Much as I want to have lunch with Q. (not least because I’m curious to see what he’ll come up with—he’s as ingenious in the kitchen as he is ingratiating in the bedroom), it appears, after the morning Tai Chi class, that I will not move anymore today or perhaps ever again. My head aches, my eyes burn, my arms and legs have given up, and my face in the mirror has a grayish cast. The bed, across the room, calls in its unmistakable lover’s croon, Come to me, come, only I can make you truly happy, oh, how happy I’ll make you, don’t resist, remember how you moan with pleasure the instant we touch. . . . Every cell yearns for that voluptuous embrace. Why deny myself?
I lower myself onto the bed, sinking as a stone sinks, then slowly bring my legs up over the edge and lie back. Once my aching shoulders hit the mattress the ache turns sweet. Ah, the relief, the luxury of not having to bear my own weight. At a time I never expected it, life has sent me another great love. I no longer care whether I’ll ever hoist myself up to visit Q., or write about the seaside town, inventing benign intrigues for the Wire Inspector, the Tree Warden, the Oil Spill Coordinator, the Shellfish Constable. . . .
I don’t feel like sleeping, though. I’ve been awake only a couple of hours. A flick of a switch on the bedside radio summons the vibrations of the universe. Often I pretend the sounds riding the airwaves are for me alone; they offer personally designed little messages in the form of music or news, chance comments, snatches of interviews. Now the sound of a solitary violin trickles out, making a long, cajoling speech. It’s taking time off from its orchestral duties to develop an ascending theme, an extended narrative, a message of . . . what? Hope? Cheer? No, more like complexity and patience. The complexity of patience. The need for it. It sounds like a voice addressing the blue ether, or soothing an injured child. My morning news. It carries me into the melody, lulling me to a half-conscious state in which only my ear is awake.
When it’s over, I find I can move. I switch off the weather report—hot, hot, hot—and inspired by the violin, put on a tape of Mozart’s Exsultate, Jubilate. Slip on sandals, comb my hair, make the little motions of preparation while the music’s splendor reminds me that somewhere people have reason to exult and jubilate, and before I know it I’m walking down the broad way, Broadway arrayed for summer with crowds of vendors: the street is a vast carnival, a performance, the stage set with books, bracelets, rows of sunglasses reflecting dozens of suns, racks of cotton dresses skimming on a breeze, pyramids of oranges and dark avocados, oh, life is abundant. I stop to buy red grapes and fancy cookies for Q. since he’s fussing over lunch, then descend into the subway.
My mind may be dulled but my senses are abnormally alert, and the subway chafes each one in turn. First the eyes: a world of grays. The walls are creamy gray and the floors dark, dust making them soft as suede. The trains are steely gray, the papers at the newsstand pale and wilted. All the faces and clothes dissolve in grayness. The passengers truly look like mourners going about under the streets. The roar of the train erupts out of the long pit, spilling onto the platform like audible lava held in check by the gray walls. At the far end of the car I enter, some unseen but surely gray person has a box blasting heavy gray music. No one suggests he turn it off. People have been killed for less. We’re savvy, we’re grateful he has the box to advertise his rage. Across the aisle a toddler in a stroller drops his pacifier, wails, and his child-mother swats him across the head. Here comes a beggar—another kind of performance artist—delivering a robotized soliloquy about his plight. Three teenage girls giggle hysterically and yank at each other’s frizzed hair, while the old man next to them snores. Warm impersonal thighs press on either side, compacting me. The air smells of grime, sweat, plus something remotely, rancidly burning—probably one of the dozens of fires on the tracks each day. A few yards off, a stuporous man sprawls on three seats; the passengers have left a discreet space around the smell rising from steamy sores on his shins. My tongue tastes bitter. I swallow hard and study the ads but they’re not much distraction. For the most part, they’re exhortations to health, as if the whole city were stubbornly sick, a vast hospital where individual immune systems conspire against the body politic. Ads for acne doctors, for bunion doctors, for anal fissure and hemorrhoid doctors, for hernia doctors; ads for gynecological clinics, for family counseling, for psychiatric services; ads urging a test for HIV, ads for condoms (“If you’re going to play around, play with condoms”—a photo of merry teenagers tossing inflated condoms like balloons); ads for detox programs—“When You’re Ready to Get Off Your High Horse,” appropriate for Ev’s dealers up in the Bronx. And many more. There’s metaphor, I could tell Grace. Not a moment too soon, I climb back out into the clean heat of the sun, my little spurt of jubilation all fizzled out. I can’t remember the sound of Mozart or why the soprano exulted.
