by Lisa Taddeo
—Yes, I said. It’s me, darling.
Leonard opened the little door to his home.
—My life! he said, pulling me into his body and kissing me on the mouth. I inhaled the smell of his age. He was wearing linen pants and a cotton t-shirt.
—Tell me the news of the world! he said, smoothing my hair back with the palm of his hand and gazing into my eyes so intently I thought for sure he would snap out of it. But he didn’t. We sat together on the couch.
—It’s vicious out there, darling. I’m happy to be back. Shall I fix us a cup of tea?
—What’s that in your hand?
—Fried squid. I brought it from Malibu.
—What were you doing in Malibu? he asked, looking haunted.
—I was down there with a girlfriend of mine.
—I see. Lenore, let me ask you—I worry you are still upset by the thing that happened?
The way he spoke to Lenore was saintly, unreal. With me, he was his crude, erudite self; with Lenore, he was a gentleman. One of my greatest furies was the way men treated me like I would not merely endure their filth but endorse it.
—Oh, what thing? Do you mean the other night when you went into my ass?
—What?
—The other night, darling, when we tried what you’ve been wanting to try.
—Oh. Was that at Sandstone? The mickey I took… I can’t remember so much.
—Yes. We were in the red bedroom. After the pool.
—I can’t—
—It’s all right if you don’t remember, my love. It hurt a little, but. Overall I’d say I enjoyed it.
—Did you?
—I enjoy everything with you.
—That’s good to hear, he said, patting my wrist like the elderly man that he was. I squeezed the wedge of lemon across the paper boat and handed him a leggy clump. An expression of pure gratitude came over his face. He took the whole boat from me. He made humming noises, overchewing each piece and swallowing with occasional difficulty. It’s a particular heartbreak to watch an old man eat something he’s enjoyed all his life. His brows moved like inchworms and he didn’t look up at me again until after he’d finished.
I walked into his kitchen for a piece of paper towel. He bought the cheap, rough kind. I wet a corner of it in the small sink and brought it back to the couch. I took the empty boat from him and dabbed his mouth with the moist paper towel.
—Lenore, you’re so good to me.
—And you to me, my love.
Lenny had an eight-bottle wooden wine rack next to the television; I selected the most expensive-looking one and poked around for glasses. He once told me he had all the good china in storage, save the Laboratorio plates. Storage for what, I wanted to ask him. He had no children, nobody to whom to pass along his china. I found two short glasses made by Oneida with seventy-nine-cent stickers from some dollar store in the Valley.
I brought our glasses to the couch. I moved slowly, wary of shocking him back into the present.
—We are in a low, dishonest decade, he said.
—Isn’t that true of every decade?
—No, not all of them. In any case that’s Auden, not me. But it’s truer now than it was then.
—Do you agree with that, darling?
—Somewhat, Lenore. Somewhat I do. September first, 1939, and November eighth of this year. They are mirrors if you look in the right light. Do you know what else Auden said? He said we all have Hitler in us.
—Hmm. I believe all men have a rapist in them, just dying to get out.
—Excuse me?
—Nothing, my love. You seem tense. Is something troubling you?
—Your feelings for me, Lenore.
He took my arms in his bony hands. His pupils were hazy, like those of a fish on ice at a discount grocer’s.
—After I lie down, love, after I take a rest, I wondered if we might lie with each other?
I could feel his penis wanting to rise. He was not wearing the watch. I would come to learn that he wore it only when he had those few hours of definitive clarity after taking his drugs. But one day he would make a mistake. I would be patient.
—I would like nothing more, darling. I’ll go and take a shower, get the sand off my feet. I like to be clean as a whistle when we—when we lie with each other.
It was easy for me to say the things that Leonard wanted to hear. I have always and unequivocally known what a man needed from me. With Big Sky I trembled in fear at saying the wrong thing. I tried to keep every message short. I rewrote lines to make them sound nonchalant. I spent morbid hours on one sentence.
