SEAN wasn’t my type. I was fairly certain of that right away. He liked to get stoned and go to a film in the evening, but Mark liked to slave away in a tie and shirt sleeves, trying to save the poor. Sean had as much in common with Mark as Hollywood had with the Bronx, but I decided to see him, if only to keep my mind off other things. We saw one another frequently but we didn’t become lovers, and I knew we’d gone through the kind of ambivalence men and women go through before they settle into becoming friends.
I knew I would never fall in love with him. You can always tell when you’re going to fall in love with someone, and I could tell that Sean wasn’t the kind of man I’d fall in love with. He was too uncomplicated and easygoing for me to fall in love with. He took things too much in stride. I wasn’t even sure a person could fall in love in the city. I knew it was difficult to stay in love in the city. But to fall in love you have to stand still, and how do you stand still in a city where nothing stands still?
One night after dinner, Sean wanted to go down by the Hudson to see the sunset. “What for?” I asked. “A New York sunset is just pollution.”
Sean smiled his crooked half-smile. His blue eyes, almost turquoise against his blue shirt, tried to figure out what I wanted. “All right. We’ll do whatever you want.”
I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so we went down to the river. Sean lent me his copy of the Voice, which I sat on while he sat on the grass. He had met with Arthur Hansom that afternoon and was excited about his new job as an assistant director. “You know, I’ll probably be going to L.A. soon.” The sunset looked boring to me. A rather mottled shade of orange. “I’ve got to take care of locations, casting, all kinds of details. And then maybe I’ll get a chance to direct.”
“Oh, I didn’t know you wanted to direct.” He wore pale blue socks and jeans, and as he rested, leaning back on his arms, his pants rose up in such a way that I could see the skin between his socks and his pants.
“Everyone wants to direct, unless you really want to act. I want to make something that’s all mine.” For some reason I couldn’t take my eyes off the small patch of very white leg. It made me uncomfortable to think of this large, handsome man with such a white, skinny, hairless leg, the kind of leg you’d expect to see on a polio victim, a withered useless limb.
It was at that moment, as I stared at the white leg, that the rat ran by us, or rather around us. It started from a tree not far from Sean and I saw it in the corner of my eye. It was your average brown, filthy New York City rat, and I thought I saw its white tooth, one huge, white, pointed tooth, as it raced by. I jumped up, screaming, “Oh my God, did you see that? It ran right by us.”
Sean, who had also seen it, jumped up too, not because of the rat but because of me. “It’s gone,” he said.
“Ugh, it makes me sick. I knew we shouldn’t have come down here. Mark and I never came down here.”
Sean looked at me rather somberly. “Well, I’m not Mark. Come on, let’s go somewhere else.”
I glanced down, afraid that I’d see the rat at Sean’s foot, staring up at his pale white leg, but I was relieved to see that both the rat and Sean’s flesh were out of sight. When we got back to Broadway, Sean said, “Come on. I want to take you somewhere.”
“Where?”
Sean took me by the arm and led me toward Columbus. “It’s a surprise. Don’t you like surprises?” He smiled, almost to himself. “No more horses, no more smashing cars. And I’m solvent again.” When we came to Baskin-Robbins, Sean stopped. “I’m treating you to ice cream.”
“That’s the surprise?”
“O.K., so I’ll take you to the Four Seasons when I get my first paycheck, deal?”
I said it was a deal.
“What kind of ice cream do you want?”
I thought for a moment. “Maybe I should pay for this. You just got the job.”
“Look, you aren’t under any obligation. What flavor?”
I pondered the options. “Chocolate,” I said definitely, after a moment of silence.
He waited. “What kind of chocolate? They’ve got a dozen kinds of chocolate in there. Marshmallow Magic, Rocky Road, Fudge Ripple . . .”
I raised my hands. “I don’t care. Anything chocolate.”
He put his hands obstinately on his hips. “What d’you mean, you don’t care? You have to make up your mind. What d’you want?”
“Really, it doesn’t matter.” He was getting on my nerves.
“Of course it matters. What you want always matters.”
Mark never asked me about ice cream. He asked me about what I thought of the latest Supreme Court decision or the volunteer army or the budget for the new administration, but if I said chocolate, he’d never say what kind of chocolate. He’d say that in the grand scheme those decisions were unimportant.
