I didn’t find any incriminating evidence inside her apartment. It was tidy and modestly furnished. She had lots of plants and family photos, and there was a computer terminal in one corner of the bedroom. There were no pimps lurking, no mirrored ceiling, no heart-shaped bed. I was ashamed of myself for even thinking those thoughts.
When we got into her ordinary platform bed, she handed me a condom. “The awful eighties,” she said, sounding suddenly, girlishly shy.
“How old are you, Amy?” I asked.
“Thirty-one,” she said. “How about you?”
“About average,” I said, and we both laughed. Jesus, Croyden had given me a password, and a theme for the whole evening.
I was less than average in the sack, though. It had been a very long time, and Amy was such a knockout. I was overeager, I guess, and faster than the speed of light. “Sorry, sorry,” I mumbled, ready to crawl away in shame.
But Amy wouldn’t let me go. She murmured consolation, and after we’d rested, she encouraged me to try again. It took a while, but then I was ready. And this time I was able to hold off, to move slowly and to give her pleasure, too. I slept for a long time afterward. When I woke up, she was sitting in the eerie green glow of the computer, wearing a bathrobe and pecking at the keyboard. “Hello,” I said.
She swiveled around to face me. “My, you sure can sleep,” she said.
I hoped I hadn’t been snoring. “It’s been a hard day,” I told her.
She came to the side of the bed and sat down. “Howard,” she said, “what’s wrong with your chest?”
I looked down, saw the shaved patches, the fading impressions of the electrodes. “I was about to get the chair,” I said, “when the governor called up with a reprieve.”
“Don’t,” she said. “I really want to know.”
“Okay. I had a stress test this afternoon, for my heart.”
“Is there something wrong with it?” she asked.
“Sort of. I had a heart attack in August.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Well, I’m fifty-two,” I said. I waited for her to express surprise at that, and when she didn’t, I said, “Things start breaking down a little after fifty. But don’t worry, you have a long way to go.”
“Longer than you think,” she said. “I’m really only twenty-four.”
“Jesus,” I said. “You’re two years older than my daughter.” I pulled the covers further up, feeling chilled suddenly, and exposed.
“How old is your wife?” she asked. I noticed that she didn’t say “ex-wife.”
“Forty-five. And we are separated. Listen, I feel really weird about this, Amy. I mean, you’re lovely, you’re wonderful, but there’s a tremendous gap here. I expect your father to come out of the closet any minute and shoot me.”
She leaned over and kissed me. “My father’s in Seattle,” she said, “and he doesn’t even own a gun.”
I was somewhat relieved; at least he wasn’t dead, at least it wasn’t a classic case study. “Older men aren’t your … thing, are they?” I said.
“Nope. My regular boyfriend is my own age.”
“Then why did you do this?” I asked her, genuinely puzzled.
She shrugged. “I wanted to,” she said. “You were so sweet and funny. And handsome, too. Why did you do it?”
“Oh, God,” I said. “For the obvious reasons. And maybe as a kind of supreme stress test. Now I guess I’m going to live forever.” It made me sad, saying it.
“I hope so,” she said. “Will I see you again?”
I hesitated. “I don’t think that would be such a good idea,” I said at last, with an instant pang of regret.
It was after midnight when I got home, but I was wide awake. I took Shadow for a walk around the block and then we got into bed together, like an old married couple. He snuffled, sighed, and finally settled down for the night with his snout on Paulie’s pillow. I couldn’t fall asleep right away. I played the whole day back, and it was strangely unreal, as if I’d only dreamed it.
23
I VISITED MY MOTHER in Brooklyn one Saturday morning and, as always, I was stirred by emotion when she undid the locks and let me in. Her apartment was a museum of family history, a warehouse for my childhood. Anything I might have forgotten was recalled and commemorated in photographs, even the pre-history of my grim-looking, immigrant grandparents. My mother kept the blinds lowered and shut, so that the place was cast in somber shadow, no matter what the weather or the time of day. In winter she’d say it was to keep the heat in, in summer to keep it out. And you had to protect the furniture and wallpaper from sunlight or it would fade. This same instinct for preservation accounted for the pervading stink of camphor in any season. When it mingled with those rich, familiar cooking odors, everything I’d enjoyed and suffered as a child came back in a wholesale rush. Doing my homework at the kitchen table while my mother prepared supper—the cheerful bubbling of soup and the voluptuous curves of my own handwriting. My father and mother behind the bedroom wall later, myself alone in my narrow bower of dreams. How I’d longed to be like them, to be in on the adult mysteries of conspiracy and power. But as I grew more and more informed, they began to seem less so, until I pitied them for their ignorance and was freed.
