It's Not About Sex

by David Kalergis

  Ray moved quickly down the steps, but Tamara was already in the car and had locked the door. He struck the driver’s side window with his fist and the window shattered, but the safety glass didn’t fragment. Tamara drove off in a panic, the car fish-tailing and the tires spraying gravel onto the lawn.

  Clutching his fist with his other hand, Ray watched her leave, staring up the road long after the car had disappeared. When he finally noticed me standing frozen at the edge of the yard, his eyes locked on mine.

  “She won’t be able to talk to Lennie,” I said. “He’s not home.”

  He held my gaze for a long time before saying, “This doesn’t concern you.”

  Then he went into the house, slamming the door behind him. A minute later he came back out and headed to the Big House, to talk with Nora, I guessed, about moving out of the Quaker Cottage.

  By noon, to my great relief, he was packing his belongings into Will Fox’s truck to move into the Keeper’s Cottage. I wondered how Ray would explain the suddenness of the move to Lennie, but I was so happy to have him out of there that I didn’t really care.

  Two hours later, after Ray had finished talking with Nora and loading his things, I walked to the Big House, arriving at the studio as Lennie returned from the police station. He crossed the room heavily and slumped into the chair near his roll-top desk. He looked ill—his face lined and his eyes deeply set into black circles of puffy flesh.

  “Hello, Bradley,” he said to me finally.

  “Lennie, this is all so tragic.”

  “The New York police have Mario in custody. He was so drunk he says he doesn’t remember hitting Lars, or anything else about that night. I helped him get a lawyer.”

  I drew up a stool in front of Lennie.

  “Maybe he didn’t do it,” I said.

  Lennie raised his massive head and looked at me. “Do you know something?”

  “Ray and Lars had a nasty argument the night Lars disappeared,” I said, and told him about Lars’s drunken anger over finding Mario in Ray’s studio, before taking the fight up to the Big House.

  He listened to my story but didn’t draw the same conclusion.

  “That’s even more evidence that Mario did it,” he said. “He was sick of Lars’s jealousy. There’s nothing to suggest anything else. Even if Mario was attracted to Ray, you told me Ray didn’t encourage it.”

  “But there’s more, Lennie. What about Raider? And Tamara left our house in a panic this morning. Ray got mad and broke her car window.”

  “He didn’t hit her, did he?” Lennie asked.

  “No, just the window.”

  “What was she doing at your house this morning, anyway?” His attention was distracted and he glanced over my shoulder.

  “What difference does that make, Lennie?”

  “It makes a lot of difference, Bradley,” said Nora.

  She had entered the studio silently by the hallway from the south wing. I don’t know how long she’d been standing there, listening.

  “I talked to Ray this morning, right after that incident,” she said. “He wouldn’t tell me what Tamara said that provoked him so, but he was offended. Did you hear what she said to him?”

  “She said she’d seen the blood on his sleeve,” I replied uneasily, because, as I was speaking, I was remembering other things Tamara had said to Ray.

  All you wanted to do was fuck me—not that you’re capable of doing that either.

  “I didn’t know she mentioned the bloody sleeve,” said Nora, looking at me closely, “but I got the sense there was something more personal and insulting.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “It was a pretty nasty argument.”

  “What else?” asked Lennie.

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  He got up slowly and walked over to me and put his hands on my shoulders.

  “Of course you’re upset,” he said. “We all are. But let’s look at this logically.”

  He removed his hands and took a step back.

  “That guy on Sixty-Fourth Street was a mugger who got what was coming to him. Ray’s not going to rot in some prison for that—not if I can help it.”

  “Lennie . . .”

  “Please hear me out,” he said. “Mario killed Lars while they were both drunk. And Tamara’s upset that Ray won’t go along with her fantasies of connubial bliss. She said something particularly nasty to him, and he lost his temper and hit a window. All these things are bad enough. But there’s no more to it than that. Anything else is your imagination working overtime.” He returned to his chair again and sat down.

