Layover

  “Okay,” I said.

  He laughed. This time a little noise got out before he throttled it. “Okay, then,” he agreed, patting my hand—what? A patronizing good-dog pat, then he turned to face our waitress, who appeared to have arrived tableside.

  “For the lady?” he asked me, totally professional and businesslike.

  I had not even looked at the menu that had been under the orb of our joined hands. I told him to order for me. I was not hungry, of course. Not only had I eaten, but the business with my hand had made a different kind of hunger rise to my mouth, so that I wasn’t sure I could wait through a whole meal to kiss him. He appeared to know this, because once the waitress had gone, taking with her the ludicrous annual reports of our menus, he put his hand to my mouth, finger out, at the angle you would to allow a parakeet to alight on it, and I bit, just a little, his finger. I was surprised by this—surprised he would be that open, in a restaurant so close to his place of employ. He seemed to be surprised himself. My teeth on the knuckle and tongue underneath, where it could feel something callused.

  He twitched the finger just exactly enough to make of its bend a metonymy for other angles: for my raised knee, a sharp turn in a Pacific Coast Highway he would travel at night, cautiously; for a nipple, backlit, lapped. And for, of course, the tent of stretched fabric in his lap that my foot could find, under the tablecloth, if this were a tacky movie and the camera zoomed below to glimpse my pump slipping off, pointed toes probing. But this wasn’t a movie. I don’t think anyone would have even noticed us, the movement of his hand near my mouth was that small. The feeling wasn’t at all lascivious: more cozy, like a kid who’s supposed to be asleep making a tent of the bedcovers to read underneath, by flashlight.

  When I opened my eyes his gaze had changed. It was moist and somewhat pained.

  “Hard to imagine you”—I for some reason said or I guess actually semi-panted or moaned, letting him take his hand back—“with Margot.”

  That broke the spell, immediately. “You know my ex-wife?” he asked.

  “Wouldn’t say ‘know.’ Met, though. Had dinner with her and Zachary at Le Bec Fin, in fact, just a couple of nights ago.”

  At the name of the expensive restaurant he winced. The neat bourbon, or the promise of sex, had considerably loosened his poker face. If I concentrated, I could have watched a whole chronology of bad blood—3:00 AM weeping, custody hearings, alimony checks written with such deep hostility that one signature could have caused carpal tunnel syndrome—pass behind his eyes.

  “And how do you know Zach?” he asked, in the same studiously casual voice.

  “Bumped into him, literally, at the teensy Four Seasons swimming pool. Wound up talking a bit about medicine since my husband is a cardiothoracic surgeon.”

  “Ah. I take it your own marriage is currently undergoing some kind of interesting flux?”

  “Marriages,” I informed him, “are always undergoing some kind of interesting flux.”

  He considered that proposition. “If you’re lucky. If not…”

  “Not,” I concurred. “This line of inquiry is less interesting, don’t you think”—I said the word interesting with a shade of contempt that I knew he’d catch—“than the way we were proceeding heretofore?”

  (This was me, I realized, imitating Zachary, imitating his father’s imitation of his own litigator’s style.)

  “You liked that, did you?”

  As answer I offered him my hands again, palms up.

  He was prevented from taking them by the arrival of the appetizers, small portions on huge plates.

  He had ordered me some kind of salad with unexpected grilled or marinated morsels nestled in the leaves. It was quite good and I ate it, although I was not hungry and also did not deem myself to need too much more roughage in one day. We did not talk at all. In his silence, I saw his son; we were sharing the same kind of companionable quietude that Zach and I had at Le Bec Fin, while Mom was in the bathroom. Someone watching us eat may have just assumed we were married, had nothing further to say. But it was a charged silence, not a dull one. Both of us ate and contemplated whether it would be possible to have excellent sex with a stranger, not in the fashion of Last Tango in Paris, with that edge of danger, hostility, but in a manner that was—chummy. Unthreatening. “Mutually rewarding,” as a lawyer would say. Our scene was possible only because I was married, out-of-state, just passing through, clearly unavailable. That made me, I suppose, as safe as a woman gets; the danger was not deep, merely a kind of lubricant. Except any woman who not only consents to, but masterminds such a situation with a strange man must be inherently unstable, I’m sure he thought. Still, I had said the magic words, cardiothoracic surgeon. The assumption being that a woman does not leave a surgeon lightly. Even for a lawyer. Even for a lawyer who can provide the star-quality sex that I’m sure he thought—and it appeared he was not incorrect—I could anticipate.