The walk to Peter’s apartment leads through a construction site lined with trucks and dumpsters. It’s looked this way for years, as I recall, heaped with rubble and chunks of concrete. Hard to tell if they’re building up or tearing down. An elevator bearing a load of caged workers creakily ascends the scaffolding. Since the street is impassable, I slink through a narrow plywood walkway plastered with a row of identical posters showing a gun aimed straight at me, then emerge into a crowd of men in hard hats, their drills set aside as they lounge on the sidewalk, eating lunch.
“My wife didn’t make my lunch,” one man says to his companions, “and she took her pocketbook with her, so I couldn’t get any money....” I’m out of earshot for the rest, but it makes me wonder again what Q. will come up with, maybe something Italian. I wonder, too, whether he might have attached some innocent woman to himself, a woman soon to be innocent no more. Over the past ten years or so, when Q. has fallen in love, I’ve been gnawed by jealousy yet felt supremely safe. His energies were occupied, he would stop preying on me like a Siren with his voice, his conversation, his repertoire of pungent lines from dramatic literature. Stop asking me to write a play with a role for him. Wouldn’t that be marvelous, Laura—voice booming, face beaming, shedding his fireworks—a play by you with me starring? Oh, yes, he’d like that. I don’t write plays, I told him over and over. I like to write the stuff in between the dialogue. The narrative, we call it.
Q. greets me with open arms and I sink into them, more from fatigue than love. We do our special kiss, the between-friends-and-lovers kiss. Handy, since we never quite know, these days, how the occasion will turn out. It’s almost like an equation in algebra: will the product of passion times affinity prove greater than that of remorse times resentment? Aside from any possible love in Q.’s errant life, the new unknown today is my exhaustion. That can probably outweigh any other factor.
He waves his arm at the surroundings: half-packed cartons, mounds of books, shoes and pots.
We’ll go out, he says, somewhere close. I just couldn’t manage to get lunch together in this mess.
I look around, think it over, judge. He’s right, I’m always judging him, deciding whether or not to take offense and mark his permanent record card. The apartment is a shambles; the chaise I like so much is piled with stuffed shopping bags; anyone would be hard put to move around in that kitchen. Okay, exonerated this time. I needn’t have bothered stopping for the fancy cookies and grapes, though, which I hand him without a word.
How lovely. Thank you, cara. We’ll come back and eat them later. Listen, do you remember that little Mexican place we once ate in? We had such a good time there, didn’t we?
I look at him in shock. Yes, we did, I agree.
We could get a cab and be there in ten minutes.
No, I say. I don’t want to go back there.
How can he even think of it? Something special happened there. Truth. Clarity. Even if they’ve since receded, the memory has to be kept pristine. But not, it seems, for Q. He lives for the moment. He wants an exhilarating experience. Even a warmed-over revival would do. The motherfucker just wants an experience.
Not back there, I repeat.
All right, never mind.
We walk in the opposite direction from the construction, so I never learn what happened to the man whose wife didn’t make his lunch. Had I known how things would turn out, I could have given him the grapes and cookies. After a block and a half, there’s a café with tables and colorful umbrellas outside, crowded with jolly young people dressed mostly in black. To Q., who was a small child during the war, black shirts mean Fascists. His shirts are white or striped. Without consulting, we step inside, where it’s dark, cool, and empty except for a middle-aged blond woman washing glasses at the bar.