  Nora spoke up, her tone earnest, even conciliatory.

  “If you think Ray was involved with Lars’s death in some way, you’re wrong, Bradley. Ray has been horribly misused for his entire life. Don’t you start doing it too.”

  Further discussion would be useless. Lennie and Nora wouldn’t send Ray back to prison, destroy AFTAR, and shatter Lennie’s reputation on the basis of my suspicions. I didn’t know what I believed. Lennie escorted me to the front door.

  We shook hands before I left, and he said in a low tone, “Please. Things are bad enough. Don’t make them worse.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  ◊

  Could Nora and Lennie be right? Maybe I just need to cool out and stop obsessing over what Ray had or hadn’t done. He was my client, and he needed to paint so we could both keep making money. Maybe what was most important was providing for my family’s well-being.

  I hadn’t heard anything further from Linda about getting a lawyer, nor had we yet seen a counselor, which would at least bring us face to face in the same room. Our separation had now passed the twelve-week mark. Other than the bare minimum required to keep the household functioning and coordinate my picking up Mary for our weekly visit, Linda still wouldn’t talk to me. Something needed to be done to break the impasse—we couldn’t continue on like this.

  Three days after Ray killed Raider on East Sixty-Fourth Street, I phoned up Harold Klinger, the gallery owner on Madison Avenue. I knew he’d been having his own problems with his wife, and he told me the name of a marriage counselor. It was a Dr. Walters, who had an office on York Avenue in the East Sixties.

  “He’s a good listener,” Harold had told me, “and he won’t take one side or the other.”

  I called Dr. Walter’s office immediately and refused to get off the line until his receptionist had given me an appointment for the coming Friday. Then I called Linda and told her what I had done.

  “You made an appointment without asking me? Forget it. I’m not going,” was her first reaction.

  “One way or another we have to talk, Linda, and work out what’s going on between us,” I pleaded. “Whatever it is, we’ll always be Mary’s parents and she deserves to be happy. And right now she’s not.”

  Linda was quiet for what seemed like a long time. I could hear some late Schubert quartet in the background. Then she finally spoke.

  “What’s the address and time on Friday?”

  Maybe I was hearing what I wanted to hear, but by the end of the conversation, I thought I detected in her voice a note of relief, even cautious enthusiasm, at the prospect.

  In any case, we found Dr. Walters to be empathic and understanding. I knew it was his job to be like that, but there was something genuine in the kindliness reflecting off his large round face that inspired our trust. During the session Linda did most of the talking, occasionally prompted by a gentle verbal nudge from the doctor. I heard, as if for the first time, her many complaints, including my preoccupation with my work, my lack of support for her career, and my “complete refusal to come to terms with the effects of Mary's illness.”

  I had continued to insist that we get Mary into a good school, and I knew that caused some of the tension. With the progress Mary had been making, I didn’t see any reason for her to be tracked with the special needs students, despite what some expert might say. Yes, at four and a half, some children could stack blocks higher
than she could, and she hadn’t yet completely mastered her ABC’s, but there was nothing wrong with her. I wanted her to go to a regular private school, like other Upper East Side children, and didn’t see any reason why she couldn’t go to Spence or Brearley. But I remained quiet and let Linda talk.

  At the end of the session Dr. Walters gave some advice.

  “I see many couples,” he said to us, “and one thing I’ve learned is that when a marriage reaches this state only one thing can save it. And that is total honesty between the two of you. You need to confront your deepest fears and secrets, and share them with each other. Expose them to the light of day. Anything less—halfway measures—and this situation between the two of you will only continue to get worse.”

  It sounded reasonable. He asked us to agree on the spot, and of course we did, neither of us willing to say we weren’t going to be cooperative. And we meant it. We planned to try that very day. Unfortunately, the “total honesty” advice turned out to be total disaster.

