Louisa Meets Bear

by Lisa Gornick

  “Do you think I could call him? I mean, what would I say? It’s not as though he ever called me back that time two Christmases ago.”

  Corrine and I go over the options: calling, writing, doing nothing. We settle on calling you at your office, just calling to offer congratulations, I will say. I will suggest a coffee or a beer the next time I’m in the city—with coffee or a beer, you won’t have to refuse if there’s a woman in your life. Corrine instructs me to be warm but cool, to make the invitation sound sincere but nonchalant, as though it just occurred to me as we were talking. We practice, she playing you, me playing me.

  For the rest of the week, I do both parts in my head. Then I dial. When I hear your voice, my mouth goes dry. I put my finger to the receiver and think about hanging up, but I’ve given the receptionist my name. “It’s me, Louisa,” I blurt.

  You respond as though we had spoken yesterday, as though you had called me. “Come down for a weekend,” you say. In the background, I can hear a lot of commotion. I imagine you in a gray-carpeted room with screens all around you like the cockpit of an enormous plane. Perhaps you have your feet up on the laminate surface that serves as your desk. Perhaps you are high enough that you can see the water, the tugboats heading toward the Narrows.

  “The city’s great this time of year,” you say. “We can catch a movie, go out to eat.” You tell me about a restaurant in Tribeca where they sauté soft-shell crabs like in Maryland and serve a Kobe steak with truffles that tastes like you’re in Tokyo. You are flexing your muscles, showing me your newfound urbanity, telling me that you have left Cincinnati and your plumber father and fisherman brother-in-law in the dust.

  “Come Saturday,” you say. I wonder who you have booked for Friday or if you have to move someone from Saturday to make a slot for me.

  *

  On Saturday, I dress carefully in a short skirt with a back vent and a sleeveless silk tee Corrine sent me for my birthday. I add a light jacket with padded shoulders, take off the tee and jacket, try a blouse, and then put the tee and jacket back on. On the train, I thumb through a book on the politics of interpretation lent to me by a comp lit guy. The debate, as far as I can glean, has something to do with whether the world is parsed by class or by sex. Riding to meet you, rising capitalist or is it capitalist tool, my breasts poking against the silk, I have the urge to add my scrawl to the margins. This is bullshit, I would write. What purpose does this serve other than the aggrandizement of the writers and their careers? I feel vicious, and then I realize that already I have put myself in your shoes, the viciousness of the commercial man toward the intellectual and, for that matter, of the intellectual toward the commercial man. Or, for that matter, I continue, of you toward me and me toward you. Then I drift off.

  When I wake, I’m in the tunnel between the 125th Street station and Grand Central. I pull out a compact, powder my nose and chin, and brush out my hair. It’s been nearly four years since I last saw you in the parking lot of Mattie’s Schnitzel Haus. Time has left me more svelte, I’ve been told, and my hair now sports a better cut, but there are also small lines that web out from my eyes.

  You don’t rush forward when you see me. You stand still, arms folded across your chest, in a lean against the ledge of the information kiosk. You watch me approach, your face open and appreciative as you look. When I reach you, you encircle me with your arms, lifting me a little in your embrace. You place your hand behind my shoulder and guide me toward the street and then into a cab that you direct to a place on the East River with a deck over the water. We drink and then we leave and go downtown to eat. You tell me about your work: what a bond really is, who buys them and why, what arbitrage and futures mean, where you stand, as you put it, as a player, the way that the business flows into basketball games at the Downtown Athletic and houses on the North Shore. Reading between the lines, I can see that it is Ivy Club redux, and that again you are courted because you, who were a boy’s boy, are now a man’s man, that men like men with a boom to their voice, that you assuage their anxiety about what a life manipulating money does to their muscles and the length of their dicks.

  Afterward we go to a movie. It’s an artsy foreign thing about a priest who falls in love with a beautiful woman. I have the sense that you have chosen it deliberately, a way of communicating that you know what I will like and how to partake of the cultured platter. I am embarrassed by how erotic it is. The priest undresses the woman. Her skin is pink and moist, like the inside of a conch shell. “You are my proof of God’s existence,” the priest says to the woman.

