“Do you want to come?” I ask.
“I don’t know, maybe,” she says in a tone that suggests she does not fully appreciate the deep symbolism inherent in my shopping choice. (Well, what do I expect; she went to a second-tier college.) More troubling, her tone suggests to me that maybe she does not appreciate anything about my feelings for her at all.
“Whatever,” I say, in a tone meant to convey that I don’t care about her, either. We are just two people who don’t give a shit about each other.
When she sees Eric and me out the door a little while later, she gives me her standard peck on the cheek and then asks what time she should meet me to go shopping.
“How about noon?” I ask and she says okay. Oh wow. Is this a date? No, it can’t be. But maybe it is. I think this might be a date.
The next afternoon at noon I am standing on the appointed SoHo street corner waiting for Martha. I am early. She is late. Ten minutes, then fifteen. After twenty minutes, I begin wondering if she will come at all. Maybe she changed her mind. Maybe she decided going candlestick holder shopping sounded as boring to her as it would to me. Even so, I am prepared to wait all day.
Finally, I spot her loping toward me on her long legs, legs that I will one day learn she feels self-conscious about because they turn in ever so slightly at the knees. But I don’t notice anything amiss with her knees. I just see the girl I like smiling at me. She doesn’t apologize for being late and I don’t care. She is here. She takes my arm in hers and I lead her away.
We pop in and out of various upscale boutiques, the kind that sell handcrafted Tibetan goat milk soaps and Karl Lagerfeld potpourri sachets and all manner of candle-related paraphernalia. Over the course of the next few hours, I examine and reject thousands of different candlestick holders in an effort to prolong our date as long as possible.
“Too baroque,” I say about one set, even though I have no idea what baroque means. Hopefully, she doesn’t, either.
“What’s baroque about them?”
Shit. She does know. I change the subject.
Finally, after several aimless hours I settle on a pair of simple metal candlestick holders because our feet are tired and we are sick of shopping.
“What are you doing now?” I ask her.
“Nothing.”
“You feel like coming over?” I ask with a clutch in my throat.
“Sure,” she says.
This is totally going to happen.
We take the subway back to my place. My apartment is embarrassingly shabby compared to Christopher’s. What little furniture I have is mismatched thrift store stuff, and there is a mortifying watercolor I painted of a nineteenth-century ice-skating scene on the back of my front door. It is perhaps the gayest thing I have ever done, and it is there in full view when she enters.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“Oh, that’s a winterscape.”
“Why is it there?”
“It was like that when I moved in.”
“It’s horrible.”
“Tell me about it.”
We settle side by side on my couch and talk for a long time. About our pasts and our families and the ways in which we never felt like we fit in at home. The stuff that people talk about when they are hovering on the edge of intimacy.
Night falls. She is still on my couch. I want to kiss her but I am afraid. Does she want me to kiss her? I think she does, but she’s got a boyfriend. Maybe the only reason she’s here at all is that she knows I won’t kiss her. Maybe she thinks I’m one of those “safe” guy friends. Because it’s understood between us that kissing her would be wrong. It’s definitely wrong, right? Or is it that I’m just a pussy and am using morality as an excuse not to make a move? I don’t know what to do. Martha decides for me.
“I’m going to leave,” she says.
“You are?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I’m starting to feel uncomfortable.”
Oh no. I blew it. I’ve made her uncomfortable. Can she see my hard-on through my jeans?
“Why do you feel uncomfortable?” I ask.
“I don’t know what we’re doing here.”
I don’t, either! That’s the problem! What do I do? She is shifting away from me, getting ready to leave.
“Don’t go,” I say.
She turns back and I kiss her.
The next morning, she tells me she needs to get home. Christopher is returning from Massachusetts later in the day. I watch her pull on her jeans, slide a sweater over her body. Almost twenty years later, I still carry that image around with me—the first time I saw Martha put on her clothes. It is the sexiest image of my life. I tell her I’ll take her home. Is that okay? Yes, she says. I can take her home. We ride the subway uptown to her place. I want to touch her but content myself with letting the side of my leg rest against hers during the train ride. She does not pull her leg away.
