by Rita Ciresi
“This is New York, people know who they are, and since when are you such an advocate of gay rights anyway?”
“I’m not advocating anything. I’m just pointing out a truth.”
“And what is that truth, pray tell?”
“That people don’t like to be called names.”
“But, Strauss, gays call themselves all sorts of names. You just don’t know because nobody in your family swings that way.”
“I work for Peg.” It was the first time he’d ever acknowledged Peg was a lesbian, and his face flushed as if he had just given some big secret away. He was so uptight about the whole thing, I felt like laughing.
“What does she have to say on the subject?” I asked.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss it—”
“Strauss, my cousin calls himself, point—blank, a faggot,” I said, careful this time to lower my voice when I got to the questionable word, although the roar of yet another bus pulling off from the curb and the clack of my heels on the sidewalk did more than enough to cover me.
“Why do you suppose he does that?”
“That’s a rhetorical question, I hope?”
“Lisar. Slow down here. I don’t mean to play Mr. Rogers—”
“I hope not. You’d look like shit in one of those cardigan sweaters—”
“Or the thought police. I’m not above laughing at a good Jewish joke—”
“But only if you tell it, right? If a goy told it, you’d get all bent out of shape—”
“—if a goy told it, the punchline would be something ugly, like, because the air is free!”
I grabbed his arm—tightly—and said, “Now, you hold it. What are we really discussing here?”
“Why you made me the chief financial officer in your novel!”
“But, Strauss! Don’t be so paranoid! It’s fiction!”
“I have a Thomas Eakins print on my wall!”
“But you’re not Tommy Akins, you’re the root—beer—swilling Casanova in the second chapter, and if you don’t believe me, you can read it yourself—”
“I can hardly wait to get my hands on it.”
“And speaking of name—calling,” I said, eager to change the subject, “you needn’t be so self-righteous, considering what you called your own brother-in-law just a few hours ago.”
“What did I call him but what he is?” Strauss asked. Then he stopped. “All right. Maybe. Maybe you have a point.”
I shrugged. It was hot on the sidewalk and I wanted to do anything else but fight. To make peace, I told him maybe I was out of line to say butch too loudly in public. “I would never call my cousin the names he calls himself I call him gay. But we both say straight.”
After a moment Strauss—probably to smooth over some of the tension bristling between us—admitted that he said straight too, even though he knew it was probably not the most felicitous term to use, because it implied that everything else was crooked.
“Do you think it’s crooked?” I asked.
“No. I mean, I know it’s not the norm—I mean, I know I’m not the norm either, at least at Boorman—”
“That’s quite all right,” I said. “I’ll still talk to you, even if you don’t do eighteen holes on Good Friday.”
“That’s tolerant of you.”
“I might even make you some Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks when I get back from Confession.”
“You don’t go to Confession.”
“I’ve gone once in the past seven years. But remind me to stop in Saint Patrick’s if and when we pass. I have to go again.”
“What grievous sins have you committed?” he asked. “Besides mouthing off left and right to me?”
“I agreed to be godmother to my sister’s baby. I have to make confession before the baptism.”
“What will you confess to then?”
“It’s private. Between me and God. Like prayer.”
We walked along quietly for a while. Then Strauss said, “It must feel good. Prayer, I mean.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
He stopped on the sidewalk. “But you do it. At night. I thought I saw you—in bed—once or twice—” Strauss shrugged, then started to show me a sign of the cross. If I hadn’t been so dismayed to have my secret discovered—and if we just hadn’t had such an uncomfortable argument—I would have howled with laughter when he touched his right shoulder before he went for his left.
“Your bedroom is dark,” I said. “How can you see anything?”
“You forget the skylight.”
“All right. So the skylight.”
“It doesn’t bother me, you know.”
“Gee. Good thing. Otherwise this relationship would be up shit creek on a small canoe, wouldn’t it?”
“You’ve probably never been in a canoe in your life, except in your naughty imagination, with this Thomas Akins character. By the way, those boats are called sculls.”
“Thank you, Harvard. I’m aware of the terminology.”
We walked along in silence. Then Strauss said, “Actually, I’m a little envious.”
“What of—Thomas Akins’s superb sculling abilities?”
“Stop. The prayer thing. You don’t have to turn away. In bed. Why do you turn away?”
“Because—because I can’t talk to you and God at the same time. Now forget it. You don’t get it.”
“But I do get it. Give me some credit here. I get it better than you think.”
I took his hand. He squeezed my palm and I squeezed his back. This seemed a much better way of ending our first fight (which I was ashamed to say I actually found rather invigorating) than smoothing it over with a banal corporate phrase, such as let us agree to disagree. But I gathered there was trouble ahead: We were both stubborn, neither one of us liked to apologize, and any subsequent truces we had were bound to be uneasy.