Anywhere you like, she waves. We sit in a corner. A waitress appears, dressed in black, too—short skirt, spindly legs, blue and orange spiked hair.
“Love your hair,” says Q.
“Thanks. Do you want to hear the specials?”
For Q., a hot roast beef sandwich with trimmings and for me, a green salad.
A few leaves of lettuce? he asks. That’s all?
I can’t eat anything heavy. It upsets my stomach.
So tell me what’s wrong.
I make short work of that subject. Yes, he claims I could never bore him, but listing symptoms is certainly walking the edge. It bores me, at any rate. Besides, speaking takes too much effort. Sitting upright is effort enough.
Have you been to a doctor? he asks. I want you to go to a good doctor and get this checked out. I really mean it, Laura.
I’m going, Q. I have an appointment.
If I get him talking, I can rest and nibble on my greens, lulled by the spell of his words, his voice. And with a small prod, hardly more than How’ve you been? How are the children?, he’s off and running.
The girls are fine, he reports. Graduate school, jobs, travel, marriage. His second youngest, Renata, is even pregnant again and this time she’ll keep it.
Mostly I’ve been alone a lot, he says. I love it. It’s wonderful, being alone. Do you know, I think that after everything, I’ll probably end up alone.
(Everything: we know what that means. Including me? Am I part of everything? I was the first, the one who jolted his settled life and launched him on this picaresque career.)
It struck me the last time Ann left me, he says. Remember Ann? You do know she came out to stay with me? That lasted six weeks.
Of course I know. Remember I called while she was there and you couldn’t really talk and then you called me back later from the theatre?
Oh, yes, he says. Oh, yes—assaulting his open roast beef sandwich with gusto, washing it down with sips of beer. Well, he goes on, so she left again. Again we decided it wouldn’t work. She was going back to the commune. I drove—
The commune? I didn’t know there were any left.
Sure, there are quite a few.
What kind of commune?
Q. hesitates. Could he be embarrassed? This was a women’s commune, he says, in California.
I almost laugh, but manage not to. I don’t believe it, I say. Do you mean she was choosing between that or you?
He shrugs. I didn’t set up the alternatives, Laura. It wasn’t my idea to live together. It was hers. She got hung up on it. It put me in a ridiculous position, as you see. If she chose the commune, as in fact she did in the end, it wouldn’t be good for my self-esteem, to say the least.
Not an easy choice, I comment.
Thank you, my love. So where was I? Dunque... I drove her to the airport. I came back to my apartment. I walked through the rooms. I looked in the closets. Her clothes were all gone. I lay down on my bed and took a long nap. I got up and took a long bath. I played a tape. Mendelssohn, I think it was. I read a book. It was wonderful.
I laugh. He’s entertaining. No pain at all in Q.’s loving solitude. I like it, too.
I saw her once more after that, he says. She called a few weeks later in semi-hysterics so I flew out to meet her in Santa Monica for the weekend. I stayed in a motel near the beach. We had lunch and sat for hours on a patio overlooking the Pacific, watching the dolphins. It’s warm there all the time, you know. Those people don’t know what suffering is. No wonder the movie industry started in Southern California. It could never have happened in Minneapolis. Anyway, we sat talking for so long we almost forgot to go to my motel for the obligatory half hour of making love. She told me astonishing things. Her parents didn’t let her speak at the dinner table. They said it would do her good to listen to adult conversation. They also had silent evenings a couple of times a week. They were clearing or perhaps it was cleansing their minds.
Maybe that’s why she likes communal life.
Hmm. I never made that connection. They made her do most of the housework, too, laundry, cooking, vacuuming, while they watched. They seemed to think it was cute, a game. They told her she was playing maid, and sometimes they even pretended to pay her.
Pretended? Real money, fake money, or what?
