A Little Change of Face

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  And he was gone.

  When my mother arrived two minutes later, I was still standing in the doorway, still feeling that hit-by-a-bus kind of stunned. Sure, I’d agreed with Pam that Saul’s feelings needed to be tested, but I’d never imagined Mush and Teenie so thoroughly taking things out of my hands and I’d certainly never imagined it going like this.

  “I’m sorry I’m late.” My mother bustled past me. “I stopped to pick up some videos for the kids.”

  I saw, as she unpacked her schlep bag, that she had three videos—all with either scare or fear in the title—as well as several two-liter bottles of soda and industrial-size bags of salty foods. Apparently, my mother knew kids a lot better than I did.

  “Where’s Saul?” my mother asked.

  I shut the door behind her. “Been and gone,” I said.

  “How…?”

  “I don’t think that man likes kids,” Mush said, looking glum.

  “He left soon’s he saw us,” said Teenie.

  “He ain’t good enough for Scarlett,” said Mush.

  I wanted to know why they’d insisted on calling me Mommy in front of Saul, but their support somehow pushed my question aside.

  “He sure ain’t,” said Teenie, “no how.”

  It was touching, really, in its own grimy way.

  “Oh, Scarlett,” my mother said, reaching out to touch my arm in a reassuring gesture. “I’m so sorry.”

  Being the object of anyone’s pity is never a comfortable thing; being the object of one’s mother’s pity is its own separate circle of hell.

  “That’s okay.” I wanted to find a way to make light of it, couldn’t.

  The next thing I did was not a pretty thing, not by any means. But I was supposed to be on a date that night. I’d arranged for a babysitter for the kids, I’d cleaned myself up as best I could under the circumstances. I wanted to be on a date.

  Excusing myself, I went upstairs, found the piece of paper on which I’d written Steve’s number that morning. Before I could second-guess myself, I punched in the numbers, waited, hoping he hadn’t made other plans.

  “Hello?”

  There was his friendly voice.

  “It’s, um,” I paused, forgetting for a minute who I was supposed to be right now. Recently, I’d been Mommy to the kids, Scarlett to my mom, while to Saul I’d been… Oh, that’s right. “It’s Lettie,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said, and I could hear his smile. “I didn’t think you were going to call.”

  “I did get your message this morning,” I said, “but at the time, I’d just made plans for tonight. And now…” God, this was lame—rude and lame. It was a lonely, crappy, small-person thing I was doing here.

  “And now you find yourself suddenly free?”

  “That’s about the size of it.” I realized that I wouldn’t blame him if he hung up on me. “I know it’s—”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “What would you like to do?”

  I had a sudden burst of both energy and inspiration, I felt that good. “I want to take you out,” I said. “I want to show you a good time.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, “I like that plan. But just one thing. I insist on picking you up.”

  I started to object, thinking of the no-neck monsters downstairs, but then I thought: Fine. You want to pick me up? Pick me up. If he turned tail as Saul had done, I’d be no worse off than I’d been before.

  My mother kept the kids busy just long enough in my bedroom that I had a chance to show Steve around.

  He’d arrived more dressed up than I’d ever seen him—khaki pants with a belt, a white button-down shirt so crisp I was tempted to ask him if he’d do my ironing, real shoes with real laces. His hair had that staticky kind of look like he’d tried too many times with the comb to get it just right and he smelled…like a man, naturally giving off that pheromone-infused scent that makes you want to celebrate the other’s otherness.

  When my mother did finally come downstairs, I could tell she was immediately impressed. “This one seems so nice,” she whispered, as Mush and Teenie made their loud entrance, both those things worrying me intensely: my mother’s approval and the kids just being themselves.

  “Mommy!” cried Mush, hurling his big little self at my skirts.

  “Mommy!” cried Teenie, coming up beside me and grabbing on to my hand. “Is this hunk of man your date?”

  Steve looked at Teenie, smiled wide. “Yes,” he said, “I guess I am.”

  He didn’t ask any questions about the kids and I didn’t say. Instead, I took him to Chalk Is Cheap.

  I knew that Delta, if her date with Dave had extended through the weekend as she’d hoped, would not be there. And I knew, from conversations I’d had earlier in the week with Pam and T.B., that neither of them would be there, either, so the coast was clear.

  “You shoot pool?” He smiled his wonder as I put my quarters on the table, marking my coins with the chalk.

  “What’s so surprising about that?” I challenged.

  He thought about it for a minute. “It’s not surprising at all,” he said. “It’s wonderful.”

  I wondered if he’d still think it was wonderful as I proceeded to whup his butt, as well as the butts of the next four guys with quarters on the table.

  “You’re good,” he said, when I returned to the table for a sip of my Chardonnay.

  “You don’t mind just watching?” I said.

  “Not at all. You said you wanted to show me a good time. Well, I’m having one. I like watching someone else do something they love to do.”

  “What would you like to do next?” I asked, when I grew tired of beating all comers.

  “Your call,” he said.

  So I took him to the Danbury Public Library. Of course, it was closed for the night, so we sat outside on a bench in front of the fountain in the cement courtyard.

  “I used to work here,” I said, feeling the cold, feeling the wine, staring up at the stars.

