I remembered the woman, the delicious rose-gold color of her hair, the lily white of her throat. She had not looked uneasy or bothered in any way by Joe’s attentions. No, she was comfortable, happy in the glow of his company.
“Hi, little sister,” Joe said, and hugged me. At thirty, Joe still had the bearing and biceps of an athlete, though he hadn’t played sports in years. Tonight he wore a pale blue shirt that glimmered like a cool liquid beneath the dim party lights. He was half drunk—I could see it in the ruddiness of his cheeks and the slightest slur of his voice—but it made him soft, not sloppy.
“I can’t wait to hear the poem,” Joe said. “Sandrine is excited, too.”
Joe took my coat and wrapped his arm around my shoulders, and together we walked into the party. Joe greeted friend after friend, introducing me to people I hadn’t met before, stopping to chat with old teammates from the Bexley Mavericks and fraternity brothers from Alden College, their wives and girlfriends.
“Tore my Achilles,” said Langdon, a friend of Joe’s from work, who wore a clunky black orthopedic boot. “Marathon training. But next year, Joe, how ’bout it?”
Joe nodded. “You bet,” he answered. “Let’s do it.”
To stand beside my brother like this, in a room so grand, was not like being Cinderella at the ball but close. It was to absorb the radiant goodwill reflected off him, the headiness of all this love and adoration. I felt myself stand taller, hold my face as the wives and girlfriends held theirs, with crescent smiles, cheeks sucked in to accentuate the bones.
Joe wandered deeper into the party, pulled forward by his friends. For a brief moment, I was alone, watching him, my heels unbalanced on the thick carpet.
And then from behind me came a voice. “Fiona? Is that you?”
I turned. The man was skinny in the knobby way of a kid who’d grown too fast. His face held some of that boyishness, too—freckles, green eyes, hair the color of a rusty ten-speed—but he carried himself with adult confidence, easily holding not champagne but a beer bottle. He leaned forward to kiss my cheek, and without thinking I offered it up.
“I thought that was you,” he said.
“It’s me,” I said, and stepped back. I recognized him, but a name and context escaped me.
He saw my uncertainty. “Fiddler on the Roof?” he said. “‘Tradition’?”
“Tradition.” And then it came back: a pink-and-blue sky, the Bryant Park outdoor-movie season just begun. We had a mutual friend, was that it? Or a mutual friend’s cousin, one of those connections that was entirely circumstantial and forgettable. After a brief flirtation, we had pulled our blankets together to share a bottle of wine.
“Poor Tevya,” he’d whispered as the movie played. “All he wants is to keep his daughters safe.”
“And marry them off to old men,” I whispered back.
The T-shirt he’d worn felt soft as skin.
That night I’d pretended to be a philosophy grad student at NYU, a waitress on my off days at a Mexican place in Chelsea, a relatively new arrival to New York, still starstruck by the skyscrapers and wide avenues.
Afterward what had I written about this man? He was, I believed, number twenty-three.
“What’s your connection?” Man #23 asked now, circling his finger in the air. “Bride?”
“No, groom,” I answered. I looked toward Joe but saw only his tall back rising from the crowd. This was the first time my worlds
had collided in this way, and I didn’t like it. At some future point, yes, I would tell Noni about the blog, I would show my siblings and explain the feminist underpinnings, read to them the many comments I received, the discussions that were sparked by my posts—my words! my experience! Time Out New York had featured The Last Romantic the previous month in a piece about virtual communities and feminist blogging. Watch out, men of New York, the journalist had written. The Last Romantic might make you her next subject. In the days after, I’d received a few tantalizing e-mails from literary agents sent to the blog’s general address. But I hadn’t returned any of them. I wasn’t ready yet to lose my anonymity.