I think real. I didn’t go into it. I’m not a novelist. She also told me things about her ex-husband that you wouldn’t believe. She said he was really a woman.
I don’t get it. An actual woman? Someone from the commune?
Just then the waitress comes by. “Everything all right here?”
“Superb,” says Q. “Ottimo.” They ask that, he murmurs, so later if you get ptomaine poisoning and sue them, they can say they asked if everything was all right and you said yes.
A woman? I repeat.
Oh, Laura, my love, you’re always so literal. He waves his hand in a cavalier way I like, almost knocking over his beer bottle. No. He’s a man. Technically. A swimmer—he almost made the Olympic team. I saw him once in a supermarket in L.A. Muscles, mustache, all the secondary sex characteristics. Works in a bank, drives a big car, very manly. But deep inside he’s a woman, she said. At home he dresses up in women’s clothes, at least he did when they were married.
I suppose that could drive you to a women’s commune.
When they made love, Q. continues, she had to pretend he was a woman. She had to call him Roberta or some such. His name was Robert.
What do you mean, had to? Did he put a gun to her head?
I’m speaking loosely.
Actually that’s not as unusual as you might think, I contribute. I saw a TV program once about men who dress as women at home. Married men. I was in a motel somewhere, on a book tour. I always watch those morning programs when I’m in motels. That’s how I learned who Geraldo was. They didn’t go into what they do in bed, though. Was it like two women making love, or did she have to pretend to be the man?
I don’t know, love. It was a long time ago and she didn’t go into detail.
Did he wear a nightie?
Q. laughs. I don’t know if he wore a nightie, Laura.
(What I should say is, Why are you telling me this? But I’m intrigued. I think of the data bank. I remember the men on the TV show quite well; maybe one of them was this Robert.)
How would a man pretend he’s a woman? I inquire.
Do I know? You have to imagine it. Well, for one thing, she wasn’t allowed to touch his cock.
No. Off-limits.
I thought she didn’t go into detail.
Well, just that. That was all.
I was under the impression men liked that.
Yes, well, they do. You’re correct on that score. Senz’altro. But she wasn’t allowed to.
Didn’t she find anything odd in this?
Of course. I don’t suppose they did it very often. And eventually she left.
So how did she act with you? (Am I actually asking for more?) Did she pretend you were a woman? Out of habit, I mean?
No, no, she was perfectly normal. There was just one thing, though.
The waitress appears again, running her fingers through her spiky hair, and asks if she can take our plates. I have some salad left and Q. is chewing his last French fry, the fork still in his hand.
“No, would you mind leaving them?” he says. “I like to sit awhile with the empty plate in front of me. It feels more like home.”
She rolls her eyes and sidles off.
They’re always in a hurry to take the plates, he says. It’s the fastidiousness of modern life. They want to destroy all evidence of physicality. Puritan America—as if the sight of leftovers were too sordid.
What’s the one thing?
I could never tell when she came. You know how with women you can always .. . I mean, even if they don’t make a lot of noise there are physiological signs. . . .
(Funny how he can look me in the eye and say these things. He wouldn’t be so clinical with a woman he’d never slept with, or with a woman he was currently romancing. How useful I am. Irreplaceable.)
Yes, I’m aware of that, I say.
Well, with her I could never tell. One time things were very quiet and I said, Did you come? And she said, Sure, I came six times.
(Did you come? One of those little jokes. When after a great display, things had calmed down, Did you come? he’d say. Sometimes I’d punch him lightly. Sometimes I’d say no.)
Six times? I echo. My dear Q., with all due respect, I don’t believe that. Researchers have found that some women who never have orgasms think all the nice little feelings along the way are orgasms. If she came six times you’d be able to tell, believe me. You know, what’s truly curious is that she picked you. Because you’re a woman in a way, too, so maybe for her it wasn’t so different from her ex-husband, not to mention the commune. I mean it as a compliment, you understand. You talk, you listen, you do all those womanly things.
