“Ivy, it’s okay,” I said. “Just get dressed and we’ll get out of here.”
“I’m not coming out. I feel terrible about what I said about Isaac,” she sobbed. “I don’t know why I did that. Why do you think I did that?”
“I don’t know, it doesn’t matter,” I said.
“I think when I set you up with Isaac I didn’t really think you would like him.” Or that he would like me, I thought. “I’ve been upset about my break up with Guy-Antoine.”
“Open the door, Ivy, okay?” I smiled at the salesgirl, pointed to the dressing-room door, and twirled my finger near my ear so the salesgirl would know I knew Ivy was a complete nutjob.
Ivy opened the door, topless again, with the straps of the pineapple bra dangling loosely around her wrists like handcuffs.
“I’m so embarrassed,” she said.
“Come on, get dressed. I’ll buy you the bra as a present.”
“You would do that?”
“Yes,” I said. “To thank you for setting me up with Isaac.”
“And you promise you won’t tell Isaac what I said about him?”
“I promise,” I said. I would tell him as soon as possible so he could finally be done with her.
“Actually, do you have the one she’s getting in my size?” she asked the salesgirl. “So we can match. Any celebrities been in lately? Call me if anyone comes in?” She handed over her business card and I handed over my credit card. Ivy seemed cheered up.
We left swinging our tiny pink shopping bags.
I might as well have saved my money because when I pulled off my shirt in front of Isaac and revealed the black lace bra, he barely noticed it.
“Is there an electric socket near the bed?” he asked, glancing around my bedside tables from Iris, Isabel, and Isolde. I was a little shocked by his question because I didn’t know what he wanted to plug in. I didn’t really go in for electronic devices on the fifth date. “Oh, here’s one.”
He went over to his CHANNEL THIRTEEN tote bag and pulled something with a long cord out of it. When he unfurled it and plugged it in, I realized it was his cell phone charger. God forbid Ivy Vohl couldn’t reach him.
After he had taken care of his cell phone, leaving it on, I noticed, he turned his attention to me. We had nice, friendly, almost intimate sex. Almost loving sex. He made me take my bra off in the middle of it.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
“I love you,” he said. He said it passionately, but sleepily, but with total abandon as if it had just spouted out of him. He said it the way I had walked out on him at Pastis, like a reflex action, beyond his control. I had never heard those words before without having to anguish first. “Hel-lo?” he said, obnoxiously. “I believe I just said I love you.”
“Hel-lo?” I said. And then after a moment I said, “You don’t even know me.” Then after another moment I said, “I love you too.” I decided I would say it now and worry about it later.
“I love you, Rebekah,” he said again.
“I love you too,” I whispered. But love wasn’t really the word for it. More amazement that I liked him so much and that he liked me.
I shouldered into the crook of his arm and remembered how incredibly lonely I had been.
“Ivy said she really likes your father,” Isaac said.
“In what way?” I asked.
“I don’t know. She said he’s fascinating. I’d like to meet him. And your mother.”
I had never heard my father described as fascinating before. “Okay,” I said, knowing I would put that off for as long as possible. I was so angry at my father that I couldn’t even let myself think about him.
“And you don’t have any brothers or sisters.”
“Who told you that?” I asked.
“I think you did,” he said. “Or maybe Ivy. Why? Do you?”
"Let’s just sleep,” I said, softly. In the past this had always been a question I’d been able to answer easily, without thinking, like most people. Now, I didn’t know what to say. I felt like a woman waiting to tell people she’s pregnant—should I wait to hear a heartbeat, wait for the doctor’s okay before spreading the happy news?
“Rebekah, what’s wrong?”
"Nothing,” I said. "What about your parents? You haven’t told me anything about them.”
“My mother lives in Florida and is obsessed with tennis, and my father’s dead.”
“Oh,” I said. I had no idea what to say next. He’d been matter-of-fact about it. “How old were you when it happened?”
“Sixteen. Junior in high school.”
“You were so young.” The word “young” just sulked there for a minute.
