Stories of Mary Gordon

by Mary Gordon

  I could tell by the way he'd looked at the food that he was really hungry, that hunger had perhaps been a problem for him, and might be once again. That he was hungry in a way that none of my customers was: a hunger that could lead to starvation. I didn't ask him what he'd been doing all those years; if I had seen the details of his life, the small disasters following one after the other, piling up, I'd have entered his life and allowed him to enter mine. As it was, I had to allow the possibility that someone who had entered my body actually needed my food to keep alive. He was clean, but except for that he might have been one of the people who ripped open the garbage bags and made such a mess on the street that the other storeowners were complaining. One of the people who went to the shelter where we gave our leftover food.

  “It isn't my fault,” I wanted to say. I escorted him out of my office. I was about to ask him what he might like to take home. Truffles? Eggplant terrine? Chicken with olives and artichoke hearts?

  As I was imagining the combination of foods he might like, planning their arrangement in the dish, my eyes fell on his hands, freckled, hairless, dried out a little now with age. I began to wonder what they would feel like on my breasts, the rough surfaces twisting my nipples, teasing them into arousal. I thought of sitting on the floor, taking my shoes off first, and then my panty hose, then slowly, tantalizingly my bra, holding my breasts in my hands, proffering them to him like two floury potatoes. Then I thought of lying back, my arm underneath my head, opening my legs, gradually, deliberately, revealingly, watching him want me, listening to him say he'd do anything, anything, opening my legs a bit more, thrusting my hips up so he'd have to see, so he'd be able to see everything, so everything he wanted would be available to him, and he'd only have to approach and enter, that would be all he'd have to do. Abject, trembling with hunger for me, he would shudder soon inside me, and I would demand some satisfaction, indicating with an angry, imperious gesture (and no words) what I would have him do. I'd make him go on and on till I was finished, then I'd make him leave.

  He was drumming his fingers on the counter, whistling noiselessly, then rubbing his hand over his mouth. I couldn't stand the sound of it; I just couldn't stand it one more minute. I was going to have to make him leave.

  “Well, I hope you'll be able to try some of our stuff sometime. Maybe sometime if you're having a party, give me a call.”

  He looked at me in shock, almost in horror. “A party's not the kind of thing that I would have.”

  “Yeah, well, you never know,” I said, looking down at my papers. “It's been great seeing you, but I'm up to my neck in work. Stop by again some time.”

  He turned his back and walked out of the store.

  “Who the hell was that,” asked jasmine, six feet tall, from Madagascar.

  “Honey,” I said, “let that be a lesson to you. Be careful who you fuck in a moment of youthful carelessness. They can keep turning up for the rest of your life. I mean, like forever.”

  “Yeah, remember that T-shirt your friend Charlie had. Some guy with a beard and granny glasses and underneath it said ‘Someone I slept with in the sixties.'”

  “Please,” I said, “spare me the story of my life.”

  I hated myself for the words I'd just said. I wanted to call Walt back, to tell him I was sorry, to give him a particularly extravagant package of food to take home with him, wherever it was he would go. But then my glance traveled out the window and I could see him, a little to the side of the glass door, peering in to get a glimpse of something of whose nature he was already far too well aware. I saw him watching jasmine and Armando laughing with me, our heads thrown back too far, our mouths too wide, too open. I knew that he knew exactly what was being said, exactly what was being laughed at. There was no reason for him to be seeing it. If only he had left and gone home when I sent him, he wouldn't have had to know. He was always doing it to himself; it was always his fault; he was always seeing more than he needed to, more than would do him good. And that is why I never could forgive him. I could pity him, but I would always want to hurt him, and I would always find a way of doing it, and, however long it took— it could be thirty years next time, or fifty, or a hundred— he would come back. He would always come back.

  I had to act as if I didn't see him and walk into the back office, pretend to pore over the numbers printed on the spreadsheets, seeing him in my mind's eye, alone on the sidewalk, watching the people coming into my store, carrying out in their full hands the things he couldn't have. He must have known what I was thinking. He was only standing there to make me think these things; it was why he did the things he did, to make me do things, to make me think things that were even worse than the things I'd done.

