The Naked Truth

by Leslie Morgan

  Bella burst onto the deck, flushed and sweaty from volleyball practice.

  She popped open a coconut water and took a sip.

  “Jake, you know my mom’s birthday is next week, right? She’s turning fifty.”

  Bella looked at me and smiled sweetly as she drew out the word “fifty,” knowing I couldn’t get mad at her in front of Jake. I felt like grabbing the grill fork and stabbing it in her ass. Instead I blinked and tried to show no reaction, the only rational way to deal with a vexing teenager.

  “Yeah, I know,” Jake said, wiping a palm on his orange bathing suit. “Everyone knows that. She’s the best-looking almost-fifty-year-old in Philly.”

  Bella had miscalculated by assuming he didn’t know my age. I wanted to grab Jake’s face and give him a smooch in gratitude for burning her teenaged sass.

  “I’m taking her skydiving to celebrate,” he proffered casually, looking at the lights glowing in the backyard, holding his green Rolling Rock bottle.

  I spat my water onto the sweet potato vine sprouting out of my terra-cotta pots. Timmy and Bella stood up from their deck chairs like synchronized swimmers. Skydiving? Everyone knew I was terrified of heights. Including Jake. I gagged on the drops of water in my throat.

  The kids had all witnessed me freaking out atop the Empire State Building, on various chairlifts, and hiking down the south rim of the Grand Canyon, which is why Bella had been so delighted I’d agreed to the helicopter ride in Mexico. My usual reaction was to sob while both kids tried to reassure me (“The gondola cable is not broken, Mom!”). The challenge for the kids was to avoid laughing, which would have only made me mad. We all collapsed hysterically as soon as these fits passed; even I found my fears absurd afterward. But in the moment, I was sure I was about to die. The hilarity reached new heights after the kids got cameras on their phones. We have a collection of my face atop high spots in exotic locales. I look like a squirrel monkey being pursued by a cheetah, eyes as big as fists, curled-back lips.

  But Jesus H. Christ, it felt nice to have Jake remember my birthday. And to treat me as someone special in front of my kids. Under my cover-up, my heart grew a few sizes, and not from the fear of jumping out into the sky.

  “Awww,” I said. “You are so sweet.”

  I leaned into Jake and kissed him, hard. Damn the kids. He reached around and grabbed my butt in my bikini bottom.

  “Stop it!” Bella shouted, hands on the hips of her green volleyball shorts, irritated she’d failed to embarrass me. “Mom!”

  Bella then looked at Jake with blue eyes that matched her cobalt volleyball jersey, a little girl again.

  “She’ll never go,” she said in a half-whisper.

  Timmy had already sat back down. His hands were open on his knees, his Gatorade cradled in the lap of his flowered board shorts. He grinned at me, and then turned to Jake.

  “Are you taking us, too?” Timmy asked.

  “Sure,” Jake said, letting me go and taking a sip of beer. “We’re all going to celebrate how great your mom is. I’ve already booked the plane.”

  * * *

  Of course, I called KC the next morning, to tell her about being taken skydiving, more or less against my will, on my fiftieth birthday.

  “I love this man!” she said. “Rekindling a high school flame is like eating an entire Key lime pie by yourself. Only a real gentleman takes a girl skydiving for her birthday.” I could hear her office printer whirring in the background. She was always working. “And the kids, too! Woohoo. He’s bringing his kids, right?”

  “Noooo . . . He never had kids, KC. Never married. No ex-wives! Isn’t that great?”

  How had I not mentioned this before? There was a long silence. I thought maybe she was distracted by a spreadsheet or something. Her office was never this quiet.

  “Honey, I hate to tell you this. You cannot date anyone without kids.”

  Huh? KC was always so logical.

  “What are you talking about?” I countered in a swirl of crestfallen defensiveness. “It’s fantastic that Jake doesn’t have any baggage. He does have a dog. She’s sixteen. She’s like his kid. A complete pain in the ass, by the way.”

  “A dog? Not even close, honey, and you know it. You trust him because you dated at seventeen. But what you’ve got together is not true intimacy, even though it feels like it. There’s so much you can’t know about him. And Leslie, moms cannot date—seriously date, screwing is fine—men without children. A man without kids is like a Porsche with a dead battery. You can drool over ’em, but they’re useless. They don’t know how to put someone else first, or to accept that sometimes, kids come first. Most men without kids are not grown-ups.”

