by Rita Ciresi
I got up at the end of the song and told them good night. Apparently I was sleeping on the boat. 800 told me to take the room at the bottom of the stairs. Nobody helped me schlepp my duffel bag downstairs to the cabin below, which was paneled in pine, with varnish so thick it shone in the moonlight that came in through the tiny window. The boards were speckled with large dark knots that looked like evil eyes. I used the lavatory, which was outfitted with an aqua toilet and sink and a shower stall with a frosted-glass door that seemed to beg me to open it, as if I could find the answer to all my questions about life waiting inside. But all I found behind the shower-stall door was a bar of white-and-green-striped deodorant soap drying out on the plastic holder.
I left on my T-shirt in case I had to get up and pee during the night, but then the cabin was so stuffy and hot I took it off, knowing nobody was going to get a thrill looking at my body anyway. That body—my body—felt like someone else’s body, swaying queasily back and forth on the bunk. I knew the boat was firmly anchored and the water was still as a mirror, yet the cabin seemed to be rocking. The combination of alcohol and hunger dug a deeper hole in my stomach, and to level myself, I thought again of Strauss—the way he put his arm around me from behind and pulled me against his body.
Why wouldn’t I want him forever? Because there was a certain blandness about being with a man who covered you with a blanket before he went off to the kitchen or the bathroom, as if naturally assuming that all women were modest (or maybe, slightly ashamed of their figures) and would not want to be viewed too closely on the trip back.
“Why do you always cover me up?” I once asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a reflex. I suppose—well, my mother and my sister always seem to be cold.”
“Maybe they have iron-poor blood.”
I tried to picture Strauss’s mother, bundled in a cherry-red terry bathrobe over a modest Miss Elaine nightgown, fixing his father dark coffee and a pile of rye toast coated—on one side only—with margarine. I tried to imagine Strauss’s sister—sitting on her Broyhill sofa in her four-bedroom split-level in Bergen County—reading The Little Engine that Could to her children beneath a multicolored afghan she purchased at the last Sisterhood fund-raiser for the temple. These were the women I was likened to, compared to, whose lives and goals seemed so radically different from my own.
“I’m not like your mother,” I told Strauss, sure of this even though I had absolutely no proof of it. “I’m probably not even like your sister.”
“No. You’re not. I wouldn’t want you to be.”
But who did Strauss want me to be? More important, who did I want to become? Certainly not this—a girl who spent the night shit-faced on a yacht belonging to a man named Hot Fuck, who had to masturbate herself to sleep with the tail end of her T-shirt while fantasizing about doing it with a couple of nameless twins, who felt so lonely after this momentarily satisfying yet meaningless act she even considered going back up on deck to talk with the guys and was stopped only by the fear that the guys were doing it doggy-style on the deck, and whose final thought before she sunk into a sleep from which she would awake with her head full of pins and needles and her mouth full of cotton was of a tale called The Secret Stranger.
In Conrad’s story, the boat was called The Sephora, and the captain strolled the deck smoking a cigar, then stopped when he discovered what he thought was a headless corpse floating in those strange, Asiatic waters. Once “the corpse” slithered up the ladder onto deck, he revealed himself to be a criminal guilty of mutiny and murder. The captain hid him in a cabin, risking the safety of his men and himself to save the stranger because he identified with this dark shadow of himself.
I dreamed of The Sephora, the moonlit sea, the wet criminal shivering in the corner of the cabin in borrowed pajamas, and a captain who looked like a sterner, burlier, bearded version of Strauss. In the middle of the night I awoke to a sound that at first I feared was the sound of a violent coitus coming to conclusion, before I realized it was something even more terrible: the ragged edges of weeping. It came from above, a horrible oh God, oh God that seemed scraped from someone’s most inner space.
Every human being was capable of tears, yet I could not imagine them coming from 800’s blue eyes. The weeping belonged to Dodie—his gift freely given to the dark night. I listened. Then it stopped, the boat went quiet, the moonlight streamed in through the porthole, and I fell into a restless sleep that was anything but oblivion.
