My first lunch break at JoyfulSongTime, I’d tried to push the song out of my head by replacing it. I sang sexy songs with frank lyrics (“Drunk in Love,” “I Touch Myself,” “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”). I sang ballads of naked self-pity (“All by Myself,” “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” “November Rain”). I sang songs I secretly loved (“Total Eclipse of the Heart”) and secretly hated (“Call Your Girlfriend”). For about five minutes after I left, my head was blessedly silent. But within a few blocks, she was there again, Alanis: yelping about high fives and cigarettes, musically distilling the paradoxes of her personality, bleating through my consciousness.
The second day I tried a different strategy: I only sang “Hand in My Pocket.” It didn’t work, not really, but I felt I was on to something: as I wailed the words hoarsely into the small dark room—Alanis’s litany of contradictory feelings, overwhelmed and high and hopeful and lost—they seemed to take on a deeper significance. They resonated like talismans of hidden meaning: like if I only sang them enough times, in my own voice, they would reveal their secrets, and I would be cured, enlightened, released from the torture of their repetition.
For the past couple of years, I’d had exactly two feelings: “overworked” and “content.” Dennis and I put in twelve- to fourteen-hour days at the firm, and then we got takeout, had quick sloppy sex on one padded piece of furniture or another, and conked out while looking through condo listings, waking up the next morning with the iPad sleeping between us like a baby.
Dennis is not the kind of man I would previously have imagined myself marrying. He is twelve years older than me and has a receding hairline and speaks loudly, like a game-show host. When I was younger, I’d imagined myself with the kind of man I’d always dated—the kind who spoke softly and wore faded concert T-shirts and considered himself a feminist and wanted to be a social worker or a public defender. My former boyfriends, collectively, would have disdained Dennis. I know the word they would have used. That word is “douche.” They would have used this word—which technically refers to a cleaning implement for women’s vaginas, and therefore, when you think about it, is not a word that should be used by genuinely feminist men as an insult—to signify Dennis’s embrace of corporate culture, his lack of shame.
But here’s the thing: all the qualities those boyfriends claimed to embody, Dennis actually did. He was kind. He was a caring, respectful partner. He was honest too: he didn’t pretend to care more about justice or honor than about food or money. And paradoxically, because his own needs were more than satisfied in the food-and-money department, he could afford to meet the world with benevolence. I saw the vigor with which he attacked his pro bono cases: helping a trafficked Serbian immigrant gain asylum, taking down an uptown molecular-gastronomy restaurant that owed its workers months of back pay. Sure, for every evil restaurant owner he took down, there was an evil corporation he propped up. Yet I couldn’t say that he did any less good, overall, than my sour, embattled exes, shepherding their indigent clients in circles through the Kafkaesque bureaucracies of government aid programs. What moral life wasn’t Sisyphean, tilted toward failure as much as success? The best one could do, it seemed, was to accept that paradox and try to really fucking enjoy oneself in the breaks between pushing the rock uphill.
I sang “Hand in My Pocket” a total of nineteen times (I counted). Again I had the feeling of asymptotically approaching their meaning, but that meaning remained shrouded, veiled in mystery. What was the significance, anyway, of the song’s refrain? What was one hand in my pocket meant to suggest? To explore this question I tried it myself. I slid my hand into my own pocket while singing the words. Or tried to. But the pants I was wearing—form-fitting cigarette pants from Brooklyn Industries, just formal enough to pass as corporate—turned out to have no real pockets, just little seamed slits meant to resemble them. Cosmetic pockets.
For some reason, this discovery annoyed me. More than annoyed me: it filled me with rage. I don’t know why. I also don’t know why my response to this rage was to jam my hand right into the fake pocket, hard, as I belted out the final chorus: “’Cause I’ve got one hand in my pocket, and the other one is hailing a taxicab!”
Because I was singing at the top of my lungs, I felt the rip rather than heard it. That quick jab of my hand had somehow torn the entire right-hand front panel of the pants away from the back, exposing the front of my thigh. A flap of cloth hung down like a lolling tongue. In the weird light of the karaoke room, my exposed flesh looked sickly and whorish, pale green and mottled by swirling disco lights.