  “But KC, Marty had kids. He was an utter narcissist. Jake is great, KC. You’ll see. And I love that there are no . . . complications with his past. Everyone has baggage. His baggage is that he doesn’t have any baggage.”

  “Leslie Morgan,” she said sternly. She saved my whole name for times when she was truly serious. “No baggage equals no empathy. You need empathy. No relationship lasts without it. We’re not teenagers. We’re grown-ups. That’s who you need. I’d personally never, ever date a man without children.”

  I had never known this. I understood what KC meant, though. Having children had turned me inside out and upside down; it was like being reborn myself, in the best possible way. KC and I agreed to disagree, and we both pushed the red circle on our phones. Mulling it over, I went back to my computer.

  For a long time, I had no occasion to reconsider what KC said.

  * * *

  The day before my birthday, another card arrived from Jake. Demonstrating the self-restraint of a twenty-year-old frat boy, I opened it right away, standing barefoot on the black-and-white art deco floor of the Rittenhouse foyer. The envelope fluttered to the ground.

  The cover was a watercolor painting of two white horses running together on a blue-green background. Inside, the quote read, “You were made for amazing things.” I felt a pop of joy beneath my rib cage.

  Below the “Love, Jake,” he’d handwritten a P.S. almost as short, and exhilarating, as the quote.

  Prepare yourself for an all-star pussy-licking session on your birthday.

  Well, I could certainly use that, too.

  * * *

  “Mom’s fifty, Mom’s fifty, Mom’s fifty . . .” Bella and Timmy sang as the wind whipped through the car windows and blew their hair around their faces. Piled into the TT the morning of my fiftieth birthday, the kids and I drove through rolling hills covered in red and orange fall foliage. Black-and-white Holstein cows dotted the small family farms we whizzed by. The air smelled like the piles of leaves I used to jump in as a kid. When we pulled up to a golden field in the middle of Pennsylvania Amish country, Jake was already there, leaning up against the hood of his Jeep, arms folded, an adorable smirk on his face.

  However, we did not go skydiving. As the date approached, I had gotten more and more hesitant. Some in my family would use the technical term hysterical. Plus, as the kids were under eighteen, I needed Marty’s written permission. My lawyer urged me not to ask for it. So instead of a skydiving field, that morning we parked in the grassy lot outside Hershey Park. It was the last weekend before the amusement park closed for the season. I promised the kids I would usher in my fiftieth by riding any roller coaster they strapped me into.

  The first ride was called Fahrenheit, which I rode once and will never ride again. In case you’ve never been, Hershey Park’s Fahrenheit is a yellow and red steel torture device with six horrifying “inversions,” plus one of the steepest drops in the world (ninety-seven degrees). Then we rode Great Bear six times; that was only a teeny bit terrifying. Finally, we went on a ride called Skyrush, which Bella promised was “a mini Fahrenheit, Mom.” It went two hundred feet up into the sky at seventy-five miles per hour. Nothing “mini” about it. In a picture taken by the automatic camera, I’m bolted into Skyrush next to Jake, Bella, and Timmy. They have looks of crazed
glee on their faces while I appear to belong to a separate species, some alien, terror-stricken tribe. I recall a brief, spectacular view before the initial two-hundred-foot plunge, then teeth-gritting terror when our car dipped straight down, a violent feeling that I was insane, and the surety that I was about to be flung off Skyrush at seventy-five miles per hour to face my maker. In the moment, I tried to calm my jumpy stomach with the reassuring thought that at least I was with my kids and Jake at the end of my life. And thankfully, because my life was over, I’d never turn sixty.

  We had to take a break afterward, because I threw up in a blue recycling trash can next to sooperdooperLooper. Which struck me as an appropriate response to turning fifty. Jake and the kids all loved it, even my vomiting. It made a supercool story whenever people asked what I’d done for my birthday.

  Even if I’m never, ever doing that again.

