“What puzzle?” I had asked.
“The big one. The puzzle of seeing who we are, why we act a certain way, what we’re afraid of, how and why we move. The beauty of the puzzle is that it has no language—it is knowledge in its truest, cleanest sense—and the moment we try to put it in language, we lose it. We break that part off: we make this little chunk understandable in language, but we lose its position in the whole.”
I had not said much. I had thought about the little chunks, the separate stories, and wondered if waiting for sense—waiting for language to explain it you—was an expectation that would only take you farther away from the beauty and the wholeness of the puzzle. And now I was slowly catching on. I understood more about the Unicorn seeing him double up than I would have if he had explained why he was doing it. I understood more about Cornelia taking off in the middle of the night than I would have if she had told me why. Or if I had tried to tell myself why. The expectation of having every story told in language was the plug that would drain the story dry if it were ever pulled.
The light was blinking on my answering machine as I closed the front door. I hit the play button.
“Hey, Leslie,” said Kevin’s deep voice. “I’d like to see you this weekend, maybe Saturday. Give me a call if you’re free.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Tortoise
Dear Diary: We sat across a small square table with a thick white cloth in this Italian restaurant. I pointed out the mozzarella appetizer with sun-dried tomatoes. You get it, he said. I hate sun-dried tomatoes. Maybe you’ll eat the mozzarella, I said. The plate came drenched in olive oil; I sent it back. The waiter brought another one with a jug of oil on the side. I asked if he could bring my salad with dressing on the side. Kevin shook his head. Are you always like this, he asked. Do you always have dressing on the side? I live in the twilight zone of anorexia, I said. He showed me his new Movado watch, sleek and flat and with a lizard strap. It’s time I started acting like a vice-president, he said. That’s my title; that’s how I should act. How does a vice-president act? I asked. I don’t know, he laughed. That’s what I have to learn.
I told him about the Unicorn. How he sat on the beach and how wise he was but how he had no material things. That’s what some people want, I said. Nothing. No Movado watches, no Louis Vuitton luggage, no Ferragamo shoes. How do you know he wants that? said Kevin. I’m sure he does, I said. Everyone puts themselves just where they want to be. How do you know he didn’t just fall on hard times? said Kevin. You are so opinionated, Leslie. You don’t like that, do you, I said. He shrugged. I guess I don’t know what to make of it. You don’t have to like me unconditionally, I said. He looked at me. I know I don’t, he said. Then he leaned back in his chair. The waiter was putting more plates in front of us. I know I don’t, he said again, but I guess in some ways I do.
I was surprised. I had never expected that kind of remark. I guessed that in spite of the standoffishness, he was admitting that he liked me. It was all going very slowly. I liked that. The more slowly it went, the better. I was in my own little world, spinning filament safely so the metamorphosis could take place gradually and solidly. Then, at work one day, Steve brought up Rodney again.
“Hey, Leslie. My cousin’s in town. He’s thinking of moving here.” Steve winked. “Wanna show him around?”
“No,” I said. “There’s nothing he doesn’t already know about.”
“Oh, well,” said Steve. “I was just trying to find out if you’d mellowed a little since Christmas.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m seeing someone.”
“Is that right?” said Steve. He was putting on his jacket to go to court. “Is it the neighbor?” He tugged at the lapels. “Love thy neighbor, isn’t that what they say?”
I closed his court bag for him.
“Well?” demanded Steve. “Aren’t you going to tell me about it?”
“Not right this minute.” I lugged his bag to the doorway. “It’s a slow relationship.”
“Slowly but surely,” said Steve. “I guess it was the hare last time and now it’s the tortoise. Right?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Well,” said Steve, lifting the lid of a box of chocolates with his free hand, “I hope you snag this one.” He picked out a chocolate. “Hey, if Rodney calls, tell him I’ll be back by four. Four-thirty at the latest.”
Snag? I heard Steve on his way to the front desk. Snag? What was the matter with everyone? Why did they think people had to be snagged?