As soon as I crossed the threshold that Saturday, I was in my mother’s net again, caught in that suffocating atmosphere, and under an avalanche of unsolicited advice. She pleaded with me to straighten my marriage out before it was too late. When you got older, she explained, all your second chances were behind you. She managed to evoke a death knell Poe might have envied. Quoth my mother: “Much too late.”
I sank into the quicksand of the down sofa and murmured sympathy. I wasn’t being insincere—there wasn’t a gloomier story to my mind than my mother’s life of bitter regret. If she’d only married the accountant with the squint instead of demanding perfection and beauty. If my father had left the post office and gone into business with his furrier brothers. If she’d been healthy enough to bear other children after the gory trauma of my birth. And that brought her around full circle to me and my present life again. Didn’t I know when I was well off? Didn’t I know which side my bread was buttered on?
“Ma,” I said, breaking into her litany. “I have some good news to tell you.”
Her pinched face softened with hope. “You and Howard made up?” she said, as if it had only been a silly lovers’ quarrel all along.
“No, nothing like that,” I said. “But it’s something very nice. You’re going to be a great-grandmother.”
Her hand went to her bosom, where her Med-Alert beeper hung like a showy religious charm. “No!” she cried with delight. “My little Annie—a mother!”
“Not Ann, Ma. Sara. Sara and Jason.”
“Oh,” she said. I watched a series of expressions cross her face, until modified delight was restored there. She was a modern woman, after all, and this was a crazy world. I gave silent thanks to Donahue and Susskind for bringing its worst aberrations into her living room and making them commonplace, acceptable. There was no shrieking and breast-beating the way there’d been years ago when I’d brought home similar news about Howard and me. Now there was only some cautious optimism. “They’re getting married soon, aren’t they?” she said.
“Oh, sure,” I said. “Although Jason’s being mulish about it right now.”
“Do you want me to talk to him?” she asked.
Just what Jason needed—a few of her compound chestnuts. You made your bed, so shall ye reap … Lie down with dogs and pay the piper …. “No, no, Ma,” I said quickly. “It’s all going to work out.”
“And in the meantime,” she said, “nobody has to know our business, right?” Then she reached across the coffee table between us and squeezed my hand. “So, my girl, you’ll be a grandmother,” she said. “If only your father …”
I glanced at the rogues’ gallery behind her, saw my father’s solemn face, the sepia gravity of his father’s. No one eve
r smiled for their portraits in those days, as if they knew there was nothing to smile about, that they’d die young and we would all flourish in their absence.
My mother and I ate a celebration lunch of cottage cheese and canned peaches, and then she took a pair of silver candlesticks from her sideboard, polished them on her apron, and wrapped them in paper towels and newspaper. “Here,” she said. “Before they get stolen.”
I hated when she did that, impulsively dismantling her household, giving away bits and pieces of her life, and mine, to me and the children. The porcelain shepherd and shepherdess I’d played with as a child were crazily incongruous in the slummy clutter of Jason and Sara’s bedroom. And Ann kept what was left of the “good” dishes somewhere in her garage, still in their newspaper shroud. She didn’t have the nerve or heart to resist the giver, to say that she didn’t need dishes, and the ornate green-and-gold floral pattern wasn’t really her taste.
“Keep them, Ma,” I said now, about the candlesticks. “I have candlesticks. And they looked nice just where they were.” I meant, stop changing, don’t disappear, but she was already rummaging in the drawers for string to bind the package. I went back to Manhattan on the subway, with the wrapped candlesticks weighting my purse like a concealed weapon.
