“Give me a minute, and I’ll drive you back there,” I said, remembering the kiss in the car at the Larchmont station.
Paulie must have been having the same thought, because her face closed and she said firmly, “No, I’ll call Port Taxi.”
When she was gone, it was as if she had materialized because I’d willed her to, except for the news about Gil she’d brought, and the sorrow that lay around the house afterward, like drifts of snow.
25
BERNIE AND I WERE both nervous our first time together. It was a Friday evening soon after Thanksgiving, and we’d left in the middle of a movie, by mutual, unspoken consent, and gone to my apartment. I’m still not sure what that movie was about. Bernie stubbed his toe on the nightstand getting into bed, where I lay huddled under the blankets, naked and shivering. He whispered a curse into the darkness, and I had to control a wild urge to laugh. Not that I was merry, and not that it was dark enough in there for me to relax. I’d been able to put aside my fears about social diseases and the protocol of conducting an affair. And I wasn’t that concerned right then about Bernie’s problem, either. I was more worried about revealing my weathered body to someone who hadn’t witnessed its weathering. How did Sherry manage that with Nicholas—by using veils? Bernie was a few years older than I was, but he was slender and solid. I could see that much in the shadows as he approached the bed. He smelled good—wintry and a little medicinal—and when he reached for me, I forgot almost everything but the instant, urgent pleasure of his touch. “Don’t be afraid,” I whispered to both of us. “It’s probably like riding a bicycle.”
But it wasn’t simply a matter of physical memory. We didn’t know each other’s bodies, and there was that awkward groping toward discovery. But what is sweeter or more absurd than first sex? Something hurts a little, but you can’t complain, not even if your arm falls into numbness under his weight. The springs are noisy, your bellies slap, and then get sucked together with sweat. Sweat, spittle, scum! A minute ago you were vertical and dressed and deodorant-dry. It’s worse for the woman, I thought, who has to coax the man to rising and guide him in. More like trying to open a door while you’re carrying a tray than like riding a bicycle. And it’s worse for the man, who has to direct the flow of his own blood, and whose watch glows and ticks like a bomb at your ear, and catches the hair on the back of your neck. “Sorry, hold still a minute,” Bernie murmured, trying to engage and disengage himself at once. He was fine, though, finally, just as I’d falsely promised he’d be that evening in the bar. “Oh, sweetie,” he sighed, drowning, like a man saved from drowning.
Later he said that he thought my body was lovely, a veritable garden of delights. Of course he was being gallant, and manic in his relief about his own performance. And he’d taken his glasses off on the way to bed—that’s probably why he’d stumbled, although I liked to think it was the distraction of desire. Perhaps, I thought, doctors have a special fondness for the human form in any shape or condition. I told him that he’d made me very happy, which was true. My happiness was complicated, though. When we lay beside each other, in what Howard and I used to call “the aftermess,” I remembered being married, and imagined that Bernie did the same. It wasn’t that I made anatomical comparisons, not consciously, anyway. It was more a question of habit and mood. Howard had always smoked a last cigarette after making love, while I stayed close to him and plunged into a deep, safe sleep. The cigarette’s flare was a kind of night-light I saw behind my heavy, closing lids. I didn’t dare fall asleep now, for fear of being rude. Bernie and I were still polite strangers, no matter how intimate we’d just been. I felt awkward again, and he seemed to be trying to think of something to say, as if we’d only just met and he wanted to make the right impression. Finally he said, “Oh, come here, you,” hugging me to him roughly, and soon we both slept.
After a few exhausting, passionate weeks, we stopped falling on each other the minute we were alone indoors. We became cozy together, almost married, sharing confidences and the Sunday paper in bed, keeping our ghosts at a safe distance. I told Bernie that he mumbled in his sleep. He said that I was a noisy mouth breather, and he was probably just telling me to be quiet. “Didn’t they take those adenoids out when you were a kid?” he asked, and I opened wide and said “Ahhh,” so he could see. I couldn’t help thinking it was Howard who really needed a doctor in his life.
