“I had a great time, too,” he said.
We eyed each other, and I hoped he would try to arrange another date. When he didn’t, I hoped I hadn’t squelched the impulse with anything I had or hadn’t said. Bill’s interest in me seemed incontrovertible, but I had such a bad track record; what if, even though he’d been the initiator, I reciprocated too enthusiastically and drove him away? My voice was misleadingly steady as I said, “See you soon?”
“Absolutely.” In his voice, there was real warmth. “Enjoy the dinner.”
Sitting at the Greenbergers’ table, I wondered, was he about to become my boyfriend? It seemed impossible. But, already, his not becoming my boyfriend seemed impossible, too. The way it had felt when he’d kissed my neck, and the way it had felt when we kissed on the lips—
“Hillary,” Elman said, and when I glanced at him, he pointed to my other side and said, “The butter?”
I could tell by his puzzled expression that it was not the first time he’d made the request.
* * *
—
In my satchel, I always carried both a fold-up map of New Haven and a bus schedule, and I’d used them to determine that the apartment in the eviction case was about two miles north of the law school. The bus I boarded on Monday morning went straight up Dixwell Avenue, and although the area around campus wasn’t particularly quaint—it featured grad student apartments and cheap restaurants—the streets became dingier as I rode north: laundromats and beauty salons where it didn’t look like business was booming, multistory brick buildings with boarded-up windows, empty lots behind torn chain-link fences. The ages and skin colors of the people I observed through the bus window also changed, the young whites like me being replaced with Mexicans or blacks.
The Suarez family lived a few blocks off Dixwell, in a clapboard triple-decker. The front door of the building opened onto a small vestibule in which three vertical mailboxes hung from the wall; a filthy mustard-colored carpet led up two steps to the first-floor unit, and I kept climbing the staircase to the second floor. I paused before knocking on the door, listening, and heard nothing. I rapped my knuckles against the wood.
The man who opened the door was just a couple inches taller than I was, with olive skin, dark hair, and a neat mustache. He wore royal-blue cotton coveralls with an oval Neely & Cooke badge—Neely & Cooke was a commercial aircraft engine manufacturer located nearby—and he was smoking a cigarette.
“I’m Hillary Rodham from the New Haven Legal Services office, and I’m here for the tour of your apartment,” I said. “To confirm, you’re Robert Suarez?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “That’s fine.”
On the phone the previous week, he had uttered the phrase Yes, ma’am no fewer than twenty times, and I had wondered if he’d be surprised when he realized how young I was.
Inside the apartment, the curtains were drawn in all the rooms, and no lights were on; in the living room, an older woman, a toddler, and a baby were watching a soap opera on a black-and-white television. Given that I was there in part due to a noise complaint, I noted that the volume of the TV was average. Robert Suarez didn’t introduce me to the woman, who also was smoking, and, following his lead, I didn’t introduce myself; I assumed she was his mother-in-law. Over the phone, he’d told me the names, ages, and estimated sleeping schedules of everyone who lived in the apartment, which included his wife, who was on the cleaning staff at a high school, and their oldest child, a seven-year-old girl.
The apartment had two bedrooms, and the tour did not take long. I spent several minutes in the sole bathroom, leaving the door ajar as I opened the cabinet below the sink and found a mess of toiletries. I debated whether I ought to explain to Robert Suarez that I was looking for plumbing problems or whether it was self-evident and to explain would be condescending; in my clinic work, I routinely felt unsure if I was being overbearingly friendly or standoffish. When I ran the sink, the pipes appeared to be in working order. The toilet also flushed normally. Leaving the bathroom, I returned to the kitchen and looked beneath the sink there, too. I walked again through the various rooms, opening and closing windows—none stuck—and turning on lights to examine the walls. There was a two-foot-long crack in a bedroom wall, but the paint wasn’t peeling.
I asked to see the basement, and Robert Suarez led me out of the apartment and down two flights of stairs. When I inquired about rodent or insect problems, he said sometimes there were mice in the winter, which wasn’t enough for a warranty of habitability violation.
In the basement, a bare lightbulb illuminated a bulky boiler and heater, stacked wood planks, and a rusty push lawnmower. This was when I saw it, just below the ceiling’s exposed beams: Where a major pipe connected to the stucco wall, a lopsided circle of gray mold billowed around the pipe’s foundation. “See the mold?” I said to Robert Suarez. “That’s definitely a violation.” He looked alarmed and I added, “No, that’s a good thing for our defense. We can use it to file an objection to the eviction notice.” I pulled the clinic camera, a Kodak Instamatic, from my satchel and took photos of the mold close up and from a few feet away.
As we returned to the ground floor, I said, “Do you know your neighbors?”
He shook his head. “Not much.”
“I have letters to put under their doors. I’m hoping that at least one of them will give a written statement saying that the noise levels in your unit don’t bother them, and we’ll be able to use those in court.” I took the folder containing the letters out of my satchel.
For a few seconds, Robert Suarez looked at me with searching eyes. He said, “The landlord—will he make us leave?”
“I’m working as hard as I can to prevent it.”