“Motherfucking Brooklyn Industries,” I murmured, dropping the microphone onto the vinyl couch with a muffled thud.
I hunted through my purse, but it contained nothing helpful: no spare clothing, no safety pins, no adhesive tape, not even a Band-Aid. It was a warm early-fall day, and I didn’t even have a blazer or cardigan I could tie around myself to hide the hole. I had two options: call Dennis and tell him where I was so that he could bring me a new pair of pants, or go out into the world like this, holding my purse in front of me to conceal the torn fabric as best I could.
The choice wasn’t really a choice. Just the thought of telling Dennis where I was filled me with a hot rush of shame. How would I explain it? How would he respond to this evidence of a craziness I hadn’t previously displayed? (“You know what I love about you?” he’d once said. “You’re sexy, but you’re also reasonable.”) I held the flap of cloth close to my skin with one hand, pulled the purse against it with the other, and hobbled out of JoyfulSongTime.
Luckily, there was a Gap right across the street. I limped inside and hunted through the rack of black pants. I quickly tried a pair, ascertained that the fit and style were similar enough, and wore them out, tossing my old pants into a garbage can on the street. As I walked the twelve blocks back to work—now almost late for a meeting with the senior partner—I slid my hands into the pockets of the new pants. Real pockets. The song was still blaring through my head, Alanis’s unmistakable nasal voice piercing my consciousness, and there was something oddly comforting about being able to enact its lyrics directly. I left one hand in my pocket the whole way back to work.
Dennis had no children with his ex-wife. Which is, you know, thank God, right? I thought it might be nice to become a mother someday, a mother to something that began as a formless pink blob inside my body—but I couldn’t imagine becoming an instant mother to a fully formed human child, with preexisting allegiances to another woman who hated me.
When I’d asked him if Carlene had wanted kids, he’d shrugged and said, “Let’s not talk about that, okay? I want them with you.” I tried not to think about the implications of his answer. I tried not to feel as if I’d stolen another woman’s future children.
Carlene was thirty-nine now, not technically too old to become a mother, but old enough to panic about it. I thought I’d seen that panic in her eyes the day we’d first met, at the firm’s Christmas party, before Dennis and I had technically started boning but well into the period when it was clear we eventually would. We were fucking constantly with our eyes, and it was obvious the rest of our bodies would soon follow. There was a palpable uneasy excitement stretched between us at all times, even when we were at opposite ends of the room; when we stood next to each other it collapsed, tightly coiled, into a pulse of sexual energy so thick it short-circuited and stalled conversations. Carlene was wearing a lime-green dress that hugged her Irish curves, and her thick red hair spilled down onto her shoulders. She was an objectively sexy woman. Yet here she might as well have been a medieval eunuch. She compensated by being aggressively friendly to me, stretching her fleshy lips into a strained, overly large smile and saying “That’s so great!” to every innocuous fact I revealed about my life: what college I had attended, what neighborhood I lived in, what particular fitness classes I enjoyed. She sensed that she was on a sinking ship, and wanted to go down with her head held high. I respected her for that. Until I ran into
her one day at Starbucks nine months later and she dumped what was left of her latte onto my shoes and said “This is my Starbucks, you ferret-faced cunt.” (Unbeknownst to me, she and Dennis had carved up the city during their breakup, splitting custody of it as if it were the child they’d never had. They each had spheres of influence, where the other could not trespass: Carlene had all the Starbucks south of Thirty-Fourth Street and all Equinox gyms; Dennis had Fairway.)
Walking back from JoyfulSongTime in my new pants, an insane thought occurred to me: I have been cursed. That was a thing in some cultures, right? That one woman could curse another—that her hatred could become strong enough to infiltrate her rival’s consciousness, perhaps even her womb? Was it Carlene’s voice I was hearing in my head now, blaring out these stupid lyrics, causing me to rip my own pants? Was it Carlene’s rage that had swept my uterus clean of whatever might have been nurtured there?
I shook my head. I was going bonkers. I pushed the revolving door and strode through the lobby, putting on my game face for my meeting, remembering what I was here for: I was here to defend Bank of America from external litigation, and I was here to make money doing it, and to look damn good while doing it, and you know what, fuck Carlene—if Dennis hadn’t wanted to be with her anymore, there was nothing I could have done about it. Some forces are just impossible to fight.