  I couldn't help it. Nothing was my fault.

  I let jasmine and Armando close up, clean out the showcase, take home what couldn't be salvaged, put the rest into the refrigerator, swab the white enamel surfaces, mop the white-tiled floor, the occasional tile imprinted with a dark blue, pompous-looking fish. I pretended to be working on accounts; occasionally I would write down a false number, something with no connection to anything in the world. I waved to Jasmine and Armando when they said good night, not looking up, as if it would be fatal to remove my attention from what was spread before me even for the second that a civil farewell might require.

  I must have sat there for two hours. The silvery twilight of a steamy June changed all at once, turned yellow blue, and then blue black. I called the car service. I stood for a while in the front part of the store, trying to breathe in what I could usually rely on: the satisfaction of knowing that all this was mine. I tried to revel in the calligraphy on the labels of the mustards and jams, the roseate and amber vinegars, the chocolates in the shapes of mermaids and shells. But my eye kept falling on the empty showcases, which looked as if they had been stolen from, as if an invading army had entered and, at gunpoint, cleared them out. Their emptiness seemed shameful to me, ruinous. I turned the lights on in the store, inhaling the sage, the cinnamon, the cardamom, the chaste hominess of the peach pies sleeping underneath their plastic sheets.

  Outside the store, the driver was waiting for me in the car. He was reading a book; the light falling on him from the car ceiling illuminated him and the book as if they were onstage. I didn't know if he could see me. I was afraid to do one thing or another: leave the store or stay inside. Anything I would do seemed dangerous. Finally, the driver looked up, saw me, and waved. I knew what his hair oil would smell of: a fruity yet bracing smell, suggesting his determination to both cut a swathe and better himself and his family. I would be all right with him.

  As I walked out to the sidewalk, the breeze lifted my skirt a bit and blew some papers past me, and a plastic bag. The driver opened the door for me, nodded a polite greeting, waited for me to settle myself, then closed the door with a civilized and plosive thud. I looked around to see if anyone was lingering. If Walt was.

  The block seemed empty. But I knew better than to trust that. He might not seem to be there. He might have pretended to have gone. But he was there, even if I couldn't see him at that moment. He was there; he was waiting for me. He always would be.

  Storytelling

  I went to Florida to see my brother Ted because I was tired of reading and writing. I'd just finished the first draft of a novel— a labor of two years. I knew what was wrong with it— everything that was wrong with it— but I couldn't think of how to fix it, or even how to take the first step. It came upon me that I had misspent my life: all those years laboring over words, words, words, and for what? What difference did it make to anyone? Who cared what I had to say? I had lost the appetite for telling.

  I wanted to visit Ted because, whatever else shifts in my life, one thing is constant: I have always loved my brother. Is this really so unusual or does it just seem so to me, that there should be a person you have loved and been loved by your whole life? What does this say, my finding it so unusual, about the age we live in, or the way I live?


  Perhaps it isn't love I'm talking about, constant love, but rather constant enjoyment, which is even more rare. I guess there must have been times in childhood when Ted and I didn't get along, but I don't remember them. I remember always a sense of safety with him, a safety of a rather special kind, because although he was older than I, he wasn't the oldest child. Our parents had, in effect, had two families: three older children who were like aunts and uncles to us, whom we seemed hardly to know, who had moved out of the house and married before we started school, whose children were a bit of an embarrassment to us, and whom we embarrassed.

  Our parents were worn-out by the time we came and it seemed to me later (though it's nothing I would have thought of as a child, or even while they were alive: they died when Ted and I were in our twenties, in a car accident) they were a little abashed by our existence, proof as it was of their untimely fecundity. They tended to us— we were physically well cared for— but they had no interest in our entertainments. Mostly, they left us alone. We had the orphan's luxury without the orphan's anxiety. We understood that our parents didn't think about us much, and so we couldn't go to them for understanding. Ted guessed, though I don't think it dawned on me, that our parents couldn't be looked to as a source of pleasure, either. We divided the world up, then, into kingdoms or protectorates of which he and I were in charge. His domain was pleasure; mine was understanding. That meant that the smooth movements of home life— that which made it more than bearable: decoration, desserts, no hurt feelings, no anger that lasted after sundown— were his charge. He made things happen and later I would suggest what they had meant.