With Vic I knew very well what to say but often said the exact opposite. In the very beginning of our relationship, the second or the third time I let him fuck me, he lay beside me after, staring with those wet little eyes of his. We were in a hotel room in Zihuatanejo. The rooms were all open air, white curtains billowing, the blue sea. Lanterns and rattan and ripe mangoes in a bowl. You’re going to throw me out one day, he said, caressing the side of my arm. The breeze was gorgeous. I was in the prime of my life in that orange and blue place. The coconut grove down the road.
Oh, no, I said. Not one day. I’m going to do it very, very gradually.
* * *
I WAITED UNTIL LENNY FELL asleep. When he began to snore, I walked to the safe in the wall. I tried fifteen or so combinations, looking over at him every few seconds. I reminded myself that there was no rush. I turned it back to where it had been and used the hem of my dress to rub off my fingerprints. I looked inside of his little closet. I found his old man robe, his old man record collection, and a photo album. I tucked the latter under my arm and I also took the pipe from his coffee table and a packet of tobacco back to my place. I sat at the outdoor table and drank a greyhound with fresh grapefruit juice and puffed on the pipe. If I’d had a child, I thought, I never would have been able to fresh-squeeze a grapefruit, to rim the glass with salt.
I lit the bowl of the pipe and looked through the album. It was almost exclusively full of pinup-type shots of Lenore. There was something sordid about them, even by my standards. Lenore sitting on the toilet with a scrunch of toilet paper in one hand. Lenore, naked in a bathtub with no water. Lenore drinking a martini in the nude on a velvet settee. Her hair up in her classic Lenore chignon. None of it was pornographic, exactly, but there was something aggressive about the pictures. Lenore had an embarrassed smile in every shot. Her relationship to the photographer, Lenny, was clear. He was the bullish director, telling her how to sit and how to hold her body and she was smiling like a woman who didn’t want a man to be angry at her.
Around five Kevin came out, wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt. He was handsome and warm, but there was something distant about him. He would speak to you on one level, but his train of thought seemed to exist on another. I kept wondering if he would start wanting me, and the not knowing gave me an enormous amount of pleasure. Being with Alice made me feel confident that sooner or later he would.
—Miss Joan, he said, coming close enough that I could smell him, eucalyptus. Haven’t seen you around too much.
—We keep different hours, I said.
—How true, how true. What’s up with Lenny.
—He’s kind for being a bastard, I said.
—I like that, Miss Joan. You got verve.
—Coming from someone with verve, I said, that means a lot.
—Nice of you to be checking on him. Why do you think you do that?
—I don’t know.
—He still in there? Little nappy for the old man? Nonnyboots, my mother used to say. Get into your nonnyboots, son.
—I like that.
—Yeah, I always dug it, too. Tonight is his regular poker game. It’s the only night he looks good to me. He gets together with a bunch of old friends in Hollywood. Long black car comes to pick him up. One of these days, Kev, he says to me, it’s gonna be a hearse.
—Sometimes I feel bad for him, I said, and other times I don’t.
/>
—You know, I think that’s just about everybody.
I was always going around wondering where everyone got their self-assurance. Kevin’s mother sounded like she loved him in a pure way. She didn’t make him take care of her. It made me want him. His mother’s love for him turned me on. I worried that with every man I met, either I was going to want him or he was going to want me. It had never truly been both at once.
—Just keep your wits about you regarding Lenny.
—River said the same thing. What do you mean?
—Nothing, really. He’s harmless, of course, but he isn’t innocent.
—What does that mean? I asked.
—Oh, I don’t really mean anything. You live in the Canyon long enough, you hear rumors and such, and anyway, you don’t move up here unless you have something to hide.
He looked at his watch.
—My lady is waiting, he said. You have yourself a fine night, Miss Joan. Young man River went to Froggy’s, ’case you’re hankering for something to do. It’s half-priced caipirinhas. All night long.
He winked and ran to his Charger. The music was all the way up as he sped down the drive, trailing baked dust in his wake.