Back at the Pierre we sipped on room—service—delivered white wine, and I slid into the long black dress with the chiffon sleeves and the zipper that traveled up the back like an insidious snake, which Strauss agreed to have the pleasure of zipping me into if he could have the pleasure of unzipping me out of it later. We went to an Italian restaurant for dinner—where I tussled with Strauss over how much food I should eat (You sound like my mother—the minute I come in the door she says “Too fat!” or “Too skinny!”)—and to Lincoln Center for a Rigoletto that I enjoyed more than anything because it was the first time in my life I didn’t have to sit through three acts in a seat so high—the fifth or sixth balcony—it induced nosebleeds.
The moment the overture began, I settled back into my seat and wondered why, since moving to Ossining, I hadn’t returned to New York to enjoy some of the culture that used to form the basis of my weekend diet (probably because the price of the tickets precluded buying groceries). As a student in Bronxville I had learned all the tricks—showing up an hour before the performance at Weill to nab five—dollar seats, and waiting beneath the overhang at Lincoln Center for the ticket scalpers. I went to Shakespeare in the Park and visited museums on the one weekday that offered free admission. I hit the public library every Saturday morning and cleaned out the office once a month for unmailed reviewers’ copies. I used to go to plays and concerts more often than I cooked myself a decent dinner. In many ways it had been a squalid life—but the art (perhaps because it took me out of my rodent—and—roach—infested apartment) made me feel it was worth trying to stick it out in the city.
The moment I moved to Ossining that all changed. It seemed a drag to take the train into Manhattan on Friday nights; the couple of times I went in on Saturdays I spent hours at Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s and the sample sales to find the right outfits for work. When I thought of how often I used to brave my fear of heights to teeter on the top tier of Carnegie Hall, I marveled at more than the thought of the famed acoustics. My life had changed, and I wasn’t sure it was for the better. Monday through Friday would be dull no matter where I worked. But my weekends weren’t charged wi
th music and drama and dance and literature anymore. I had an apartment nice enough to keep neat. I had to drop my suits and silk blouses at the dry cleaner’s. I had to replace the panty hose that had ruptured runs. I had to work out every night to convince myself I still looked decent enough for any man to look at me, and when a man—Strauss—finally looked, I ended up with lingerie so delicate I had to hand—wash it every night.
I hadn’t turned on my stereo, it seemed, in weeks. But at least I had made some headway into my novel—and I vowed that when I got home I would change that facile plot once and for all. The opera, which raked up all the passion that had come to an absolutely stultifying rest in the suburbs, made me vow to go deeper. Why did I always have to go for the yucks? Why shouldn’t I write something as profoundly tragic as Rigoletto? The story of a hunchback man whose quest for revenge resulted in the loss of his beloved daughter moved me beyond belief The tears I had held back that morning returned to clutch at my eyes when Gilda sang Il mio nome, and I had to borrow Strauss’s handkerchief at the end. I wept through the prolonged applause and the numerous bows. We were sitting so close to the stage that the long—stemmed roses flung at the soprano almost pelted me on the head.
“That was wonderful,” I told Strauss, and in a response infinitely more sober than mine, he said the plot was less than credible, as it always was in opera—but he was moved by the music and especially the horrible moment when Rigoletto discovered his daughter’s body in a sack.
“But you didn’t cry,” I said.
“You’ve done enough of that for both of us,” he said, holding his wet handkerchief by the corners, as if he were a prisoner coming forth from his hiding place, giving the signal to surrender.
“Do you ever?” I asked. “Cry? Why don’t men cry?”
“Because you learn at an early age to put a lid on it.”
“I could never put a lid on it.”
“Duly noted,” he said, and carefully folded his soggy handkerchief before he bunched it up into his pocket.
Outside on the street, Strauss wanted to catch a cab, but I wanted to walk back, and we bickered—gently this time—about just how safe it was to walk along the park at night. “Give in to me,” I said, and he did, but he put his arm around me, as if this would ward off all potential muggers and rapists and homeless people shaking tin cans. I wanted to drink it all in—the curved purple neon lights of the coffee bars opposite Lincoln Center, the dark steps of the brownstones on Sixty—fourth, the black boots and leather jackets of the students hanging out at the Columbus Circle subway stop, and even the smell of dung that pervaded the lower end of the park where the horse—drawn carriages were parked—an odor that prompted Strauss to lead me across the street so we could walk by the Saint Moritz and the back end of the Plaza rather than listen to the horse cabbies in their top hats and roses hawk us for a midnight trot around the park.
Strauss squeezed my shoulder. “What are you thinking of, birthday girl?”
I held him tight. “That you would look like an ass in a leather jacket,” I said, and gave him a big kiss.
“I look even more ridiculous in a yarmulke.”
I put my hand on his shirt. “But you look like a million bucks in a tie. I like this tie.”
A slight smile spread across his face. “You wouldn’t happen to have seen another tie of mine lately?”
“I see you wear a new tie every day.”
“This one is black with red diamonds?”
“Sounds ugly,” I said. “Maybe you should be glad you lost it—”
“Ah, I didn’t say I lost it.”
And I didn’t say I stole it. Instead, I thanked him for such a wonderful belated birthday celebration. I offered him a long account of my real birthday at home with Carol and my mother and told him all about Security Man, except for the part about how Dodie and I flung him into the ditch. When we hit the stoplight at Fifth, I even told him about my father’s birthday whacks.
