by Melissa Bank
“Well,” I said, and then, accidentally: “Thank you for opening your home to me.”
2.
JACK CALLED NAOMI “Gnomie” and “The Gnomester,” and he laughed at my cockroach joke. When I repeated Robert’s “We opened our home” remark, Jack shook his head and said, “Robby, Robby, Robby.”
It was my first night in Jack’s apartment, and we had just finished a great dinner that his girlfriend, Cynthia, had cooked. She’d put tulips on the table, and the kitchen was dark except for candles. It was a nice atmosphere, and I was glad to be there, but I also felt bad about the way the conversation was going.
Jack said, “There’s a word for what our little brother has become.”
I said, “I don’t know about that.”
He said, “Oh, I think you do.”
He was talking to me, but he was also teasing Cynthia, who was from Alabama and probably didn’t cotton to words like pussy-whipped.
“Jack,” I said, “I think he’s going to marry her,” and I realized it was true. Now that I thought about it, they acted like they were already married.
I wondered how Jack would feel about his little brother getting married before him. Maybe Cynthia wondered, too; she was looking at him.
He was quiet, and I could tell he was picturing the talk he might have with Robert; he even moved his lips a little. Whatever he imagined, I was pretty sure Robert wouldn’t listen. Jack knew how to make women fall in love with him, but that didn’t exactly qualify him as a guidance counselor.
When Jack came out of his reverie, he asked how my job hunt was going and whether I’d met any of the editors whose numbers he’d given me. He didn’t mention their names in front of Cynthia, and it occurred to me that they were all women he’d gone out with.
I said that I was waiting until I could type forty-five words per minute.
Cynthia gave me a big, encouraging smile: You’ll get there, Sugar Bear.
She was tall with very long arms and a big, red-lipsticked mouth. She was a clothing designer and had one of those personalities that drapes itself all over you at first. She’d hugged me when we’d met, for example, and talk-talk-talked all through dinner, not that I minded. She had a pretty voice and in it you could hear the song of the South at the end of a sentence.
We stayed up a long time talking, and I did the dishes. Afterward, when I went out to the living room, Cynthia was tucking sheets and a blanket into the futon sofa I’d sleep on.
Jack opened his bedroom door just enough for his head, so I knew he was in his underwear or nothing; he said, “Good night, Tinkerbell.”
Cynthia gave me a little squeeze. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said, which made me love her.
. . . . .
I’d never heard anyone having sex before, and it took a few minutes for me to realize that’s what it was. Faintly, I heard Cynthia whimpering. Jack sounded the way he had lifting weights in our basement, sort of a growl that got louder and in the past had ended with the crash of barbells. Then they were both laughing, and I kind of laughed, too.
Josh and I were silent when we had sex, and I thought the next time I would make some noise.
I didn’t, though. The next night at dinner, Josh told me that he needed to spend more time writing poetry.
We were at Szechwan West—Szech West, we called it—around the corner from his apartment; we’d just ordered.
Before meeting me, he explained, he’d spent every night writing in the library; now, he said, he was just going to his day job and seeing me at night. He said, “My poetry is really suffering.”
I smiled when I said, “I don’t want your poetry to suffer.”
I tried to keep the conversation on poetry, instead of asking, say, whether he’d fallen out of love with me. But “What are your poems like?” dead-ended into him saying that he’d show them to me; “Who are your favorite poets?” resulted in a list.
When he asked who mine were, I sighed, as though musing among many, and tried to think of one. Finally, I recited my favorite poem:
Shake and shake
the ketchup bottle
none’ll come and
then a lot’ll.
Our dishes arrived, and he warned me about the hot peppers in mine. He said, “I ate one of those once, and it made me want to blow my head off.”
At his apartment, in his bedroom, it was harder to pretend that everything was okay. I told him I was going to smoke a cigarette, which meant going outside the apartment. One of his roommates smoked, but just in her bedroom; Josh complained about the fumes that came out when she opened her door.
I felt better as soon as I was out in the stairwell. I sat on the dusty black steps and lit a cigarette. I sat there and tried to get my personality back.
Back inside, I opened the door to Josh’s bedroom. He’d already turned out the light. I inched forward in the dark. My knee found the bed, and I got in. I lay very still. Then Josh put his arms around me, and it was safe to love him again.
. . . . .
Every time I called home, my mother told me she’d received another overdue notice for 20th-Century Typewriting.
Its main author was D. D. Lessenberry, and those Ds might have stood for Deadly, Dull, Dread, or Doom. All day, D. D. bored me with exercises and drills called “Know Your Typewriter” and “Reach Stroke Review,” for which I typed such paragraphs as
Do you think you can learn to type well? It is up to you, you know. You build the right kind of skill through the way you work and the way you think; so think right and type right and you will have this prize of fine skill.
Around 6:30, Cynthia came through the door, with groceries for dinner and clothes in dry cleaner’s plastic; she had her own apartment and supposedly wasn’t living with Jack. She carried her groceries in a string bag that bulged with big and little brown bags. Instead of shopping at the supermarket around the corner on Bleecker Street, she went to the fish store or the butcher, to the cheese shop and bakery and the farmers’ market. She said this was how people shopped in Paris, where she’d lived after art school.
