Layover

  The word love itself clitoral, quickly swallowed by the vortex of its own sound. Love like a flock of birds V-ing into the horizon.

  To say I was inside the sex is to immediately create a contradiction in terms. One of those Zen paradoxes, like “To think that I will not think of you is still to think of you. So I hereby vow not to think that I will not think of you.” The second you say you are lost, you have located yourself linguistically. This is the problem with trying to talk about sex. We live, simultaneously, in language and in our bodies. Both impose limits. To complicate matters further, both words and acts exist in time, which is another limit, maybe the most stringent. Describing an orgasm takes far too long, and thus is false.

  Only during sex can you have such thoughts without having them. My pleasure felt distinctly intelligent. I was aware of being driven back to something elemental about who I was and how I had gotten there; this included, even if it did not directly reference, my nursing son, the different yet related pleasure of watching his toes curl, his satiation intense but not tense. From outside, you would see only the soft-porn cliché of my leg around the lawyer’s back, my foot arching and flexing. But no one watched. And Michael was not outside.

  During orgasm you never see your own face, hear your own cry. You can’t lose the self for long, though. Soon it all floods back. Dead son, philandering husband, thyroid problem (?), Hillary Katzenbach (!), court date, alimony payment, pretentious interior-design statement. Persistent car alarm. Then, bizarrely: hunger. How many times was I going to have to eat today? I tried to remember if the munchies were a symptom of early pregnancy, pre-morning sickness. No, I had probably just worked up an appetite. My body was a mess—a Rube Goldberg contraption, the bells of all needs clattering at once. But it was hard not to feel, as Michael left the bedroom and returned with a box of microwavable popcorn upon which Paul Newman grinned iconographically, then spooned up against me while I decided whether or not popcorn was, indeed, what I wanted, that in certain critical matters, my body still worked.

  Well after midnight, Michael Davidoff, who planned to take a deposition, by dawn’s early light, played the cello for me, naked. While a nude flutist might achieve a certain Pan-like élan, a naked man sawing away at a cello can’t help but look like a buffoon. Bach’s suites, holy and funereal, require a tuxedo. The luscious wood of the instrument, its auburn glints the same tone as the chest hair it is covering. His bony-kneed, hairy legs sticking out on each side, ending in hairy feet: man and bulbous cello made a sort of stick-limbed Mr. Potato Head. I watched from the couch, where I, too, was naked, inclined, breasts flopping, bowl of microwaved popcorn bull’s-eyed on pubic triangle.

  “I’m not very good,” he confessed to me, from behind the cello. “But I stuck with it because of a girl who played the violin. Marion.” Even now, he fondled the name a bit when he said it: his eternal Maid Marion. Every man had one in high school, including Ken.

  “I was a real nerd in high school,” he revealed, as if it would surprise me. It did not. Weren’t all Casanovas nerds in high school? “On the Math Team, even.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Math Team and literary magazine. Unusual combo.”

  “Ah. Reciting Plath by heart?”

  “Yes. ‘Daddy’ and Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’—I felt really, really bad for her. How could James Taylor dump her? If Joni could get shat upon, who was safe? And penning my very own Depressed Ballads about how tough it was to get the car on Saturdays to go to the mall.”

  “Did you have real long hair back then?”

  “Armpit-length, yes. In two braids that I wrapped in two circles over each of my ears, like ram’s horns.”

  “Like Princess Leia in—what was that movie?”

  The father, like the son, made cinematic allusions. I smiled. “Well, your son isn’t a nerd, it appears.”

  “No. Because of the sports, I guess. I mean, I was around long enough for Little League. And even in absentia I was able to pull off a proper birds-and-bees speech, which my father never did.”

  “Now that I would have liked to hear.”

  He grinned. On the cello, he laconically sawed out a couple of bars of what might have been Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” Then said, shaking his head as if slightly irritated by the recognition, “God, you’re…”

  “Thanks,” I responded.

