There was a circular booth in the back of the club near the bathrooms, and we crowded in there. The better-looking man slipped a folded square of paper from the front pocket of his jeans, opened it, and took out a tiny plastic envelope. Inside the envelope I could make out chunks of something white, like sugar left out during a rainy spell. He shook one of the chunks onto the back of a credit card and began chopping it with a blade he unfolded from the tiny Swiss Army knife that dangled from his keychain.
“Is that cocaine?” I gasped.
“Sssssh,” the three others said in unison.
“We have to get out of here,” I said to Lindsay.
“I wanna do this,” Lindsay said.
The better-looking man rolled up a dollar bill and handed it to Lindsay, who handily snorted a line of the cocaine.
“That’s enough,” I said, pulling on Lindsay’s arm. “We’ve got to go.”
I’d actually done cocaine, in the early eighties, at a club in London a few nights before I met Gary. It had been fun, I remembered; it had made me feel wonderful, until I woke up in bed with someone who smelled so bad I thought I might throw up. Then I met Gary, and in short order fell in love, and found to my enormous relief that a safe and happy future was mapped out before me, and the memory of the cocaine was connected for me with all the danger in the world from which I had been lucky enough to escape.
Now the better-looking man was snorting his own line, and then handing the rolled-up bill to his friend. And then he leaned over and kissed Lindsay, bringing his hand as he did so directly to her breast.
“Lindsay,” I repeated, more insistently.
Lindsay kept kissing the guy, and his friend was eyeing me. If he tried anything like that with me, I’d tear his windpipe out with my fingernails. I even thought I’d enjoy doing it.
Josh, I thought. All I wanted was Josh.
“Lindsay,” I said, pulling on her arm this time, standing up so I had the traction to drag her out of the booth. The better-looking man tried to hold on to Lindsay’s other arm, but I leveled a look at him, holding the windpipe-ripping image in my mind as I’d learned in Krav Maga class.
“Let her go right this instant,” I said, in the firm voice I’d used to let my child know when I was really serious about something, “or I will crush your balls.”
He let go instantly, and Lindsay, giggling wildly, fell away from him and spilled onto the lap of his friend, who put his arm around her.
“It’s time to go home,” I said.
“I don’t want to go home,” said Lindsay.
She turned deliberately away from me then and to my astonishment began kissing the second-best guy. The good-looking friend smirked at me and slid over to press himself against Lindsay’s back, reaching around to cup her breast as she kissed his friend.
“Lindsay,” I said loudly. “We have to leave right now.”
Lindsay looked up at me with drunken eyes. “Leave me alone,” she said. “You’re not my fucking mother.”
I wanted to leave right then, but I couldn’t let myself abandon her. I stood by myself at the bar, drinking club soda and watching. At least she stopped letting herself be used as sandwich material by the two creeps, though she stayed with the better-looking guy. She knew I was there, too. As she left the club with him, she glanced at me, but then quickly looked away.
By the time I worked my way outside after them, they had vanished. I stood there for a moment breathing in the cigarette smoke, trying to decide what to do. Finally, I hailed a cab myself and gave the driver Maggie’s address. But then, as we were heading across town on Houston Street, I changed my mind and asked the driver to go to Williamsburg. To Josh’s. Josh was a night owl, often up watching TV or even working long after I’d dropped off to sleep, and I suddenly felt like I had to see him, the way you crave a shower after spending time in a room filled with smoke and grease.
The taxi driver, angry at feeling he’d been duped into going all the way out to Brooklyn in the middle of the night, dumped me off on the dark street and sped away. This was the difference between Brooklyn and Manhattan: whereas Maggie’s street was populated at any hour of the day or night, Josh’s shut down by midnight, no open bars or restaurants, no pedestrians in sight. The only movement came from somewhere near a parked car in front of Josh’s building, a flash that I first thought was a cat and then realized, with a little scream, was a rat.
Rushing to the door, I pressed his buzzer frantically and then, when he didn’t answer, hurriedly punched his numbers into my cell phone. The rat was still pawing around near the car, probably trying to eat the tires, and I was afraid it was going to lunge for me next. When Josh didn’t answer his phone either, I began to think that maybe he’d gone out for the night. Met someone. Hadn’t come home.
Gingerly, I stepped back on the sidewalk, craning my neck to get a look at Josh’s windows. Shit. They were dark. That meant either he really had gone out, or this was the first night he’d fallen asleep before midnight since I’d known him.
If there were other cabs around or if it were early enough to safely take the subway back to Manhattan, I would have left right then. If he’d really gone out, I couldn’t stand there waiting until who knows when, and if he was sleeping, I hated to wake him up, especially after ditching him for my misguided night out with Lindsay.
But I was stuck. I tried buzzing and calling again unsuccessfully, and then finally edged over toward the curb, scooped up some gravel, and tossed it at his window, calling, “Josh! Josh!”
Finally I saw a light go on in his apartment, heard the rumble of the window sliding open. And then I saw blessed Josh’s head appear.
“Josh!” I pleaded. “Let me in.”