  It all began well enough. Inspired by the session, Linda said I could come back to the apartment for a few hours so we could talk further. During the silent cab ride on the way home, I tried to prepare my arguments as to why we should reconcile. What should I tell her? And what would she tell me?

  Carlos smiled as Linda and I entered the lobby and I greeted him, trying to bring myself back into the moment. Still, the elevator ride to the sixth floor was surreal, and I could hardly believe that I was again walking down my own hallway and entering the door to my own apartment.

  After I’d given Mary a big hug and Luzia had departed, Linda and I sat in the living room talking circumspectly, since Mary was sitting at our feet. Soon, to my delight, our conversation warmed, and before long we were reminiscing about happier times, not that many years ago.

  Mary was clearly thrilled to be in the same room with both of us, without any fighting. Linda and I talked about being the only two Americans working at Weatherby’s in London, the thrill of our first date, the triumph of my promotion and our move to Manhattan, and meeting Mr. Bell. As we talked, I also recalled the passion of those early years and how we couldn’t get enough of each other. I wondered if she was thinking about this too, when she abruptly shifted gears and told me something I had long suspected—that she'd been keeping a secret and that she would tell it to me later, after Mary was asleep in bed.

  I was sure I knew what it was. Earlier this year, Tom, her college boyfriend, had come to New York and they'd spent an evening together while I was on a business trip to Hong Kong. When I returned she’d accounted for what they did that night only vaguely.

  After we'd eaten a quiet dinner, Linda put Mary to bed while I cleaned up the kitchen. I needed to tell her of a betrayal too, one that had occurred at the same time and had been haunting me ever since. Her own confession would make mine easier. Dr. Walters had been wise in his advice, I thought.

  I met her coming down the hall toward the living room. “Before you start,” I said, “I want you to know that I'll always love you, no matter what you tell me.”

  She looked as if she'd been crying.

  “And I think I know what your secret is,” I continued. “I'm not happy about it, of course, but I can forgive. Anyway, I'm sure you know that I haven't been totally blameless myself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That I'd wanted to tell you about Club BeBoss, but I couldn't, I’ve felt so guilty.”

  “Club BeBoss? Wait,” she said. “Slow down. Start at the beginning. Let’s sit down.”

  I went into the kitchen first and got two glasses and a bottle of Sancerre, which I opened while she went into the living room. When I joined her, she was sitting on the sofa. I put the wine and glasses on the low glass-topped coffee table between us, and sat across from her in the upholstered chair.

  “You’re sure you want me to go first?” I asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Okay. Remember early this year when I was in Hong Kong with Mr. Park?” Mr. Park, a Korean art dealer, was one of my principal business contacts in Asia. “I was bird-dogging a Twombley for Mr. Bell. Its owner lived in Hong Kong, and Mr. Park had the connection with him.”

  “Yes . . .” she said. “Go on.”

  “A Chinese friend of Mr. Park's whom I’d met before—Mr. Leung—picked us up at the airport in his Mercedes convertible, and that evening we all went out to one of those restaurants where everyone points out their own fish from a giant aquarium. Mr. Leung and Mr. Park were having a great time drinking and yakking it up in Chinese, and then they’d remember I couldn’t speak it well and switch back to English. After we finished eating, we did the ritual fighting over who got the honor of paying the tab, and Mr. Park won, like always. After dinner Mr. Leung drove us through the streets of Hong Kong with the top down, so we could look at the incredible displays of neon. It was lit up like Times Square for block after block.”

  I couldn’t read Linda’s reaction to the story, but plunged ahead.