  He was popular in school, an astonishing social success, but his grades weren't good. I had no friends but was valedictorian. So he went to a poor state school and I to Radcliffe on a scholarship.

  We were proud of each other in those years, but our orbits didn't touch. Happily, I watched him drive by in convertibles, picked up for tennis or for swimming by bronzed gods, their golden hair absorbing more than its fair share of light. Sweetly, every year he drove me to Cambridge in our sky blue Rambler, the only family car. Then after college he came back to New York and worked for an advertising agency, where he met Pete.

  It would be wrong to say that Ted came out to me: there was no need. That he would have a man seemed to me unremarkable. That we could keep it from our parents the expected thing. Pete and I liked each other; we liked to laugh at the same things, and we both loved Ted. Ted was twenty-five when they moved to Fort Lauderdale and opened a wallpaper business. They've been there ever since. Twenty-five years.

  They enjoy their comforts. And I travel to see them when I want comforting. Their house (which, as Ted says, is a living hymn to wallpaper) looks over a golf course. It has all the things I enjoy that I wouldn't think of having: a refrigerator with crushed ice that appears, magically, through the door, a swimming pool, a hot tub, a shower as big as my Upper West Side kitchen.

  Ted picks me up at the airport. He takes my winter coat: “You still own one of these?” He carries my bag, complains about the weight of my laptop.

  “We'll bury all this under a palm tree while you're here. But I'm not even going to give you the time to unpack. We'll lock everything in the trunk. We're having lunch by the water. I want to introduce you to jean-Claude.”

  “So who's Jean-Claude?”

  “Jean-Claude is an expert on bathroom lighting. Particularly boat bathroom lighting. He works on our upmarket jobs. That's where we met. He's from Grenoble. If he's not from outer space. I'm never quite sure. There's something a little extraterrestrial about him. But as our grandmother would have said, he's good for what ails you. At the very least, he's awfully pretty.”

  He pointed to a table where a man was sitting alone, a man of about our age, fifty or so. He was attractive, certainly, but I wouldn't have called him pretty; there was nothing fine or fresh about his looks, and nothing girlish. His hair was thick, dark brown with a few strands of gray. His eyes were bluish green and gave the simultaneous appearance of being hooded and alert, as if he couldn't decide whether to succumb to something or spring for its throat. His shirt was Polo, navy blue, tucked into khaki trousers. He wore loafers without socks.

  “So,” he said, before I had sat down. “You're wondering whether to start coloring your hair. Don't. I love the silver. It makes you look experienced. People aren't going to want to take advantage of you. But with that wonderful skin, those fabulous eyes, of course they'll be intrigued. And, you begin dyeing, it's nothing but enslavement.”

  “This is Jean-Claude,” said Ted.

  “I'll bet you want her to color her hair,” he said. “So you look younger.”

  “I want her to start when I start.”

  “Edward, please. I can't begin to tell you the calamity of someone with your complexion embarking on such a course. So, you're depressed,” he said to me. “What happened? Have you lost your lover?”

  “I don't have a lover,” I said. “I've been married for twenty years.”

  “And how old is your husband?”

  “Fifty-eight.”

  “You need a lover.”

  “My problems aren't about love. They're about work. I'm tired of my work.”

  “I understand completely. Then you must travel. When I'm tired of my work, I go somewhere completely new. That's how I got to America.”

  The waiter came by and took our drink order. lean-Claude ordered Beaujolais nouveau, which had just arrived that week.

  “Tell me about your coming to America,” I said. Recognizing that I was feeling curiosity, I realized how long I'd gone without.

  “Yes, tell me,” my brother said. “I've never known.”

  “First, we take a moment to appreciate the beautiful young waiter. If you're young, you don't have to do anything. lust your health and youth is beautiful. Look at the fresh color of his lips, even his gums are beautiful when he smiles. Because everything of him is healthy it says, ‘Nothing will grow old and sick and dead.'”

  “How's Ray?” my brother said.

