“You’re not short,” he said, handing over her drink. He didn’t collect her money—he tapped the cup and his lips, mouthing gratis.
It made the back of her neck warm, the movement of his mouth, the implication. Her blood diverted the course of its circulation, determined new necessary spots, prepared itself for animal intentions. It was absurd. He teased her one day, another, and then she started going for coffee at least daily. He was a kid and she was sucking down designer drinks and giving herself reflux by leaving out the half gallon of milk she ought to use to soothe the lining of her esophagus.
Whitening her coffee with milk reminded Reeva of her great-aunt Bertie, who was always complaining about her gas and reflux and saying things like, “Oh, I can’t possibly have that, it’ll make me fluff,” the worst moniker for farting Reeva had ever heard, to this day. Bertie was pigeon breasted and let her hair go gray, then dyed it so it shined a glossy light blue. Bertie was prone to streaks of jokes, which made her laugh so hard Reeva suspected it had made her wet herself. Reeva feared she might become like Bertie, but crass without the joy. She had this postpartum problem herself, and always had to wear little panty liners. She kept a Post-it with a K written in red permanent marker on the dashboard of the Explorer, but she hardly ever remembered to do her kegel exercises anyway, and if she ran more than a few yards, if she laughed too hard, she peed just a little. It was horrifying.
The thing with Jordan had started eight weeks ago, when Charlie was going to Utah twice a month for some project that bored her so much she didn’t listen when he told her about it and then she felt guilty when she had to ask about his day in great abstraction. She worried, a low-grade, chronic worry, that maybe Charlie had found someone else. She was sure she was turning old too young, not listening, wetting herself. Pathetic. Then one day she was looking in her closet, digging out the short leather skirt she got between Tina and Johnny, when she’d been using the gym religiously, every day, for six months, and had a flat enough belly to buy herself something new and sexy. Charlie didn’t really like the skirt, made his special silent grimace of disapproval when he saw it, but she wore it to Starbucks and, just as she’d imagined, only better, Jordan had said something about it.
“Nice skirt,” he said, leaning over the counter, putting his long-fingered, hairless hand too close to hers. His skin looked so smooth, she thought, too young.
“I thought I might get something for my friend,” she improvised, waving toward the overpriced coffeemakers. “Can you help me pick something out?”
“Mmm-hmm,” he’d said. What was she doing? It was Starbucks, and asking for help was respectable enough, even flirting was respectable. Charlie probably did it at work all the time. She knew Charlie’s office, the glass walls, the heating always up too high, the women who bronzed their naked legs and sported Jimmy Choo shoes, much too much sex for a tax attorney’s office. She’d flirt if she were he.
Jordan had been very disrespectful, helping his suburban housewife customer with the coffeemakers. He’d led her to one, then another, first brushing her arm, then leaning against her back as he pointed, explained, whispering about the steamer and the dual spouts and the built-in grinders. He spoke too close to her skin; his voice burned her. He’d taken her to the back, holding her hand—right there in Starbucks, gripping it as if they were supposed to be partners on a field trip—to look for more stock, something that might be on sale, and he’d turned her, his hand on her shoulder, to look at some boxes, then he’d run his other hand right down her ass to the bottom of her skirt, and he’d touched her thigh, just gently, as if her skin was firm and fragile as an egg. He’d spun her in like a dancer to face him and he’d kissed her hard; his mouth tasted of too-strong mints and of dark-roast coffee.
“Jesus,” she said.
“Jesus good or Jesus bad?” he asked. “I’m never sure, since I’m a Jew.”
She’d laughed. She’d had no idea he was a Jew. In her fantasies, he’d played rugby. Like her husband. Like Charlie. It was pathetic, her fantasies were pathetic, and her behavior was pathetic.
“Jesus good,” she’d said, anyway. “And Jesus bad. You do know I’m a grown-up, right?”
“Um, so am I,” he said, standing straight. Such a boy, his mouth pursed. “I should tell you I have a little problem.”
