My mother says my first sentence was I broke it. I was eighteen months old. I think I’ve always had a very special relationship to guilt. It’s familiar. If someone rushes into a room and announces their car’s been stolen I start to sweat. I feel an urge to shout I didn’t do it. I don’t even drive. Last night I heard the word “affair” on TV. The word reverberated inside me sending little shocks up and down my spine. Affair affair affair I kept repeating, until the word split apart, fragmented into soft little pieces. Puffs of breath. Then I thought about Mark and Yvonne and it slammed back together.
Affair. The word conjures visions of my parents at a dinner dance. Everyone dressed up. Their children at home with babysitters. It’s something you do when you’re married. Single people do not go to affairs. And they do not have affairs. They have relationships. If you’re married and involved with someone else you don’t say I’m in a relationship, you say I’m having an affair. Usually you don’t say anything at all.
I’m thirty-five and married and I’ve never been to anything I’d call an affair. And I’ve never had an affair. I’ve never had a relationship or an affair with a student. I mean it’s just not something I would ever do. Not that I haven’t been tempted. Fantasized. I mean I’ve had affairs with whole classes in that way you tease and seduce students into their best work. That power you feel as they laugh together, stay after class for advice, learn to love a difficult writer. Because you do. From time to time they bring in little gifts: a poem, a tape of music they thought you’d like. Brian did that yesterday. A tape he made of old Irish ballads. I’ve been playing it all day.
I love Irish music. The sadness. That plaintive, wistful knowledge of loss. Voices naked and unmoored. Suffering without any note of bravado. My father always played Puccini. That’s the kind of suffering we listened to: passionate and operatic. Italian suffering. Blasting out of the living room, through the apartment, throughout my childhood. I love Puccini, but these voices leave you room for your own sorrow. There’s no big fat star taking up all the emotional space. I’ve been playing the last song for the past half hour. “The Cliffs of Dooneen.”
“I made this for you, Terry,” Brian said yesterday. He’s from Ireland—only been here eight months. He’s got a voice just like the singer on the tape. Tender. “Terry,” he said. He’s been in my class all semester, but it’s funny the way you can feel when someone says your name for the first time. And now I’ve been walking around all day, his tape in my Walkman, his music filling me up, and it feels like I’ve always known him.
I feel so connected to him that it’s hard to believe I hadn’t much noticed Brian before last week. He’s quiet in class. Now that I think of it, he has a way of listening I’d been vaguely aware of. You can feel him taking you in.
What with a couple of sick days and Anita’s funeral I’d missed several classes and was trying to make it up with an especially rigorous lecture on prosody. I discussed the different ways to enter a poem. Easing in with a loose iambic. Or opening with an attack. A hard stress on the first syllable. I can always come up with the perfect illustration on the spot. It’s one of my strong points.
“Others,” I began, stressing the trochee, “because you did not keep / that deep sworn vow have been friends of mine / yet always . . .”
The poem caught inside me. Out the window the traffic on Broadway whizzed by. Horns, sirens, a bus shooting out its exhaust. The falafel vendor wheeled his cart to the corner. Somewhere uptown my husband was sleeping with a woman who taught classes not very different from mine. My throat closed and my eyes went blurry. Damn if I hadn’t picked Yeats. Tiny pieces of plaster were falling from the old ceiling onto the desk in front of me. The class had gotten really quiet.
“Yet always . . .”
I tried to continue. I knew the class thought I’d forgotten the line. I think they did, anyway. After all I’ve said about it being impossible to forget a line of Yeats. Not a word out of place, not a syllable. I was leaning forward onto the desk. Big tears were dropping onto the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, making a little puddle on the cover. I don’t think they could see I was crying because my hair is thick and was falling forward over my face.
“Yet always when I look death in the face, / When I clamber to the heights of sleep, / Or when I grow excited with wine, / Suddenly I meet your face.”
It sounded like the voice of an angel. A soft Irish voice. Gentle. I was looking down at my desk. Hallucination. The word floated up into my head. It sounded like a younger, sweeter Yeats reading his own poem. A heartsick Yeats.
