“Damn it, Shay, you’re so careless. Jerry Russo is not a guy to mess around with. I warned you—he’s connected to people who take care of business. They protect their own. You just don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” Shay repeats wearily. “Natalie left her keys in the car. It’s all her fault.”
Mickey turns around to flag a waitress. This allows him to ignore Shay’s charge against me and remain neutral. It’s hard to tell whether he’s acting like a gentleman or a politician.
My stomach is churning so violently I am unable to speak. The injustice of her accusation makes me dizzy.
“Hey, waidaminute,” Eli says. Although he missed the first bounce, he’s got the rebound. “Nat has done a lot for you, Shay—why don’t you give her a break once in a while?”
I lower my eyes, overwhelmed by Eli’s defense. It’s almost as if he still loved me.
SNAPSHOT
I took this picture of Eli. We were in England, staying at an inn near Blenheim Castle, and had spent the night in a fever of sexual excitement—probably because we were so elated to be in England. Actually I had been hemming a dirndl skirt when Eli asked me if I would sit on him while I sewed. Drunk with happiness, I climbed aboard him, where I sat sewing with a slanty overhand hemming stitch that’s as distinctive as my signature. He enjoyed this sex a lot because it was a very full skirt. The next day we went out for a walk and when Eli came through the doorway I snapped this photo. He has that sheepish, bearish, shit-eating grin on his face and I was dizzy with love for him, deliriously happy that we were married.
“Anyway, what’s the drill for tonight?” Eli asks, standing up. His voice sounds removed. Remote. Receding. Clearly he’s had suspicions from the very beginning that Shay was going to invade our lives for the weekend. “Are you folks coming home with us or what?”
“Would that be okay?” Shay asks in an elevated, innocent tone of voice.
“It’s okay with me, but let’s get outta here right now,” Eli says decisively. “I’ll make some drinks back at our place. C’mon.”
Mickey Teardash stands up. He has absorbed everything. Already he knows about me and Eli and the estrangement between us. Already he knows about Shay and me and the rage between us. He’s wickedly quick. Dropping some bills on the table, Teardash picks up his stool and carries it over to the young guy standing nearby with a bewildered expression on his face.
“Sorry about that, old man,” Teardash says, with Jay Gatsby charm. “Here’s your chair back.”
Then we all walk back to the parking lot to reclaim Eli’s car and drive home.
I love my house.
The more insecure I feel about Eli and our marriage, the more I love our house.
SNAPSHOT
That’s Eli and me standing in front of our home on the day of the final closing in 1976. He has his arm around my shoulders and is smiling one of those sloppy grins that spills all over his face. We both feel very grown up to have bought such a distinctive home. Eli is happy because we have purchased a handsome two-story stone farmhouse On Adams Mill Road only three blocks beyond the hot skillet of Eighteenth and Columbia. Some family actually moved it in from Virginia to this urban site in 1899. While one branch of Adams Mill Road accesses the National Zoo, which is nestled inside Rock Creek Park, the other branch winds along a thickly wooded bluff that juts away from the edge of Adams-Morgan like a long fingernail. It is atop this hilly slice of wilderness that five gnarled old homesteads sit. Eli and I bought the last house, the one closest to the zoo.
At night, lying in bed, Eli and I can hear the lions and tigers roar, the elephants trumpet and the hyenas scream. Some of our friends can’t stand the wild cries that rip through the fabric of night silence. Fear of the untamed is a common sign of the White Man’s Disease. Several times, in the middle of the night, I have found visibly shaken houseguests sitting in our living room, fully dressed and ready to flee. These are often brave people who do brave work. I have come to believe that what frightens people is not what is savage in those jungle soundings but what is encaged and enraged.
Eli and I love the jungle music to which we dance away our nights. The roars of the lions always lent a “Snows of Kilimanjaro” strain to our sex. Fun and game. That’s what Eli used to call it. The shrieks of jungle animals became as integral a part of our existence as did the screams from the urban jungle, three blocks away in the opposite direction; human cries also cut the edges of our dark nights like a pair of pinking shears.
