My Old Man

by Amy Sohn

  We dated from Simchas Torah to Purim, which means about five months. At the beginning it was amazing—he’d go down on me for hours in his Park Slope apartment and when he was finished he’d practice trope and I’d do my reading. But sometimes when we were rolling around his hair would catch under my hand and he’d cry out “Ow!” in this high-pitched voice, and once when I was going at it especially vigorously on top, he said I was crushing him, which was totally embarrassing. (We weighed about the same—one forty-five, except he was six inches taller.)

  Sometimes he’d wake me up in the middle of the night sobbing, saying he was afraid I was going to leave him, and I’d have to stroke his hair until he fell back asleep. And other times when we were out to dinner he’d just stare at me, his mouth hanging open, not saying anything, a look of suffocating love oozing from his eyes. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to be human; I just didn’t want him to be so overt about his need.

  Yet despite all my doubts I felt I should give him a chance because he was Jewish and arty, he cared about me, and I knew he wanted to have children. It didn’t hurt that my parents loved him and he was Sephardic, not Ashkenazic, which meant our kids wouldn’t even get Tay-Sachs.

  So I stayed. And suddenly the other students got nicer to me. They’d say, “You two look so cute together,” or, “What an adorable couple.” I tried not to put too much stock in them but when the whole world tells you you’ve won the lottery, your instinct is to agree. My parents kept making noises that we should marry, and I told myself they were right. He had all the trappings of correctness—cantorial, intelligent, witty, sensitive—but emotionally I couldn’t get it up. He was the Emperor’s New Boyfriend.

  One uneventful night in March we went to Bend It Like Beckham at the Sunshine theater on Houston, and on our way out to the street something snapped. It might have been the erection problems he was having as a result of his Zoloft, or his constant tirades against the seemingly never-ending reign of the Yankees. Or it might simply have been that he loved the movie and I found it totally insipid and contrived, but when we got outside I was surprised to hear myself say, “I don’t think we should go out anymore.”

  He cocked his head and said, “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t think I should be so serious with someone so early on in school,” I said.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “We have so much fun together.” I looked at him silently and he said, “What? I’m not fun?”

  “You are, you are,” I said desperately. “I just think you need to be with someone who can appreciate you.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “Not the way I should.”

  “Well, then what’s wrong with you?” he shouted angrily.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, as I stepped out into the street to hail a cab.

  For the rest of school I ate lunch in a diner a couple blocks from campus so I wouldn’t have to run into him, and when I passed him in the halls I averted my eyes. He hadn’t called me once since then, even after I dropped out. Sometimes I felt guilty about doing it so abruptly but more than anything I had this lingering anger at myself for trying to believe someone wrong was right. When you’re in your twenties, five months is a long time to waste.

  “Why would you want to date a David,” I asked Liz, “when he’s not even my BF today?”

  “He was the right type! Don’t be ashamed of it. Embrace it. You have an uncanny ability to fall for men your parents would appreciate.”

  A part of me wanted to tell her about Powell, but something about the admiring look in her eye told me this was not the time to confide. I was Liz’s pedestal girl, the one she looked to as an example of how she was supposed to be. Every girl needs a pedestal girl on which to pin her vision of her ideal self. Nine times out of ten the pedestal girl isn’t really moral at all—she’s just more discreet—but the worshiper clings to the fake vision or else she has no reason to try to be good.

  What Liz didn’t know was that she was my pedestal girl too. She was the one I looked to so I could learn how to be slutty and base. She was the one who’d been in the back of my mind when I said things to Powell like “I hope this doesn’t mean you’ll stop mounting things in the future.” She was my motivator, my evil twin. I didn’t want her to meet a nice Jewish guy; we’d never have anything to talk about.

  “I haven’t been able to introduce my parents to one of my own boyfriends,” she announced, “since freshman year at Hampshire when I was dating Lenny Lichtenstein, who later turned out to be a flaming Mary. Now he runs Gayjews.com. You know what their motto is? ‘When you need a little tuchis.’ ”

  “So date some MOTs.” That was what we called Members of the Tribe.

