But Monday, yes. Once again, I got in his beloved car for a two-hour trip to Newport, though they said it might storm. The cold made my bones smart. I anchored the camera in my lap to stay calm.
“So. Did you go away?”
“Yep. With someone I shouldn’t have been with.”
“Really? That’s never pleasant.”
“Wrong. It often is.”
“Oh,” I said, somewhat shaken, because I thought of her: Richard’s friend, roommate, new lover. She had spiky hair, Hawaiian eyes, a passion for math I couldn’t muster.
As Seth headed for the seaside cliffs I promised myself that I did not want to know about this friend, did not want to know who she was. Then it began to snow. As soon as we turned onto the highway, it came down in flying slabs and skidded across the lanes. Traffic linked up and started sliding in bunches.
“Maybe we should turn back,” I said.
“Okay, screw this.” He pulled over to the side and waited with his hand on the stick.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
He looked perturbed as if his thoughts had turned into a ditch. He opened his coat and found a cigarette.
“How about if you film my apartment? Do you want to?” He looked at me.
“Yes, I would.”
“It’s not much.”
“I don’t care,” I whispered. “Let’s go.”
He flicked the cigarette ash out the window and we got back on the highway: a few more miles, another exit onto a smaller road. The CD typed out burgeoning scales on the piano. Snowflakes clung to the rims of the window shield.
“See that turn there?” I said, pointing to his street.
“You know where I live,” he said, turning.
We parked in a lot behind his building and climbed a short flight of stairs. I waited on the landing while he found the right key. I worried about the curls in my hair, my breasts, my perfume, the size of my ears, my teeth.
He touched the door and it drifted open. I hauled the camera inside, toward the radiator hissing at the far end.
“I’ll make coffee,” he said. “Or would you rather have wine?
“It’s early. Coffee’s good.”
He switched on the lamp by the couch. The red shade tinged the wood floors, pale walls. I went over to the window and looked down through the snow at the traffic light that had caused me so much discomfort the night before. Now my chest found relief and I breathed.
A million white specks flung themselves at the glass when his arm moved in around my waist. I leaned back. His hair and clothes smelled of smoke and snow, his lips on my neck. I couldn’t hear anything except for his hand touching my face, my ear, measuring my shoulder, my hip. The kettle moaned and startled us. We were partially undressed. “You still want it?” he whispered.
“Yes.”
Desperately. I wanted to manage this.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
In his bedroom I hurried under the blanket and cold sheets. Posters hung like wallpaper. Huge, fantastical faces. Black trumpeters thrust out of every empty space. Next to me, the white window shades dropped halfway to the sill. Below the sill, a bookcase was stuffed with used college texts, piles of Blues CDs, a photo album, a coconut shell and a hula doll from Hawaii.
“See, it’s not much,” he said, entering.
“Look at all your CDs.” I took the cup and flicked the hot coffee with my tongue, testing it.
“I’ve loved Blues since I was twelve.”
“Why twelve?”
He lay next to me on the bed and released the cup from my hand. “I guess I started noticing things.”
I expected to know his body from my dream but didn’t. Our clothes bunched together at the end of the bed. I lay my hands on his buttocks and pulled on the essence of what I had lost in Richard. Sand trucks thumped down roads somewhere in the distance, a muted sound. Inside me, Seth stiffened, then rested his head in the pillow.
We didn’t say anything at first. I had an idea of what our lovemaking could have been like and wasn’t. The memory of stretching beside Richard speared my chest.
“We’re in our twenties,” he explained. “You’ll see it’s really the best thing. I’m not ready to be needed so much.”
“Listen to the snow,” I finally said to Seth.
His cell rang then, like a ghost.
“Not now,” he moaned. “Go away.” His cell rang and rang.
“Pick it up,” I said. “Please shut it off.”
He answered.
“Yes. No,” he said. “I can’t.” Then he listened. Then he said, “A friend.” Then, “I will, later.”
I fished for my underwear in the sheets and put them on.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“I’m getting more coffee. Who was that?”
“A friend.”
“Someone you’re seeing?”
“No.”
“Should I believe you?”
“Probably not.”
I hooked my bra and snapped my legs into my pants, my arms into my shirt. Breaking my vow of not wanting to know, I asked: “Are you seeing anyone else, besides her?”
“Why?”
“Tell me.”
“Sometimes.” He leaned up against the pillow. I looked at his cell on the pillow, the room sealed as an igloo. Snowflakes dwindled outside. He pulled off the sheet to show me his penis had become small and drawn into itself. I retreated too, cold as ever with nothing to say: old hurt rooting deeper, seeking nourishment. I looked up, finally, at a mass of strangers in his eyes. So I left the room and went into the kitchen. There, on top of the refrigerator I saw the single stem rose, a bottle of wine one third full, as recently drunk as the weekend I imagined, and an empty candy dish.
He came into the kitchen, fully dressed. “You’re upset,” he said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“I would be.” He slid the bottle into the cupboard.
“Speak for yourself then.”
“Okay. Will you stay and have something to eat?”
“If you’ll drive me home.”