Chapter Twelve
It’s Your Funeral
I was the first to wake the next morning—or rather, the first to make an appearance on deck. Before I went upstairs I slipped on a tank top and shorts and peed a foul-smelling urine into the aqua toilet. Then I splashed a blast of cold water on my drawn skin and cracked lips. The first sip of water I took from the cup of my hands left me queasy, and I resigned myself to a morning—if not an afternoon and an evening—of dry mouth. My hunger was completely gone, but my forehead felt heavy and I craved caffeine.
It was 10:15. I sat on the deck, the floorboards already warm beneath my bare feet. Desiccated lemon slices floated on top of the pale brown liquid left in the glasses. One of the strings of chili pepper and cactus lights had fallen from the guardrail, and on the table next to me was an ashtray soiled with cigarette butts. Once I looked closer, I saw they were a couple of roaches. Dodie and 800 had been smoking dope last night without me.
After a while the sheer curtains on the top floor of the A-frame moved slightly. Dodie’s head peeked out. He made a shh gesture by raising his finger to his lips, and just before he dropped the curtain I saw a bare leg on a bed behind him.
Dressed in the same clothes he wore the night before, Dodie walked too slowly down the log staircase. He, too, looked like a wreck. He obviously hadn’t showered or shaved, and I had the urge to lick the palm of my hand and run it through his rumpled hair, smoothing it back down on his skull.
“Man, I’m hurting,” he said. “You got your car keys?”
I patted my shorts pocket and heard the familiar jingle of my Saint Christopher key chain.
“Let’s go get some joe,” Dodie said.
I cocked my head toward the house.
“Homer doesn’t drink coffee,” Dodie said. “He’s macrobiotic.”
My parched mouth opened in disbelief. I extended my first finger, like a gun, toward the ashtray full of roaches.
Dodie shrugged. “He’s full of contradictions. Come on,” he added, with such impatience that I knew escape from Homer Francis was the name of the game, which I was more than willing to play.
The nearest coffee joint was a Dunkin’ Donuts on the main drag. Dodie refused to drink his joe at the counter next to a pair of cops and a retiree who actually wore a baseball cap that said GONE FISHIN’. We ordered four cups, which Dodie held in a cardboard container on his lap as we headed along the main street that ran parallel to the beach.
“No sudden stops,” he said, “or I’ll never have children.”
“You want kids?” I asked.
“Doiyyyy,” Dodie said, making the ugly sound we used to let off as teenagers when we wanted to indicate the person we were speaking to—usually one of our parents—was acting completely retarded.
“You’d actually be a good father,” I said. “Better than either of ours.”
“That wouldn’t take much effort, would it?” Dodie asked. He cracked the safety lid on one of the cups and carefully raised it to his lips. After his first sip of coffee he asked, “Do you want to hear my deepest, darkest fantasy?”
“Spare me.”
“It’s nonsexual in nature.”
“Oh,” I said. “Then really spare me.”
“Eccola, Lisa. Here it is: I go home and tell my father I’ve gotten a girl into trouble—”
“Don’t make me laugh—”
“—and my father claps me on the back. Takes me out for a beer. Or three or four. Or eight. And my mother, she gets down on he
r knees in front of that white plastic Madonna she’s got on top of the Magnavox—”
“They have a Quasar now,” I said.
“Oh. How long have they had that?”
“A couple of years, maybe.”
Dodie fell silent. I, too, was quiet, as if it were my fault I knew more about his own parents’ house than he himself did.
The road beyond Shore Line was two lanes only and shaded on both sides by pine trees. Dodie told me we had a good thirty miles to go before we hit the place he wanted to show me—a wild and beautiful spot that 800 took him to last weekend. For a few minutes we did nothing but drive—quietly, slowly—on this road that bore almost no traffic on a Sunday morning. Then Dodie asked me, “How about you, Lise?”
