Carrie Pilby

by Caren Lissner

  Petrov leans forward. He’s excited.

  “And we ended around four a.m. And he lives near me, so we got into the hired car together.”

  And then, I think, we stopped in front of a huge mansion, and he said, “I live here. Would you like to skinny-dip in the indoor pool?” So we ripped our clothes off and raced to the water. Under the skylight, we tasted every inch of each other’s wet bodies. After we came up, I could see the love in his eyes, as well as the redness from the chlorine.

  “So he started talking to me, and he said he just graduated from college, and we had some things in common, and we agreed to meet up at Barnes & Noble that weekend.”

  “Great,” Petrov says. “So how was that?”

  “It was all right. We didn’t have much to talk about. And he got weird. He has all these strange food preferences.”

  “Like what?”

  Boy, is he nosy. “He skips breakfast every day, and made me feel guilty about wanting anything with fat in it. And then, at the end of the date, he said, ‘I’ve never seen anyone drink juice from a jar before.’”

  Petrov laughs. I think the laughter is partially to encourage me, to make me feel like what I’ve done is normal.

  “Maybe that was a compliment,” Petrov says. “Maybe he’s hoping…never mind.”

  Ah, so I am not the only one with my mind in the gutter. But I decide to feign innocence. “What?”

  “Nothing. So are you two going to see each other again?”

  “No. He’s weird.”

  “But….”

  “You said one date. If I have to go on a second, I want time and a half.”

  Petrov settles back. “Well, so was it a bad experience? Honestly, were you glad you did it?”

  I have to think. “It didn’t change my life,” I say. “But I guess I wouldn’t have been doing anything more important at home.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Petrov says. “What else are you up to?”

  “I went to that church,” I say. “It’s actually not bad. I’m going to help them get publicity for their church group for people in their twenties. They want to get young professionals in town to start coming back to church.”

  “Wonderful!”

  “At first I thought it was a cult. I don’t want to be bought off. But it seems okay.”

  “Maybe you should trust your instincts,” he says. “You might be heading in the right direction.”

  “I might,” I say.

  He beams.

  “But there’s a weightier topic I want to talk about today,” I say. “Something’s been confusing me.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  “Well, I know this guy who cheats on his fiancée. And I know that a lot of people cheat. The whole cheating thing has me confused. You know how I’ve always said that people are hypocrites and don’t stick by anything? Well, I’m sure when people get married, they never intend to cheat. They take an oath. But so many people do end up cheating. And I know marriages are long, and they can get dull. But does this make it right?”

  Petrov takes a deep breath. “Well,” he says, “I guess it’s situational. Each person has to decide for him or herself what’s right.”

  “Are you saying there might be cases where cheating is right? Even though the other person doesn’t know about it and would feel hurt if they did know? Even though you could be taking risks?”

  “That’s a bad thing,” Petrov says. “Yes, you could be hurting someone.”

  “So if you have the urge to cheat, if you’re very attracted to someone else, should you break up your marriage and date the other person?”

  “Sometimes there are things to consider,” Petrov says.

  I look at the picture of Petrov with his two children. “Your daughter’s about twenty-eight, right?”

  “Yes,” Petrov says. “Samantha, yes.”

  “If she were dating a guy who was fifty, how would you feel?”

  “I…I would feel kind of strange,” Petrov says. “I’d want to make sure he wasn’t taking advantage of her.”

  “So you’d never date someone Samantha’s age.”

  He stops. Thinks. “Everything depends,” he says. “Some people are at different ages mentally. You, for example. You are nineteen, and in some ways, very very mature.”

  “That’s what Professor Harrison used to tell me.”

  “I’m sure he did.”

  “But back to what I’m getting at,” I say. “Adultery. Wrong? What if there’s no justification, and someone is married and just cheats because he or she is attracted to someone else. No abusive spouse, no bad situation.”

  “These are questions…Carrie…that I can’t….”