Bernie didn’t move in with me, although we discussed that possibility, and decided against it, at least for the time being. He did stay overnight whenever he could. One Saturday, his service woke us at 2 a.m. with an emergency call, and he had to leave. I gave him a sleepy, wifely kiss goodbye and rolled right over. When he came back, sometime after dawn, I turned to him the way I used to turn to Howard coming home from a late gig.
But I discovered that even when I was alone I was less lonely than I’d been before. I’d gotten into a regular work routine—the proofreading became easier as I became more familiar with the language of engineers and editors, and my column seemed to be inspired by city living. I’d learned ingenious new ways to combat roaches and mice, and how to make the most out of limited closet space. After much hesitation, I had joined a health club, during one of those discount membership drives they hold every week. I told myself I needed to get in shape for my new life, and that it wouldn’t be anything like phys ed in high school. But it was. It took nerve just to undress in the communal locker room, where some ravishing young creature was always wriggling in or out of a shimmery, flesh-colored leotard. I tried to remember Bernie’s pleasure in my body, and my own. And I tried not to listen to my desperate breathing during Slimnastics.
The most important and daring thing I’d done, though, was to register for a poetry workshop at the New School. We met on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. around a big conference table: twelve men and women and the instructor, a woman about my age named Ruth Trueheart, who’d published seven books of poetry, none of which any of us had ever read. She wrote their titles on the blackboard the first evening, but admitted that they were very hard to find. In fact, they were impossible to find, in any library or bookstore, so I’d placed an order for one of them with a book-search service that advertised in The New Yorker.
Ruth was a good teacher, charitable but honest, and she became a model for me of courage in the face of lost causes. What was a boxful of linty rejection slips compared to seven out-of-print, out-of-mind books? Every Tuesday evening, we read and discussed the poems of two or three of the workshop members. We would dissect each poem, see how it was made, and then try to put it together again in a better way. I hadn’t had a turn at bat yet, but even the thought of it made me sick with anxiety. I would have to bring in something old—I still hadn’t completed a poem out of the fragments I’d written at the library—and the old ones had all been rejected everywhere, without a single personal comment. If I put any of them up for class criticism, maybe the comments would be unbearably personal. I’d never even shown my work to Bernie; I was shyer about that than I’d been about my body.
One afternoon in January we made love, and after we’d slept we got dressed and went out to get something to eat. We walked from restaurant to restaurant on Irving Place, and then Twenty-third Street, reading the menus hung in the steamy windows, unable to make up our minds. I remember that we were holding hands, swinging our arms and laughing about something, when I saw Ann and Spence coming toward us down the street. It’s true that lifelong roles can be instantly reversed; in that moment I became the child, caught at some forbidden activity, and Ann became the omniscient parent. I dropped Bernie’s hand and moved away from him a little, without thinking about doing it, but I’d already seen the shock and disapproval on my daughter’s face. Spence was only on the edge of my vision, a neutral figure in a puffy down jacket and a jaunty scarf, part of the blur of other figures and awnings and neon signs. He said something, and I said, “My, what a happy coincidence,” in what Ann used to refer to as my phony telephone voice. Her face was white and unfor
giving. “What are you two doing around here?” I chirped, and then I tucked my arm through Bernie’s in a belated gesture of loyalty and bravado. Spence said they’d been visiting friends on Gramercy Park. He was like an interpreter between two ill-humored, opposing heads of state. “I wish you’d called,” I scolded, “to let me know you were going to be in the neighborhood.” That sounded as if I would have made plans to see them, when I really meant I’d have hidden out with Bernie until they were gone.
They knew about him, at least vaguely. I’d made a point of telling Ann and Jason that I had a new, close male friend. They could make of that whatever they liked, I’d decided, and in those first excited weeks I hardly thought of my children at all. Now I introduced Bernie. “This is Dr. Rusten,” I said. “Bernie, this is my daughter, Ann, and her husband, Spence.” I realized why I’d used his title and only their first names—I was trying to throw a smoke screen around Bernie and me, and to right the reversal of family roles. But who did I think I was fooling? Surely Ann knew that we’d just come from bed, if not from her old instinct for sexual action, then from that hasty separation of our hands.