“Of course it matters. What you want is what you feel. You want a sweater because you feel cold. You want a mint julep because you feel hot and sticky . . .”
I’d read somewhere that the lovelorn should eat chocolate because chocolate has an enzyme that you release when you’re in love. I thought very hard. Marshmallow Magic sounded too illusory, and I’d had my fill of the bittersweet. I wanted something with strength and texture, yet at the same time gentle and smooth. “Jamoca Almond Fudge.”
“Is that all?” I nodded and he smiled encouragingly. “Wait here.” He went inside, took a number, flashed it to me, and signaled that there were three ahead of us. In a few moments he returned with two cones. His was yellow.
“What’d you get?” We strolled toward Central Park.
“Banana Republic.” I made a face. “Here, try it.” We lapped quickly at the cones, which in the summer heat were already beginning to run in little rivulets.
We exchanged cones but I didn’t like the Banana Republic at all. “I like the name, though.”
“Yeah.” His tongue worked quickly around the cone. “Makes me think of torrid, dangerous places that aren’t New Jersey. The only flavor I won’t try is Bubble Gum.” He fumbled for napkins that were in his pocket. We reached the parkside and sat down on a bench.
“What about Peanut Butter and Jelly?”
He pulled out the napkins. Taking my cone again, he gave it a few licks, bandaged it, and handed it back to me. “Oh, I tried it once, but I was in California. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
When we’d finished our cones and wiped our hands, he said, “Ready?”
I said, “Ready.” But we didn’t go anywhere.
We sat, staring ahead of us at the traffic zipping uptown, at the landmark buildings across the street set against the darkening sky. Neither of us made a motion toward leaving. When he reached across the bench and pulled me toward him, I was already reaching for him. He pulled me to him, took my chin in his hand, and I was already sliding into his arms. And when he raised my chin and kissed me, my mouth was already turning toward his mouth. I was aware of how sticky our hands, our lips, were from the ice cream. Of how sweaty we were from the heat. Our teeth accidentally banged together when our mouths first met. We tried it again. Our noses met. A hair from his mustache tickled the lining of my nose. Our overbites didn’t quite mesh. It wasn’t a perfect kiss, but it was a kiss, and I kissed him back for a long time.
Afterward he held me. His beard rubbed my cheeks. Our sticky fingers intertwined. His heart beat too fast and he couldn’t hide the fact that it was something he’d wanted for a while. “We should go,” he said. We both agreed we should go, but we just sat there.
Two Hispanics passed us, smoking a joint. They whistled and caressed one another in ridiculous ways, mocking us. “Let’s go back to my place,” I said.
We walked to my apartment in silence, our feet shuffling along in stride. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t know what was the right thing to do. I didn’t know what I felt or what I wanted to feel. But I knew too many months had passed since Mark left me and that it was time to begin to go on.
We’d hardly said a word as we walked back to my apartment and we didn’t say anything when we got inside. I flicked on the overhead light and Sean flicked it off behind me. When I turned toward him, he placed his palm under my chin. “Ever since I met you,” he said, “I’ve wanted to make you relax.” He kissed me on the lips.
Gently he unbuttoned my shirt. “I better go to the bathroom,” I whispered. But Sean shook his head. He told me I wouldn’t need any birth control, not right now. “I just want to make you relax. That’s all I want to do right now.”
So we went into my room and I lay back on the bed. Sean took off his shirt. “Now just relax,” he said again. He stroked my hair, my cheek, as I nestled into the pillow. “I want you to forget about everything,” he told me as he kissed my eyes, my neck, my mouth. He took off my shirt and let his hand slide over my breasts, my legs. “I just want you to be comfortable,” he whispered. He unbuttoned my pants and rubbed my belly. He kissed my breasts gently and then his lips moved down to my belly. I closed my eyes.