Rodney called at about three and the front desk put him through to me. “You’re Leslie,” he said, sounding surprised that I was still there. “I remember you.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “I remember you.”
“Yeah …” he said, letting his voice drift a little, as though he were trying to picture what I had looked like at the Christmas party. “That’s right. Hey—I hear from Steve that you said something funny about my car.” He waited for my reaction.
“What?” I said. “Your car?”
“Yeah, my car. You said something funny about it—rocket-mobile, or something, Steve said.”
“Oh,” I said. “Penismobile.”
“Ha ha,” Rodney laughed. “Penismobile. That’s really funny.” He laughed again. “Hey,” he continued, “I’d really like to get to know you better. You’re a smart girl. Do you want to maybe—have dinner some night?”
I was silent. “I don’t know,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Rodney.
“Well, it’s hard for me to accept an invitation like that,” I said. “I’m kind of dating someone right now.”
“Hey, no problem,” said Rodney. “I just mean we should go out for a friendly dinner, that’s all. Think you can handle that?”
I pictured Rodney’s big mustache stuck on his upper lip. Don’t you think it makes them look like a vall-russ? Cornelia had once remarked.
“I wish I could say yes,” I answered carefully, “but I really don’t think I should.”
“Hey,” said Rodney. “I lose. I’d say he’s a lucky guy. I hope he knows it.”
I put the phone down slowly.
Kevin, for some reason, would not talk about Cornelia. The couple of times I had brought up the wild night—more to reflect on how it served to bring us together than to ask, And what did you do with Cornelia in that midnight hour?—he would grunt or mumble, “Yeah, well, she sure has a lot of problems.” I couldn’t learn any more, and a part of me really didn’t want to know.
Cornelia had tried several times to help me. “I cannot remember anything this night,” she would repeat, frowning at the tabletop or the carpet in an effort to search her memory for helpful information. “I know I was very drunk. We were sitting on his bed, kissing, and then I don’t remember any more.” Then she would look up at me and say very quickly and firmly, “I didn’t sleep with him. Of this I am sure.” And another time, she came up with a little more. “When we were kissing, I asked him about you, and he said he liked you very much, and then, when we were both thinking are we going to do more, he said, ‘You know, I cannot do this, I really like Leslie.’”
That I found shocking. Could it be that Kevin—the ambivalent Kevin—the Kevin who had run away from me for a year—would say that? Wow, Leslie, I said to myself silently, that is wonderful.
Kevin and I were different. He dressed better than I did. His pants were always pressed by the cleaners and he wore nice sweaters in muted colors, very soft to the touch. I almost always wore my washed-out jeans. Dressing for work was enough for me, and no number of dinners out or movies could induce me to put the same clothes back on. He was aware of his clothes, I could tell. He would sit down carefully—not in a rush, and occasionally I would see him fingering the cuff of a shirt or pulling at his collar, and hitching up his pants so they wouldn’t bag at the knees. The Movado watch gleamed like a penlight on his wrist. Once we went to a movie and I held his hand, and every time I shi
fted in my seat the bracelet I was wearing came crashing down on the crystal face of the watch. I remained paralyzed afterwards, petrified and embarrassed, and the third time it happened, I leaned gingerly over the arm of the seat and said in a painful whisper, “I’m very sorry.” He laughed.
I once found him staring at the watch, almost musingly, his arms stretched out, his fingers laced around his knee.
“You really like that watch, don’t you?” I said quietly.
He nodded slowly. “You know, I think it has to do with growing up poor. This is the first really expensive watch—the first piece of jewelry, really—I’ve ever bought. I can’t believe I own a watch like this. And when you work in the business world, you really need a nice watch. It’s something people notice a lot. I see them looking down at my wrist when they reach out to shake my hand.”
“I guess I never thought of that,” I said. “I guess it’s something that people do notice.”