Of course it was Brian.
“Are you all right?” he asked later. Not pushy. He stood by my desk after everyone had gone and waited as I gathered my books.
“Sure,” I said. I looked at him. That was a mistake. There was such sympathy in his look. Concern. “Just a rough moment. You know.”
He rubbed an orange paint stain on the arm of his leather jacket. “Can I walk you somewhere?” he asked.
I have been thinking about what drew me to poetry. At the beginning. My family has never been big on books or reading. I’m the only one who went to college. But I’ve always loved the sounds of words, the feel of them in my mouth. As a kid I walked around repeating prayers, incantations. Sounds that made me feel good. I’d lie on my bed, roll and rub against the blankets, whispering words that excited me. Tongue or naked or loins.
In high school I discovered symbolism. Mr. Parisi stood by the window reciting Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan. Yeats and Keats and Joni Mitchell. He had a beautiful ass. Tight jeans. It intrigued me, the way a straightforward line, about birds, say, or parking lots, could connote death or rebirth, lust or love or decay. You could hear it. The word would pulse, seem to collect all this energy around it. It was as though I was hearing something confirmed. The reason it had always embarrassed me to hold the Host on my tongue. The body of Christ. The naked body. Jesus in my mouth. How I tried not to think of the different parts. Thighs. Loins. Or the undercurrents that rushed through the rooms when my mother said something simple like “You are not leaving this house.” Hidden things. The way you feel drawn or attached to a person you barely know. Feel them tugging at you. The way a rhyme in the third line links back to the first and makes a kind of gluey bond.
Brian walked me to Houston Street. The next day we walked together again. Saturday we went to the Museum of Natural History and wandered through reconstructed dinosaur bones, the Hall of Evolution, dioramas showing what happens underground during each season. By the glass cases of Asian peoples we chose our favorite figures. Two men squatting by a fire. A woman hanging bones outside her door.
Usually with students I keep a kind of arch and flirtatious distance. Teasing and helpful. But everything about Brian—his musical voice, wavy reddish-blond hair, soft lips, the way his eyes linger around mine and then look away—I don’t know, it gets to me.
“Feelin’ a bit under it?” he’ll ask. It’s sweet.
The museum’s closing bell rang while we were in the South Asian Hall imitating poses of Siva and Kali. Brian was staying uptown and said he’d walk me to the subway. Both of us stood looking at one another. Below West 4th Street I know myself a little better. Know what to do. If we’d been below West 4th Street I would have kissed him. No question. Below West 4th Street you kiss anyone you’ve met at least once before. Except one of your students.
When we got to the subway I made the first move. I held his arm and kissed his cheek. He’s your student, I kept thinking. I told him my theory about West 4th Street. He laughed.
“So,” I said. I get positively inarticulate when I’m attracted to someone. Either that or I talk myself into a tangle.
“Well, I’ll be seeing you, Terry,” he said.
“This was nice,” I said.
“So, next time maybe we should meet downtown.” He rubbed at the orange paint stain on his jacket.
“Downtown?”
“Below West 4th Street.”
I laughed. I was relieved he could take the initiative.
Yesterday he told me he’d never seen the Three Stooges. Never even heard of them.
It’s been almost two weeks since I went to Yvonne’s apartment. This morning I stopped in the Korean vegetable stand on Spring Street near our loft. I don’t know if it was the vegetables or my mood, but as soon as the young Korean woman touched the lemon to count out my change I thought I was going to throw up. I stuffed the change in my pocket and ran three blocks over to Dean & DeLuca to use their bathroom.
I threw up. I hate to throw up. It terrifies me. That feeling of your whole middle opening up and ripping apart. I stood in the tiny bathroom reading the graffiti on the wall above the toilet. Obey God, Go to Church, Read the Bible. What do you think dickface? scrawled across a crude rendition of a penis with eyes. That did it. I must have thrown up two weeks’ worth of pastina. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and reapplied my lipstick. Yvonne’s lipstick. I stood by the sink for a few minutes. Then I went upstairs for a cup of tea. It was a relief to be so empty. So light. I was still dizzy. As if there were a big hollow space inside me filling up with ether.