For the first time in months I forgot where I was. He told me to relax as he kissed my stomach, my thighs. So I relaxed until I thought I was falling asleep. Until it seemed my body grew heavy like a stone and I didn’t know if I was moving or being moved. I relaxed until I thought I was made of lead, and then, when I knew I couldn’t relax anymore, I began to feel lighter and lighter. I felt so light that my hand, gripping Sean’s shoulder, flew up to my mouth to stifle a cry. I was light and floating. I took a deep breath of air. I was like some anaerobic form of life that floated up from the bottom of the sea and didn’t die. I felt myself emerge, feeling lightheaded as a mutant strain.
I must have dozed off for a few moments. When I woke, I found Sean resting but awake at my side. Then I got up, went into the bathroom, and found my diaphragm. It seemed dusty to me from disuse, like some old relic you’d come across in your grandmother’s attic. When I got back in bed, I leaned on my elbow beside Sean. I began kissing him gently on the mouth as he dozed; my hand reached down, caressing him. “I’m not satisfied yet,” I told him. Sean pulled me down toward him. We made love furiously and then, when we were finished, when we were really spent, Sean cradled my head in his hands. “Now,” he said softly, “you should be able to sleep.”
But while he slept, I didn’t sleep. Not at first. I lay still, my head cradled against his shoulder, thinking how I was in a strange state of peace. The kind of peace that does not need to sleep. I lay there fully awake, thinking about my amorous history.
The nature of desire has always been a mystery to me. In high school I dated big, stupid football players. The kind you had to brush up on your hand signals before you could go out with them. I had nothing to say to these Neolithic creatures and yet I desired them. I wasn’t completely inexperienced when I met Mark. I’d made my first pathetic sexual attempts in the boiler room of the Leonardo Da Vinci, en route to spending my junior year abroad studying Roman piazzas, with a deckhand who smelled like salami and wanted to paint frescoes like Michelangelo. He also had a penchant for oral sex, and so we crossed the Atlantic, lapping at one another while the engines churned away.
And then I finally lost my virginity in an MIT dorm with a college boyfriend named Ralph Rothman. Neither of us had ever had sexual intercourse before, not all the way, and our first attempt failed because Ralph put Vicks VapoRub on his penis as a lubricant and he came to bed smelling of eucalyptus; within moments he was writhing in pain. Our second attempt, a few days after Ralph healed, was an improvement, only because it was less dramatic.
With Mark sex wasn’t really something you did with your body. You had to use your mind, your eyes, your words. Sometimes he seemed to like seeing me more than he liked touching me. In the midst of the most complex problems of contractual law, he’d ask me to remove all my clothes above the waist. And I’d sit, trying to solve urban-housing dilemmas, worried about low-income units, while Mark wrote briefs, pausing to examine my breasts. Occasionally he’d walk over, touch them, then go back to his books. In some way he sealed me to him.
We overslept the next morning, and woke when the phone rang. I knew it must be Mr. Wicker or his secretary, calling to see why I was late. “Oh, God,” I muttered to Sean as I reached for the phone, “it must be my office.”
It was Mark. He said he had to see me, that it was important. “You don’t sound happy to hear from me,” he said. I told him his timing had always seemed strange. Sean sat up, kissed me on the shoulder, and headed for the shower.
“I want to see you,” Mark said again. I told him that if it was about a divorce, I would get in touch with my lawyer. “No,” he said flatly, “it’s not about a divorce. I just want to see you.”
That evening we met at seven o’clock at the Echo Inn, a small bar in Little Italy. I’d prepared myself mentally to wait for Mark. To my knowledge and recollection he had never been on time to meet anyone. He always used to send flowers on my birthday and on our anniversary because he knew at least flowers would arrive on time. But at seven o’clock sharp, Mark was waiting for me.
He sat in the booth in the back of the dimly lit bar, his jacket removed, tie undone, a shirt collar slightly frayed. He started to get up to kiss me on the cheek, but I motioned for him to keep his seat. Still he maneuvered a kiss before I had a chance to sit down.
Mark liked the blouse I wore. I liked his tie. He liked my hair. “You look great. You really do.” He reached across for one of my hands but I pulled away.
The waitress hovered near our table. Mark signaled her impatiently. “Just a minute, folks.” She disappeared with an armful of dirty dishes.
“I spent some time in the country this summer with Jennie Rainwater. Funny you never met her.”