“It really is.” He looked at the watch again. “And to me, it means something else, too. It means that I’ve left the environment I was raised in. I’ve left the freezing emptiness of upstate New York. I’ve left being poor. I don’t know if that’s something you can understand.”
I was quiet. I was listening to him.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever been poor,” he said.
I shook my head. “My father was a judge in Mercer County.”
He gave me a flat grin. “My father was a machinist in Ithaca.”
At times the dressing up was a little much. One evening, he proudly showed me green socks, a green stripe in his polo shirt and the green golfing jacket he planned to wear over the shirt. “You want to see coordination?” he said.
“Amazing,” I replied. “You’re much more coordinated than I am.”
He turned to put the clothes hanger back in the closet. “That’s because I make a hell of a lot more money than you do.”
He always paid for my dinners. I never ate much—faithfully following my rule of ordering less than my date—but most of the time he ate even less than I did. I once read that wealthy women order expensive meals but only pick at them. I thought that maybe not devouring food meant that he didn’t need to eat it, but I thought of that much later, long after I had noticed the pattern.
He began to sleep with me more regularly. It wasn’t that often, maybe once a week, and a lot of nights he would say he needed to get home, claiming he wasn’t feeling well or had to get up early. Those evenings always left me feeling shortchanged, as if it was already decided that being with me was an effort, a project, and one that didn’t always ensure rewards.
I loved to be with him. I loved to kiss him. He was great at it. In spite of the ambivalence he had about going to bed, he had kissing figured out hands down. We would do it on my couch or his couch, sometimes very suddenly, and it could go on for a long, long time. If you can’t kiss someone, I’ve decided, there’s not much hope for your relationship. Kissing isn’t something that’ll get better with time. Either you like it the first time, or you don’t, in which case it becomes something you avoid, something you’d rather not talk about and—if you’re at a movie—rather not watch. Kevin’s mouth was like a mysterious melody—sometimes strong, sometimes haunting, but always consistent and never weak. I was sold, entranced: I dived as the melody pulled me into it; I listened to its different stories, lived with it in different corridors, followed it as it danced and swelled and faded and swelled again. It was the perfect dancing partner, giving me its all, its fullest, its most, for it was going nowhere. I could tell as I was inside his mouth that he was wrestling with the segments of what to do next. I would wait; I wouldn’t pressure him; I hung back and let him call the shots. Gradually, it grew easier. The canyon between the couch and pulling back the sheets on the bed gaped less and less wide, and he would stand up and say perfectly naturally, “Come on, Leslie, let’s go to bed.”
In the dark, we would lie next to each other and then, as though we knew we had to grab the float while it was passing, we would begin to have sex. It was wonderful and soft and silent, but it was very definitely a little bit weert. As the minutes went on, he would move more and more slowly, and then he would stop, staying very still inside of me, and after a minute or two more, he would turn over on his side. It was all over. The first few times, I pretended that was plenty and turned into the covers to go to sleep, but there came a night that I took a deep breath and after counting the seconds into the inevitable pull-out, I rose up off his chest and asked the question.
“Is there something wrong?”
“Huh?” he said. “No, no. There’s nothing wrong.”
“Are you having fun?”
“Fun? Oh, yeah. Sure, I’m having fun.”
“You don’t look like you’re having fun.”
“No, no. Don’t worry. I like this a lot. Of course I’m having fun.”
I stared at his face in the blackness. I could see it, white and large, floating a few inches under my own. “I don’t believe you. I think there’s something wrong.”
He shifted under me. “What makes you think there’s something wrong?”
“You’re somewhere else. You’re not here. This is one-quarter sex and three-quarters something else.”
He folded his arms behind his head. I was still on top of him, my bare chest inches above his. “Why do you think I’m not enjoying it?”
“Most men grunt and groan a lot more than you do,” I replied.
“Huh,” he said. “Well, grunting and groaning is not my style.”
“You know what, Kevin?” I countered. “Grunting and groaning is everybody’s style. When people don’t grunt and groan, it’s because they’re not letting themselves.”
