“You are so nervous when you talk to your family—or you don’t want to talk to them at all. It’s really something, Jose.”
She looked at me, warily. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that your voice gets squeaky and you can’t sit still and you look like you’re about to jump out of your skin. What did they do?”
She bit her lip and looked away from me. “You don’t understand, Danny. They … my brother and my father, with the booze. You know. They just …” She was silent a long minute. When she spoke, she looked steadily at the sofa cushion. “I’m afraid they’ll take me down with them. I just can’t let them in.”
I took her in my arms. My heart sustained a small crack for her that night. But as I sat there with my arms around her, her face pressed into my chest, I felt her tightening against me. I felt that unyielding growing back over her skin, over her heart, over her soul. I thought that loving her would wear that unyielding down. That’s what I hoped anyway.
A FEW WEEKS AGO, she went out on a dive to examine some of the institute’s equipment and check on some whales they’d been tracking. She called me after to see if I wanted to meet her and the other divers for a drink, but I turned her down. I was in the middle of finishing a big grant proposal and I didn’t want to stop. She got home that night after I was asleep.
The next morning, she climbed on top of me before the alarm even went off, before the sun was up. She was everywhere, kissing and sucking and whispering. I was surprised—she’s not usually like this—but I sure as hell wasn’t gonna stop her. Afterward, she lay with her head on my chest. “Good morning,” I said. She laughed, “Good morning.”
“That was a great way to wake up. What got you all worked up?”
I could only see the top of her head. “I just felt like it. You know, just turned on. I get like that after a dive.”
She does, but she hadn’t been like that for a while, ever since we got into this whole baby thing. I pulled her a little closer and didn’t say any more.
THE STORY EVERYBODY KNOWS about infertility these days is about a woman’s desperation. How the couple, usually driven by the wife, will do anything, anything to get that baby. Hock the house, sell the family jewels, have sex standing on her head in the middle of the street if necessary. Anything. But that’s not Josie.
We’d been trying for about three months, and she’d just gotten her period again. She didn’t tell me but I saw a tampon wrapped up in the trash. We were at breakfast when I brought it up.
“Jose, why didn’t you tell me you got your period?”
“I have to tell you when I get my period now?” she said incredulously.
“You know we don’t have a lot of time to waste. We shouldn’t try for too long without seeing a doctor if nothing happens.”
A door closed in her face right after I said that. “Is that what you want?”
“No, but if we want to have a baby, we might have to.” Somehow, we had never talked this through.
“I don’t know, Danny. I don’t think I want to go through all that. I mean, if it happens, great, but if not.…”
“Look, Jose, you know as well as I do that our chances are slipping every day. Don’t you even want to try?”
“We are trying.”
“You know what I mean. Do everything we can.”
She drew in a deep breath and looked deep into her cup of coffee. “No, Danny, to tell the truth, I don’t.”
What? What was I supposed to do now? She was the one with the uterus. If she didn’t want to go further, we wouldn’t. I didn’t say anything more that morning or that evening, or in any of the mornings or evenings since that day, about a month ago. But we started touching each other less and less after that, the absence of her swelling belly creating a space between us. We hadn’t had sex in about two or three weeks so when she climbed on me all revved up like that, it felt good. Hell, it felt great. But it didn’t fix anything. It didn’t get her pregnant. It didn’t make me feel like she loved me.
Sixteen
A Sunday afternoon. Ben and I are together at his house, in bed. Since Leslie left, we are free to meet there, and because he doesn’t live anywhere near me, I can manage it. I’m grateful Daniel and I have two cars, even though I sometimes feel guilty about how much gas we use. I almost never feel guilty about Ben. He has become as necessary to me as air. Or so it seems.
He smells like the ocean, salty and fresh and unexpected. I love that about him. That and how warm his skin always is. He told me once that his normal temperature is a couple of degrees higher than 98.6; some people’s are, you know. I am licking various parts, his hipbones, his shoulders, kind of moving around, grazing his chest with mine the way I know he likes. He is kissing the parts I have guided him to over and over. We have figured how to please each other over and over. I try to keep my eyes open the whole time I’m making love with him, even when I’m coming. I don’t want to miss any of it.