On the way to my apartment, I stopped to buy cookies and fruit. I was expecting Katherine and La Rae to visit that afternoon, and I was excited about seeing them. It would be just like old times, when we were all neighbors, and a regular threesome. But soon after they arrived, Sherry showed up, too, escorted by her latest beau. She’d been dating this man exclusively for a few weeks now. He was a boy, really, someone who’d answered her personals ad with his C. W. Post yearbook photo, taken five or six years before. When she’d first mentioned Nicholas to me, I’d told her that it would be more difficult for the mother of a son to date anyone that young. And not just because of the sexual implications. I said that I’d probably start nagging him to stand up straight, or to clean up his room. My only lover, besides Howard, had been that age, but I was a kid then myself, and not the least bit maternal toward him. Douglas, I remembered, had been exuberantly sexual—the word “cocksure” must have been invented to describe someone like him—and Nicholas struck me the same way.
He was simply beautiful, early Warren Beatty, and La Rae rolled her eyes at me as he strutted around in his skin-tight jeans. Sherry showed him off with the blatant pride of a stage mother. While he browsed among Mary and Jim’s bookshelves, she told us that his degree from Post was in Comparative Literature. We sat there, gaping, as if we were the audience at some kind of improvisational theater, of which Nicholas was the star. Then he lounged among us—the four women old enough to have been his baby-sitter, if not actually his mother—and read steamy passages from D. H. Lawrence aloud. By the time Sherry carted him off, everything but his heated presence had gone out of our minds.
“Holy shit!” La Rae exclaimed before their retreating footsteps had stopped echoing in the hallway.
“Oh, come on,” Katherine said. “How long do you think that’s going to last?”
“All night, honey,” La Rae said, and we all burst into raucous, jealous laughter.
“How about you, Paulie?” Katherine asked. “Is there a little Oedipus in your life, too?”
“Yeah, Paulie,” La Rae said. “You’re a swinging single again. You seeing anybody?”
I looked sharply at her, thinking of Frank’s visit, hoping he hadn’t told her about it, knowing that I never would. La Rae’s face was open and friendly. I hesitated a moment too long before answering, and when I finally said, “No, there’s nobody,” and felt my own face redden, they both looked at me with skepticism. The trouble with intense friendship, I decided, is the lack of privacy. Actually, there wasn’t anybody, in the most intimate sense, but I had been seeing Bernie Rusten. He’d called me, as he had promised that day in the bar, and we arranged to meet again in the study area of the library. Since then, we’d gone to dinner a couple of times, and to the movies, and back to our bar, but he hadn’t ever come home with me. We took long walks in every other direction, and usually parted later in a taxi, after some strenuous necking. I knew we couldn’t go on this way much longer, and I didn’t really want to. My body was much lonelier than my spirit, and it longed for appeasement. But I hadn’t been able to put Howard and my marriage completely away yet, and Bernie seemed hesitant, too, in spite of those galvanic kisses.
One evening, while we were sitting at a booth in the bar, disclosing more things about our past lives, I said, “This is a little like mutual therapy, Bernie, isn’t it? I mean, our talking this way about ourselves and not passing judgment on each other.”
He smiled and ran his long, cool fingers down the side of my neck.
“That wasn’t a very Freudian gesture,” I said, with a delicious shudder. “I don’t think he even shook hands with his patients.”
“I guess I’m more into behaviorism,” Bernie said. “Or maybe faith healing.” He reached under the table and touched my knee. “See, now you can walk again.”
“You mean now I can’t.” There was a disquieting pause, and then I said, “Howard and I used to lie on the living-room couch together when we were first married and confess things to each other. It was a lot different then, though. We did pass judgment. At least I did—I hated everyone who’d ever done him wrong, and everyone who’d loved him before I did, starting with his mother.”
“Ellen was like that,” Bernie said. “Possessive, and unreasonable.”
“It’s not so unreasonable. A doctor sees all that flesh at work every day.”
“Not just at work,” he said. “At dinner parties, too. I’d go into the bedroom to put my coat down and there’d be some woman in there, opening her blouse to get my opinion of a mole.”
“Ah, the old mole game,” I said. “Listen, Bernie, Howard once played a wedding reception where the bride propositioned him between sets.”
I asked Bernie why he’d left Boston, and he said it was because of Ellen, because of all the memories of her associated with the city. I told him how Howard and I had ended up living in the suburbs, and we sat there for a few moments, quietly acknowledging our respective ghosts. Then he said, “Paulette, I want to make love to you.”
