by Rita Ciresi
I chewed on the end of the pencil. There was one more line left. I pressed my finger hard on the pencil and added the name of the man, with the exact address and the phone number I had memorized within a week after I began dating him: Eben Strauss.
Then I drew in my breath, full of hope, and thought: Why not? Why not have the Board of Health call Strauss and tell him that an anonymous former partner had submitted his name for testing, so that Strauss would be forced to come to me, as he no doubt would, and say, “Lisar. I have something awful to tell you. Please keep an open mind. Please listen.”
This plan momentarily struck me as the ideal solution. But as I stared at the last line on the legal pad, I realized I had no idea how many women Strauss had taken into bed before me. I knew there was a steady girl in college—described rather ruefully as Well, you only fall in love like that once in your life, thank God—and in his twenties, someone he said he hadn’t cared for, and in his early thirties, the psychiatrist to whom he had been briefly engaged until he decided it wasn’t right. But since then? Since the fiancée? Strauss was thirty-six, the age at which his parents more than expected him to be married, the age at which the number of adventures usually began declining as opposed to escalating. He had already sown his oats. But where? With who? How many?
There hasn’t been anyone else. In quite some time.
I bit the end of the pencil so hard the eraser came off in my mouth. I spit it out. It was no use. Strauss and I obviously had not shared the same circulation rate. One call from the Board of Health and he would either intuit the identity of the anonymous party, or else he would show up at my apartment, take one look at my ashen, penitent face, and find out.
I picked up the phone and called Strauss. He arrived at my apartment an hour and a half later. And then he showed me just how rough and rude he could play. In fifteen swift minutes our relationship was over.
Chapter Fourteen
Hurts Is a Verb, Not a Possessive
In the long dim months to come, I would play and replay that conversation, like a foreign-language cassette that spoke a dialogue I needed to repeat but couldn’t master. I remembered every last hateful, hurtful, blown-out-of-proportion line we uttered, beginning with the undignified ouch! that escaped my lips when he first embraced me and the palm of his hand—like the press of an iron—came down against my sunburned back.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked, pulling away and holding me at arm’s length, his head bent so he could see me better in the dark of the hallway. “You look awful, Lisar. I mean, not yourself.”
“I went to the doctor.”
“What did he—” Strauss stopped. “Excuse me. I’ve been hanging around Peg all day. What did he or she say?”
“It was a he,” I said. “And he told me bad news.”
Strauss blinked. “About your period?”
“I don’t have my period.”
He pushed up his glasses. “But I’m confused. On the phone. You said you did.” He hesitated. “Is it late? Are you trying to tell me it’s late?”
For a second I paused. I hadn’t even thought of that one—the oldest ruse in the book, performed by countless wily heroines in nineteenth-century novels: snaring a man into marriage by faking pregnancy. The setup was perfect: In the Frick I’d told Strauss I’d forgotten to take my pill. That such fraud was beneath me, but not my depraved imagination, sent me even further into despair about myself. I swallowed hard and told him, “It isn’t late.”
“Oh,” he said. He gave me a sad smile. “Help me out here, Lisar, with my dumb-guy etiquette. I guess I’m supposed to say I’m relieved.”
I bit my lip. “I wouldn’t know. What a man was supposed to say—”
“Of course not.”
I took a step backward. “I need to tell you something.”
He looked at me expectantly.
My voice faltered. “I’m trying to do the right thing.”
“Of course.”
“Why ‘of course’?”
“Because that’s the kind of person you are.”
I shook my head. He stared at me for a moment, then looked back at the door, almost as if he wished he had never come into my apartment in the first place. “What do you want to tell me?”
“Anything but what I have to tell you.”
His hand went up to his jacket. I had seen him do that at Boorman: touch his lapel, and then his tie—as if it were a talisman—before he went into an important meeting. “Sit down, please,” he said.
I took the couch. He took the chair. I started to speak, then put my knuckles up to my mouth. Strauss held out the Kleenex I had parked on the coffee table—I’d already gone through half a box that morning. I took the box, grabbed a tissue, and blew my nose.
He winced. “Something happened at work while I was gone, didn’t it?”
“It doesn’t have to do with work,” I said.
“What does it have to do with, then?”
“This weekend—”
“Where were you this weekend, anyway?”
I dropped the Kleenex to my lap. “I was at the beach. I went with my cousin to the beach.”
Strauss gave me a hard look. Then he reached over and turned on the floor lamp. “I thought that was a sunburn on your face,” he said, in the same disapproving tone my father had used when Carol and I came home—red as a couple of Maine lobsters!—after baking ourselves on the scorched, gravelly sand at Lighthouse Beach. “Why didn’t your cousin give you some sunscreen?”
“Stop blaming him.”
Strauss looked annoyed. “Who’s blaming him? I don’t even know him—”
“It’s my fault, it’s all my fault—”
“What is your fault, Lisar?”