  “Twenty years ago,” I say, “twenty years ago, I bet you would have had the answer. I bet you would have thought cheating was wrong.”

  “Yes,” Petrov says. “I did have a friend who was cheating on his wife back then, and I thought he was a slime for it.”

  “Well, now,” I say, “you’ve developed, what. Tolerance? Or ignorance?”

  “Well…”

  “Basically, we change our rules to fit our situations. We have firm beliefs until something affects us and makes us feel different. You believe in something that’s right, but then it becomes inconvenient. Morality is inconvenient. You have feelings for this girl who lives up the street from me, and suddenly you do something that you found abhorrent in an earlier incarnation.”

  Petrov looks nervous. His eyes seem moist.

  “I can keep a confidence like you can,” I say. “You haven’t told my dad about Professor Harrison. I won’t tell Sheryl Rubin’s father about her.”

  He sits up straight.

  “Sheryl Rubin,” he says.

  “She lives up the street from me.”

  “And…?”

  “I saw you two kissing in the window.”

  He lets out a breath. He looks at the ground.

  “You can tell me,” I say. “It’s confidential. I promise.”

  “I have no guarantee of confidentiality. You have one. And I’m here to help you.”

  “You said a while back that you hoped one day I could come in and say, ‘Everything’s great, but I want to talk anyway,’” I say. “You made it seem as if you want me to treat you as a friend. But I can’t because of the inequalities. You know everything about me and I know nothing about you. I just want to know your justification. It’ll help me. Or have you not even bothered with a justification? I’m not saying this to pass judgment. I just want to understand more about morality, situational ethics. Changing sides, who’s a hypocrite and who’s not. About having fun, and whether you should live to be eighty never having done some things because they’re wrong. Why is it that if you’ve never smoked pot, you make a great presidential candidate, but if you’ve smoked it just once, it looks so bad? Why is there such a difference between one and zero? Why is it that if you’ve never had sex, you’re a virgin, but if you’ve had sex only one time in your life, you’re not? Does one act one time put you into a completely different category? If drugs are wrong and dangerous, then we should all die never having smoked pot. But if someone dies having smoked it once, just to have the experience, is that awful? Are there lines we should absolutely never cross, and is crossing once as bad as crossing a thousand times? Can we cross once, decide never to do it again, and be moral? Or should we just never ever cross the lines?”

  “You’re asking a lot of questions,” Petrov says.

  “Because of church,” I say. “It’s making me think.”

  “Normally, it doesn’t.”

  “You just think that because you’re Jewish,” I say.

  “Lapsed,” Petrov says.

  “See, you can talk about yourself.”

  With that, he starts laughing. And I know he’ll say something.

  He thinks for a second. He looks down at his brown shoes, which have tassels on them. Then at his rug. Finally up at me.

  “I do part-time consulting for S
heryl’s agency,” he says slowly. “She works with abused children. We spent a lot of time together.”

  I nod.

  “I invited her for coffee.” He shrugs. “We talked. We talked more. We wanted to spend more time together.”

  “And?”

  “You and I really shouldn’t talk about this.”

  “Theoretically, we shouldn’t,” I say. “But you’re a family friend. Besides, there are hardly any people you can talk to about it. And I need to. I promise that anything you say today, I’ll forget when I leave. In fact, I’ll pretend you made it up to help me. Just tell me. Do you feel guilty? I know Sheryl’s married to a guy named Leshko.”

  Petrov doesn’t deny it. He just looks down at his shoes.

  “Do you condone what you’re doing?” I ask. “That’s what I need to know. Has it suddenly become okay?”

  He’s silent for a second. Then he says, softly, “I don’t condone it. But if we hadn’t done this, I’d be sitting here, thinking about her all the time, not concentrating on my work. I was seized. I had to see her.”

  “Are you in love with her?”

  “Let’s move on….”

  “It’s hard to tell, when it’s not a regular situation. If you had her all to yourself rather than a quarter of the time, would it be as exciting? What if you two had a regular routine, and there weren’t all these challenges and parameters?”

