Mason’s hand is on my hip.
We climb into a cab, without discussion of the fact that we live in opposite directions. Mason tells me to tell the driver where I live. I do, and before I know it, we are outside my apartment and Mason holds my hand and leads me into my building.
“Emily, you okay?” Robert asks me, standing guard as usual.
“Fine, thanks,” I say, attempting to sound sober. “This is my friend Mason. From work.”
“Nice to meet you, sir,” Robert says, and shakes Mason’s hand. He looks appraisingly at Mason’s suit, decides he looks professional enough, and lets us pass.
“Good night,” Mason and I say, in unison, and step onto the elevator. And suddenly, within the confines of this box, I am nervous and already morning-after sober. We stand against opposing walls facing each other, and Mason smiles at me, one of those knowing smiles that says I can’t wait to see you naked. But he doesn’t kiss me yet, and I am grateful for that. I need a second to regather my nerve. Something about seeing Robert, who greeted Andrew and me practically every night for two years, makes me wonder if this is a good idea after all.
You can do this, Emily. Just look at him. He’s delicious.
We walk into my apartment, which means we walk into my bedroom, because I live in a studio. The place feels smaller with Mason here, and though we are still across the room from the bed, I feel like we are too close to it. I want more steps in between.
“Would you like another drink?”
“No thanks, darlin’,” Mason says, and moves toward me so that we are barely a foot apart. He takes one of his arms and puts it around my back and draws me in closer, so that our faces are almost touching. We are going to kiss. I am about to kiss Mason.
But we still don’t, not yet, anyway. Mason tries to catch my eyes first, to see if it’s okay, but I can’t seem to look up. Instead, I stare at his lips, which any second will be touching mine.
And then we are kissing, very lightly at first. Mason plays it perfectly. He goes for the tiny kisses, little teasing kisses. His lips brush against mine, and he keeps his mouth closed, so I keep mine closed too, and they tickle, these baby kisses. And like they should, our kisses then get stronger, and the tongues come out. I close my eyes; I don’t need to look at his lips anymore to know where they are.
This is a mistake. Not the kissing but the closing of my eyes. It disorients me, and I see Andrew behind my lids. I kiss Mason harder, to make Andrew disappear, the image and the name, bruising my lips against his. I tell myself that Andrew is probably kissing someone else right now, just a train ride uptown, and that I have no reason to feel guilty, or to feel so sad.
He told me to leave him alone. This is me leaving him alone.
And so I keep kissing Mason, but now with my eyes open wide. I look at him as we kiss, up close and clinical. I see his extra eyebrow hairs and a mole under his right cheekbone. Concentrate on his mole. It’s charming. Concentrate on that.
Mason opens his eyes and sees me staring at him, then the kissing stops and he steps back. He takes a moment to catch his breath, to reclaim his words.
“Do you want to do this?” he asks, not angrily but softly.
I decide to keep going with this, with him—this is the way to go—so I don’t answer and just lean in and put my lips against his, and we kiss some more.
“Emily.” He takes a couple of steps away. We make eye contact, and his look says it all: Not like this. I don’t want you like this.
“Is it Andrew?” he asks, though I know he already knows the answer. I nod my head, too disgusted with myself to speak. Why did I have to drag Mason into this?
“Aw, Em,” he says, when he sees that I am near tears. He pulls me against him now, into a friendly hug. “I didn’t know. If I did, I never would have.”
“I know,” I say.
“I just thought it would be fun.”
“You didn’t. I mean, I didn’t. I mean, this is not your fault. I’m sorry, Mason. I thought I could. And it would have been…”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, it would have been fun.”
A tear leaks out and lands on Mason’s suit jacket.
“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” he says loudly, almost too loudly for the empty room.
“What is?”
“This. I’ve been hoping to get you into the sack for years, darlin’.” He lets out a laugh, and this somehow takes the hint of sex out of the air, and it is just us, my old friend Mason and me, here.