Yes. Q. laughs. But I also let people touch my cock.
(As I well recall. But let it go.)
So, did you ever get to the motel for the obligatory lovemaking?
Yes, we finally went. She stayed for an hour. After she left, I stretched out on the bed and gazed out at the ocean. Then I took a long bath. I turned on the TV and watched the news. By that time it was evening. I watched the sunset out the window. I read a book. It was wonderful.
Tell me something. Do you talk about me, too?
You? He looks shocked. Never. I’ve never spoken like this to anyone about you and me. You know I wouldn’t.
Why? Because I’m not weird enough?
Because the way I love you is too important.
I see. Listen, Q., I just can’t sit up anymore.
Come, we’ll go back so you can lie down. I’m sorry I went on so long. He waves for the check. I got carried away, he says.
I encouraged you. It’s grotesque that you tell me these things and I listen. It’s not even titillating. Or only intellectually.
He takes my arm and we walk back to the apartment, into Peter’s bedroom, a maelstrom of clothing, suitcases, books and papers. Still, the bed is welcoming. One is as good as another—I’m promiscuous about beds. I shove things over and flop onto it. Q., too.
Oh, are you going to lie here with me?
Well, where else? Do you want me to sit in the living room and we’ll shout back and forth? Unless—and suddenly he’s not ironic but considerate—unless you really want to sleep?
No, I don’t want to sleep, just rest.
Lying on a bed with Q. is not restful. Many nights we spent together left me frazzled: as a sleeper, he could be jumpy and clutchy or aloof, bunched in a corner. How could I have imagined sleeping a lifetime with him? I would have died young from sheer exhaustion. Yet I’m exhausted now in any case.
Lying next to any man generates sexual vibrations, but with Q. they’re fraught with ambiguity. Since the day I threw him out, that is, and he closed the door so silently.. . . After that, I was always bitter over history while he was bitter because I married. Each of us too proud to show a need, waiting for the other to make a move. At least I think that’s how it was. Why else would he pursue me over the years, always wanting to lie down? Just to be lying beside a woman? It’s also true that he’s happiest with his feet up—probably low blood pressure. I’m the same way. Why stand on ceremony, after all we’ve been through?
With such a tangle of pride and need, it’s a miracle we’ve made love through the years. How does it happen, if neither of us can yield (a bad example of push hands, the Tai Chi teacher would say)? It happens. We touch, we fall together, and it’s happening. It’s ready to happen at a touch. Then it goes on for a while until something else happens, a hasty word, a flare of anger, a love affair—his, not mine, after all, I was married. . . .
Today, though, is different. I want only to lie still. Let’s hope he doesn’t come too close, so I don’t have to back off and hurt his feelings.
He senses how I feel and doesn’t come too close. My feelings are hurt.
On my way here I stopped in Cleveland to see my sister, he says, rolling onto his side, head propped on his elbow to face me. I hadn’t seen her in almost a year, Madonna. Not since her latest divorce. I went over for dinner, saw the ragazzi, that was fine, the usual teenage pandemonium. Nice kids. All different fathers, but they get along. The next night I took her to dinner at my hotel so we could talk. I was staying downtown. The seventeenth floor was all they had, with a little balcony. You know how I feel about heights, Laura. Anyhow, that night Gemma was totally different. Like Mr. Hyde. Ms. Hyde, I should say. She was getting hysterical in the restaurant so we went up to my room. It’s this man she’s in love with. He’s married, what more need I say? She wept and moaned and tore her hair. She wanted me to tell her what to do. Me, of all people! Why? Because I’m still the big brother. Gemma, you know, is a woman who lives for love. She’s spent her whole life searching for love. Amore. In between that, she’s a CPA, as you know, but in actuality she lives for love, not figures. This man, though, also a CPA—he’s in her office, no less—sounds like a CPA to the bone. He doesn’t live for love, I’m sure of that. He sounds very practical. I tried to tell her that. Gemma, I said, for all the wild passion, this Herb sounds like a very practical man. He’s not going to leave his wife. When it comes right down to it, they don’t, most of the time. They stay where they’re comfortable. That is the nature of the beast, says Q., changing his position and leaning closer. I can feel the warm stream of his breath, slightly beery, not unpleasant. I could fall asleep this way, if I let myself.