We all stood there a while longer, suffering the cold and chattering mindlessly. Bernie asked them to join us for supper, but Spence said it was late, they weren’t hungry, and they wanted to get home before it snowed again. Bernie and I went into the next restaurant we came to, a crowded Greek taverna with live bouzouki music. He ordered a bottle of retsina with our meal. It was strongly bitter, like the cough medicines of my childhood, but we drank every drop of it. On the way back to my apartment, I felt tipsy and terribly blue. Bernie put his arm around me. He said, “You have your own, separate life now, you know.” It was almost an echo of what I’d said to Howard the day Gil died.
“I know,” I told Bernie. I didn’t remind him of how sad and withdrawn he’d become at the end of December, right before his wife’s birthday, or that my ghosts, at least, were still alive.
I called Ann the next morning, after Bernie was gone, and we made a date to meet for lunch at a quiet place in the mid-thirties. After our food was served, I spoke directly and swiftly to her, the way I’d removed Band-Aids from her knees and elbows when she was a child. I told her why I’d left Howard, how much I had loved him, and how deeply betrayed I felt by what he’d done.
She was very quiet while I spoke, turning her fork over and over in her hand, ignoring the salad on her plate.
“I know this all makes you very unhappy, Ann,” I said, “and I’m sorry.”
“I was thinking about how I used to get into bed between you when I was little, in what I always thought of as ‘the warm place,’” she said.
“I have some happy memories, too,” I said.
“Well, don’t they count for anything?” she asked.
“You’re an old married woman yourself now,” I said. “How would you feel if you discovered Spence was unfaithful?”
Her eyes glittered with tears, either for Howard and me, or for the awful possibilities of her own future. “Well,” she said after a long pause, “maybe I wouldn’t mind so much if it was someone I didn’t know.” It was practically a question.
I smiled. “That would give him a pretty wide field, wouldn’t it?” I said.
She smiled back, weakly, bravely. “Can’t you ever forgive Daddy?” she asked.
“Oh, Ann, it’s not as simple as that, it’s not just that single issue,” I said. “It’s the whole sense I had of our marriage, of my life. I felt limited. Oh, dear, I’m making this sound all wrong, like a delayed adolescence or seventies narcissism. I mean I’m not looking for myself or anything like that—but I do want to be on my own right now.”
“Are you in love with him … with Dr. Rusten?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s pretty early. I certainly like him a lot.”
“I’m too old to care this much,” Ann said. “But I can’t help it, it’s like a death in the family.” She sighed. “Mom, do you remember my friend Jane Somkin, in fifth grade?”
“I remember you carried your Barbie dolls back and forth to each other’s houses in those hideous cases. Her parents were divorced, weren’t they?”
“Yes. I think they used to beat each other up or something. Anyway, it was horrible. We’d sit on the twin ruffled beds in Janie’s room, dressing our dolls in their cruisewear or their wedding gowns. Then Janie would hold her stiff little dressed-up Barbie against her chest and rock back and forth, back and forth. I used to ask her what she was doing and she never answered me. Her eyes were sort of glazed over and far away. At first I thought she was just rocking her Barbie to sleep, the way we did our baby dolls. When I was older, I wondered if she’d been masturbating. Now I think she must have been mourning.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “Darling, it takes time, but everyone recovers.”
She sighed again and put the fork down alongside her plate. “Not Jason,” she said. “He needs about forty years on the couch.”
“He’s making an effort, Ann. And next week he’ll have his own marriage to worry about. It’s wonderful of you and Spence to have the wedding at your house.”
“You know I love parties,” she said. “And I get to be one of Sara’s attendants. When we bought her dress at Great Expectations, the salesclerk didn’t even bat an eyelash. They had a whole selection of wedding dresses with expandable waists.”
So the subject was changed, if not resolved, and we were able to turn our attention to lunch.
That night I dreamt of being lost in a maze of streets. Before I was fully awake, I reached across the bed for somebody. I wasn’t sure who I wanted to find there. I had a moment’s panic in which I didn’t recognize the room, either. Then, slowly, the tide in my chest subsided, and the dark shapes around me were furniture once more.
