“Then I’m sure you’ll get it,” I said, patting her hand even as I began to back away. “I’m just going to try and manage one thing at a time.”
Chapter 10
He called me. Then I called him. Then he called me again. Each time, what started out to be a brief conversation turned into an extended talk. I took the phone under the covers in my red tent. I whispered to him from the supply room at work. It was like I was in middle school again, when I first discovered the telephone, and I never wanted to hang up.
It seemed easier to open up to him when it was only his voice I was dealing with, when the physical reality of him and his age weren’t in the picture. And when I was a mere voice myself, which seemed somehow like a truer, more timeless version of me.
I might have been satisfied to play out our entire relationship on the telephone, but then, inevitably, he wanted to meet. He suggested a place, but I was afraid our embryonic romance wouldn’t survive another night of grinding dancers or their equivalent. I offered to cook him dinner. That night at Lindsay’s had reawakened my cooking instincts, and I knew, if nothing else, the process would relax me.
He assured me that the place he was subletting in Brooklyn had a decent kitchen and what looked to him like a full complement of pots and pans—though he’d never actually attempted to prepare anything more elaborate than frozen ravioli.
I set out to shop on Saturday at noon, a full six hours before I was due at Josh’s. The city seemed quiet and the ice had all melted and the temperature had thawed a bit. My internal sense of time no longer moved to the rhythm of the school calendar, but I realized it must be the start of Presidents’ Week, a time when we always took a family vacation. But inevitably, if we went skiing it was so warm that the snow had turned to mud, and if we went south the weather was as cold as it was back home.
Not my home anymore, I told myself firmly, at least not for now. In fact, Maggie’s Lower East Side neighborhood was beginning to feel more like home than I ever imagined it could. I’d developed my own little routine in the mornings and the evenings and had assembled a cozy village of shopkeepers and restaurant people I chatted with—the tall Albanian guy who started preparing my cappuccino with skim milk, no cinnamon, two minutes before I customarily walked in the door of his café every morning, the counterman at Katz’s deli who knew just how to trim the pastrami sandwich I sometimes treated myself to, the tiny eternally busy woman at the vegetable stand, and the waitress at the restaurant where we’d gone on New Year’s Eve, who’d just landed a part in a tampon commercial.
Today was a chance to expand my range. I stopped at the old-fashioned butcher shop that was always closed by the time I got home from the office, as if it didn’t want to trade with working women. But today, the courtly man behind the counter discussed at length with me my various roast options—Josh assured me he’d happily eat whatever I wanted to cook—and then meticulous trimmed the fat from the leg of lamb he helped me select. At the Chinese bakery I bought two pork buns, and then a block later, at the Italian bakery, I couldn’t resist a beautiful loaf of semolina, so warm and crusty and fragrant I ripped off a hunk and munched on it as I strolled down the street.
The sidewalks were wet, and the sun shone warm on my face. When Maggie first moved to the Lower East Side, all the stores were Hasidic, shut down on Saturdays. And then for a while, when crack first made its debut, the neighborhood became so dangerous it was terrifying to simply walk through the streets, even in daytime. Now there was a whole new generation of street life: groovy bars and restaurants, a café owned by a rock star that served a hundred varieties of tea, a sneaker shop that drew entire suburban families and kept its priciest wares locked inside thick Plexiglas boxes, like the Hope diamond. I strolled along, putting everything I bought in a backpack so my hands were free to examine the apples at the fruit stand, to carry a cappuccino and shop for a shirt I ended up changing into and wearing out of the store.
When I reached the entrance to the subway, I decided on impulse to ride up to Fourteenth Street to see what I could find at the Union Square Greenmarket. It was amazing to me that this outdoor farmers’ market operated year-round. If I closed my eyes, blocking out the bare trees and the stall operators and shoppers in their turtlenecks and heavy coats, I could almost imagine it was spring. I bought parsnips and carrots for a puree, apples and peaches to make a pie.
My pack was full and I carried a bag in each hand by the time I headed out to Josh’s house in Brooklyn. I’d gotten so involved in my shopping that I’d almost lost sight of why I was doing it, what this night might hold, so it wasn’t until I was walking toward his building, peering at street signs and addresses, that I remembered to get nervous.
“You’re still in control,” Maggie told me. “This is the age of AIDS. People don’t sleep together on their first date.”
“It’s our second date,” I pointed out. “Or maybe, if you count New Year’s Eve as well as the night I stood him up at the bar, it’s Date Two and a Half. Plus it’s also the age of Sex and the City.”
“Oh,” said Maggie. “You’re right. It’s obviously time to fuck his brains out.”
Had I been making a pro-fucking-his-brains-out argument? I hadn’t been aware of that. In fact, if I let myself even think about fucking his brains out, I wanted to hurl the groceries into the street and hightail it (note to self: don’t say “hightail it” if you want people to think you’re under forty) back to New Jersey.
It’s just dinner, I told myself, in rhythm to my feet. A mere leg of lamb.