I told him. And after I told him, the refrigerator in the kitchen let off a sudden hum—like a low, far-off droning of a bomber plane—and then the sound spiraled down to silence, which was followed by Strauss’s thin-wire whip of question after question I didn’t want to answer: Why did you lie? Even if you did shoot up only once, once is enough, isn’t it? But if it was only once, the chances are slim, unless you’ve done other things to put yourself at risk? What else have you done? What else haven’t you told me?
“I slept with a lot of guys,” I said.
He started to say something, then stopped. “How many?” he finally asked. “Be honest, that’s all I’m asking from you now.”
“Enough to fill up a sheet of paper,” I said.
He put his forehead against his hand. “You’re joking, I hope.”
“Why would I joke about something like that?”
“A better question is why would you do something like that?”
“You wouldn’t ask me why if I were a guy—”
“Don’t change the subject. This has nothing to do with being male or female.”
“It has to do with a double standard.”
“It has to do with—I don’t know what to call it but self-respect—”
“You said yourself you’d once been with someone you hadn’t cared for—”
“—and sheer numbers. The numbers.”
I clutched the box of Kleenex on my lap. “What about your numbers? How many women have you been with?”
“I don’t owe you that information.”
“But I owe it to you?”
“You do, and you know it, or else you wouldn’t have initiated this conversation—but what is eight to your what? Two dozen?”
“One-third.”
He glared at me. “I can do my math, Lisar.”
I pressed my foot hard against the leg of the coffee table. “All right. So I made some mistakes—”
“But in this day and age, to make mistakes of that magnitude—haven’t you been reading the newspaper? And the dishonesty of not telling me, that’s what I can’t stand. The lying. And beyond that … to be so reckless with yourself—”
I shoved the box of Kleenex onto the couch cushion. “You didn’t mind my recklessness when you
pushed me onto your carpet.”
“Wait a second,” he said. “I didn’t push … I didn’t set out to hurt you. I never set out to hurt you, and now I see there’s this hurtful hidden side of you—no, don’t interrupt me—that shows a real want of judgment, a lack of moral sense, and what in God’s name are you praying for at night, Lisar—”
“For forgiveness! Because I had an abortion!”
My face felt on fire from my sunburn. I had a good long time to savor the sensation, because Strauss sat there, for several moments, in silence.
Finally he looked down at the back of his hand and asked, “Was it mine?”
“Ours.”
“How could you have—”
“But it wasn’t yours—I mean ours—whatever name you want to call it—”
“Whose, then?” Strauss said. “Or shouldn’t I ask?”
“It was right before I met you. Remember you asked me if I’d been involved with someone else in New York—”
“He forced you to have it?”
“I never told him. The man was married, and don’t give me that look, Strauss! You thought I was married when you first met me, and that never stopped you from coming down to my office—”
“I came down to your office in a professional capacity—”
“Did you?” I asked, surprised at the threatening tone that came out of my mouth.
“—and I never would have … initiated a relationship with you … if I had thought you were married—”
“What do you know about marriage?”
“I can use my imagination!” Strauss said. “I have used my imagination on that point, Lisar, more than once. Use your imagination now: Can’t you see how wrong that was of you, to come between two people?”
“Use yours: What if the two people are grossly unhappy? What if you had married this other woman, this fiancée of yours, and were utterly miserable and then you met me—”
“And got just as miserable with you?” His face flushed. “Stop putting me into these hypothetical situations to deflect attention from your own mistakes—”
I leaned forward on the couch. “Who are you to judge? You have no idea what it’s like to go into a clinic and make that kind of choice—do you think I felt good about it, do you think it was any kind of choice at all? What was I supposed to do, go home and have the baby in front of my sister, who couldn’t even get pregnant, and live with my mother for the rest of my life? Oh, what do you know about anything, sitting there in your coat and tie? You’re a man—”
“Why do you say you’re a man as if it’s a fault? What kind of man do you expect would understand even half of what you’ve told me? And don’t tell me your cousin—”
“I will tell you my cousin!” I said. “He’s a better man than you are. He at least has compassion; he at least understands that people make mistakes! He at least stood by me. How could I ever have thought you would stand by me?”
“How could I ever have thought …” Strauss’s voice trailed off. “All right. Let’s put a stop to this right now. We’ve both said enough.”
“More than enough.”
We hesitated, as if we were listening to the echo of our own words against the walls. Then we both stood. Because I was in my stockinged feet—without the benefit of higher heels—I had to lift my chin to look him dead-level in the face.
Strauss held out his hand—not for my hand, but for the phone number of the Board of Health. Or the clinic. Where, he said, he hoped a man could be tested confidentially.
“They give you a number,” I said. “Or you can use a false name.”
“Like a criminal.”
“Exactly,” I said. “You take this test, and then you have to take another in six months.”
I handed him the card. I already had the number memorized. He tucked it into the inside pocket of his coat.
“About work,” he said, in a voice that sounded too purposefully cool, the way my own voice had frosted over not to show my fear when I once had to tell a guy on the subway platform, Here’s the money in my wallet, I’m giving you all the money in my wallet, now please step away.
“What about work?” I asked, trying to control the shakiness in my own throat.