“Jesus,” she said again. She was thinking that this was a cliché. She was a cliché. Middle-aged housewife pretending to be young again. Affairs, they were a cliché. She didn’t believe in them. She loved her husband. Her kids didn’t deserve this. But then, she did. She deserved the intense desire she felt, that she wanted to grip his thigh between hers, Jewish or not, twenty-something or not. Wasn’t this the kid who skipped a year of middle school, some genius kid or something? Really good at the piano? She wished she could remember all her local history. She could almost conjure up a picture in the local paper—she had noticed it when it was in her living room: an almost entirely symmetrical face, like a trick, which half is which, only a tiny beauty mark, a small dark pen dot on his left cheekbone, to differentiate the smooth landscapes. She kissed him back. He slid his hands up into her skirt, but she stopped him short of reaching into her underwear. Not because she didn’t want him to, but because of the panty liner. Pathetic. Exquisite. He had a wonderful mouth.
“About that problem,” he said. His face was bright, two circles of pink on his cheeks. A boy doll. Incredible long lashes. No red in his scleras, such new, coffee brown eyes. Even the brown wasn’t worn away from the overbrightness of days.
“Fine,” she said, listening to her own voice, as if she were a character in a play. “Tell me, ruin the moment.”
“I have a problem stopping. I don’t want to stop,” he said. He was reaching up inside her shirt now, his thumb on her nipple. She moaned. She didn’t mean to. She realized clichés existed for a reason. Other people did this. It was a comfort, knowing this bad behavior wasn’t original. It felt so good.
“It’s just that sometimes my body kind of takes over and I can become inadvertently aggressive;” now he was pinching her. It was ridiculous, shocks of heat in her crotch. “So you need to really tell me if I must stop.”
She would learn later what this meant. It meant sex with the boy was exhilarating, like almost drowning, like falling, like climbing trees as a girl, unsure of the footing but sure of the direction—higher. Her body had forgotten all this modulation, all this raw sensation. It meant sometimes she tried to get him to slow down, and that excited him, and that his wiry arms were strong and he might pin her down. That she liked that, too, despite herself. They selected a code word, “cellophane,” which meant she really wanted him to stop. She floated inside it, the miraculous bubble of desire and satisfaction.
Between physical bouts—gorging themselves—Reeva did learn some things about Jordan. He wasn’t really Jewish, just his father was, and even his inherited surname wasn’t identifiable, House. Plain and strange. Perhaps it had once been Hausenstein or something, Jordan speculated. He liked to claim Jewishness, the intellectual identity, and it fit him well, though Reeva hadn’t seen inside his particular kind of lust for argument, for knowing, in anyone else before.
He ate like a child out of control. He told her how he drank coffee all day long at his job, filling and refilling one giant paper cup per day—he didn’t want to use more than one because it was wasteful, all those cups in landfills taking ages to biodegrade, but he liked the taste better in paper than in a mug. He didn’t like mugs; the texture of ceramics bothered him.
On his breaks Jordan walked over to Kings and bought half a dozen Krispie Kreme doughnuts, which were his food all day. She was tempted to bring him some of her famous pork stew, but she didn’t want to mother him. He had a mother, Elizabeth, to whom he referred by her first name. He had a photo of her as a young woman in a prom dress, turned so she looked over her shoulder at the camera. There was something imperious in her glamour, and she looked like him, long lines, long fingers, secret
eyes. Now Elizabeth had multiple sclerosis and walked with a cane. She was living with Jordan’s aunt, her sister-in-law, in a big house in Fair Lawn now—Jordan’s childhood home had netted enough money for his college, for his graduate school if he ever went, for his sister’s medical school at Yale, for his father’s new habit of betting on horses when he wasn’t working at his veterinary practice in Yonkers, where he grew up. He was semiretired and Jordan said he still hoped Jordan would go to vet school or at least medical school someday.
At least medical school made Reeva chuckle. No one was parenting Jordan now, though, and the way he lived reminded Reeva of her sons, made her imagine what horrible habits they’d relish if she were indisposed. Sometimes he ate a four-pack of iced walnut brownies for dinner. Two prewrapped cheese sandwiches from the little Italian market on Hope Street. No lettuce or tomato. Mustard packets squeezed directly into his mouth. She had never seen him eat anything green.
