“Yeah, it’s a strain on me.” Then Amanda’s stupid memo came to mind. I smiled. “They’re obstinate. They can’t be shooed away.”
“You can’t shoo people away, Hapworth.”
“Yeah,” I said, my eyes to her Camel Lights packet. “I’m beginning to notice.”
“So, is that why you didn’t want to see me?”
“What are you talking about? I wanted to see you. It’s just that, you know, I didn’t get your message for a while because I didn’t recognize the number you were dialing from and didn’t check the voice mail and then when you called—”
“When I called, you were married,” she completed.
I nodded.
“Maybe you’re not allowed to see me,” she said quietly.
“Of course I am,” I said emphatically, but with a pang. Seeing her was just about all I was allowed to do. I was married. No matter what I’d imagine could happen between us, it was a foregone conclusion how this would have to go, where it would end up. I was now prohibited by social mores (and possibly even certain litigable formal norms) from having intentions beyond wine and conversation. More important, I couldn’t bring myself to do something that would hurt Izzy. Sure, we were having problems. I hadn’t gotten over the feeling that she’d left me when she left me. But it would have been madness to just throw it all away, for sex with my old student Talia, someone with whom I had little significant connection otherwise. We weren’t soul mates. We’d hardly even been entangled. I was still single during those two months we were sleeping together, and so was she. We’d owed nothing to anyone then, but that was no longer the case for me. If anything were to happen with Talia now, even if Izzy never found out, I’d be breaking a promise I made. I had to remind myself that though sitting across from Talia helped me pretend I was someone I else, I was no longer that person. I sat here as someone she didn’t know and whom I was just getting to know, someone monumentally different beyond fancy clothes, someone married. I had to be.
“So what do you want to do now?” she asked.
I glanced at the silver band on my finger that Izzy and I had picked up in Chinatown after we got engaged, the ring I forgot to bring to the City Hall ceremony when we eloped. “Say good-bye?”
“Is that really what you want?”
“It doesn’t matter if I do or not,” I said. I wasn’t looking at her face. I could feel my resolve slipping again, as it was wont to do in her proximity. Goddamn it. My eyes lingered around an arbitrary fixture behind the chrome and glossy cherrywood bar. I couldn’t even make out what it was. It was too late to find out.
“Oh, Hapworth,” she said. “What would you do without me?”
When I got home that night, Izzy’s still-packed suitcase stood on its wheels by the breakfast bar. There was an open bottle of DeKalb County Chambourcin on the counter. Beside it lay the cork, which had fractured in the middle, with the key Bea Corton gave me at the wedding still screwed through it, holding the two pieces together. My wife was back, but the luggage and the wine were the only indications. She wasn’t on the couch. The TV was off. The pug was snoring in his crate.
I found Izzy in our room. She lay on her side of the bed, reading a novel. Even absent its dust jacket, I recognized the hardcover I’d bought at O’Gara’s in 1992 from the doorway: Crazy Cock. I said hello. She closed the book without marking her page and set it on the night table beside a full glass of wine. Then she pulled back a corner of the comforter and gestured for me to get under the covers with her. She was only wearing her bra and underwear.
“How did it go?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
“Will you just lie down with me?”
“Right now?”
Those first couple of weeks after we’d begun dating, we did it at Izzy’s place or mine (and really early on, both) every day. It began without preamble. We just started in, wherever we were, in medias res, like teenagers. But after we moved into the Biscuit Factory, our sex life tapered. There were still some nap breaks between seminars at a food and wine festival and recumbent tussles after speaking engagements here and there. Though at home, it was just too absurd and distracting to commence while the Laheys carried on. Izzy wouldn’t even shut off the television and turn in for the night until the fight ended, usually after Scott drove off to go sleep in his office or they’d gone to bed at opposite ends of their loft. Rest for us was certainly out of the question prior to that, let alone fucking. In the aftermath, neither of us was much in the mood to get in the mood. I didn’t think I’d lost interest. I’d just let the obstacles get in the way of this, too.