“What about me?”
“Think you’ll ever have kids?”
I swallowed. Dodie looked out the window to hide his embarrassment.
“Carol had her baby,” I said. “Last weekend.”
“You should have told me.”
“It was a boy. I went home. And listened to her sing the praises of motherhood.”
“Did your mother join in?” Dodie laughed when I didn’t answer. “Were you inspired to follow suit?”
I shrugged, remembering the irrational sob I let loose when I gave Al Dante Junior back to Carol. “I don’t know. I mean, I want to someday.”
There were breaks in the evergreens along the road. We kept passing in and out of the sunlight, which aggravated my headache.
“What about this guy you’re going with now?” Dodie asked.
“What about him?”
Dodie looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “You look like shit, Lise. You must be in love.”
I glanced at him out of the side of my sunglasses. “What’s your excuse?”
Dodie gave me an odd laugh, thick and sputtery like a blender clogged with sticky stuff the blades wouldn’t whirl. “No excuse,” he said. “So to return to Mr. Right … I really think it’s time you ’fessed up about him.”
“There’s nothing to ’fess.”
“But you’re so secretive. I’m beginning to think he’s what your mother calls a Negro—”
“He’s not a Negro. What a stupid word.”
“So why are you hiding him? Where is he this weekend?”
“He went to a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium.”
“Sounds like he has potential,” Dodie said. “Why don’t you marry him?”
“Because—because sometimes he bores me,” I blurted out.
“Oh. Then you really ought to marry him, because you know exactly what you’re getting into.”
I tried to laugh, but my mouth and throat felt too tight. “Why would I want to get married, anyway?” I asked.
“Because you’re getting too old for this shit—”
“Et tu, Peter Pan?”
“—and because you like a man telling you what to do—”
I started to squawk but swallowed it when Dodie said, “—if only because you like to buck against it.”
“Bingo,” I said.
Dodie fell quiet for a moment. Then he told me he would love to see me happy—although why he thought marriage was the ticket to la-la land was beyond me—and that he thought I needed to start thinking about playing it safe, viewing the long run, working toward being more secure. “Besides,” he added, “I’d like to see what you’d do to a man, Lise.”
I kept quiet. For the first time in my life I was frightened of what a man could do to me—or what I would let him do to me.
“So what else does this guy do, besides bore you?” Dodie asked.
“Bore isn’t the right word,” I said, even though Strauss did have all the hallmarks of the kind of man I often saw standing in the lobby of a concert hall, patiently waiting for his wife to come out of the ladies’ room. “He’s just so decent—”
“And you want a bad boy—”
“And gentle—”
“What do you want him to do—break your hips?”
“And polite! How can I marry someone polite, who doesn’t even say shit when he drops something on the floor, and then the next minute—he’s so friggin’ bossy!—he turns around and tells me to fetch it for him, please! How am I going to have a really good fight with him—and win it?”
“Find the right button,” Dodie said, “and push it.” He flipped down the visor. “I take it this isn’t a nice Italian boy we have here?”
“Nice Jewish boy,” I said.
“Oh,” Dodie said. “Can I watch when you break the news to your mother?”
“No, you may not.”
“Are you going to break it to her?”
“Why would I?”
“Because that’s what you do,” Dodie said. “If you’re straight. And you’re serious. You take the other person home.”
Suddenly I realized the gravity of the situation: The moment I accepted Strauss’s invitation to meet his parents, I would have to reciprocate. “God,” I blurted out, “I guess I’ll have to—”
Dodie smiled. “I knew it. I just knew it, there are diamonds on the horizon—”
“Look out, Dodici,” I said, “or I’ll name my firstborn after you.”
For half a second this appalling thought shut Dodie up. He looked out the window at the pines, which were beginning to thin, so we could see through the trees to the white dunes along the beach. Then he reminded me, “Jews don’t do that—name after someone living.”
