by Rita Ciresi
The blinder Strauss seemed to my past—the wanton chapters, at least—the more I wanted to hide it. I metamorphosed from one kind of woman into another. Or maybe I just stopped thinking of myself as a girl. In any case, I quit shopping the Juniors’ department and marched straight to the Misses’. I redid my weekend wardrobe. Gone were the leotards and the tank tops and the bitchin’ black jumpsuit that made me look like a paratrooper. I bought clothes for which the manufacturers provided extra buttons: khaki pants and button-down shirts and even a white broadcloth blouse, which I wore underneath a new jumper on our fourth date. “You look nice,” Strauss said when he came to fetch me, and I thought, okay, moving right along here. But never had I gone at such a snail’s pace.
We always drove at least twenty miles out of town before we began our date. On the bright Sunday afternoon we visited West Point, Strauss wore a pair of tortoiseshell prescription sunglasses that made me want to jump him. As he carefully inspected the foldout map of the grounds we picked up at the visitors’ information center, I speculated whether he always took his glasses off before he moved in for the kill, or if he had ever been so swept away he left them on through the entire act.
“Do you want to see all the chapels?” he asked.
“How many are there?”
“Three. One is Catholic.”
“I’d rather scope out the cadets.”
From behind the light-brown lenses of his sunglasses, Strauss looked at me impassively, and I had the bad feeling he was thinking that my strip Vuarnets didn’t exactly match my excessively prim chintz jumper, with the empire waist that might have given some people the mistaken impression I was pregnant. He quoted from the brochure: “The cadets are on review September through November and March through May only.”
“I guess I’m stuck looking at you, then.”
“There are worse fates, I hope.”
“Could you put that map down?” I asked him. “For half a second?”
I pushed my sunglasses up on my head. Still he did not take the hint. Although the days had been getting hotter and hotter, I had yet to see him in short sleeves—or shorts—but the rolled-up cuffs of his cotton sleeves revealed wiry muscles and the promise of more black body hair than I previously had imagined. I reached out and touched one of his cuffs.
He smiled. “You seem to like my shirt.”
“I do.”
“And the person inside?”
“He also has his attractions. And please don’t tell me that’s useful information.”
“That’s useful information,” he said, and I was about to groan when he looked around the lawn to see if we had an audience. Determining the coast was clear, he leaned over the unfolded map and silenced me with a kiss.
“Will that keep you quiet for a while?” he asked.
“How long do I have to wait for the next one?”
He shook out the map and tried to refold it along the original creases.
“It’s not origami,” I said. “Just fold it any old way.”
“There’s a proper way to do it. Have patience.”
“I am patient. I am very patient.”
“You’ll forgive me if I wouldn’t call that one of your strong points,” he said, as he finally collapsed the map. He put it in his shirt pocket, and when I continued looking at him expectantly, he gave in and put his arm around my shoulder, drawing my head against his chest.
For years I had wondered how Dodie had kept himself from putting his arm around his lovers in public—at least above Fourteenth Street—and now I finally knew the truth of what he answered: But, sweetheart, that’s actually a little side benefit of homophobia—it’s so much sexier not being able to touch someone. The word wrong is a powerful aphrodisiac. Swallow it sometime, and you’ll see what I mean.
“It’s hard seeing you at work,” I told Strauss as we walked along, “and not being able to say anything. But the secrecy is kind of fun.”
“I hate to admit it. But it is.”
“Do you suppose anyone notices?” I asked, although I had given this plenty of thought and had come to the conclusion that if I couldn’t tell if he was hitting on me, how could anyone else pick up on it?
“What’s to notice? I only come down to your office once a week now. I never call you into mine.” He thought about it for a moment. “I saw you in Peg’s office the other day.”
“You should have stuck your head in and offered us greetings.”
Strauss lightly pinched my sleeve. “What did she want?”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to talk shop.”
“It’s an innocent question. Don’t answer if you like.”
“I’m working on more form letters for her.”
“Is she still quibbling about Dear Sir or Madam?”
“So you were listening that day.”
“Guilty.”
“And you were looking at my legs”
“I was not.”
“I was looking at your—”
“Lisar, please. Just hold the line a little. That’s all I ask.”
I shrugged, but not enough to throw off his embrace. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “If Peg asks you to do anything that involves the two of us, tell her your work load is heavy and ask if she can assign it to someone else.”
“But what if it’s a really good job?”
“I don’t care. I’d like your word that you’ll do that.” After a pause, he said, “I’m looking out for you, you know.”
“I can look out for myself. But I’m touched. And you have my word.”
“And now you have my thanks, and let’s drop the subject.” We kept walking. Half a minute later he broke his own rule. “That was a wickedly good imitation of Peg. Say it again.”
“Greetings.”
He laughed.
“I’ve been practicing,” I said.
“I’d hate to see how you imitate me.”
“I don’t want to imitate you,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true, because the root—beer—swilling philanderer in Stop It Some More had lately been blinking and pushing up his glasses far too much for even my own comfort. But I hadn’t told Strauss I was working on a novel, hardly eager to answer his first probable question about the whole endeavor: “So, Lisar, what’s it about?”