“I’m surprised you mentioned that,” Strauss said. “You hardly ever talk about your father.”
“What’s to say? He drove a Ford and aspired to a Buick. And now he’s dead. And when he was alive, he was never home. He was always working.”
“My father wasn’t home much either.”
The taxis lurched to a stop and we crossed Fifth. On the other side, Strauss said he could tell I didn’t get along with my mother—
“That’s the understatement of the year,” I said.
“Did you get along any better with your father?”
“No. Neither did my mother.”
“Surely something was there between them.”
“It’s called Catholicism. Which says, Thou shalt not divorce.”
“You never saw any—” and I hooted after Strauss said displays of affection?
“Sure,” I said. “You could tell when they had their annual sex. Because in the morning my mother would strip the sheets and storm the house with a sponge and a can of Jubilee. By noon she would have mopped the floor, scraped the streaks off the window with ammonia and a razor blade, and vacuumed all the floors and ceilings—”
“Oh, Lise. You really know how to exaggerate.”
“This is not a story,” I said, glad I hadn’t gone so far as to tell him about the evil rubber hose snaking down from my mother’s douche bag, which always hung from the shower head the morning after my father forced her—for she did not seem to welcome his advances in any way, shape, or fashion—to discharge her conjugal duties. The whole house smelled—for the rest of the morning—of white vinegar.
“Why do you think I only have one sister?” I asked Strauss—not mentioning my mother’s miscarriages—for he already knew about my fifty—five first cousins and the fact that some of my aunts and uncles had nine or ten children each.
“I only have one sister too,” Strauss reminded me. “Of course, that’s due to birth control.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Positive. My father told me when he taught me about sex.”
“Your father taught you about sex?”
“Of course. Who taught you?”
“Boys,” I said.
“Couldn’t you ask your sister?”
“She was fat. She didn’t get asked out much.”
“Have you always been so thin?” Strauss asked.
“It’s a recent phenomenon.”
“You don’t take diet pills, do you?”
“Why are you so focused on my weight? Just because your sister had an eating disorder—”
“I never told you my sister had an eating disorder.”
I thought hard and fast. “Yes, you did. That first time we went out. You said she obsessed about food.”
“I meant her marriage—the whole kosher thing—gives her a socially acceptable method of watching her food intake. But you’re not far offtrack. She did have a problem once. A big problem. While she was at Brandeis.”
“She would have had good company at Sarah Lawrence,” I said. “Although along with the anorexics, there also was a big contingent of girls who decided fat was a feminist issue after they put on the freshman fifteen.”
I failed to tell Strauss that as a transfer student, I was guilty of putting on the junior year twelve-and-one-half Thank God that after college I suffered from abject poverty, or I probably would have gained even more. In Brooklyn I had shed that extra dozen pounds by walking everywhere to save the subway fare and from eating in ways that were practically an advertisement for how to suffer from malnutrition.
“Is your sister okay now?” I asked.
“What’s okay? She’s married to Zalman—that’s his name, the man I called the professional Jew, and don’t give me any more lip about that, Lisar. He keeps a close eye on her.”
“He sounds pretty horrible. But he can’t be all that bad if she’s still with him, right?”
“She could never get by on her own. She’d fall apart.”
“You once said the same about your pare
nts. If one of them died.”
“That’s different. My parents have something different with each other.”
“You mean love.”
“Well, yes. They don’t say it, but you can feel it.”
“How?”
“They still sleep together. I mean, more than sleep—”
“Go on!” I said. “How old is your dad again?”
“Seventy-nine next week—”
“Strauss, that’s impossible.”
“It is not impossible.”
“How do you know? Point—blank, do you ask? Or do you just imagine?”
Strauss said he was just as squeamish as the next person when it came to imagining his parents. He knew only because a couple of years ago his father had gone in for what he thought was a routine hernia repair done on an outpatient basis. But something undisclosed had gone wrong, and when Strauss ended up visiting his dad in the hospital two days later, he had sneaked a look at the chart and saw, to his amazement, that his father had undergone surgery for a penile implant.
“Can I laugh now?” I asked.
“Sure. Go ahead.” Strauss actually smiled too, but sadly, as if he was afraid of getting old—well, who wasn’t afraid?—and of having basic human desires that the body no longer could respond to on its own.
The lobby of the Pierre seemed even more imposing in the dark, like one of the French provincial period rooms at the Met. As we rode the elevator in silence, I wanted to know why Strauss had come for lunch here with his fiancée—had her vastly upscale parents hosted a party to celebrate their engagement? Somehow it gave me pleasure to imagine Strauss squirming as somebody else picked up the tab, which undoubtedly was enormous. But it did not give me any pleasure at all—even if he were telling the truth and hadn’t found much joy in the process—to imagine Strauss and his fiancée in bed.
The room felt stuffy when we entered. But the air—conditioning, forced out of vents along the ceiling, felt cold on my back. While Strauss was in the bathroom, I sat at the writing table and gazed out the sheer curtains. The park was now nothing but a big stretch of blackness ending in tiny squares of light from apartment houses on the west side. The distance was too great to make out any human figures.