  Really, we could have been dating. Why not? Other than the fact that I was already married. Plus there was the slight problem of the son. I tried to imagine us at dinner a couple of years from now, slightly drunk, telling our new joint friends about how we met. She just stormed right in! Could not imagine it, exactly. Nor could he, it appeared; as his hand stopped moving on the cello’s strings, his face had closed back up, decisive as a Venus flytrap. Just like that, I was not on his radar screen. And then the phone rang.

  He did not pick it up, but the answering machine was right there, so as the caller left the message, we could both listen.

  “So,” a woman said. “What else is new.”

  It was the legal associate I’d spoken to, earlier in the day! I recognized the exasperated voice.

  She paused. “Pick up,” she said.

  “Come on,” she said. “You’re not sleeping.” Then sighed, and hung up.

  Michael looked at me, shrugged, as the answering machine noisily rewound.

  I gave him a tight-lipped smile that indicated subdued sympathy. If I were dating you, the look said, I wouldn’t let our roles slide into me whining for more, you pulling back. Do you need more of this, after Mar? But of course it was easy for me to say. I was going home. And knew better than to talk about any of this. Instead I said, “Got anything for me to drink?”

  The cello-playing naked lawyer-stud emerged, in high spirits, from behind his instrument, to hold his other instrument, semi-wood, up toward me as if it were Bert or Ernie and asked, in goofy Sesame Street voice, “What can I get you, lady? Pepsi? Water? Prefer something more elegant: cognac?” And I heard myself say, “Cognac is pretty good with popcorn, actually, though you wouldn’t think it. Notice I am saying this to you in my own voice. No talking clamshell vaginas, thank you very much.”

  He laughed, straddled me for a kiss. Proclaimed, “Salty.” Proclaimed, into my very cavities, “In both senses of the word.”

  While M.D. fetches cognac for me, the following hallucinatorily clear word picture of a different MD.

  Kenneth Leithauser, husband, in our kitchen. We have been disagreeing about something. Not exactly arguing; just discussing heatedly. He faces the sink, does not look at me. Scrubs in his own way, methodically. I hear him say:

  That’s a very, very if not circular, then at least convex, argument.

  This line, only, in my husband’s voice.

  Very if not circular then at least convex.

  Subject unclear.

  The image so overwhelming that it knocked me out, brought back the cosmic fatigue in a rush, so that by the time Michael got back from wherever the liquor was kept, I was asleep.

  He did not wake me, just fetched a blanket. By the time overbright dawn woke me, he had already been back to his office, to fetch the relevant papers and my briefcase. I had evidently slept right through his bleary-eyed workfest at the dining-room table. Rubbing stubble, groaning in his Calvin Klein undergarments, he looked stressed-out and manly—a living ad for middle-aged success.

  “I am too old,” he informed me, “way too old, for all-nighters. This is not good. If I screw up, it is your fault. Coffee?”

  I nodded yes. My nakedness, under the blanket, had a morning-after rawness. He set the coffee down on the end table and lifted the blanket up and off me with an exaggerated voilà. Reached down with both hands to tweak my nipples as if they were clown noses. “Honk,” he said.

  “You’re a real goofball, huh?”

  “What can I say. You made me happy. How are you. How are you?”—nipples greeted, here, individually, each with
its own mocking pantomime of a firm handshake. Then: “Whoah. Say what?”

  I looked down. As we both watched, just one nipple pushed out a globule of murky fluid about the size and consistency of a drop of blood from a finger-prick test, which then dangled there, refusing to drop.

  He flicked his forefinger quickly to catch the drop, tasted it. Put on a wine-taster’s pondering face. “Not pasteurized, that’s for sure, but definitely—hey.”

  I felt the milk arrive in the other breast. The nipple pushed it out in a fluttering spasm, like a fart.

  “Cool,” said Michael Davidoff, in imitation of his son. Then, concerned: “Is this regulation?”

  “Don’t know,” I admitted. “Will have to investigate. Bathroom.”

  “Feel free to use toothbrush,” he called after me, “figuring, germs already majorly mixed.”

  A physician’s wife! A physician’s wife who had not thought to mention as a symptom, when a doctor came to her hotel room, that her breasts were leaking, three years after burying a child who had not been nursing, anyway, for years before his death. Who had managed to suppress that detail—who even though she had, at the time symptom first happened, at the Four Seasons Hotel with Zachary, remembered the official term for the condition, could not remember it now, when she needed to, except that it had a sci-fi sound.