  Petrov keeps looking at the rug. “I don’t know,” he says. “She could end it tomorrow.”

  “And,” I say seriously, leaning forward and putting my hands together, “how does that make you feel?”

  He shakes me off like I’m a pitcher. “We have to stop this.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I just have so many questions.”

  He sighs. “I know. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “That people say that it’s not a black-and-white world,” I say, “but maybe it should be. And even if there have to be shades of gray, then maybe those shades could have borders.”

  “They could,” Petrov says.

  “There are things that seem wrong, and then when people do them, they try to justify them and make everyone else do them, too. And that’s even more wrong.”

  He nods.

  “So I have to know. You once thought cheating was wrong. Now you’re doing it. What’s your justification for what you’re doing?”

  He pauses. “All right,” he says. “If you must know…my justification for things…well, I used to be a religious person, and even though Jewish people don’t have hell and penance and all that, I did try to stick by moral codes. And what I said when I started seeing…her…was that maybe God wouldn’t have wanted me to have these feelings if they weren’t valid. And I thought about how I met her working with children. That can’t be so bad.”

  “And you believe this?”

  “No.” He looks at his hands. “I’m probably, like you always say, a hypocrite. I can’t deny it. And maybe it’s wrong. But it’s not so wrong, not so wrong as other things. There are worse things people do. This doesn’t meet the standard of hurting someone else right now.”

  “It might be hurting Sheryl’s husband.”

  “He’s away for days at a time…”

  “Excuse.”

  “He might be cheating…”

  “Excuse.”

  “But maybe…”

  “Excuse.”

  “I didn’t even say any—”

  “Excuse.”

  “I—”

  “Excuse.”

  We both sit there in our chairs, hanging like tired tennis players ready for the next lob.

  “Maybe,” I say, “she’ll leave him.”

  He’s lost in thought.

  Maybe he doesn’t really want her to leave her husband. Maybe he does and he hates himself for it.

  I don’t know what he wants. But neither does he. He doesn’t know what he wants. Like Natto doesn’t know what God wants. Like I don’t know what I want.

  But don’t I have a faint idea?

  I want to do what’s right.

  I also want to be happy.

  Is it necessary for these two things to be exclusive?

  What if it is? Should I do what Petrov does, keep lowering the bar a bit? But won’t I just keep lowering it again and again, for whatever situation I run into? Isn’t that what people do in these situations? When people steal, lie, cheat, break the law in some way—don’t they at some point lose the feelings of guilt or reluctance because they’ve crossed the line so many times that their new mentality tells them everything’s okay?

  Is it true Petrov’s actions aren’t really hurting anyone? Are there things that hurt people only in theory and not in reality? Is Matt really hurting Shauna if she never finds out about his lovers? Is Sheryl Rubin hurting Daniel Leshko? Is Kara hurting anyone except herself when she smokes? Is the belief that these people are hurting each other based on societal taboos more than reality?

  Petrov puts his chin in his hands. “My therapist,” he says finally, “is a psychoanalyst. Which, I admit, is a problem right there. But he’s a smart man. He keeps trotting out the old line about Sheryl wanting me because I’m a father figure. As if a woman in her late twenties can’t be attracted to a man in his fifties. But you liked your professor, right? He was older. Doctors like to shove things into little boxes.”

  I’m still processing the revelation that Petrov has a therapist.

  “Do you think your therapist has a therapist, too?” I ask. “And do you think he has a therapist? And does his therapist have a therapist? For all you know, you could be your therapist’s therapist’s therapist’s therapist’s therapist’s therapist’s therapist’s therapist’s therapist’s therapist’s therapist’s therapist’s therapist’s therapist. And the question is not what this daisy chain of doctors means for you, or for any of them; the question is, what does it mean for New York?”

  Petrov and I look at each other.

  Then, suddenly, he says, “We’re out of time.”

