Games to Play After Dark

by Sarah Gardner Borden

  “You didn’t have as many toys, for one. And I think there was less then, in a lot of ways. Now you know so much and you’re expected to address it all. But. Yes, there were still plenty of little things. Why?” Her mother looked up hopefully. “Are you thinking about going back to work?”

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  “I’m sure the development office would take you back.”

  “Whatever.”

  The girls abruptly abandoned the puzzle and ran screaming upstairs to Kate’s old bedroom.

  “I might spend the night,” Kate told her mother.

  “You and Colin aren’t … ?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t have plans?”

  “He’s out with the guys. I’m going for a drink with Pam,” she said.

  Pam Pellegrino, a friend from Whitney Hall, lived in Hamden now with her husband and kids. Kate hadn’t talked to her in a year.

  Then her mother was staring at her, at her right arm. “Oh, Katie, what happened?”

  “What?” Kate looked where her mother was looking. “Oh, that.”

  “Are you and Colin fighting?”

  “Are you serious? I fell down the stairs, Mom!”

  SHE PARKED in the Broadway lot. She applied lipstick as she walked from her car—she checked her compact, still walking.

  “Going to meet someone, are ya?” the attendant said.

  She laughed a little. “Yes!”

  Well—she was!

  She felt like running toward the Q Club, away from her cluttered, littered car. She anticipated the diffuse lighting, the taciturn waiters, the dish of olives and bread sticks and celery. In college, from time to time, she’d dined there with her father. She would drive her mother’s car to meet him, just like this, maybe even leave the parking lot with a similar high, that of an impending encounter with an exciting person.

  She hung up her coat and located Jack near the front. He stood up as she slid into the wooden booth.

  “It’s all the same!” she said. The sameness thrilled her: the gilt mirrors, the sconces and depictions of ducks at the back of each booth, and the middle table where her father had flipped bread from the end of his fork, where material surfaces had interrupted a possible orbit.

  Jack motioned for the waiter, then looked at Kate carefully, registering all the little things about her: the way her necklace fell into her shirt, the way her hair hung about her shoulders, her collarbone, the old burn in the hollow of her throat where a match tip had flown off and struck her as she lit the grill.

  “What happened there?” He tapped the base of his throat.

  She explained. He raised his eyebrows in dismay. A shame, his look said—she was beautiful there!

  Jack had his drink already, a scotch. Kate ordered a martini. The olives and celery and bread sticks appeared.

  She took in the gap between Jack’s two front teeth, the appealing irregularity of the whole set. A buzzing rose within her, a low pleasant hum—akin to that of a vibrator or a cell phone—that temporarily hid her intentions from herself. It was a familiar sound, one she registered but, by dint of its nature, could not identify. It obscured her immediate plans and actual inclinations as well as the giant fact of Colin. It hung about the table, altering the atmosphere. The buzzing interfered with the voice of the waiter, from whom Kate ordered a Caesar salad and salmon, smiling at him through the sound. The drink came, the food. They discussed Kate’s father: his brilliance, his eccentricities, his abrupt passing, the project he’d been working on at the time of his death.

  “I imagine he wasn’t the easiest person to live with,” Jack said.

  “No. My poor mother.”

  “He talked about you a lot.”

  “Well. That’s usually the way.”

  “So what the hell have you been up to?”

  “Let’s see. Kids. Other stuff. Kids.”

  “You were at Yale for a while, am I right?”

  “Yes. At the development office. Now I volunteer at a shelter. I teach a class on sticking to a budget.”

  Another round of drinks arrived. She didn’t remember more being ordered, but she moved happily into her second martini.

  “You were saying.” He leaned back. She felt him spread his legs under the table.

  She shook her head. “So your ex-wife—was it amicable, or whatever?”

  “Relatively speaking. She got an offer from Harvard. She wanted kids. I didn’t. And so on. We were only together four years.”

  “Four years is sort of perfect. I feel like marriage should be renewable, like a driver’s license or something, or a political office. Electoral terms of marriage.”