“He was a drunk. He and I went to look at colleges.” I braced myself the way I had to for wildlife documentaries, prepared for the worst. “We went to a restaurant for dinner and then he was driving us back to our motel, drunk, and he saw a roadside bar. I remember it was called Snyder’s and had Dobermans in a big pen in the front. I said I wouldn’t go in there with him, and he said it was his car and he’d do what he wanted with it. So I got out of the car and walked back to the motel, more than ten miles, and he drove frantically up and down the road looking for me and got into an accident and was killed. The car went up in flames.”
“My God, that’s terrible,” I said.
“If I had gone into the bar with him we both would have probably been fine.”
“You don’t know that,” I said.
I thought of Isaac, a teenager, trudging stubbornly along the road. I wrapped my arms around him.
“I’m glad you weren’t in the car,” I said. He seemed to slip far away from me. I’d said the wrong thing. “Are you sad?” I whispered.
“N’I’ve made my peace with it. He was a drunk, I was an ass. The worst part is when I got back to the motel I was so angry I sat at the little desk they had and wrote him a very detailed letter telling him how sick and tired I was of his shit, and then there was a knock on the door and it was the police telling me he was dead. So that’s my sordid past. I was a real little man back then. Twenty years ago.”
“I was a real little man back then too. Twenty years ago,” I said. “In my sordid past.”
I thought about my father driving me to the airport for my trip to Disney World and how after that, everything’d changed. I’d gone to look at colleges by myself. And I started to cry, but it was the kind of crying I sometimes did where my face remained serene and unmoved, as if my face and body were refusing to acknowledge the fact. Sometimes I stored my tears in my cheeks like a chipmunk, and I’d suddenly turn into Dizzy Gillespie. Isaac didn’t know I was crying until tears wet the hair on his chest.
“I don’t mind if you feel sorry for me,” Isaac said. He held my hand. “Thank you for being so nice to Ivy. You know, I don’t have family here, or anywhere really, and she’s been like a sister to me. We should take her out to dinner to thank her for setting us up.”
“I think we’ve thanked her enough,” I said.
“I don’t think so.”
"I bought her a...” I stopped because I didn’t want to say the word “bra” and conjure up an image of Ivy Vohl’s enormous breasts. “Lunch,” I said.
I fell asleep thinking about the terrible things she had said about him and wondering if I would be doing him a favor to tell him, or if it would just hurt his feelings.
When I woke up in the morning I noticed that the sheets were very damp. Isaac was still sleeping next to me, with his curly hair flattened over his forehead, making him look like a kid. He must have sweated a lot in the night.
He opened his eyes and I switched on Little House on the Prairie. Eliza Jane, Almanzo’s sister, was coming to town to teach school, which meant that Laura meeting Almanzo was not too far off. Eliza Jane was a wonderful sister to Almanzo; my eyes started to fill with tears.
He threw the covers off him and said, “What’s this? Everything’s wet.”
“You must have sweated a lot,”
I said.
But then we both noticed that his whole side of the bed was soaked through. The sheets smelled like pee. He had peed in my bed. “Oh my God, Rebekah, I’m so sorry.” He had such a surprised and embarrassed expression on his face, I had to stop myself from laughing.
“Do you do this a lot?” I asked.
“No!” he said, mortified. “I mean, I’ve never done it before. I mean, since I was five.”
A man wetting the bed at age thirty-five was definitely a new dating dilemma for me. This made my having thrown up on his penis seem like the most normal thing in the world.
I thought about the other men I’d been with. Nathan, with his tight hamstrings and Pratesi sheets, washed and ironed by his cleaning lady twice a week. If he’d let loose and pissed on them just one time, I might still be with him. When we started dating, he hadn’t even let me visit him in the hospital when he’d had his appendix out.
“Do you think it happened because you told me the story about your father dying?” Asking the question like that made me sound like Ivy Vohl.
“No, I think it happened because I dreamt there was a fire and I had to put it out with a long hose,” he said. “You should be happy, I saved us with my big hose.” He started to laugh.
