by Rita Ciresi
I said my father—whom I dearly did not love—did the same damn thing when he was alive.
Strauss offered his condolences.
“It was a long time ago,” I said.
“But you should have told me. I never would have gone on about my father. I’m sorry.”
I shrugged. Because for a very brief moment—just long enough for the candles to flicker when the air conditioner hummed on overhead—I felt complete and utter shame. I was sorry, and yet I wasn’t sorry, my father was dead. And I wanted to ask Strauss, as if he could provide the answer: You know, if I never loved him, then why did I want him to love me?
We sat there in awkward silence. Then Strauss asked me if I had a large family.
“Can you beat this—thirty-four first cousins on my father’s side, and twenty-one on my mother’s?”
He didn’t even ask if that was a joke. “I can’t begin to compete,” he said. “I suppose you have to attend a lot of weddings?”
“And funerals.”
Strauss sat back in the booth and adjusted his shirt cuff. “I’ve heard tell you have a mouth,” he said, smiling slightly to indicate he’d made his inquiries about the office.
“And a sister,” I told him. “Just one sister.”
“Are you close?”
“Are you kidding?”
Strauss also had a sister, with whom he admitted he once had a rocky relationship. However, now they got along fine. They had made their peace. She was married to an accountant and lived in Bergen County.
“And your parents are pleased with this,” I said.
“Not exactly.”
“What’s the issue?”
“They objected to her marriage.”
“Oh.”
“It’s not what you think. She married a Jew—”
“This is a problem?”
“He’s very religious—”
“This is a problem?” I repeated.
“He’s a bit of a fanatic—” Strauss said, still idly adjusting his shirt cuff.
“I’m about to play editor here.”
“Grammar’s never been my strong point.”
“You can never be a bit of a fanatic—” Then my eyes widened. I remembered how I once took the subway farther inland than anyone in her right mind should dare to go and could hardly believe the fur-hatted, forelocked customers who got on at Crown Heights. “Oh, my God,” I said. “He’s a Lubavitcher!”
“Not that extreme—”
“A Jew for Jesus?” I said, in a voice almost as insistent as the full-page ads these Messiah proselytizers often ran in The New York Times. Those ads always sent Dodie over the edge. For in spite of belonging to an oppressed category himself, Dodie had a wide streak of intolerance in him, and he reacted to Jews for Jesus the same way he got his back up at bisexuals. He rattled the newspaper and chastised them, “Please: Make up your mind!”
Strauss shook his head. He told me his brother-in-law was not Hasidic, not even Orthodox, but Conservative—very Conservative. “You look mixed up,” he said. “Should I explain?”
“Please.”
“On the most basic level—this is a gross oversimplification, of course—Conservative Jews obsess about what they eat and have a lot of kids.”
“Sounds Italian,” I said. Which still did not explain why Strauss’s father would object to having this fellow in the family. “So how many kids does she have?”
“A boy and two twins. I mean, a set of twins. Three all together.” Strauss looked flustered for a moment, then added, “Of course, she’s lucky to have any at all.”
Quite matter-of-factly, he informed me his sister suffered from fertility problems, which she finally overcame by using a drug manufactured by our very own mother company, Boorman Pharmaceuticals. After she had her first child she was photographed and quoted in a four-color glossy ad for the drug that ran in JAMA.
“I don’t think my parents approved of the publicity,” Strauss said. “But now they do nothing but dote on the grandchildren. The oldest one can talk now, and he says things like, ‘You know what, Uncle Ibby? Your birthday is the day when you were born.’ ”
“The kid’s a genius.”
“So my parents think,” Strauss said, smiling.
I smiled back, in a way I hoped illustrated the meaning of the adverb warmly. Because all of a sudden I found myself liking him. Really liking him.
The waiter brought our salads. After the first glass of wine—and the tenth time he called me Lisar (clear evidence that not all of Brooklyn had been pounded out of him)—I didn’t have the heart to suggest he might want to drop the superfluous r on the end of my name, so I told him, “People close to me call me Lise.”
