The man was visiting from London. Someone brought him along to our after-work drinks, introduced him around, and we faced each other at a table ringed with loud friends. The Englishman watched my general flirting, and I watched him watch. So far he’d made talk about airline comfort and the Japanese market. I turned to him.
“What is it you want in a woman?” I demanded, the crackle of abandoning good manners.
“Passion,” he said, and then colored, as if he’d spoken in spite of himself. I was used to that.
Gordon returned to England, and I let the sliver of flirtation between us turn into expensive phone calls. When Patsy invited me to meet her in London, I gave notice at the magazine and went, but not for her. I went for the fresh start embodied by the man. I was almost delirious with hope.
I called Gordon from a sidewalk phone booth, knowing I’d wake him. I told him where to come get me and my suitcase, my breath in the mouthpiece. That first night we were proper, Gordon charmingly sleepy as he made up the guest bed with a white eiderdown. I let him slide past me in the doorway, let our clothes-against-clothes promise tomorrow. He was terribly tall.
How hard we fell, a thunder of the first nights that never stopped its din. The mad carnival of it: my second night in London, he took me out to a straitlaced dinner, and we flirted in every gesture, then tore at each other’s hems and buttons in his front foyer; the next night he scored black-market seats to a hot West End show. We had great, unstoppable sex. Just look at us, we cackled, how well we work out, the shoulder and chest of him, span of hips, which he signed over to me right away. Has anyone ever felt this as much as we do? The third night, he brought home two tickets to Spain, for tomorrow! The sort of thing that would happen to Penelope. “I never take holidays,” Gordon said warmly, wanting me to hear that this was “I’ve fallen in love with you,” and I did hear it, and we went away for two weeks, Madrid and Granada, hotel rooms we assessed at once for how loud we could be making love. “Your first Beatles album, your favorite movie, your best kiss?” “This one.” At the Reform Club his father confided to me tender stories of Gordon’s boyhood and lost mother. They hadn’t known me a month, and they told me everything. Gordon drove with confident speed through the nest of London streets, knowing the right restaurant for Sunday afternoons after sex; and wouldn’t I like a skirt from Agnès B.? Wouldn’t I like the jacket, too? Wool always hangs well. I changed my return ticket and changed it again, staying in London, expertly cared for.
“I made reservations,” my mother said to me over the phone. “The restaurant is called Ménage à Trois!” She giggled. She was in town and, until today, I’d been dying for her to meet Gordon. I tried to ignore the push in her voice, as I was tired of jokes like this.
I said, “We’ll pick you up at your hotel.” Gordon and I were taking her to dinner. (Well, Gordon paid.) We collected her, and she was stoned on painkillers.
“The flight was hell on my back,” she said. “God, you are tall.”
She drank enough vodka before the food came that she never noticed the plates, never shut up. She’d been with Wissam for several years, more than anyone had expected her to last, traveling with him on business between the Middle East and London, New York and Barbados, redecorating his houses, buying copious amounts of gold jewelry duty-free. She said she hadn’t touched coke in ages. She said they were talking about getting married. “The Arab and the Jew,” she said. “Israel can’t work it out, but we can.”
She was supposed to be asking about us, to see I was in love.
The waiter cleared the plates, leaving a white expanse of tablecloth. My mother grabbed Gordon’s cuffs and pulled his hands across to her. She stared at him.
“You must be very good in bed because sex is so important to Susy.”
“Uh,” Gordon said, snapping his hands back.
“She wouldn’t have picked you otherwise.”
“That’s it, stop,” I said. Heat rushed up my neck. I should have warned him, and I hadn’t, hadn’t gotten yet to that part of my life and the way my mother played her role. I wanted to escape to the bathroom, but I couldn’t leave him with her. Although I didn’t know him well, I felt his upright distress. All we had were our first heady and predictive weeks, and now this. I wanted a decorous English boyfriend. And privacy. What she’d said, that was a violation, wasn’t it? She would joke away her behavior a few minutes later, and a few minutes later I wouldn’t be positive things had gone as I remembered.
Gordon paid the bill as she fumbled around in her bag and took another pill. She tried to kiss him on the mouth as he put her in a cab.
“I certainly wasn’t letting her in my car again!” Gordon was trying to be jolly, but we couldn’t laugh. We returned to his house, and he held me, perplexed, as I cried with wordless rage. Then I wanted huge sex to shake her off and remind him this was still us. Don’t look at her, look at me.
The next morning after Gordon left for work I picked up the phone. I needed witnesses beyond him, company. When I reached my sister, my aunt, my grandmother, I heard my mother’s version of the evening, distributed early and absorbed: Bossy, uptight Susy ignored her, then packed her off in a cab, too rude to drive her because she couldn’t wait to get home and fuck her (attractive) new man. She had already warned them: “Susy’s going to lie about this.”
He had the company move him to New York, for me I thought. Gordon was shy about giving me the news. I called Penelope first. She’d appreciate the romance.
“Wow,” she said. “Do you think I’ll ever have a boyfriend like that?”