  “I’ve often thought that about you,” you whisper in my ear.

  From then on, I realize we are beginning again. When the movie ends, you hail a cab, this time to the lot where you store your car. It’s a metallic-gray Mercedes. Your second German car. You unlock the door. I’ve never been inside such an expensive car and for a moment I am scared to get in, scared of the car, scared of you and all about you that I no longer know.

  You drive north on the Henry Hudson and then up the Hutchinson River Parkway. You still drive with the window open, and although I am cold, I am relieved that you have not taken to using the climate control. We talk, but not about Andrew and whomever it is that you’ve been with. I wonder if you’re driving me back to New Haven because her things are still in your apartment or if maybe she herself is there.

  When we get to my apartment, you push me onto my bed before I’ve even turned on the lights or taken off my jacket. You are the first man I have had in this bedroom. You yank my skirt over my hips.

  Afterward, I cry. I can’t tell if I am crying because there is something brutal about the way you touched me or because you’ve stripped my nerves bare or because you feel new and shiny and strange.

  You lie on your back. I pull my skirt back over my hips and lie on my stomach looking down at you. You run a finger along the line from the base of my throat to the hollow of my breastbone. “I’ll do this,” you say. “I can’t stop myself. But we’re star-crossed.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You’d find the people I see, the people who are my friends, a snore. Stupid. Ignorant. Some of them are the same Princeton guys you dismissed five years ago. Others are punks from Brooklyn College who’ve made their way to the floor from the mail room. They don’t read the kind of books you’ve got around here. They’re dirt Republicans. They watch football in the fall and basketball in the winter and baseball until the last World Series game. They drink a lot of beer and they belch and they laugh when somebody farts.”

  Are you sneering at me? You trace a star on my forehead, pull my head down to your mouth. “Star-crossed,” you say before you kiss me again.

  *

  Once, I try to get you to talk about what happened between us that Ocean City summer. It’s September, early evening, and we are at Sachem’s Head beach, the sun an orange ball sinking into the glistening water, the colors sharp and full-hued. All afternoon we’ve been lounging on beach chairs, reading the Times, snacking on the fruit and cheese I buy each weekend before you drive up.

  I angle my chair so I can see your face. “We should talk about it,” I say, “what happened before you took off for North Carolina.”

  Your eyes narrow. Since we’ve been back together, you bristle at anything I say that hints at a demand. “Why is that?”

  “Because,” I say. “Otherwise it will seep back in and poison what we have now.” What we have now: the words feel awkward in my mouth. What do we have now? You drive up Friday nights or I take the train down Friday afternoon. If we’re in New Haven, we go to the beach and eat lobster from a place that serves them broiled over a pit. If we’re at your place, we sleep late and then eat Thai or somewhere downtown, since you have a rule that outside of work you wear only sneakers and jeans. Other than one day at your friend’s summer house in Bay Head, we’ve never seen anyone else during these weekends.

  When we go out, you always pay. At first I tried to pay for at least a few things,
a breakfast here and there, but always you’d object. “You’re a student,” you would say. “It feels odd,” I’ve complained to Corrine, “having all the bills whisked away. Unreal, as though I’m Peter Pan refusing to grow up.”

  “What happened,” you say, “is you left me for a rich-kid drug dealer who’d been off screwing some other girl all summer.”

  “I don’t mean with Andrew. I mean with you.”

  “I’ve told you. I told you that first night in Ocean City. You made me feel like an animal. Like a dog who can’t control himself from sniffing the backside of a female. That’s what I felt like, Louisa. Like I was crawling around sniffing your butt. How much more graphically do you want me to put it? You want me to get down on all fours and demonstrate?”

  I bite my lip to keep myself from crying. You are enjoying hurting me. I put on my sunglasses so you can’t see my eyes.

  “How about you?” I ask. “Why won’t you tell me who you were with these past four years?”