He wanted to know what Lise did on the weekends.
“You probably play golf,” I said.
“Badly.”
“Isn’t that the core curriculum at Harvard Business School—how to distinguish between a wood and an iron?”
He took the gibe well. “Yes, and to get your degree at Cornell you stand in front of the dean while he holds up two screwdrivers. If you can’t identify the Phillips, you get to graduate.”
“Which one has the four prongs?” I asked.
“You forget I graduated.”
“Summa?”
“Magna. And you?”
“Just cum.” But I didn’t give the U enough resonance and the word sounded slightly obscene when it came out. So I quickly added, “But I bombed biology. Don’t tell—” I was saved from uttering Peg’s name by the arrival of the bread.
He returned to his original topic. “You must do things on the weekends with your girlfriends.” He took a sip of wine and added, “Or maybe I should say boyfriends?”
I wanted to laugh at the 1950s ring to his vocabulary. “If you’re still trying to identify my bodyguard that Saturday you saw me in the office—”
“I’ve tried not to give it too much thought—”
“It was my cousin. I’m close to my cousin. Of course, he’s gay.”
The minute the words were out of my mouth, I felt as if I had betrayed Dodie, by doing exactly what he didn’t want me to do: identify him first and foremost, just like Auntie Beppina, by where he did or did not plug it.
Strauss answered only with a nod and then by adding that he hoped I didn’t mind him saying this? he really didn’t believe in making generalizations, but—?
“Spit it out,” I told him.
—but he supposed, from what little I had told him, that this was rather taboo in my family, just as it would be in his?
“You got it,” I said.
I didn’t go on to embellish my relationship with my cousin. I didn’t tell Strauss that Dodie was the only person in my family I could talk to about anything more significant than the tide patterns in New Haven Harbor and the results of the Connecticut Lottery. I did not say that when I left his apartment, Dodie handed me a long rectangular pan and asked if I could manage to get it home on the train without getting mugged for the treasure within—a dozen beautifully rolled vegetable enchiladas. I didn’t tell him that Dodie gave me a bowl full of black beans and a container full of five-alarm salsa that he assured me must be consumed only on the weekends, in the privacy of my own home, or he would not be held responsible for the consequences. I didn’t say Dodie made the best pot brownies this side of the Mississippi, and baby, did they send me flying. I did not tell Strauss that Dodie was the only man—indeed, the only person on the planet—I knew who had read all of Proust and who liked to discuss the motives of the characters and compare the relative merits of the focused Albertine Disparue with the broad scope of Cities of the Plain. I didn’t tell Strauss that my cousin directed where I invested my very limited amount of extra money, so that over the years I had accumulated much more than I ever would bumbling around in the world of mutual funds and stocks and bonds all by myself or by letting it sit in a savings account, where it would collect a measly two-and-one-half percent.
Instead, o
ver my Friday fish dinner, I played Peter and betrayed my cousin once more by giving Strauss a mildly ugly reading of my relationship to Dodie, an interpretation not without a grain of truth: that I liked to invite Dodie to dinner because he cleaned up so well afterward—better and cheaper than a maid, the price being only a little bit of scolding about what a slob I was. I left out the best part of this story: that the last time Dodie went on a cleaning rampage he went so far as to invade my bathroom and come back with my toothbrush, which he sprinkled with Comet and used to polish the filthy, water-stained spigots. When I protested, Dodie said, “You’re supposed to change your toothbrush every six months anyway. Relax, Garlic Breath. I’ll get you a new Oral-B in the morning.”