But the last few weeks, I’ve felt a slow, steady sliding away. I don’t even know how I know it. It has made me wild and a little desperate when I’m with him. I keep whispering in his ear, “I’ll do whatever you want.” And he moves me around and kisses me and touches me but I don’t feel my wildness being met by his anymore. It was at first. But now he can get enough of me.
Afterward, we lie together. Sometimes I wish we could go out more. I wonder if that would make a difference, being able to be out together like a couple. Anyway, his hand is on my stomach and we are both breathing heavily. I roll over toward him and look directly into his eyes. They are so utterly, richly brown. Like mine. “Ben, do you want to be with me?”
He laughs a little. “I think I’m with you right now.”
“No, I mean … you know … be with me. Do you want me to leave Daniel? You never ask me to.” I pause. “I would if you asked me to.”
His hand goes still on my hip. “You would?”
I feel as though I can no longer breathe normally. Part of my brain is asking why I’m even going down this road. Do I even mean what I’m saying? I’m not sure I would leave Daniel for Ben. But I can’t stand watching him slip away. “I would.”
Ben doesn’t say anything. Then he takes his hand off of my hip and rolls onto his back. “That’s an awfully big decision, Josie.”
I sit up. We are not touching each other anymore. Rage is forming a rocket in my chest. “Yeah, but I would make it. I would make it for you.”
“I don’t know if I can ask you that, Josie. I just don’t know how I’d feel about it, if you did that. If …”
“If what? I’m thirty-six years old. I can decide things for myself. If we want to be together badly enough, we can be. If you want it. If we want it.”
He swings his legs over the side of the bed. He gets up, picks up his shorts and underwear, and sits back down to pull them on, his back to me. Then he speaks. “Well, I don’t know if I want it.”
The air goes still. “What do you mean?”
He’s getting up now. I want to pull him back in bed with me. “I mean that I don’t know if I want to go on with you … in some kind of permanent way. What we’re doing.… Well, Jesus, Josie, sometimes I don’t know what we’re doing.” His back is to me, he’s sitting on the edge of the bed. He doesn’t turn around. “I still want to be with you. But I don’t know how I’d feel if you gave up everything for me.”
“But I’d be getting what I want. It’d be worth it to me to give up something to get something. To get you. To get to be with you.” My voice is high in my ears. It breaks. I hate the sound of it.
He doesn’t turn around. “I’m not sure it’s what I want. Or that I want to get it that way.”
My chest caves in at this. Can’t he hear it? He must be able to hear it crash, my breastbone breaking open, blood all over the sheets. I struggle to keep my voice level. “Well, what do you want?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know, Josie.” His back is still to me. His skin is so seamless over the muscles an
d bone. “I really don’t know. But I’m not sure it’s this.”
Before I know I’m even going to do it, I’ve hit him between the shoulder blades as hard as I can. I’ve turned into a crazy lady. He wheels around and looks at me, shocked. “Josie?”
“What the fuck is this then? What have we been doing?” I’m so loud. I’m so loud and crazy.
“You need to go now. We can talk about this when you’ve calmed down.” He’s standing over me now, clenching and unclenching his hands. I know he’d like to hit me. I can’t seem to stop shouting. “I mean it, Ben, what the fuck is this? If you’re not gonna be with me and we’re just gonna go on like this. Well, what the fuck?”
“Josie, you’re not making sense. We never talked about trying to make this permanent.”
He is fully dressed now and I’m still naked, which makes me feel even crazier. I pull the sheet up over my breasts. He was just touching them. He was just kissing them ten minutes ago. How could this be happening? What is happening? He sits back down on the side of the bed, slightly calmed. He won’t hit me now. I’m crying, not angry anymore. My chest is very tight. It’s hard to breathe. “Josie. I didn’t want to come to this this way. But I don’t know what’s gonna happen here. I’m not sure I can give you what you want. I’m not sure I can be what you need. I don’t know if I’m the one.”
