Exodus: A memoir

by Feldman, Deborah

  After the show, instead of going back to my room, I hung around outside with Amanda, Pat, and Tops, trying to figure out what to do next, while Conor was in the bathroom. Amanda and Tops confided in me that Conor hadn’t shown interest in anyone since his divorce a few years ago and that they were happy to see him have a good time. They invited me to spend the rest of the night with them.

  “Well, what are y’all gonna do?” I asked, my acquired Southern accent kicking in by association.

  “What can we do?” Amanda said.

  “Strip clubs and bars, pretty much,” Pat said. “Bars are out of the question for Conor, so . . .”

  When Conor came out, he said he’d just finished doing the carpentry work for one of the classier strip joints. He offered to take us, show off his skills. A carpenter! Perfect, I thought. I bet this man has never read a book in his life. This will be excellent fling material.

  We went, and us girls sat together at one table while the men retreated to the back of the club, and I had a grand time trying to get the dollar bills to stay put on the women’s bodies. It didn’t feel nearly as seedy as I’d expected it to. One of the women was Creole, and her skin glowed with a coppery tint in the dim lights. She slithered gracefully on the stage like a serpent. Also, the wainscoting was indeed magnificent.

  And then Conor piled us all into his pickup truck, assuring me that after dropping his friends off at his house, he’d definitely drive me straight back to my hotel.

  “Come see my garden.”

  “You can garden?” I asked.

  He nodded, with a smile that showed he knew I didn’t expect it of him and that he got a little bit of pleasure out of popping my bubble of assumptions about him.

  His house, which he’d built and decorated, was beautiful, all drooping tendrils of ivy and stained glass and hand-carved furniture. What girl wouldn’t be seduced at that point? In the romantic comedy, this is where the previously one-dimensional dude gets all deep and sensitive, and the girl is suitably chastised for her judgmental attitude. It’s a classic. I got suckered in.

  I stayed for a ginger beer, which I pronounced disgusting. We all sat out on the front porch for a while chatting, and I was thinking how cool it was to have come to New Orleans for the first time not knowing anyone and then to find myself on some random porch, temporarily inserted into the social dynamics of other people’s lives.

  Eventually, I interrupted the conversation to quietly ask Conor if he could take me back to the hotel.

  “You can stay here,” he offered, only somewhat jokingly.

  “I have to take my medicine.” I wasn’t lying, but my thyroid pills definitely weren’t a matter of life and death. I was just trying to do the smart thing, which I had always prided myself on, and I knew it didn’t look good on paper for me to sleep over at a strange man’s house, even if nothing happened, especially when I had a perfectly decent hotel room to return to. Flings were nice in theory, I supposed. Maybe I wasn’t quite up for it.

  “Wow, that is the best damn excuse I’ve ever heard,” Pat said, only slightly less intoxicated than when we’d first met.

  “I bet I could come up with something way better if I was looking for an excuse,” I retorted.

  “Hey, don’t worry about it,” Conor said. “I’ll drive you back right now.” And I could tell he was kind of happy to get away from his friends, and a bit embarrassed for Pat.

  I was quiet and self-conscious when we were alone in Conor’s truck, and I pretended to be interested in the nighttime scenery outside as we drove along quiet streets to the French Quarter. Once we hit Rampart, the streets were suddenly choked with traffic and people. The area around Bourbon Street was cordoned off for pedestrians, so Conor parked his truck and insisted on walking me the rest of the way back to the hotel.

  Just outside the door, he asked for my number and offered to show me around the next day before I left for the airport. I knew my time would be tight but I gave him my number anyway, thinking he would never call, that it was just a thing people did to look decent.

  Then, ever so slowly, just like in the movies, in that way you never think will really happen to you, he leaned in, gently gripped my waist, and kissed me. He kissed passionately but with restraint, and we stayed like that for about five minutes, as the crowds continued to stream past us, and neon lights flashed. When he pulled away, I was out of breath, and he seemed a bit disoriented as well.