  * * *

  Before we left Hershey, Jake invited me to New York for the weekend before Halloween. He’d lived there for ten years, but I had no idea what his home was like. In the days after I said yes, he inexplicably tried to cancel.

  “Ah, it turns out it’s really not the best weekend for you to come,” he announced one night over the phone. I said nothing in response.

  “Unless, of course, you really want to.”

  I stayed quiet, letting the silence speak for me.

  “You have such an adult house. Rittenhouse Square and all. My place is an apartment. It’s small and not so fancy.”

  Like I cared? He was a documentary filmmaker, not an investment banker. His father, despite wealth that included a Central Park West penthouse, never gave Jake handouts. I wanted to see Jake’s life. I wanted to belong there.

  “Jake, I’m coming. And I’m really, really excited.”

  “Okay, okay.” He sounded as overjoyed as Pooh’s friend Eeyore.

  I spent one Starbucks sessions with KC, and half a phone therapy appointment, dissecting the possible reasons behind Jake’s ambivalence. Were there other New York women cluttering his life? Why did he seem so eager to come into my world, and yet so reluctant to invite me into his?

  “He’s intimidated by you,” KC said. Really, intimidated by me?

  “He’s afraid of commitment,” my therapist, Sara, thought. “Any man that age who hasn’t married or had kids has a phobia about being vulnerable.”

  Neither explanation fit the Jake I’d known for thirty years.

  So, early on Saturday morning, Jake waited for me at Penn Station, his head and shoulders sticking above the crowd under the blinking Amtrak arrivals board like a scruffy rocker. I slipped my arms around his back, and buried my face in his chest. He smelled so damn good, even at nine in the morning. I pressed my body against his warmth.

  He leaned back and held me at arm’s length. He chuckled at my effusiveness, checking to see if a nearby grandmother in a fake leopard coat holding a six-year-old’s hand was watching our PDA. A few feet away a homeless man stood clutching a long-empty Dunkin’ Donuts Styrofoam coffee cup.

  “Whoa, girl,” Jake said, in his soft, easy way, pushing me back but holding on to both my hands. “You don’t want to frighten the horses.”

  Then he picked up my scuffed black suitcase and said we’d drop it at his lobby and go for a bike ride in Central Park. I agreed that sounded lovely. What I really wanted was to take him home, check out his apartment, and fuck his brains out.

  “It’s such a good day, so crazy warm, we want to get out early before the park gets mobbed,” he said, looking over his shoulder as we crossed Seventh Avenue. Was he still trying to back out of having me over?

  “Okay, Jakey. Your turf, your rules.”

  He led me down a narrow, curved Village side street, overhung with Callery pear trees that arched into a yellow tunnel above us. Little black wrought iron gates guarded each sidewalk box from dogs looking for a picturesque place to pee. It felt as if Robert De Niro or Christy Turlington were going to walk toward us at any second. Jake stopped in front of a tall, stately redbrick building with arched stone cornices above the doorway and each window.

  “Ta-da,” he said, waving his free arm toward the entrance. We walked inside a lobby, lined with cracked and faded elegant marble walls, formerly white, now gray, and a defunct stone fountain carved into a corner. But instead of walking to the elevator with its polished brass buttons, Jake took me through a swinging painted gray door and down the utility steps to the basement. In a poorly lit bike room off the hallway, he unlocked two street bikes.

  Once helmeted up, I followed him as he weaved like a bike messenger through the streets, dodging New York taxis and blowing through red lights. Central Park was cool and relatively empty, the hundred-year-old elms bright orange and red. After we cycled two loops up to Harlem and back, Central Park got crowded with families out for Saturday strolls, increasing the likelihood we would squash a runaway toddler. Around two o’clock, we abandoned the park and biked down Broadway, heading home amid yellow cabs. Back in the Village, we locked Jake’s bikes near his front door. Jake took my hand and announced another delay, a long, sunshiney walk along the High Line. Was I ever going to see the inside of his building?