“What do you think I am?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Give me some credit.”
“I do.”
“Look, the snow stopped,” he said, changing the subject. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a box of chocolates.
I wasn’t hungry but I sat down and nibbled the sweets, rapidly improvising talk about other men I had been seeing. Small, silly lies. It was true that every day on the street I saw men—men who were taller or shorter than Richard, lighter or darker. Everything Richard.
If his love for me decreased by half every day for one hundred days, on what day would his love become half of what it once was?
Easy answer.
The last day.
“I really need to finish this film,” I said, standing up. “I can use what I have. Thank you for your help.” I snorted at the sound of my pseudo-formality, my need to pretend.
“I didn’t do anything.”
Then I said something about stillness after a storm, magnificent fresh air. He carried my camera to the car.
“I’ll call you,” he said when he dropped me off.
We kissed and I hurried up the stairs to my room, sterile and bright from the snow. Four inches had fallen. Ice patterns gleamed on my windows as if to say there was more to silence than I imagined. I took a hot shower to erase the cold, empty, tired, restless feeling inside. In the early afternoon, the quiet remained, so I slept.
I slept until evening, when he called.
“Can’t see you tonight,” he said. “How about tomorrow for lunch?”
“Who are you seeing tonight?”
“Why must you ask?”
“Why not?” I felt the sarcasm nipping my tongue.
“It’s a question of tact.”
“We’ll see,” I said, and we hung up.
He showed up the next day half-shaven, shirtsleeves unbuttoned. I swung my camera up from my hip and caught his eyes skittering across a low sky before we entered the college café. My stomach was sore from nerves. At the table I felt small as if he couldn’t see me. I felt gigantic as if I were blocking his beautiful view. We sat amidst chattering, exam-free students, the feeling of bursting in the holiday air downtown. I ripped my napkin. And then it came: his bid to remain friends.
“Cliché—oh God, are you kidding me? I should laugh.” I jiggled my ice water like a warning bell. Hurry up boy. Hurry up.
“No, I’m serious. You don’t believe me.”
“I do. It’s just so plebeian, isn’t it?” My wet glass circling made tiny infinity marks on the tabletop.
“I’ve upset you,” he said. “You flattered me. I don’t know what I want.”
“Neither do I. You flatter yourself.”
“You’re angry.”
“Indifferent.”
He shook his head. “Come on, Jennie. Be honest.”
Oh, yes. Honest. If I were honest, I would have said, “You’re right. I’m heartbroken over Richard. I failed in love. I’m so desperate and lonely. I failed with you.” But I needed more lies. I hadn’t tired of the game. I told myself that I had won something by putting another man’s flesh between Richard and myself.
Home was an interminable silence, sixteen blocks away. I counted, unable to unhinge my jaw to speak while he drove.
“Listen,” he said as I was getting out of the car. “Don’t cry over this.”
“You egotist,” I burst out as if I were yelling at Richard. “I’m not crying. Do I look as if I’m crying? You’re uptight, you know? We slept together once. I didn’t ask you to marry me.”
“One thing leads to another. Whose idea was this?”
“Mine!” I said, and slammed the door.
He drove off.
I went straight to the editing room and spent more hours in the dark pushing buttons, rewinding, splicing his slender wrists folded over his thighs. Segments of him circled me like the steering wheel of his car, the rim of his eyeglass, a curved cheekbone angling away from me in the rearview mirror. I sank deeper into that room, drifting downward until I could drift no further down, and despite how I tried to hold on, waving my hands through the projector’s barrel of light, those images broke apart on the screen, scattered naturally in a blizzard of wings, rippled back into muddy shallows.
Forgiveness
1
That restless summer I craved my only sister like hunger craves food, like fatigue craves sleep, like loneliness craves love.
2
That was the summer after our father died.
3
I took a temporary job transcribing medical reports. It was easy good money, mindless, all fingers and letters—my laptop balancing anywhere on tables in coffee shops, my bed, my studio apartment floor.
4
My life was missing air.
My older sister was coaching a women’s wrestling team in Florida. That’s odd, right? And she was living with a woman.
“She never hurts me,” she said.
5
That summer I went to bars, waiting, running, chasing, tagging for guys. One guy took me for a ride in his convertible. After he dropped me off at home, I sat at my bedroom window, blouse ripped open, too flushed with sex to sleep.
One man down, how many more to go?
6
When we were kids, Ruth climbed the highest tree on our street, a crowded block lined with brick apartment buildings and two-family houses just outside of a Northeast city. While she was playing ball or hanging upside down on a limb, I was upstairs on my twin bed, grooming the plastic hair on my dolls. Father called me princess. He said Ruth should stop acting like a boy.
7
Our house was narrow and crowded; everything echoed off wooden stairs and floors. It didn’t take much. Her homework not done, a misplaced comb sparked outrage and a hand slap across my sister’s face. Ruth told him to shut up. More slaps. It didn’t stop.
8
Each time, Mom whispered her desperate need to leave. She was pretty in a sad kind of way. Small shoulders, slumped; thin feet.
9
Each time he hit Ruth, I wanted to flee. Where would I go at age four, six, eight?