26
IT WAS CRAZY, BUT I felt as if I was on the way to my own wedding again, instead of Jason’s. Except for the pregnant brides, the circumstances were completely different. Paulie and I were married in a small private room in a neighborhood restaurant in Brooklyn, during the lunch rush; I can still hear the not-so-distant banter of the kitchen workers and the crash of china as we said our vows. Jason and Sara’s morning wedding, in Ann’s elegant living room, would certainly have a lot more class. She and Paulie had hired some fancy local caterers to do the breakfast—crepes and Irish salmon and good champagne. This time I was driving there by myself. Twenty-four years ago I was in a cab, wedged between my father and mother, who tried to talk me out of going through with it all the way there. “What’s your hurry?” my mother kept saying, as if Paulie wasn’t three months gone, as if twenty-eight wasn’t considered overripe for bachelors in those days. She even hinted that the baby might not be mine, a claim no one could ever make once he was born. The taxi got stuck in traffic, and we arrived at the restaurant almost a half hour late. There was no private entrance to the private room, and I remember rushing through the main dining room with my parents right behind me, past all the gaping diners, the waiters with their loaded trays. In the little side room, our friends and relatives were standing around impatiently, as if they were waiting for an overdue train to pull into the station. An accordionist was strolling among them, playing a desperate medley of love songs. I didn’t see Paulie right away, and I felt a rush of relief, tinged with disappointment. She was in the ladies’ room, and when she came out, I was right near the door. We looked at each other in an intense way that almost married us right then and there, without the benefit of a ceremony. Still, we went through with the ceremony, although I was a jittery mess just before it was supposed to begin. The end of freedom! My bass man, Roy, who considered himself a card, mimed putting a noose around his neck and stringing himself up. Paulie’s parents flanked her like bookends, and glared at me, and my own mother pinched my arm hard as I broke away from her. The accordionist began to wheeze “Because,” a number I’ve always hated, and I felt something warm trickle, and then run, down my face a
s I went toward Paulie. It was a nosebleed, a gusher, the first and only one of my life. Years later, during a quarrel, Paulie would accuse me of bringing it on deliberately, as a symbol of the period I wanted her to get. But that day she was all concern and tenderness, running to the bar herself for ice cubes to put on the back of my neck. A few minutes later the nosebleed was stanched, and pale and splattered, my collar soaked and my neck numb with cold, I was joined to Paulie in holy matrimony. The accordionist broke into the finale of “The Wedding March,” and there was scattered applause, the way there is for a third-rate act in a noisy club. Sara’s sister had agreed to stand up for her today, but her parents had stuck to their boycott. We’d invited several friends, but only a few members of our families, so Sara wouldn’t feel even worse about the poor representation of hers. My mother had declined the invitation, saying that her feet were bad, as if we’d asked her to walk up from Miami. Paulie’s mother was there, though, and her corsage was crushed between us when she hugged me. “This is the day, Howie darling,” she said. “Our chickens are going to come in. Wait and see.”
I was early this time—only a handful of guests were there before me. Jason hadn’t even arrived yet; he was coming directly from Atlantic City, where his group had played a gig the night before, without Sara. She’d stayed overnight at Ann’s, and I imagined the serious, sisterly talk they must have had—Ann bestowing love secrets and expensive lotions and perfumes on Sara. They seemed to be in cahoots now, along with Sara’s sister, Peggy, whispering and giggling together, looking gorgeous in their wedding clothes. I talked to them for a while, and to Spence, who pinned a red carnation to my lapel. There was an earthy, springlike smell from all the flowers heaped in baskets around the living room. Ann and Spence had rented little gilt chairs with red velvet seats, and a guitarist in a long dress was sitting on one of them, plucking out strains of Albéniz. Paulie was nowhere in sight, and I walked casually around, looking for her. I hadn’t seen her since Gil’s funeral, when she’d stood beside me as they lowered him into the ground. Now I found her in the kitchen, giving last-minute instructions to the caterers. She was wearing a blue silk dress and she had a flower in her hair. Blue is my favorite color, which Paulie once remarked was predictable and not very interesting. But she’d always worn a lot of it to please me, and she even favored songs with the word “blue” in the title: “Blue Moon” … “Am I Blue?” … “My Blue Heaven.”
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