Dean & DeLuca is like a giant playpen in the middle of Soho. You can’t walk in there without meeting half a dozen people you know and ten more you recognize. With its frosting-white brick walls, high ceiling and skylight, the neat stacks of tiny sandwiches and perfect-looking cinnamon rolls, gingerbreads and poppyseed cakes, cappuccino and fifteen varieties of tea, it’s like a scene out of Mary Poppins. I rarely have anything but coffee or tea but I always leave there feeling like I’ve been at a feast.
I stood at the counter and watched the busboy rearrange rows of bottled water. Blue. Green. Clear. I love watching people make order. When I turned I noticed Mark waving to get my attention. He was by the side wall with his assistent, Glenda. Right where Mia Farrow and Judy Davis sit in Husbands and Wives.
“Ciao bella,” I said and kissed Glenda on both cheeks.
“You look awful,” Mark said. He leaned over and kissed me then pushed my hair back. “Your hair is soaked. Are you okay?”
“I think so. I was feeling kind of woozy.”
Glenda stood up and started brushing powdered sugar off her black leather skirt. “We’re celebrating,” she said, still chewing. She had on the clunky black combat boots she always wears.
I looked at Mark. I wondered if Glenda knew about Yvonne. If she was feeling sorry for me. Or superior. Or guilty. Maybe she was sleeping with Mark, too. We’ve known her for two years and she just moved in with Mark’s brother David last fall. Right after Mark and David opened the gallery. I’d told her about Moe. Warned her. I looked at her boots. Maybe Moe is her favorite Stooge, too.
Glenda would have to know if Mark were having an affair. So would David. And who else? I looked her in the eyes but she just looked the way she always does.
“I’m doing Iago at the Public next spring,” this guy was saying in a loud voice at the next table. He had that actory tone.
“We sold the Rauschenberg,” Mark said, rubbing the lemon rind around the rim of his espresso cup. He said it quietly, not loud enough for the whole place to hear.
“Great. Who bought it?” I remember the night he bid on it. At Sotheby’s. The first painting he bought at auction. We’d been there together.
“Trust fund baby,” he said. “You don’t know her.”
Yvonne. He didn’t have to say it. I knew it was Yvonne. A trust fund. Teaching to do something between shopping trips. I tried to picture where she’d hang it. No, she’d have it locked in a vault. Couldn’t risk having someone break in and slash it.
I pressed the point on my arm that’s supposed to be for nausea.
“Treas?”
“Great,” I said. “You have to work hard to sell it?”
“Usual,” Mark said. “Lunch. A few phone calls. Inspired talk on the rise of the art market.” He was wearing a short-sleeved, cream-colored silk shirt and a black silk vest I gave him last year for his birthday. I love his arms. “I kept the Elizabeth Murray,” he said. “I know you love that one.”
Iago was putting on his leather jacket with a flourish and saying some very loud goodbyes. “Ciao, bellissimi,” he said, blowing kisses.
“Terry, are you okay?” Glenda asked.
“Why?”
“You look kind of pale. Your eyes look funny. Maybe it’s just that lipstick.”
Mark put his hand to my forehead. “No fever,” he said.
“I’m going home,” I said. I dipped my finger in the tea and sucked it.
“Honey, wait a minute. I’ll walk you.” He stood up.
“I’m fine,” I said. “We’ll celebrate later.” I kissed both of them. “Bring home the bill of sale and we can have it mounted.”
“Ciao,” Glenda said and held up her fingers to wave.
Turned out it wasn’t Yvonne. Maybe Sarah was wrong. Maybe Yvonne is just a prospective client. Right. And Mark has her keys in case he needs to check out her wall space.