Josh had told me he was subletting his apartment from a musician, so I wasn’t expecting the sweep of elegant space behind him when he opened the door. It was more a loft than an apartment, nearly as big as Maggie’s, and nearly as unfurnished, but in a different way. Everything was sleek and modern: a steel-armed charcoal sofa facing an enormous flat-screen TV, a rectangular black dining table with wheels on its legs, and in the far corner a bed as flat and vast as a field, blanketed in bedding as soft and white as snow.
Quickly, I turned my eyes from the bed to the long wall crowded with recording equipment along with what I guessed were Josh’s own computers and video screens, speakers mounted in all four corners of the ceiling, and shelves filled with thousands of records and CDs.
“What kind of music do you like?” Josh said. “We’ve got it all here.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I need to put down these groceries.”
I definitely wanted to avoid the music question. I didn’t really know any music that had been made since the seventies, early eighties at the very latest. After that I’d gotten too busy being a mom, and when Diana had gotten old enough to be interested in music, I bought her a Walkman so I wouldn’t have to listen to it. Sting was my idea of a new musician. Elvis Costello, someone extremely modern. Even better, I liked the music we’d listened to at dance parties in high school and college, Motown, mostly.
Josh led me into the tiny stainless steel kitchen, which looked like the kind of place where you might invent a cure for cancer. It looked as if it had rarely been sullied by anything so plebeian as raw meat or mud-crusted parsnips. I set down the bags and began unpacking my backpack, looking around and thinking about where the cutting board might be, trying to distract myself from the fear of melting into a pool of my own nervous perspiration.
“Come on,” he said, running a hand along my hip. “Let’s dance.”
I giggled, perhaps girlishly.
“There’s no music,” I said.
“We don’t need music.”
He pulled me close, one arm around my back, the other holding my hand close to his heart. It was the way people danced at weddings, which at least was something I knew how to do.
“Come on,” he murmured in my ear. “Tell me what kind of music you like.”
“Martha Vandella,” I said finally. “Marvin Gaye.”
It was nice, dancing in the silence. I liked swaying with his arms around me, resting my c
heek on the soft cotton covering his substantial shoulder.
“Oh,” he said. “Oldies.”
I stopped moving.
He laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The guy I’m renting this place from has everything. It’s all arranged chronologically.”
He went over to the shelves that held the CDs and reached toward the top, which I figured was somewhere near the beginning of time—but not, I was relieved to see, the very beginning. I guessed there might be a few Billie Holiday and Elvis Presley recordings up there before it.
“Here’s something I think you’ll like,” Josh said, pulling one down. “It’s a favorite of mine.”
It was Sam Cooke, “You Send Me.”
He held me more tightly now as we began dancing again. I felt something nudge my hip and realized it was him, growing hard. I wasn’t thinking about groceries anymore.
Unfortunately, what I was thinking about was even less romantic. I was remembering the visiting professor I’d slept with at Mount Holyoke, the poet who was in his late forties when I was barely twenty, of how slack his skin felt compared with that of the handful of boys I’d had sex with. He’d felt somehow worn, like an old shirt.
I was horrified by the idea that Josh would feel that way about me, would divine, once I was naked and in bed with him, by the look of my skin or my feel or my scent, that I was older—much older—than he’d thought I was.
He took off his T-shirt.
“Uh, I don’t think so,” I said.
He stared at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not you.”
Like the boys always said: It’s not you, it’s me. Except in this case, it was true.
The music was still playing, but we had stopped dancing. I reached out and touched his shoulder, so hard, so tight. I couldn’t resist running my hand along it, over its curved edge like the lip of a waterfall and down the smoothness of his biceps. I trailed my hand across his chest to his nipple, hard as a pebble. I moved closer and kissed him there, flicking out my tongue to feel its ridge.
He groaned. “Alice,” he said. “This is too hard.”
I ran my hand down his flat stomach, unsnapped his jeans, and touched his penis.
“It’s too hard for me, too,” I said.
He grabbed my hand.
“Please,” he said.
I pulled my hand away and used it to push his pants down around his knees. He stepped out of them. He wasn’t wearing any underwear. The Sam Cooke song had ended, and something unfamiliar had come on. I knelt down before him and took his penis in my mouth. This was something I couldn’t remember ever wanting to do before, but I wanted to do it now. Maybe because this was a way to have him without taking off my clothes.
“Oh, God,” he said, digging his fingers into my scalp and arching his back so that he thrust deep into my throat. “I want to see you, Alice.”
I stopped and looked up at him.
“Let’s just do this,” I said.
“Come on,” he said, nudging me upward. “Please.”
I stood up, and he began unbuttoning my new shirt, its buttons difficult to work through the still-stiff buttonholes, finally pulling it off my shoulders and reaching into my bra, cupping my breasts in his hands. Then he unsnapped my pants and pulled them down in the exact way I’d tugged at his. I was wearing black cotton underwear, bikinis, not new. He seemed to smile when he saw these, but then reached inside and put his finger into me, not seeming to mind at all the thicket of pubic hair he encountered there.
“Oh,” I said.
“Yes,” he murmured, pressing it in more insistently. “Oh.”
“Oh.”
I thought I might have my first person-to-person orgasm before we even started on the actual sex.
“Let me take my clothes off,” I said.
“I’ll do it for you.”