I couldn’t hear the coyotes but I could sense them. The rustle of the breeze might have been their tails thwapping against the saltbush and the milkweed. It was easy to pin my fear on the animals and the darkness of our queer compound. I wished I were in a place where I wouldn’t be afraid to be alone, to turn in early with a book and a cup of chamomile. But even when I’d lived in such places, in the Jersey City apartment building, for example, surrounded by city lights and the noises of families, even then I had been afraid to be home early, to be sober and unaccompanied as dusk approached.
Very quickly I dressed in a black jumpsuit and my new, stolen heels and drove down the winding road to Froggy’s.
I saw River right away, sitting at the bar, alone in an unalone way. We spoke candidly for a while. I was very attracted to him. I felt safe because I wanted to fuck him more than he wanted to fuck me.
He told me the story of how in grade school he’d been walking home one day with his best friend, Eric. They took the same route as always and it was a bright spring afternoon. Cherry blossoms, baseball season. Eric was wearing a blue sweatshirt his cousin sent him from Hawaii. It said ALOHA HAWAII on the front in rainbow letters and there was a rendering of all the islands.
A white pickup truck drove past, slowed, and came to a stop. A man got out. He had long gray hair, a silvery goatee, jean shorts, and paint on his bare knees. He was flustered and nervous and asked if one of the boys could help, his little girl had fallen into a well on Shroudsbury Road at the old pump house. He was on his way to get help, but he didn’t want to leave her there alone.
—He was looking at me the whole time, River said. And I didn’t say anything. I guess I believed him, but I don’t know, I didn’t say anything. But Eric said, Sure. Eric hopped right into the cab. The old man told me to run along home and call the fire department, tell them to go to the pump house. But he kept looking at me as he backed away. Then he got into his car and they sped away. Eric waved at me out of the window.
That was the last time River saw Eric alive. The next day they found the old truck a few counties over. It was a florist’s van. It had been stolen from a funeral home during a wake. They found Eric’s body in a ditch, naked, a few days later.
—Jesus, I said to him. We were very close to each other in that moment and I looked into his eyes. I suppose, like anyone, I’ve never lost the hope for perfect love to come out of nowhere. River was not brilliant but he was physically perfect and kind and a life with him would be like a Grateful Dead t-shirt.
—I knew, River said, that the man wanted me. I knew I was the one he really wanted. And I’ve been living with that for all of these years.
Despicably, that story was like foreplay for me. I needed to have him; just as I needed to see all the sides of a new town, I needed to feel wanted by a good-looking man. To feel good, to feel as pretty as Alice, to feel potent enough to be near her.
By the time we left, the whole bar knew we were going to fuck. We parked in the driveway of our compound and were about to get out of my car when a long black car drove up. Down! I hissed. And we both shrank beneath the windows.
—It’s probably just Lenny, River whispered.
—Yeah, I said.
—Why are we hiding? he asked.
—I don’t know, I said. I stayed down there until the car took Lenny away.
River led me down the rough terrain from our driveway to his yurt, holding my hand as my heels scraped the rocks. I knew they were getting ruined but I didn’t care; I hadn’t paid for them. I followed him into his yurt and recalled all the times I’d been fucked in creepy places. It was a circus pavilion. Thin balsa beams held the structure up. The beams were in diamond shapes, an accordion; then they straightened and met at the top like the spokes of an umbrella. There was a pellet stove in the center like the one in my home. On the floor were many mismatched carpets. There were Aztec pillows and bright burlap blankets covering arabesque floor couches. His bed was in the back and center, the focal point. Right above it a skylight, a hexagon of navy sky.
He undressed me the way young boys undress a woman. Tentatively they undo one button or tug a corner of the shirt off your shoulder, then they lean back, smile, and wait for you to do the rest. If you never moved, neither would they.
I slipped the jumpsuit off and left my heels on. I wasn’t wearing a bra, so I stood there in just my black thong and those delicious green shoes.
—Do you know what happens, he asked me, when you pour hot aluminum into anthills?