Robert Suarez did not appear to be reassured. His expression was grim as he said, “We don’t have nowhere else to go.”
* * *
—
On arriving home at night—often this was at nine or so, after a lecture or meeting—I’d eat something quick if I hadn’t had dinner: peanut butter on toast or soup from a can, followed by a pot of chamomile tea. Then I’d change into blue pajamas and a white quilted nylon robe that my mother had given me before my freshman year at Wellesley. I’d pull my hair into a ponytail, set a cup of tea on my nightstand next to the lamp, sit on my bed with two pillows propped between my back and the headboard, and make a list of what I needed to do the next day. In addition to using a spiral notebook, I kept a daily planner, which was eight by four inches and which I reordered by mail every October. I thought of this arrangement of tea, pillows, notebook, calendar, and textbooks as my nest.
When the to-do list was complete, I’d read or write for three or four hours. Routinely, I’d become immersed in my work, look up, and realize two things: that it was well after midnight—sometimes several hours after—and that, due to all the tea I’d consumed, I desperately needed to urinate.
In college and law school, these had been the hours when I felt most like myself. I liked being around other people during the day, and I was relieved to be alone late at night; it was the latter that made the former possible. In fact, setting up my nest often made me think of a Wordsworth phrase I’d learned in English class as a high school junior: emotion recollected in tranquillity.
On that Monday night, it was not yet ten and I’d been in my nest less than an hour when my phone rang. When I answered, a male voice said, “This is Chitty Chat Clinton. I’m wondering if you’d like to have dinner.”
“Now?”
“Are you busy?”
“Well, I’ve already had dinner.” I certainly wasn’t trying to rebuff Bill; I just was surprised by the call.
“Then meet me at Elm Street Diner and I’ll buy you an ice-cream sundae for dessert.”
I glanced down at the notebook in my lap, my pajama-encased thighs below it. “What about tomorrow?”
“Alte
rnatively,” he said, “what about five minutes from now?”
* * *
—
When I entered the Elm Street Diner, he was sitting at the counter, his back to the door, and I hesitated—he was wearing a brown wool sweater that was unfamiliar to me, and I was reminded of just how much about him was unfamiliar—but then he turned, held up his hand, smiled, and said in a joyful tone, “Hillary!”
Bill stood as I approached, hugged me, then ate the french fry he’d been holding in his left hand. “I’m so happy to see you!” he said. What was the catch? Wasn’t there a catch?
As I sat on the vinyl-covered stool next to Bill, a middle-aged waitress on the other side of the counter said to me, “I hear you’d like a sundae. Whipped cream and nuts?”
I’d had a sense of the sundae being more metaphorical than literal, but when I glanced at Bill, he nodded. “Sure,” I said.
Bill gestured toward the waitress, whose uniform was a white apron over a pale-pink collared dress. “Edith voted for Nixon but thinks McGovern might have what it takes in ’72.” Edith smiled indulgently. “And two spoons, Edith,” Bill added as she turned away from us. There was on the counter in front of Bill a large oval plate, half-full, which was the source of the french fries he hadn’t stopped eating even as he’d greeted me. He nudged the plate toward me. “Help yourself.”
“Are you a regular here?”
“How could I not be? Tell me you’ve ever in your life tasted better fries.” He held one out, in the vicinity of my mouth, and although I didn’t think of myself as a prude, it felt practically obscene to bite it—to do it there in the brightly lit diner, when I’d been in Bill’s company for about a minute. Instead, I plucked the french fry from his fingers. As I chewed—it tasted both ordinary and delicious—he was grinning. “Yeah?” he said.
I laughed. “It’s good.”
“What were you doing when I called?”
“I was drafting an affidavit for a clinic case. What have you been doing?”
“As I just told Edith, I drove to Boston today to meet with a fellow from the McGovern campaign. I’ll be opening an office for McGovern here in a month or two. Oh, and I got a great letter from a woman in Hope who I’m crazy about.” For a split second, I felt a sense of displeasure, then he said, “Her name is Lou, and she’s eighty-eight. She’s rereading all of Shakespeare’s plays, and every time she finishes one, she writes and tells me what she thinks and I reread it and write back telling her what I think. She just finished Troilus and Cressida, which, truth be told, I’ve always considered a lesser work, but Lou had some great observations about whether it should be classified as a tragedy or a comedy. Lou is the widow of a real character. His name was Walter, and she was his tenth wife. Talk about a leap of faith, huh? I asked Walter once if he remembered the names of all his wives, and he said, ‘All except two.’ But he and Lou were married thirty years and from everything I saw, they seemed pretty damn happy.”
In the fifty-one hours since I’d parted ways with Bill, I’d thought of him frequently and felt both eager to see him again and anxious that it would be awkward when I did. It also had occurred to me that our time at the gallery might have been a one-time thing, that he might be a person whose enthusiasm was intense but ephemeral. But the energy between us in the diner—it was as if we were picking up exactly where we’d left off outside the Greenbergers’ house.
