Days later, on another of our long walks, the idea of no longer waiting for love paved the way for another question. When I told my friend about waiting for Brad to want me again, she simply asked, “What about your desire? Don’t you deserve sex?”
In the weeks that followed, I considered her question as if I’d been asked to consider a new religion. I began to toy with my desire and tease it. I noticed the tight pecs and the chin stubble on the bag boy at the grocery store. I inhaled my dashing optometrist’s minty breath in the darkened exam room. I scandalized myself when—standing around at a friend’s sunny backyard party, kids hooting and playing nearby, parents sipping wine—I saw our host’s husband lift his arms overhead. His shirt rose as he did and my eyes traveled from the waistband of his jeans up the trail of dark hair to his navel.
That night, I claimed my yearning. In the darkness of our room, I reached for my husband. At first, the shyness between us lingered, but I did not hold back. Surprised, he kissed me with slightly opened lips. His fingers scanned my body with even more eagerness than I remembered. I wrapped my legs around him, showing how I wanted him, even though I thought a younger, nicer wife was what he deserved.
Who knew that was all it took to be happy again?
Later I would learn his reticence had never been about me. He had always relied on the balm of alcohol to face his desires, but my wanting him with such abandon changed that. I had ginned up courage for the both of us.
The next morning, I went for my usual swim at the Y. With my goggles hanging around my neck, out of habit I chose for him the woman dressing next to me. As I busied myself with folding clothes, tucking them into my locker, I made myself jealous wondering how my blue-eyed husband would find her body—if his hands would have more desire for her.
But then I stuffed my long hair into my swim cap, my thoughts secret inside my head. With my lover’s touch of the night before still humming on my skin, I turned from that woman in the locker room the same way my husband had once turned from drink.
I can’t tell you the precise moment I stopped looking for my replacement to reveal herself and take away all I had ever wanted. But I know it was in Maine—before we became city people again. I know it was where we skated on a frozen lake without falling through and dove into its liquid depths when the leafy summer arrived. I know it was there that I finally realized my husband, my babies, and those dormer windows were truly mine.
Part III
Dream Dad
THIRTY YEARS AFTER I’D FIRST SPOTTED MY FATHER ON television, I was casting the same is-that-him scrutiny over the arriving passengers at Reagan National Airport. Brad, the kids, and I had moved from Maine to suburban Washington, D.C., by then.
As other travelers streamed by me, I kept an eye out for Nick’s signature cowboy hat. But then I caught sight of him wearing a baseball cap low and I understood he was incognito, befitting the star he was supposed to have become but never quite did.
Still, people often thought they recognized him. They’d stop him in Starbucks, pointing a finger, “Hey, aren’t you . . .?” They were never sure who he was. Maybe they’d actually seen him on the old Battlestar Galactica or opposite a young Robert De Niro in Bang the Drum Slowly. Years ago, people mistook him for Nick Nolte. Now over 70, older and skinnier, they confused him with the British actor Bill Nighy. Whoever they thought he was, it didn’t matter. He’d nod at them as if to say, yes, it’s me. Satisfied, they believed he was the “someone” they wanted him to be.
It had taken Nick most of his life and mine, but he’d finally quit drinking. After he got sober he began to send me birthday cards—signed with many Xs and Os, pink and flowery with effusive definitions of wonderful daughters. He’d send me these cards even though I had never been a wonderful daughter to him. Did he know from my mother that I could be when I wanted to? Or was it just the kind of magical thinking he and I had always been so good at—conjuring up a story and believing it in an attempt to make it true?
When he saw me, he approached on spindly legs, his herky-jerky step the result of the accident that had led to his sobriety. Stumbling out of a bar, weaving along a dark road, he’d been unseen by the motorcyclist who mowed him down. He spent months learning to walk again. My mother was there by his side in the hospital, but I have no recollection of her telling me about the accident.