When we get to her apartment, there are half a dozen messages from Christopher on the answering machine.
“It’s me,” he says in the first one. “Where are you?”
In the third he says, “I’m on my way home.”
By the fifth, he is calling from a pay phone, about to board a train to Grand Central Station. The sixth and final message from him says he has arrived in New York. Where is she, he wants to know, although his voice betrays no suspicion. That message came in only half an hour ago; he could be here any second.
Suddenly I am in that familiar movie scene in which the hero walks in on some jerk messing around with his girl. Everybody hates that jerk. But now I am that guy. Maybe I had that guy in the movies all wrong. He’s not a jerk at all. He’s sensitive, lovelorn. Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I realize that guy is kind of a poet.
The elevator pings a floor below. Christopher could be on that elevator. I have to get out of here. I try to leave but my lips keep finding Martha’s, and hers mine.
“You need to go,” she says.
“I know,” I say. I don’t go.
The elevator whooshes past her floor, but the next one could hold her boyfriend.
“You need to go.”
She hustles me toward the stairwell. I muscle open the fire door and make my way down twelve flights of stairs to the ground floor. I poke my head into the lobby. No Christopher. As innocently as I can, I stroll across the lobby and out the revolving front door. When I am safely outside, I take a deep breath, letting the cold November air fill my lungs, still feeling her lips on mine. I should let it go. I really should. I had an amazing couple of days with the Beautiful Martha, Ice Queen of MTV. That should be enough. The wise thing to do would be to let it go and return to my Great Year of Sexual Liberation. But I do not want to, and even though the effort required to continue my pursuit of Martha will far exceed “minimal,” and even though what I am doing is wrong, I want her. And I think maybe she wants me, too.
We see each other a few more times after that, but I don’t know if it’s going anywhere. Obviously we keep our relationship secret, and the secret makes it better. Every so often we meet at my apartment for canoodling. Oodles of canoodles. And the canoodling is very good, the way such things are when people’s bodies are new to each other. At work, we ignore each other, which I find sexy as shit.
I like her. Maybe I like her a lot. But she still has Christopher. She doesn’t love him, she says, but she can’t afford to leave him. New York is an expensive city for a girl right out of college. If she breaks up with him, she doesn’t know where she will live.
When Christmas comes, people disperse for the holidays again. This time I’m going to Florida to visit my family—my brother, sister, and mother, newly single after her nineteen-year relationship with her partner, Elaine, collapsed. So that should be fun. Ugh. I don’t want to go there and spend a week consoling her about lost love. Not now when I am, for the first time in years, optimistic about my own love life. No, I want to stay here in the gusty cold
city with my secret girlfriend doing secret girlfriend things (sex). Besides, my relationship with Martha is considerably better than my relationship with Christmas, a holiday I have not fully enjoyed since I was five years old …
CHAPTER 4
fuck you, alan alda
It’s 1976. This will be our first Christmas in this other house, with these other people. We’ve lived here a few months now, but it still feels like we’re on some crappy cut-rate vacation. The house is kind of shabby and there aren’t enough bedrooms for all the kids, so I have to share one with my sister, Susan. Eric and Elaine’s son, Greg, are in another. Mom and Elaine have the third; they seem to be the only ones pleased with the new sleeping arrangements.
If there is anything out of the ordinary about Mom and Elaine’s relationship, I don’t notice it. At five years of age, I am unable to distinguish between the various types of adult friendships—they all seem equally weird and vaguely creepy. Mom and Elaine are simply together, the way (until recently) Mom and Dad were together. The word divorce has yet to come up, let alone the word lesbian.