As I stood with Man #23, I was jittery and distracted, wanting only to escape him before Joe or Noni saw us talking. And before he formed some connection between our night together and the blog. Did he read it? Had he recognized himself? Generally my posts revealed personal details about the men I slept with. Never names, of course, but there were other ways to identify a person. Tattoo, birthmark, snaggletooth, scar. I was candid when evaluating my partners’ sexual techniques, their understanding of a woman’s body, their kissing, their intelligence. More than one commentator had called me cruel.
But Man #23? The details of our encounter were escaping me. What had I written? As he smiled at me, his green eyes reflected spots of gold. His eyelashes were the same rusty red as his hair.
“It’s great running into you,” I said now to the man. “But I . . . I have a boyfriend, and he’s here, and this is a little awkward.” I flashed him what I hoped was a winning, sincere smile. These days I never hesitated to lie; I’d even stopped recognizing them as lies. They were simply a part of the project, as necessary as my keyboard or computer.
“It’s Will, by the way,” he said. “It’s okay, I forget people’s names all the time. Good luck with that boyfriend.” And Man #23—Will—turned away and disappeared into the crowd.
* * *
During those first years after the Pause, my siblings were busy with after-school activities and friends and homework, but I was home promptly at two forty-five with nothing to do, no one to play with, and so Noni hired our neighbor, Iris Durant, to look after me. Iris had brown eyes set very close together and a quick, high-pitched laugh. She was eighteen, just graduated from Bexley High with atrocious grades and a disinterested mother. She agreed to take the babysitting job until something better—anything, really—presented itself.
This was in the mid-1980s, the Reagan era of Just Say No and a blond Tipper Gore warning us about the corrupting effect of dirty song lyrics. Since the Pause had ended, I’d become the kid who was always asking questions. Probably this had to do with attention seeking or trying to make sense of Noni’s vivid return. I never asked about anything useful—how does the television operate, say, or why do we catch colds?—but only questions that were elusive and unanswerable and always about people. Why do some people get married and some not? Why do women carry their wallets in handbags and men in pockets? How long can a person go without talking? How long does it take to fall in love?
I suppose this is how the game with Barbie began. Perhaps I asked Iris a question about sex. Or perhaps it was just boredom. Bexley on a sodden spring weekday afternoon was no place to be. We had Barbie dolls by the dozens, not bought by Noni—perish the thought!—but handed down by the friendly parents of older girls who had moved on to other games. Barbie ballerinas and Barbie stewardesses, Barbie nurses and singers and brides. One wore a green sequined sheath that curled up her plastic body like a giant snake. I thought of Barbie’s hard, jutting breasts as some sort of weaponry, torpedoes, perhaps, or small bombs, and the denuded, squared-off space between her legs as a mysterious slot into which a mechanical tab might fit.
For years Barbie was my example of womanhood. Noni was not a woman; she was our mother, too much and too close. Our friends’ mothers were irritated carpoolers, bleary-eyed pancake makers. A quick, dark ride to the movies. A hatted figure clapping lazily at a soccer game. But Barbie wore frilly dresses and pliable plastic heels. Barbie stared dully from blue eyes painted beneath a crescent of long, pretty lashes.
It was Iris who took it upon herself to teach me the mechanics of sex. For this exercise she used the Barbies.
“First they get married, then they do it,” Iris would say.
I dutifully marched Barbie the bride down an imaginary aisle toward our lone Ken. Ken had fewer clothing options than Barbie; his limbs were not as supple.
“Does she have to marry him?” I asked.
Iris shrugged. “That’s usually how it works, but it’s not like there’s a law or anything.”
Iris showed me how to make Barbie have sex missionary style with Ken and I soon extrapolated from her examples. Over time the couplings I conceived grew increasingly complex and difficult to arrange. I might include the adolescent Skipper, for example, or the small, posable figure of Batman’s Robin, though he was burdened with painted-on clothing. I don’t know where this erotic imagining came from. Iris herself was surprisingly conservative.
“Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” I asked her one afternoon. “Your mom works nights.”
