by Rita Ciresi
“In you! Is he crazy? It’s not like you’re marching around on Yom Kippur with a Yasser Arafat dish towel on your head.”
“But I’m not Jewish enough.”
“But what does that mean?”
The squeaking sound of a corkscrew came from the kitchen. The cork must have been stubborn; Strauss seemed to be talking through slightly gritted teeth. “It means I told him once there are better ways to serve God than to go looking for hatred in every nook and cranny on earth.”
“What’d he say to that?”
“He argued with me and I argued back until my mother said, ‘Please, this headache I have,’ and my father said, ‘Did you hear her, your mother has a headache,’ and then we both shut up.”
“Your house sounds—a little—like my house.”
“I’m sure there are similarities.”
The cork popped.
Strauss came back with a bottle and two goblets. He had not covered himself up—in spite of his insistence or his ill-founded belief that I wanted and needed to. I tried not to stare at him—I had a shy side too—but I looked long enough to confirm his body was just like his philosophy in life: moderation in all things. When he set the bottle and the glasses down on the carpet and got us a few more pillows so we could make a nest together, I told him, “You look good without a tie on.”
“So do you.”
He sat beside me and I adjusted the afghan to cover us both. “This is definitely a man’s place,” I said. “You could open the front door and immediately know that a guy lived here. It just has that aura.”
“Of something lacking?”
“Not really. It just isn’t done up. You know how women always try to do up a place.”
“Like yours,” he said, probably remembering the pictures on the fridge and the lace on my coffee table and the set of clay figures on the bookcase. He had never gone to the back of my apartment, not even to use the bathroom (where I was guilty of keeping scented soaps in a china dish on the back of the toilet) or to peek into my bedroom, which was utterly froufrou in a way I was ashamed to like, because it seemed so adolescent and unsophisticated to have matching crocheted dust ruffles and pillow shams—even if they were pure white—and a cut-glass lamp by the side of my bed.
“How long have you lived here?” I asked Strauss.
“Four years. I waited a year to buy. I wanted to make sure I was happy at Boorman.”
“Are you?”
“If you’re asking me if I want to spend the rest of my life waiting for my luggage to come off the belt at JFK—”
“That’s one way to guarantee an extremely long life.”
“—the answer is no. I wish I were home more often.”
Even when he was in Ossining, Strauss went into the office early and sometimes did not leave until after I had already worked out and showered at the gym. Although I couldn’t quite figure out what he did all day, he certainly put in the hours.
“Why do you work so hard?” I asked him.
“I’m my father’s son,” he said. “You know how that is?”
“Can’t say that I do.”
“I mean, I’ve inherited a competitive streak. I can’t settle for the B. I always want the A. But why do you say you don’t get it? You clearly want the A too.”
My lust for the highest grade wasn’t inherited. My need to ace my classes and be the best editor in the office had nothing to do with my father, unless it was a reaction toward his own complacency. Daddy had worked like a dog, but he had never even dreamed of moving beyond—or even of expanding-his business. His feet—but not his heart—had been stuck in his own cement. The kind of work ethic he had passed on to me was valuable, but I felt it also had engendered something servile in me. I never felt comfortable asking the secretary to type something for me. I cleaned Mr. Coffee and the microwave, chucked the rotten leftovers out of Editorial’s refrigerator, and even dusted my desk the night before the janitor was scheduled to do it.
“Everyone at your level at Boorman seems totally married to their jobs,” I said. “There’s more to life than who has the biggest mound of paper clips.”
“You’re smarter than I am,” Strauss said, “if you’ve figured that out before you turned thirty. I just clued in to that last year.” Strauss poured me some wine—a souvenir from a recent trip to California he had taken with some business-school buddies. The vacation was fun, Strauss said, but there were some awkward moments. He never had much in common with those guys, outside of the hard work they all went through to get through the program. After graduation they all had gone their separate ways—making fortunes and marriages that made The New York Times. Now, on the lam from their wives and kids, they drank too much and told locker-room jokes and kept talking about how they wanted to quit their executive-level jobs and open a coffee bar in Madison, Wisconsin, or Burlington, Vermont, or retire up to the Maine woods and make furniture out of logs they had cut down themselves.