  Milk this early, as a precursor of pregnancy? Unlikely, but in the bathroom that was my first, optimistic hypothesis. The second went to persistent, pathological grief brought to a head (if that is the proper expression for a nipple) by, perhaps, the shitball in Wilkes-Barre, the shock of his force to milk’s source. Or, more likely yet, cancer. That was why I’d forgotten the name of the condition. Because I didn’t want to confront my imminent mortality—knew without knowing, as women are said to intuit their husband’s infidelities. Wasn’t I supposed to think, now, Good? The bright side being that I could now rejoin my son in some backlit fourth dimension?

  I tried to calm myself, took Michael up on the toothbrush. A physician’s wife has the sense to say, reasonably, breathing deeply: it’s probably nothing.

  When I returned, wrapped in one of his towels, he offered breakfast—“many options, all frozen, frozen waffles, frozen bagels, Lean Cuisines if you want to start your day off with some fettuccine Alfredo,” but convivial as the sentence was, his face was already elsewhere. “Gotta get moving,” he said. “This is bad. If we lose I swear I will sue you. You are responsible.”

  It was just after 6:00 AM.

  The coffee, which I blew on although it was no longer that hot and sipped tentatively, tasted normal. As he showered I let the towel fall and did my daily check of reproductive status. (In the heat of the moment, as with the son, birth control had not been discussed. Frighteningly, the topic had not even surfaced in my brain.) Pregnant, about to get my period, neither—just going to skip this month’s whole reproductive false-alarm call-and-response. About to die. No way to tell. I didn’t feel bloated, though. In fact, I felt nicely scooped-out, taut. Of course good sex can do that, too.

  I couldn’t wait for Michael to leave, so I could get busy with my Merck Manual. Until then my best bet was to distract myself. When I could hear he was done shaving—he’d opened the door, just as my husband does and maybe all men, to let out the steam—I poured more coffee and went to curl up on his bed, to watch him dress. A lovely feeling, left from girlhood with fathers, to watch a man fortify himself with the armor of his workday and, on the other end, gratefully divest. Shoes tied taut as a corset. The Boy Scout seriousness of a man knotting a tie and, later, the swish of a tie knot unfurled, silky as hosiery. All men have their talismanic tricks for robing and disrobing, too, secret fetishes and eccentricities. My husband puts his pants on first, zips and buttons the pants, and only then puts on his shirt. Which requires unbuttoning, unzipping the pants he has just done up, to tuck in the shirt. I have often noted the inefficiency. I just do it this way, okay?

  Ken often, anyhow, in scrubs. No zippers at all. Men in scrubs look about as sexy as mental patients.

  The interior designer had spent some time militarily laying out Michael Davidoff’s walk-in closet. Like his ex-wife, he was a clotheshorse. In his closet he got the manly lope of a carpenter, in tool belt. Each article of clothing he put on helped to construct his working self. He concentrated totally, oblivious to me.

  The coffee was not going down so well. Father-or-son Davidoff spud abrewing, or acidic coffee on empty stomach after two dinners, excessive lettuce, overly energetic sex; popcorn, which takes, if memory served, a couple of decades per cup to digest. Or nerves, pure and simple.

  “So, how long you around for?” Michael inquired of me, behind him in the mirror.

  Mentally I retorted, six months to live. Bald and brittle, I would be grateful for my husband’s forgiveness. What would chemotherapy do to the fetus? Maybe I could hang on seven, eight months. Ken weeping in his surgical mask, his finger stuck through the porthole of the incubator. What would it matter, then, that the baby wasn’t his?

  Then scolded myself, Just had an uneventful mammogram! Tumor-the-size-of-a-golf-ball, tumor-the-size-of-a-grapefruit highly, highly unlikely! Doctors do not permit themselves to spiral into worst-case scenarios. They take things calmly, step-by-step. Read the teeny-tiny print.