“They went to Costco. It will be quiet for a couple of hours. Come on, Hapworth, let’s not waste it.”
I took my shirt and jeans off and spooned her. Pressing my thicket of chest hair against her back, the lengths of our torsos aligned, my knees filling the divots in the hollows behind hers like that, brought me to a state of rapt priapic attention. She reached around, drew down my boxers, and took it into her hand.
“Tell me what happened,” I heard myself whisper.
“You don’t want to hear,” she whispered back. She clung to my dick tighter.
“I want to.”
She let go of me and began to get up, but I reeled her back and climbed on top of her. She relented. I pulled down her underwear. The bare surface above her crotch was slippery against my abdomen.
“I missed you,” she said.
“I missed you, too.”
I obviated her bra and landed my mouth over a pert nipple. I took my tongue to it and encircled. She clamped down her eyelids. I curled my fingers and pushed into her.
“Keep doing that,” she said. “Make me come.” She interspersed the words with throaty vocalizations.
I finished with my hand and was inside her now. She jammed her tongue against mine. The harder I pushed, the harder she pushed, but her push felt like a pull. As she rose, she was simultaneously falling. I was driving her down instead of resurrecting her. And she, me.
After a while, she wanted me behind her and pulled me out of bed. Trying to find my way into her vertically, I flailed around. She directed, righted my course. I could see through a gap between the venetian blind slats that the Laheys’ SUV was still gone. How much longer would they stay away? I suddenly felt like I was on an orgasm deadline. I had to make Izzy come before they came home. Once the running and screaming started up, there’d be nothing to keep her from falling apart. I didn’t want her to be reminded of how she’d imploded after the wedding. I didn’t want either of us to have to return to that scene, even though I knew it was inevitable. She was against the wall beside the door that slid open onto our back porch, above the parking spaces. I was disappointed screwing like this—it was as though we were strangers doing it in an alley—but she was into it. Obviously I had to keep going. Her hands against the concrete balanced the tripod our fused limbs made. The only sound besides our breathing was the hum of the humidifier.
When we were done, we fell back onto the mattress. Our limbs lay like battered, cast-aside merchandise that remained after the Christmas shopping stampede. We’d been thrown from the shelves and trampled into unfamiliarity in the aisles. My ears buzzed. Eventually Izzy tore herself away from me. From under the bed, she pulled a pack of American Spirits I hadn’t known was there. She lit a cigarette with a match from a box on the nightstand, heretofore used in the apartment for the sole purpose of igniting Pottery Barn cherry-and-lavender scented candles.
I let this smoking go without comment. Izzy was so placid. I couldn’t imagine disturbing her with reproof. Periodically she turned to ash on Henry Miller. The building was still silent.
“I don’t want you to leave again,” I said. I waited for her to tell me she wouldn’t. I wanted her to tell me that if she had to go somewhere, she’d take me with her, just as she’d always done before.
But she didn’t.
8
<
br /> I’d hoped we could spend a few days together, but Izzy returned to work the next morning, and the mornings following. There were tastings to lead and talks to give. There were private dinners to host and fans to greet at the bistro. As though that weren’t enough to keep her busy, she had episodes of Vintage Attraction to film. The most arduous show she described to me was a three-part series on serving wine at parties. It covered how to open a bottle of Champagne without blinding your friends. “Use a towel and rotate the bottle, not the cork,” she said. One guest wanted to know what wine to pair with heat-and-serve Costco hors d’oeuvres. Izzy’s It-Tip: pour a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, the crisp acidity of which does wonders to mask the freezer burn that attends the reconstituted Bagel Bite. She also gave suggestions about how to keep tarrying party guests from sneaking into your stash after everyone else has left and availing themselves of prized bottles. “As soon as you decide a vintage should be saved rather than drunk, open it immediately.” In lieu of that, hide collectibles among the empties, where no guest would ever look. Just be careful to check the capsules before making a trip to the recycle bin. I was glad for the stories. It was heartening to see her industrious. It was also lonely without her around. Izzy often didn’t return to the loft until well after midnight. I had conversations with Ishiguro while I graded papers. He and I ordered a lot of pizza.