Recently, I pieced together that, as fate would have it, Nick’s nearly dying happened the same year Brad got sober, and I started my own recovery. I’ve racked my brain trying to remember hearing about the seriousness of his condition, but I’ve either blocked it out or was too caught up in my own tragedies to pay attention to it. I know I never called him. I never visited.
It was he who reached out to me again. His calls started when I still lived in Maine. At first when I’d see his name on the caller ID, I’d let it ring. One day, with a decade of Al-Anon to lean on, I answered. We began talking about movies—our safe zone. We’d kept up those calls ever since. Sometimes we could talk for nearly an hour not only about movies but my kids, his dogs, my writing, the latest script he was trying to get made, and the liberal political views we shared. We avoided talking about my mother, who remained a sensitive topic.
Nick had flown in from Vegas. This trip was a twofer for him. His ultimate destination was New York City to see my mother. Once a year, she sent him a ticket because even now she couldn’t escape his charms entirely. I’d finally made peace with the fact that she didn’t want to.
During his New York visits, my family and I would join them in small doses—a brunch or a dinner. At eleven and eight years old, my kids didn’t really know their grandfather. Even though I’d never told them to be afraid of him, on the rare occasions they’d seen Nick, they skirted him like a scary house down the block. My daughter once told me that she first heard the word “fucker” from him. She was eight. She was both startled and intrigued to know the word could expand from verb to noun.
I’d been the one to suggest he stay with us this trip. It would be a first. Before leaving for the airport, I’d made up the bed in our combination guestroom-office, placing flowers on the nightstand. He would be with us for two nights and three days.
In the airport now, I wondered if passersby registered us as father and daughter—our matching almond eyes, high cheekbones, and slim physiques a dead giveaway. As Nick and I embraced, it hit me that I’d forgotten his scent—a scent I once thought of as “handsome” and later as the smell of my own fear. Wrapping my arms around my father was like hugging one of my dogs—hard and unyielding. Our bony shoulder blades offered no comfort to one another. We’d both been beefier once, but the years had distilled us down to our essentials.
“So how ya doin’ kid,” he said in his soft Southern accent as he kissed the top of my head.
I scanned myself for the old hurt I’d always felt when I was with him, but it was difficult to muster. “Fine. I’m good.”
He squinted one eye, as if he could see inside me to divine whether I was indeed fine. He’d been doing this since we first met, sizing me up, seeming to have some deeper wisdom about me.
Moving to baggage claim, he put a hand to my back, protectively. A flash of the time I hit him between his shoulder blades sprang to mind. I was twenty-five. “Get out of my sight,” he’d screamed as he turned away to push through the swinging kitchen door of the apartment he shared with my mother. He was wearing a thin chambray shirt tucked into Lee jeans, threaded with a big western belt. My fist landed with a satisfying thwack on the soft fabric of his shirt.
After I hit him, a nervous smile twitched on my lips. As he turned back around, he stared in disbelief as I dared him to hit me back. Rather than reacting angrily, he seemed caught off guard, a wounded animal, tail between its legs.
He turned again to push through the door. “This is a daughter,” I heard him say as if reminding himself, soothing himself. “This is a daughter.”
All these years later, my stomach clenched now with a twinge of
panic. Phone calls were easy to end, but I could not hang up on him now. In the days to come, would we circle one another the way we used to, still wild in our hearts, lunging and snarling, ready for a fight? Would he sink into one of his dark silences, unfathomable as a black hole?
I had been caught off guard before by his stony hazel eyes, jaw cocked to one side, and the gnarled knuckles on his big hands. Old images I always forgot until we were in the same room again taking up our roles: Wonderful daughter. Wolf father.
What big teeth you have.
All the better to eat you with, my dear.
Nick asked about his grandchildren as we stepped into the bright sunny afternoon. While I regaled him with their quirks and accomplishments, inside I told myself I would not be his victim again. I told myself I was different now. He was different now. Surely, the old wolf at my door could finally come inside.