“Oh, remember, you lost track of her.” He twirled his drink in his hand. He had ordered something before I’d gotten there. “You know who I ran into? Peter Kramer, remember? That guy who lived near us when we were downtown next to the funeral home. He asked about you.” The waitress came over. “You want a vodka tonic, right? Two vodka tonics.”
“Wasn’t Peter that guy who was always in love with foreign correspondents and they were always getting shipped all over the world?”
Mark laughed. “I only remember the one who worked for NBC who got sent to Iraq.”
“God, I’m sure there were others.” We were quiet for a moment. “What’d you want to see me about?”
He stiffened. “I just thought we should talk, that’s all. I haven’t seen you for a long time.”
“Talk about what?” I was having trouble deciding if my coldness was an act or authentic.
“That guy I saw you with. Are you dating or what?”
“I really don’t think that concerns you anymore.”
He leaned back against the cushion, pressing his head against the wall. “I’d just like to know what you’re doing. I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.” He scratched his head, and dandruff flakes fell on his shoulder. Had he always had dandruff? For some reason I’d never noticed this before. “I was thinking . . .” He seemed to be talking to the judge. He stared up and spoke methodically. “Maybe we should give it another go.”
“I was thinking we should file for a divorce.” I smiled at him, the way you smile when you run into someone you used to know and you’re happy to run into them but you can’t for the life of you remember their name. “I just think it’s time.”
He leaned forward on his hands. “You know, these have been bad times, but what about the good times? What about Bermuda? What about when you broke your wrist and I took care of you? What about that summer in Maine?”
“I’m not the one who left.”
He cleared his throat. “Look, I’m confused. We got married when we were very young. I’d hardly been on my own at all. I think I’d like to see you.” He paused. “I want to see you again.”
“Mark, this is ridiculous . . .”
He stared into his glass. “I’m trying to talk to you.”
I sighed. “I know that. I understand that. I even appreciate that. But don’t you think your timing is a little funny? Have you tried to talk to me at all since you left? When I needed to talk, you wouldn’t even come to the phone.”
He turned his drink in perfect circles. “I couldn’t talk then. You drove me away. You were so introspective, you were too dependent on me. I mean, maybe I can be cold and distant, but you were always on my back.”
The waitress brought us a little bowl of peanuts and I began eating them, one at a time. “I think it would have been much more productive if you’d said something at the time.”
He shook his hand at me, a courtroom gesture I’ve always hated. “It’s just your damn ego that’s involved.”
“You’re damn right it’s my ego.”
“I want to see you again.” He reached across the table for my hands.
“No.” I was adamant when I spoke but I was filled with silent doubt. He was my husband. He was the man I married at twenty-four and I thought that lying in bed with him on a Saturday morning was about the best thing that I’d ever known. We owned things in common. His money was my money and my money was his. This wasn’t some fly-by-night affair. This was what I’d committed myself to. But what had I committed myself to, I wondered. To a man who never sweated in bed, who could eat one chocolate chip cookie and close the bag; to a man who could leave a note on the kitchen table and depart. To a man with, as far as I could tell, nearly perfect control.
Mark held my hands tightly in his. “Look, can’t we just see one another? Just until we figure this out?”
I was still looking for a way to hurt him and Lila, but not at the expense of hurting myself. If he’d done this to me and now he was doing it to Lila, I was fairly certain he’d do it to me again. “All right”—I squeezed his hands—“I’ll see you.” His face brightened. “If you leave Lila.”
He frowned and shook his whole torso. “You don’t understand. I’m confused. I’m not sure what’s best. I need . . . well, I need to see both of you, just until I’m clearer.”
I had the sobering memory of a kiss on my lips from the night before, and even if I hadn’t had that memory, I’d been told lies by this man. I had to look at him very intently to remind myself that no matter what I’d done to hurt him or what had happened between us or how I felt about him, he was not a man to be trusted.
“I’m afraid,” I whispered, “that’s not possible.”
Then, angry, still half in love with him, but knowing there was no going back, I looked away.
When Sean left for Los Angeles at the end of September, I was relieved, and plunged into work. Two of my smaller projects had received funding: a traffic-pattern alteration in the Bowery and a commercial revitalization project on the Lower East Side. Neither was as big as SAP, but they were enough to keep me busy. I was at my desk from early in the morning until after dark. From the back of the office, I could see the place where the East River met the Hudson, and I could spend hours staring at the confluence, at the point where two huge bodies of water merged. It was always turbulent at the point of confluence.