  She ate an olive out of her martini, registering, unrepentantly, that she’d just given away crucial information.

  “You know, actually, in some primitive societies they would do just that. Mate for four years, procreate; then when the child was close to four years old—old enough to need only one caregiver—they’d move on and mate with somebody else.”

  “Well, then I am long overdue.” She laughed dismissively. “How old is your youngest?”

  “Robin? She’s four.” The theme felt suddenly embarrassing. She ate another olive.

  “Your kids, what are they like? Do they get along?”

  “They fight, but Lila, the older one, is a dream. Robin’s usually the instigator. The four-year-old. She’s a menace.”

  “So Lila takes after you. Right? I remember you being sort of a dream child.”

  “Maybe for five minutes.”

  “Your dad thought so.”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure he always thought so.”

  “No?”

  “I don’t mean to talk trash about Robin. It’s appropriate, of course, for your kids to defy you; you want them to learn to question authority, but also it doesn’t seem right for them to run the show—sometimes you wish they’d just fall in line. You know? It’s like that after-all-I’ve-done-for-you feeling.”

  “You think you’ll go back to the development office at some point?”

  “Oh, I just had this exact conversation with my mom.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, no! It’s fine. Let’s see. The job itself, I could take it or leave it. The benefits are great, but so are Colin’s. Maybe I’ll work in finance again. I don’t know; I guess I feel like I still haven’t figured out exactly what it is I like to do.” She took a roll from the breadbasket and picked at it. “Anyway, how about you; do you have some sort of research project going?”

  She saw him glance at her neckline. “Well, right now we’re using microwave radiation to determine the conductivity of single-electron transistors.”

  “Hmm. Interesting.” She finished dismantling the roll. She procured another one and looked at it. “Do you remember having dinner here? With my parents? There was some Yale party. You were with a girl.”

  “Lindsey.”

  “Is that who you married?”

  “God, no.”

  “My father was flipping the bread from the end of his fork. Shooting it at the other tables.”

  “Like this?” Jack took the roll from her hand and put it on the end of his fork and hit the tines. The roll soared out of the booth and into the adjacent one.

  “Oh, my God.” She twisted around and got on her knees and looked over. The dining room had emptied except for two male professor types sharing a slice of pie. “No. More like this.” She flipped a second roll. He flipped a third one. A bus-boy removed plates and the breadbasket. The waiter brought the check. Jack signed it.

  “Thank you,” Kate said. “Right. That whole men’s-club thing.”

  “They take women now, you know.”

  “Oh, thank God. Been losing sleep over that.”

  He reached across the table and took her hand. “This is nice, huh?”

  They kissed in the parking lot, beside her car. He slid his arms under her jacket and held her waist. She felt as though she’d swallowed a string and he
was pulling it out of her, a string that had made its way down her throat and through her abdomen and female internal organs and down her vaginal canal, and he was winding it around his wrists; the pressure between her legs intensified, as if yards and yards of magical thickening string moved in and through her.

  “I’m a little drunk, I think,” she said eventually.

  “Want me to drive?”

  He took her keys and drove her to his apartment. He lived, it turned out, in an industrial part of town on the wrong side of the highway and the park. His building had clearly at one point housed some sort of factory. They took the freight elevator up to his floor. She removed her coat and stood shivering in his living room while he adjusted the thermostat. Then she let him pick her up and carry her to his bedroom. At the gallery and at the Q Club he’d seemed skinny, his shoulders narrow under the flannel shirt, but his arms surprised her—they were very strong. His bed was covered in a military manner by a blue batik print. No headboard, no decorative pillows. There was something embarrassing about the bed’s plainness—in that it, this lack of adornment, clearly announced the bed’s functions—something delightful too.

  “Hold on,” she said.

  From the bathroom, she called her mother and left a message saying she had decided to spend the night at home.