  You roll the business section of the paper into a tube and swat at a fly on your leg. “I was with Carrie Carston for about a year. She was in a training program at another bank. We spent a lot of time at her parents’ villa outside of Rome. It was hot as hell and everyone drank too much and pretended we didn’t know her old man snuck off every afternoon to fuck his mistress. Then Carrie got pregnant, wanted to get married, have the baby, the whole nine yards. It was the year my parents died, and I was completely wrapped up in that. We broke up. Then I met this girl Susan. She lived in my building. She was an actress, had a part in one of the soaps. I was infatuated with her, with how beautiful she was. When she lost her part, I let her move in. But she wouldn’t get out of bed. I’d come home and she’d still be in bed with all this food spread out around her—boxes of cookies, bags of potato chips, cartons of ice cream.”

  You reroll the paper and whack the arm of your beach chair. “One night I found her sticking her finger down her throat. After that I couldn’t stand to touch her. I don’t know, maybe I just didn’t want to be bothered with her problems. I told her I’d help her get her own place. She got hysterical and threatened that she was going to jump out the apartment window. I had to call her mother in Philadelphia, and she came and put her in Gracie Square Hospital.”

  I look out at the horizon. There’s a sailboat silhouetted against the sky, too far away to see any people. It looks like it’s sailing itself. I can hear you swatting at another fly.

  “What else do you want to know?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “I got the picture.”

  *

  In January, we decide to take a trip. You suggest Hawaii, an out-of-the-way island you’d been to with Carrie Carston. I look in the travel section of the newspaper. There’s no mention of this island, but round-trip to Honolulu with seven nights’ lodging is two thousand dollars. I don’t have two thousand dollars.

  “Should I let him take me?” I ask Corrine.

  “Of course. It’s nothing for him.”

  “But he hasn’t offered.”

  “He’ll offer,” Corrine says. But you don’t offer. I wonder if you just assume that you’ll take me or if it never occurs to you that I wouldn’t be able to take myself or if you’re waiting for me to ask. Is that it, I wonder, cat and mouse, and then, smelling danger, I call you and suggest Vermont. “It would be simpler,” I say. “We can just throw our things in the car and go.”

  I reserve us a room in what looks from the picture (gabled roof covered with snowdrifts, a tree-lined drive leading up to the door) like a storybook inn. What is left out of the picture, we discover, is the highway on which the inn sits. You refuse to look at me. I comment on the few redeeming features: the large color TV with cable in the middle of the guest living room, the library of discarded paperbacks, the chocolate mints placed on each pillow. You punch the mattress and declare it filled with sand. We try taking a walk, but it is painfully cold. The hairs inside our nostrils freeze and my toes grow numb.

  “All right, it’s awful,” I say. “Should we go somewhere else?”

  You snort. “You think they’re going to give back the deposit?” The deposit is on your credit card; I let the subject drop.

  That night, you complain that the mattress is injuring your back. I try to interest you in simply holding me and ignoring the bed but you carry on, finally dragging a blanket from the bed and sleeping on the floor. I come and lie beside you. You turn away. I remain awake until I hear you fall into sleep.

  In the morning, we pack up and leave. Back in New Haven, I make pasta with a pesto sauce I keep in the freezer and that you have always told me you love. You eat without talking and don’t finish what’s on your plate. “Look,” I say, “I’m sorry. I obviously didn’t realize the place would be so horrid. But what can I do now? It happened.”

  “It’s not your fault,” you say, but still, after we do the dishes, you tell me that you’re going to leave.

  I am close to tears. I’m sure you can sense this. I count backward from a hundred subtracting threes. I am on the verge of grabbing your coat, telling you that it’s unfair, that you’re punishing me, that you agreed to go to Vermont, that it’s not a sin to make a mistake. Instead, I keep counting. If I make a scene, I say to myself, I will make myself the problem.

  I watch you through the window, unlocking the Mercedes, throwing your bag on the back seat. I hear the engine turning over, see you fiddling with the radio. Then the car door opens and you step out onto the street. My heart pounds and for a moment I think you’re going to come back upstairs, you’ll put your arms around me, and this will all dissolve into a funny story.