One night I arrived home to find digital music playing on the television. Izzy was in the kitchen. She diced tomatoes on a white IKEA cutting board. When I entered the alcove, she kissed me without stopping what she was doing with her hands.
“No bistro?” I asked.
“No,” she said. She sounded rather pleased. “I actually get a night off. How about that?”
“That’s excellent,” I said. I scanned the cupboard. “Do you want a glass of wine? There’s a Cabernet.”
Izzy touched the bottle and clamped her lips together.
“I could put it in the freezer.” Chilling a room-temperature bottle down to cellar degrees was a trick of hers. This heightened the fruit and softened the alcohol burn, which was always sharper when wine was warm, like with vodka.
She pointed at the refrigerator. “Get the Albariño back there. That would work. We’re having paella. I don’t want any yet, though.”
I opened the door and retrieved the bottle. Izzy was cleaning shrimp, deep in a cooking trance. She said nothing when I poured myself a glass or when I left for the couch to laze with Ishiguro.
Even though a part of me really wanted to know, I purposely didn’t ask what had happened in Carbondale, what old haunts Izzy had reconnoitered, or whom she’d seen, or what she’d done. Aside from what there was to interpolate from the footage recorded at the wine festival that would end up in a package on an episode of a cable-access TV show I’d someday watch, I’d never find out how the going back into her past and the returning to the current life she’d built from the ashes in Chicago had affected her. I didn’t need to know. Her resurfacing—not to mention the sex with which we toasted it—seemed to suggest she was ready to begin our marriage, this new life of ours. Plus, what reason would I have yet had to think any ghosts she’d have worked to elude could provoke her from anywhere but three-hundred-thirty-three miles away? As for my own erstwhile provocations, the presence of a self-collected, affectionate, dinner-preparing Izzy made me feel even guiltier about having flirted with disaster in her absence. I didn’t want to dwell on my own brief devolutive foray. There was as little sense in my dredging it up as in Izzy’s. And I’d have been happy to forget the entire meeting with Talia had even taken place. Unfortunately, she was still very much in mind of it. When Joe Walsh began strumming, ba bah ba ba baah, the sound, as if a watch alarm, reminded me to take the note I’d found in my mailbox at school out of my back pocket.
Now Izzy added Valencia rice to the paella pan roiling on the range. She reduced the heat and arranged the prepared shrimp and clams from her mise en place. It was doubtful she would be able to see what I was reading from across the room. To err on the side of caution, I flattened the paper and arranged it between two pages of Wine Spectator ads for temperature-controlled cellars I could have installed in my basement or in the galley of my yacht. Then Izzy peered into the oven to check on the gilding of the apple tart she’d made from scratch, crust and all. Her back was to me. I read the note’s text quickly. Then I folded the document back up again.
The words circled my brain involuntarily. I can’t go back to Iowa yet . . . everything seems heavy now . . . caused me to question the relationships I’ve had with men over the past few years . . . so what are we supposed to do? Reminisce the good old days and meet for wine again . . . or what?
To begin to determine the “or what?” required me to remember everything I could about our brief dalliance. She’d been my student, my beautiful student with the wild hair. She was always dyeing it. The shades often matched the color of the paper onto which she had Charles Wilcox in the department office mimeograph her draft copies when it was her turn to present work to the group. While the rest of the class packed up their bags and filtered out of the room at the afternoon’s end, she’d stay behind to talk. We could converse effortlessly. Sometimes she followed me back to the office. All of this was, outwardly, very innocuous. For a time, I diligently tried to keep her off my libidinous radar. Our relationship could have been easily explained then. That changed when I started coming to her off-campus apartment, and she to mine.
“Dinner’s almost ready,” Izzy called out. “Want to set the table?”