“No kidding. Where did you learn to kiss like that? You’re a pro.”
“I know. Girls have been telling me that for years. I think I should patent the technique.”
“Thanks, Mason. For understanding, I mean.” I feel shy and bring my hand to my lips to cover up the evidence.
“No problem. What are friends for?” he says, and tips an imaginary hat toward me, ever the gallant cowboy. “Listen, though, since you got me all riled up, how’s ’bout you give me that new friend of yours’ number. Ruth, right?”
“Sorry, Mace, Ruth doesn’t do booty calls. Wait a second, though. I have an idea.” I take the portable phone into the bathroom, make a quick call, and come back with a scrap of paper. “Remember my friend Jess you used to ask me about all the time?”
“Yeah, the tall hot blonde, right?” he asks, and there is excitement in his eyes now. Jess and Mason have both talked to me about wanting to sleep with the other, though the timing has never worked out.
“Go there. Now. She’s waiting for you,” I say, and hand over her address.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I love you, darlin’,” he says, and kisses me on the cheek.
And before I can say anything back, Mason is already out the door, on his way to have sex with my best friend.
I should make clear that I do believe in casual sex, much the same way I believe in psychopharmaceuticals, and euthanasia, and the right to choose. I want them to be available to me, and the rest of the world, but I would prefer not to have to count on them. And sleeping with Mason tonight might have been a good idea, at the very least statisticswise. My number would have been up to five, which is a bit more respectable and slightly less embarrassing than four (though still countable on one hand) considering I am twenty-nine and have already lived through the years in which I should’ve had a lot of great sex with a lot of interesting people.
But here’s the thing. I know I am no good at casual sex. (Not sex itself, at which I assume I’m about average, no better or worse than the next girl, though probably not nearly as good as Jess, who has had significantly more practice and prepares for it likes it’s the bar exam. She has flash cards.) Had I slept with Mason, tomorrow morning I would have woken up and thought about what it all meant, and it would have meant something to me—though I’m not sure what—but probably not all that much to him. In the scheme of the world, or better yet in my microscopic morsel of the world, the fact of us having sex does not matter at all. And this is true regardless of how skilled Mason may be, since the event would likely not have made it into my autobiography. If I won’t remember it when I am Ruth’s age and shooting the shit with some other old ladies at the Riverdale Retirement Home, then it’s not worth worrying about now.
But here’s the other thing: I am a hypocrite, because even though I know sex with Mason wouldn’t mean anything at all either way, I would still think about it, and worry about it, and wonder about Andrew and Mason, and Mason and Andrew, and me and sex, and how I was, and whether we will do it again, and did it really mean good-bye to Andrew, and can I be as flexible the second time around, and did I smell nice. And I don’t have that kind of energy. So for me casual sex is a lot like dairy. It’s not a good idea, since I don’t stomach it all that well.
After Mason leaves, I lie down in the middle of my bed, stare at the ceiling, and make a mental list of the things in my world that I understand. Two minus one equals one. I am in my apartment because I took a c
ab here and then the elevator and then I opened the door and kissed Mason and then wrote something down which made Mason leave so now I am here alone. Two minus one equals one. That noise is the toilet running because I haven’t called the plumber to fix it. Tomorrow I will wake up after I have slept a little, but not all that much or all that well, and I will have a headache, since I’ll be dehydrated from the six cosmopolitans I drank. Grandpa Jack is disappearing because the nerve cells in his brain are dying, which happens to one in ten people when they get old. Maybe then Ruth is one of the other nine, the safe nine, but who knows, because percentages don’t work like that. Andrew is probably in bed, maybe with someone else, but likely uptown, a whole cab ride or subway trip away. He is far enough that I can’t hear him. Two minus one equals one. Carl’s wife has twins growing in her belly, because his sperm fertilized her egg, which split, and that can happen regardless of how much of an asshole a person is. I don’t know what my father is doing, but I bet it involves budgets and calculations, impossible choices and trade-offs. Two minus one always equals one.