“These are guys who can’t even drive a straight nail, never mind fix a cup of Sanka,” Strauss said. “And all of a sudden they want to be gourmet chefs or lumberjacks.”
“Is that what you call midlife crisis?” I asked. “Have you had yours yet?”
“It’s not part of my game plan.”
I let that one go without comment.
Strauss was the first man I’d ever been with who used the word priorities while he was naked. He told me lately his had been changing. Last winter his plane had landed at LaGuardia in the middle of a sleet storm, and the roads were slicked with a sheet of ice. He had considered staying with his parents in Park Slope, but he needed some papers in his office and decided to chance the drive back. “I was coming up 9A through Yonkers when I went into a skid,” he said. “I practically sideswiped the guardrail. And then, after I sat there for a moment—thank God nobody was coming behind me—I righted the car and kept going. I don’t know why I didn’t pull over. It just seemed so important to make it home. But then when I got here, there were all these rooms in front of me, and they had never seemed so empty—so quiet I could hear the ice cracking on the creek outside the window. I just kept moving from room to room, and there seemed too many places to sit down, and none of them seemed comfortable.”
He asked me if I understood. When I said yes, he seemed to know instinctively that I really meant no.
“Maybe you’re too young,” he said.
“I’m really not that young.”
“But you don’t remember when JFK was called Idlewild.” Strauss poured us both more wine. “What I meant to say is that when I came home I questioned who would care if I crashed the car and killed myself?”
“Your mom and dad, of course.”
“My parents aren’t going to be alive forever.”
“I would miss you. I did miss you, Strauss. I turn on the TV every night when you go away, to see if your plane has crashed.”
“Lisar. I’m very touched.” He smiled. “My mother—and Peg—do the same thing.”
“Peg!”
“She can be a worrywart. She’s a very nervous traveler. She suffers from motion sickness. She can’t sit backward in a stretch limousine. When we take trips together, I have to remind her to take her Dramamine.”
“Oh, don’t tell me these things. Tell me something else.”
“This?” He set my glass down on the carpet and kissed me so long and delicately his tongue seemed to push the taste of the wine around in my mouth.
“Yes, that. And that. Mmm. Give me some more of that.”
As I wrapped my arms around him, I wished the weather were unusual. I wished for rain splattering on the skylight, or maybe—even though it was summer—for some of that snow and sleet that almost killed Strauss on the highway last winter, just so we could hear the wind howling and the ice creaking in the eaves. But it was a rather ordinary late afternoon, the sky beginning to go gray as we embraced. The second time felt slower and sweeter and Strauss had plenty of opportunity to prove his persistence
. I was a long time coming and felt compelled to apologize afterward. As if to prove that Sorry was my middle name, I chose that moment to knock my wine onto the carpet and reveal my lowly upbringing by using my cast-off blouse to soak it up.
“Good thing it’s white wine,” I said. “Or your father’s carpet would be ruined.”
“I doubt he’d mind. Considering the cause.”
“Aren’t your parents prudes?”
“About sex? No, not at all. They want me to be happy.”
“Come on. No way.”
“Why is that so hard to understand?”
“Because I’m a girl.”
“And what did your parents want for their girl?”
“To keep quiet,” I said. “Not to make trouble.”
“Yes, but beyond that.”
“There is no beyond that in my family.”
Up until then I had tried—hard—not to play my violin and to make my childhood seem like a fun joke. But there it sat, for just a moment, noticeable as the wine on the carpet: all my resentment toward my family, the way they had failed me—and the way, I supposed, I had failed them.
I wondered how Strauss had let down his own parents. “You never wanted to go into business with your father?” I asked, imagining a storefront in Brooklyn, bolt after bolt of remnants stacked to the high ceiling, a counter where customers could sit and flip through swatches.