I was going to point out that he’d said his father’s car had gone up in flames, but I thought better of it.
“Too bad you weren’t downtown on September eleventh.” I quickly stripped my bed and blotted the mattress with sopping wet towels. I couldn’t remember much from Hebrew school, but something about the pee felt Biblical. My bed felt like an ark. A man certainly wasn’t going to leave a woman after revealing himself like that. He was mine—if I wanted him after this—and it felt like he’d broken a bottle of champagne on our bow.
Two if by sea, I thought.
“I brought the concept of the wet spot to a whole new level,” Isaac said. He seemed almost to be enjoying this.
“Maybe you can use some of Mrs. Williams’ Depends.”
“You won’t mention this to Ivy, will you?” he said.
“I wasn’t planning to mention it to anyone.” I wasn’t exactly proud of it. It wasn’t the kind of thing I couldn’t wait to tell people. My new boyfriend wets the bed! But I did embarrassing things too. I lactated, for one thing.
“I’ll pay for the laundry,” he said.
The fact was, I didn’t feel squeamish or disgusted by the pee in my bed the way I was by the cups of it on the bathroom sink in my father’s office. It wasn’t the pee of old people, it was the pee of Isaac, and therefore it was okay. I had an incredible urge to call my ex-shrink to tell her how far I’d come—I was able to love, to accept a man with all his flaws, to let love leak out the way it wanted to—but school was starting, Miss Wilder was ringing the bell, and the children were filing into the one-room schoolhouse, younger children in front, older students, like Laura and Nellie and Willie Oleson, in the back. “Good morning, children,” Miss Wilder said, and even though I already knew, I had to see what was going to happen.
16.
At 33, she briefly takes up residence at One Fifth Avenue
After we showered and got dressed, Isaac went to the Quille, carrying the wet sheets and towels in a laundry bag slung over his shoulder to drop off at the Aphrodite cleaners, and I went to a café to sit and think about him. It’s the best thing in the world to be alone when you’re in love. It’s so much more relaxing than being with the person and just waiting for them to do something at any moment to ruin everything.
Nothing could go wrong as long as I was there in that café. I’d had a boyfriend when I’d left the house that morning, and I’d still have one at the end of the day.
I sat in a chair next to the window, watching shopping bags walk by. It was three days before Christmas and the place was filled with gay guys but it didn’t matter because I had a boyfriend. We were going to Bret Easton Ellis’ Christmas party together that night and Isaac and I were spending Christmas with Mrs. Williams. My L.A. friends—surprise—had decided to stay in L.A. this year. I usually visited my mother in Woodstock, but I couldn’t face her now that I knew she had kept Sascha from me.
I wanted to tell someone about Isaac, and, in a burst of enthusiasm, I called my ex-shrink. Her machine picked up and as soon as I heard her voice, I got choked up.
“Hi, this is Rebekah Kettle,” I said. I could picture her in her tiny office, hear the white-noise machine whirring on the floor outside the door. “Uh,” I said, trying to think what it was I had wanted to tell her. “This is going to sound strange, but I just found out I have a sister. . . .”
I stopped talking because a black girl walked by and even though I hadn’t really seen her face, and didn’t even know for sure that she was black, I wondered if it was Sascha. I realized I’d been staring very intently at black women ever since finding out about her. The machine cut me off with a long beep.
I sat there for a little while, drinking cappuccinos and looking at black people walk by, trying to decide what to do. And then it occurred to me that maybe I didn’t have to do anything. Maybe this was my father’s problem, not mine. Maybe when Isaac asked me if I had a sister I could say no, because so far she was just a manila folder, a newspaper clipping, a childhood photo, and a clove-scented memory, and those things didn’t add up to much of a sister. Or maybe if he asked me if I had a sister, which I realized he might never ask me again because most people only ask you a question like that once, I could just say, “Yes, but not very much of one.”