  You take off your coat and get back into your car.

  *

  In the morning, you call me. From the sounds of many things clicking, I call tell that you’re back at work. “You went back,” I say.

  “Yeah, the market’s hot. No point missing out.” You pause. “Listen, I’m sorry. I was a real bastard.” I hear another phone ringing. “Hold on, I’ve got to take this.” Three minutes pass before you get back on the line. “There’s a big play about to happen. Can I call you tonight?”

  So we continue. Over the summer, I move in with you. By the fall, we’ve settled into a routine. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I take the train to New Haven. Tuesdays, I stay over with a friend. Thursdays, I take a late train back to the city. Mondays and Fridays, I work in the apartment.

  I learn your trader’s habits as I had once learned your Princeton and then your beachcomber rhythms. I watch as you rise every morning at exactly ten of six, never playing games with the alarm, never pressing the snooze button three, four times as I do. You listen to the news while you shave, hum while you select your tie, lean over to kiss me goodbye before leaving and double-locking the door. I learn that you buy three papers at the newsstand on the corner, thumb through all three on the subway ride downtown, buy a large black sweet coffee, a carton of orange juice, and a bagel with cream cheese from a blind vendor, and are at your desk before seven. On the days that I’m home, you call me midday, inquiring about the progress on whatever course paper I’m writing or the work on my dissertation proposal, giving me the lowdown on what is happening on the floor. “The Turk is leading a raid,” you might say, or “I’ve got this guy by the balls but he refuses to holler uncle and close the goddamned deal.” I learn that after work you walk to your gym, that on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays you lift weights and climb the stair machine, and that on Mondays and Wednesdays you play basketball with a group of Catholic kids from Brooklyn who have found their way onto various trading floors. You call them the Toddlers. You telephone at nine, asking what I want for dinner, and when you arrive, you’re minty-smelling, your hair still damp from the shower, a bag of takeout Chinese, calzones, or roasted chicken under your arm.

  “The only problem,” I say to Corrine, “is sex. We hardly have sex. Is that normal?”

  “What do you mean, ‘hardly’?”

  “I mean hardly,�
� I say, not wanting to let even Corrine know how little hardly is. “Part of it is we barely see each other. If I add up how much time we spend together in a day, not even counting the night I’m in New Haven, it’s not much more than an hour.”

  “Them’s the breaks, sweetheart, with one of those fast-track guys. You don’t think I choose the grungy, wannabe artists for no reason, do you?” Corrine has a point. Although none of her boyfriends lasts more than a year and even the ones in their late thirties seem still like kids, they are there. They listen to her dreams and her thoughts about how the woman with the floppy hat is her anima and how the robber with the stocking cap is her animus. They are interested in what foods she would choose if she could only take three to a deserted island and her ideas about what happens to your body after it’s buried under the ground. With you, in our snatches of time, these things never come to my mind. The agenda is full: catch up with the events of the day, plan for tomorrow.

  After the winter break, I find myself thinking about one of my professors, a young guy with a reddish beard and a certain flair for clothing—an enfant terrible, I’ve been told, always au courant on the latest theoretical discourses and renowned for his sexual escapades. I know that really his passion is for the sound of his own voice, his greatest fascination with the meanderings of his own mind. Still, I can’t help noticing during his Tuesday seminar on French literary theory how he seems to appreciate everything I say or how at the departmental cocktail hours he hovers near. Or how my hand flutters from my glass to push back a strand of my hair, my chin tilting slightly up.

  When I think about it, though, riding the train back to the city, what his kisses might be like, they are, I realize, patterned after yours when we first met, long exploring kisses that moved from my mouth to my throat, kisses that have evaporated, it seems, in the savage light of this, our adult life.

  *

  I can imagine many endings to our story. In one version, I go on to have an affair with this rakish professor. There is an explosive scene. You throw a plate. Lo mein hits the wall, pieces of broccoli and broken dish cover the floor. One or the other of us packs up. Mostly, I imagine it is you emptying drawers, throwing underwear and socks in a bag, grabbing an armload of suits.