“He has someone under him who will buy out the business when he retires.”
“He’s never pressured you?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” He shrugged. “I find it hard to get excited about carpet.”
“But you’re excited about drugs?”
“Drugs—good drugs—can really help people,” he said.
“Carpet can keep old people from breaking their hips.”
Strauss smiled. “I like the thought, at least, of helping other people. I tried premed. But it was no good. The dissection got to me.”
“You couldn’t stand digging into that poor formaldehyded kitty on the table?”
“It was a pig. I knew if I couldn’t take that, I’d never make it up to the cadavers.”
“You’re too nice to be a doctor,” I said. “Doctors are callous.”
“Not all of them.”
“Oh. Don’t tell me. You have an uncle—”
“All my relatives are in business.”
“So are mine,” I assured him, although I didn’t mention that among these establishments were a tuxedo-rental outfit, a shoemaker’s shop, two liquor stores, a newsstand even my mother seemed aware was a cover for a numbers-running operation, and a storefront labeled FAST CASH NOW FOR YOUR CAR TITLE.
“My mother almost hit the roof when I told her I took a job with a drug company,” I told Strauss. “Get my relatives together on a Sunday and they’ll abuse everyone in the medical profession. For hours they’ll complain about the cost of their high-blood-pressure medicines and hemorrhoid pads. They think Boorman makes its buck off people’s misery.”
Strauss launched into a Kiwanis Club speech that made me want to groan. “As companies go, Boorman has very high ideals. And pharmaceuticals can really help people. I mean, I wish you could have seen my sister before and after she got pregnant. The change was so radical. It turned her life around.”
I didn’t know Strauss’s sister, but already I questioned whether I would like this fertility goddess of Bergen County, who only had to pop a Boorman pill, open her legs to her religious-fanatic husband, and a cornucopia of children came flying forth. On a surreptitious visit to the advertising back files, I had looked up the ad that featured her and the drug that assured her success. She was lit from below, in that fuzzy Hallmark card kind of glow found on Mother’s Day cards. She sat in a rocking chair, and her head was bent toward her swaddled baby, yet I could tell—just from looking at her long, glossy, kinky hair and thin, ballet-dancer features—that if Strauss had gotten the brains in the family, she sure had gotten the looks. She was beautiful in a way I’d never be. And the baby—no words, I thought, could ever adequately describe the beauty of a newborn baby. Already I knew my eyes would grow wet when Carol let me hold Al Dante Junior for the first time. Probably the only thing that would stop me from full-fledged crying would be Carol’s inevitable smug remark: “I hope you’ll have children too, someday, Lisa. Because now you see how wonderful it is.” That would not be the appropriate moment, I knew, to remind Carol how bitterly she had complained to me about her bowling-ball boobs. But I knew I’d be tempted.
The tears that came to my eyes as I gazed at Strauss’s sister in the ad also fortunately were stopped by the text below: In six years, there will be piano and ballet lessons … in sixteen years, boys will come knocking at the front door.…
Oh, Christ, what a barf, I thought, pushing the ad back into the folder and slamming the file drawer shut with a bang. My desire to poke fun at the whole thing was further satisfied when I remembered Strauss mentioned having a nephew, not a niece. His sister’s oldest child—the baby in the picture—was not a girl, but a boy. I wondered how she felt about having his sex changed for the purposes of promoting this fertility drug. Maybe this was the basis for Strauss’s parents’ objection to the ad, which apparently had run for two years in all the medical journals and probably accounted, at least partly, for the drug’s whopping success.
“How old is your sister?” I asked Strauss.
“Thirty-one.”
“And she has three kids!”
“This surprises you, who has fifty-plus cousins?”
Oh, why had I ever told him about those fifty-plus cousins? It just seemed to confirm the stereotype that all Catholic girls had to do was look at a guy and they would squirt out kids faster than sinners spit out frogs in those weird Hieronymus Bosch paintings.