  “But the Jews never notice me! The Yids rebuke me continually, while the working class and minorities flock to me! I’m like the Statue of Liberty!” Before Gordon she had dated a Bay Ridge refrigerator repairman she’d met at a bar on Smith Street called Angry Wade’s.

  “Why don’t you go on JDate?”

  Her eyes popped out in horror. “Have you seen the men’s photos on those sites? They’re myopic and zitty. They look like Robert Wuhl!”

  “You’re so self-hating.”

  “There’s no ‘self’ in this hatred! The women are knockouts and the men are heinous and over forty with kids. I don’t want to be a stepmother to a bunch of Ramaz brats. I have to find a hot mensch with a lot of money who is grateful to have me. I’m thirty-two years old! I just want a nice guy who is kind, treats me well, and lets me lick his asshole from time to time. Is that so much to ask?”

  “No it’s not, baby!” said Virgilio, standing up and shaking his butt at her. “I’ll give you what you want right now!” The other three guys erupted in a chorus of laughter.

  “Oh, for goodness sake,” she muttered.

  “Whassa matta, Leez? You no hear me? I got what you want right here!” He did a salsa dance up and down the sidewalk as his friends pointed and howled.

  “Yours is the only asshole in New York City I wouldn’t lick, Virgilio!”

  “Why’s that, baby?”

  “Ask your girlfriend,” she said, pointing to Mariano. The laughter stopped.

  “You calleen me a woman?” said Mariano, getting up too.

  “Uh-oh,” she said. “We’d better get out of here.” I put the key in the lock and we raced inside, giggling.

  THAT night as I fell asleep I replayed my conversation with Powell over and over again. I knew it was bad to be into someone semi-famous and not Jewish but he had cast a spell over me and I didn’t want anything to break it. I wanted to believe that his interest in me was more than just passing, that he’d seen something special, something worth knowing better. But it was stupid to think I had a chance. Joey had said it; he was a devil with women. He probably just got off on flirting with fresh meat and I’d played right into his hand. Right at this very second he was probably fucking Kim doggy-style on an expensive bed with a mirror on the ceiling. Just because she was his agent didn’t mean she wasn’t also his girl.

  And yet despite all my worries, as I fell asleep I imagined him covering my mouth with his hand. I saw myself screaming with wide excited eyes as he suppressed my cries and instead of making me frightened I nestled in this vision like it was a beautiful dream of something about to begin.

  When I woke up the next morning Joey called. “You missed a good night,” he said. “We stayed a long time after you left. Nathan Lane was doing these disco moves with Mira Sorvino. Powell got drunk and told a lot of stories about when he was a Hollywood golden boy, after Bassett Hound won the Spirit Award. Did you know he used to date Demi Moore?”

  “Did you have to tell me that?”

  “I’m just saying you’re in good company.”

  “He said he wants to date me?”

  “No, but he said, ‘That girl is very ambitious.’ ”

  “I’m a bartender!”

  “It doesn’t matter. You made an i
mpression. I’m telling you, he reads people.”

  “Does he have e-mail?” I said.

  “Hold on a second, I think it’s on the contact sheet.” He came back and said, “Anima@aol.com.”

  “What does ‘anima’ mean?”

  “Beats me.”

  After we hung up I went over to the dictionary. “Anima—in the doctrine of Carl Jung, the feminine presence in a man. See also animus.” Animus turned out to be “the masculine presence in a woman.” Maybe this explained the limp wrist.