Sean phoned me about once a week from California. On our last call, he sensed I was distracted, so he told me when he would be back and said I should call him when I felt like it. It was almost a week after he said he would be getting back that I called him at his parents’ place in New Jersey. “Can you come to New York?” I asked when he reached the phone.
“Tonight?”
I thought for a moment. “No, tomorrow night.”
When I met him the next night on the corner of Mott and Canal, he looked bored as he rocked on the balls of his feet. I was late and he was a little annoyed, but I was glad to see him. “What took you so long?”
“The subway was mobbed.”
“No, to call me. You waited a long time.”
“I don’t know.” I slipped my hand through his arm.
“I don’t either.” He kissed me lightly on the cheek.
“I’ve been very busy.”
“So have I.”
We walked slowly, looking for a restaurant, though neither of us seemed very anxious to eat. “Why’d you call?” he asked me at last.
“I don’t know. I guess I wanted to see you.” It had been almost a month that we hadn’t seen one another. “Look at that intersection.” I pointed to where the Holland Tunnel fed into Chinatown. “It should have been redirected years ago.”
“Where should we eat?”
“I don’t care.”
Sean sighed. “If you don’t care, why’d you call me to have dinner with you?”
“I didn’t call you for dinner.”
“So why did you call?” He was growing impatient with me.
I took a deep breath. “I called because I wanted to go to bed with you.”
Every weekend for the next three weeks in a row, Sean came into the city. We spent the whole weekend together. On Wednesdays he often had meetings, and we’d spend that night together when he was in the city. He’d arrive from the meetings a little flushed, excited. He’d talk a blue streak all night about the film industry and how crazy everyone was. On the fourth weekend, Sean called to say he’d been invited upstate to visit some old friends. “They’re great. You’ll love them.”
He picked me up from work on Friday and kissed me as I climbed into the car. “Bring your long johns?”
“Get in.” He pulled me to him. “I’ll keep you warm.”
Sean cut over west and headed straight uptown. “We’re going to miss rush hour if I’ve got anything to say about it.” He took Riverside to the Henry Hudson Parkway, and we were off. From the parkway to the thruway. The thruway to Albany. “I can make it there in four hours flat,” he proclaimed and proceeded to do just that.
I watched him drive as we sped madly along. He drove with precision. He drove the way some men think. He moved with cold logic, straight to the point. There was something direct and honest in the way he drove and if he’d been my type, I would have fallen in love with him for that. “So,” I said, trying to make conversation, “tell me about Sandy and Earl.”
“They’re great,” he said. “You’ll love them.”
“I know. You said that, but what’s great about them?”
“Oh, you’ll see. They’re swell people.”
“How do you mean ‘swell’? I mean, what’re they like?”
He made a tsk sound. “I don’t know. You’ll see.”
It was the word “swell” that first made me think something was wrong. Nobody says “swell” anymore. “So how was your week?”
“Oh, fine. Not much happened.”
I settled into the cushy bucket seat and watched, his hand resting not on my knee, as it usually did, but on the little green plastic ball of the gearshift. His fingers caressed the ball, which glowed an almost Day Glo green; his hand massaged it like a breast. “Nothing happened?”
He shook his head and turned on the radio. I leaned against the window and he motioned for me to lock my door. His hand gripped the green plastic ball.
“Is something wrong?”
He shrugged. “I just want to concentrate on the road, O.K.?” There wasn’t much to concentrate on, actually. It was a pretty straight and even stretch of highway, without much traffic. All he had to do was point the car in front of us and talk to me.
“Sure, that’s O.K.” Something was wrong. I couldn’t pinpoint it. I started retracing our steps. Had I said something stupid? Something insensitive? Had I not shown sufficient interest in his job as assistant director? Or perhaps I was just expecting him to behave the way Mark behaved. With Mark, silence was synonymous with anger. “I got a new assignment. Seems they want to alter traffic patterns down in the Bowery.”