She wept more and more, he goes on. She wept and moaned so much that it got very late and finally I said, Look, Gemma, cara, it’s very late. Why don’t you just sleep here in the extra bed? You’re in no state to drive. Call the ragazzi and tell them—they’re old enough to stay by themselves, they’ll be fine. So she stretched out on the bed and I lay down on the other bed and turned out the light. Like the old days. Then just as I was falling asleep I heard her starting all over again.
Gemma, I said to her in the dark. I was trying to be patient. Gemma, everybody has gone through this. We’ve all had our love affairs and gone through our pain and heartbreak. That’s all it is, nothing unusual, just pain and heartbreak, magari. I didn’t know what else to say at that point. I was down to the rock-bottom truth. Isn’t that the truth? Finally I fell asleep. When I woke early in the morning, six-thirty, she was gone. She didn’t even leave a note. How do you like that? The first thing I did was, I went out on the balcony to see if she had thrown herself off. I was terrified to look down. Besides how I feel about heights, I thought I’d see her body spattered there in the middle of downtown Cleveland.
But it wasn’t, I say.
No, grazie a Dio. I called her at the office a little after nine just to make sure she got there. She was fine. Ms. Jekyll. As if it had never happened.
Jilly once told me, I say drowsily, about a performance artist who jumped out of a window and managed to have photos taken of himself in midflight. A second-story window—he didn’t really mean it. It was for art, you know. The seventeenth floor would be more than an artistic gesture, I guess. But you’d have more time to get the photos.
I don’t think it’s artistic from any floor. At least I wouldn’t want to see it. I honestly thought she was capable of it, though.
So you’ve seen her secret life, I say.
It’s everyone’s secret life. But why do they tell me?
Because you listen like a woman. Or at least a hermaphrodite.
Huh! I’m improving. Other times you said I was a frog.
That, too.
Dropping off to sleep, I picture Q. slipping into his male costume each morning, hairy skin complete with musculature and genitals. Maybe he keeps on talking while I doze, it’s not impossible. When I open my eyes, Peter is packing clothes in suitcases with Q. following along, trying to help.
“Hello, Laura. Stay where you are, it’s all right. I’ll work around you.” I used to dread Peter’s finding me in his bed. Or on it, as now. Today I don’t care. How will I get home with my eyes hot and my legs clogged with sand, is what I care about.
“Hi, Peter, it’s been quite a while. I’m so sorry about Arthur—how’s he doing?”
“Still dying. What about you, Laura? Quinn tells me you’re not feeling so well.”
“Oh, it’s nothing. Just a little tired.”
The relativity of suffering is a problem. No objective standards of measurement, we’re all entitled to our own—so say the experts. Yet in the face of Arthur’s dying I can hardly complain of my sandbag body, or the little things that slip from my grasp, or my inability to stay upright for more than a few hours at a stretch.
I thank Peter for the hospitality of his bed, and Q. accompanies me downstairs. Peter is moving in two days, he says, holding open the front door. I’ll be working here for a couple of weeks. I never got to tell you about the movie. You wouldn’t by any chance have any room for two weeks, would you, Laura?
(Ah. That’s what the frogs always say in the stories. It’s not enough to have me in your garden, you must keep me by your plate at table; it’s not enough to have me near your plate, you must keep me on your pillow.)
Won’t they put you up somewhere while you’re shooting?
Queens. He gives a pathetic grimace as we head for the comer.
I’m sorry, Q., but I don’t feel well enough for a guest. Besides, I think our time for living together has passed.