She’d ask how my day was, and I’d say, “Okay,” or, “All right.” I wanted to say more, but a day of typing did not produce fascinating anecdotes. What could I say? Well, Cynthia, I’m finally settling into the home keys.
When Jack came through the door, I turned off the typewriter and carried it from the kitchen into the living room; I stowed it under the coffee table.
He’d say, “What’s the score?” meaning how many words per minute, and I’d tell him the miserable number. Sometimes he called me Katie, which I didn’t get; Katie, one of my best friends from college, had been a diligent student, but did he know that? When I finally asked him, he explained that Katie was short for Katharine Gibbs, the secretarial school.
Cynthia called Jack “Big Old Bear,” which she pronounced bar and said in the voice of a little girl with a cold. It was apt: Jack was big and meaty and covered with fur everywhere but his head. She said it with great affection, and usually he’d take her in his big beary arms and maybe kiss her.
The living room was small, just the futon sofa and a few chairs that you were supposed to look at rather than sit in. But the kitchen was big and airy and looked out on leafy trees turning yellow and red, and that’s where we all hung out.
While Cynthia cooked, Jack read the newspaper, and I’d read a section, too, even though I was dying to talk and be talked to. I’d make myself be quiet, though, and that felt nice after a while.
Sitting down for dinner, I could feel that we were a small, happy family.
After I’d done the dishes, I’d meet a friend for a drink or go up to Josh’s. If I didn’t have plans, I’d take a walk around the neighborhood to give Cynthia and Jack privacy. I’d walk up Christopher Street, which was still the center of gay life then. When I saw men kiss I didn’t believe it at first.
. . . . .
Finally, I reached twenty-five words per minute, where I peaked and plate
aued.
I told Jack this when he came through the door. “I’ll be an old lady and typing twenty-five,” I said, and I made my voice creaky and said, “Still twenty-five.”
He laughed, but the next night when he came home, and I said my creaky, “Still twenty-five,” he said, “Fabulous,” a word I’d never heard him use, and he said it like he was imitating someone.
As usual, I carried my typewriter into the living room and returned to the kitchen.
He was reading the paper. Cynthia bent down and kissed his head. I saw him flinch.
. . . . .
Jack was talented at every art form. On the living-room wall, he’d painted a mural of the street outside—the trees and sidewalk, a boy on a skateboard, and a woman carrying a string bag full of groceries; it took me a week before I realized she was Cynthia. In his bedroom were dozens of framed black-and-white photographs he’d taken of his bed, rumpled and made.
Jack had gone to graduate school for architecture at Yale and to Harvard for art history, a year apiece; he’d written for a famous magazine and rocked in a band. Now he wanted to direct movies—or, as he called them, pictures.
He was working for a production company, but I kept realizing that I didn’t know what he did, and every time he explained it to me, I knew even less. All I’d remember were the names of famous actors he said were “attached” to movies his company would produce.
“Tell me what you do again,” I said one night when he’d folded up the newspaper and Cynthia was putting a big bowl of pasta on the table. I said it because the kitchen felt quiet, and not in the nice way it had in the past; it was loud with quiet.
He said, “I’m a P.A.,” and I could tell from his tone that was all he wanted to say.
I knew he was in a bad mood, but I was hoping to talk him out of it. I said, “Riddle me this, Batman: What does P.A. stand for?”
“Production assistant.”
With all the surprise I felt, I said, “You’re an assistant?”
He said, “Yup.”
. . . . .
I always looked forward to the moment when Jack came home, and not just because it signaled the end of my typing day. Hearing him on the stairs, I’d think, Let the fun begin! But when he actually did walk in, the apartment itself seemed to tense up and go gloomy.
Now when Cynthia said, “Big Old Bear,” she seemed to be trying to remind him of how he felt about her; she was asking him to be the bar of yesteryear.
I noticed that he didn’t always answer her questions. He’d be reading the paper, and she’d say something ordinary, like, “What’s the news of the day?” and silence would follow.
I knew she didn’t care about the actual answer to her actual question; it was her way of saying, Hello, or even, I love you. When he didn’t respond, she’d go back to washing her lettuce or sautéing onions, like she hadn’t asked anything in the first place.
I told Josh about it, and his answer, a long blink followed by a blank expression, made me wonder if one day soon he’d stop answering my questions. So I said, “Don’t you think that’s rude?”
He sort of shrugged.
I was defending myself when I said, “It just seems wrong.”
He said, “It’s between them, though.”
. . . . .
In a way, I hadn’t really seen Jack up close before. He’d lived in the attic bedroom, which was like a separate house on top of ours. Then he went away to college, and he didn’t always come home for vacations. He’d visit a girlfriend somewhere or go on a trip. Sometimes he’d promise to come home and then change his mind.
Once, when I’d been really disappointed, my father had tried to explain that I couldn’t count on Jack the way I wanted to; I had to learn to appreciate him for what he could do and not be too crestfallen about what he couldn’t.
I knew what my father meant. One year Jack drove a thousand miles to have dinner with our mother on her birthday; the next he didn’t even call.