“Oh, yeah?” He pulled off the road. “Let’s stop somewhere. I’m hungry.”
“You’re not interested in my new assignment?”
“I just want to get a bite of something.”
I tried to explain that my new assignment had to do with more than just traffic problems. It had to do with population distribution, with sociology, with urban design, with pollution, with politics. It was no use. He wasn’t listening. He was looking for a Howard Johnson’s. The window felt cold against the back of my hand and I knew winter was coming. I could feel it in the glass. The sky was very clear and the few clouds overhead were white, but I knew that ahead of us, up north, winter was coming. My first Christmas without Mark. I hated being cold. I moved away from the window, closer to Sean, and let my hand fall on his thigh. “How did you meet them?”
He sighed, as if he were about to make a huge effort. “Let’s see. I met Sandy when I was doing soaps out in L.A.”
“I didn’t know you did soaps.”
“I don’t like soaps. The money’s good but I hated doing them. I had to play this stupid gynecologist. Sandy was casting director. We got to be friends. She quit after she met Earl. He’s a photographer and he teaches. They’ve got this great thing going. Now she runs a little theater outside of Saratoga.”
“Sounds nice.”
“It’s very nice.”
The last three weekends I’d spent with Sean he had talked nonstop. He talked about everything. About the film, about my work, about what he liked for breakfast. Maybe it was driving that made him quiet. I looked at the road. There were trees, and hills that were starting to rise into mountains. The trees, the road, the leaves starting to turn, they all reminded me of those weekend jaunts Mark and I used to take out of Cambridge. The older you get, the more things remind you of other things. Everything reminded my father of home. Every lake was Lake Michigan. “Trees,” he said about the redwood forest; “we’ve got big trees right in Wisconsin.”
We pulled into a pancake house outside Albany. Sean ordered strawberry pancakes. I ordered a bowl of clam chowder. The chowder tasted fishy. The strawberries ran off his pancakes like blood. He ran his fork with a bit of pancake on it around his plate in circles as if he were going to paint a picture. I sighed and ate slowly. This wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind. So he was moody. Lots of men were moody. Lots of people were moody. A cup of coffee loosened him up. He described the little brook that ran behind the farmhouse. The two apple trees. A dog named Sophia. He sipped his coffee and told me about the way the leaves up north turn a special shade of scarlet. Like those cornpuffs in the box of Trix. Did I remember Trix? Those round balls of mauve and russet and orange?
He reached across the table for my hand and dipped his sleeve in the syrup and strawberry sauce in his plate. “Damn.” He frowned and seemed at a loss for what to do.
“Here,” I said. I moistened a napkin in my ice water and gently wiped his sleeve. He smiled and kissed every finger on my hand. But when we got back in the car, he drove in silence. “How much farther is it?”
“We’ll get there eventually,” he answered.
“What do you want to do this weekend?” My hand rested on his hand, which rested on the Day Glo green gearshift.
“I don’t know. We’ll do something.”
It seemed I’d spent most of my life trying to understand men. My father, Zap, Mark, and now Sean. Women, I’ve always understood, more or less. What moves us, I think, is the desire to fill spaces, to destroy emptiness. The womb, the heart, the shelf. But men seem to be running away from emptiness. They drive fast, they go places. The sky was darkening as we passed through Albany, heading on Route 87 toward Saratoga.
What was I doing here, I asked myself. Why did I have to bother to start again? It is always at this time of day that I get maudlin. Sometimes I think these memories of dusk are going to kill me, and it is this time of day that always brings me back to my family.
My father hated going out of his way. He dreaded getting lost. Every Sunday we drove the thirty miles to see my grandparents, and when we drove home it was always dusk. He hated driving at dusk and he always took exactly the same stretch of road. Sometimes when we drove back from my grandparents’, my mother would say, “I feel like something sweet. Why don’t we take the kids for ice cream.”
“Ice cream?” he’d shout with cries as distant and piercing to me in the back seat as if he’d just driven off a cliff. “Ice cream!” he’d yell. “You must be out of your mind. I’m not driving fifty miles out of my way for ice cream. We’ve got ice cream at home. We’ve got a freezer full of ice cream. We’ve got ice cream nobody eats. You want me to get into all that traffic in Kenilworth? You want to take Sheridan when it’s pitch black and they haven’t got a goddamn light on the highway? You heard the weather report. You know it’s going to pour. I’m not going to get trapped on Sheridan Road in a storm because you want ice cream.”