Maybe I could just forget I’d ever found out about her. She might be crazy. She might be stupid, or worse, successful. Irmabelle, with her teddy bears and Precious Moments figurines, wasn’t exactly a genius, but what if Sascha had gotten my father’s math and science genes, and was a Westinghouse winner or something? What if she wanted me to fork over some of my grandmother’s jewelry, I thought. I instinctively felt for the aquamarine ring I had put on that morning, to make sure it was still there, as if I expected my grandmother to have already snatched it off my finger.
It might all be a trick. Irmabelle might have told my father Sascha was his daughter and he’d been too kind and polite to demand a DNA test. But he was a doctor, I thought. He could collect his own evidence, undiscovered, in the middle of the night, swab the insides of cheeks, pluck hairs from heads, send vials of blood off to a laboratory.
I stood up ready to confront my father, and then sat down again. Maybe he’d just wanted to protect me.
I dialed Isaac on my cell phone and was surprised when my father answered. His voice was harried and upset. “Dr. Kettle.”
“Hi,” I said. It took me a second to realize I’d dialed my father’s office by mistake. It was incredibly creepy to have called my boyfriend and reached my father.
“Rebekah?” he asked.
No, it’s Sascha, I felt like saying.
“Rebekah, where the hell are you?”
Three black girls walked down the street, carrying shopping bags and laughing.
“Rebekah?”
“Yeah, Dad,” I said. “Sorry, I couldn’t come in today. I had a publishing lunch.”
“Oh, well, that’s nice,” he said. “Listen, I’m glad you called. We have to keep tabs on your peripheral vision. There’s not much we can do about it, but if your vision starts to drastically decline, I think we should know about it. I want you to have a field-of-vision test to use as a baseline, so we can better monitor that tumor of yours. I arranged for you to have a drop-in appointment with Dr. Max today. I’d like for you to take care of this promptly.”
“Fine,” I whined, feeling confused because I should have been confronting him, not obeying his medical advice.
“Okay, good,” he said. “The other line’s ringing. Hold on,” he said and hung up.
I paid my check and took a cab uptown to Dr. Max’s office.
I had always hated going to Dr. Max’s office since I was a kid, waiting for hours, being told your vision is getting
worse, leaving with dilated pupils barely able even to hail a cab.
I waited helplessly for my name to be called. The waiting room was filled with old people. The women behind the desk didn’t look up when they handed me the clipboard for me to update my information. They were so angry and miserable, I wondered how they had so many Christmas cards taped to their wall. My waiting room only had one old person at a time but this one was chock-full of them.
I tried to turn my attention to the clipboard. I filled in my name and birth date and then stopped for a moment on marital status. They didn’t have IN LOVE as a choice, so I circled MARRIED since it felt more right somehow than SINGLE. It felt so good that I decided to answer the other questions as if it were in the future and my life was appropriately improved. I made myself taller and considerably thinner. I gave myself two children, health insurance, and the address of a building I had always wanted to live in, One Fifth Avenue. Although it didn’t ask, I wrote in (Three Bedroom Apartment).
All the old people started clucking because a little boy, about five years old, walked into the waiting room. They all stared at him so intently it was as if they thought whomever he turned his gaze on first would instantly become young again. The boy carefully avoided them all, demanded his lollipop in advance, and then sat down next to his mother who had sat down next to me and was trying to sneak a peak at my clipboard. I tilted it subtly in her direction.
“Rebekah Kettle?” she said.
I turned to her. “Candi?” It was Candi Miranda, one of my five best friends in elementary school. Her father had been a famous newscaster. I practically lived at their apartment on Sutton Place.
She turned to the woman sitting on the other side of the little boy. “Mom, you remember Rebekah Kettle.”
“Mrs. Miranda! You look great,” I said. I had always been so good with my friends’ mothers. As if it were yesterday, I remembered us at Serendipity, Candi and I eating our favorite things, vichyssoise and foot-long hot dogs.
“This is Scott. He’s getting his first pair of glasses,” Candi said, patting her son, who just shrugged and kept his eyes on his little game. “You have children!” she said, pointing to my questionnaire. “That’s lucky.”
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