  It was the kind of kiss that makes you see the world differently. The night was newly awash in color. Even Conor’s face had suddenly come into sharp relief; it seemed to have attained new characteristics that made it more memorable. I blinked, because it was almost like he was a whole new person.

  “I’m gonna call you, girl,” he said, waving the paper slip with my number on it as he backed away. I smiled, and he watched me walk into the lobby before he left.

  On the elevator ride up, I resolved never to think about it again.

  My phone rang as soon as I landed at JFK the following afternoon. Did he really want to pursue something with a woman who lived twelve hundred miles away and had no plans to return to his city? I guess in the beginning I kept up the conversation because I was so curious about his intentions. It wasn’t until much later that I realized I had already started falling in love with the memory of him.

  I spent quite a few weekends in New Orleans after that. I like to say I fell for a man and a city at the same time, and boy can that have an intoxicating effect! I know that now; I still have a tendency to fall for the foreign, for the man who comes in an exotic package.

  Somehow I was persuaded to get on the back of his motorcycle, and I held on to him tightly in sheer terror as we whizzed around the city. Later, it became a thrill I wanted to repeat, over and over, and we’d ride for hours, sometimes skidding in circles in City Park, where the late-afternoon light cast long, syrupy shadows in the grass. I’d focus my vision on one spot and everything else would fade out of focus. The world became reduced to the small yet mobile space we occupied, the two of us on that bike. We came to a stop at Lake Pontchartrain to watch the sun set in wide, spreading arcs above the silvery horizon. The waters turned neon pink, the palm trees became black shadows against the chemical sky, and it seemed a very glamorous backdrop against which to be carrying on a romance.

  I did not need much more to be seduced. Sex with Conor was good. It was the first time I really enjoyed sex for its own sake, and it was enough to prove to me that with the right person, sex could be exactly what it was cracked up to be. For that alone, being with him was a valuable and transformative experience.

  At the time, I wasn’t able to understand why it was different with him. We weren’t doing anything particularly special. We laughed a lot. We were very comfortable with each other (although I suspect that wasn’t new to him the way it was for me). I had an uncontrollable physical attraction to Conor that I couldn’t explain. There were things about him that I would have written other men off for. I did it all the time. I found tiny, insignificant reasons not to be attracted to people. But everything about Conor seemed perpetually, painfully perfect to me. I would look at his blue eyes and feel my gut wrench in response. I couldn’t eat around him because he made me so nervous. I would watch him polish off a whole plate of oysters with enormous gusto while I became the girl who sipped lemon water.

  “Why is it good with us?” I asked him once.

  He shrugged. “It’s chemistry,” he said. It seemed so simple to him, not even worth questioning. Some things you just couldn’t explain.

  But I rolled that answer around in my head. Chemistry. Was I really capable of experiencing that supposedly ordinary reaction that ignited between two people at random and unpredictable permutations, that was constantly happening all over the world, that I had always assumed was unattainable for me precisely because I was somewhere off the grid on which these circuits were sparking?
Was it really possible that Conor, a man decidedly and fixedly on a grid, if not at the center of it, was chemically connecting with an aimless, broken piece of wiring like me?

  That’s what I felt like. Like a dead piece of wire that someone had temporarily spliced with a live one, and for a few brief moments I bucked and shivered with electricity. Then it was gone.

  One day in New York, my phone buzzed when Conor sent a photo. In it he had wrapped a curly phone cord around his head and topped it off with a black fedora, so that it looked like he was dressed in Hasidic garb.

  “See? I’m one of your people,” he texted.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or be offended.

  Conor tried to learn Yiddish for me. It was exactly the opposite of how I had expected to be treated by an Irish Catholic man from the South, who should have known next to nothing about Hasidic culture. Instead of making me feel like a freak, he made me feel endearingly quirky. My past made me interesting to him but did not define me—in his presence I felt valued only for my ability to intrigue him with my wit or sex appeal. It felt cleansing to me, as if I was being purified by his gaze.