I need to hear someone else’s voice—something real and tangible that I can hold on to before I go to bed. I buzz Robert downstairs.
“Good night, Robert,” I say, through the static of the intercom.
“Good night, Emily,” he says, like he understands. Like people buzz him all the time just to hear his voice.
Thirty-one
Dude, I owe you big,” Jess tells me the next day over the phone, sounding eerily like a frat boy. “That guy should patent his technique.”
“So you didn’t mind my whoring you out?” I feel weird for having sent Mason over to her apartment, this, after all, being my first foray into pimping my friends.
“Are you kidding? You didn’t whore me out. If anything, you whored him out, and he was worth every penny. I’ll spare you the details, considering you passed him along. But let me tell you, you missed out. He might have screwed some sense into your head.”
“Consider it your Christmas gift. Speaking of which, do you want to go shopping today?” I cross my fingers. I dread the thought of spending the day listening to pumped-in Christmas carols alone.
“Sorry,” she says. “Too sore to walk.”
“Dude, I owe you big,” Mason says to me about twenty minutes later, in that same frat-boy tone.
“So you didn’t mind my whoring you out either? I felt bad about everything that happened.”
“Are you kidding? Best night of my life. Like a rodeo, that one. She’s going in the book.” He sighs, like he has just eaten a great meal.
“Want to go holiday shopping with me today?”
“Sorry,” Mason says. “Got whiplash.”
“What are you doing today?” Ruth asks when she calls a little while later. She says it accusingly, as if she can see me right now, sitting on the couch in my pajamas with no intention of leaving my apartment today, or perhaps ever again. Suddenly being outside among the holiday shoppers, and the Salvation Army bells, and the fake department-store snow seems like too much to bear alone. I have heeded the siren call of the television, where the world does not bleed outside its four corners. Everything is safely tucked inside the square and totally irrelevant to my life.
“Nothing much,” I say, which is true, although “nothing much” is an altogether different answer than not showering and rotting away my brain with MTV and my teeth with a bag of Gummy Bears, the latter being the whole truth.
“Well, then, I’ll see you at Bloomingdale’s at one-thirty. We have a group field trip into the city today, and I figure I’ve seen the Rockettes enough times. Anyhow, I need your help picking out some holiday gifts.” My objection is dismissed before I have the chance to make it.
“All right,” I say. Maybe I’ll be able to handle the holiday frenzy with Ruth by my side. She will be my shield, like a personal Marge, only a lot smaller and eighty-four and Jewish.
“And, Emily, there are some things we need to discuss,” she says before hanging up, her voice tender now, like she wants to help me get off this couch. Perhaps she has some career advice, a destination in mind for the pile of résumés I have printed up but haven’t yet figured out where to send.
Or maybe Ruth will become my new Magic 8 Ball, the decision-maker in my life, since the one that I have been using for over a decade seems to be defective. It said Outlook Good when I asked whether I should accept my job offer from APT, again when I asked if I should break up with Andrew. It has steered me toward here.
Today, when I ask whether Ruth will take its place, it gives me a different two-word answer: Very Doubtful. Very Doubtful? I shake it once more, and I get Reply Hazy, Try Again. I try again, as instructed, and when I get the same answer the next three times, I realize something is up. Ruth is going to die. That’s what the Magic 8 Ball is saying from the safety of its unbreakable plastic window. One day, probably in the next five years, ten if we are lucky, Ruth is going to die, and then I will go to her funeral and maybe shovel some dirt onto her coffin. Do they do that at Jewish funerals? Shovel dirt? And I will wake up the next morning—whether we shoveled or not—in a world without Ruth, a Ruthless world, and go about my business. And pretend that it’s all right, that I am perfectly fine, that old people die every day.
“I hate the holidays,” Ruth says by way of greeting when we meet in front of Bloomingdale’s at one-thirty sharp. I have collected myself, and showered, and put on makeup to hide the fact that I have been crying. I hope Ruth doesn’t ask why my eyes are red, because I can’t explain that I have spent the last two hours writing her eulogy in my head. Somehow, I don’t think she’ll understand.