Iris was polishing her nails a brilliant bubblegum pink, and the acetone stench filled the kitchen. This was generally how the afternoons with Iris progressed: I returned from school, she pulled a snack from the refrigerator—salami, cheese, yogurt—and I ate while watching her perform some act of personal decoration. Hair braiding, makeup application.
Now Iris paused in her polishing to consider my question. “Oh,” she sighed, “boyfriends are too much work. All they want is for you to go places with them and put your hand on their you-know-what. It’s disgusting, actually.” She resumed her nail polish with a little shiver.
I was prepubescent, no breasts to speak of, still two years away from pubic hair and a first period, but of course I knew the implication of a you-know-what. Why disgusting? I had never in my life seen pornography or a naked man other than my brother, but I had glimpsed the covers of the girlie magazines displayed on the high shelves at the pharmacy. Once I had spotted the high-school calculus teacher, Mr. Louden, standing at the rack, flipping casually through the pages as though it were his birthright to look at naked women under the pharmacy’s fluorescent glare while the rest of us passed through with our cough-syrup needs and prescriptions for eardrops. I watched as he tilted the magazine, pulled out an oversize page, raised his eyebrows. A small, secret smile.
Years later, after I began The Last Romantic blog, I would remember those magazine covers. They suggested something so alluring, so corrupting that they were safe only on the highest shelf, where children and women could not reach. Female sex appeal was dangerous. Sexual desire something expressible exclusively by men. My friends’ fathers, male teachers, older brothers. All of them, reaching for that high shelf.
Where, I asked myself even then, was my high shelf? And what wonders would I find there?
* * *
With Will gone I searched in earnest for Noni, worrying that she had seen us speaking and that I would be forced to explain. Noni did not recognize boundaries when it came to us, her daughters, our skin problems or boyfriends or job prospects. Her questions were always frank and pointed, designed to elicit answers that contained enough salient information for her to critique. Dodging Noni’s questions had become a sport for my sisters and me, a verbal tennis match with Noni always retaining the serve. I could only imagine what she’d do with Will and the kiss he’d delivered.
But I didn’t need to worry. When I found her, Noni stood alone at the edge of the party, looking out of place but not uneasy in her black cotton dress and chunky hippie necklace. In late middle age, Noni carried a mystical sort of self-possession that set her apart from all the showy money here. She never wore makeup, and had let her hair grow long again, curled and crazy like mine.
“It’s about time,” Noni said as we hugged. “I was thinking you’d forgotten how to get uptown.”
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“I’m not that late,” I said, feeling chastised and annoyed and then silly for feeling chastised and annoyed. I was a grown-up. I could come and go as I pleased.
“I was trying to talk wedding details with Sandrine’s mom, but she kept asking me about the feral-cat problem.” Noni rolled her eyes. Sandrine’s mother, Jacinda, bore an eerie resemblance to Iggy Pop: blond and bland, thin as a racing dog. She spent the majority of her time serving on the boards of various charities related to pets. It did not surprise me that she and Noni had trouble communicating.
“What did she say about cats?” I asked, remembering the ones from Caroline’s new house. I had in the end taken them all to a shelter in Queens. My feckless roommates hadn’t wanted a kitten, not even the smallest one with the white-blue eyes, but I had lied to Caroline and told her I’d found homes for them all.
“Apparently it’s a huge problem in the suburbs. All these dirty, skinny cats wandering around. Jacinda wants to tour some pet place when she comes to Bexley.” Noni had invited Sandrine’s parents to stay overnight with her later in the week, a decision she regretted deeply once she learned that Jacinda was gluten-intolerant and abstained completely from alcohol.
For a moment Noni and I stood at the window, gazing out as one by one the streetlights flared on in Central Park. Standing so close to this wall of glass induced in me a sense of vertigo, as though the trees and lights and people moving sludgily along the park path were all traveling toward me, or me toward them. Inside and out, up and down. I closed my eyes and turned away.