Some days later, Nate said there’s gold in the security box, grandmother’s jewelry, take it as collateral. She hated his pleading, his putting her in an impossible position, he knew she had to protect her future. What if, she thought, what if… and she wasn’t being selfish, life was unpredictable. She wondered why she’d ever fallen in love with him, he didn’t know her at all. A hardness insinuated itself inside her, and a space opened between them that was palpable to Nate. He appeared to wither before her eyes, too insecure, she realized, he’s nothing like his father. She couldn’t name what he was doing to her, but it was wrong, everything about him and her felt wrong. Meanwhile, Nate’s potential partner waited, an intrepid humiliation returned, and Nate even drank in front of Abigail.
Still, Abigail suppressed her nameless protests and went with him to open the security box. It was strange walking down the hall where they’d first talked and fallen in love, but more terrible she felt it was her death march. The guard opened the door, and Nate and she entered the vault, where two straight-backed chairs were brought to them and then the gray steel box. There was some jewelry, she could have it appraised, some certificates, gold, and bonds. Nate lifted one up to show her, and beneath it lay his little black book. When Abigail reached for it, Nate put his hand on her arm.
—It doesn’t mean anything, I kept it like a scrapbook.
She shook his hand off.
—You lied to me.
She rose, his address book in her hand, evidence of everything she’d been thinking, no one could blame her, she wasn’t responsible, leaving him wasn’t selfish. But it meant nothing, he repeated the next day. It means everything, she repeated, she could never trust him again. He claimed she already didn’t, she wouldn’t lend him money, she insisted that he wouldn’t have asked for it if he really loved her. She wanted a divorce.
—You never loved me, he said.
—That isn’t true, I can’t ever trust you again.
To Nate, her abandonment confirmed his father’s bad opinion of him, and also that his past had caught up to him, it always would. Abigail had to protect herself, no matter what, he didn’t understand.
Their prenuptial agreement made divorce relatively easy, and she was so calm, her friends believed she was in shock, but his betrayal had been awful, they all agreed. When Abigail heard he’d returned to all his old ways, proving her right, that he would’ve just dragged her down, she felt sad but also secure in herself. And she was herself again, her friends thought, especially because Abigail volunteered at an animal shelter on weekends and fed strays on the street as she had during law school. When people at the office asked why, she’d explain she trusted cats and dogs, humans domesticated them, so they’re defenseless without us. But people, she occasionally added, people usually deserve what they get.
More Sex
There were many men she wanted to have sex with, some days more men than other days, though she’d already had sex with many men, but those were the ones who were easy to have sex with or to find for sex, since they lived in the neighborhood; she could meet them at parties or in clubs, even in grocery stores, especially near the beer, wine, and cheese displays, probably because they’re often served at parties. It was easy to find men for sex, because she knew that men think about sex all the time, or every seven minutes, so they’re always ready for sex. She had read the seven-minute statistic in the Times science section some years back and wondered about it. Then she experimented with herself. She set a timer for seven minutes throughout five hours, when she was home, and, whatever she was doing, reading, eating, washing dishes, looking at the ceiling or out of the window, when the alarm went off, she thought about sex. Every seven minutes, she realized, was very frequent, and, if she were feeling sad, it was hard to think about sex, and also she realized she didn’t think about sex, maybe she didn’t know how, and she managed poorly or inadequately to concoct an image or something or someone to fantasize about. Every seven minutes was hard, she didn’t know how men did it, because she didn’t have that kind of imagination, and also she didn’t know for how long men thought about sex every seven minutes. And what did they think up? Their penis entering a woman’s vagina, if they were heterosexual, while she’s moaning, Fuck me, fuck me hard, and was it always the same? Her lack of sexual imagination was one of the reasons she liked going to the movies. There was usually sex in the movies she saw, sometimes lots of it, if it was unrated or X-rated, and sometimes there was soft-core porn-like sex in movies, in so-called love scenes, which activated her dormant, lackluster, or empty fantasy