I pictured my son and daughter arriving home from school in a few hours and after that, Brad would come home from work. It would be easier when I had them for backup to remind me of the woman I’d become. I knew that night we would all sit down together for dinner as if it was the most normal thing in the world to have him at our table—just a grandfather with his family.
But for now Nick and I were on our own, and I worried how we would fill the time. Then an idea struck me.
As we loaded his bags into the car, I said, “Want to go to the movies?”
He smiled. “Anything, darlin’.”
At the fancy movie theater in Bethesda the early matinee was about to begin. We bought popcorn to share and bottles of water. On a Tuesday afternoon, the theater was nearly empty. Settling into the prime center section, we sank low in our velvet seats. Nick kept his hat on. The lights went down and we turned our faces toward the screen. Side by side, father and daughter, waiting for the story to unspool before us, we were full of anticipation. We were full of hope.
Ripe
WHEN I WAS TEN, MY MOTHER DECLARED ME OLD ENOUGH to stay on my own between the time school let out and the time her new Buick Skylark would roll up from work, tucking in behind our modest apartment near the Pacific Ocean. She tested me first, made me run a mock fire drill and a bad-guy-at-the-door drill. After passing her gantlet, I was liberated from my babysitter, the muumuu-wearing, horn-toenailed Mrs. Carmichael.
Although we never would have referred to me as a latchkey kid (my mother forbade me to wear a key around my neck), that’s what I was. During those witching hours growing up in 1970s Los Angeles, I banded together with other untethered children. We dared each other to jump from my second-story bedroom window into thick ivy below. We roamed the neighborhood on our bikes, stole candy from the supermarket, and tried out the confessional box at St. Bernard’s even though we weren’t Catholic.
But sometime during sixth grade, that daring girl I’d been just the year before turned inward. Unlike my classmates, I’d begun to look more woman than girl. Boys who had once been friends accused me of stuffing my bra; they taunted and grabbed me. Too much engine under the hood for the girl I was, I didn’t know how to respond. I was ashamed of their attentions mostly because my body seemed to be complicit, revealing new desires I wanted to keep secret. Only after school was out, left to my own devices and free to discover the rev and purr of my body, could I appreciate my full breasts in the mirror.
When I wasn’t lost in myself, I escaped into television. This was before VCRs and TiVo. My options were soap operas, bad cartoons, game shows, and my favorite—Westerns. I liked the old ones made before I was born: Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, and The Rifleman. At that age, I vacillated between wanting the rifle-wielding Chuck Connors for myself and wanting him to ride up on his horse and rescue my mother.
One memorable commercial peppered these shows. Voiced by spokesman James Garner, the ad provoked a longing in me I’ve not forgotten, both a yearning and an urge to act. The ad was for strawberries, sponsored by the California Strawberry Growers Association.
Just as there was no on-demand television then, fruits had strict seasons that lasted only a few months. Over photos of sliced berries garnishing piping hot oatmeal and piled high on waffles laced with maple syrup, Mr. Garner teased: “Imagine strawberries on a crisp autumn or cold winter morning?” His closing pitch: “Why now? Because they’re here now.”
It was the here now that pierced me. Come October and December, I would want those strawberries, yet they would be an impossibility. The memory of May’s shortcake would be my only salve.
By high school, even as the bodies of my classmates had caught up to mine, I yearned but had yet to act—to delve into real sex, to drink, to stay out late, to speak out for causes I believed in, to flout authority in any way. Not wanting to risk the judgment of others, I sat on the sidelines hungry for a taste of the grown-up things I longed to do—waiting for the day when I would finally take myself out for a spin.
I have a man between my thighs, but it’s not what you think.
I’ve just swung my leg over the back of Brad’s Ninja sport bike and tucked my hands into the front pockets of his leather jacket. Pulling away from the curb, already the seat vibrates my most secret places. As we take off down the block, my knees press into his hips, giving me the illusion I’m in control and steering, but with the pavement so close my life is in his hands.
