You can tell a lot about a person by who their favorite Stooge is. It’s significant. Mark and I both love Curly the best. Some people pick Larry and I can understand why. Larry’s pretty funny, and he can take care of himself better than Curly can. Mark’s brother David says Moe is his favorite. I would think a long time before getting involved with someone who said Moe was their favorite Stooge.
I was involved with Mark before I knew it. I met him at a dance party somewhere in Tribeca. I love to dance, to move from partner to partner. For hours. It was late. I’d been dancing with the same guy for a long time. We were at that point where your bodies anticipate one another. When you lean and twist and yield and turn and it’s all perfectly timed. The man pressed against my hip, leading, turning. I was so hot my dress was sticking all the way down my back. When the dance was over I said I needed a drink and went over to Sarah.
“Girl, you can dance,” Sarah said.
I took her glass and held it to my neck.
“It’s like sex,” she said. Sarah hadn’t had sex in a while. She was standing with a guy who turned out to be Mark’s brother, David.
I laughed. “It’s better than sex,” I said.
“Who you been having sex with?”
I looked toward the voice. It was a thick voice, a rich voice. At first all I saw were his lips, which were large and almost startling in the way they curled in that smile. I remember thinking that they reminded me of the drawing of the Devil in my First Holy Communion prayerbook. His hair looked black in the dim light and his eyes were the color of his hair. He leaned against the wall, smiling. I couldn’t say anything. That was Mark. That was it. I was hooked.
He could dance, too. But I found that out later.
Mark can dance, he can whip up an incredible late-night frittata, do fifty consecutive push-ups and a perfect imitation of Curly. Nyuk-Nyuk-Nyuk he says, snapping and wriggling his fingers the way Curly does. Sometimes when I get moody he sneaks up behind me and does his Curly until I laugh.
Mark’s the only one I know who’s read all seven volumes of Proust. He says that’s why he’s such a good lover. He is. Mark not only taught me to like sex, he made me crave it. I’d had lovers before him but I could barely name the parts of my body. Not the way lovers do.
“Where?” he’d ask, running a finger up my thigh.
“I don’t know. You know. Down there.”
“I want to make love to you all day long, and all night long, and through the night into the morning,” he said once. Something like that. I was enthralled but the idea horrified me. I mean I couldn’t imagine what we’d do after the first twenty minutes.
“I don’t come,” I said, to get it over with.
“Me either,” he said. It’s hard to catch Mark off guard.
Once, after we’d been together about a month, he called from a pay phone. “I’m downstairs,” he said. “Take off your clothes, go into the bedroom, and wait for me. And Terry”—there was a long pause—“don’t say a word when I come in.” Poor Sarah had to run up and hide on the next landing, and spend the rest of the day at a friend’s.
When I think about those times it seems as though we were in some kind of rolling erotic daze. Hours, weeks went by in his tiny West Village apartment. The two of us moving, whispering. On the bed, on the floor, on the table, in the shower. Mark would call, sometimes at three in the morning, and ask what I wanted. “Think about it all day,” he’d say. Or “What do you think about when I’m not with you? When you’re going to sleep?” He’d suggest something that sounded awful and after a few days I couldn’t stop thinking about it. He taught me the French word for every significant part of my body and I’d never been with anyone who found more parts significant. Our talks were sexy and our books were sexy. Mark gave me Nietzsche. I gave him Baudelaire. He was painting then and the apartment reeked of oils and turp. Abstract landscapes leaned against the walls. Tacked to a bulletin board was a photo of him and an old girlfriend—Isabelle—in front of the Sorbonne where he’d gotten his degree in art history and philosophy. Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil above it in big block letters. Mark had quotes from Nietzsche posted all through his apartment.
Sarah, it turned out, started seeing Mark’s brother, David, a few months later. It was before she realized she was actually more into women than men, but they weren’t such a great match anyway. Sarah said David could spend an entire night narrating interminable synopses of movies she’d never heard of. And he says film instead of movie, which she thinks is pretentious. They just didn’t click.
Mark and I did, though. I expected it to cool down. But even after we got married—five years ago—things stayed pretty hot. Maybe it’s the Proust. Mark says he learned everything from Proust, that it’s because of Proust he’d know immediately if his lover were having an affair. Well, he could have saved a lot of time. All he’d need is someone to tell him.