I stood there like a child, holding my arms out from my side while he eased my shirt and my pants all the way off, while he unhooked my bra and pulled down my panties. From the recesses of my mind came the memory that I was nervous about him seeing me without my clothes, but my desire for him immediately overrode my anxiety.
It was immediately evident that he was too excited, too, to notice anything other than that I was standing before him naked, and that we were about to make love. He took my hand and led me over to the CD player, which he switched off, and then to the big white bed.
At the bed, he pulled me down, pressed his mouth to each of my breasts and then between my legs. I could have danced to the beat of my heart. I had never felt like this before, truly. All the years in recent memory, my sex life with Gary had been routine and unenthusiastic, an occasional lunch with a boring colleague. The months in bed with my pregnancies and then the months recovering from those losses, the years at home with a small child and then a curious adolescent—these had all taken their toll. And before that, with Gary and with the few lovers I’d had in college, the problem had been mine alone. I remembered the excitement of kissing, the thrill of getting undressed, and then losing interest when it didn’t progress beyond a certain point. Waiting for him to come, and feeling as if I never ever would.
Now I felt overcome by my excitement, so that I lost all sense of myself and of what we were doing. Did he feel so different because he was not Gary or because he was young and so strong, so eager? Who cared? It was thrilling that as strong and eager as he was, I felt every bit as strong, and a lot more eager. All that exercise—I’d taken more Krav Maga classes with Lindsay, and was back at the gym running on the treadmill and lifting weights—fueled my energy now, and I felt as if I could keep going all night. At one point it seemed as if he came, but that barely slowed him down. He lay on his back with his eyes closed while I moved slowly above him, and then he joined back in.
I wanted to talk to somebody, afterward. Is it like this, I wanted to ask, for you? I thought of all the women I’d known, my old Homewood friends Elaine and Lori, my neighbors and the moms of Diana’s friends, even Maggie, even Lindsay, and I couldn’t imagine they felt this way about sex. If they did, they’d be having it every second. They’d be grabbing men—or women, in Maggie’s case—in the street and doing it every chance they got.
But maybe I just felt this way because it had been so long. Because it had been, I thought with a laugh, forever. I was a forty-four-year-old virgin, I thought. A forty-four-year-old virgin who had all the mechanics down pat.
“That was amazing,” Josh said.
I looked at him in surprise. I’d nearly forgotten he was there.
“Really?” I said. “It was for you, too?”
“Of course,” he smiled, turning onto his side and running his fingertips lightly over my torso. “You’re incredible.”
“I am?” I said.
He nodded solemnly. “You seem like you really like sex.”
“Doesn’t everybody?” I asked, really meaning, Don’t all young women like sex? Because I was thinking it was probably just my generation that had so much trouble getting started. Girls today, with the magazines, the how-to books, with Sex and the City, seemed to have such an easier time.
“Not that much,” he said. “You’re different.”
“You’re different, too,” I said.
He was different from Gary, of course, and from Thad, from all those men who lived within their own egos. And he was different from the dreamier young men I’d dated in college, too: less gallant and more interested in my life, not as macho and more willing to let me take the lead. He’s a lot, I realized now, like I always wished men would be, back when I was dreaming of Prince Charming. A lot like I assumed Gary was, back when I was blinded by love.
Or maybe Gary was really more like this back then, when he was studying in England and writing poetry. His poems had been beautiful, and he had been so serious about them, about his search for beauty and truth. I would come home to our tiny apartment in the early days of our marriage, during my first tour of duty at Gentility, to find Gary
staring unseeing and openmouthed at the wall, or a few times with tears streaming down his face, immersed in the feelings and the words.
“Can I ask you a question?” Josh said.
He was not quite looking at me, I noticed.
“All right.”
“How old are you?”
I stopped breathing. He knew. He had guessed. He could tell by my crepey skin, my stomach, my thighs.
I hesitated for a moment, trying to decide which I wanted more: to tell the truth or to keep him wanting me. “I’m older than you,” I finally said.
“That’s what I thought,” he said.
I was relieved, now that it was out. I was glad that he had brought it up, because I was obviously too much of a coward to do it myself. When he learned the full truth, I wondered, would he run away? But better to have it all clear now.
“Really?” I said. “What are you, twenty-five?”
“Bingo,” he grinned. “How did you know that?”
“Lucky guess,” I said. “That’s how old Lindsay is, too.”
“I figured she and I were about the same age,” Josh said. Then he laughed, his eyes dancing. “Though I figured Thad for at least fifty-eight.”
And then I had to ask: “How old do you think I am?”
Please, I thought. Don’t let him say over forty. Though I fully intended to tell him the truth.
He grimaced, and I held my breath.
Finally he spoke. “I’d guess you’re…twenty-nine.”
Chapter 11
Teri arrived a few minutes early at the office, clutching a Starbucks cup as big as a vase in her black-gloved hand. I’d already been there for an hour, working, as had become my habit, on my classics project, sketching rough ideas for a new cover direction. As soon as I saw Teri I curled my arm over my notebook, just like I used to do when Bobby Mahoney tried to copy off me at St. Valentine’s.
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