life, but then she often became infatuated with the lead actor and, for a while, she pictured having sex with him. Many of the men she wanted to have sex with were actors, especially those who were good lovers in movies and sometimes on TV. They appeared to be good at sex, although that was hard to define, she didn’t know if it was similar to being good at tennis or some other activity; anyway, to her, inexactly, it was the way they held a female actor, the way they looked into her eyes, the kind of passion they exuded, and, manufactured or not, the sex or passion seemed real to her. She hoped they were really good at sex and not just acting, although actual people do act when having sex, too, though why they do and for what purpose, she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t only faking orgasms, which women were said to do to make men feel better or just to get them to stop, since they really weren’t having any pleasure anyway. Men acted during sex, too, she knew several, some were worse actors than others. But the men she wanted to have sex with, the actual actors, were not available to her, they were in Hollywood, or London, or they were sometimes on the streets of New York City, like Sean Connery, but he was old when she saw him, and Michael Imperioli from The Sopranos, but she had never wanted to have sex with him, he was weaselly, even if she felt sorry for him in his part, and Al Pacino, she’d seen him in an Italian restaurant where he walked around in dark glasses as if he didn’t want anyone looking at him but made such a show of it everyone recognized him, though no one said hello or anything to him, because few do that in New York, mostly people don’t. But none of these actors she had seen in person appealed to her. She wanted to have sex with Daniel Day-Lewis, but only as he was when he played an American Indian/Caucasian in The Last of the Mohicans, not in any of his other roles, he was never again a barechested, mostly silent Indian, and now he didn’t want to act, she heard, and was a shoemaker, and then for a while she wanted sex with David Caruso, when he was on TV in NYPD Blue, because he could do tenderness and seemed gentle and also lusty, but then he quit the show, and she heard he was the opposite of that role, an egomaniacal asshole, and she did not want to have sex with George Clooney, Sean Penn, Tom Hanks, Ralph Fiennes, countless others, even McDreamy in Grey’s Anatomy, because everyone wanted him, and that made him much too common, and in her fantasies, when she could cook one up, she would have had to compete with too many women—and men, probably—for him. There were so many she didn’t want to have sex with that sometimes going to the movies was as disappointing as real sex with actual non-actor—though, on occasion—acting men. But wanting to have sex with men she couldn’t have, because they weren’t around ever, and would ignore her in favor of another actor, male or female, was also all right, because she could easily have sex with men she didn’t necessarily want, and they weren’t so bad, really. She could ask them about what pictures they had in their minds every seven minutes, and she didn’t think she could do that with movie stars.
Dear Ollie
Dear Ollie,
It’s been a long time. I think of you sometimes, and I know you think of me. I take a perverse satisfaction in that, even in the jaded ways you disguise me in your so-called fictions. I really don’t care. But I just read your “manifesto against the past.” No one “votes for guilt.” I also have “funny mental pictures” of that mansion we lived in on the Hudson. It wasn’t “haunted,” except by an unghostly Timothy Leary. Everyone said he dropped acid there. Everyone said they used to have wild parties. Even back then th
e term wild parties bothered me. No one ever gave details.
You and I were the only non-psych students living in the mansion. You and they were older, graduate students, but they were all research psychologists and thought everyone else was crazy, so they devised experiments to prove it. There was that one sullen guy who worked with rats. He had a big room near mine. I used to look in as I passed it. He kept his shoes under the chair of his desk in a certain way, everything in his room had a specific order, and if his shoes were moved even a quarter inch, he went crazy.
Remember when he drove his car into a wall? Then he disappeared. Remember it’s my past, too, you want to “throw into the garbage, to be carted away by muscular men and sent floating on a barge to North Carolina.
One night, you brought a friend home from Juilliard, a fellow student. If you recall, our dining room had dark walls and no electricity. We ate by candlelight—there were many candles in different states of meltdown on the long table that night. About ten, I think.