  “After we’d been driving for a while, Mr. Leung said, ‘Now we will show you the real Hong Kong, Mr. Bradley.’ He drove us to a fancy night spot called Club BeBoss and two valets opened the car doors for us and another one took the Mercedes. A beautiful older Chinese woman in a red silk gown greeted us at the door to the club.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well, we followed her through the crowd—mostly men in business suits and younger women—to a banquette near the back. The noise from the techno music was deafening, and it was so dark it was hard to see. As my eyes became accustomed to the dark a waiter brought us drinks, and a parade of women came to our table. They wore a lot of makeup and costumes that were supposed to be erotic, and they flirted with us, but I was repelled. Until a beautiful young Chinese girl came over wearing a white gown.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Eighteen; maybe twenty. She didn't show me a birth certificate.”

  Linda waited for me to continue.

  “I still sat there stone-faced, not touching my drink. Mr. Park and Mr. Leung were disappointed that I wasn't having more fun. I could tell I was letting them down. Finally the tall Chinese lady waved all the girls away from the table, and Mr. Park paid for the drinks. I didn’t try to fight him for the check.

  We moved toward the door, when standing in the crowded hallway staring at me was the most beautiful, sexy-looking woman I’ve ever seen. She was in her twenties, a mixture of Caucasian and black, I think. Her skin was a beautiful coffee color . . . Are you all right, Linda?”

  She had dropped her empty wine glass on the carpet but quickly retrieved it and put it on the table in front of her.

  “And you couldn't resist the temptation,” she said.

  “No, worse than that,” I answered. “We were staring at each other—the girl and I—when Mr. Park asked me, ‘Is it that you don't like Asian girls?’ I felt like I'd insulted him, so I said ‘No, no, Asian girls are very attractive.’ And he said, ‘Which one did you like the best?’ Without thinking I said, ‘The young one in the white dress.’

  “He spoke to a waiter, and the next thing you know the tall Chinese lady came back half dragging this poor little girl in the white dress. I could tell now that it was a bridal gown. The beautiful mulatto girl laughed at me when the lady brought the little bride. I'd never felt so ridiculous and I wanted to get out.”

  “I should hope so,” said Linda.

  “So the four of us piled into the car . . .”

  “The four of you? You brought the child bride with you?”

  “Well, I didn't bring her. Mr. Park did. He said it was all arranged, and I shouldn't give her any money, no matter what she told me.”

  “And you said, ‘Great.’”

  “No, I said something different . . . something strange. As we were driving to the hotel, I said, trying to make them understand, ‘I’m from the Christian religion.’”

  “Why in the world would you say that? You haven't been to church in
years.”

  “I don't know what I meant. I looked at these three baffled Asians, and they obviously didn't have a clue either. I suddenly had an overpowering longing to touch someone and to be touched by someone, and I thought, What the hell, I'm ten thousand miles from home. I took her up to my hotel room.”

  “This is a disgusting story.”

  “Well, I've started it now. Let me finish, and it's your turn.”

  So I told her how, in my hotel room, the girl had put a gold ring on her finger and said in accented English “I’m in Christian religion.” And how she'd taken off the white dress. And how my erection had been without sensation when I entered her and how she'd whispered in my ear, “So big, so big,” in a fake, dramatic voice. And how, when I finally came, the orgasm had been without intensity, none at all. And I told her how, afterward, the girl asked in good English for money so she could take a taxi and I gave her twenty dollars. I couldn't stand the thought of her riding a bus in her white wedding gown. Linda sat silently for a long time after I finished my story.

  “It's your turn,” I said finally.

  “That's the most disgusting story I've ever heard in my life.”

  Her hands shook as her voice rose half an octave.

  “I’ve lost four years of the career I love to stay home and take care of our damaged daughter, and you're off indulging in a sacrilegious sham-marriage with an under-aged Asian girl? How dare you tell me this now?”

  “I’ve felt so guilty ever since it happened,” I said. “It was a secret that stood between us, and I hoped telling you would make it easier for you to tell me about Tom.”

  She looked at me in wide-eyed shock.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know you must feel guilty too. Can't we forgive each other?”

  “Nothing happened between me and Tom! Is that what you thought I needed to tell you? Men are so repulsive! Why does everything have to be about sex, sex, sex with you?”