  We got a bottle of wine, very nice Pinot Noir, and our main courses. He’d ordered himself a steak and me a loin of pork in a crust, with some kind of berry glaze, accompanied by delicately fried zucchini blossoms and shaved potatoes the size of fingernail clippings. The kind of thing that sounds good on a menu but on plate and palate overacts somewhat. It was not the perfect choice for a second dinner but I was happy he had thought to order me this and not some fish that I would conceive as noble, because I perceived myself as always four pounds overweight. The kind of dieter who orders whatever’s boiled or broiled—a hair shirt of an entrée—then rewards herself with extra bread slathered in sweet butter. And dessert. I was happy he took me for a drinker of blood-red wine, a lusty carnivore.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Ambitious. But I kind of anticipated that, from the Keogh prospectus of the menu.”

  He laughed. “And what do you think of me?”

  “I think you’re not quite the man I thought you’d be.”

  “You mean, from talking to the fair Margot.”

  I nodded.

  “Not Hitler, you mean?”

  “Not even Warren Beatty.”

  He grinned, agreeing.

  “Just a reasonably nice guy,” I continued, “soul flattened a bit by life on the planet, life as an acquisitive American, who would like to fluff soul up a bit, doesn’t quite know how. Likes the law, loves the law even, but tires of reputation, not entirely inaccurate, as sleazebag and would rather, therefore, be doing something else, preferably something more romantic than a glorified version of ambulance-chasing—write novels, maybe, like Grisham?”

  “No, thanks,” he said. “I’d rather be a scientist. Play with my little chemistry set. Cure AIDS. Identify cancer genes. Also,” he confessed, “I play the cello.”

  “The cello?”

  “Badly. And you?” He was warming to this now. “What was in that briefcase?”

  “Christ,” I said, startled. Realizing, now, as I looked frantically at my feet, that I had actually managed to leave the briefcase in his office. The laptop was with me—I had somehow slipped it off my shoulder after the walk here. But I’d forgotten my briefcase. Was not used, basically, to carrying both my briefcase and laptop out of their slots on my luggage cart, when I was in motion in a foreign port. As I had at the Four Seasons, at check-in, I experienced the threat of loss of my belongings as a deep and wrenching grief, as if I’d just regained consciousness at the war hospital to confront the stump of my leg. Or as if I’d saved the wrong things as I fled the house on fire. Scatterbrain! I scolded myself, to clear away the mounting panic.

  “Well, we can get it,” M.D. assured me. “It’s safe at my office. So: you. Traveling salesman of something lucrative—that case way too slim for samples. Lots of time, on the road, to discreetly satisfy your appetites. Especially now that your kids are older, less demanding. They’re at—summer camp? Summer camp for the whole friggin’ summer! ‘Dear Mom and Dad. Joey put a frog in my trunk. It pooped. Dead cockroach floating in Bug Juice. Love, Junior
.’ Hey, you should be enjoying this freedom with your husband. When was the last time you were in Paris? But I bet he’s too busy…”

  However my face had collapsed in reaction to this speech, the timing indicated to him that the offensive part was the last. The workaholic hubby with his predictable lunchtime liaisons. “Sorry,” he said. I shook my head no and waited for the waitress to pour more from the bottle of wine, before I explained.