“My sister probably wouldn’t have had kids at all if my brother-in-law hadn’t been so dogged about it,” Strauss said. “I can understand wanting to have children, but he turned it into a crusade—a children-are-the-best-revenge sort of thing. He put so much pressure on her, it was painful to watch.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“As I was reminded by my mother—more than once—it wasn’t my marriage.”
We were both quiet for a moment. Finally I said, “My sister had trouble getting pregnant too.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you had nieces and nephews?”
“I don’t. Carol’s expecting at the end of summer.”
“That’s nice news. You’ll like being an aunt.”
I shrugged. “I get kind of bored by Chutes and Ladders.”
“Uncle Wiggly is much worse,” Strauss said.
“I don’t know about that. Some of the names of the characters are fun at least: Skeezicks. Dr. Possum. And the Bad Pipsisewah.”
“I see you’ve played fairly recently.”
“All those younger cousins,” I assured him.
“Is your mother excited? About your sister’s baby?”
“Believe me, she’s beside herself It’s going to be a boy. She always wanted a boy. So did my father.”
“How old were you when your father died?”
“Twenty-one. He was fifty-nine. Why? How old is your father?”
“Seventy-eight.”
There followed a big pause, while I did what constituted (for me) complicated math in my head. “Wow,” I said. “He had you kind of late too.”
“It was his second marriage.”
“Oh,” I said. “Like the execs at Boorman?”
“Not quite.”
I did more math in my head. “Your mother must be more than a little younger than your father.”
“There’s a difference in age, yes.”
“How much of a difference in age?”
“Fifteen years.”
Now it was my turn to refrain from saying, That’s useful information. “Got any stepbrothers or stepsisters?” I asked.
“No.”
“So who�
��d your father marry the first time around?”
“That’s a long story.”
“We have all night.”
“I’ll save it,” Strauss said, with a finality that I knew was meant to close the subject.
We drank three-quarters of the bottle, and Strauss brought us a plate of peanut butter and crackers that served as our dinner. As we finished up, I told him, “You keep your place really neat.”
“Actually, just the opposite.”
“You?” I asked. “A slob? Your desk at work is always clear.”
“I have a secretary. And here, a cleaning woman. I mostly live upstairs. I’m afraid you’ll have to see it now.”
“It’s almost dark.”
“Yes, but it gets very sunny, very fast, in the morning.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“Of course you’ll spend the night,” Strauss said, as he got up and pulled on his trousers, leading me to think of how my mother and aunts always made fun of bossy men: Hmmph! They think they’re God, but they still have to put their pants on one leg at a time! “I mean, you will spend the night, won’t you? I want you to.”
“I want to too,” I said. All of a sudden I craved nothing more than to watch him do the ordinary things that made him look so much more approachable than he ever was at the office, such as buttoning his wrinkled shirt and buckling his belt.
Strauss said he would bring me something to slip on before he showed me the bedroom, as if I wouldn’t dream of walking naked upstairs with him. But what he brought me from the front-hall closet made me despair: a starched shirt still in its dry-cleaner bag.
I gave him a look that showed him he was hopeless. “Get me something that’s been worn. By you. Preferably a few times.”
“You’re sure?”
I nodded. He went upstairs and I heard him rooting around in his closet or drawers and I knew he had a lot of stinky laundry to choose from. This was confirmed when I followed him up the curved stairwell wearing the denim shirt he brought back for me. He was a disgusting housekeeper. In the room at the top of the stairs, a low bed was covered with wrinkled white sheets and a pile of laundry. The floor was littered with socks and tennis shoes, a pile of receipts and unopened mail sat on the chest of drawers, and in the corner leaned a baseball bat, the hardball kind my father gave me when I went off to college, for the purpose of fending off boys and other intruders and which I seriously thought of using on the rat I found below my kitchen sink before I slammed the cabinet door shut and boxed him in with all three volumes of Remembrance of Things Past. I wondered if Strauss also got his for free at Yankee Stadium on Bat Day.