Virgin cooled air, soft as a silk kimono, wraps itself around us when we enter the front hall. Stashing Shay’s and Teardash’s gear near the stairs, we walk toward the rear of the house, which hugs the tree-covered slope that scrambles down into Rock Creek Park. I have made our three-hundred-square-foot cathedral-ceilinged kitchen the centerpiece of our home. It is furnished with turn-of-the-century and mission-oak pieces that I rescued from yard sales in rural Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia. I restored all of them with a great deal of time and effort.
I had the time because I didn’t have a child.
When Eli turns on the recessed lighting, Mickey Teardash emits a shrill, showy whistle. Shaking off his jacket, he walks around the kitchen, carefully studying my various antiques. Shay wanders off to the powder room, which we created from a butler’s pantry adjacent to the kitchen.
“Not too shabby,” Teardash finally says, grinning at me with genuine appreciation and admiration.
I give him a four-star smile and start to like him a little better.
“What’ll you have to drink?” Eli asks, opening the signed Stickley corner hutch where we keep our liquor.
“A beer,” Mickey says, loosening the collar of his shirt and rolling up the sleeves. The recessed lighting lacquers his blond hair from above. “I always drink beer when I’m in the tropics. It helps fight off swamp fever.”
Now Shay reappears, kicking off her sandals to pad across the oak floorboards. Like Clark Kent, she is changing her identity—from embattled journalist to late-night siren. Even barefoot, Shay looks expensive.
“Well, it’s getting late,” she observes. “I know the whole drill about the guest room, so don’t worry about us. It’s a good thing I’m too tired to boogie tonight,” she says to Mickey. “All our condoms were in the El Al flight bag I left in the car.”
Although Mickey Teardash looks embarrassed by her comment, he lifts his beer can as a good-night salute to us, and then follows Shay toward the entry hall. Eli flicks off the lights and we go up the rear staircase to our bedroom.
Since Eli sleeps in his boxer shorts, as soon as he peels off his shirt and trousers, he’s ready for bed. I sit down at the oak writing desk I use as my dressing table and stare at myself in the wall mirror.
I am a prose statement of a woman. I am like Michael Dukakis. What you see is what you get. Nothing glamorous, swift or shimmering. Nothing to inspire passion or cause any craziness. Like Dukakis, I radiate sturdy, solid decency, which turns out to be more boring than either wimphood or nerddom. Men will kill for a California-type hard-bellied woman like Shay; I am not one of the female players men pursue.
Eli lies down. I go over to the bed, put my mouth on his forehead and cover his face with soft kisses, quiet as questions. He’s tired. Even though he can do what we do in his sleep, he doesn’t want to bother.
Over the years, we unavoidably domesticated our orgasms.
We tamed them like wild beasts trapped in the jungle and brought back alive to be kept in captivity. Like zookeepers who train their animals to appear at feeding time, we conditioned our orgasms to arrive by command on demand. Marriage made our lovemaking dependable, but relieved it of either savagery or surprise. We wore down our own passions, used them up greedily until they suffered inevitable erosion. Now Eli and I no longer share the pleasure of stalking our satisfaction on long, dark safaris; we simply summon our climaxes in from the wilderness.
“Go take your bath,” El
i says softly, brushing my hair away from my face. “Wake me when you’re finished. In case I fall asleep.”
He doesn’t mean what he’s said.
Our bathroom was photographed for the Thursday home supplement of The Washington Post. We kept all the old Victorian fixtures—tub, sink, toilet and shower stall—but had them reglazed a fire-engine red. A magician of a plumber got them all working again.
I turn on the water, spill in some bubble bath and then fold myself inside the curvy cup of the claw-footed tub. It is not until I turn off the brass faucets that I realize I can hear Shay and Mickey Teardash talking. For some reason they are directly beneath my bathroom. Instead of sleeping in the first-floor guest room, they are in the den. They must have opened the sofa bed.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard pillow talk in my own home.
“I’m not your toy-boy.”