  I teased him about hiding his books in his nightstand, so that none of his friends would know that he liked to read. He spent most of his social time watching football with his friends and grilling whatever animal they had managed to kill that day. He made fun of me for valuing intellectual activities more than what he considered good old-fashioned American pastimes.

  One Friday night in New Orleans, Conor pulled up in his pickup to take me out to dinner. I was wearing high heels and a nice silk shirt, and he called me the Yiddish word for princess, which he had managed to track down from a Tulane professor. I pointed to his work boots and called him a stable boy, and we resumed our usual banter.

  The wait at Irene’s was forty-five minutes long that night. Because the presence of him was enough to cancel out even the most vigorous hunger for me, I suggested we skip dinner and go somewhere else instead. We went to the Spotted Cat on Frenchman Street, reputed to have some of the best live music in the city. The saxophone player winked cheekily at the two of us, sitting on our bar stools with our knees touching, our identical bottles of spring water sitting untouched on the bar.

  Later, outside, a man sitting on a crate in front of a typewriter stopped us. “I am a poet for hire,” he said. He wanted to sell us a poem. “Give me your names,” he said, and we did laughingly, not yet committed to the idea of purchasing a poem yet to be written. “Come back in twenty minutes. It will be ready then.” Before we moved on, I asked him who his favorite poets were, and he stared at me blankly. I was chagrined by his lack of response. I thought longingly of the poems I had read in my classes at Sarah Lawrence, of the sinewy ecstasies of Crane and Whitman, the terse fragments of Anne Carson, the smooth rolls of Wallace Stevens.

  Somehow, we never did make our way back to pick up the poem that had been written for Conor and Deborah. It seemed trivial then, the forgetting, though now I long to return to that night so that I could see what he had written, if there was any foreshadowing in it, if it was a missive I should have heeded.

  Even though I had girded myself for every possible danger in life, I had not been prepared for Conor. I had not considered the possibility of falling for his kind of man, and so had not adequately checked myself at earlier opportunities. Why would I fall for the guy with the one-eyed pit bull in his backyard? How could I have been convinced to ride on the back of some dude’s motorcycle? I believed myself above him and his crowd simply on the basis of my Upper East Side address; like most New Yorkers, I had bought into the mystique of superiority that came as a consolation prize for life in a harsh and lonely metropolis. I had anticipated falling for the suave lawyer, an emotionally messed-up writer—but never a redneck with a shotgun collection. That certainly wouldn’t fly on Park Avenue.

  Very early the next morning, when it was still dark outside but just barely, Conor woke up so that he could open his business, a salvage company that had been in his family for generations. The light from the bathroom illuminated the right side of his body as he dressed, and I noticed the tattoo on his shoulder as if for the first time. It was crudely drawn, the ink pale and blurry. I asked him about it, and he clapped his hand over it.

  “Don’t look,” he said. “I got it when I was sixteen. I couldn’t regret it more.”

  I wondered why I found his confessions of a wild past anything but a turnoff. Conor never failed to remind me of the foolish, reckless person he had once been; he had told me about the alcohol, the violence, the bad judgment, all of it. And although I knew I was the kind of woman for whom these things were deal breakers, I was breaking all of my rules with this man, and I couldn’t stop myself. I was doomed, and I must have known it.

  The night we celebrated his birthday, I realized that it wasn’t a fling. It was January, and in the early morning after his birthday we walked to the coffee shop a few blocks from his house, and the weather was beautiful; flowers were still bursting from between cracks in the concrete, and the winter sun was gently warming even at that hour. I looked at his face, and it was that glance that I remember most vividly, because I got a pain at the pit of my stomach as soon as I saw his enormous blue eyes turn translucent in the sun and his whole face crinkle when he smiled. It was the pain of a premonition, because that same spasm would come back to haunt me in later months and years, the pain that I suppose could be called lovesickness, which I had never encountered before and didn’t understand. I thought it was telling me to run away.