After a blast of cappuccino and a few spoonfuls of Strauss’s zabaglione, which I felt obliged to eat rather than admit that eggs sometimes upset my sensitive tummy, Strauss took me home. In the parking lot, I didn’t grab him by the lapels and say, “Let’s get upstairs and read my tarot cards!” but I did invite him in for a highly redundant round of coffee, which I actually felt forced to make once we were in the kitchen, until he said, “You know, I really shouldn’t have any more; I’ll never get to sleep.” I was just about to take this as a cue to slip into the bathroom and discreetly address the birth-control situation, when Strauss squelched my desire by examining the stuff I had posted on my refrigerator, which I had forgotten to hide in my haste to scrub out the bathtub and change the sheets, pegging him as the kind of guy who expected to spend the entire night.
God, why didn’t I remember to take that shit down before he could find out I clipped coupons for Jergens soap and belonged to the Hanes panty-hose club at Macy’s? Why didn’t I toss that coupon from the Toyota dealership that announced YOU NEED A LUBE RIGHT NOW! Why didn’t I hide that grainy photograph that showed Dodie and me singing into a microphone at a Little Italy coffee bar on La Festa di San Gennaro? After smoking a big stiff joint and throwing back three shots of grappa each, Dodie and I had belted out “Bella Ciao” to a ragged accordion accompaniment and then thunderous cheers. This performance had felt radically different from the time we stood as fifth-graders on the front steps of the Hartford capitol two weeks before election day and sang, “Buon giorno, mio caro,” to a group of dark-suited state senators, who felt obliged to show their appreciation of Italian-American culture with a polite round of Protestant applause.
“That’s a horrible old photo,” I said, when Strauss kept peering at it.
“I have to say, red eyes don’t become you, Lisar. Is this your cousin?”
“That’s my one-time drug buddy,” I blurted out, kicking myself a moment later for not blaming my pot-red eyes on the camera’s flash.
When Strauss remarked, a little too neutrally, “You don’t strike me as the type who does—I mean did—drugs,” I knew I had better put a lid on a large part of my history with Dodie.
I also suddenly remembered I was standing in the kitchen with one of six vice-presidents of my company, which had a clearly articulated substance-abuse policy. Before I was hired I had to sign an oath that I did not abuse drugs, including alcohol, and sign consent for an FBI background check. I had blithely put my pen to the document, curling the last a and o in my names with a flourish, as if to express my good fortune in never having been arrested. Three hours later I was in Dodie’s apartment, quarked out on ludes, my head hanging off the mattress so when Dodie came out of the kitchen in his I’ll Be Grateful When They’re Dead T-shirt, he not only looked upside down, but double. “May I have this dance?” Dodie had asked the two obscene-looking squash we earlier had selected at the Korean grocer’s. He bowed to the first squash and then waltzed with it for a few moments before dumping it for his next partner.
“Whatever happened to George?” I asked Dodie in a slow-motion voice. “You’ve never told me why you broke up with George.”
“He played bridge. And he sang in a barbershop quartet—”
“But he had such great hair.”
“Don’t ever date a man who cooks for his own mother,” Dodie told me. “Don’t even talk to a man who talks to his mother.”
But I hadn’t heeded Dodie’s warning. There I stood in my own kitchen, with exactly that kind of dutiful man. I doubted Eben Strauss had ever waltzed with a root vegetable. I was sure he called his mother every Sunday morning.
I told Strauss, “There’s a rumor circulating at work—”
“There’s always a rumor circulating at work—”
“—that we all might have to undergo random drug testing.”
“Everyone in the lab has to undergo a weekly urine screening. That’s policy.”
“The question is, will we all have to pee into a Dixie cup on Monday morning?”
“If the spirit moves you, please feel free. Unless you’re afraid you won’t pass—”
“That picture was taken in college,” I said.
Strauss finally gave me a smile. “I was young once. Too.”
“I’m twenty-five.”
“I’m thirty-six,” he said. “Does that surprise you?”
“Not at all,” I said, holding back an astounded gasp. “And you’ve never been married before?”
“No,” he said. “Have you?”
“Good God, no,” I said. And when I asked, “Do I look like it?” he peered over my shoulder at the doorway and said, “Is there a living room back there?”