“He’s named after his dead brother.”
“What did his brother die of?”
“It’s too complicated to go into. I just know the brother was named after his grandfather—”
“Lisa, please. What is this man’s name?”
“He goes by his last name—”
“And what do you call him?”
“His last name—”
“Oh, man! Lise! Isn’t that just like you, to sit on a guy’s face and then call him sir—”
“I don’t call him sir! I call him Strauss.”
“Strauss, huh?” Dodie said. “What’s his grandfather’s name—Jo—hann?” Dodie hummed a Viennese waltz. “Richard? Levi? Nathan? Wow, Nathan Straus, the guy behind Macy’s—”
“Don’t start getting wild, Dodie. His father has a family business. He sells carpet in Brooklyn.”
“Home or industrial?”
“I don’t know. And what do I care?”
Dodie knocked his hand against his forehead. “Because—you ignor-anus—there’s a big difference between his father managing big-time jobs like hospitals and airports and him offering penny-pinching housewives like your sister three rooms for the price of two and the hallway runners for free.”
Because my own father had put down cement, it had suited my imagination just fine to picture Strauss’s dad on his hands and knees driving in carpet tacks. Now I wasn’t so sure that was the case. “His parents live in Park Slope,” I told Dodie. “I guess he must be some kind of contractor.”
“And this man of yours, he’s in the rug business too?”
“Not exactly.”
“So how does he earn his living?”
I hesitated. “By going to a lot of meetings.”
“Sounds like he has a healthy salary.”
I squinted, flipped down the visor, and admitted I knew this much about Strauss’s financial state: “He has to do his taxes on a quarterly basis.”
“Now we’re talking,” Dodie said.
“But that’s not why I’m going out with him,” I added.
“I didn’t say it was.”
“I wish he made less money.”
“Are you out to lunch?”
“But, Dodie. It’s a power thing. It makes me nervous. He always picks up the check.”
“Christ,” Dodie said. “Can’t you find something better to complain about?”
“But then he’s in control.”
“Lise, somebody’s always in control, whether it’s obvious or not—”
“But it’s supposed to be fifty-fifty, or at least sixty-forty, or at least more balanced—”
“You want balance, take t’ai chi.” Dodie sipped more coffee and replaced the lid. “So where’d you meet him, the gym?”
“Nope.”
“A bar? A personal ad?” Dodie paused. When I didn’t answer he said, “Don’t tell me what I think you’re about to tell me.”
“All right, so he works with me.”
“In another division,” Dodie prompted me.
“Sort of.”
“You told me everyone in the Editorial division kept tampons in the bottom desk drawer.” Dodie took a quick look at my face. He drew in his breath. “Lisa, you’re sleeping with your boss—”
“So what if I am! He’s not married!”
“That’s never stopped you before—”
“And he’s under forty—”
Dodie let out a long, low whistle. “It’s your funeral.”
“Stop overreacting. It’s not like we’re fucking on the boardroom table.”
“But, Lisa, people aren’t blind. They notice this shit. They pick up on the vibes.”
“Half the time he’s on the road,” I told Dodie.
“And the other half he’s not. So who knows? Or is this public knowledge and everybody just turns their head?”
“No. I mean yes. I mean, it probably wouldn’t be kindly received. We kept it secret up until last weekend. Then somebody spotted us.”
“Doing lunch?”
“No.”
“In neutral territory?”
“On the sidewalk.”
“On the sidewalk in front of where?”
“The Pierre.”
“The Pierre Hotel? Madonna mi, your goose is cooked.” Then Dodie laughed. “I’ve never been in that hotel. What’s it like?”
“Oh, Dodie! Tell me what to do. I don’t know what to do—”
“You’re going to quit your job, is what you’re going to do—”
“Are you crazy? Why doesn’t he quit?”
“Because he’s on top of you, is why. What’s his title?”
“VP—”