I arranged the plates and knives and forks and water goblets and wine stems in two adjacent places on our screw-it-together-yourself (yet fashionably expensive) dinette. I was still thinking about Talia. In those months we were sleeping together, she would show up at my apartment at night. Wordlessly, she’d walk the length of my junior one-bedroom after closing the front door. She shed her clothes as she went. By the time she reached the green IKEA pullout couch or the bedroom and my squeaky mattress, she was naked. We’d share a joint after sex. I felt the situation warranted breaking the landlord’s no-smoking-indoors policy. Mostly because of Talia’s urging, I was moving out of the place I’d stubbornly occupied for close to a decade at the end of the semester. Then we were starving and plotting the procurement of dinner. We usually ordered cheeseless pizza from Domino’s. If the mood struck, we’d get dressed and take off in my Mustang and have pancakes at the Golden Nugget. There were the boxes of pasta and packets of instant risotto she brought and affectionately heated. Once, she announced she wanted to make something—for me. Wary, but resigned to indulge her, I drove to the Dominick’s. She picked out strange ingredients I couldn’t even recognize. These were things I wouldn’t have had any idea how to incorporate into a dish. I pushed the cart and said nothing. I paid for everything. We went back to my place. I carried the groceries upstairs. There she set about a long, spiraling cooking process. It ended up accomplishing pretty much everything except producing a meal. She cursed and sputtered and clanged from the start, only to give up halfway through. She claimed that the recipe she was using was faulty, and blamed the mishaps—a scalded onion, an overly salty sauce, a tripped smoke detector—on my dorm room appliances and Salvation Army dollar pots. I was left to clean everything up. She went to sit on the porch in one of my rusty beach chairs and sulked and smoked cigarettes and listened to indie rock songs on her giant white iPod. All the wasted expensive gourmet products, the produce, the organic proteins in the garbage bin made me furious. By the time I finished getting my small, inefficient kitchen back in order, seething and muttering pronouncements to myself, I was ready to throw her out. Of course then, at almost precisely the same moment I was riled enough to give her “the talk,” she came in from outside, a blue-gray cloud of Camel Light smoke trailing. She looked even more beautiful than before she’d left, with these big, mournful eyes, and all this multicolored hair, and this ghostly pale skin. She came ove
r to me. We started kissing. All I could think about was how much I never wanted her to leave, never wanted to find myself in this apartment alone, never ever again. We kissed some more. She started to take off her clothes. Then gone were my own. We lay down, in the living room on the carpeted floor. I inserted myself, gradually and suddenly, my cock jumping the Brazilian waxed turnstile, and plunged into the subway. There, I pommeled away for as long as I possibly could. Always after the detonation I felt embarrassed that I couldn’t have made it for another ten or fifteen minutes, but the profusion of sensation brought on by having my unadorned dick devoured by her relatively pristine nougat was just too much. Just too much. A porn star I was not. She smiled though, and swiped sweat from her brow, as if to say, You’re not so bad. Before she got dressed and back into her red Jetta, she sparked another joint from my stash. I didn’t object. When she was gone, I crashed into the bedroom and squeaked my way onto the unmade bed, still vaguely redolent of our fucking the night before, exhausted, delirious, and appreciative.
“This looks good,” I said. I took my seat across the dinette from my wife, a person who mere months ago was only a recognizable face on a popular television program to me.
“Sorry it took so long,” Izzy said. She removed an empty mussel shell from her bowl, but wasn’t eating.
“Rough day?”
She swirled her Albariño. “You could say that.”
I played tag with saffron-tinted rice grains. It was a rare opportunity to eat without Ishiguro’s scheming and cajoling for an edible fragment. He snoozed blissfully on the couch. But when Izzy’s BlackBerry began convulsing and chirping on the table, he awoke right away, sat up, and stared at us. Izzy inspected the display and read a text message. “I have to go out later,” she said. She looked crushed.
“Why?”
“Put in an appearance at a dinner Chef Dominique’s doing.”
“Where?”
She returned to the screen. “The Peninsula.”
Vintage Attraction Page 12
