by Anne Bernays
I protested that I was too fat and he said most women in New York were too thin. That’s all they thought about, staying a size eight. “Eight?” I said. “It’s more like a four.” I told him I knew someone who was a size zero. All the while his hands were skimming my body, landing one place, then another. He brushed me lightly with his penis, back and forth, barely touching me, and taking me to a pitch of excitement so taut I made a kind of screeching sound, as if I were being strangled; it was a noise like none I’d ever made before. “You like that?” he said. “Oh my God, yes,” I said, no longer looking on self-consciously, but right in the thick of things. He entered me easily, smoothly, then quickly pulled out. He did this several times, with no apparent effort, and each time, I rose up on my hips to meet him, then fell back as he withdrew. This was exquisitely inflammatory. “My God,” I said. “What are you doing?” “Getting you ready,” he said. “You weren’t ready before.”
“I am now,” I whispered. He lay square on top of me, supporting himself on his elbows and leaving me plenty of room to thrash around in and to let my body answer whatever question his body asked me. Then, at his urging, we reversed roles, with me astride his hips, with my poor old breasts hanging down. I looked at his face; he was grinning, his eyes squeezed shut. “You’re amazing,” he said. His arms and legs were thinner than Tom’s, his torso longer, his chest hairier; it was covered with hair, curly black, thick as weeds. His penis was smaller than Tom’s, not much but still enough for me to be aware of the differences. Nevertheless, we fit as if we had been custom-ordered for each other. We fell briefly asleep, then, waking, made love again. “You’re crying,” David said.
“I’m not.”
“What’s this, then?” He had lifted a tear off my face; it glistened on his finger like a tiny pearl.
“Because to be this happy is to know what you don’t have most of the time—and that’s terribly sad.”
He made it clear that this could go on for a long time. It was up to me. Then he told me that I was astonishing, adorable—there was that word again. I suggested that he just might be especially horny. “No,” he said. “It’s you.”
I accused him of flattery and he said he didn’t want to ever hear me talk that way again. He was so serious. He said I should be able to accept a compliment without turning it on its head. “I suppose you’re right,” I said. “But I really don’t know what to do with praise from the outside.”
Then, out of the blue he asked me if I knew that he was Jewish.
“Well, I guess I just assumed it,” I told him. “Why, does it bother you?”
“No, not really. I guess I’m just a little sensitive.”
“Nobody gives a hoot anymore—except maybe my mother.” He asked about my mother and I gave him a thumbnail sketch, bathing the picture in a faintly rosy light.
“Okay,” he said when I was finished. “And my mother would call you a shiksa.”
“So we’re even?”
“We’re even.” He smothered me with passionate kisses.
I didn’t give a hoot whether or not David was Jewish. I had, years before, assumed he was, because his name said he was. But it hadn’t even occurred to me to view his Jewishness as of any more consequence than his shirt size. My mother, on the other hand, would have said something like “Oh, really?” had I been foolish enough to tell her I had a Jewish lover. She was born in the so-called Roaring Twenties—although it’s not clear who was doing the roaring. People like my mother didn’t know any Jews back then, except maybe the man who owned the local pharmacy. Did I care that David was not a Christian? Not a bit. And then I realized that maybe it did add a little something exotic to the mix, a spice I found tasty, like fenugreek. So, basically, his Jewishness was a plus, not a minus.
“Why is it so important to you? It’s not to me.”
“We’re sensitive—no, ‘oversensitive’ says it better. It’s like an atavistic shudder. But you haven’t answered my question,” David said. He was staring at the ceiling.
I told him I’d answer if he didn’t let it become a thing between us and that I didn’t know what was going to happen or if these few hours would ever be repeated. He interrupted me with assurances that they would be repeated. I told him I couldn’t go on cheating on Tom. “And you’re not even Jewish,” he said. “It’s not how I want to live,” I said. “Besides, everyone I know who’s had an affair says it wrecks your work, all that sneaking around and telling lies—it takes too much time and energy.” I turned on my side and lightly touched the hair on his chest—what a novelty! “You’re my first,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. I thought for a moment that he was going to ask me how he compared, but thank God he spared me that. Men are so hung up on their dicks—but I knew that already.