Sarah says I have to stop thinking about it, but what I can’t understand is why. Does he love Yvonne? Does he think about her when he’s with me? Does he think about me when he’s with her? Does she know things about me? I can’t stand the thought of him touching her. Talking to her the way he talks to me. I wonder if she’s as eager a student. So willing to be conquered. So quick to catch on.
“I can’t believe you let me do that,” Mark said once. I was on the floor, “coming to.” He held me, kissed my shoulder. “It’s incredible,” he said, “how you’re changing. You’ll do anything.”
“You asked me to,” I said, suddenly embarrassed.
“You could have said no.”
It never occurred to me to say no to Mark. I was deeply in love or deeply charmed. Something.
“Do you think I shouldn’t have done that?”
He straddled my hips and began to tickle me. “There’s nothing more impossible than an Italian Catholic,” he said.
Now he acts like things are just fine. Yesterday I bought a tube of Scarlet Memory and wore it to dinner.
“Do you think I should wear lipstick?” I asked him.
He frowned. “It doesn’t look like you, Treas.”
Who does it look like, I wanted to ask. So much for memory.
He was spooning spinach onto his plate.
“Do you still love me?” I asked.
“With or without the lipstick?” He tore a piece of bread off the loaf, then looked up at me. “Come here.” He reached over and pulled me onto his lap. “Of course I love you.” He kissed me. “What’s going on? Treas, come on. What’s up?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m premenstrual, I guess.”
“You just had your period last week.”
When I was a kid I had a game called Fascination. Two plastic mazes with steel balls at the bottom and notches at the top. The boards were attached by a wire. At the word “Go” both players would begin to work their board, trying to get the balls through the maze, into the notches. When one of the players worked all three balls up a green light lit their board. The trouble was, if you started one of your balls down a dead end it was almost impossible to change course without knocking out your other balls. You had to maneuver the board very carefully. I played this game endlessly with my sisters. It sometimes seems to me marriage is a lot like that. And I’d just lost one of my balls.
Last night I dreamed of the Korean woman. She was at the bottom of three long sets of rickety stairs that led into a cavern that was also a beach. She stood in a line of identical women wearing white diaphanous dresses. She was waving those silver serving tongs, carrying Yvonne’s red plastic alarm clock.
“Who is the Korean woman?” Eric asked.
I don’t know why I mentioned the dream. I wasn’t ready to tell him about going to Yvonne’s. Usually I don’t hold back. I spill everything. Sometimes even to strangers. Once I told a woman interviewing me for a teaching job that I first realized I was in love with Mark while he had me handcuffed to the headboard. I don’t remember how it came up. I was surprised myself that I still hadn’t told anyone about Yvonne’s apartment. Not even Sarah.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Who does she remind you of?”
“Maybe one of those huge weddings in Korea. You know. When thousands of Moonies marry strangers in one big ceremony.” I had to say something. Sometimes I think about how much money I waste taking Eric down the wrong paths.
“Do you think you married a stranger, Theresa?”
Two years ago when I started seeing Eric I introduced myself as Theresa. I don’t know why. To sound more mature, I guess. No one calls me Theresa, not even my mother. Mark calls me Treas or Terry. Tree when he’s really excited. I keep wanting to tell Eric to call me Terry but I feel stupid after two years. Every session I have to remember to sign the right name on my check.
“Who’s your favorite Stooge,” I asked.
Sometimes when Eric looks at me I can feel his eyes moving over my face, inch by inch, like a fly crawling across a table looking for crumbs.
“Excuse me?”
“Moe, Larry, or Curly?”
“Theresa . . .”
“Why can’t you just answer me?”
Eric looked at the clock.
“Goddammit why do you keep looking at the clock? Am I boring you?”
“Who are you angry at?” Eric stared at me over those praying hands which were pressed, as usual, against his lips. Like he was afraid he would say too much.
I put my feet up on the chair. I couldn’t see the clock but I guessed we had about another half hour. Water was running in the next apartment. A phone rang. Eric’s shoe tapped the rug. He has three pairs of the same exact shoe. Black, brown, and oxblood. Loafers with these little fringy tassels. There’s not a whole lot to look at in his office. A plant. A blue couch. Three blue pillows on the couch, always in the same configuration. My last therapist had paintings all over and tiny animal statuettes. The guy I’d interviewed before Eric had a room full of heads. All kinds of heads. When I made a joke about it he didn’t even crack a smile. I thanked him and left in the middle of the interview.
“Maybe I should just go,” I said. I think there should be some kind of therapy where you curl up in the therapist’s lap for fifty minutes and get held.
“Do you want to lie on the couch?”