Before dinner, one of the research psychologists suggested it’d be fun to put blue vegetable dye in the mashed potatoes. Your friend wouldn’t know. We’d act as if the potatoes weren’t blue, just the usual white, and even though your friend might protest and insist they were blue, we’d keeping insisting they were white. We’d just pretend he was crazy for thinking they were blue. We cooked this up in the kitchen. When you came in with him, someone took you aside and told you. You went along with it. Everyone has a streak of sadism, one of the psych guys said.
I don’t remember who brought in the potatoes, we all participated, though, and then we all sat down around the big wooden table. The blue mashed potatoes were served in a glass bowl. Even by candlelight, they were bright blue.
We passed the food. When the bowl of blue potatoes reached your friend, he reacted with delight. Blue mashed potatoes, he said. Someone said, They’re not blue. Your friend said, They’re not? They look blue. Someone else said, No, they’re not. You were sitting next to him.
The potatoes kept going around. Your friend said, again, They really look blue. Everyone acted as if nothing was happening. Your friend kept looking at the bowl. He became visibly agitated. He said, They look blue. Someone said, Maybe it’s the candlelight. The flames have a bluish tinge. Your friend kept looking, squinting his eyes. Then he insisted, They look blue to me. Someone said, with annoyance, Would you stop it? They’re not blue. Your friend turned quiet. He kept looking, though, and we all kept eating.
The coup de grâce, I guess you’d call it, was dessert. In the kitchen, someone decided to dye the milk blue. The cake, coffee, and blue milk were brought to the table. We served the blue milk in a glass pitcher. No one said much as the pitcher went around the table. Your friend watched silently. When it came to him, he stared at the pitcher and poured the blue milk into his coffee. This time, he said nothing. Nothing. At that point I ran into the kitchen. I couldn’t control myself.
Later, you told him. After dinner, when you were alone with him, you told him. But I’m wondering, after all these years, did he ever forgive you? What happened to him? Does he still play the trombone?
You were good, Ollie. But somehow, in “regurgitating the past and moving on,” I’m “the reckless prankster” whose “promiscuous heart” you broke. The only thing in that house you ever broke was your musician friend and crazy Roger’s green plates.
Whatever,
Lynne Tillman
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
But There’s a Family Resemblance
There’s a story in my family about Great Uncle Charley, who didn’t know, until he was eighteen and married Margaret, that women went to the bathroom. It’s always told with that euphemism. My father, whose uncle Charley was, told it to me when I was thirteen, in a father-son rite of passage, his three brothers told their sons and, later, even their daughters, when they loosened up about girls.
When Charley and his brothers were kids, they made up their own basketball team in the Not-So-Tall League, they were all under 5’ 8”. They even had shirts made up; there are six photos of that. I’m named after Great Uncle Charley, they say he guarded like a wild dog. My dad’s generation is taller, mine even taller, except for my twin sisters. They’re short, in every snapshot they look like dwarfs. I pored over the family albums starting when I was a kid; I think it was because I was the youngest and needed to get up to speed fast. I knocked into furniture all the time, too, because I raced around, not looking where I was going, running from everything as if a monster would get me. I’m still covered in bruises.
When I think about Great Uncle Charley’s shock at seeing his blushing bride, Margaret, on the can for the first time, I can visualize it, like a snapshot, but I never knew him, he died before I was born. They say you can’t know the other, you can’t know yourself, and sometimes you don’t want to know the other or yourself. I’m sick of trying and failing. But when I imagine my namesake, I can see a smile and a robust body, because of the family pictures, and I always ask myself: could Uncle Charlie have had any kind of a sex life after that?
I don’t know why they named me after him, I’m not like him, according to my mother, but I feel implicated in his sexual ignorance. Families do that, implicate you in them. There are the twins, and one boy ahead of me, he’s the oldest, and we’re separated, oldest to youngest, by six years, so my mother was kept busy, but my father was the boss at home and in the world. He owned a paper factory, and I developed a love for paper, because he’d bring home samples; I liked to touch them, especially the glossy kind, photographic paper, which I licked until one day my mother shouted, “Stop that. You’ll get cancer.” So I stopped.