  “One kid. Dead. I used to have a lot of fantasies about summer camp, actually. It’s one thing I still can’t bear, to listen to friends talk about their kids away at camp. The tenderness. The kind of—cheerful longing. Sometimes I used to do a little bit on myself, just pretend he was at summer camp, ruse of positive imaging. Not dead; just gone. I mean, if he was going to live in memory, as people always say I’m perfectly entitled to have him do, why can’t the memory include a projection of the future? But I’ve moved on. Had to. Hated freezing him at twelve. Couldn’t get him to stay in focus, voice changing, growing like crazy. Now I pretend he’s off to college, just like your son. His adult form already in place but still becoming, still with all that excited sense of the unknown—just off my radar screen.”

  He dipped his head once, to say sorry.

  We just studied each other for a while, and I watched a parade of thoughts flash past his face then get snatched away. Real pity for me. Some pornographic interest in the nature of the death, the when and how of it, whether it represents a litigable claim, an injustice—did the brakes function properly? Some disgust or shame at his own interest and some fatigue with it, too—who wants to be on professional duty with a woman he’s about to bed? Some disappointment, because how is a woman in the grip of grief going to be fun to fuck, then some interest in rising to the challenge as he considered that perhaps my plan was to fuck my way out of grief, which would require a certain intensity of concentration and was news to him, too, somewhat off the beaten path of anger, depression, defeat, lust for retribution with which he worked daily. A memory that he needed to be working. Flash, both panicked and comforted, of the mountains of papers in a strategic map on his desk.

  This is how he resolved the spate of conflicts: he stood, decisively. He whipped his wallet from his pocket and began piling bills on the table—fifty, fifty, twenties. I watched as each bill got slapped down: this was going to be a happy waitress. Then he slid in beside me on my side of the banquette, against the wall, so that one of his legs touched one of mine under the table. He put his arm around me, reached up as if he were going to stroke my hair but instead put the ball of his thumb on my second cervical vertebra and pressed down, hard, like some kind of acupuncturist.

  “Claire,” he mused.

  Something about the way my name sounded in his voice—sharp, knubbly, skeletal—made me feel as if I were going to cry.

  He said, “Shall we?”

  Outside it seemed to have just gotten dark, as if sunset had waited for us. We were old enough to pass for long-married. Walking easily beside Michael, I saw that he was my husband’s height and had pretty much my husband’s body type, long and liquid. Still, he was not my husband. It appeared that we could stroll to his apartment, across historic Rittenhouse Square, which would be elegant, except for the panhandlers and deinstitutionalized schizophrenics, casualties of the failure of American health care. We could talk about that, probably.

  Instead he asked, lightly, “What’s the catch?”

  He was looking at me sideways, probing, courteous. I tipped my head, to request amplification.

  “Come on,” he said. “A woman just shows up, offering sex—if I can be so bold as to assume that’s what you meant by ‘a present’—with no strings attached. Women don’t do this. Not women like you.”

  “But men do? What are ‘women’ ‘like me,’ anyhow?”

  “Who’s taking the deposition here?” he asked, uncomfortably.

  If you didn’t count Zachary—and for some reason I didn’t, quite (that seemed to be the point of Zach)—I had not touched a man not my husband for seventeen years. Nine or ten of them tied up with the child, before and during and after. Prior to that: Ken’s residency. Ken getting into his practice. Three different jobs for me, and three different houses (two rented), in three distinct locales and climates: new checking account, new car registration, new grocery store check-cashing courtesy card. Dinner parties for Ken’s current colleagues and their wives, women with whom I couldn’t possibly connect, although I had to look as if I were making an effort. If Ken and I divorced, my lawyer would make an issue of this (you helped put him through medical school!), but I chose the road. I should have been an army brat, I guess, or a diplomat’s daughter, though I’d spent a childhood in a stable family, in a suburban split-level, and maybe that’s exactly why I didn’t want an identity bound by place and things.

  “I mean,” he said. “Why me?”

  The question was a fair one, really. But I couldn’t answer it. Instead I merely parted my lips, in a way that I hoped would indicate my helplessness before his irresistibility.