“Look at all these people crowding up the city. I want to tell them all to go home and let me shop in peace,” she says, and links her arm with mine so that we don’t get separated by the acquisitive hordes. I take a deep breath and try to memorize everything about her. The warmth of her wool jacket next to mine, the smell of her Shalimar, which, it turns out, is slightly different from the way it smelled on my grandmother, the sound of her voice. As soon as we are inside, I am immediately overwhelmed by all the stimuli and annoyed that they are interfering with my total absorption of Ruth. Today is the day I will hold on tight, commit her to memory, so that whenever she is gone I am not left hollow.
But I can’t focus, with the flashing lights, the perfumed air, the elbows, the umbrellas, the fucking “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the mothers and daughters. Particularly the mothers and daughters, a holiday advertisement for everything I don’t have and can’t buy. A walking billboard of all the details I have forgotten. Or never thought to remember.
I look at Ruth and link my arm a little tighter. She feels like insulation. She leads me through the crowds and across the store and then does a loop, bringing us back to the spot where we started.
“What do you say we skip shopping and go eat instead?” Ruth asks, and even before I answer she begins leading me downstairs to the café.
“Yes, please.” I can’t walk through here today. I realize that now. It is suffocating, standing under the weight of a thousand shoppers, each hungrily consuming and checking off people from their endless lists. I picture men shopping for their mistresses and for their wives. Daughters shopping for parents and stepparents, brothers and sisters. Half brothers and half sisters. Cousins. Lovers.
My own list is so small that I don’t even have to write it down.
“You look terrible,” Ruth says to me, once we are seated across from each other in the crowded café. Here the atmosphere is still rowdy but contained. Here it doesn’t feel like the collective tension is about to burst.
“Thanks.” I like that Ruth feels comfortable enough with me to say it like it is. “I feel pretty terrible too.”
“Yeah?” she says, asking without pushing.
“Yeah. I’ve been missing Andrew. He said he doesn’t want me to contact him ever again.”
“That must have hurt.”
“Yup. But I as
ked for it, didn’t I?”
“Yes, I guess you did. That doesn’t make it any easier, though, does it?”
“No. And the holidays are hard for me, you know?”
“Me too,” she says. “I always miss Irving most this time of year.”
“What was he like? Irving.”
“It’s strange, but I hate describing him to people, because I can’t do him justice. It diminishes him somehow to turn him into a list of details. The truth is, he was a mensch. You know that word?”
I nod yes.
“Well, that’s who he was. He was just good, and smart, and kind. But shy, shy. I used to do the talking for both of us. His parents got out of Germany just before the war, and they moved to Brooklyn. If you could believe it, they moved right next door to my parents, and we were neighbors growing up. We went to the prom together. We went through everything together. He knew every incarnation of me—when I was a skinny schoolgirl, when I was an angry prosecutor, when I sat on the bench. It’s hard now, because he didn’t get to meet this version of me—Senior Citizen Ruth.”
“You mean Kick Ass and Take No Prisoners at Poker Ruth?”
“That one too. He’d have been impressed. You know what? I think the holidays are hard for everyone. We are all putting on a big show. The holidays are an elaborate way of saying to the world ‘I am okay.’ If you have gifts to give and parties to go to, then your life must be all right, right?”
“I guess.”
“Have you ever seen someone laugh at a funeral?” Ruth asks me out of nowhere, and I wonder if somehow she knows about my friends and me after my mother’s wake. When we laughed in a corner—hysterical, shrill laughter—because it was the only thing we knew how to do.
“Yup.” Because it is Ruth, I give more. “After my mother’s funeral, that’s what I did. And the funny thing was, it actually felt funny. Hilarious, even. It was so ridiculous, it couldn’t be anything else but funny.”
The Opposite of Love Page 21