I said, “Do you think people in Arkansas are born more interesting than people in other places, or is it Southern storytelling that makes them more interesting?”
“Oh, Hillary.” Bill seemed delighted. “We’re just getting started.”
Edith set a stainless steel ice-cream bowl, really more of a goblet, in front of me, and Bill pointed to his plate and said to Edith, “And how about some more fries?”
“Wow,” I said. “When did you last eat?”
“I know,” Bill said. “This is why I’m so fat.”
I’d been joking—flirting, or so I thought—and it wasn’t the response I’d expected. Though many women I knew watched their weight, it seemed strange to me that this was the second time he’d mentioned his own. “Oh—” I said. “No. Not at all.”
“It’s the salty-sweet thing that does me in.” Even as he spoke, he was dipping one of the two spoons into the sundae. “Do you know why sundaes are called sundaes? It’s because soda shops would make them using the leftover ice cream from the weekend, but they’d put toppings on in case the ice cream had turned.”
“How appetizing.”
“That was before refrigerators. I’m sure it doesn’t apply to this fine establishment.” He took another spoonful of ice cream and said, “How was the Greenbergers’ potluck?”
“Good,” I said. “I may have been a little bit distracted.”
“Oh, yeah?” He smiled, reached out, and rubbed his fingers against the back of my hand. Just this skin contact gave me some of the same swoony feeling as in the gallery.
Then Edith set a fresh plate of french fries in front of Bill, and he glanced over with a sheepish look.
“Please,” I said. “Don’t hold back on my account.”
“I’m calculating how disgusted you’ll be when I dip a fry in the ice cream.”
“One of my brothers does that. I’ll feel right at home.”
He did it, and as he was chewing, he said, “What’s the affidavit you were working on when I interrupted you?”
“A landlord is trying to evict a family for excessive noise, but I think it’s pretextual. I’m very glad you called.”
“You are?” He was looking at me intently.
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
We were still making eye contact and smiling, and Bill said, “How would you feel about being kissed inside a diner?”
I didn’t hesitate; I leaned in, under those bright lights, and I kissed his mouth. I said, “Does that answer your question?”
He looked very happy. “Your fearlessness,” he said, “did your parents instill that in you, or did you come out of the womb that way?”
“I wish I were fearless.”
“You weren’t afraid to take on Professor Geaney for his Ladies’ Day nonsense.”
“He was clearly in the wrong,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“Didn’t Mark Twain say something about courage being the mastery of fear rather than the absence of fear? Although this might answer your question. My family moved into the house where my parents still live when I was three, and another little girl in the neighborhood immediately started trying to fight with me. Physically, I mean. When my mother realized I was running away and hiding inside our house, she very calmly told me that the next time Kathy hit me, she wanted me to hit her back. Not even ‘You can hit her back’ but ‘I want you to.’ I did, and it solved the problem.”
“Kathy started hiding from you?”
“Actually, we became friends and still are.”
“Of course she wanted to become your friend. I’m sure everyone does.” He ate the last spoonful of ice cream. “Is your roommate here tonight or in New York with her fiancé?”
“She’s in New York.” I paused. “Would you like to see where I live?”
“I’d love to see where you live. But before we get out of here, should we order one more round of fries and a sundae?”
For the first time, I was genuinely taken aback by Bill. More than I was put off, I was confused by his simultaneity of appetites. Wasn’t this moment about sexual tension rather than eating? But Bill, apparently, could be hungry for multiple things at once. Though it wasn’t a word anyone used at the time, he could multitask. I’d have far preferred to leave immediately and continue kissing, to kiss for real, but because of his earlier reference to being fat, I didn’t want to make him self-conscious.
“Sure,” I said, and he flagged
Edith, and when the next order came, I took one bite of the sundae. When he’d polished off the food, he grinned and said, “Does the offer of the apartment tour still stand?”
* * *
—
We were lying in my bed, him on top of me, both of us on top of the covers, the only light on in the entire apartment the small one on my nightstand. I was wearing jeans, socks, underwear, and a bra, and he was wearing jeans, socks, underwear (or so I assumed), and a white T-shirt. His sweater was on the floor, and we’d been kissing for a long time and it had been wonderful. I loved how his neck smelled and I loved his chest pressed to mine and I loved how his back felt when I ran my hands up inside his T-shirt and I loved how sometimes we were talking and joking around and sometimes we were just making out.
He propped himself up, as if doing a push-up, and looked down at me, our faces perhaps six inches apart. He said, “You’re not a virgin, are you?”
I smiled. “You sound like Professor Geaney.”
“You know that’s not how I meant it.”
“No, I’m not a virgin,” I said. I was joking as I added, “Are you?”
“Yes, so please be very, very gentle.”
“I’m on the pill, if that was your next question.”
“At the risk of scandalizing you even more than I already have,” he said, “I lost my virginity when I was fourteen.”
“Wow,” I said. “I was nineteen.”
“Who was the lucky fellow?”
“My college boyfriend.”
“Were you in love with him?”
“Not really.”
To my surprise, he laughed.
“Were you in love?” I asked. “At fourteen?”
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