It took him a moment, through his half-open eyes, to tell what was going on. Then he let out a low chuckle. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “Come on, get in here.”
I took the steps two at a time, not pausing for breath until I was safely inside his apartment, not a rat in sight.
Then I hurled myself into his arms, and stood there hanging on to him, feeling like a ship that had finally sailed into port. He held me for a long time, until finally he pulled away and said, “What happened? Girls’ night out gone wrong?”
I shook my head no, reluctant to somehow be disloyal to Lindsay, and then I nodded a woeful yes. “I should have been with you.”
“Should have been?” he asked.
“Wanted to have been. Wished I had been.”
He kissed me then, a soft kiss using only his lips, again and again, like the kisses I remembered from junior high, before sex made everything so complicated. I felt, with him, that I was home, and that home was the only place I wanted to be. So much for my wild young self. The first man I’d been with since the husband I’d married at twenty-one, and all I wanted to do was be at home with him every night.
For the first time, taking off my clothes, climbing into bed with Josh, twisting myself around him as if it were possible for us to become one, I began to consider that maybe our relationship didn’t have to end just because he was going to Tokyo. Maybe I didn’t have to put so many limits on it, could allow our feelings to determine how involved we got. I began to wonder whether, since I’d successfully defied time, I might be able to think about forever.
Chapter 15
My tenants were moving out, back to their own newly renovated house, leaving me to decide once again what to do about my house. One option, of course, was moving back in, but the only reason I could see to do that was if Diana came back home. Did Diana have any intention of coming back home? Her e-mails and phone calls, spotty as usual, made no mention of what she was doing, and I, absorbed in my own new life, had stopped hounding her.
But now I had to know. I left a message for her at her field office in Africa, and then waited three days for her to call me back. No, she said, she had no plans to come home.
“That’s good,” I said.
“That’s good?”
“I mean,
that leaves me free to rent out the house again and stay with Maggie in New York.”
“It sounds like maybe you want to move there permanently.”
“No, no,” I told her, though to my surprise I wasn’t totally appalled by the notion. “It’s just more convenient right now. Don’t worry about rushing home.”
“All right, I won’t,” Diana said. “In fact, I’m thinking about signing on for another year.”
Another year. I felt my heart sink at the prospect of not seeing my daughter for another whole year. But maybe I could persuade her to come home for the holidays this December. Or maybe, now that I was earning money, I could even go over there to visit her.
“I’m glad things are going well for you,” I told her, really meaning it. “Maybe staying would be a good idea.”
Over the next few days I found the idea of renting out the house for a longer term or maybe even putting it on the market growing on me more and more. I’d started this whole younger thing as a lark, a one-night experiment. And then I’d pushed it a bit further to see whether it would help me get a job, jump-start my life.
Now everything was going so well, I found that I didn’t want to give it up. Any of it. Maggie said that while the adoption board had seemed curious about her “unusual living arrangements”—she’d made quotes in the air around these words—she thought the visit had gone well, and so I felt more at ease about being in the loft. And at the office, with Teri still at home—once all her kids were finally better, she came down with the flu herself—I was sailing forward with my project.
The only weird thing was Lindsay. Since we parted outside the club, she’d seemed cool to me, though she claimed everything was all right and she was merely swamped with work. Well, I was swamped too. Figuring Lindsay was embarrassed about what had happened or annoyed with me for trying to tell her what to do, I decided to take the opportunity to lay low, holing up in Teri’s office to work on the project from early in the morning until late at night.
When I wasn’t working, I spent all the time I could with Josh. His departure for Japan was still far enough away that we could relax and have fun without worrying that our time together was about to end.
And why did it have to end at all? I was beginning to wonder. I mean, eventually, of course, I’d have to own up, maybe, but why should it have to be in two months or two years or any set amount of time?
How long, I tried to calculate, could I pull off pretending to be roughly fifteen years younger than my true age? When I was fifty, could I fake being in my mid-thirties? Closing in on sixty, could I pass myself off as fortyish?
Sure, I had the advantage of looking naturally young, but that wasn’t going to last forever. I could exercise every waking hour and things were still eventually going to sag. Lines would form, skin would grow crepey, gums would recede, and hair would thin. It was happening already to women my age or a little older; certainly, it would happen to me too.
And then there was that guilty feeling I got, way beneath the skin. At work, even with Lindsay, I could tell myself I wasn’t hurting anyone, that my performance as an employee, even as a friend, had nothing to do with my age, real or fake.
But with Josh, the guilt was more persistent. Our relationship may have started out as a fling, but without either of us willing it, it had turned into much more. Our feelings for each other were serious and genuine; shouldn’t I be just as real with him about my age?
Yet suppose we decided to stay together for the longer term, and I confessed my real age, and Josh accepted that. Suppose I came out as forty-four to the entire world. Wouldn’t it still make sense for me to try to look as youthful as I possibly could? The business world definitely was more welcoming to someone who looked young, and even if Josh knew the truth, I’d want to look like his girlfriend, not his mother. That didn’t mean resorting to plastic surgery, necessarily, but less radical methods. Creams and peels. Botox. Restylane. Gloves that sent little shocks to your skin.