  “I’m due home, really,” I told Michael. “But I could try to finesse the weekend, if you’d like.”

  “I’d like, very much.” He paused, cautiously. “Will have some finessing of my own to do, though.”

  I thought it best to let this one pass. “Do you mind if I stay a while?”

  “Yes. Vacate the premises this second, in your towel.”

  Playfulness aside, he was already way gone, already composing himself to stride into lawyerdom. During our choreography about key and burglar alarm—“you don’t need to answer the phone,” he said, “the tape’ll pick up, unless it’s me, and you want to”—he checked his watch compulsively. If this is how he functioned on no sleep at all, it would be much harder than I’d originally thought to break his control. Might take torture. Or sex so good (and here a line from the other Michael came to me) that it shakes the foundations. No, no sexual earthquake. Because you can always just walk away, collect the insurance money. Lawyers, doctors—doctors don’t need sleep, just take it wherever, whenever, like soldiers, or airline stewardesses: what would it be like to live with a normal man, who came home from work at a prescribed time, then stayed there? Reading, maybe, in an easy chair.

  As if I were one to talk.

  I would have liked to hibernate at Michael Davidoff’s apartment without the specter of illness or death. Watch daytime talk shows, eat a Lean Cuisine, wash the fork. Make the bed, try a stranger’s shampoo, scrub the mold off his shower curtain—as worthy a house guest as Snow White. Check out his portfolio of assets. Unearth the vibrator in the shoebox under the tennis racket. Or just nestle under his creamy quilt, so by the time he returned, exhausted, elated, from a long day of entrapping witnesses, I would be ready. We’d start with a premise of amicable efficiency, straightforward as rear entry, but would sink into it, pleased with our own abandon. Pizza delivery, dining naked, finer than the cozy cliché of girl in man’s big shirt: I saw him curling up the slice vertically, so he could fit the end in his mouth, as he told me about the day’s travails. I would not mind that he talked with his mouth full, cheese dripping. Sorry to hurt you (Michael to Legal Associate-cum-Lover), but we simply fell in love. Why is it that even when we should know better, all stories end with change, with fate? Because sex opens you up, if you’re a woman. We can make a nest out of anything. We eye each twig and scrap of gum-wrapper tinsel for potential adaptive reuse.

  How much does The Merck Manual weigh? Three pounds, four, despite the fact that the paper is Gideon tissue—thin, the type microscopic. Yet I had been walking around with this tome entombed in my briefcase for almost a decade, and why? Most of the products I sold I knew intimately. Merck provides, anyway, the most
basic of summaries, flirting with out-of-date. Just enough information to induce paranoia. Relax in a hotel room with a guide to local yummy restaurants, a People magazine, and Merck for a nice chilly bedtime story: so many different things can go wrong.

  Half an hour with The Merck Manual gave me my condition’s name and outline. Galactorrhea, undercaptain of the starship Enterprise. If production of “nonphysiologic” milk not result of “prolonged intensive suckling,” could be (what couldn’t?) stress. Condition exacerbated by antidepressants, Valium. “Must rule out hypothyroidism; increased TRH stimulates increased secretion of both TSH and PRL.” Could indicate hormonal problem: excessive estrogen or, if in combination with amenorrhea—no menstruation! This had not even occurred to me! Much more likely in my case than pregnancy! That would explain the periods so light as to have seemed like the spotting of early pregnancy. For amenorrhea, one should—take thyroid level. Check “nutritional status”: not starving Ethiopian, Olympic gymnast. Check for “psychological dysfunction—stress.” That ought to settle it, in my case, except that one-third of women with complete suppression of menstruation have pituitary adenoma.

  There it was: cancer.

  Most microadenomal tumors not dangerous, I read! Most very small, slow-growing, or stable! Not neoplastic!

  Almost all respond to drug treatment!

  Not even open of business day and I had already gotten diagnosed, hysterical, cured.

  Trying to stay calm, I ate one of Michael’s cardboard-tasting frozen waffles, showered. Put myself back into the clothes from the day before. Nothing so quixotic-feeling as cloaking a clean body in dirty underwear. Then had only ten minutes to wait before I could get busy.