by Steve Tesich
I was asked to do the kinds of things that dads did. Crawl on the floor on all fours with Laurie on my back. Throw her in the air. Play catch, with a soft cloth ball. At the top of the list of the “masculine side of life” was having Laurie watch me shave.
“She was only two when her father left, and he was neurotic about having to be in the bathroom alone, so she’s never seen a man shave,” Jessica explained. “So if you don’t mind, Saul, I think it’s something that would be very healthy for her to see from time to time.”
I didn’t mind. I loved shaving. I had never thought of it as a spectator event, but I didn’t mind trying. It didn’t take long before I became fond of the whole thing. Either born to be or genetically predisposed to be a much better father figure than an actual father, I came to love the role-playing I was asked to do and found that the artificiality that had bothered me in theory was quite enjoyable in practice.
Almost every Saturday or Sunday, between ten and eleven in the morning, until they grew bored with the ritual, I took Billy and Laurie to the bathroom to witness “the shaving of the dad.”
Billy had no desire to watch me shave when Laurie wasn’t there, but with her next to him, the two of them, sharing a seat on top of the toilet seat cover, watched me with the rapt attention of true theater lovers. Seeing their faces in the mirror while I shaved was something I came to look forward to and then missed when I had to go back to shaving alone.
Despite an almost full year difference in their ages, which with three-and four-year-olds can sometimes qualify as a generation gap, the two of them got on great. Even when Billy grew older and, emulating other little boys, professed to have no use for little girls, Laurie was excluded from that condemnation. The older they got, the closer they became.
It was Laurie who introduced Billy and me to chess. It quickly became apparent that she had a true gift for the game. Billy and I got better at it over time, but we never became anything more than competent. We plunked along, one move at a time, as if playing individual notes on the piano while Laurie played chords. Using two boards, she played both of us simultaneously, and so fond of her was Billy that he took enormous pride in the speed with which she dispatched both of us. It was from Laurie that I learned, although I never admitted it to anyone, that the word “endgame” was part of chess terminology and not, as I had thought, an invention of Samuel Beckett. I used this information to correct others whenever possible.
She and Billy didn’t so much fall in love as become worn out trying to resist it. They became lovers at the beginning of his senior year at Dalton, her junior year at Hunter, but it ended abruptly, for some reason.
When I left Dianah, all contacts between Laurie and myself ended as well. I missed her for a while. I thought about calling her from time to time. But then other matters and other maladies took over and I forgot about her completely.
I might have never thought of her again had not Dianah brought up her mother’s name. Hearing “Jessica Dohrn” reminded me of Laurie.
Burdened by my motive for calling her, I resisted calling for as long as I could.
It wasn’t until Wednesday evening, the night before my dinner with Cromwell, that I finally picked up the phone.
I pretended I was calling just to see how she was. Just to chat. To catch up.
I pretended to be surprised when she informed me that her mother had gone off to some spa with Dianah.
When I asked her, as if the idea had just occurred to me, if she wanted to have dinner with me and some people from LA the following evening, she said, “I’d love to.”
3
Instead of taking a cab to pick up Laurie, I rented a limo. I wanted to be free to smoke and I also saw the advantage of having a limo waiting for us outside Cafe Luxembourg, so that after I delivered my harangue to Cromwell’s face, there’d be a limo waiting to whisk us away. It seemed neat and clean that way.
I told Laurie I would pick her up at seven thirty, but I was fifteen minutes early. As it turned out, she was looking forward to seeing me so much that, early as I was, she was all set to go.
She had let her hair grow. It fell over her shoulders like black velvet curtains. Her voice was deeper. Her neck seemed longer. She had always been pretty, but now she was an achingly beautiful young woman. When she smiled, her smile seemed to have the wingspan of a bird in flight.
The way she smiled when she saw me. The way she hesitated for a split second, as if considering the appropriate form of greeting between us. The way she then chucked appropriateness aside and threw her arms around my neck, her lips on my cheek. Her words, the way she said those simple, wonderful words: “It’s so nice to see you again, Saul.”
“It’s so nice to see you too, Laurie,” I replied.
Laurie lived on Thirty-second and Third Avenue, where she had lived since she was born, and so we had a leisurely ride in the limo, north and west toward Cafe Luxembourg.
On the way there, we touched on briefly, in a chapter heading kind of way, what we were doing, what we were planning to do, and what we had done with our lives since the last time we saw each other. She was going to Stanford in the fall, to study computer science. She was now a nationally ranked junior chess player. Her heroines were the man-beating, checkmating Polgar sisters from Hungary. She was glad her mother was out of town. It was a relief to be alone, all alone, for a week. It bothered her that her mother was becoming a professional “poor friend” of rich women. Laurie worried what would happen to Jessica when Laurie left to Stanford.
I smoked my cigarettes and brought up events and memories from a long time ago. Of course she remembered coming to watch me shave, what did I think? The ballets I took her to with Billy. The movies. The symphonies. The opera, that one time.
