by Rita Ciresi
Strauss came out and leaned in the bathroom doorway. “It’s nice to see you sitting there.”
“Did you think I’d run away?”
“I hope you won’t. Before you have a chance to open a present.”
“Another present?”
“You said you didn’t like growing older. Maybe this will take away some of the sting.”
“You shouldn’t have,” I said, and he laughed and told me that just for that false and feeble remark, I could root through his suitcase and find it myself.
“I really don’t want to root through your clothes, Strauss.”
“Don’t you, Lise? I thought you liked that.”
“A suitcase is different than a closet—”
“Aha. Now I’ve caught you.”
“You haven’t caught me at anything.” I got up and hesitated in front of his bag. It was unzipped. I opened the top and slowly put my hands in. Then I pulled them out.
“I’m not going to do that,” I said. “If it’s a gift, then give it to me, goddammit.”
“Emily Post would be appalled by your language.”
“I’ll send you a handwritten thank-you afterward.”
“How will you sign it?”
“Yours.”
“We have a deal.” He came over and reached into the suitcase. I could tell he was embarrassed—because he didn’t look at me—as he handed me a velvet jewelry box.
I also was embarrassed. Because it was the wrong size, the box. Too big to hold what I suddenly knew I wanted from him and just as suddenly feared he would never give me. And I didn’t want him to see that on my face. How could I keep a feeling as strong as that off my face?
As I pried open the emerald-green box, I caught a glimpse of a gold chain, so fine and delicate it looked like the slightest touch could make it break. Then the lid snapped shut on my finger like a dog’s bite.
“Ouch,” I said.
“Careful.”
“Shit,” I said, tears in my eyes. “It’s lovely. Thank you.”
“Are you all right?”
“Here. You open it. I’m frightened to do it again.”
The bite of the box lid had been a distraction, and a good excuse for my tears. Strauss kissed my finger before he reopened the box. I stood in front of the mirror as he put the chain on me. But his big klutzy fingers fumbled so long with the clasp I was afraid he would notice—for the first time—the unavoidable rough stubble left behind on the back of my neck. It seemed shameful to be a woman whose hairdresser always grimly got out the electric razor after putting down the scissors.
The chain looked chaste and delicate against my black dress. Strauss apologized for not giving it to me earlier, because then I could have worn it to Rigoletto.
“And then some thug from Hoboken could have yanked it off my neck on that perilous walk home,” I said.
“It really would have been more prudent to take a cab,” Strauss said, and he went on and on about the craftiness of the criminal mind, how it only took one second with your guard down and they had you, theft and violence lurked everywhere looking for a victim, and much as he did not like to even say the word, the word was worth saying and reminding myself of from time to time: A woman on her own needed to protect herself from rape.
I sat down during his lecture because my feet really hurt. Then I asked, “Have you ever considered a career as an officer of the law?”
“No.”
“Chief of police, then?”
He frowned. “Jews don’t become cops any more than they become professional football players.”
“You’re perpetuating stereotypes.”
“I’m telling you God’s honest truth.”
“Too bad,” I said, as I took off my shoes and stretched my aching toes. “You know I have a secret thing for cops.”
“Is that why you flirt with the night guard at Boorman?”
“I was trying to throw Gussie offtrack.”
“I think Gus was on the right track before even you and I were.” Strauss smiled. “I could have killed him that night he called me your shadow—”
“He’s definitely on to us. He’s winked at me a couple of times when I went in on Saturday. Does he wink at you, Strauss?”
“I doubt he finds me worth winking at.” Strauss loosened his tie and slowly unknotted it. He draped it over the chair, took off his jacket, hung it over the wooden valet, and unbuttoned his cuffs.
“Has a man ever come on to you?” I asked.
“Why do you ask such questions?”
“Just curious. If you don’t want to answer, then don’t.”
“I’ll answer. I don’t have a problem with answering.” But he obviously did, because he said, “Once, maybe.”
“What’s maybe? Coming on is either a definite yes or a no.”
“Not if you’re eighteen and you don’t have a clue what’s happening.”
“Was it a professor?”
“How did you guess?”
“Were you interested?”
“I was appalled.”
“I thought you were Mr. Tolerant.”
“It was an abuse of power, that’s why it bothered me.” In the mirror, I could see his face flushing. “The other thing bothered me less. I mean, it made me uncomfortable. I didn’t even know what two men did together.”
Strauss slipped off his loafers and put them in the closet. Then he did something endearing: He picked up my shoes and placed them next to his in the closet, taking care to line them up in a neat row.
“How about you?” he asked. “Is it true that all women have a so-called lesbian episode?”
“Where did you learn that?”
“The Diary of Anne Frank. The scene, do you remember, where she suggests to the other girl that they feel each other’s breasts?”
“I remember. I’ve never done that, though. My, you look relieved. What would you have done if I said I’d made it with another woman?”
“You haven’t. You just said you hadn’t, so it’s a moot point. Unless you’re still curious.”
“Everybody’s at least a little curious.”
“Of course, but that doesn’t mean everyone acts upon it. It’s just a line I wouldn’t cross.”