The grounds of West Point were dotted with tourists and what appeared to be a group of retirees doing an Elderhostel. By the time we did the circuit of the reservoir and the chapels and the museum that displayed Napoleon’s sword and the baton used by Goering to usher millions to their death, I imagined that everyone who looked at us—for I knew we were giving off that sickeningly saccharine glow of budding lovers—realized I was putty in Strauss’s hands. He called the shots—no matter how gently, and no matter if they always were phrased as questions. He was the one who asked, “Ready to roll?” and “What do you feel like for dinner?” and who asked, “May I see you inside?” when he dropped me off, late, very late, and told me he could only stay a few moments because—he hadn’t wanted to mention it before and ruin the day—he had to go home and pack. The next day he was off to Cincinnati and Des Moines and a couple of other cities no one in their right mind ever elected to visit.
“I’ll miss you,” I said.
We stood in the cramped entry of my apartment, and when I stepped forward to meet him, my foot grazed a blue—and—white golf umbrella I forgot to put away after the last hard rain. I stumbled back against the door. The knob on the end of the safety chain—which wasn’t fastened—dug into my shoulder blade. Strauss held me a long time. We began to kiss, softly at first, and then harder, until he reached down and clumsily unbuttoned the top two—then the top three—buttons on my jumper, and I knew he was annoyed when he realized he had to do the same on my blouse if he wanted to get inside.
How good it felt—his fingers fumbling on the broadcloth, his breath and then his tongue in my ear as he finally made enough progress to slip his hand in my blouse to caress me. Echoing Donna Dilan
o’s inane words to Thomas Akins, I whispered, “Don’t stop, oh, don’t stop kissing me—”
Why didn’t I just keep my mouth shut, instead of giving him bright idears? He immediately pulled away, brought together the two sides of my blouse, and set me away from the door. “I’m leaving now,” he said.
“Call me?”
“Every night.”
He left me half-buttoned and totally frustrated. I had never longed for a guy so badly before in my life, and what made me feel even more helpless was not being able to thoroughly discuss it, not even with Dodie.
“How’s Mr. Mystery?” Dodie asked when he called.
“Stop calling him Mr. Mystery.”
“But Lise—what should I call him? Who is he? A Mafioso?”
“Right.”
“A tae kwon do instructor? No, don’t tell me—you’re running a poetry workshop at Sing Sing. The guy’s a convict. You recite bombastic lyrics at one another from the opposite side of jail bars. You are doomed never to touch—”
I was afraid the last was true. “Dodie, please. I haven’t even gone to bed with this guy—”
“Maybe you better send him in my direction.”
“No way. You degenerate. I feel the vibes. The vibes are there—”
“So what’s the holdup? Have you put on weight or something?”
“Nah.”
“He’s met your mother?”
“Dodie!”
“Maybe he wants you to meet his mother—”
“God forbid.”
“Can you check his prostate?”
“How?”
“God, did you go to college or what?” Dodie laughed. “I can’t wait to meet him.”
“You’re not meeting him.”
“Then you’re not meeting mine.”
“Fine,” I said, although I was curious who Dodie was seeing. Deep inside, I hoped he had gotten back together with George and was just holding back the joyous news as another form of having fun with me. But I didn’t want to say George’s name until Dodie said it to me first. I don’t know why I thought that might jinx their relationship, but I did.
Strauss was gone five days. There were a couple of phone calls from airports and prolonged late—night conversations from Marriotts and Ramada Inns. On the last night before he was due to come back we ran out of news to discuss, and when Strauss said, “I miss you more than I thought I would,” I told him, “Describe the hotel room.”
“It’s just a regular room.”
“Tell me what it’s like,” I said.
“You know. Clean. Empty.”
“Is the bed hard or soft?”
“Hard,” he said.
I cradled the phone in my ear, as if to bring the breathlessness of that word right into the room with me. I started to say, “That’s the way I like it—” when Strauss cut me off
“Lise,” he said. “I— Look. We need to have a long talk. I’m struggling with this. You work under me.”
I let that statement hang in the air. For I had found that sometimes Strauss was just as disconcerted by what I didn’t say as by the pointed suggestions I let fly out of my mouth. Sure enough, my silence got to him. He asked if he could pick me up—at my apartment—the next day on his way back from the airport. He said he found it difficult to talk about sticky issues on the phone, that he wanted to talk to me face to face about the moral dimensions of our relationship. I wanted to tell him, I have a great idear, dear: Let’s not let morals get in the way of our romantic life, but I also let this go unsaid and was glad of it: because the point was completely moot the next day when he picked me up and took me back for the first time to his place, where, without even unloading the luggage from the car, he fucked me on his living—room carpet in front of the fireplace, stopping only long enough to hastily shove a big cotton floor pillow beneath my tush after he asked me if I was protected.
Oh, it had been a long time. Far too long! I’d like to think I sang like Callas when he penetrated me, but I’m sure I moaned like a cow, and kept groaning so loud that if I were back in my flat in Brooklyn, I would have scared off not only the roaches, but even that enormous rat in my kitchen cabinet.