While we talked, the limo driver driving slowly, listening at times to what we were saying and reacting with a smile of his own, I felt something happening to me. My father-figure feelings were reviving, coalescing around her. I not only felt wonderful, but I suddenly realized why.
Of all the people I had ever known in my life, Laurie was the only one left to whom I had never lied, whom I had never hurt needlessly, never betrayed in thought or in deed. She was the last living witness on this planet who could testify on my behalf without having to perjure herself. I had been loving and decent toward her for all those years, and by some miracle I had not ruined it all the way I had done with every other man, woman, and child I had ever known. My record with her was still perfect and clean and reminded me that, diseased as I was, I still had a scrap of unsullied goodness inside me.
It was something I didn’t know I had.
The joy, the overwhelming joy, of that discovery.
The promise it offered.
The possibility of renewal. Of rebirth. Of living out the rest of my life in some other way.
4
The waitress brought my drink. I took a couple of sips, feeling Laurie watching me intently.
“It takes a lot more booze these days, doesn’t it?” she asked.
“What do you mean?
“To get you into orbit. That’s your third and you still seem completely sober.”
“I didn’t know you were counting.”
“Old habit,” she smiled. “Billy and I used to keep track.”
“The three of us went out a lot.”
“Yes,” she nodded, “yes, we did. Public events, Billy called them. And after every event, we’d have dinner, and he and I would watch you drink and nudge each other as soon as one of us spotted the first telltale sign that you were sailing away toward blotto land.”
I shrugged and lit a cigarette.
“If I remember correctly, two quick ones was all it took to fire up your rocket engines. On the third, you were in countdown. On the fourth, you were in orbit.”
I decided to confess. It seemed fitting that Laurie should be the first person to hear about my drunk disease.
“I don’t exactly know what the problem is, but something’s gone wr
ong with me. I can’t get drunk anymore, no matter how much I drink.”
“You needn’t sound so sad about it.”
“Did I sound sad?”
“Yes, very. It’s not exactly a tragedy, if it’s true.”
“It’s true, all right. Watch.” I held up my gin and tonic and drained it in a gulp. “You see? Nothing.”
I raised my empty glass to our waitress as a sign that I wanted another.
“I am scared,” I went on. “It’s one thing to be on the wagon as a choice, it’s something else to have no choice in the matter and be condemned to sobriety despite myself. I don’t know. I’ve heard of bodies rejecting transplanted organs, but I’ve never heard of any body rejecting alcohol.”
She half frowned, half smiled, uncertain whether to take my remarks as clever banter or as something genuine. I was ready to go either way.
“If that’s the case,” she said, “then maybe you should listen to your body.”
“If you had a body like mine, would you listen to it?”
She cracked up.
I loved the way she laughed.
I loved feeling capable of provoking so much joy on her face.
As her laughter began to subside, I hit her with a follow-up to my previous punch line:
“The truth of the matter is that my body and I haven’t been on speaking terms for years.”
She laughed again, this time in an obliging sort of way, out of respect for me. But even as she laughed, she was letting me know that she hoped this evening would not degenerate into an entertainment. There was a polite request in her laughing eyes for us to move on to other matters, if I didn’t mind.
We fell silent. I lit a cigarette. My drink arrived. Around us, the din continued and above the din I could hear the dying black swan voice of Billie Holliday overdosing on the blues. Laurie, head bowed, deep in thought, was moving the salt and pepper shakers as if they were chess pieces. Then she looked up at me.
“I was so in love with Billy,” she said.
How to describe her face as she said those words? The way in which every single feature of her face, every square inch of it was in perfect alignment with the words she had spoken.
A phrase, not my own, came to mind to describe the expression she wore. “The sweet seriousness of life,” somebody had called it.
“Yes,” I nodded, “I know. And he was in love with you, too.”
“It bothers me how it ended. How it just ended. This may be stretching our friendship, Saul. He’s your son after all and I wouldn’t want you to betray his confidence, but if you do know, and if you’re at liberty to tell me why it all ended like that, I wish you would. He opened his heart to me and invited me inside and then he suddenly …” She shrugged.
“There’ll be other boys,” I said.
She winced and shook her head.
“I wasn’t fishing around for reassurance. Of course there’ll be other boys. There already are. That’s not the point. The point is this particular boy. Why did he do that to me, Saul? Can you tell me?”
I retrieved a line from Billy’s letter and flashed it on the monitor of my mind: “Lovely girls come and go, friends come and go, love comes and goes and I never ask it to stay because I’m waiting for you.”
Laurie sat there, waiting for me to reply.
The steady look in her eyes, the expression of her face left no room for me to maneuver.
I was confronting a question posed by a seventeen-year-old girl, but the quality of her question and the features of her face made me realize that I had, despite my age and the ages of those with whom I associated, been out of touch with the world of adults until now. I had been cavorting with middle-aged kids, thirty-year-old kids or forty-year-old kids, and to answer her question properly I would need to grow up.
She, on the other hand, wearing both the sweetness and the seriousness of life with ease, neither embarrassed nor proud of her maturity, waited for me to reply.