I never wanted this feeling to go away, the high plain of Love. I’d force its longevity if I had to, stick to fidelity, keep recounting the first starry weeks! We never mentioned the Ménage à Trois dinner, and everyone knew not to talk about Daphne with me. I wasn’t speaking to her. She left me a message, inviting us to her sudden wedding, but I wasn’t interested.
It was work, though, that day, not to go.
Gordon and I moved into a Chelsea loft so enormous I was embarrassed with my friends but gleeful. I felt like a movie star, allowed to take up all that space in the city. Another magazine had hired me, a movie magazine, where I was an editor’s assistant. I took messages from Warren Beatty and Billy Wilder. At home we had stemware, a custom sofa ordered. I waited for the phone company and the cable man. I waited for the man to install the air conditioner, pacing away the morning and then the whole afternoon on the bleached wood floors until the buzzer went. “It doesn’t matter to them, does it, Susanna?” Gordon said. “If you miss a day, no one should mind. It’s the sort of work anyone can do, isn’t it?”
We gave crowded parties during which we didn’t speak to each other but only to our guests, a married sort of thing to do. When my college boyfriend called me I said, “Sorry, Jason, no, not anymore. This is the real thing.” I so much wanted a real thing. In the evenings Gordon stared out the window with its twenty-foot-high view sloping down the island. We had short dinners with my father and avoided talk of politics. I wished he’d stop saying the company paid for everything, his morning taxis, his rent. I wished he’d say “our rent.” Why didn’t I notice how often he had his back turned to me, that what I got of him was his back, his errands, his instructions? The eiderdown must lie like this.
“Must you bite your nails, Susanna?”
I got acrylic nails manicured over my own. Sometimes I went with my sister, meeting her at a corner place she liked on rainy evenings after work. She knew her manicurist by name.
“How’s la dolce vita?” she’d say.
“I don’t know, I can’t tell. It’s kind of flatter. Maybe that’s the way a proper relationship is.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said. She launched into one of her look-what-the-new-guy-did-for-me tales. I was jealous of her carefree liaisons that had nothing but glitz and future to them, and she was jealous of my security.
“Mummy’s coming,” Penelope said. “She’ll be here a week.”
I felt the little stir. “So?”
“Why are you like this? You’re so mean to Mummy.”
“But I’m not!” I said. “I would see her, but when I do, when I do…” What? How could I set all this in front of my sister? The two of them had something else, a unity and barricade, and a complete futility washed over me.
“You never want her when you’re happy,” Penelope said. “You’re so selfish.”
I was waiting for the initial feeling to come back, the to-hell-with-everything-else feeling, the flying-to-Spain thrill, the hurry as he walked through the door, suit jacket half off the quicker to take me to bed. Instead, his decisive step throughout the loft, his concern at the coffeemaker, reminded me of the office. He locked his file cabinet and never spoke of his income, squirreled his mail away. His privacy insulted me. We still made love, which ended in his immediate silence and sleep. We both knew the love affair had shifted, deserved examination, but we were waiting for the custom-made Roman shades. He didn’t like my shoes in the middle of the living room.
“Damn it, Susanna, at the end of the day, to come back to this.”
He always left for work first, and I got home from the magazine before him. A year passed this way. One night, after we’d made love and our bodies were still connected by sweat, he said, “I don’t love you.”
“His heart rate hadn’t even settled down yet!” I told Aunt Irene. We lay on her bed. She’d ordered me Indian food, put everything on a plate.
“Bastard,” she said. She was pragmatic on the subject of love. She’d moved to New York from London several years earlier and Daphne flirted with her new boyfriend when she came to town, but I don’t know if that bothered Irene.
I was sobbing. “He said, ‘I don’t love you anymore.’” If I repeated his words, maybe I’d understand them and stop crying. “Why doesn’t he? I’ve done everything right! I was never unfaithful, this whole year, not even once.”
“You’re not real with him,” Irene said. “You invented the Susy you thought he wanted to see.”
“That’s a liability?” I said. I sat up. “I thought that was a present! I thought it was a brilliant, complicated achievement.”
Gordon and I still had tickets to Mexico, and we still went. Had I been older I would have known that you don’t do that to yourself, but I was sure passion could overcome our situation, his sequestered heart. I was sure, and when we arrived that afternoon it looked like I was right. We had a shaded cabana on the sand and unzipped our suitcases to retrieve the swimsuits we’d packed on top. We applied sunscreen, hands and lotion on skin and sweat, which turned into lovemaking, falling on the bed, the fan swimming above us, the door not even locked. Through the sex, through the coming, I was thinking, No, we won’t break up. Every day we went scuba diving, and I watched Gordon underwater, his blue eyes even paler through his mask, and I reminded myself I was in love with him. At dinner we had nothing to say.
I moved to a studio on Christopher Street, and Gordon brought over a pillow and tossed it on my bed. He planned to sleep there, which meant he could, might, love me still, or again. A few days later, he phoned and asked me to dinner, and we walked to a central point from our apartments. I was dressed for having my clothes come off, one piece at a time, perfume on the pulse points between my legs. I rehearsed the outrageous phrase, the quick come-on and flirt, and walked into the restaurant exhilarated about the rest of the night, as if it were a first date.