The air—conditioner clicked off “I slept with a teacher once,” I blurted out.
When Strauss pressed me, I told him about my creative—writing teacher at Sarah Lawrence, who had leaned forward in his desk chair as he criticized the characters and the conflict in my short story as farfetched and facile. “ ‘If you want to be a good writer,’ he told me, ‘you need to get your heart broken.’ ”
“And don’t tell me,” Strauss said. “He wanted to be the one who broke it. Did he?”
I hesitated. Something strange had occurred that afternoon—be—sides the professor’s impotence. Only in retrospect did this episode seem even remotely comic even to me, who liked more than anything a good laugh: the motel room in Rye, the squeak of the battered box springs, how his breathing became so belabored he actually started to snort, and the way he had kept coming at me, over and over, not accepting the failure of his own body, until I finally said, “Look, I think this is a futile attempt we have here.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll still ace the class—provided you don’t put this in your next story.” Up until then I hadn’t been that concerned about my grade, but all of a sudden I thought, Oh … is this what he thinks this whole things been about?
“I don’t want to ace your class,” I lied. And then I told the truth: “You’re a lousy teacher.”
“And you’re a lousy writer,” he said, “and an even lousier lay. Get dressed and I’ll take you home.”
My feet had felt ice-cold on the tile in the bathroom. When I looked in the mirror, my eyes seemed off—focus, as if to prove I was nothing but confused about why I had done what I just had done and why he had tried to do what he had just tried to do. What could I possibly have been looking for with this man so old his
very pubic hair was going gray? What emptiness in his life had led him out of his marriage bed? What was his wife like? Who called him Dad? I would have felt sorry for the kids who called him Dad if I had not felt so in despair about myself.
“He didn’t break my heart,” I told Strauss. “He did something worse. He broke my spirit. For a while, at least. He couldn’t do it, and afterward he told me I would never write anything worth reading.”
“That’s a cruel thing to do. To a young girl.”
“The toilet paper was blue … in the bathroom … afterward … and the dye stung my eyes. I couldn’t stop crying. Really, it was worse than tonight at Rigoletto—”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“I definitely have a lot of sobbing inside me,” I said. Then I laughed. “But not enough to get me onto the best-seller list.”
“Well. Who said the pen is mightier than the sword? Now you can have your revenge. Make him a character in your book.”
“I don’t think writing should be revenge. Or therapy.”
“What should it be, then?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s mental illness. A weird noise in your head. Like voices that come from a god … Oy, stop looking at me like I’m some berserk Joan of Arc—”
“If the helmet fits.” Strauss smiled. Then the next moment he frowned. “About your book. You haven’t portrayed yourself in a very flattering light.”
“You really don’t like those green glasses, do you?”
“Forget the glasses.”
“When you remember they’re characters, not people in real life.”
“What I mean to say is, this Donna should be a little less critical of the corporation. You might want to tone down your descriptions of the caricatures she draws during staff meetings—”
“But she wants to be a cartoonist.”
“But she has to acknowledge that people are going to grow and change—”
“But you just read the first chapter. Besides, in really great stories—like, like, Peter Rabbit!—the characters don’t change, they just keep making the same stupid mistakes, and if you want stories about spiritual growth, go read Dostoyevsky—you notice he’s not banging off the best-seller list. And name me one great novel that has a co-author!”
“I wouldn’t presume to co-author. But I might suggest you get rid of this root—beer detail you spoke of that’s supposedly in the second chapter.”
“Maybe I’ll just burn the whole manuscript.”
“Don’t do anything hasty,” he said—but I noticed he didn’t offer to come in with a fire hose and put out the flames should I be so inclined to play the arsonist. His disapproval—or maybe his fear of the way I might have portrayed him in the book—was palpable. I felt guilty. But I told myself my decision to ditch the juicy subplot had nothing whatsoever to do with his approval or censure. The Casanova stuff was too facile and farfetched—and more important, heartless—to hold much interest even to me, who enjoyed subverting the reality of Boorman while leaving in enough key details so I undoubtedly would be physically escorted off the grounds of the corporate headquarters if the manuscript ever saw the light of day. If Strauss’s death wish at Boorman was sleeping with yours truly, Stop It Some More clearly represented mine.
As promised, Strauss helped me with the zipper of my dress, but he patted me on the shoulder after he pulled it down, and all the little signals we gave off to one another made it clear that for the first time since we started staying with one another, we weren’t going to make love when we went to bed. He moved away to take off his shirt, and after struggling with the clasp on the chain, I undressed without looking at him and did not don any of the lingerie he had given me. He also undressed without looking at me. We both got into bed, and Strauss let me have the side closest to the bathroom even though he was the one who always seemed to prowl around during the night, not me. Then he did something that irritated me—he got up to check the locks on the door to make sure we were bolted in tight. He took so long to check, I suspected—then became certain—he was squinting at the discreet card the Pierre posted on the back of the door to mark the emergency fire exits. He couldn’t see very well with his glasses off, and only the dimmest of light came into the room through the still—open shades.
“Strauss,” I said. “I know what you’re doing, and I don’t like it.”