Brian and I were meeting for dinner. Below West 4th Street. I made another trip to Yvonne’s to borrow something to wear. I was tired of my own clothes. Everything black. Yvonne looked about my size, and she probably wouldn’t miss a blouse or two. I still thought of her as a trust fund baby even though she wasn’t the new owner of the Rauschenberg. Once I get a fact I can’t part with it. I use everything I can find to piece her together. She’s become a kind of project—like those enormous jigsaw puzzles people start and keep on their dining room table for weeks.
After my session with Eric I walked up Broadway toward Yvonne’s. I passed her street and walked two extra blocks to the Korean vegetable stand. For good luck. Or ritual. Catholics have a habit of doing things exactly the same way every time.
The sneaker vendor smiled. I could see him telling the police he’d begun to see me hanging around.
“I’m from the neighborhood,” I said.
“Verdad,” he said.
The Korean woman was not at the register and I took that as a sign. Maybe Yvonne was home. Maybe I should call first. But she probably screens her calls. Besides, according to her schedule, she was supposed to be teaching.
I took a box of saltines to the register. The store’s smell was getting to me. Every time I see a Korean I think of Yvonne. Every time I see vegetables.
“Where’s the woman that’s always here?” I asked the old man at the register.
“Yes,” he said smiling broadly, trying to push the box into the bag. He had big, clumsy, arthritic-looking fingers.
“Is she sick?” I asked.
He kept smiling and shaking his head up and down. He ripped the bag. I hoped she wasn’t sick. I pulled off the bag and left it on the counter, then opened the box and took a few crackers to calm my stomach.
Yvonne’s apartment looked exactly the same except the letter from India was gone. I’d been stupid not to read it.
Not a glass in the sink. No half-drunk cups of tea or coffee scattered through the room. Not a stray paper on the desk. It amazed me a person could be so neat. I thought maybe she has someone come in to clean the apartment. I slid the chain lock into its groove.
It didn’t take long to find what I wanted. A black silk boat-neck top and a black skirt, size four. The skirt was straight so there would be no playing around with size. It would either fit or not. It fit. Even the length was okay. Yvonne’s probably a touch taller than me. The top was a little tighter across my breasts than it was supposed to be. WASPs have an easier time affecting that blousy look.
I checked the drawers. Yvonne is the kind of woman who would have several unopened packages of stockings on hand. Not like me. I keep a pair or two around and have to dash out in a panic if I get a run. I don’t know what makes me know her so well. There were nine slim card-board envelopes. Opaques. Evening Sheers. Control Top. Sandalfoot. Varying shades of black though there was one hideous green pair. And taupe. I never wear taupe. I chose Jet Black Evening Sheer. Donna Karan.
I’d planned on bringing it all home but I got an urge to shower and dress at Yvonne’s. Her clock said one, but it was three. She’d never replaced the battery. Anyway, if she was teaching it would be a while before she got home.
“You may travel far far from your own native home,” I started singing “The Cliffs of Dooneen.” My voice sounded strange in the apartment. Not like my voice at all. I thought about Brian. The shy way he’d offered to show me his poems. I took off all my clothes and laid Yvonne’s clothes out on the bed. My shoes weren’t exactly right, but I never borrow other people’s shoes. I can’t imagine wearing someone else’s shoes.
On my way to the bathroom I noticed the red light blinking on Yvonne’s answering machine. Three blinks. Three calls. I’m not the kind of person that would listen in to someone else’s calls. Besides, I was afraid I’d erase the messages. I don’t know how long I stood there watching that blinking light. It reminded me of the confessionals at Holy Cross Church. A red light beamed out from above the wooden box when the person inside was on the kneeler. Once they stood up the light went off and the next person could enter. Whoever was inside was usually so nervous they’d shift around on their knees, fidgeting, half standing, thinking it was time to go, and all this time the red light would be blinking crazily on and off, everyone outside the box getting more and more nervous. I used to keep letting other kids get in front of me as I approached the head of the line, even though it only made the anticipation worse.
I was feeling panicky. I dialed the number for the time, to check my watch. I dialed Mark at the gallery but hung up when I heard Glenda’s voice. I dialed Eric.