That first week she brought him a bagel sandwich, beautiful pastrami, which she hadn’t eaten herself in years, let alone bagels, so densely caloric, and he picked at the edges, eating the sesame seeds. When she pressed him, he told her he didn’t like meat of any kind, and he abhorred mayonnaise. Abhorred. Sometimes, after they finished and she was getting dressed, he grabbed the notebook at the side of his bed and wrote. He was left-handed. The crook of his arm, to keep the ink from smudging, moved her—poor lefty, different. The veins on his skin so thick and close to the surface, the same blood that filled his penis.
Sometimes he wrote equations, or musical notation, sometimes he wrote in Latin; he refused to tell her what it was about. “Nothing,” he said. “I have nothing important or original to say, yet I feel compelled to express myself, so I just write it down and let it go.”
She knew it must be brilliant. He made these bizarre connections, between the distance between leaves on the maple tree that leaned over the carriage house and the spaces within a crystalline structure like a snowflake. He knew about the cut and flaws and color of diamonds—lord knew how and why—and he told her all about her own, the one she wore on her engagement ring, the three teardrops on the anniversary necklace that sat just a little too low between her breasts. He pressed his finger into the center one until it pricked and bled.
He was the smartest man she knew. Boy, not man. She realized that intelligence wasn’t just the body of knowledge—he had that, he knew all about classical music, murmuring, “Trout Quintet,” when her car radio played it, murmuring, “That’s too aggressive, it’s supposed to be adagio.” He knew about the wines she brought him, Charlie’s wines, client gifts or pleasure purchases. Jordan lay the bottles on their sides between the books he had more of than anything else in his messy little nest. It was a fire hazard, really, his carriage house full of books and papers and a cello lying in the corner of the room like a corpse. It was cello he’d played, a prodigy. He’d played with the Julliard Orchestra as a seven-year-old; he’d won competitions and played solo at Carnegie Hall at eleven. He gave it up before college, he said, waving at it, dismissive. But it was still with him, the tawny animal of an instrument, out of its case, on its side like an odalisque.
• • •
“Play for me,” she said, feeling brave. It was a heavy summer day and the carriage house smelled like rot and sugar. Charlie was at the office; Steve was at his camp job; Tina was still at a sleepover; and when Johnny came home from camp, Linsey Hart, the sweet girl from down the street, would come meet him and babysit. One more week and her best babysitter was off to college. She hated losing confidence that way, confidence, and invisible time like this, with this boy, in his hovel.
“I don’t play it anymore,” he said, looking away. He pulled his hand from her thigh. Her body cooled a few degrees—modulating. She loved his hand on her thigh; she was confident of her thighs because she had been regular, all these years, about aerobic and then water workouts and now yoga and Pilates at the New York Sports Club, where she watched her friends drop out, one by one, replaced by younger and older, but not forties, not her age, when it was crucial you keep moving or risk permanent sag.
“Why not?”
“Because,” he said.
“Why not?” She was teasing, but she wanted to know. She wasn’t in love with this boy, she told herself, she couldn’t be, but she wanted to eat his history, suck him up, be a girlfriend. Pathetic, she thought.
“Tell me,” she said, her voice harsher than she’d expected.
“Fine,” he said, looking away from her. “I played it for Emma Gold senior year. I was in love with Emma Gold. She was incredible; she had this exquisite long hair. Not quite red—not brown. She was superior, but she earned it. Until high school I thought she was a snob, but she was just busy doing, while I was busy thinking. Wasteful. Mental masturbation.”
As he spoke, Reeva saw herself for who she was, practically middle aged, no girl with long hair, the hair Jordan was lifting invisibly in the air. High school wasn’t that far away for him. She’d worn bell-bottoms in high school, and in the cycle of fashion, they were back again, a sure sign she was ancient.
“She went to Oberlin,” he said. “She was going to be an ethnobiologist, or do genetic research. And on the side,” he said this with contempt, “on the side she was a better musician than I ever was. She sang, this huge voice in a long lean girl. Sang like Ella, and sang like La Divina—” He looked sideways at Reeva. “Maria Callas, of course.” And Reeva hadn’t known, but she had heard of Maria Callas. Maria Callas was for her parents’ generation, not this kid’s.