My mother would always move close to the window. “Sorry I asked,” she’d reply, and sometimes, “Pardon me for living.”
“Ice cream. It’s practically winter and you want to get ice cream.”
And then we drove the rest of the way in silence. It took me twenty years to understand that my father wasn’t angry about ice cream at all. He wasn’t angry because we had a freezer full of ice cream. What he was angry at was some minor offense someone had committed in the course of the day, the kind of thing he could never get angry at. If he poured me a glass of orange juice and I didn’t say thank you. If he asked Zap to play golf but Zap wanted to play tennis. If he’d gotten the car washed and nobody noticed. He was a man plagued with an inability to get angry at the thing that was really upsetting him.
My father never actually did anything with us. Instead he’d drive us to the movies, drive us to ride horses, drive us to a school play. And he’d either wait in the car for two hours until we were finished or he’d come back. But it was difficult to get him to come inside. And if he drove us somewhere and you forgot to say thank you, he waited until you made the fatal error of leaving on a closet light or forgetting to put the butter away. “Who do you think pays the goddamn bills around here? You have to be such a goddamn slob. Let me let you in on a secret. If you’re lazy now, you’ll be lazy all your life.” When she could, Mom would whisper to us, “Did you say thank you when he picked you up from swimming?”
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the men in my life. And dusk seems the time of day when it is most difficult for me to understand. It is the time when the light seems most uncertain. And as I drove with Sean, silent beside me, intent on the road, I thought how it was the time of day when my father came home from work. There was always a blue-black sky behind him as he stood in the doorway, a little bewildered as if he’d come to the wrong house.
I am told I was the one who waited for him. I waited until he stood in the doorway and then I rushed to get his slippers. I never said a word, but silently I untied his shoes and helped him into his slippers. My father was always exhausted when he came home. He’d take two ice cubes in a highball glass and pour himself a Scotch. Then he’d sit down with his paper and watch the news. Usually he fell asleep in the chair and I’d watch him. A kind of torment would come over his face, as if the news stories that had put him to sleep had entered his dreamy thoughts.
But my first memory of dusk isn’t of my father coming home tired and falling asleep in a chair, his face contorted with the news of the day. It’s from a time before he was so tired. He was looking out the window, hands thrust in his pockets, and suddenly he turned to us. “Come on,” he said. We were already in our pajamas, Renee, Zap, and myself. He grabbed the blankets, scooped us up, stuck us in the back seat of the car.
He drove as if he were escaping from the Gestapo. Renee was angry because she’d missed the end of “Uncle Johnnie Coons,” and Zap was already half-asleep, but I was wide awake as he pulled into a field somewhere and dragged us out of the car. “There,” he said, pointing to the sky. He lifted us up and put us on top of the car. “What do you think of that?” We didn’t know what to think. We didn’t know what we were supposed to be looking at. He folded his arms across his chest. “That’s the finest sunset you’re ever going to see . . .” The three of us gazed at the orange and scarlet horizon. “So remember it.”
When we walked in, Sandy kissed Sean on the lips for what seemed like a long time. Sean laughed nervously and pushed her away a little, pretending to be admiring the work they’d done on the house. “Hey, you exposed the beams.”
“You have no idea how difficult that was,” Earl said deadpan. Sandy swooped down on Sean again. She squeezed him as if testing to see if the fruit was ripe. Then she squeezed my arm. Earl was somber and thin, yet a little flabby at the waist, like someone on the verge of deteriorating into middle age. When he smiled, the only thing that happened to his face was that his lips curled upward. “We’re glad you made it,” Earl said, making me fairly certain he wasn’t very glad.
“It’s just impossible to pin you down.” Sandy was exuberant. “And you must be . . .” She squeezed my fingers, trying to remember my name.
“Debbie,” Sean said.
“Sean told us all about you on the phone. You’re an architect, right?”
“I’m an urban planner.”
“You guys must be starving.”
“We ate on the road.” Sean was trying to be polite.