I knew he wouldn’t answer. His voice on the tape is an attempt to sound soothing. “Tell me where I can reach you,” it ends. I was going to hang up but at the beep I started talking.
“Eric. Hi. It’s Theresa. Spera. I . . . well . . . I can’t be reached.” Hi Eric. I’m standing here naked in Yvonne’s apartment.
I hung up. I watched the blinking light dying to know if there was a message from Mark, but I couldn’t listen. I thought about Brian. I pictured him holding me, talking to me. For a brief minute I considered bringing him to Yvonne’s. To fuck him in the same bed my husband was fucking Yvonne. It was then it hit me that Mark and Yvonne could have been using our loft. I don’t know why I’d never thought of it before. We live only a couple of blocks from the gallery and if he had to dash out for an hour what could be more convenient? We’d made love in the unfinished back room when the gallery first opened. They could be fucking in the gallery.
There was a bottle of vodka on the kitchen counter. I poured a glass but couldn’t drink it. I thought of adding it to the water in the refrigerator or her contact lens solution, but I wasn’t that far gone. I poured it back into the bottle. I guess I really don’t want to hurt her. I don’t know, maybe just a little.
I took a shower and put on Yvonne’s clothes. They felt good. The way well-cared-for clothes feel. They looked good on me too. It was almost amazing the way they fit. It’s funny Mark would choose someone almost exactly my size. Who looks like me. Who also teaches English. Not funny, really. It’s bizarre. Like that Ionesco play where the two strangers get around to talking about where they each lived. Both lived on the same block. At the same address. They were neighbors. The same apartment, too. How extraordinary. Could they live together and not know it? What’s your name? one of them asks. Bobby Martin. Mine too. They were both Bobby Martin. I always have a student who objects to it all. It doesn’t make sense.
Yvonne doesn’t look exactly like me. But if you described us both physically you might use a lot of the same terms.
I dabbed her Opium at my neck and shoulders and stomach. A little more than I usually wear. In high school my best friend Helene gave me a vial of patchouli. She said it didn’t matter what I looked like as long as I was wearing patchouli. It was irresistible, she said. Scent was important. Ancient Sumerian prostitutes put their own sex juice—that’s what she called it—behind their ears to attract men. Something like that.
I stood on a chair looking at myself in the mirror. I love the way you can stare at something for a long time and make it break down. I first discovered this looking at my mother. It amazed me how at first she’d look so familiar—more familiar than anything. I’d stare and stare, like I was caught on her, unable to look away. Little by little her face would distort, the way your own face does when you’re looking at yourself reflected in someone’s sunglasses. As I stared harder the eyes would move and seem at angles to one another. Her mouth would twist, disintegrate. Then she wouldn’t look like my mother at all until I shut my eyes hard and refocused. I practiced making her disintegrate and come back together. It was happening now. At first I looked like myself. Then my face got blurry. I felt almost dizzy. I tried to imagine Yvonne’s face there instead of mine. It didn’t work. Not like it does in the movies. Like Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann in Persona. I tried to let my wavy hair straighten. My dark eyes lighten. My olive skin get that whitish look Yvonne’s has. I still looked like myself. But I didn’t feel like myself. I felt like nobody. I half expected my image to disappear from the mirror.
The phone rang. I jumped from the chair and stood still as though the voice could discover me. Her doctor’s office reminding her about an appointment.
I stuffed the dry-cleaning wrap in my bag. I looked around to make sure I wasn’t leaving anything behind. But I didn’t dry out the shower. It would dry by the time she got home.
It would be scary to walk into your bathroom and see the mirrors fogged and the shower curtains all wet when no one had been there all day.
Brian’s apartment was a mess. Books open and facedown on the floor. Lots of them. Teacups everywhere—even in the bathroom. Papers, newspapers. Postcards and photographs tacked every which way on the walls. He lives on 6th Street above an Indian restaurant so there’s that sweaty smell of cumin and curry throughout the apartment, a smell I’ve never liked much until now.