  We’ve got to stop this, I said to Conor. There is no future in it.

  I wasn’t ready to get my heart broken by the first guy who happened to buy me a Coke. What I didn’t account for was the fact that I might be preemptively breaking it myself.

  The last time I saw Conor, he fell or had fallen off the wagon. It was the weekend of his nephew’s confirmation, and he had flown to New York to attend. I had agreed to pick him up from the airport, and Conor asked me to join him and his family for the weekend, out in the Hamptons. It was confusing at the time, being introduced to his family, because they all seemed to think I was so important. And yet, we were not together. I sometimes think I filled a need for Conor that weekend, a need to show off someone presentable to gain his family’s approval. I could see that they all considered him a wild card. He did run his mouth a lot.

  We slept in the same bed and hugged and cuddled, but we did not kiss or do anything else. This was for the better, but at the time it felt wrong and terrifying, like a form of rejection. Then we went out on Saturday night with his party-hardy cousin Katie, and he ordered three identical drinks from the bartender. They were golden brown and had cherries in them. He gave Katie and me our drinks, and I peered at my glass.

  “Shirley Temple?” I asked.

  “No, silly goose,” he said. “That’s a Manhattan.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Bourbon. And some other stuff.”

  “Oh.” I was so surprised. He’d never gotten me an actual alcoholic drink before. We’d always had this thing, our matching Cokes or club sodas.

  “What’s yours?”

  “Same thing.” I was so stupid, too. I didn’t get it. I thought it was his first drink. I had observed the tension between him and his sister; I knew they’d been fighting for years before I first met Conor. I thought he was being tempted to drink because he felt bad. He had been so emotional last night, going on about how I was the only consistent person in his life, which seemed to say more about everyone else than about me.

  So I watched him drink. I got drunk first, of course. Inexperienced, I downed my cherry-topped Manhattan in one delicious gulp. I think we each had three Manhattans. I hit my max and cried while we shimmied on the dance floor. Katie let me bawl into her jacket. But then I was over it. It wasn’t until we hit the third bar that I realized that Conor was beginning to be
affected. I’d never seen him like this, slushy almost, his usual crisp manner and presence blurred into a sort of miserable blob.

  I urged Katie to help me take him back to his sister’s house. But she wasn’t ready to be done with the night, and I ended up leaving her at some other bar while I carted Conor home. He was completely gone. I worried about getting him into the car, but I should have been more worried about getting him off of it. He collapsed onto the hood and refused to move for five minutes despite my begging and shushing. It was 3 a.m. The lights in the house were out. Conor’s sister said she’d leave the back door open for us, so I dragged him around, through the little door in the fence. But before we made it to the back door, I heard a loud thunk and crash. Conor had tripped over the barbecue and knocked it over. He lay sprawled on the ground pathetically. Something clicked quietly and quickly in my brain that I would later qualify as disappointment. He wobbled back to his feet and beckoned me close, drunkenly.

  “What?” I whispered. I was angry now.

  “Please,” he slurred. “Don’t let . . . them . . . see . . . me like this. They can’t see me like this.”

  So he was aware of that much, at least, aware that he had gone too far because he didn’t know how to stop, aware that in this moment he really was an alcoholic, aware that his deciding to drink was bad and put his family in a terrible position.

  I sighed. “Okay.”

  I snuck him upstairs, where he fell into bed, already asleep as I pulled off his shoes, jacket, and belt.

  He was very blasé about it the next day, refusing to admit that his drinking was a problem. It had always been drugs, he said, in complete contradiction to what I had heard before. Alcohol had never been his problem. Anyway he had been sober for ten years now, he could have a drink once in a while, and would I just give it up? He confessed that he had started drinking again a while back.