One night, Ruth came home late. I heard a car drive up, the car door click shut and his silence waiting for her on the front step. She didn’t see him in the shadow. But I saw his hand flashing up and down, up and down, her wet, red face gleaming in the streetlight.
“Screw you, Dad.”
She ran for blocks.
Down the hall, Mother pretending sleep, and me?
The next day, father prostrated himself, groaning. He called Ruth over and over.
“Come home. Do you hear me?”
I lay on my side paralyzed, watching her empty twin bed. When Ruth returned, he bought her a spotted mutt from the pound. He built a doghouse and put it on our small front porch, gluing shingles to the roof, leaving open holes on the sides for windows.
You see, our father was nice, too.
My sister named the puppy Happy.
10
That summer after Dad died, I walked to the park near my apartment, a small green square between brick buildings. I watched sprinklers spinning, spitting waterblades whipping a net of spray over everything. Little rainbows flew up and twinkled in the daylight. I sat on the bench wondering if Ruth tired of gym sweat or the smell of mildew growing in terrycloth towels? Did the sound of metal lockers echo an empty feeling inside as it did for me?
11
I craved her like questions yearning for answers.
12
In the car, Mom had dozed off in the passenger seat. The monotonous dark rains turned greasy, the narrow road heading south onto a sleek surface that spun them into a guardrail. Dad, unbelted, smashed against glass. Mom survived broken ribs.
13
That summer I went to a hotel bar and met a man from Argentina. He didn’t speak much English. My Spanish was worse. Ola. Yo no hablo. That was about it. We dove into bed, loveless drunks. After he conked out, I escaped into the cool summer night, crossing a street to catch a bus. I didn’t see a car speeding toward me. The man at the wheel braked, skidded away, almost hitting me, his face scattering with barely missed disaster.
“Watch where you’re going,” he screamed.
I’m going to Florida, I thought after that. I need to see my sister.
14
Not long after she graduated from high school, Ruth moved to Florida, met a woman and stayed. That was seven years ago.
15
On the plane to Miami, I fell asleep next to a man in a plaid shirt and khaki pants. When I awoke, he passed me a glass of orange juice.
“I saved it for you,” he said.
“I just dreamed I had twelve children,” I told him, smiling, accepting the drink. “And I’m not even married.”
“Well, you’re young,” he said. “I’ve got two blessings. A girl and a boy. Four and six. Take a look.” He showed me two stamp-sized school pictures. “The boy is the oldest. Great kid. Obsessed with baseball. A real boy.”
“What do you mean by real boy?” I looked closer at the photo.
“Well,” he said, tilting his head as if he’d never considered this. “He’s a good kid.”
When we landed, the married man wished me good luck and we parted ways at the end of the exit ramp. I got into a cab.
16
In my hotel room ten floors overlooking Biscayne Bay, I washed my face. The bed was king-sized—so enormous�
��I lay on it and floated while two clouds crossed the picture window. Once, when Ruth’s puppy hurt her paw from a nest of thorns, Dad carried her for a mile to the vet’s, whistling the whole way to keep the puppy calm. But Happy died young from a rare immune disease.
17
The sun pressed against the hotel curtains. I unwrapped a glass at the mini-bar and poured my father’s favorite drink—gin with a splash of water. I adjusted the thermostat and opened the closet door to explore. When I was little, I hid in our closet behind my sister’s clothes and pretended I was a rich lady waiting for my train ride to start. Mother would come into my room and say: Jennie? Jennie? Where are you now?
That hotel room on Key Biscayne was my rich lady’s suite. I walked all around, squished my toes into the rug.
18
Ruth owns a wood bungalow home on Marathon Key. The front porch slopes and one of the stairs is broken, the corner bitten off. Pink flowering Bougainvillea streams down one side.
“Ruth, hey! It’s me,” I called through the screen door, then opened it up and let myself in. She had a beige couch that sagged on one end. Laundry was piled on a dining room table. Sneakers in a pile next to the door.
“Jennie, What the hell?”
We hugged. She felt solid with good health: browned arms, her hair streaked with sun. Ruth is small. Her hands and ears shaped like mine.
As it turned out, she was leaving that night for a tournament in the north part of the state.
“My luck,” I said. “I should have called.”
“We might be champions this year.”
“I’m not surprised.” She had been winning blue ribbons since first grade.
“Do you need a place? Where are you staying?”
I told her about the hotel. In the kitchen, she poured two glasses of icy water.
“Come on. I’ll take you out on the boat. I have time for that.”
I followed her down a sandy path through tall grasses behind her house. She was so comfortable trudging through thorny leaves, but I thought those thick roots looked like snakes and they made me jumpy.
“It’s okay, Jennie. Don’t be afraid. They’re just plants,” she said, knowing me.
The trail ended on the beach, lined with Australian pines. They bowed over the sand like long feathers in a light wind. As I walked, the ocean emerged looking vast and chlorine green, almost fake. I had never seen such color. Her small motorboat was anchored in the shallow water. She held it steady as I climbed in.
Women in Bed Page 11