He spoke carefully, as if he suspected I would memorize his words to use against him at some later date. “I blame myself for a lot of this,” he said. “For most of this. It’s obvious that this has been a mistake from the word go, that I—that we—both used poor judgment. I want you to know I won’t use this against you at work. But I think you should promise me the same.”
“You have my word.”
“If nothing else, we owe that much to each other.”
“I just gave you my word,” I said. “For all you think my word is worth.”
He hesitated. “I want to trust you on this.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re afraid I’m going to do you in.”
“You have … you may have some ammunition, but—”
“But what? You have the corner office. And you could drive me right out of mine—”
“That would be indecent,” he said. “You don’t know me very well if you think I’m capable of that.”
“Anyone is capable of anything.”
“But to live like you are—to live like you’re capable—is wrong. I need to go to bed at night and not be sorry for what I’ve done that day.”
“You can’t sleep at night anyway,” I said. Then—because there didn’t seem any point in trying to hold it back any longer—I started crying again. “I hope you lose even more sleep over this one.”
“But I never wanted to hurt you,” he repeated. “Look at me. Look at what you’ve done here, Lisar.” But I couldn’t—I had to look away—because suddenly there seemed no more wrenching sight in the world than a man on the edge of tears.
Gray fog rolled into Westchester every morning; thick rain fell all that September. As autumn came, I tore off the pages on my desk calendar and remembered the depression that always came with winter, the despair I used to feel as I shoveled my parents’ long, wide driveway after the fifth or sixth bad snowstorm of the season. When I propped the wet metal shovel against the wall of the garage, I used to look longingly at our red-and-white-striped beach umbrella—covered with cobwebs—that lay folded on our old redwood picnic table, and my feet never felt so soggy nor my hands so numb with cold than when I thought of all the months left of winter before I could nestle my body in the sand and gaze up into the star-shape spokes of that beach umbrella.
That was the way I felt after Strauss walked out of my apartment: like I’d never be warm again.
In the dark hours of the morning, when the alarm carved its insistent monotone into my dreams, I hit the button and rolled over, so groggy from the sleeping pill I took the night before that I often fell back into a deep slumber. I forced myself to roll out and stumble into the kitchen to plug in the percolator, which I had set up with coffee and water the night before. While the coffee maker did its happy little song-and-dance routine, I blasted myself awake with a shower so hot the mirror stayed steamed for close to half an hour. I ate a granola bar and drank two cups of coffee while slumped on the couch in my bathrobe. I spent fifteen minutes getting dressed and made up (on the off chance I bumped into exactly who I was trying to avoid at work). After pulling on my gloves and coat, I raced downstairs and started the car. Even on the grayest, cloudiest of days, I wore sunglasses, because I routinely wept on the way to work.
At Boorman—much as I tried—I couldn’t avoid Strauss. I looked into the rearview mirror and saw his Audi trailing mine, three cars back, on the long driveway that led to the parking lot. I came careening out of the ladies’ room and practically knocked him down along with a squadron of statisticians, a bowling ball to their ten pins. To brace myself for those unexpected meetings, I always looked for his car when I swung by the VIP lot. When the Audi was gone for days at a time, I thanked God for inventing places like Springfield and Saint Lo
uis and Kansas City, because Strauss was there and that meant I could roam around the halls of Boorman without bumping into him as I delivered a report to another office or headed to the cafeteria. But I also was depressed because I knew that was one more day I wouldn’t see him, one less chance that he would stop me—call me—and say, This is ridiculous, I’ve been a fool (and you’ve been an even bigger one!), but what are you doing tonight, what are you doing for the rest of your life, do you want to get back together again?
He proved stubborn, and so did I. I, too, did not pick up the phone or log on to my computer to send him a message. Instead, when I opened my desk drawer at work, I stared at the Cracker Jack surprise he left on my desk early in the morning on that day we broke up. The surprise came wrapped in a thin paper packet printed with repeated images of the Cracker Jack sailor boy, and the bulbous shape within turned out to be a miniature blue whistle imprinted on the side with the word POLICE. Sometimes I imagined that if I raised the whistle to my lips and blew, he would hear the lame, sputtery sound that crescendoed into a high trill, and like a dog responding to his owner, he would run to me.
So why didn’t I whistle for him, especially after my initial test came back clean? Why didn’t I try to talk to him instead of waiting for him to talk to me?
“Lisa,” Dodie told me on the phone. “Forget whose fault it is. You’re negative, which means he’s probably negative, so call him and declare a truce.”
“I can’t. I won’t. I’m not going to yodel up to him on his moral high ground. I don’t even know why I want to be with him anymore.” Just to test how credible it sounded—as well as to gauge its dramatic qualities—I quoted one of Donna Dilano’s lines from Stop It Some More, which I was considering retitling If I’m Hearing You Correctly, You’re Saying It’s Over. “I already had a father,” I told Dodie, “and I don’t need another man around to make me feel like shit!”
“Christ, I hope you didn’t say that soap-opera line to him.”
“I didn’t!” I said, not bothering to report that Strauss and I had exchanged more than a few other choice phrases that could have been straight off a General Hospital episode.