“Oh come on, Mickey. Just be nice tonight.”
“I’m always nice.”
“Yeah, nice and hard.”
“Move down here.”
“No, I don’t want to tonight.”
There are some muffled sounds.
My sister laughs.
“We don’t have any condoms, Mick,” she whines.
“We don’t need any. I bought you a present.”
Silence.
“Oh my God. Where’d you get that?”
“Pleasure Chest.”
“Jeez, it’s huge.”
“Flesh pink and battery-run.”
A dildo.
All in good fun.
Soon I hear Shay moan.
All women make the same sounds. Like the deep hum of sea mammals. Shay’s initial moan signals penetration, an ambivalent mix of relish and reluctance, surprise and surrender. Any woman can tell where another woman is being touched from the sounds she makes. Each internal pressure point releases its own unique song.
Oh, yes.
Shay is on her way. Now she is an audible time bomb ticking toward detonation. I hear all the sequential sounds of abdication, the delicious shrugging off and loss of self, before the ultimate dissolution.
I sink lower into my bathwater.
I remember sex … like a sweet, almost forgotten, rain that touches every surface before sluicing off into secret spaces, filling canals and channels, rushing forward to spill over a waterfall. I hear my sister’s soundings of pleasure and I feel a wild despair stir me. Stark deprivation stalks my heart. I feel as if I’m dying and have only one second left in which to mourn the loss of love. Life without sexual pleasure is like the earth without rain, withering as it waits for relief.
SNAPSHOT
That’s the Loring apartment building. Those stones were brought from Europe and the cupolas are copies of some famous ones in Rome. When we lived in the Loring, having sex made me feel important. In the morning, when I walked outside, I thought everyone who saw me knew what Eli and I had done in that first double bed of ours. Back then I believed sex was serious, that those liberties we took with each other’s bodies were important. I thought we did things no one else had ever dreamed of doing or dared to try. I felt as if what we did was significant in the larger realm of things … an important social statement about freedom and passion and love. There’s that much to say for innocence: It makes everything feel like a first. In those early years, before I learned I couldn’t get pregnant, I was scrupulous about using my diaphragm. I still regret using that damn thing when I didn’t even need it. It always slowed me down when I most wanted to hold Eli in my arms.
Eli is sleeping when I return to our bedroom. I do not wake him. If our marriage ends in divorce it won’t be a no-fault divorce. It will be a default.
Eli is defaulting on me.
5
It is three o’clock Saturday afternoon. Wearing a demure cotton dress and sandals, I leave my house and walk past our private wilderness area toward the congestion of Columbia Road.
The midafternoon heat is circling overhead like a troubled airplane.
I walk east on California for three blocks to reach the Third Precinct, which I consider my police station just as I think of the Safeway on Columbia Road as my Safeway. However, the fact that I view the V Street station possessively does not mean anyone there is glad to see me. Of the five black police officers behind the room-length counter, none makes any sign of noticing me enter. They do not see me approach the counter any more than I saw the unemployed black men plastered like posters against the storefronts on Eighteenth Street.
Selective blindness is a popular means of doing business in Adams-Morgan.
I lean against the counter for a long time while the police continue whatever they were or were not doing before I arrived. The two women officers are talking about a strip search they performed on a female suspect the previous night. I do not want to hear the details, so I go deaf. Selective hearing is another negotiable neighborhood instrument. Taunts, threats and racial or sexual slurs are best left unheard.
A young cop is writing in a large ledger not far from where I’m standing. Behind him an old-fashioned wall clock clucks it tongue disapprovingly during our long standoff. After stretching his insolence to the max, the young man finally relents and asks me what I want.
“I’d like to speak to a detective,” I say.
Then all five of them turn around to look at me.
Of course the White European Lady would like to speak to a detective.
Why would she want to speak with a plain, ordinary, not to mention black, cop? Why would she bother speaking to a rookie when she has been trained to speak only with management—to deal exclusively with supervisors and higher executive authorities?’
“Whaddabout?”
“My car was stolen.”