  When I finally walked into his prewar apartment in Greenwich Village late that afternoon, as the sky outside was purpling with dusk, I understood immediately, viscerally, why he hadn’t wanted me to see it. We crossed the black mahogany threshold, and I could tell right away the apartment itself was spectacular: spacious, with soaring nine-foot ceilings, vintage crown dentil molding, a coveted extra half bathroom with black and white subway tile immediately off the front entry hall, all pouring into a large dining room. I caught a glimpse of a galley kitchen and a living room beyond the dining room. On the far side of the apartment, there was a massive arched doorway leading into a bedroom with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the pear trees.

  The problem? First, there were books piled everywhere. Of course you’d expect that, plus hundreds, or even thousands, of DVDs. As you’d imagine in the apartment of a filmmaker and screenwriter.

  But the volume of clutter went beyond the mad-genius-poor-housekeeper bachelor mess. I counted three bicycles in the dining room alone. On the table, there wasn’t room for a single place setting. Instead, there were stacks of old, wrinkled magazines, small mountains of what looked to be forgotten mail, empty envelopes with cellophane windows, loose unfiled bills, crumpled parking tickets, and old water-stained letters in precarious towers. On one corner of the dining room table, Jake proudly pointed out a sloppy two-foot pyramid of cards and posters he was planning to frame to give to his mom, his sister, his nieces, his favorite documentary narrators. The detritus repeated itself like mold on the living room coffee table, mushrooming along the floors, inching up the walls, covering the windowsills, even lining the hallway leading back to the front door. I counted six deflated basketballs and what looked like at least four dozen plastic water bottles with various sports logos littered throughout the place.

  My sweet boyfriend was about a year away from being the star of an episode of the A&E show Hoarders.

  There was no way Katie Couric’s Manolo Blahnik heels had ever touched down on these floors. I remembered, abruptly, Jake telling me once that a girlfriend had broken up with him the day after she first saw his apartment. Looking around, I knew why.

  “Wanna see my bedroom?” Jake said, tilting his head to a doorway framed by elaborate stringcourse square tooth molding.

  I nodded, unable to speak, but not from sexual anticipation.

  In the bedroom, there was a cherry sleigh bed loosely covered with a faded navy blue comforter thick with dog hair. There was a lumpy pile on the far side of the bed. That turned out to be his dog, Jennie, who was asleep under the covers, her head on the pillow. It was simultaneously sweet, and confusing, because wasn’t I supposed to sleep there? A pair of snowshoes were leaned up against Jennie’s side of the bed. Piles of Jake’s messily folded T-shirts, jeans, and flannel pajamas blocked the
bedroom windows, going up at least three feet high. There were two sleeping bags on top of the radiator.

  There wasn’t room for me in the bed, in the bedroom, or anywhere in the apartment.

  Jake stood in the doorway, framed by the intricate white trim, looking somewhat dazed, but also very sexy. Was he oblivious to the way his place looked to others? Embarrassed? Afraid I’d be Girlfriend No. 2 who broke up with him after seeing his hoarding proclivities? I turned sideways to carry in my suitcase. I stumbled over an empty Amazon box. Jennie raised her head from the pillow to look at me suspiciously, like one of the three bears catching Goldilocks tiptoeing by. She gave me a hairy eyeball, like, Huh? Who’s this in my bedroom?

  After I caught my balance, I looked around.

  “Jake, is there a good spot for me to put my stuff?” I asked, trying to clue him in.

  “Yeah, sure, right here,” he said, inching over to the foot of his bed, his tone suggesting a luggage rack or open space I’d missed. Instead, he perched my bag precariously on top of a stack of unfolded orange and red beach towels. He patted the suitcase to secure it onto the towels.

  I picked my way carefully to the main bathroom to shower. There were so many bottles of ibuprofen and shaving cream and Bengay and Bumble hair gel, boxes of Band-Aids and Epsom salts and even more water-wrinkled magazines, there wasn’t room for my toothbrush. I hung my purple toiletry bag on the back of the door and didn’t unpack anything. I used a towel that I thought—hoped—was fairly clean. He hadn’t put one out for me. I felt like I was visiting a spoiled frat boy, not a man in his late forties.

  We had less than an hour in his apartment before our dinner reservation, which made it easier for me to avoid commenting on his piles of stuff. Or the food-encrusted dishes stacked in the sink. Or Jennie’s six food bowls on the floor. He had not cleaned up. He had not made any room for me. Although he, obviously, knew I was coming.