“Could you shut the light?”
He shut the light. I lay on the couch. It was softer than it looked and soon I was feeling calmer and a little tired. Neither of us said anything for a long time. Eric’s comfortable with silence, that’s how he puts it. There are many kinds of silence, he said once. A lot can happen in silence, he said. But it all feels the same to me.
“Does your clock glow in the dark?” I asked finally.
Eric didn’t say anything. I wondered what kind of silence he thought this was.
“I’m scared,” I said, after a long time.
“What are you afraid of?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Do you remember why you started seeing me?” he asked all of a sudden.
Cello music was coming from somewhere in the building.
“No,” I said. The cello had a lonely, mournful sound.
Mark had gone to the Venice Biennale and I’d spent two weeks alone, hardly sleeping at all. I was nervous and jittery, convinced someone would try to break into the loft, convinced Mark wouldn’t come home. I’d finally started staying with Sarah. I’ve never lived alone and didn’t realize until then that I’d hardly ever slept without someone else in the room. Even when I was a kid I’d always shared a room with my sisters.
“I feel so alone,” I said. “I feel so alone.”
“That’s good,” he said.
“That’s good?”
“It’s a start,” he said, “but I’m afraid we have to end.”
This morning I called NYU and canceled my class. The second one this week. I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t think of standing in front of thirty students discussing the concept of irony and hyperbole in Marvell. I’m as far away from irony as I can get. I keep wanting to go uptown to Yvonne’s but I can’t leave the loft. I’ve just been lying here listening to Maria Callas’s Mad Scenes and thinking about Yvonne.
That’s her, Sarah had said that night at the opening. She pointed across the room, through the crowd, and I saw Yvonne. Laughing. Smiling up at Mark. I saw her casually hold his arm as she bent to fix her shoe. I saw Mark laugh and bop her over the head with a rolled stack of flyers. I saw that. The way she looked at him. And I keep seeing it.
It’s cold in here. Lofts are always cold. Yesterday afternoon I made two bowls of pastina and sat and watched the videotape of Olympic figure skaters I made a few years ago. I kept fast-forwarding through the commercials and slalom to Victor Petrenko. He was skating to Chubby Checker’s “Twist Again,” a song I used to dance to with my mother. He did three triple axels and a triple toe loop. Every once in a while I got up and danced with him. Moving around cheered me up a bit. Got me a little warmer. But mostly I just watched. When he leaves the stage after his encore, my favorite part comes on: Klimova and Ponomarenko ice-dancing to what the announcer calls Bach’s Sacred and Profane Love. I think I’ve watched it a hundred times. I still can’t believe the timer screwed up. Somehow the recorder stopped and cut the dance three-quarters of the way through. After hours wasted on skiing and hockey and slalom. At the most important part. I mean some things just shouldn’t end. Moments of music. It’s almost excruciating to feel them break off. It keeps you hanging out there, waiting. And the two bodies moving together, never breaking contact, falling and turning gracefully, passionately, over and around one another. I’ve watched it so many times I know the exact moment when the sound will stop, the bodies disappear, and the screen go black with that white snow shaking all over it. And then the bald black-and-white head of Isaac Bashevis Singer comes on, its mouth moving but no sound for a few seconds. “You read the story. You get the meaning,” is the first thing he says. Then “You must believe in free will. You have no choice.” I kept playing his head backward and forward as though he would tell me something important. As if there would be a special meaning in what he was saying. Then I’d rewind to the skaters. I watched them all afternoon.
Mark wasn’t at the gallery. He said he was meeting a client for an early dinner. I called Yvonne’s. I didn’t expect him to be there, I guess I just wanted to connect with Yvonne. To hear her voice. To see if she screened her calls or answered breathlessly, hoping it would be Mark. If she would pick up quickly, being lonely and wanting to talk.
I found her number in Mark’s Rolodex. There it was, ordinary and plain. In Mark’s tight handwriting. Yvonne Adams. Not coded or written lightly in pencil.
“Hi. This is five-five-five six-two-three-two. Please leave a message.” She sounded like a robot. She has one of those machines where the beep lasts forever and fades into a couple of short beeps depending upon how many calls have come in. There was only one short beep. I called three times but left no message. I imagined her on the other side of the machine, barefoot in her neat apartment. Eating salad out of a plastic container. Perhaps my husband was beside her.
I made another bowl of pastina. It’s the only thing I can eat now. I’ve lost three pounds this week which is just about the only cheerful thing I can think of.