  She returned to the bedroom, where Jack was waiting with his beautiful arms crossed behind his neck. She stood at the end of the bed and removed her shirt. Then she lost her nerve and crawled toward him on the bed. Cold air came in around the tall ramshackle windows and brushed her skin. Across the way, a light went off and then on again. The radiator clanked. Jack had put music on, something soft and countryish.

  Underneath him, under the covers, she put her arms around his neck. She laughed.

  “What?” He looked around.

  “This is something I like to do.”

  SHE COVERED HER FACE with her hands. She bit her arm. At one point she became dizzy and gasped on her hands and knees.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I might pass out.”

  She didn’t.

  He slapped her on the ass. He flipped her back over. “Scoot down,” he said. “Like that. Good girl.” He stood up at the edge of the bed and held on to her hips. She hooked her legs over his shoulders.

  “You’re so pretty,” he said. “I love it.”

  SHE BORROWED HIS TOOTHBRUSH and an undershirt to sleep in. She burrowed into his armpit.

  “How old are you, anyway?” she asked.

  “Forty-eight. Old. Old man.”

  While she slept, love, or its alias, infatuation, took her over. It sprang from his pungent armpit, or maybe his toes, and engaged her completely. It colonized her body and brain and turned the vague notion of him into a fully developed ideology. She woke up elated and agitated, as if she knew him and loved him already, as if he’d simply been hidden from her all these years.

  20

  S SHE DROVE to her mother’s the next morning, then home after picking up the kids, her elation persisted.

  Was that all it took? Was that all she’d wanted?

  She went to get waxed at her usual place, where Olga waited critically for her at the desk.

  “Hello, honey. Eyebrow?”

  “No, bikini.” She followed Olga to the back room. She lay quietly with her eyes closed as the older woman ripped her inner thighs apart.

  “You are happy today. I never see you like this.”

  “Yes. I am happy.”

  Outside, a young girl’s voice sounded. “I will leave you here just a minute, honey.” Olga flicked the lights out as she left the room with a physicianlike rustle. Kate lay quietly in the dark. Her crotch itched and burned. “Hello, honey,” Olga said outside.

  “Oh, hi!” the girl said. “Hi!”

  “What, no kiss today?” To the manicurist, Katya: “I am spoilt.”

  The girl laughed. “I saw your son the other day,” she said. “I didn’t know he was your son. But I’ve seen him before … at the Playwright. I was talking about this place in some context, I don’t know what, I have no idea. But someone said, ‘Oh, do you know that there’s a guy who comes here whose mother works there. Curly.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I know about Curly!’ ”

  Voices rose—Katya’s and one or two others. “Curly? Why Curly?”

  Olga said, “Not his hair. Some—he doesn’t tell me. Some secret thing.”

  “Because his hair is straight!”

  “Yes, straight.”

  “So straight!”

  “I don’t know,” Olga said—proud, bemused. “At camp, when we leave, like a celebrity. Pulling out, everybody, ‘Good-bye Curly! Curly!’ ”

  A small silence accumulated around the mystery of Curly. Then Olga went to call him.

  The girl and Katya discussed polish colors. Kate heard Olga’s voice at the back. “Honey? A girl here … ?” She called over her shoulder. “He says hello!” She hung up and returned to the group. “The Three Stooges. Moe and Curly and—”

  “Larry.”

  “Yes, Larry.”

  Olga returned to Kate and her smarting crotch. “Turn over. Knees. Show me the money.” She slapped on wax and ripped. “Your husband will think you are very sexy.”

  “Oh, yes,” Kate said. “My husband.”

  Olga nudged Kate’s hip and Kate lay on her back again. Olga examined her handiwork. She applied baby powder and cooling lotion. “I tell you, if I had choice between evening with a nice gentleman and a good book, I know what I would choose. Every time. Every time.”

  “Really? The book? Really?”

  “Every”—she patted Kate on the thigh and gestured for her to sit up—“time.”

  “Because that is so not what I would pick.”

  “You would pick your husband. Good.”

  “No—I meant, if I were single.”