“She ran track and had these long legs.” Jordan was lapsing into lazy language. Jordan didn’t speak like this. She must have been incredible, Emma Gold.
“And she quit the singing, and she got her degree in fucking English.” What was wrong with English? Reeva wondered.
“And she married some guy who took her to make hammocks on a commune in Canada. MARRIED.” He spat it out. “She’s fucking twenty-one years old.”
Twenty-one, Reeva thought. I sure hope that’s younger than you. But she didn’t ask. She tugged the recalcitrant shade over the window. Last week she’d been straddling Jordan on his bed, his hands on her breasts, when she’d looked out the window and had seen her son and Linsey Hart walking through the woods. Johnny rode Linsey piggyback. She’d grabbed her own clothes and ducked down to close the shade, but stopped and looked, kneeling on the floor. The dappled light through the maples mottled their skin. Linsey had a pink team sweatshirt from the high school tied around her waist. Johnny wore a blue T-shirt from Steve’s elementary school soccer team—he didn’t play. Pink and blue. Girl and boy. They matched, a set, youth and youth, in a way she’d never match with Jordan. In fact, Linsey was a better match for Jordan. Reeva was expired milk, she was finished. Johnny started to slip, and Linsey hitched him up, higher on her back. Reeva had been clutching the windowpane, absent from the room, absent from everything but her son’s weight on a young woman’s back, and she thought maybe Linsey looked up. Maybe Linsey saw her. Maybe Linsey had seen the Acura on the street, two houses down to be discreet. She’d told the girl she was going to a meeting for Library Friends—she’d even checked to be sure there was a meeting, but it wasn’t on this street, it was at the Library Café, and here she was, her face visible to someone who might walk past on the woods path, naked in the carriage house rented by the college graduate between commencement and purpose.
Today she wouldn’t be accidentally exposed.
“More,” said Reeva, ducking away from the window. She touched the symmetries of his face, long perfect nose, the corners of his mouth that held judgment and private pleasure. “I want more,” and as usual, Jordan was happy to oblige, pushing her down onto her knees on the bed, not gently, exactly, but with a kind of comforting purpose.
3 CEDAR COURT
Though he was less than a year older than the twins, and catty-corner behind them on the cul-de-sac, their properties kissing at the edge like the tini
est overlapping of universes, George Amos Whitebread didn’t play with Cody and Toby. It wasn’t that he eschewed boys a few months younger than he was, or that he was a loner by nature, or that he wasn’t often outside. In fact, Geo was always outside, measuring the depth of the snow in winter with a wooden yardstick he found in the basement, caking pinecones with peanut butter and rolling them in birdseed in February, chipping away with his fingernails at the pitch-sticky bark at the base of the almost dead white pine in the corner of his backyard.
He had gone to church summer camp for two weeks, though at ten he was already agnostic, and considered the prayer session and Bible stories they told, sitting in a circle on the floor of the youth room that smelled of dust and Juicy Fruit gum, to be propaganda. His mother wasn’t particularly religious, and the story was that his father had quit the church when they married and were supposed to go to counseling for a week beforehand. He didn’t like the priest’s breath, he said, burnt onions. Geo’s parents told him things, spoke in front of him about sex and politics and about his own strange situation, as if by not addressing him directly, they were not exposing him to the strange workings of the adult world. Geo liked it; he felt respected. Basically, his father was a skeptic and his mother was angry with God, but the church camp was almost free, and all three of his sisters with their windy long hair and crackly white voices had gone, so Geo went, too. Then he spent the rest of the summer in his room or in the yard or at the little local lake, where he played for a lethargic hour or two on the raft with the boys his age, feeling the sun soaking into his skin, the water repelled by his natural oils. Then he moved on to the deep end, answering the guards over and over, who should recognize him by now, yes, he was a member of the club, here was his badge, and yes, he had passed the deep-water test. Sometimes he said yes, sir, even to women, but the irony was lost on them.
When She Was Gone Page 3