“I do. I think we’re supposed to be together. I do.”
“That’s not enough, just thinking that. Just you thinking that.”
“Ben, I …”
“Here.” He holds out my shirt to me. “You’d better get dressed. We can’t talk about this anymore right now. You ought to go home.”
I just look at him. He doesn’t touch me. Then I put my shirt on like a chastised child. I walk into the bathroom and splash water on my face. When I would get to crying too hard in college over whatever a college girl might cry hard over, my roommate Sandra always took me firmly by the hand and marched me down the hall to splash cold water on my face. She wasn’t particularly loving or gentle as she did that. But somehow her very firmness made me feel loved. I don’t feel loved now.
I come out of the bathroom and stand in the doorway. Ben is standing with his back to me, looking out his bedroom window. His shoulders look strong, like they always do. He has a thin, efficient body—he was probably very gangly as a boy. Sometimes I wish I could see pictures of him when he was a teenager, squinting through his glasses. “Ben?” My voice is very small. He turns to face me. “I’m gonna go now. I love you.”
“I know you do,” he says. “Be careful going home, okay?”
I find my way to the door, blind, and step out onto the porch, blind, and make my way to my car, blind. How can I find anything now? How can I find anything now?
I MADE MY WAY out to the car, got in, drove. I couldn’t go right home, not in the state I was in. I drove around, back and forth, up and down, trying to calm down. I wished I’d told a girlfriend about Ben so I’d have someone to call and weep to on my cell phone. But this is such a small, small town—I didn’t feel like I could say anything to anyone. So I drove. After a while, I found myself thinking not about Ben but about my father. I’m not sure why, but there it was.
He got sober a few months after he moved out, near the end of my senior year of high school, after I knew I’d be going to Stanford. After he was sober and had been gone from the house for a while, I began to visit him, cautiously. Tick was busy running the streets so we never went together and, at first, I was very nervous. We’d sit in the kitchen and talk awkwardly about this and that. Daddy was quiet, contemplative. He’d begun reading again. “I read Invisible Man again over the last few months,” he said to me on one visit. “It was good to go back to where I started from. I know you’re not much of a one for novels, Josie, but you liked that one, right?” I nodded. There was a lot of it that I didn’t understand but a lot I loved, nevertheless.
I was always uncomfortable during these visits. I couldn’t forget the looming silences, the nasty remarks, the beer stench I grew up with. What happened to that man? How’d I know he wasn’t going to reappear?
And then of course, he did. It was just before I left for my senior year of college. I took the bus over to his house—my mother needed the car for something—and rang his bell. He came to the door in his undershirt, which was my first clue; he didn’t do that kind of thing anymore. He was always nicely dressed. “Hey, baby girl,” he said.
“Daddy? Are you all right?”
He rubbed his face. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Whyn’t you come on in, I’ll get us something to eat.” He leaned forward to kiss me and I smelled it on him. I lost it—kind of like I did with Ben. I have never been so angry in my life, I didn’t know what I was going to do until I did it. I shoved him away from me, shouting as I did it. “You’re drunk, aren’t you? Admit it! Admit it! Goddamn it, admit it, you’ve been drunk almost my whole goddamn life.” I pushed him; I pushed my big father back into the doorway of his apartment. I pushed him away from me. I kept yelling, “Why should I believe anything you say to me? You spent your whole life like this disgusting, miserable mess. I’m not dealing with it anymore. I’m done!” I ran out, crying. I could hear his voice behind me but I didn’t stop. I didn’t dare stop. I cried the whole way home on the bus as people strenuously avoided looking at me. Once I got off the bus, I stood on the corner long enough for my face to dry. I took a lot of deep breaths. And when I got home, I didn’t tell my mother anything. But I’ll tell you something that I knew in that moment. I was done with him. He wasn’t getting another chance.