  “Well, you are young. Still pretty young. You get to be my age, all that just—” She snapped her fingers in the air.

  “What, men, you mean?” Kate retrieved her purse and coat.

  “Well, yes.” Olga gathered up the paper cover, stuck here and there with wax and hair. “Men, and sex.” She shrugged, raised her eyebrows. “You wake up one day and it’s gone. Those feelings.”

  “Really?”

  “Then, you know, you get back to you. Is different. Not bad.”

  “No.” Kate stood in the doorway. She wriggled her hips against the itch in her bikini area. “No. That doesn’t sound bad at all.”

  21

  ATE CHECKED at regular intervals all weekend for an e-mail. On Sunday one materialized. Joy leaped in her like the dancing peppercorns of West Twelfth Street. On Tuesday, after dropping the girls at school, Kate sneaked off to New Haven. Jack buzzed her in and Kate wandered about the drafty apartment, fingering artifacts and piles of academic writings. Then they sat together on his weathered corduroy couch, Kate cross-legged and nervously mauling a recent issue of Applied Physics.

  “Maybe Lila will follow in my dad’s footsteps,” she said. “She loves science. I mean, at least the kindergarten translation.”

  “I thought she wanted to be a ballerina.”

  “Oh, yes. Okay. Ballerina first, physicist later.”

  “What does your husband do again?”

  “Finance. Money management. Private equity.”

  “Right, of course.”

  She looked at their hands together and admired the sight, then pulled hers away and twisted them in her lap and looked down. “We still do it, you know,” she said. “Every now and then. No, but seriously. Every week. Ten days.”

  “You trying to make me jealous?” Jack grabbed her chin and kissed her. He tossed the back pillows one by one off the couch. Clothing followed. Change fell from his pockets. He pulled her knees apart and examined her.

  “Okay, Doctor.” She shifted and tensed her thighs. She tried to align them.

  “No, don’t do that.”

  “My kids wreaked some h
avoc down there.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, yes, they did. I used to be …”

  “No way.” His tongue explored Olga’s impeccable work. “You’re so soft.”

  She clenched one arm over her face and grabbed the couch with the other. Then: “Get something.” She reached into his pants with both hands and gripped him. “I’m ovulating.”

  “You are?” He caught her under her arms and picked her up. She wrapped her legs around his waist. “Beautiful.”

  “Get it.”

  He brought her into the bedroom. “I love carrying you around.” Holding her, he rummaged in a bureau drawer. He put the thing on. He pushed himself up inside of her. She tightened her hold around his neck. He got them onto the bed and spread her legs and pushed her knees up to her chest. “I could fuck you like this all day.”

  “No false modesty, please.”

  “None.”

  “You are good at that.”

  “What, false modesty?”

  “No. The other thing.”

  “I mean it. I could do this all day and all night.”

  She hooked a leg over his shoulder.

  “You are exceptionally flexible, you know that?”

  Lila, her ballerina, pirouetted through her mind. Then Robin. Colin clomped by alongside. All aroused fondness but annoyance as well. She didn’t want them, at least not at the moment. She just wanted Jack. She’d rather lie around an old canning factory on a weekday afternoon engaging in baby-making activities with a near stranger than spend time with her actual babies, their actual father.

  HE TAUGHT MONDAYS, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings she drove up to New Haven and Jack’s apartment in Erector Square (aptly named, she could not help but think). Thanksgiving passed—Colin’s picturesque Darien childhood home, the insufferable Moira and the blue-eyed Liam now a real grown-up kid, the Cornish game hens. The following Tuesday Kate waved good-bye to Colin and the girls, swept dishes into the sink, dressed herself in what she hoped was a fetching getup, and tore out of the driveway.

  “So that night at the club,” she said. She curled up next to Jack under the covers and draped her arm across his chest. “My father told the waiter I flipped the bread, to tease me, remember? And it really bothered me even though I pretended it didn’t. And maybe you could tell, because you said something about my arm, or my aim, and you shot a roll into my father’s wine.”