  I went to my computer and wrote an e-mail in one quick burst: “Dear Mr. Powell, I am Joey’s friend Rachel who met you last night at the party. I haven’t lived very long but it was one of the high points of my short life. You are exactly who I expected, which is a good thing. Those flat vowels and the eyes that take in everything, even when a person doesn’t think they are at all. I would like to talk to you. I’m trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do in life and right now I don’t have a whole lot of ideas. You seem to know. You seem to know your own myth. Anyway I would like to drink a cup of coffee with you, at D’Amico or somewhere else.” I put my phone number and signed it, “Love, Rachel. P.S. If I asked you really nicely, would you give me an anima?”

  As soon as I sent it I clicked Check Mail, as though he could have read the entire e-mail, responded, and sent it back to me in a nanosecond. E-mail makes people lose all sense of logic and rationality. I got up, made a cup of tea, logged on, and checked again. I showered and checked, naked. I dressed, walked to the door, went back to the desk, and checked one final time for posterity. Nada. I knew my mistake. Never end a mash note with a scatological joke.

  I ALWAYS ate breakfast at a little deli next to Cobble Hill Park, on Clinton Street and Verandah Place, and ordered an everything bagel and a large coffee with milk. But today when I told the counter boy the coffee part I stopped myself and said, “Make that a cappuccino.”

  “A cappuccino?” he said.

  “Much better for the stomach.”

  I brought the food outside and sat in my favorite wicker chair outside the door. Just as I was opening the paper a gaggle of mothers came down the street, wheeling strollers. The mommy brigade was one of the unfortunate consequences of drinking morning coffee by a playground. Two of the women had single strollers and one had a monstrous double. They had shoulder-length blunt cuts and wore bright-colored Nikes, sunglasses on their heads, exercise pants, and T-shirts that were ostentatiously tight, like they were desperate to prove to the world that they hadn’t totally domesticated out, they still had tits, however drained.

  The one with the double was a blonde and had two sickeningly angelic two-year-old twins. Her friends were a hippieish brunette with a dark-skinned black toddler boy, and an Asian woman with a fat biracial baby boy and a large greyhound.

  “Jacob can’t fall asleep unless he has my breast in his mouth,” said the Asian woman. “It’s so embarrassing, but what am I going to do? Yank it out so he can keep us up the whole night?”

  “Nicky was the same way,” said the blonde, pointing to one of the towheads. “Whenever he woke up I’d just stick the tit in. Mark always used to say, ‘He’s going to need therapy when he grows up!’ ” They laughed in a horrendous, nasal, upper-class chorus and parked their strollers right next to where I was sitting. “What do you guys want in your coffees?” the blonde asked. The other two gave their orders and tried to give her money but she waved them off and went inside.

  I peered over at her kids. The boy was sleeping and the girl was staring into space and picking her nose. Suddenly she seemed to realize her mother was not in the two-foot proximity, pulled her finger out of her nostril, and started to bawl, “Mommy!”

  “Mommy will be right back,” said Adoptive Mom.

  The kid only shrieked louder and a second later her brother woke up and started bawling too. Adoptive Mom squatted down and tried to distract them with a rattle attached to the stroller. As she knelt I saw a thong sticking all the way up out of her jogging pants, Monica-style. It was bright red mesh and it rose so high it boggled the mind. I tried not to look but I was transfixed. It was like a Bee Gees song: “How Deep Is Your Crack?” She had to be in pain. Was this a deliberate flash, an attempt to compensate for her malfunctioning womb? She couldn’t conceive but she wanted the world to know she was a babe?

  She seemed to sense me staring because she turned around abruptly. I tried to look away but it was too late. She blushed, yanked her shirt down, and went back to consoling the child.

  Just as I was recovering from the Mom with Thong incident the blonde came out with three coffees and the babies stopped crying as if on cue. “Mommy’s right here,” she said. She doled out the coffees to her friends like they were juice boxes. They each took one sip and then deposited the cups into these black holders attached to the side of the strollers.

  These women were Ubermoms, on a tear to make mothering seem like some glorious grand achievement, when all you had to do to become one was lie on your back. I felt like motherhood was this awful disease the baby passed on to you on its way down that eerie canal. How else to explain the way the moms’ decibel levels soared as soon as the kid popped out? How come as soon as they had a baby they began talking about themselves in the third person—“Mommy has to get her hair cut,” “Mommy’s coming, sweetie,” “Mommy’s going to have a sesame bagel. What kind do you want?”