I invited him into it. I sat on the couch and slipped off my Pappagallos. He sat on the chair and leaned back all the way. He asked me about my former stint in publishing, and when he found out I used to live in Brooklyn, he got all nostalgic and started talking about the bridge and Prospect Park, until I told him about the two-ton rat I found chowing down on a Brillo pad in my grungy apartment, and he assured me New York had become a jungle, there was crime everywhere, the filth now overshadowed the fun and the glamour, and he stopped just short of uttering what my uncles always used to say when I went home for Christmas: The Big Apple is no place for a nice-a-girl like you!
We conversed about the revitalization of downtown Ossining and the ominous presence of Sing Sing, and then, after breaking our own established rule and wandering onto shop talk, we ended up squatting on the very subject we both had been trying to avoid all evening.
“Peg thinks very highly of your work,” Strauss said.
“She never says so.”
“She’s not one for superfluous words.”
“So I noticed.”
“You think she’s difficult to please, don’t you?”
Over dinner—after his self-effacing comments about his performance on the green—Strauss had admitted it was Peggy who had helped him hone his golf game. I thought that showed a fair amount of compassion on her part. I imagined she had taught him how to keep his eye on the ball, but I doubted she had showed him how to be wicked with a driver—or whatever that club was called that packed the most punch.
“I think Peggy’s a hard-ass,” I said, “with a heart.”
“That’s a good read on her.”
But I wanted a better one. Something about Peggy intrigued me. “Why doesn’t she ever give out compliments?”
“She’s of the school that thinks people will fall flat on their face if you pat them on the back.”
“So how am I supposed to know how I’m doing?”
“You can take it from me. I’ll tell you.”
“Will you? How will you? By giving me more work?”
“So you’ve sniffed out my strategy.”
“It took a while. But I think I’m on to you.”
There was a silence. I’d gone too far—either that, or the wine was wearing off for both of us, leading me to add, “Then again, maybe not.”
The wall next to the couch vibrated for a moment. Downstairs, my neighbor had turned on the plumbing. Strauss hesitated before he said, “I hope I haven’t given you the wrong impression by asking you to dinner.”
“Not at all.”
“S
ome people might … misinterpret the gesture.”
“Of course.” Because all the fun of the evening seemed to be rapidly slipping away, I said, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being friends outside of the office.”
“Nor do I.”
“But I know—just like you said—some people might have other opinions.”
He paused. I was about to ask him if he’d like to hear my opinion, when my voice was stolen away by the digital clock on the side of the couch, which clicked as it slipped forward onto 11:48. We both looked at it, and as if he feared his Audi was about to turn into a pumpkin, he cleared his throat, glanced at his watch to confirm my clock was right, and said perhaps this discussion was best reserved for another time. He had enjoyed the evening. It was late and he needed his rest—“No,” he insisted, holding up his hands as he rose from his chair, “don’t protest, I’m an old man, I remember the dollar movie and carbon paper—”
“I remember carbon paper,” I said, and the utter banality of this remark hung in the air like a bad smell that just wouldn’t go away.
Flabbergasted used to be my favorite word when I was in fourth grade. Suddenly I was back at nine years old, astounded by Strauss’s quick turnaround from flirtatiousness to all business. Strauss held out his hand toward me like I was a German shepherd about to perform some canine trick. I took his hand. He actually shook mine, then practically assured me I didn’t have to play guide dog by saying, “I can find my way out.”
“I’ve got manners,” I told him. “I’ll escort you to the door.”
But at the door I discovered that the double locks meant to keep strange men out could effectively detain, for just a crucial moment, another more desirable man within. In my haste to get Strauss inside my apartment, I had left off the safety chain, but I couldn’t remember if I had turned the lock on the doorknob, which functioned as backup to the dead bolt. It turned into the seat-belt scenario all over again, only this time I didn’t dare say, Now we really could be here all night.