Nobody ever asks me to lie, but it is clear that we are not to publicly disagree with our new family’s absurd cover story that Mom and Elaine are sisters. They could not look less like sisters. My mother is olive-skinned, big-bosomed, and overweight. Elaine is fair, flat-chested, and thin. They look as related to each other as me and FKF.
Conveniently, both women married men named “Schwartz,” so at least we all share the same last name. The only other point of convergence is that we are all Jewish, although our Judaism is of a distinctly liberal bent. We are the kind of Jews who don’t go to temple, eat a lot of bacon, and celebrate Christmas.
Jesus Christ, I love Christmas.
It is far and away the most important day on my calendar. Stripped of any devotional meaning, it is a day of naked, orgiastic greed. At five, though, my relationship with Santa is growing tenuous. Yes, I believe in him, but that belief is quietly eroding against the encroaching power of logic. Consequently, I try not to think too deeply about him. Never mind that he probably doesn’t know my new address. Never mind that we do not have a chimney for him to slide down. Never mind that the gifts his elves so lovingly craft by hand in his North Pole workshop sometimes have price tags from Toys ‘R’ Us. Never mind that he uses the same wrapping paper Mom keeps in the basement. To question his existence is to jeopardize the appearance of the presents themselves. If Santa turns out to be fake, it could potentially upend the entire business of gift-getting. No, best to keep all thoughts on the subject to myself. To be extra safe, I should put all thoughts out of my mind altogether.
Later in life, when I have children of my own, I will come to hate Santa and everything he represents: forced jolliness, fuzzy logic, the exploitation of elves, children sitting on the laps of strange men. I will struggle with whether or not to preserve the Big Santa Lie and will feel enormous societal pressure to do so.
A braver man would just tell his kids the truth. “I bought this shit for you with my money and I expect you to be grateful. See? Here are the goddamned receipts. Santa my ass.”
But I am not a brave man. So, as generations of parents have done before me, when Christmastime comes, I will look into my children’s wide, trusting eyes and I will lie. I will feed them a line about a magic fat man and his mutant deer. And they will believe me because they are stupid.
Moreover, instead of using Santa to celebrate the holiday, I will use him as a threat. Santa will be the bad cop to my good cop.
“Personally I don’t care what you do, but I would hate for Santa to find out you didn’t put away your toys. There’s no telling what that guy will do. He’s crazy.”
Then, having lied to my kids about one mythical creature, others will fall in line: The Easter Bunny. The Tooth Fairy. Leprechauns? Sure, why not. No wonder children are terrified of the dark. If all these mythical creatures can just come and go as they please, who’s to say what else might be out there in the night?
When I was five I was scared of the dark, too, although it had less to do with supernatural beings and more to do with my sister. Sharing a room with Susan is terrifying. Every night we go to sleep and every night I think she is dead. I don’t know if it’s a function of her Down syndrome or what, but when she sleeps she stops breathing for long periods of time. There are often excruciating intervals throughout the night when she does not appear to be breathing at all, and I find myself lying across the room from her, wide awake in bed, reassuring myself that she is still alive.
She’s fine, I tell myself. She’s fine. She’s fine. She’s fine.
She’s not fine. She’s not breathing.
Wait.
Oh God.
She’s dead.
She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead.
Then, just as I am about to bolt from bed to get Mom, Susan inhales a huge, gasping breath. She sounds like a vacuum cleaner that’s just sucked up a mouse. I relax. This process repeats itself throughout the night, every night.
This Christmas Eve, though, her sleep apnea (if that’s what it is) becomes an asset, helping me stay awake to listen for Santa. Despite my best efforts I can’t put Santa out of my mind, and I find myself seeking confirmation of his existence.
Yes, I have been warned that Santa will not come until I am asleep, but this logic seems sketchy. I mean, Christmas Eve only lasts so long; he has to come at some point, right? Santa wouldn’t pass by our house just because one member of the household cannot fall asleep due to his retarded sister’s breathing problems, right? That just seems wrong. Santa wouldn’t punish all for the sins of one, would he? Not my Santa.