  “Terrible. Suffering. Dying.”

  “lean-Claude volunteers with the AIDS crisis center. He takes people to their doctors’ appointments, helps them with meals. This guy Ray that he helps is, what is he, lean-Claude, twenty-three? You're very good to him.”

  “Well, what I am feeling is it's the least I can do. It's my way of saying ‘Thank God,’ when I am spared. I am not sick, and really I deserve to be sick, so much more than these other people. I mean, I was really promiscuous. Not only that, I made a living off it.”

  “Being sick isn't something anyone deserves,” I said.

  “I know what you mean. But I did all the things you are supposed to do to get it. And I'm spared. So I do this in gratitude.”

  “You were telling us how you came to America.”

  “Well, of course, it starts in Grenoble. I'm a bastard, I mean literally. Let's say that right away, because it isn't something that bothers me or something I try to hide. It's like the color of my eyes: just something that's there, that I was born with. So why try to hide it? My mother was very young when I was born and she left for Canada with a man when I was six. My grandparents were kind and good, but too old for a wild boy like I was.

  “Probably now, I'd be called A.D.D. I couldn't stay still in school and all the teachers hated me. I was bored, so I made trouble to entertain myself. Doesn't everyone do that, do anything to entertain themselves when they're bored? I swear people do the most unbelievable things because they're bored. I never had any teacher who liked me. Not one. I wonder what would have happened if I did. That's why I never learned how to read very well. Do you know I've never read a whole book in my life? Not one. And here I am talking to you, a real writer, who's written so many books. But it doesn't matter, does it? Because we're just people, talking, enjoying each other. It would matter if we were bored, but we're not bored so it doesn't matter.”

  I thought how odd it was that he was right, that i
t didn't matter. And that I didn't know what I felt about his never reading a book, and what that meant about his life. I wondered whether or not I should be sad for him, and I didn't know why I was so insistent on introducing a note of sadness when jean-Claude told the story of his life with so little self-pity, such an easy sense of “once upon a time,” “and then this happened and then that,” such a peaceful sense of proceeding without thoughts of “The End.”

  “Perhaps if some teacher had taken an interest in me I would have been different. Now I make up this story about this retired teacher who moves onto my street. One day I see her having trouble carrying a heavy package from her car, and I offer to help. She invites me for tea. She plays the piano for me. We become friends. I help her around the house. She gives me books to read and helps me with my reading. We go to the opera. In the summer we go on vacation, where we go to museums and read books in the hotel. But when I was young I never met anyone like that, or maybe I wouldn't have ended up on the streets of Paris at the age of fourteen. But if I hadn't gone to the streets of Paris, I wouldn't be here, having lunch with you in the sunshine by the pine trees and the beautiful green sea. Maybe I'd be a grandfather now, working for the telephone company in Grenoble, with a fat wife getting varicose veins. Your legs are great, by the way, you still have a girl's legs.”

  “Why do you think you'd have a wife?” I asked. “Haven't you always liked men?”

  “I've had two wives already.”

  “Jean-Claude,” said Ted, looking amazed. “You've never told any of us that.”

  “Well, all right, I haven't had two wives, only one, according to the law. But I lived with a woman I wasn't married to for six years.”

  “This is incredible,” Ted said.

  “She had great legs, too, but not like yours. Hers were very long, very strong, like trees. Like a man. And she gave great blow jobs, as good as the best man, which is very unusual, most women just don't get it. We had a restaurant together. Well, a cafe, more of a bar. When I met her she was already pregnant. I went to the hospital with her. Her son called me daddy. I was always the one who got up with him and then took him to school. She was a lousy mother. She started picking up men in the restaurant. Then she threw me out, so one of them could move in. He beat her up, he hit the kid. The kid came to me, trying to get away from them. I was living with a rich American then, and he wanted to take me to America. But I'd have given it up and stayed in Grenoble if she'd let me have the kid. She said if I ever came near the kid again she'd have me arrested as a pedophile. I saw him ten years after that, he was nineteen, a complete mess, greasy hair, missing teeth, sitting in a filthy hamburger place drinking wine, he already had a kid. We had nothing to say to each other.”