Silent exasperation escapes and floats up toward the ceiling like a helium balloon.
“Didja report it?”
“No.” I let a little white-woman edginess creep into my voice. “That’s why I want to see a detective.”
Hooked now, the cop sidles along the counter toward where I’m standing.
“How do you know it’s a detective you need ta see?”
The two women officers have now returned to their desks and are trying to look busy while listening to our strained dialogue. Eventually, my cop slides a mimeographed paper toward me and says I should fill out a stolen-car report.
I take the form, but let my irritation shift into a higher gear. Again I ask to see a detective. Now my voice is sharply petulant. I have introduced the threat of hysteria into the room like someone advancing a political candidate. The effect is equally disruptive. After a few more moments, the cop releases a reluctant sigh, picks up an intercom and speaks to someone in an inaudible but aggrieved mumble.
“Okay,” he says to me. “He’ll be right down.”
Now everyone gets busy. Very busy.
And quiet. Very quiet.
Washington is one of the few American cities where a white person can feel what it’s like to be the Other. The Outsider. An intimidated member of a disliked minority group.
Racial hatred is sizzling through the room.
They hate me!
I am the White European Woman. I am the enemy. I am a colon. I am a Brit during the Raj. I am a Boer in Johannesburg. I am a settler come to rape Rhodesia. I am a White European Woman who drinks hot tea in the midday sun and sips late-afternoon mint juleps seated on a veranda from where I watch the natives working my land. At night I dress for dinner in lacy white Victorian frocks, get drunk and go off to shoot antelopes by moonlight in an open Daimler.
Now a slow burn, like a long snake, hisses and crawls on its belly across the floor.
I recognize it immediately. I know too well the heat of any resentment fueled by injustice. Because of my incendiary relationship with Shay, I know there is nothing hotter than a slow burn. A slow burn will destroy the host that harbors it. A slow burn will scorch the earth and the entire environment enveloping it.
I walk over
to an oak bench shoved against the wall and sit down. From the lockup behind a barred gate there come some troublesome noises I prefer not to sort out. I look at the stolen-car form. I take a pen out of my purse. The only blank I fill in is SEX?, where I write: “Infrequent.” When I see the stairwell door open I shove the paper and pen back in my purse.
“You waiting to see a detective?”
A black man wearing sport clothes is walking toward me.
The guy’s maybe fifty. Overweight with a mini-beer belly that begins beneath the middle button of his short-sleeved madras shirt. He’s handsome. Very handsome. His skin is the color of an emery board. He has gray-edged close-cropped hair, a well-trimmed Vandyke and teeth for which there is no English adjective. Maybe the Eskimos, with all their words for snow, could come up with one.
His moves are street-smart. Slow, but steady, sort of premeditated. He looks like he’s seen it all but can still forget about it when he wants to. He looks like he might have been the guy who spray-painted last Thanksgiving’s harsh messages on the brick wall of the Eighteenth Street parking lot:
SAVE A TURKEY—EAT THE RICH and
TOO FEW HAVE TOO MUCH—DOWN WITH YUPPIE VALUES.
“You waiting for a detective?” he asks again.
“Yes, I am,” I answer in precise standard English.
At least I don’t succumb to counterfeit street talk, to any slurred hipster accent, which is a common symptom of the ethnic nervousness often accompanying the onslaught of the White Man’s Disease. I do, however, involuntarily rise to my feet in deference to an officer.
“Well, what can I do for you?”
Flat. Uninflected. Unfriendly. Uninterested.
“My car was stolen last night.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
I did that good. A quick return close to the baseline. I didn’t get suckered into playing net. Twenty years as a colon, you learn some moves.
“Come up to my office.”
He jerks his head at me to follow him through the doorway marked EXIT and up a set of cement stairs. When he brushes past me, I can smell a lot of Lagerfeld cologne. From behind, I can see his muscular back straining against his shirt. His love handles jiggle a bit, creasing his style. He has missed one of the belt loops on the back of his trousers, which makes me smile a little despite the practiced disdain he dumped on me back downstairs.
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