I wait. I listen. Gradually, I begin noticing that Susan hasn’t taken a breath in a long time. Longer than usual. She really isn’t breathing this time. I know I say that to myself every night, but this time she really isn’t breathing. Every nerve in my body focuses on my sister. Breathe!
She’s still not breathing.
Should I get Mom? I should get Mom. But what if I wake up the whole house and it turns out Susan is fine? Then everybody will be awake and then the Santa Rules will almost certainly apply. I don’t think I can risk not getting presents just to save my sister’s life.
On the other hand, Santa definitely won’t come if I let my sister die. Definitely not this year and possibly never again.
She’s not breathing. She’s dead. I know she’s dead. If she doesn’t take a breath in three seconds I am going to get Mom. One … two … three … Nothing.
Three!
Nothing.
THREE!
Oh my God, I think she might actually be dead this time. Presents or no, I need to get Mom. I wriggle out from underneath my blanket and tiptoe into the hallway. When I do, I hear noise coming from downstairs.
Santa?
Monster?
My ears strain toward the sound, trying to determine its origin. I dare not move. If I move, the floor might creak. If the floor creaks, whoever is downstairs, Santa or monster, will discover me. From the spot where I am rooted, I can just see a sliver of the living room. Something is down there. I am terrified.
A flash of movement below. What is that? Something being held aloft. It looks like a present, being carried by whom, or what, I cannot say. But it doesn’t look like Santa. All I see is a snatch of blue the exact color of Mom’s robe.
From behind, I hear Susan take an enormous, raking breath. I had completely forgotten about my dead sister. I rush back into bed and close my eyes in case somebody comes to check on her. But nobody does.
Then, I don’t know what happened, but it is morning and all of us boys are up with the sun and hurling ourselves down the stairs into the living room. There, scattered around the base of our very natural-looking plastic Christmas tree, is a gorgeous, glistening mound of presents.
HE CAME! I don’t know when the son of a bitch did it, but he came. I love you, Santa. I never doubted you for an instant.
We are forbidden
from opening anything until Mom and Elaine come downstairs, so we stand back and admire our bounty. I circle the tree’s circumference, picking my name out among the gift tags. There are presents for me from Mom and Eric and Susan, one from Elaine and Greg, and in the middle, an enormous box whose gift tag reads, “To Michael. From Santa.”
My God. It is far and away the biggest present of all, which means, of course, that it is far and away the best present of all. I have heard the expression that good things come in small packages, but that saying has always struck me as a vicious lie, something people say to comfort those who have just received a pair of socks. The best presents are big. Model railroad sets. Big Wheels. Electric-powered cars you can actually drive. It is obvious to me and every child I know that a present’s size is directly proportional to its greatness. This year, the biggest, most obviously awesome present is for me. And it is from Santa. There is only one conclusion I can draw from this unexpected turn of events: Santa is real and he loves me best.
I am truly a magnificent little boy.
Finally—finally!—Mom, Elaine, and Susan come downstairs and we are granted permission to open our presents. Although I am dying to know what’s in the big box, I do not open it. I am going to save it for last, and when it is time, I will tear off the wrapping paper half an inch at a time, drawing out the suspense as long as I possibly can. This is how a five-year-old cock-teases himself.
We rip through our presents: board games (so-so), puzzles (boring), clothing (boring, the worst), a Barbie for Susan (boring), baseball cards (cool), SnapTite automobile models (pointless: they will never be assembled), a record album of silly songs (hilarious: includes the song “Disco Duck”), picture books (boring), balsa wood airplanes (good: will not survive the day), and then whatever boring shit the grown-ups got.
In about ten minutes, the magnificent pile beneath the tree is gone, replaced by a debris field of torn wrapping paper, crushed cardboard, and crinkly shards of cellophane. All that remains to open is my giant Santa Box, standing tall and proud alone among the ruins.
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