“I thought you’d want this back,” Gordon said, before I could say more than hello. He felt at his breast pocket and set a miniature silver clock on the table, an antique my mother had given me. When I’d given it to him, week two, he’d placed it among his cuff links and daily change so he could look at it every morning and night. “I thought you’d want to give it to someone else.”
“Do you have someone else?” I demanded. I was seething, humiliated not to be wanted.
“Actually…,” he said. I thought, Get up and leave, Susanna, go. But I sat stuck to the leather banquette. I wanted one final trip to bed with him, the oblivion and release of breakup sex. He owed me. It would make a better story when I phoned Penelope: “In spite of everything!”
He took a swallow of his gin and tonic and said, “Shall we order?”
He paid for dinner, and I didn’t thank him on purpose, trying to think up every little way to be rude. He walked me to the corner where he turned to face me, and for a second I saw him and what I’d never had access to. “I should tell you about Holly,” he said.
She’d been to our parties. She’d asked how Gordon was in bed. And I’d told her, a tearful lunch with her when the breakup was imminent, days away, when I’d been fixated on what I was about to lose. Holly? I was supposed to be in that role, the late-arriving seductress, the snake of a friend. I shoved my fist into Gordon’s chin, and from the sting in my knuckles I knew I’d hit him, but the punch was clumsy, not the way I would cast it in tomorrow’s report.
When Gordon dumped me, I made the spontaneous lurch at a plane ticket to Barbados. I hadn’t seen my mother since the infamous dinner, and the time off had given me some guilty delight, but my family believed in the extraordinary gesture—deliveries of gigantic gourmet fruit baskets, paying the cute guy’s bar tab. It renewed us, and I counted on the effect, the flood of excitement to mend us. Daphne lived in her husband’s giant house, with the pool, the staff, the wing for guests. Penelope visited her frequently. They also lived in Dubai, for his work.
I got a taxi from the airport, feeling worldly. In the driveway I eased the car door shut, then walked into the living room.
“Oh my God,” said my mother as she came in from the kitchen, her hand jumping to her tan chest. Not speaking to her was how I had protected my fresh romance (she left me no choice, I told friends), but when I sank into her neck I felt crippled and empty for having made things that way.
“Is Gordon with you?”
“We broke up.” Everything hurt, and I wanted her to soothe it. She smelled like white wine, coconut oil and that pharmacy smell from the crushed remnants left inside her pillboxes. She smelled like tea rose, Band-Aids, honey and coffee. I wanted to crumble and cry.
“Baby,” she said, and put me in the guest room over the pool.
Easily, I told her everything. My mother’s ability to read back-story like tea leaves was something people marveled at. I told her of the work hours Gordon kept, the dead mother, the friends he had, the deteriorating quality of our phone calls when he was away on business. Yes, how he was in bed, how I was in bed. Yes, my stubborn denials. Yes (a little carefully), how Aunt Irene had listened and helped. My mother was leaning back against my pillows, poking through my wash bag. Between my reports she held up eye cream and mascara to tell me what they would have cost in duty-free.
“Let’s list five bad things about Gordon,” she said. I shook my head. “Come on, let’s do it. It will help you get over him.”
“He was glad about Desert Storm.”
“No!”
“I can’t think of anything else. Everything was good. I always knew what was going to happen the next day. He was reliable.”
“I want to clear up a few things,” she said. Obviously, she was done with my part, which wounded me, but I could never not listen to her voice. “First, I am really, really sorry about that night I met Gordon, and because of that evening I will never touch another alcoholic drink again.” Her eyes were hugely round, rims wet, the expression she used for absolute earnestness. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to hit her. “The pain of losing you for that year was too much to bear.” When our eyes met, her insistent lock, we both started to cry. I sat down next to her, and she took up my hand and held it against her abdomen. I looked at the way each section of her face seemed to move on its own in isolated muscle groups. It was such a strange trait, as if she couldn’t inhabit her whole face at one time. She could speak without moving her top lip, her bottom one sliding and shifting to compensate. “The other thing, well, I was very nervous. I was meeting the love of your life, and right away I didn’t like him. I thought, if this is the man Susy’s going to marry, I’m going to kill myself. She’ll be unhappy the rest of her life.”
“It didn’t take that long,” I said, inviting myself to cry harder.
“What are you thinking?” she said.
I was thinking that I hated to have failed and hated that she could predict me. “How could you have formed any opinion of Gordon that night? You were completely stoned.”
“Watch it, miss.” She was grave. “I. Am. Sorry.” She let go of me, and her attention drifted, fingers back among my toiletries. “Did I tell you about my exam? You do your own breast exams, don’t you?” She reached out, and I pulled away, stood up. “Well, do you know how to do them? Because I thought I did, but the last time I saw my doctor she found a lump here, and she pushed”—she caught my fingers anyway and pressed them into her breast—“and it really hurt. So I had the mammogram. I don’t know the results yet.”
“A lump? When was this?”
“And then she was feeling around in my ovaries, and said, ‘What’s this lump?’ So that was a sonogram, too.”
“Oh, God.”
“I’m a mess.”
It had taken an hour for me to want to get out, away from her tissue and organs, her foul breath and inquisitions. God damn it.