  I wished there was a vaccine I could take now to insure I’d never become the way they were. I didn’t know what to do with my life but I didn’t want to wind up like them. But it seemed so inevitable. Maybe none of these women had been rabbis, but before they had kids they ran corporations or traded stocks. Now they all seemed so content to nurse and make small talk about diaper varieties, like that was what gave them true joy.

  If I was still living in Cobble Hill at thirty, with a husband and a baby, I’d be an even more disgusting breed than they were—not just an Ubermom but a holdover Ubermom. I saw a few of those on Court Street from time to time—girls I’d gone to nursery school with, or Hebrew school, who were the same age as me and were now living in brownstones of their own with non-native-Brooklynite husbands, wheeling a baby down the same streets they’d been wheeled down, pushing a kid on the same swings we used to swing on. Sometimes they’d recognize me and say hi and as we made chitchat I’d stare at the kid, totally befuddled, trying to figure out how it could have been squeezed out of a vagina the same age as mine.

  Their coffees upright in the holders, the children momentarily silent, the greyhound under control, the Ubermoms gripped the handles of the strollers in unison, tilted them up like there was some really complex art to it, and headed down Verandah Place. “This is where Walt Whitman used to live,” I heard the blonde say. She was wrong—it was Thomas Wolfe—but I knew better than to interact. I tried to go back to the paper but I couldn’t focus. I had to get out of this neighborhood.

  AT three o’clock that afternoon, as I was getting ready for work, the phone rang. I checked the caller ID. Blocked. I let the machine pick up. “Hello, Rachel,” said a distinct, flat voice into my answering machine. “This is Hank Powell. What is my myth?”

  I skipped to the phone and picked it up. “Don’t you know?” I said.

  “I do, but I’d like to know your answer.”

  “Well,” I said, desperately trying to get my brain to focus, “it seems like the story you tell over and over again in your movies is about men figuring out how to be men, how to maintain their independence but at the same time come to terms with the responsibilities of domesticity.”

  “That’s wrong!”

  “But what about that line in Lydia’s Chest Wound when Scooter tells Lydia, ‘Marriage is like an unjust war. A man hates every minute of it but doesn’t go MIA because his ingrained sense of responsibility outweighs the crippling guilt he feels at having sold his soul to the devil’?”

  “Yeah, but then he leaves her!”

  “I know, but I alwa
ys felt he wanted to go back.”

  “Are you crazy? He’d never go back. He wanted her but he couldn’t stand to be a part of the greatest evil of the known world: the bourgeois ideal.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why don’t I tell you over dinner?” I couldn’t believe it. He’d up-sold from a coffee to a meal. “Are you free at eight o’clock tomorrow night?”

  “Yes,” I said, wishing I could rewind and pretend I had a life. “But—”

  “But what?”

  “A girl’s not supposed to make plans with a man so quickly. She’s supposed to make him wait. There’s an entire book about it. It’s called—”

  “The Rules. I know all about that book.” It was incongruous to think of Powell as having read The Rules. It seemed so after his time. Then again he was single. No single man, even one in his fifties, could escape the terrifying power of The Rules.

  “Well, if you’ve read it then you know one of the Rules is that you’re not supposed to take a date for Saturday after Wednesday.”

  “Fuck all a that. I once dated a girl who was doing that book. I could predict each move she made. Everything was tactical. She made me wait for dates, she withheld sex, she cut conversations short. Finally I figured out the game she was playing and I bought the book. Once I read it I realized I could pinpoint the exact moment I was going to get her into bed. Instead of keeping it going I immediately lost interest. Her scent no longer intrigued me. I was a dog whose erection had gone down. When it comes to me you gotta throw all that shit out the window.”