Not that I had tried.
That night, while I stood at the kitchen counter pouring us each a glass of Pinot, Dennis came up behind me and slid his hands into my back pockets, cupping my ass. “Hmm,” he said. “I like this. Wait, are these new?”
“No!” I cried, a little bit too loudly—so loudly that I startled myself and spilled the wine all over the granite countertop. “Oops,” I said, leaning away from Dennis to reach for a paper towel.
“Really?” he said. “I’m sure I haven’t seen these before. I’m sure because I notice your ass. I spend a lot of time noticing your ass. Full disclosure.”
“I don’t wear them a lot,” I said, laying paper towels on the spill, watching them bloom blood-red. “They’re old.”
“Well, you should wear them more often,” he said, turning me around to face him and sliding his fingers down into the front pockets. This action filled me with an inexplicable panic, and I twisted away from him. “The thing is,” I said, reaching for the two now-full glasses of wine and handing one to him, “I actually hate these pants.” I was surprised by the way the word “hate” emerged from my mouth: I practically spat it out, with twisted vehemence. Softening, I rushed to explain: “It’s just something about the material. It kind of itches.”
Dennis’s eyes widened. “Okay,” he said, shrugging. “Then don’t wear them. Your ass looks good in other things too. Your ass looks good in everything. Here.” He set his wine down on the counter, without even taking a sip, and began to unbutton the pants. He nuzzled his lips into the crook of my neck and murmured into my ear. “If you hate these so much, let me help you out of them.”
What kind of woman stands in the kitchen of her Upper West Side apartment, sipping from a glass of ’97 Pinot while her handsome rich fiancé slides her pants down and begins to slowly, expertly eat her out, and finds herself distracted by a dumb midnineties song she doesn’t even like?
’Cause I’ve got one hand in my pocket, and the other one is giving a high five.
It was too much, the cognitive dissonance of it. “You know what I was thinking?” I said, reaching down and lightly tugging on Dennis’s ears to disengage his face from my crotch. “About the wedding. I know the caterers suggested that roast chicken. But, you know, chicken at weddings…I mean, have you ever had wedding chicken that was really compelling?”
He looked up at me, brow furrowed. “Compelling?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You’re interrupting cunnilingus to discuss whether a piece of food you might eat in six months will be compelling enough?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, pulling him up to his feet, leaning into him and planting a kiss on his neck. “I’m just in a weird mood today.”
“What’s up?”
“I don’t know. Wedding planning, I guess.”
He sighed. “Listen, Chris,” he said. “I’m dying to marry you. But, and I hate to bring this up, but I’ve been through this before. I know what a wedding does and doesn’t mean. I want it to be a fun party. I want you to be happy. But I really could care less about how compelling the chicken is.”
“You mean you couldn’t care less.”
“What?”
“If you could care less, that means you do care. What you’re trying to say is that you don’t care at all.”
“But that’s what I said.”
“Never mind.” I sighed. “Do you mind if we just go to bed? I’m tired.”
That night I dreamed I was being chased by some shadowy creature through the crowded streets of the city. It had no face, or discernible body parts; it seemed to be covered in some kind of fringe that flap-flap-flapped as it ran. I ran up Fifth Avenue, over to Columbus Circle, back down Seventh; as I turned left, toward my office, I could feel it drawing closer, its moist cottony breath against the back of my neck. I turned and saw what the “fringe” was: the monster was made up of hundreds—possibly thousands—of pockets, covering every inch of its surface, all turned inside out, flapping sadly against its side like used condoms.
“This is what happens,” said the monster, in Carlene’s voice, “when you turn yourself inside out.”
I screamed again, and my scream woke me up.
The song was still blaring through my brain, louder than ever.
That day, on my lunch break, I did not go to JoyfulSongTime. Instead, I walked downtown, to the elementary school near Gramercy Park where I knew that Carlene taught fourth grade, and sat on a bench outside the fenced-in schoolyard. I nursed a large iced coffee and waited, though I wasn’t sure exactly what for.