  “Why did you leave?” he asked.

  “I guess I needed a change.”

  “So, what—you exchanged one library for another?”

  “Something like that.” I could smell him next to me.

  “Did you ever think of doing anything else?”

  “Not recently. I belong in libraries.” He smelled a lot nicer than a library.

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s where the stories that get told are kept.” I didn’t want to talk about me anymore. “How about you?” I asked, realizing how little I knew about him. “Is painting shop windows for the holidays the extent of your ambitions?”

  “Not exactly.” He smiled. “I’ve always wanted to be an artist, capital A. I study the works of the masters. It’s not very popular these days, where the emphasis is always on the new, but what I want to do is paint big things, like Tintoretto, things with lots of people and expression, realism made better. Of course, there’s no guarantee that anyone will ever want to look at my work, much less buy it. Until that happens or doesn’t happen, I’m content to do carpentry—which is what I do when I’m not painting windows—and paint the windows to pay the rent. Besides, I like talking to the people who come to watch me work, particularly the kids. It’s not possible to get that kind of interchange when I’m working indoors on a big canvas and I need a certain kind of light.” He looked at me. “I’d paint you.”

  I looked at him close. “I’m going to kiss you now,” I said, deciding it even as the words were coming out of my mouth. “I hope that’s okay with you, because that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  I didn’t wait for an answer, moving in closer to him, looking up at his face, placing my lips on his, taking in the soft feel of his lips for a long moment before parting them with my tongue.

  I kissed him exactly the way I’d been wanting to be kissed myself for so long, no more, no less.

  We stayed like that, connected only by our lips, as the night intensified around us.

  �
�I’d like to take you home with me,” he said, stopping the moment.

  I debated with myself, wondering if I could do it. “No,” I finally decided, “it wouldn’t be fair to my mother to ask her to stay with the kids overnight.”

  “Well, let me at least see you safely home,” he said.

  At home, the kids were still up. Well, obviously; it was only twelve-thirty. They were glued to the TV so firmly that they didn’t even notice that the population in the room had just increased by sixty-six percent.

  “They were little angels,” my mother said, putting on her coat, a parka thing that looked like maybe she thought Fairfield County was about to go tundra.

  Angels? Who was she talking about?

  “You sure you wouldn’t like me to stay a little longer?” she offered, nodding her head at Steve. “Maybe you two could, I don’t know, talk in the kitchen?”

  “That’s all right,” he told her. “I think we’ve got it covered.”

  Then Steve walked my mother to her car, saw her safely behind the wheel and returned, turning off the TV.

  “Hey!” Mush objected.

  “Hey!” Teenie brightened, seeing who it was. “The hunk is back!”

  “I’m going to tell you two a story,” Steve said, “but first you have to get into your sleeping bags.”

  “We’re too old for stories,” said Mush.

  “Shut up,” said Teenie, punching her brother before heeding Steve’s words. “We don’t even have to brush our teeth, so what are you complaining about?”

  With visions of periodontal work later in life for Delta’s kids dancing in my head, I sat down at the dining room table where the kids couldn’t see me, but where I could still hear Steve spin whatever tale he was going to spin.

  “This is a story,” started Steve, “about a painter and a librarian…”

  “We don’t know no painters,” objected Mush, yawning.

  “Maybe you do,” said Steve, and he proceeded to spin a lovely tale, a tale that succeeded in putting Mush and Teenie, with their reliance on fear-based entertainment, to sleep; a tale that succeeded in showing me that he was seeing things in me that I certainly hoped were there, but that I’d never dared hope another human being would see in me. It was like being naked, in the best way possible.

  “I think they’re—” he started to whisper as I walked into view.

  “Shh,” I said, reaching out my hand for his, “come on.”

  I led him upstairs to my bedroom, feeling a disconcerting sense of déjà vu. This was so like the night with Saul on Halloween, but so different, too.

  “Wait here,” I said, leaving him seated on the bed as I went to the bathroom, exchanged glasses for contacts. I didn’t want the feel of even the glasses between us, but I also wanted to be able to see the man I was making love to.

  He didn’t remark on the change, just took my face in his hands, kissed me again.

  “I’ve loved your eyes since the day I first saw you,” he said, looking deep into me, and there was that thing again: that amazing recognition of at once seeing the other person and being seen.

  I let him pull my long dress up over my head, wanting the moment to move faster, wanting to freeze the moment in time.

  “Oh, Lettie,” he said, “I always knew that you’d be beautiful.”

  And then I was being my most indelicate self, hurrying him out of his clothes because I’d always known, somewhere, that he was going to be beautiful, too.

  I kissed my way down his body, hit my knees in front of him, feeling so…grateful, wanting to thank him for seeing me.

  But he stopped me; my mouth having barely grazed his cock, he stopped me.

  “No,” he said, pulling me to my feet. “I want you so bad, I’ll probably come in an instant. If I do, I want to feel you around me.”

  If I was another woman with another man, I might have been disappointed at the prospect of what I wanted so badly being over in an instant. But it wasn’t like that. I loved what his words were telling me so much that I wanted it to be like he wanted it, him coming quickly inside me, waiting for the time to pass for him to become hard again, to do it much longer.