He loved doing huge favors and surprising people with his generosity. He liked going above and beyond the call of duty, but he didn’t like duty itself.
It occurred to me that he might think I expected him to ask my typing score; anyway, he stopped asking.
This was a relief, since my score wasn’t improving. How could I type all day, every day and not get better? The answer: I wasn’t typing all day, every day. I’d started taking long breaks in the afternoon. I’d pack a sandwich and go to Washington Square Park, intending just to stay an hour. I’d linger awhile by the dog run, especially if there was a puppy. I’d sit by the dry fountain, where a comedian tried out jokes on the NYU students. I pretended to be one of them. Sometimes a mime performed. A voice in my head would nag me to get back to my typing, but another one would say, Just a little longer.
I might walk over to St. Marks Place and try on sunglasses that were displayed on tables. Or I’d get lost, looking at clothes in a boutique. I stayed out later and later until my goal was to get back to the apartment before Cynthia got home.
. . . . .
Josh and I went out to inexpensive restaurants—to La Rosita on Broadway for Cuban breakfasts, to V&T up by Columbia for pizza, to any place on East Sixth Street for Indian food, or to the Corner Bistro on West Fourth for burgers. Every once in a while, though, he’d ask me to meet him at a nicer restaurant, and I came to realize that we went when he’d finished a poem. He’d read it to me during dessert, and I’d applaud and kiss him.
It was after one of those dinners that I finally worked up the courage to whimper in bed.
It felt like acting at first, but then it wasn’t. It was great. At the end, I let out a big yell, which made me laugh afterward and say as a joke, “I came.”
Josh was quiet. “Honey,” he said, “I have roommates.”
. . . . .
One night before dinner, when Jack didn’t answer Cynthia I glared at him, and he said, “What?”
I said, “Cynthia asked you a question.”
He looked at me for a long moment, like he was trying to remember liking me. Then he turned around to Cynthia. With more affection than I’d heard in weeks, he said, “What was that, sugar pie?”
. . . . .
She didn’t come over the next night.
When Jack walked in and said, “What’s the score?” I knew he was trying to make me feel that everything was all right, so I knew it wasn’t.
“I didn’t take a test today,” I said. For the first time he was the one who carried my typewriter to the living room and stowed it under the coffee table.
“Chinese?” he said, and handed me a menu.
We agreed on a few dishes. He called and ordered. Then he sat down with his newspaper in the kitchen.
I went to the living room and opened the book on Edward Hopper.
He called out: “You’re not going to keep my company?”
“I’ll be there in a second,” I said, but I didn’t join him until our dinner was delivered. We unpacked the cartons and sat down at the table.
“Sophie,” he said, once we were eating.
I kept my eyes on his hands as though absorbed in learning how to hold my chopsticks by watching him hold his. I said, “Uh-huh?”
He spoke slowly. “What happens between Cynthia and me is between Cynthia and me.”
I knew he was right, and I felt embarrassed—and embarrassed to be embarrassed in front of him.
After a moment, I said, “Maybe I should stay somewhere else for a while.”
He didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “Where could you stay?”
I had a terrible feeling—I don’t have anywhere to stay.
I’d gone to Robert’s for dinner a couple of times, but I’d noticed that he only invited me when Naomi wasn’t going to be there. I thought of my friends from college and pictured their apartments. No one had enough room for me or my clothes, and especially not for my huge typewriter.
I thought of Josh. Usually just the idea of him cheered me
up. Right then, though, I experienced the sensation of being in love for the uncertainty that being in love is.
The only other possible host was Grandma Mamie. I still hadn’t visited her. It was hard even to make myself call her every few weeks.
I said, “I could stay at Grandma Mamie’s,” hoping against hope that Jack would say, Don’t be ridiculous.
. . . . .
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said during our farewell dinner, when I said the dress Cynthia gave me was too big a present for me to accept. It was a sample from her showroom, a dress made of blue-black wool jersey, which she said I could wear on job interviews.
I went to the bathroom to try it on. In the mirror, I saw that the dress was a little longer on one side. I didn’t want to embarrass Cynthia, so I hunched my right shoulder and lowered my left to make the dress hang evenly.
Cynthia understood; she said, “It’s cut on the bias,” which meant that its unevenness was deliberate.
“It’s great,” Jack said.
. . . . .
Jack surprised me by offering to drive me up to my grandmother’s. This was just the kind of favor Jack liked doing most. He was going to make a difficult thing fun. It was cold, but he put the top down on his convertible and turned the heat on. We drove along the river. The sky was a cold blue.
Grandma Mamie lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, one exit past the first toll on the Henry Hudson Parkway. When we got to her apartment house, Jack tipped the doorman so we could park in the circular drive, between NOPARKINGANYTIME signs.
Jack carried my big typewriter in the elevator. He hid while I rang my grandmother’s doorbell.
When she opened the door, he showed her his handsome face.
She was thrilled to see it.
He was flirty with her, calling her Mamie instead of Grandma and telling her how fantastic she looked. He sat down and ate a pastry she’d made, a yellow briquette he proclaimed “delicious.”