I’ve stuck with that. He apologized to me about the whole thing a few months afterward; that slip didn’t become a binge. The apology was part of his making amends, I guess. After he made his little speech, we hugged each other. But I didn’t believe him. Not really. I didn’t dare. I couldn’t stand the disappointment when he failed me again.
There is a great deal of evidence that shows that addiction lies in the brain, in its very makeup. That’s why not everyone can quit; sometimes you just can’t outrun that circuitry. It seemed my father had done it—he had certainly been sober for a long time since that slip. I was furious but not too blind to see that. But even so, if it was in your brain, it was in your brain. I understood that now, in my bones. Because that’s how I was with Ben. After that fight with Ben, after I got myself together, I told myself sternly that I had to pull away a little, but then I would take one look at him and it was like being hit with a two-by-four. I was felled by desire. I wanted to feel the way I felt—the way we felt—that first time we made love. That’s an addiction, of course. But you can never get back that first high. You just keep looking for it, no matter how much damage you cause.
Seventeen
Tick woke up … where? He didn’t know where. There was a leg thrown across his, a heavy, smooth, brown one. He supposed he ought to take some pleasure in this. It seemed to be a woman’s leg. But he couldn’t remember anything about the person it was attached to, where he was, how he’d gotten there. The room smelled of cigarette smoke. He coughed and his head pounded, slowly, rhythmically. His tongue felt like sandpaper and his nose was running. The owner of the leg snored and rolled away. A name distantly floated into his head. Tonya? Was that it? He lay there. Looking at the ceiling. Yellow, pockmarked with cracks. He’d begun his evening in a bar. He did remember that.
He was supposed to stay out of bars now. They were bad for him. Full of what ailed him. Packed with nothing but his sorrow, Mom’s and Daddy’s broken hearts, my disdain, everything he wanted to avoid. But last night, without warning, that siren song struck up again Just like that.
The funny thing about his slip was, just like they said in all those twelve-step meetings, it wasn’t a special day or a special occasion or like he’d decided Damn it, I’m gonna drink again. He didn’t even know it was starting when it started. There was this girl, one of the many girls who were always around the parking lot at the end of the day hoping for
the slightest magic touch from one of the magic men on the team. Or even someone associated with the team. Someone like him. This girl was a little more desperate, a little more used up. The players, all of them so young and strong and full of themselves, could smell it on her. None of them took her, the casual way they’d take one girl and not the other; sometimes they’d take two. But they didn’t even see her. When Tick came out of the locker room into the late-afternoon sun and headed toward his not-giant, not-shiny car, she sashayed up to him with a big open smile, and said, “Well, what do you do for the team?”
“I’m a trainer.”
She took a step toward him. “Ooh, a trainer. Does that mean you get to go to practices and work with the players?” She took another step. “Did you used to work with LeBron?”
In fact, he never had. Only the most trusted senior trainers got anywhere near that priceless body. But she was looking at him with such steady admiration. It had been so long since a woman had looked at him like that. What would be the harm? “I used to. It was kind of fucked up the way he left with that ESPN shit. But he had to do what was right for him. I get it.”
She shifted her body in a way that let him know she was his for the evening. Just like that. “Yeah. You gotta do what’s right for you.” She twirled a strand of her long weave around her finger. She had long fucshia-colored fingernails. “I’d love to hear more about your job. My name’s Tonya.”
“Well, why don’t we go get a drink and I can tell you all about it.”
When he said that, he was thinking he’d just stick to Coke. No harm in that. No harm in sitting with a girl and having a Coke, right? It was like something out of one of those fifties shows like Leave It to Beaver. So they got in his car and they drove and they found a little place called Pedro’s.
It was a golden-colored late afternoon. The downtown streets had that internal quietude that so much of Cleveland seemed to have. Tonya chattered away—something about the Cavs—but he wasn’t really listening. For some reason, he thought of me, how much I hated Cleveland. He didn’t understand why I felt the way I did. He was used to his city. Its small grayness felt like home to him.
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