He didn’t need to stoop but his ceilings are low and it seemed like he was stooping. There’s something cave-like about the apartment. Close. There are no clocks. I like that.
“Tangled Up in Blue” played out of a small black tape player that was spotted with the same orange paint that’s on his jacket sleeve.
“Blood on the Tracks,” I said. “I haven’t heard this in years.”
“I love Dylan,” he said. “I play him when I’m missing home.” He nudged a few books aside with his foot. Picked up a teacup and put it on the table. “I play him all the time actually.”
I was noticing how pale his eyelashes are. How young it makes him look. I didn’t want him to be missing home. I wanted him only to be thinking about being here with me. I’m starting to feel this kind of longing for him—to hold him and touch him and take care of him.
“I sang in a rock band,” I said. “This was our name. Tangled Up in Blue.”
“Wow,” he said, “that’s pretty wild.” I think he was picturing me on stage at CBGB’s. I didn’t tell him that we basically played on the Catholic high school dance scene. Strictly Bishop MacDonald.
Dylan was singing the part about her showing him the Italian poet from the fifteenth century. Brian and I stared at one another. We must have stood there through the whole song. It was hot and I’d taken off Yvonne’s scarf and my sweater during “Simple Twist of Fate.”
“Do you always wear black?” he asked.
“I’m Italian,” I said.
We both shifted around a little. He seemed too tall for the room. Like he was cramped in there.
“Why don’t you sit?” he said. He cleared off some newspapers and books to make space on a chair.
I almost made a joke about Spiritual Housecleaning but I was nervous and afraid it wouldn’t come off.
“Would you like some tea?” he asked. “Water?”
“Water’s good,” I said.
He went to the kitchen. It was almost a relief to be in there alone.
Yeats lay open on the floor. And Rimbaud, Rilke, Neruda. The same editions as mine. Yvonne’s book collection is pretty paltry. Beside her bed where you’d expect to find stacks of books—on the nighttable, on the floor—I’d seen only a copy of the Norton Anthology of Poetry and a murder mystery. The small wooden bookcase in the living room contains some good fiction and poetry but has room for three glass paperweights. And a framed painting of a dog. A dog, for God’s sake. I hate dogs. I’d pulled out her copy of Ariel. Sylvia Plath seemed appropriate to the occasion. No notes in the margins. No underlinings. The book looked a lot less ragged than my own copy. She hadn’t even written her name in the front.
Brian stood beside me holding a glass. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I reached for his hair and stroked it. I pulled his head toward me and kissed him. His lips were soft at first, his tongue a little tentative. Then his mouth moved hard on mine.
I don’t think either of us had known what would happen and I guess I was pushing the direction. The way you almost unconsciously move the planchette over a Ouija board. Dylan helped. I rocked with Brian. Moved into the beat.
“If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangiers,” I sang softly to him as we moved with one another. I thought how now he’d always think of me whenever he heard this tape. It still makes me think of a guy I worked with at a bookstore in Penn Station. “Listen,” he’d said, as he put the needle back to the beginning, “I can’t deal with virgins. Come back when you lose it, okay? I mean it. Send me a note or something.” I was to hear variations of that line until I was twenty-four and finally managed to get rid of it in a small hotel in Paris by the Seine.
Brian ran his hands down my back and over my behind. Up my thigh and under Yvonne’s skirt. I’d thought I’d have to bring him out. The way Mark had done for me. Undress him slowly, tie his wrists easily with Yvonne’s scarf, whisper poems in Italian as I tongued his neck and licked down the length of his body. Pulled his stories out of him. His secrets. Uncovered everything about him. But he seemed to be doing fine on his own.
“Look at me,” he said. He held my chin and, with his thumb, wiped off the Scarlet Memory I’d put on at Yvonne’s and reapplied in the cab. “I like you so much better without it.”
I could tell then he’d be a good lover. His body felt warm next to mine. We fell to the couch. The tape switched to the other side. My first affair. We’d have our own veritable Innisfree.