  If this were a movie, he would not stop, before sex with a stranger, to check his answering machine. But he did, as soon as we got to his place. I excused myself to use the bathroom off the hallway, to give him some privacy, but from there, even with the fan on, I could hear the murmur of the messages playing: a woman’s voice, cajoling. Then a gruff return call—not to her. Work-related. Get files from so-and-so. This made me feel highly irritated with him. I hoped he planned to show me a good enough time to justify whatever betrayal he was currently engaging in. “If you’re going to check e-mail and voice mail next, forget it,” I warned him, and he smiled, shook his head no, led me to the bedroom.

  About first kissing this man, here is my conviction: that on my deathbed at, say, ninety-three, I will not have forgotten. Yet what will I be remembering? Only my own abandon.

  No hallway groping. When we got to his bedroom he threw the keys and loose change in his pocket into the ceramic piece on his dresser that a designer had selected for this purpose, and watched me as I began to take off my clothes, not fast, not slow. There was a chair handy, to receive them. My suit fell in a crisp, lineny rhythm, as if the chair appreciated the hand of the fabric. I knelt on his bed. Then he began to undress too, watching me as I watched him.

  I see myself, in memory, kneeling on his bed. The bed is not flat against the wall but, as a result of the interior designer’s inspired burst, angled into a corner, and I am kneeling on the corner of the bed, too, so there is a kind of triangular motif, visually. I am sidelit, and feel it. Both exposed and private. Michael, jacket somehow removed but otherwise fully dressed, his shirt the same chemical blue as the city sky viewed from his high-rise window, stands yards away, symmetrically centered on the bed’s corner: another triangle. Another: the distance between my yearning breasts and the well, below, to which all sensation flows. Yet another: the distance between those breasts and his hands, his hands and his mouth. All those Pythagorean equations that help the body sail.

  Sex is a story you know the ending of. More or less the same story with the same ending, every time. Yet we want to keep hearing it, the way a child listens to a fairy tale, vigilant for variation. I knelt there in, I swear, a trembling suspense of not-knowing, waiting to see where and with what this man would alight on me.

  This is what he did: kiss me, solely. No conjoining of hands or chests. If my eyes had been open, I could report how this was achieved. It must have entailed some canting forward on his part, using the bed as a brace. We were tongue-joined—tongue-and-groove. Blind and without history, I felt, and was, mouth only.

  Not then but much later, retracing the scene, I would remember the other Michael’s poem about breastfeeding babies, about the totality of the hunger and its relation to identity, and an equation would come to me that seemed to spell out, mathematically, the link between desire and deprivation:

  Want = Want

  Those words look how the kiss felt. Mouth
. Mouth. A precise mirroring. The = was the “we.” So by the time he—and this was his next movement, decisive enough to qualify as symphonic—put one hand, only, to one breast, as if to divine, by Braille, the relationship between nipple and mouth, then moved his mouth to the place his hand had just felt out first like a blind man’s cane, to lip-read the language he had just invented, I was: well, I was way, way gone. Later there would be time to scold myself “What are you doing?” or remember to register some vestigial shame about the breast (which was not, any longer, in broad daylight, a young woman’s), or come up with some distancing quip, like “You’re quite the stud, for a Philadelphia lawyer.” But for the moment I allowed myself the be here now, babe that was the very point of sex with someone new.

  Although he was not quite new. Son and father had, eerily, almost the same hands, the same teeth. The same earlobes, eyebrows, tongue; even, if one can be so crass as to mention it, virtually the same cock, in meat if not motion. (At some point it occurred to me that were it not for incest taboos, fathers and sons would be the scientific subjects of choice for Masters and Johnson, as twins, separated at birth, are for all controlled studies on biology and destiny.)

  I would like to say that touch is simply touching. But I had not felt like this from sex with the son. With the son I had stood outside, watching. With Michael there was inside, only. There was, let’s face it, a skill differential. The lawyer’s sexual MO was highly unusual. The smallness of scale of his touch, the intensity of focus, on thumb or spinal column, may have been a trick, gleaned from an instructional G-spot video that he cribbed from as if it were an appellate brief. But it worked. It allowed me to fall into a well of my own sensation. Made the whole stretch of skin and time that was the act’s narrative arc feel—not to put too fine a point on it—clitoral.