His words were even more disturbing than his touch had been, and I felt that old pit-of-the-stomach plunge. “Me, too,” I said. “But not yet, Bernie, I’m not ready yet.” I hoped he’d know it wasn’t coyness on my part, or lack of response, but that my ghosts were more persistent and less benevolent than his.
“That’s all right,” Bernie said, fiddling with the book of matches in the ashtray. “I want to make love to you, but I’m not even sure I can.”
“What do you mean?” I said. And then, weakly, “Oh.” This was a complication I hadn’t even considered. My long-ago lover, Douglas, had probably never so much as contemplated failure. His virility was almost comical, like the irrepressible spring of a child’s pop-up toy. Impotence, I’d thought, only happened to husbands in the long winter of marriage.
“Don’t worry, this isn’t Hemingway, it’s not a war wound or anything,” Bernie said. “It’s just that I haven’t been … um … active for a while. For two years, actually.”
“You mean since your wife died?”
He nodded and leaned back in his seat, seeming relieved, and grateful for my prompting. “It’s not that I haven’t felt lustful,” he said, “especially lately, with you.” He smiled. “You may have noticed. But there’s something that happens, a kind of holding back, a distancing … Boy, this is really hard to explain.”
“You don’t have to,” I said.
“What—explain?”
“That, or anything,” I said. “It’s all right.”
“You mean we can just be good friends,” he said bitterly, “like Jake and Lady Brett?”
“This conversation is crazy, Bernie,” I said. “And it’s getting embarrassing.”
“That’s on
ly because people don’t talk this much about sex without having it.”
“The funny thing is,” I said, “right before Howard and I separated, I tried to imagine … being with someone else, and I mostly worried about other things, like catching something terrible. I wondered how you asked about something like that, if you went in for blood tests together, the way people do before they get married. I know your abstinence makes you feel nervous, Bernie, but, if it’s any consolation, it also makes you safe.”
“Sure,” he said. “You’ll probably only die of boredom.”
“You’ll be fine,” I assured him, uncertainly. “Listen, Bernie, maybe we should just—”
“No, it’s okay,” he said, smiling again, taking my hand and kissing it. “We’ll find the right time, sweetie, don’t worry about it.”
I did worry about it, when I wasn’t distracted by other things, especially the mess of my family’s life. Despite what I’d told my mother, I didn’t know if Jason would ever marry Sara. Howard seemed to think it was only a matter of time, that some small event would spark his commitment to her. I was especially disappointed that the baby’s first flutters of life hadn’t done it. When Howard used to lay his hand and then his ear against my restless, swollen belly, we became a perfect, imperishable unit. If Jason didn’t respond in the same way to Sara, was it because we had seriously harmed him with the example of our marriage?
Howard and I were apart, but also still together in this shared problem. I began to think we needed some ceremony of separation before we could fully assume our independent lives. On Sherry’s advice, I’d consulted a lawyer who advertised no-nonsense, quickie divorces in the Voice, but I found out that even those required time and patience.
Thanksgiving was coming up soon, the holiday I’d always liked best because there was no exchange of gifts, and its traditions seemed particularly sacred. In school we used to sing “Abide with Me” and “We Gather Together,” hymns that still moved me in a quasi-religious/patriotic way. Thanksgiving was a truly American holiday, an American family holiday, and one for which we’d always convened, no matter what. I loved the festive but formal table, the chaotic, fragrant kitchen—everyone safely assembled once more. Thank you, thank you, I used to think as I basted the turkey, as I stirred the bursting, jeweled cranberries. Now I wondered if Jason would be agreeably affected if we all met again this last time, and if it would also be the ritual that helped me to let go of Howard. I didn’t mean for us to gather in Port Washington or at my apartment, but in some other, more neutral place. My mother wanted us to come to Brooklyn, of course, but I knew that wouldn’t work. She’d be in command there, even if I brought the food, and she’d try to exercise her authority. Like Ann, she’d bang heads together, and order everybody to kiss and make up. I’d been staying away from Larchmont since my surprise reunion with Howard, and there wasn’t enough room for us all to sit down at once at Jason and Sara’s.
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