I told him it was my turn to ask him a personal question.
“I guess it is,” he said. “What would you like to know?”
“How did you lose your little finger?”
“Oh this?” he said, holding up his hand and looking at it as if seeing it for the first time. “Fireworks, when I was a kid,” he said. “I got too close, the thing went off before we were ready. I was with my brother, Freddie. He got his eyebrows singed off. They never grew back.”
It was a pretty good story, although not quite on a dramatic par with alligator or thresher or chain saw.
“You don’t really need your little finger,” he said. “I’ve stopped noticing.”
I asked him how old he was when it happened. “Nine,” he said, “and fearless.”
David spent the night with me in the Rhinelander Hotel. The next morning, after making love a third time, we took a shower together, soaping each other’s best parts, then dressed and went out for some breakfast. We found a deli cafeteria a few doors down the street, the sort of place that doesn’t exist in Watertown or Truro, where you fill your plate with chunks of melon, berries, salmon and cream cheese and whatever else looks good from bowls sitting on ice on a steel buffet counter, and bring it to the cashier who weighs it and charges you accordingly. A swift river of people on their way to work came in to buy breakfast to go, coffee in paper mugs, bagels slathered with cream cheese, a cup of fresh cut-up fruit. “Are you sad?” I asked David. The sex magnetism was still severe; it was all I could do to keep from leaning over and kissing him on the mouth.
“I’m sad. Because you’re leaving.”
“I’m too old,” I said, leaving most of what I was thinking unsaid: We’re not kids. I have a husband and a life I’ve constructed out of a medium-sized talent and true grit. What I feel might be love. On the other hand, it’s just as likely to be a sudden rush of passion, mixed with a sense of going nowhere and desperate to move—any-where. The bottom line was, whenever sex is involved, you don’t know what you feel—except that you want more sex. You have to engage in the daily comings and goings for months, maybe years, before you know whether it’s love or just sex that’s gluing the two of you together. Do you really like the guy? Do you both think the same people are weird? Do you both dismiss New Agey thinking as stupid? Can you stand his nasty habits? Does he genuinely care about what happens to you?
“Too old for what? Not too old to make me your slave.”
“You’re kidding, yes? I don’t want you to be my slave.”
“I am kidding,” he said. “But I mean, after last night, we’ve got to be more than working friends. I see us together. Or rather, I want us to be together. You have a lot of thinking to do, I know that. It’s easier for me.”
Neither of us had said I love you, among the most delicate phrases in the English language—unless you’re a sociopath who wouldn’t hesitate to use it to secure any number of things you fancy. For most of us, it’s a sacred phrase, to be employed only when the mixture contains exactly the right amounts of its assorted elements: sex, pleasure, warmth, reciprocity, humor and, above all else, the appetite—and stamina—to spend years together without descending into boredom, resentment, betrayal, ill will. I tried to imag
ine eating breakfast with David Lipsett for the next twenty-plus years of eight o’clocks. It was pretty hard, mainly because he was—I faced it—a stranger. That I felt, at that moment, drinking the remarkably good coffee he had bought me, that we were somehow suited to each other in ways that even Tom and I, at the beginning, had not been, that our sensibilities dovetailed, was only an index of how I felt at that moment. How would I feel next week, in six months, in three years?
“You’re certainly not making it any easier for me,” I said.
David looked at his watch. “It’s after nine-thirty,” he said. “I’ve got to get to work. What are you going to do?”
“I was thinking I should be getting back to Watertown.”
“I’m going to miss you.”
“I’m going to miss you too.”