Afterward we rolled off the pillow and he turned it over—wet side down—and put it beneath our heads. Then he took off his glasses and slid them onto the coffee table. He reached around me and unhooked my bra, which he had pulled down but not removed all the way. I pulled his head close to mine and whispered, “Now we really need to have that talk.”
He gave me a gentle swat on the rump. “I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
“I did.”
“So soon, I meant. I didn’t mean for it to happen so soon.”
“You can’t take it back now.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Strauss said. “In fact, I’m already dreaming of a repeat performance.”
“When?”
“Give me a little downtime.”
“Then give me a little something to drink.”
“Red or white?”
“White,” I said, slightly annoyed that Strauss didn’t remember what I’d already told him: Red wine always gave me a headache. “But don’t go just yet,” I told him, stretching my thigh over his to lock him in a moment more. I kissed the crinkly part of his eyes—which became even more crinkly when he smiled. He smelled like a combination of hotel deodorant soap and the stale smoke of airports. It pleased me.
Strauss’s skin was slightly paler than mine, with a yellow undertone that seemed more pronounced against the plush pile of the cream-colored rug. “Is this your father’s carpet?”
“How did you guess?”
I ran my hand over the pile. “It’s nice carpet. Soft. Good for fucking—”
He smiled. “You make a lot of noise,” he said. I took this as criticism until he pulled my head near his and quietly added, “I like that. I really like that.”
My sense of triumph was completely out of proportion to the compliment—especially considering that I later saw him surreptitiously wiggling his finger in his right ear, as if to gauge whether I had damaged his hearing.
When Strauss got up, he covered me with a cotton throw that had been draped over the armchair—just for this purpose, or was it there because his mother got chilly when she visited? The blanket did not smell like Strauss, nor like anything or anyone else for that matter. It was probably just a decorative piece. As I smoothed the fringed edges I remembered a conversation Dodie and I had in which we determined that the blanket issue was probably the only definitive difference between men and women, beyond the obvious genital issue, of course. “No man—straight or gay—sits on the couch with an afghan tucked around his tootsies,” Dodie had said. “And women—all women—always do.”
While Strauss was in the kitchen—a long galley that looked gleaming white from my position on the floor—I propped my head on the pillow and checked out the place. The inside of the condo was sparsely furnished with a leather sofa and a more inviting dark-brown armchair. Next to the fireplace—covered with a black screen and bricked with pale Umbrian tiles—lay more of the big creamy cotton pillows identical to the one beneath my head. One of the blurrier Degas racehorse prints hung on the wall, and over by the dining area—which consisted only of a glass table and four bentwood chairs—hung an odd photograph of a gargoyle who rudely stuck out his tongue. There was no TV, at least downstairs, which I considered a good sign, but there didn’t seem to be any books around other than a stack of magazines on the coffee table and some week-old Wall Street Journals. We hadn’t talked very much about books—the one time we did, I found out, to my dismay, that Strauss had never read anything by Chekhov—and suddenly I was afraid Strauss read Washington-based power novels, or worse, mysteries. But there was still the upstairs to explore. For a single guy, Strauss had a lot of space.
When we drove in, I noticed the condo was in the far back corner of the complex—and on the end, which undoubtedly added something to the price tag. But who woul
dn’t want to shell out big bucks—if he had it—for this swell unit? The entire back wall of the sunken living room was glass, and the view gave out onto a creek big enough to accommodate sporting little creatures like otters and beavers. On the other side was a thicket of trees that looked like it might be home to even more friendly woodland creatures along the lines of Squirrel Nutkin and Mrs. Tittlemouse.
“Are there deer in those woods?” I called out to Strauss.
“And skunks too.”
“Has Peggy ever visited?”
“Once or twice—why do you ask?”
“She reminds me of Beatrix Potter. You know, the little animals in the forest that always get into mischief—Peter Rabbit, Tom Kitten, Jemima Puddle-Duck?”
“I read one called Pigling Bland to my nephew. Of course, it had to pass the censor first.”
“Is that your brother-in-law?”
“None other.”
“What’s he looking for?”
“Any character who has a larger-than-average nose.”
“That rules out Pinocchio, I guess.”
There was a pause, then Strauss said, “Can you hear me smiling from out there?”
“I’d rather hear you laugh. You don’t laugh enough.”
“But I can’t laugh at that. It drives me crazy, the way he finds anti-Semitism in everything from Shylock to Scrooge McDuck—”
“Who’s Scrooge McDuck?”
“The old one with the glasses. I think he’s supposed to be the grandfather of those triplet ducks—Huey, Dewey, and Louie—or Pee-uwie, I forget their names now—”
“But his beak is no bigger than mine—is it?”
The laugh I finally elicited from Strauss was loud enough to be heard above the clinking and clanking he created as he rummaged through his silverware drawer. I knew I was a prime candidate for a schnoz job. Still, a little argument on his part would have been polite.
I heard the drawer close. “What I’m trying to tell you,” Strauss called out, “is that he finds it everywhere. He would find it in you, and he definitely finds it in me.”