“You’ll thank me if the hotel goes up in flames. Just remember to crouch down and take a right to get to the nearest stairs. I’ll take the room key in case we have to crawl back.”
“Are you done doing your fireman imitation?”
“Yes. But I warn you, it’s supposed to rain tomorrow. Already I’m dreaming of saving you from drowning in a puddle.”
I laughed. So did he. But neither of us turned to one another once we were under the covers, and finally he just took my hand.
“Tired?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Will you be hurt if I don’t touch you?”
“No, no, not at all,” I said, and the honesty of this hurt me more than if he had grabbed me tight enough to bruise me.
I gave him a kiss on the cheek. He put his arm around me. Within minutes his breathing became steady. Locked under his arm, I envied his fall into the dream world. I couldn’t go to sleep. I lay there thinking: I don’t want to make love with him. I want to marry him. That those two feelings seemed so linked together confirmed my worst fears about permanent relationships. Although I suddenly found myself longing for it, I was afraid that marriage to Strauss would be like wonderfully warm, soapy bathwater that bit by bit turned colder and colder, each bank of white foamy bubbles shriveling up and wearing away. If I married him I would have to quit my job. I’d have to find another—or stay at home like Carol and my mother and Strauss’s sister and his mother. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. But I knew if I stayed home I would only pretend to be keeping house. The minute he left in the morning, I’d dash upstairs and get cracking on my novel. I’d sit in front of a notebook and a cup of cold coffee all day, and it would be only a matter of weeks before I began living in a very strange place inside my head, talking to myself like some antisocial entity who never had a lunch date, weeping at the beauty and majesty of my own melodramatic words, or worse—shooting off one—liners like a comedienne given her first break on national TV and fighting for her life to win the audience. Meanwhile, the carpets and kitchen floor would collect dust; green slime would creep forward, like a growing worm, on the tracks of the shower door. Four o’clock would roll around and I’d have to rush down to the kitchen and preheat the oven, because somebody in the family had to make dinner. My neck would be more knotted—with tension—than my apron strings. I’d get out a bottle of fine wine and think, I really need to let this chardonnay breathe—but because I was afraid Strauss would comment on how much I had slugged, I’d end up drinking jug wine to relax, pouring more down my throat than into whatever sauce I was fixing. Dinner would simmer as close to perfection as a chef like me would ever get it—and then it would burn. Strauss would come home late, and the minute he opened the front door I’d realize just how tightly I’d been cooped up all day, and I would want to run out of it.
Any progress today? he’d ask, and because any progress made—on any piece of writing—might collapse like a cobweb hit by a broom the very next morning, I’d have to be honest and tell him, I don’t know.
He would say: You just have to keep on trying.
He would say: Maybe you ought to take a course at the local community college on how to write a book and really finish it.
He would say: The floor is filthy and the laundry isn’t done. I don’t ask for much, Lisar, but can’t you find a better balance between this dream you have and the more pressing concerns that keep life running smoothly in this house from day to day?
Then I’d doubt myself I’d start mopping the floor to avoid writing, and then how soon would it be before I did nothing all day but dust and sweep and deliver his dry
cleaning? How soon would it be—in fact, he already seemed to have started—before Strauss, who paid all the bills, would begin telling me to stop doing this or that or the other? How soon would it be before he started nagging me to go off the pill and get pregnant? How soon before I began making excuses not to visit his parents on Saturdays, before he began welcoming those trips out of town as a relief from having to work all day and then come home to a crying child and an embittered wife? How soon before the whole house smelled of diapers and disappointment, and lovemaking came about only to satisfy the urge, not prompted at all by the desire to please the other person?
Why in the world would I want that with any man? But Strauss wasn’t just any man, and I wasn’t just any woman. That wouldn’t be us, I thought. We would go to Italy … and make love under an arbor, while the moonlight shone through the trellis and the night sparkled with Tuscan stars! We would stroll through Sleepy Hollow and walk along the Palisades—while Strauss praised my latest writing endeavors as utterly brilliant, beyond compare, and while I smiled demurely and refrained from saying inappropriate words like butch and faggot! We would have a baby—and she would wear a sailor dress and chase sea gulls on the beach. How neat and clean our house would be! How sweet the summer cottage on the lake with the wide white porch and rockers! How easy every night—because nothing in the world was wrong—to thank God in our prayers.…
If it was just as easy for me to imagine happiness as sadness, then why did sadness seem more real? Because it was 1:00 A.M. and I wanted to be dreaming, but couldn’t? Or because the darkness only spoke a scary truth, that so many things happened in spite of my imagination or will, and that there really was something to be said for the way fate was already spelled out in the stars? I lay there listening to the traffic rushing by on Fifth Avenue, and the sound seemed more muted—but just as senseless—as the noise in my heart. I felt like a city that could not sleep. Yet I must have drifted off, because during the night I stretched out my leg and realized Strauss wasn’t beside me. When I opened my eyes, the dark was turning to dawn, and he was sitting across the room in the chair, watching over me the way angels were said to guard a person who lay gravely ill in a hospital bed. I would have spoken—I would have told him I loved him—had it not felt so profane to disturb the silence.