We left the question of “us” hanging. When I got back to Watertown, my mind started working properly again; its parts having been silently realigned. I hardly knew David. What was I thinking? Half my life had been spent with Tom, and I could let it go more easily than I could a lost wallet?
For the next week or so, Tom seemed to be a shadow in the house, arranging his schedule so that he only came home late at night and left, most days, before I was fully awake. Where he worked, rocket scientists were a dime a dozen. Although there were none in the house on Whitman Street, there was no need: I would have had to be comatose not to realize that he was trying to avoid me. Nevertheless his shirts and underwear appeared daily in the bathroom hamper, waiting for me to put them in the washing machine and return them, clean and folded, to their owner. This was my marriage.
I retreated to Truro. When I arrived, the wind was ferocious—loud as a train, bending tree branches and whipping sand against the windows. Raymie and Mitch were in Florida, in a condo owned by Mitch, escaping the coldest, dampest, windiest weeks of the Truro winter. I was feeling so low that I turned on the television. There’s little or no cable on the Outer Cape, although some folks have satellite dishes that skew around crazily in the wind. I watched the news, stunned by the consistency of George Bush’s instincts, which struck me as instinctively wrong-headed, mean-spirited, and sometimes tyrannical. He seemed to be convinced that business was more important than people and that this should come as a surprise was in itself a surprise; this depressed me and for the first time in years, the weather and isolation made me feel edgy in my house rather than snug. Just as I had made up my mind to go back to town right after breakfast the next day, the phone rang.
“Hi there, sweetheart, it’s me, your New York admirer.”
“David! How did you know I was here?”
“I called you in Watertown and a man, I guess it was your husband, said, ‘She’s not here.’ I told him I was the editor of the book you were working on and that I needed to get in touch with you. He suggested e-mail. I don’t think he was going to tell me where you were until I used the word ‘urgent.’”
“So like Tom,” I said. “Where are you?”
“You’re not going to believe this,” David said. “I’m at the Provincetown airport,” he said. “I just used the bathroom and bought a Mars Bar from the vending machine.”
“You’re not serious.” He assured me he was. “I’ll come pick you up,” I said. “But you know, you can’t stay here.”
“Oh?”
“This place has eyes and ears you wouldn’t believe,” I said. “They can see and hear through walls. And they get high on chewing over juicy bits of gossip: ‘Who was that guy who got into Dannie Faber’s car with her at the airport?’ Bad enough I should be seen picking you up at the airport. I tell you what, I’ll wait outside in the car. It’ll take me about twenty minutes to get there. Is that okay?”
“Are you sure you’re not being just a wee bit paranoid?”
“I’m sure. David?”
“Yes?”
“Damn—I can’t wait to see you.”
David was standing outside the front door of our spiffy new airport, since 2001 fitted out with the latest in security equipment, including a giant machine that X-rays every bit of your luggage, including carry-ons and laptops, and makes you step on a scale right in front of everyone. The smile he produced when he saw me melted the hesitation that had been forming like a chunk of ice over my heart on the drive over. He tossed his shoulder bag into the back seat, got into the car and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. “You smell good,” he said.
“You sure no one saw you?” I said.
“A couple of people saw me,” he said. “I’m not exactly invisible. But they didn’t know where I was headed. Although, come to think of it, a guy in coveralls gave me a fishy look…”
“You’re kidding, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I’m kidding.”
“It’s not funny, David. I don’t feel right about this.”
“You’re ambivalent. That’s okay with me, honeypot. I wouldn’t like you so much if you didn’t feel conflicted. It’s going to come out fine, I know it, whatever happens. Right now, I want you to tell me what we’re seeing. Believe it or not, I’ve never been out this way before. I always meant to, but just never got around to it—’til now.”
Just having him six inches away set me on fire. Maybe I was going through a second puberty, with all systems electrified, ready for someone to hit the button. I hadn’t felt so excited since the first year I was married to Tom. “You’re passing Pilgrim Lake,” I told him. I cut over to the shore drive to be off the highway and close to the bay. It was lead-gray, with white caps. “It’s kind of bleak,” David said.