I don’t know what I would have told her had Cromwell and his entourage not arrived at that moment.
He came at the head of his cortege, which fanned out on both sides of him, so that the whole procession was shaped like a letter V. Although aware of the scrutiny he was receiving, Cromwell looked neither left nor right, disdainful, indifferent to it, the prow of his forehead cutting through all that attention like a clipper ship through floating debris. Everyone in his entourage carried a little bell in their hands, which they shook merrily as the whole group moved toward us.
CHAPTER NINE
1
HOW TO DESCRIBE the rest of that evening, the way in which, and the speed with which, everything changed with Cromwell’s arrival?
One moment I was who I was, sitting there with Laurie, and the next I was somebody else, standing up to embrace and be embraced by him.
The way we embraced. The way I sucked in my gut when I felt the pressure of his abdomen against mine. My realization, or his, which I perceived, that our relative heights had changed by the inch and a half I had lost.
The post-embrace position. The way he pushed me away from him to look at me at arm’s length. The way he looked at me. The way he looked me over, as if to say, and then saying: “Let me look at you, Saul. It’s been a long time. Too long, right?”
“Right,” I said.
The way I said it.
His forehead. The size of his forehead. The sheer size of it.
The young Asian girl at his side, his date, his concubine. The mirthless glow of her doll-like eyes.
I introduced Laurie as “my old, young friend.”
Cromwell shook her hand with his right and with his left he squeezed my shoulder as if my flesh were a surrogate for Laurie’s, and his gesture, that repeated kneading of my shoulder, was a masculine sign of commendation for my choice of Laurie as my companion.
He winked at me and with his left hand he drew me close to him again to whisper in my ear. “Nice, very nice, Saul. Robbing the cradle, but nice.”
The sound of his voice, the warmth of his breath, as he breathed those words down my ear. The physical sensation that he was not merely saying the words but making sure that each one of them entered the orifice of my ear without spilling.
There were three other men there. Maybe they were older men who looked good for their age, or maybe they were prematurely old Brads. They had wonderful white teeth. Maybe the teeth were theirs, maybe not. All three had little bells in their hands, as did the young women at their sides. Cromwell rattled off the introductions, but the names I heard failed to stick. I heard them all, but then, as if some memory magnet were suddenly demagnetized, the names slid off the board of my mind and fell into a common heap.
2
Drinks arrived. We drank, delighted with ourselves, congratulating each other on who we were and how wonderful it was to be spending an evening like this. We had to shout to be heard, but it was so much fun being who we were that we enjoyed shouting.
The three men, and to a much lesser degree the three young women with them, were familiar with my work and they all expressed a high regard for it.
A pro, Cromwell called me.
“A toast,” he said. “To one of the true pros in the entertainment industry.” He raised his glass to me and I, like a true pro, raised mine to him.
Drinking up, he glanced at Laurie over the rim of his glass and winked at me again (“Nice, very nice”) and smiled.
The way he smiled. How to describe the innuendo of that smile, lips parted, teeth showing, eyes elaborating on what the lips and teeth were doing.
The way his attendants responded to his smile with little smiles of their own. The voting that took place while we bantered at the top of our lungs in the din of that restaurant.
It was secret balloting by little smiles, but it was a secret only to Laurie. Sensing that something to do with her was happening but not knowing what it was, she kept her eyes downcast. In her confusion, she even moved her chair a fraction of an inch closer to mine, as
if I were still her father figure, her guardian from harm.
All the girls at our table were young. The Asian girl, Cromwell’s girl, was younger than the other three, but Laurie was even younger than the Asian girl.
I had the youngest one there.
Laurie’s youth was transformed into consumer goods, which I possessed.
It was I who had her youth, not she.
My popularity at the table was soaring.
The ease with which, and the speed with which, my relationship to Laurie, so recently renewed, so recently treasured as a potential source of my salvation, the ease with which, and the speed with which, its nature was reinterpreted by the drinks before dinner plebiscite.
The vote was unanimous: I was fucking the youngest one there.
I was declared the unanimous winner of this night.
And it was all done by smiles and glances, the whole plebiscite took less time than it takes to take a few sips of wine.
Why couldn’t I, when I saw clearly what was happening, reject the results of the voting?
Cromwell’s conviction, and by his extension the unanimous conviction of his attendants and their dates, of who I was and who Laurie was and what our relationship was, the unanimity of all those convictions was much stranger than anything I possessed and I could not counter it.
I had no way of holding on to my own convictions because I had no way of holding on to anything of my own for too long.
I went along with the new drift of things. Let them think what they want to think, I thought. I’ll recapture my mood of salvation later.
The way Laurie looked, unable to understand the specifics of what was going on but sensing a smarmy plebiscite descending over her.
The way she kept looking up at me for guidance.
The way Cromwell looked at her. His zest, as it’s been called, “not just for his own life, but for the lives of others.” The size of his forehead. The Kissinger shape and size of his forehead and the frightening power of the darnned-up thoughts behind it.