The children playing in the schoolyard all looked Nordic and robust and well cared for, dressed in snug fall jackets and brightly colored sneakers, whooping and cackling and running in circles. About 75 percent of them were blond. I could just imagine them, these children’s blond mothers, prancing down the sidewalks like thoroughbreds in their Lululemon yoga pants, their bodies bearing no marks of childbirth (perhaps some of them having even avoided the ordeal entirely by transplanting their blond eggs into some brown woman’s body), still trophy wives long into their supposed middle age, when they’d send their blond children off to elite blond universities with a faint blond wave.
After fifteen minutes, I’d finished my iced coffee and was considering getting up to leave—what was I doing here, anyway?—when she emerged from the side door of the school, leading her own class out into the schoolyard: Carlene, her long red hair swept up into an elegant twist at the back of her head, wearing a pretty dark-green sweater-dress and excellent brown leather boots, her hand on her belly.
She looked about six months pregnant.
I needed to leave, but I couldn’t bring myself to get up. For the moment, my head was thunderously silent: no song, no internal monologue, just the pounding of my blood and the pulse of one monosyllabic question: how?
I sat there watching, unable to even think about moving, unable to think about anything. I just watched Carlene, transfixed. She shepherded the line of children out into the schoolyard and then set them free, walking over to join the group of teachers chatting and patrolling from the sidelines. I watched her laughing, making conversation with the other teachers, periodically resting a proprietary hand on her stomach or leaning down to respond to the question of a child tugging on her dress. She looked radiant, like an exceptionally well-dressed Earth Mother, not anything at all like the sour, embittered woman who’d dumped a latte onto my shoes a year earlier.
Yet when she turned in my direction, I couldn’t help myself: I got up and fled, walking away as fast as I could, before she might recognize me. Meanwhile the song started up in my head ag
ain, loud as ever.
“I was just wondering,” I asked Dennis, later—we were on the couch, about to dig into a takeout artisanal pizza strewn with artichokes and arugula, then turn on The Daily Show—“have you heard from Carlene lately?”
“No. Why would I have heard from Carlene?”
“I don’t know. I was just wondering about her for some reason.”
“Why?”
“I just, you know—I guess I feel bad about it sometimes.”
“So do I.” He frowned, for just a second, before his face rippled back into its usual expression of masculine serenity. He shrugged. “But what can you do? We weren’t happy. We hadn’t been happy for a long time. And then I met you.”
“Do you think she’ll get married again?”
“I hope so.” He sighed. “You remember, I had coffee with her when you and I got engaged—I didn’t want her to hear it from someone else. She seemed fine. Took it well. I didn’t get the sense she was with anyone, though.”
It seemed impossible that Dennis would not have heard of Carlene’s pregnancy, but if he had, he had no reason not to share it with me. I had to conclude that he genuinely didn’t know. This made me feel slightly crazier, as if I’d imagined the pregnancy, or as if it somehow existed for my eyes only.
Why didn’t I tell him what I’d seen? Would it have cost me anything? Maybe not, but somehow I couldn’t think of a way to bring it up without explaining the whole train of insane logic that had led me to the bench from which I’d observed his ex-wife—the song, the possible miscarriage, my crazy idea of a curse. None of it made sense to me; how could I explain it to another person, even to him?
Especially to him. Dennis was so passionately logical. That was one of the things that had initially impressed me about him. He loved to argue, but not in the blustery overblown way that many men do; he’d listen to your argument, nodding with deep comprehension, making you feel that you’d never been more closely listened to in your life. Then he would pronounce one sentence, with the cadence of an announcement, and the coolness of its refrigerator-crisp logic would make everything else fall away; it was like taking a shower at the gym next to a model-thin woman and suddenly becoming aware of your own flab, qua flab. Initially, when I first met him as a summer associate, this quality of Dennis’s had intimidated me, made me feel wobbly and diffuse. But then it took on a sexual edge; it was a turn-on for both of us when he demolished me like that. I was a very smart person, I was a good lawyer, but next to Dennis my own way of thinking seemed intuitive, impressionistic, full of curves. It was oddly flattering to both of us when we argued, this sexualized inscription of difference. Yet lately, when he’d cut through some cellulitic worry of mine with the scalpel of his logic, I’d felt exposed, diminished, vaguely lonely. Why was there so much of me I had to explain? Why was there so much of me?
The Wrong Heaven Page 3