“You should see it in early July. Pink and red galore, everything in bloom. It knocks your socks off.”
I told him this bleakness created the kind of tension that exists only in a place where the seasons are discrete and distinct in the extreme. “It’s not like Antigua or the South Pole. What you see and feel in winter isn’t anything like what you see and feel in summer. It keeps you on your toes.” He smiled at me indulgently and I realized I was sounding pedantic, but it seemed more important for me to underscore my devotion to my home than to achieve the right insouciant tone.
When we got to the house, I was really nervous about being seen with David. I looked in every direction, but of course, since I was out of sight of anyone on my stretch of the beach, I needn’t have bothered. Still, my conscience was bothering me. David represented the New York part of me and when he came to the Cape, he had changed the rules, making them harder to obey.
“You first,” he said as I gestured for him to go inside. So he followed me in. Once the front door was behind us, he put his hands on my shoulders and his eyes focused on mine, told me that he’d been terrified the plane would be grounded and he wouldn’t be able to make it.
“What did you tell your boss?” I said.
“I’m my boss,” he said. “I told me I was going to spend a night with the love of my life.”
This did not seem to require any sort of response, so I asked him what he had told Ashley. “I said I’d be back day after tomorrow. She’s got my cell phone number if there’s an emergency.” I wondered what sort of emergency might befall an editor of children’s books; it wasn’t exactly like working for the Defense Department.
“Where’s the bedroom?” he said.
“I love your house,” he said as he unbuckled his belt and stepped out of his chinos. His calves swelled with muscle. He pulled down his boxers. His penis pointed toward the ceiling. “Aren’t you going to get undressed?” he said.
“Oh.” I had been transfixed, watching him. “Look at it!”
He looked down. “‘She plays me like a lute, what tune she will, / No string in me but trembles at her touch.’ But in your case, you don’t even have to touch me.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “Who wrote that? You?”
“I’m flattered. It’s John Masefield.”
The only poem I ever heard Tom quote was “Casey at the Bat.”
“Come on, let me see you, feel you, a
stonish you.”
Sometime later—it was heavy dusk and the wind had dropped almost entirely—David asked me whether I’d like to go out for dinner and, although the idea had definite appeal, I was afraid that one of our hungry gossips would see us together at one of the few restaurants still open.
“We could sit at separate tables,” he said. “Or how about takeout?”
I shook my head. “No takeout. No Chinese restaurant, except at the Wellfleet miniature golf place. We’ll have to rough it.” There was enough in the freezer and the cabinets to make a soup, a couple of broiled chicken thighs, courtesy of the defrost setting on the microwave oven, and a canned bean salad. David had brought a bottle of Pinot Grigio, which he uncorked. I lit two candles. “Voilà,” I said. “What do you think of the instant feast?”
As we sat down to eat, it struck me with some force that David had gone on as Tom’s understudy in my domestic drama. How was he doing? He was doing just fine, outdoing the star, who had gone lazy and forgetful. He praised the food and he reached for my hand, holding it lightly. “I can’t just go home and that’s that,” he said.
“What did you have in mind?” I said.
“I want to be with you all the time. You give me the feeling that the world isn’t going to hell.”
“Isn’t that optimism by default?” I said.
“Whatever. But I’m terribly lonely when I’m not with you; I thought I liked living alone. I don’t. There’s no one to listen to my bitching about the job. Besides, I think about you instead of my work. It’s getting so that someone noticed in a meeting last week. He said, ‘Head in the clouds again?’”
“We’re not sixteen.”
“Don’t you think I’ve been over this territory a million times?”
“Of course, but I want to know what exactly you have in mind.”
“You said that already.”
“But you didn’t answer.”
“I want you to come to New York. I want us to live together.” He paused, meaning to make the pause create an impact. “Why don’t you say something?”