Since when am I a guest? I’ll take care of you. I’ve done it before, Laura, don’t you remember? Whatever you need. I’ll make you soups. I’ll rub your back. In fact I’ll rub anywhere you say. You just name it.
It’s too hot for soups. It was April, last time. Look, don’t you have any women here these days? Or have you been away too long?
Nobody. You have the wrong idea about me.
Really. Nobody on the set?
There’s someone who interests me but she’s much too young.
(It’s easy to imagine her, assuming she really exists. I know just what he likes. So well that I could earn a finder’s fee. Elegant women, but not ethereal. Not too thin, firm, not fragile, with a certain grace. A touch of earthiness. Never coarse or crude, yet with an ineffable, barely discernible hint that they might be crude at the right moments. Intelligent, but not quite as intelligent as Q.—there’s my failing. Vastly tolerant, optimistic women.)
How young? I ask.
Never mind. Too young. She’ll be ready in about ten years. Besides, she’s in the motel in Queens, too. He pauses. You know, Laura, you make me say these things. You deliberately provoke them.
Do I? Did I provoke you to tell me about Nadine?
Nadine? Who’s Nadine?
The sexual savage from El Paso.
Oh, Laura. Che sciocchezze. I forgot all about her. It was nothing.
Maybe. But you told me unprovoked.
I thought I could tell you anything. You were the one person. .. . It was amusing. But I see I was mistaken. I remember now. You hung up.
(Indeed I did. It was during a spell when we, more likely he, had decided it was too difficult being lovers; we should be “just friends,” an arrangement that left him free to confide his escapades—after all, I was his best friend. The damnedest thing happened in El Paso, he said over the phone. We did M. Butterfly, and afterwards there was a cast party given by—
Which one were you? I interrupted.
I was the diplomat. What did you think?
I thought maybe you were the mistress, you know, the man who pretends to be the woman all those years.
No, that has to be an Asian.
They could always fix you up.
There are limits. I’m too big. That kind of actor has to be able to look delicate. Anyway, why do you think that?
Because, I keep telling you, you’re a woman at heart. I think you’d be great in that role.
Well, I wasn’t. So anyway, the Chamber of Commerce gave this party and I was introduced to one of the county judges and his wife, Nadine, her name was. She looked young, especially to be married to a judge, but he was a young judge. I guess out in El Paso there’s not a huge supply so they take them younger. Now, you know I’m not captive to Hollywood standards of youth and beauty. That kind of thing means nothing to me. To me a woman is a woman, a person, not flesh at a particular stage of ripeness. I’m definitely not American in that, I’m glad to say. You were the youngest, I’m pretty sure, and you’re not so much younger than I. What is it, ten, twelve years? Well, anyway, this nubile Nadine must have made up her mind the minute she saw me—she was a character, I’ll tell you—because as soon as she got the chance she literally rubbed up against me. That’s the only way to put it. There was definitely some . . . chemistry, magari. I didn’t think much of it, it was just droll. After all, the judge was right across the room, and at this point, well, I’m not one for quickies in hallways and things of that nature, not that I ever was, much. But before she left she asked me my room number at the motel. Expect me, she said, just like that. Wouldn’t you know it, later that night there’s a knock at my door. Circe of the Sunbelt. Not a word of explanation, how, what, anything. There wasn’t time, frankly. It was one of those wild, once-in-a-lifetime things. This woman, Laura, was like a savage. I’ve never seen anything so uninhibited in my life. Q. chuckled. What could I do? She brought out the beast in me.
I pressed my finger soundlessly on the button, then kept the phone off the hook for a while, holding my breath, as if it required my total rigidity to break the connection. A few seconds after I replaced the receiver, the phone rang.
What happened?
We were cut off, I said.
Oh. That’s odd. Well, where were we?
You were in El Paso. Look, I can’t stay on. I’m expecting a call from my editor. It’s important.
At this hour? Okay. Did I run on again? Sorry. So, I’ll talk to you soon. I’ll call you in a couple of days.