  I look at the clock behind me. It’s true. We’re five minutes over.

  “I won’t hold it against you,” I say. “I’ll just dock five minutes from your next session.”

  Petrov gets up unsteadily, as if finally climbing out of a train wreck. “This was an interesting session,” he says.

  “You’re telling me.”

  “I suppose I’ll see you next week.”

  “I hope so,” I say. “I know you feel weird, but honestly, I learned a lot.”

  “Sarcasm?”

  “No, I’m serious,” I say. “I’m sure you learned things, too.”

  “Yes,” he says. “I learned I should close the shades.”

  Petrov can’t tell anyone about our talk. He’ll probably benefit from it somehow. Maybe it will get him thinking. Sheryl will benefit, too. Next time she sees him, he’ll be rumpled and shaken up. And she’ll get to play nurse to him, cooing all over him. Women love that.

  On the other hand, I made him feel guilty. Is that good or bad? Is it going to make a difference? Will we, in the end, always follow our urges anyway?

  As I head home, I relive the session in my mind, and I don’t snap back to reality until I see a fluorescent sign in the coffee shop reading, Now Open 24 Hours.

  I walk in, and Milquetoast is sleeping sideways on the counter.

  “Ronald!” I yell.

  He springs up. “Cappuccino?”

  “I don’t drink ’chinos,” I say. “Those are pants. What’s with the twenty-four-hour sign?”

  His mouth is bumpy and out of whack, like a dog’s chops. He wipes his arm across it. “Murray, our manager, it’s his new idea. I was thinking of taking that shift. It pays a dollar an hour extra.”

  I feel bad for him. Or anyone who does something they dislike just because it’s a dollar more an hour. Whenever I see a window washer twenty stories in the air, I always hope he’s a brave guy, not just a poor guy who needs extra cash. If I were that high u
p, I’d jump to end my pain quickly.

  I want to help Ronald. I feel guilty for what my life is like, sleeping half the day and never having to pay rent. And then I look down on people who have to worry about these things. What is my problem?

  I have one of those moments again where there’s a sickness in the pit of my stomach, where I feel a bit hazy, where something is wrong, something big. I can wait until it goes away. But maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe I should face it and solve it.

  Do I know who I am? Can I face the parts I don’t like? Am I judging people by black-and-white standards in order to justify my inability to talk to them? Ronald isn’t brilliant. So what? I can still make an effort to talk to him.

  “Have you seen Cy lately?” I ask Ronald.

  “Once or twice,” he says. “Have you looked on the fire escape for him?”

  “I’ve looked,” I say. “But I haven’t seen him.”

  “He’s a nice person,” Ronald says. “Cy’s really nice. He says hi to everyone in the shop when he comes in, even if he doesn’t know them. But he only really has long discussions with me.”

  I smile. “That sounds nice.”

  “He keeps strange hours. I’ll probably see him more when I work the lobster shift.”

  “Lobster shift?” I say. “I thought it was called the graveyard shift.”

  “I think they’re the same thing,” he says.

  “I wonder where those terms came from.”

  “They don’t have a lot to do with each other, lobsters and graveyards.” He laughs.

  “Swing,” I say. “Swing shift. Wasn’t that a game show? The twenty-five-thousand or half-a-million dollar pyramid, where they’d give you a list, like lobster, graveyard, swing, and you’d say, ‘Words that come before shift’?”

  Ronald shrugs. “I don’t have cable.”

  “It’s not on cable,” I say. “It was thirty years ago.”

  “I wasn’t born yet,” he says.

  “I wasn’t either, but they showed things in syndication when we were little, didn’t they?”

  “I don’t remember,” Ronald says.

  There’s silence for a few seconds. But I’m not going to give up. I owe it to him—and to myself—to try harder with people.

  “So, how are you doing in general?” I ask.

  He grins. “Good,” he says. “I’m good. My parents might help me move to the basement apartment in our building. My own place.”