  I lay down on the bed, spread my legs for him to enter me. Then:

  “ShitshitSHIT!” I said, remembering all of a sudden who I was.

  He stopped, pulling back.

  “Um,” he said, “that’s not exactly the response I was hoping—”

  “You don’t know who I am,” I said, punching myself in the forehead with my fist.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I’m the woman who never has condoms in her bedroom drawer,” I said, cursing myself, “that’s who I am.”

  He rolled over to the side of me on his back, striking himself in the forehead with his fist. “ShitshitSHIT!” he said.

  “What—you, too?”

  “Yes,” he spoke his frustration through gritted teeth. “I’m the guy who never keeps condoms in his wallet.”

  I sought for a solution. “We could go out together to get some,” I suggested. But then I remembered the kids downstairs. Sure, they were sleeping now. But if they woke for a minute and discovered themselves to be unchaperoned, who knew what they might do? “Or you could go by yourself and I could stay here…”

  “Shh,” he said, pulling my head onto his shoulder. “As much as I want to make love with you right now, I don’t want to leave you right now even more.”

  “Well, but we could at least—”

  “Shh,” he said, stroking my hair. “I don’t want the first time we’re together to be anything but me inside of you with you around me. Shh, Lettie, we’ll get another chance.”

  You wouldn’t think that two naked people, the sexual tension crackling all around them like an exploding fireworks factory, would be able to sleep, but eventually we did.

  I awoke in the morning to rain striking the windows and an empty pillow, two sheets of paper laid on it, beside me.

  Was I doomed, I wondered, to be the kind of woman that men easily left in the morning?

  The top sheet was a letter:

  Dear Lettie, I’m sorry I had to leave without talking to you first, but I like to paint in the mornings and I didn’t want to disturb you or the kids. I’ve left a little something for you, in appreciation for the most wonderful—and most frustrating!—night ever. I hope you like it. In a way, the part of me that’s scared you won’t like it is relieved that I won’t be there to see your face. By the way, I think I might be falling in love with you, if I’m not already there. Steve

  I turned over the second sheet of paper, wondering what it could be.

  It was a picture of me in profile, sleeping, done crudely with an unsharpened pencil. My short hair stood out at all angles and there were creases around my eyes that I usually tried to avoid looking at whenever I looked in the mirror. Somehow, under Steve’s hand, those creases had become marks of achievement, something I’d won in a long battle, hard fought. My smile, in the sleep he’d captured, was warm and smart, my cheekbone lonely, aching to be touched.

  At first, I didn’t think I knew this woman, wasn’t sure I wanted to, certainly not the lonely part, but then I recognized her and wondered how he had.

  I felt conflicted, looking at that drawing, a swirling mixture of fear and wanting: wanting to be seen; fearing that, once seen, truly seen, I would no longer be loved.

  37

  Knock-knock.

  Knock-knock.

  Knock-knock-KNOCK!—

  The knocking, followed by abject surprise from me, who, having finally flung open the door to confront my impatient caller, was met with:

  “Best Girlfriend!” I shouted as she dropped her backpack-in-place-of-a-suitcase at our feet, obviously sensing that she’d need both arms free to hug me back when I flung myself at her, which I of course did. In between my attempts to hang on to my trusty old life raft of sanity, I did my share of further exclaiming: “Oh, my God, ohmyGod, ohmyGod! What are you doing here?”r />
  “I came to save you from yourself,” she replied, slowly extricating herself from my death grip of a bear hug. As she took a step back, I could see that she was just as startlingly beautiful as she’d ever been. Some things never changed, nor would they ever change, not as long as we two drew breath.

  “Save me from myself?”

  “Well, you never come out to see me.”

  “True.”

  “No matter where I happen to be living.”

  “Also true.”

  “No matter how great a place wherever I happen to be living might make as a travel destination for you, no matter how many weeks you get off a year, no matter how badly you need a change of place, no matter how badly you could use my help, no matter how screwed up your life—”

  “Are we going to cover any new ground today, or are we just going to keep rehashing old territory?”

  “Both,” she conceded.

  “Excuse me, but my memory is failing now that I’m nearly as old as you were eight months ago, so refresh it for me. Just what exactly are you doing here, without a phone call first, without checking to see if I was available this weekend, without any advance notice?” Seeing the look on her face, I hastily added, “Not that I’m not the happiest person in the world to see you here right now, of course.”

  “As I said before,” she took a deep breath, “I came to save you from yourself.”

  “And, as I believe I asked before, save me from myself?”

  She took my hands in hers and really looked at me, with that penetrating kind of depth that human beings rarely use on another, unless they’re a Freudian analyst or they’re playing parts in a movie about people falling in love and they’re trying to simulate that look-deeply-into-each-other’s-souls look that new lovers get at the dawning of love. This rarely happens in real life unless they’re between the ages of puberty and legal drinking age, that penetrating seeing-and-being-seen that most people avoid due to—God, I hate using such a canned phrase, but it is true—intimacy issues.

  I knew exactly what she was seeing with her pinning-the-bug-to-the-lepidopterist’s-slide look.