He seemed to be thinking. “You may be right,” he finally said.
“So, can you tell me what’s wrong?”
He wrenched underneath me and I rolled off. I could feel him staring at the ceiling. “I don’t know.”
I waited.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s this thing I have about abandonment.”
“Abandonment?”
“Yeah. I think I’m afraid you’re going to abandon me.”
“Abandon you?”
“My father abandoned me when I was eight. Then there was Lauren, my wife. So I guess I think you’re going to abandon me, too. I guess I think that about all women.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “I don’t even have you to abandon you.”
“I know.” He was still staring into the darkness. “I guess the thought of it makes me afraid. Ambivalent, you know.”
“I see,” I said.
Dear Diary: And so we went on. I was always a little nervous—afraid that naturally I was too eager for him. I remembered my license plate: 2EGR391. It was like a brand, a tattoo, a character trait that stuck to me like a stubborn piece of Scotch tape. I was afraid I was very transparent, that every time I smiled, talked, or did anything in front of Kevin, the hunger, the eagerness was flashing its neon message across every cell of my face. I tried to be as cool as possible. I was the calmest I’ve ever been. I never got rattled, I was sensible, caring and serene.
“You’re very kind,” he once said, as I lay on his arm and he burrowed into the couch. “You’re very kind, you’re very patient and you’re very organized.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Daughters
Winter had fully given the ship up to spring. The warm air floating off the ocean brought with it a sharp but elusory salt smell that made you want to reach up and grab the leaves of the trees and swing like a monkey waking up from a long and restful nap. The wind would bat around the hard little acorns that fell from the eucalyptus in the back yard, and I would listen to the rattling as I read my magazines at night after swimming or one of my long walks along the water.
I had seen nothing of Paul. Our dance, cresting to a spire of fury like Ravel’s Bolero, was over. I often wondered what it meant, what I had missed in the music
that would have told me the tale. A grocery boy at a supermarket in Paul’s neighborhood had gawked at me one day, and only after I had turned away, annoyed, did I realize that he was Robbie, Paul’s son. I wondered what Paul might have said to him. “Kids, let me teach you what good manners are. That Leslie—remember her? Well, she lent my books out …” Paul had been a fool. And a fool at over forty was a fool indeed.
“This was not normal, don’t you think?” Cornelia commented about Paul. Naw-ml, she had said. “Do you think this was naw-ml?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what to think. He just went crazy all of a sudden.”
“Ya, so you are not talking to him anymore?”
I shook my head again. We were sitting in my living room, like old times, drinking tea. “He’s a nut.”
Cornelia put her mug on the coffee table and stretched back on the couch, folding her arms across her stomach. “Another nut is this Raul. You want to know what he said now?”
I looked up. “What?”
“I saw him again. In the juice bar. Eat Healthy, or whatever it is called.”
“Eat It Raw,” I said.
“Ya. That one. Well, he came next to me and said hi and everything, and how are you, and have you been in any more planes, and I said no, and how are you and are you still with your girl friend? And then he laughs, this big laugh, you have to see it …” Cornelia spread her arms in the air and gave a big, bright smile, “and he said—‘Ya, she was having some nervous days.’ Nervous days! Can you believe this?
“And so I said, too bad, is she better now? And he said, much better. But I think I have to move soon. And I said, move? Is this not a good relationship? And he said, Some days yes, some days no. Then he looked at me very strangely and he said, ‘See, you and I could fall madly in love two months from now, but right now it has to be like this.’” She stopped. “That is what he said. Do you think this is weert?”
I looked at her dubiously. “Very weird. What does it mean?”
She shrugged. “This is what I would like to know. ‘You and I could fall madly in love in two months.’” She focused abstractedly on my small potted palm. “It is like all these men are not here now. Do you know what I mean? ‘In two months.’ Not now. Now you cannot hold them down. They are like a sheddo. Later, maybe. But not now.”
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