I didn’t tell him I found him loathsome. That would only have strengthened the bond. No words could weaken it. His spell thrived on words, exchange. The way out was silence.
Months later when we were lovers again I wanted to ask, What did she do? Maybe I could learn it. I’m willing to learn. But Q. seemed very content—he himself was not what I’d call savage—and I never got around to asking.)
You’re afraid to have me stay, aren’t you? he says, still standing on Peter’s comer.
What are you afraid of? That it will start all over again? That might not be so bad. You never seemed afraid before.
I hail a taxi cruising up the avenue about two blocks south. In less than a minute I’m out of here, out of danger. Did I really hear what I just heard? For a moment the mist clears, my legs are light. I could, maybe, fall into Q.’s arms and erase the past dozen years. . . . Oh, God! It takes the last dregs of my will to master the impulse.
Yes, I’m afraid it might start all over again, I say. I’m also afraid it might not. Or start and stop again.
Q. looks at me with utter comprehension. Maddening. If I leaned forward two inches. . . . No, he just wants a comfortable place to stay for two weeks. With me in it. The taxi pulls up.
Anyway, I say, I have a friend who’s around a lot.
Oh. A man, you mean. You didn’t tell me.
I open the taxi door. No, I say, you’re the one who tells stories.
(So many stories, fed to me like lotuses, that he makes me forget the story of my own life. Well, this time I’m heading home.)
Who is he? I want to know about him. What is he to you? Tell me, this is important.
I’ve got to go now. (I’m in the cab, I give the address, but Q.’s holding the door open.)
You’re very hard on me, Laura, he says, leaning inside.
Hard? I say, as the meter clicks on. Because I can’t fit you in? Because you expect me to be what I’m not. This is who I am now. I can’t change at this point.
How I wish I had it in me to make some perfect gesture, kiss him hard on the lips and say good-bye forever, memorably, or cast a glance so filled with chi that he staggers off in retreat—anything to mark this moment when I am actually standing firm and refusing Q. what he wants, not out of wisdom but some animal instinct of self-preservation. Instead I drop my purse and Q. deftly reaches in to pick it up.
“Well, Missus, we are ready?” asks the turbaned driver.
We never ate the grapes or cookies, I say.
Oh! Q. smacks his forehead dramatically. And they looked so good. Thank you for bringing them.
Eat them with Peter. ’Bye. I pull the door closed, leaving him disconsolate on the street.
Does this mean I am “getting over” Q.? Does the onset of one sickness obliterate the previous sickness? Or is it all the same sickness translated into different symptoms, behaving metaphorically? Whatever it is, I’m not fond of this new-found sanity. In the stories, the princess always risks it and takes in the frog. Two weeks of unadulterated Q., at my table, surely on my pillow, like being stoned. Yes, and then what?
As we slog through ear-splitting traffic, motorcycles being gunned and puling car alarms, plus the occasional pneumatic drill cracking the pavement, I lean back and stretch my legs in what might be the last Checker cab in New York. A clutch of police cars and an ambulance block the entrance to the Port Authority, and the next thing I know the taxi driver is tapping on the glass to rouse me. “Missus, missus! You have reached your destination. You are okay, missus?”
I can hardly wait to get back to bed, the only trusty lover. And to my squirrel.
It’s no longer there. I didn’t think it had the strength to leave. The last few times, it hardly responded to my taps, as if it no longer cared about such minor nuisances. Could his friends have carted him off to a sacred burial ground? Ants, they say, do something like that. Why not squirrels? Unless it simply decided to die elsewhere, on some other ledge, if you could call it a decision. But when I look closely I see that like his cousin rat, the squirrel has built a little nest of ivy—leaves, twigs, and pale-green berries—along with clumps of hair and scraps of tissue, suggesting he plans to return. I haven’t seen the last of him. I’ll have to clear out this nest as I did the other, the rat’s. Later. When I’m stronger.