The sun is neon orange and low. It’s Friday evening in early September, technically still summer, the air buttery soft around me. Living on the other side of the country now in Washington, D.C., my local grocer carries strawberries year round. Not a girl anymore, I’ve been married to Brad for nearly twenty-five years. Our daughter is in college and our son has just started his senior year in high school.
The year before our girl went away, I was overcome with fits of crying. Like a wave I could see off in the distance from shore, our life as a family of four was coming to an end. Scared the bittersweetness of it all might pull me under, I braced myself to ride it out. That was a couple of years ago. Now with our son’s departure imminent, instead of an end it feels like a beginning.
Earlier in the afternoon, I texted Brad, “How about a motorcycle ride?”
We leave our neighborhood behind, heading upcountry on roads whose names—Lost Knife, Old Gunpowder, Bowie Mill, Goshen—inspire the storyteller in me. Sitting at a stoplight, waiting for green, I glance at the people around us, car windows open, heading into their weekends. Two girls in a black SUV are laughing and singing to the radio. They beam smiles our way. Brad reaches back to pat my thigh, his hand lingering. The light changes and we’re gone.
Merging into traffic, we bullet forward. I fly back a little and grip his middle tighter. Who are we to offer up our fragile Humpty Dumpty heads like this? I think. A boy in his last year of high school still needs us. I see my daughter in her twenties and remember myself at that age. They both still need us. Picturing friends and family, especially my mother—at seventy-three still working, still traveling the world, still beautiful—I see them at our imagined funeral, anguished and shaking their heads, saying, Why would they be so stupid, so careless to ride like that?
I’m not sure what Brad feels about this impending time when it will be just us again; I’ve been afraid to ask, and now I’m not sure I want to know. For all the time we’ve been together, part of me has always been on the lookout for that moment when the music will stop and harsh lights will be abruptly cast on the glow of our party.
But on this September evening, I feel freer than I have in years. As we accelerate, I don’t worry about crashing and burning amidst the cars around us, even after I catch sight of a dead fawn on the shoulder, legs mangled, white belly exposed, the burnt-leaf scent of its baking carcass sharp in my nostrils. I relax, the way I learned to float as a child: lying back on the surface of the water, trusting it would hold me.
We ride for miles, as I duck down behind Brad to keep us streamlined and fast. We lean in unison as we take the curve of a freeway onramp to head for home. Shifting lanes, I instinctively
turn my head as he does, looking over our shoulders in sync, as if we’re part of a movie’s chase scene, staying just ahead of what’s after us.
Back home, we make love as we both knew we would. After all, that’s what my invitation for the ride was all about. Lately, we’ve been having more sex than ever. Something has changed and I think it’s me.
Despite having had my fair share of lovers before I married and a robust sex life with my husband, for all these years I’ve still been shy about revealing the magnitude of my desire. Pleasing someone else is easy for me, but enjoying my own pleasure takes a different kind of letting go. Especially without the tried-and-true de-inhibitor of alcohol. In solidarity with his sobriety, I, too, quit drinking long ago.
Yet lately, clear-eyed and sober, I flaunt my desire for him.
Walking naked into our room, no need for the cover of darkness, Feast your eyes on me, I’m eager to say. I am that girl in front of the mirror again, reveling in her own body, inviting my husband to be equally seduced. I’ve shed my youthful need to look perfect. I don’t see thighs I once thought too big. Instead I appreciate slim hips and sexy shoulders. I’m grateful for the way my body makes me feel, the way it makes him feel. No longer encumbered by all the pressures and worries of raising children, now my job is to move forward, to keep living.
The morning after our ride, Brad gets up early as he does every Saturday morning. While I’m still sleeping, he’s opening the doors of a church basement, turning on the lights, getting the coffee ready for the AA meeting ahead. Afterwards, he calls me and laughs as he says, “I kept thinking about last night. During the Lord’s Prayer I was afraid I was going to groan or say something I was thinking out loud.”
I'm the One Who Got Away Page 11