After Charley died, a terrible secret exploded on Aunt Margaret, who had a near-fatal heart attack and became an invalid, and then she died when I was ten. My parents still won’t tell me what happened. Neither will Stella, Charley and Margaret’s only daughter, tall and willowy, and strangely silent about everything. Maybe she doesn’t know.
I have a doctorate in cultural anthropology and am a tenured associate professor—the big baby can’t be fired, my brother likes to joke—and teach my students that a family’s implicit contract is to keep its secrets. They’re essential to the kinship bond, which offers protection at a price—loyalty to blood and brood. What happens in the family stays there: no obedience, no protection. I use various media to explain certain phenomena and enduring characteristics, as well as new adaptations, of the American family. For example, Mafia movies succeeded, after the family was hammered during the 1960s, by promoting oaths that, like marriage, were ’til death do you part, while guilt and criminality occurred only by disregarding the Family, not the law. The movies glorified the thugs’ loyalty to the clan, but HBO’s The Sopranos portrayed mob boss Tony Soprano’s sadism so graphically that, Sunday by Sunday, the viewer’s sympathy was shredded. But other genres will fill the bill, there’ll be no end to war stories for an age of permanent war, and, with the cry for blind patriotism, an American’s fidelity to family can be converted into an uncritical devotion to country.
My whole life, I’ve been absorbed in the family photo albums, home movies, and videos, classifying and preserving them, yet each time I look at my mother when she was nine, I stare, rapt: what’s that expression, I wonder. Time passes in looking, I don’t know how long, and the same fantasy occurs: I might see her static face move, speak, explain herself to me; in the videos, when my father sits at the head of the table at holidays, I see his contempt and malevolence and despise him even more. The few photographs I myself shot of him he hated, he said I made him look bad, that he didn’t look like that, and tore them up in front of me. It’s more evidence of his aggression to me.
At home, I study the familiar images, but in the end nothing changes, the movies run along the way they always do, and without close-ups, it’s hard to see their faces, too many people are walking away from the camera, and the photographs don’t open up, either, their surfaces are like closed doors, a
s mysterious as they were when I first saw them. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, that’s the most honest response to explain my mania. I look and wait. The unguarded moments are the best, they’re most available to interpretation and also to no interpretation, but always they remain unguarded moments that I can make more of, just the way I want to make more of my life. Instead, I’m facing their ambiguity, which may be truer. I also collect snapshots and albums of unknown people. My pleasure is that I don’t know them, their anonymity identifies them to me, and, in a sense, through them, I can recognize my anonymity to others. It’s like making yourself a stranger.
The American family sustains itself and mutates along with its movies, TV sitcoms, photographs, video. Since the 1960s, in tandem with political agitation, media have remade it, blood ties are no longer necessary, but family cohesion still requires loyalty and secrecy. Any gay/straight sitcom pledges allegiance to the same flag. And though the worst things happen in families, the most disgusting and painful, with long legacies, the family is still idealized; there’s no replacement yet. It remains necessary for survival, and if you’re not in one, your fate is usually worse. Children in London, taken away from their parents in the Blitz, sent to the countryside for safety, were more traumatized than those who stayed home during the bombings. No matter what kind of terrorism happens in a family, relatives hardly ever betray their families’ secrets. The exceptions become sensations—Roseanne, La Toya Jackson. A member’s self-interest can break any contract, implicit or explicit, in the name of honesty, to cure the family or to get just desserts.
Uncle Jack tried to sell life insurance after Uncle Jerry’s funeral, and then my father stopped speaking to him. It’s nothing to the big world, but the break reverberated in ours, loud, disturbing, and still does. What about weddings? How does the tribe meet, on whose territory? When my oldest first cousin, Betsy, married a black man, only the adults knew. We kids were told Betsy had done something wrong and went away. I figured she’d had an illegitimate baby, as it was called then, but after three beautiful legitimate kids with him, a nice guy, nicer than Betsy, her bigoted father relented, so she was back in the fold, times had changed—look who came to dinner in the movies and lived in big houses on TV. Her kids have refused to have anything to do with us. I don’t blame them.
Someday_ADE Page 4