My cats circle me and lie in my lap the whole time I’m home. They know when I’m sad. Maybe it’s the Maria Callas. I was thinking about Medea. How she killed her two children when she learned Jason was having an affair. I thought of Mark coming in to find Tony and Chico dead in a cloth sack. There’s no way I could do anything like that. I love Tony and Chico. But I wonder how long Medea knew about the affair before she hit that pitch of passion.
I called Sarah. I always call Sarah when I’m upset. She’s the kind of person who’ll listen to you worry and complain for hours, then take you out and buy you a lace bra she really can’t afford, and never get annoyed if you end up not taking her advice. Sarah’s always saying things like “Life hands you the comb after you’ve gone bald.”
“Why don’t you try saying the Serenity Prayer,” she said after I told her about Medea. Sarah had started going to Al-Anon meetings when she decided her lover was an alcoholic. Karen, it turns out, was not an alcoholic, and they split up soon after, but by that time Sarah had met another woman at the meetings and was in hot pursuit.
She read me the prayer. “Just ignore the God stuff,” she said. “It’s really helpful.”
Asking a Catholic to ignore God is like telling a thief you left your door unlocked. But Sarah is Jewish. Jews can ignore God. Mark can.
I wrote the prayer down. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. It’s no poem, but the rhythm’s nice. I tried saying it. Kept the paper in my pocket. Personally I like Catholic prayers a lot better. Precious Blood of Jesus, Devoted Mother of the Holy Womb, Strength of Martyrs, Wash me of guilt, Cleanse me of sin. Now those are prayers.
Anyway, Sarah convinced me to go to a meeting. “Keep the focus on yourself,” she said. She can pick up lingo in a minute.
I went to Al-Anon. I went after my session on Friday. I still haven’t told Eric about going to Yvonne’s but I did say it had been hard to leave the house.
“Make yourself go out,” he said. “Make plans.”
Sarah took a long lunch and brought me to a meeting called Midday Keeping Faith at St. Barnabas Church midtown, not too far from the Elle offices where she works. The basement was dingy and crowded and filled with aluminum folding chairs and bright posters. I was terrified I’d see someone I knew. Sarah was afraid she wouldn’t. People—it was mostly women—kept smiling at us.
“I’ve got to run back right after,” Sarah whispered. She was bent over an article she was editing on contemporary women sculptors. “I’m on deadline.” I knew she was doing this for me, so I tried to seem enthusiastic.
The leader was reading what she called Steps. Latecomers were finding seats. Everyone looked kind of rueful and pathetic.
“Some meetings are better than others,” Sarah said. “Don’t get turned off too soon.”
Actually it was the first time I’d felt like laughing in days.
The leader was asking if there were any newcomers. Sarah poked me. I stuck my hand halfway up.
“Hi, I’m Linda and I’m co-dependent,” said a plump woman in an awful pink dress.
“Hi, I’m Sandy and I’m in recovery,” said another.
One after another. It was getting closer to me.
“Hi,” I said, trying to sound upbeat, “I’m Terry”—I hadn’t thought of what I’d say—“and I’m just visiting.” No one laughed. Sarah just shook her head. I guess it wasn’t really funny.
One story was worse than another. The plump woman, Linda, stood up and started to cry. Her husband had hit her, she said. Last night. She knew it was the liquor and not him, but he’d hit her. He’d come in late and drunk and he’d hit her. She was rubbing her little hands up and down the awful pink dress that stretched tight around her hips. I couldn’t help thinking that if I were her husband I’d have hit her, too. Anything to get her to stop whining.
“And the worst thing is,” she said, “I was so upset I had a glass of wine.”
“Well, you needed a drink,” I said. I stood up, inclining myself toward her. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
Sarah yanked me down.
“No crosstalk. No crosstalk,” someone shouted.
“That’s not going to help.”
“Ssh.”
“Please don’t offer advice.”
“That’s our problem, everyone’s always trying to fix fix fix.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I whispered.
We had to climb over all the women and pocketbooks and folding chairs. Sarah murmured apologies all the way down the row.
“Look,” the leader was saying, “you can’t buy oranges in a hardware store.”
Sarah kissed me and ran back to work and I walked all the way downtown to Little Italy. I stopped in the old St. Patrick’s Church on Mott Street to light a candle. I was glad they still had real ones and not the electric kind a lot of churches have now. A youngish priest was shuffling papers by the altar. He smiled.
And I wondered who his favorite Stooge was.