When I mentioned to Maggie, as casually as possible, that I was thinking of trying one of these age-defying techniques, she squealed and spilled her espresso. “What?”
“It’s not a big deal. It’s completely natural.”
“You’re completely out of your fucking mind! Why in hell do you want to give your face shock treatments?”
“To look younger,” I told her.
“You look young enough already!” said Maggie. “I’m tired of this! I want my friend back!”
“I’m right here,” I said.
“Oh, no, you’re not,” said Maggie. “Not completely.”
That stunned me into silence. I had no idea what she was talking about.
“How am I not there for you?”
“In little ways,” said Maggie. “I miss hearing you talk about your garden. I’d rather hear about your tulips coming up than some stupid club you went to with your baby buddy.”
I nodded, though I remained unconvinced. I suspected Maggie found both topics equally deadly.
“And I miss you inviting me out to your house for a nice ham dinner,” Maggie said.
That, at least, made me laugh. “You know you would never come, not once, when I invited you to New Jersey for a nice ham dinner.”
“I’d come now.”
“You would not. You’re just saying that because I don’t live there anymore.”
From the street far below Maggie’s loft, salsa music drifted up to where we sat, side by side on the chaise, sipping our espresso.
“I was thinking,” I ventured.
“Uh-oh.”
“My tenants moved out,” I told her, “and I was thinking about what I wanted to do. And I think I might want to move in here. For, you know, for good.”
We were both silent for a long time then, until finally Maggie said, “I don’t think that’s a great idea.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling my heart smash onto the hard wooden floor. “Of course not. I’m crowding you, you have your work—”
“That’s not it,” Maggie said quickly. “But while you’ve been working sixteen hours a day and then spending your nights out in Brooklyn, I got some bad news.”
“Oh, Maggie,” I said, feeling myself flush with the realization that, in fact, I had been so caught up in my own life that I had completely lost touch with what was going on with her.
“The Vietnamese adoption people turned me down,” she said. “I completely flunked the home study.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Mags.”
“It’s not your fault—you tried to warn me. I’m applying to another agency now, and I’m going to take your advice.”
“Really?” Frantically, I tried to search the dusty archives of my mind for what advice that might be.
“You said I should fix this place up,” Maggie reminded me. “I’d love it if you would help me with that.”
“Oh,” I said, brightening at the thought of moving more comfortable furniture, some soft pillows and cozy afghans, into Maggie’s spare loft. “Of course.”
“And I think you should move out,” Maggie said.
I felt like I might fall onto the floor. My whole self, along with my heart.
“Not forever,” Maggie rushed to say, “but it turns out you were right. It was a problem with the first agency that you were living here.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling my flush deepen.
“If domestic partners are living together, they both need to be checked out,” Maggie said.
“But I’m not—”
“Duh. But given my sexual orientation, they didn’t necessarily believe me. And it turns out that even lesbians who are adopting together usually establish separate residences and have just one person apply and then the other parent adopt once the child is part of the family, because it goes much more smoothly that way.”
“I had no idea,” I said.
“I didn’t either, until now. But I can’t afford to make the same mistakes again. I’m realizing I really need to be sma
rt about this,” Maggie said. “Do you mind terribly?”
“No,” I hurried to assure her. “Of course not.”
“You can always move back in,” Maggie said. “Later. Though I’m not sure when.”
“Sure,” I said, my mind spinning in search of alternatives. “Of course.”
“Hey,” said Maggie. “Maybe we could go out to New Jersey this weekend, get some stuff to fix up this place. Do you have anything that might make it look more, you know, normal?”
Well, I thought, what wouldn’t? If anything, Maggie’s loft had become more quirky over the past few months, with many of the wire women now suspended from the ceiling to make room for the cement blocks that crowded the floor. But the wire figures were so large that you couldn’t simply walk beneath them. Instead, they dangled down to three or four feet above the floor so that you had to crouch and dodge your way through the space, or risk getting bashed in the head with an iron thigh.
“I have a couple of dark blue velvet armchairs that might look good with this chaise,” I said, working to keep the doubt out of my voice. “And a nice Persian rug that would look great on this pine floor, maybe a coffee table—”
“That’s why I need the old you back so badly,” said Maggie, clapping her hands in excitement. “I need your straight eye. Straight eye for the queer guy. Girl.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I guess.”
“Can we go to a mall when we’re in New Jersey?” Maggie asked.
A mall? I guess she really wanted to do the full Jersey experience. “Sure.”
“Will you bake me a ham? And a pie?”
“If I remember how.”
Thinking of spending the weekend in New Jersey, back in my old house, my old life, filled me with an unexpected shiver of fear. I felt as insecure about trying to be the person I’d been before as I’d felt, not that long ago, about launching my new life in New York. I was certain I wasn’t ready to go back. But it was Maggie who’d asked me. And for Maggie, I’d do anything.
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