I laughed and said I had no idea what happened when you did that.
—It travels into all the passageways and hardens there, and then you dig it up, and you have this castle, this aluminum castle, with all these doors and intricate hallways. It’s amazing. It’s insane.
—What about the ants, I said.
—Yeah, he replied solemnly.
We began fucking standing up. His body hard and warm. Touching his rear made me self-conscious. After several perfect minutes he laid me down atop his shitty mattress and plunged in and out so rhythmically that it seemed choreographed to go with the Penguin Café Orchestra tinkling from his laptop speaker.
He rolled us over so that I was on top, and I performed the required spectacle. I held my hair above my neck, making triangles of my arms. I swiveled my hips and did not mash myself the way I have done with some men when I just wanted to get myself off. I did everything that I figured he would want. I sucked my stomach in, though I was mostly bones and tendons. I even turned around, reverse cowgirl. I felt the oldest then, the most ridiculous. I decided reverse cowgirl had its expiration at thirty-seven, at least with a new and younger man.
Oh man, he said a few times, but otherwise he wasn’t a grunter. He held my hips firmly but tenderly. Nothing about him was gruesome or untoward. You’d be surprised at how few men you can say that about. Vic held me more gently and timidly than anyone, but it was insidious. His fingers like a Venus flytrap, closing in imperceptibly, wary of offending its prey.
I wasn’t able to relax that night, but there’s nothing better than fucking a beautiful man who is also kind and elusive. I faked an orgasm forty minutes in. I liked that he brought his mouth between my legs after we’d already started fucking. I liked the messiness. I looked up through the skylight at the wolf-gray stars and cried out like I was calling up to someone in the galaxy. I looked down to see the proud look on his shining face. The dog, Kurt, lay near the door, his chin resting on his paws, watching sex the way that dogs do, like they are confused as to why you’re making more of it than it is.
* * *
IN THE MORNING I WOKE before he did. I didn’t know how anyone could sleep past dawn in a yurt. The sun made me feel like a slut. River lay there, lightly snoring and handsome in a way that I found offensive.
I rose and gathered my jumpsuit and my heels. He woke up and looked at me and didn’t offer water.
The previous night, after he’d come, he almost immediately began talking of his life plans. I was dismayed when the hemp curtains parted to reveal his boyish ambition. He was the same as Jack. They wanted you to think they didn’t need technology and meanwhile they were furiously mining bitcoin.
I’d looked up Jack around that time. He wasn’t the Internet entrepreneur he’d planned to be; in fact, his online presence was slight and bland, with one exception. Photographs of him were featured on the blog of a young woman named Kylie who was studying in Ireland for a master’s program in something esoteric and unexciting. Jack had gone to visit her in a small town in County Clare where she lived with a bunch of other skinny girls in jean jackets. During Jack’s visit they milked goats and burned peat moss. They went on hikes to well-known cliffs. They drank beer or wine in every shot. There were several still lifes of bouquets. Jack buys me flowers any time he sees them, the accompanying caption read. And if they aren’t available for purchase, he makes his own bouquets.
At the top of the blog was the customary Kerouac quote, though I was sure a girl like Kylie knew no mad ones. I was a mad one who had held her new love’s scrotum in my palms and kneaded it like dough.
Women have the upper hand. It’s taken me half a lifetime to realize it. We don’t actually care about the man who is bringing flowers to another woman. River was a stand-in for Jack. All present men are stand-ins for former men. And all men are stand-ins for our fathers. And even our fathers mean less than our own self-preservation. May you not go around the world looking to fill what you fear you lack with the flesh of another human being. That’s part of what this story is for.
On a practical level, both young men, Jack and River, were proxies for Massi, my first kiss, at ten, following the figs soaked in grappa. When I saw boys in the streets with their low-slung backpacks, I thought of the girls they liked, the girls who got to be eleven and twelve and thirteen, with unicorn stickers and slap bracelets. I did not get to be any of those ages. I was ten and then I was thirty, and then I was thirty-seven.