“Oh.” Sandy looked uncomfortably at Earl.
“But we can eat something,” I offered.
“She made a feast.” Earl could have been saying, “She has cancer.”
Everybody seemed to me incredibly awkward. Sandy kept squeezing us. Earl spoke in monotones. He walked across the kitchen as if being dragged by an invisible dog. First they gave us the tour of every nook and cranny of the house. The storage room, the wood-burning stove, the antique wallpaper, the bay window. “We bought it for five. The roof was burned off,” Earl informed us.
“Now it’s worth at least forty,” Sandy broke in. “Thanks to all the work Earl put in.”
“We couldn’t have afforded it otherwise.”
Sandy squeezed Sean’s arm as we toured. She seemed to need to squeeze things, as if she were blind and had to make sure they were there. At one point the men disappeared somewhere into a closet to look at pipes. Sandy pulled me aside, her fingers digging into my arm. “He never brings women around. Must be serious this time,” she whispered into my ear.
Sean overheard. He rolled his eyes at Sandy. “Sandra, let’s not get all dramatic. How about some drinks?”
In the middle of dinner, Sandy reached over and held Sean’s hand. Earl grimaced. Then she threw her head back and laughed. “I’m just so glad you’re here.”
That was when I knew Sean and Sandy had been lovers. The minute I figured it out, everything fell into place. Sandy’s clutching at him, Earl’s somber tolerance. After dinner we crawled into bed. We slept in an old brass bed in the carriage house under Earl’s grandmother’s crazy quilt, and Sean began making love to me with the wonderful precision I was growing used to. He probed and turned and dipped. He brought me up and down and he paused and made me wait until I couldn’t wait any longer. The quilt was warm and we tossed it off. It was a hundred years old and belonged in the museum. And all I could think about was that Sean and Sandy had been lovers.
What did it matter what had happened with him and another woman, probably years ago? I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter, but what mattered was that he hadn’t said anything to me. I felt very close to him after we made love, so I asked, “Were you quiet in the car on the way up because you and Sandy used to be lovers and you were thinking maybe this visit wasn’t such a good idea?”
Sean lifted his head off my chest, where he was resting. “Is it important?”
I explained that it wasn’t important that they had been lovers. It was important that he hadn’t told me and that he’d been moody in the car all the way up. “Why didn’t you just say we were going to see an old girlfriend? At least I’d understand why Sandy is almost hysterical and Earl looks like he swallowed a frog.”
“Oh, they’re always like that . . . But O.K., we were lovers five years ago for a couple of months. It wasn’t much of a thing. I was back from Vietnam and was trying to get over someone who’d dumped me while I was overseas.” He kissed me on the cheek. “Is that O.K.?”
I shook my head. “I think you should have told me.”
“I really didn’t think it would matter. You’re being oversensitive.”
The carriage house hadn’t been winterized as yet and I was beginning to feel a chill. I reached for the crazy quilt. “Maybe I am, but I think you’re wrong. You don’t understand. I’ve been hurt by just that sort of thing.”
Sean sat up. “What sort of thing? It was a long time ago. You don’t even care about me very much anyway.”
“I care about you,” I said, unsure of how I meant that.
Sean shrugged, “Well, I care about you, too, but I really didn’t think something that happened years ago would make the slightest difference. And you know what else? A lot of people have been hurt. People get hurt all the time in ways you can’t even imagine. I’m not Mark. I’d never hurt you the way he did. And be glad you aren’t that woman, whatever her name is. Instead of being hurt you should be relieved.”
Now I was sitting up. “I think about that woman a lot. I still want to get back at her.”
“So why don’t you call her up and tell her to go to hell? But don’t concoct that I’m going to do the same thing to you. I should have told you that I’d been with Sandy five years ago, and I thought about telling you, but then I thought it wouldn’t matter very much.”
“You think I should call Lila up and tell her to go to hell?”
“I think you should get it off your chest.”
“I can’t tell you how much I despise her . . .”
“Deborah, you know what? Everyone has a past too. Even me. Lots of people have had things happen to them.”
We both sat cross-legged on the bed. “What’s happened to you?”
“Oh, not much. My mother took off when I was three and came back when I was ten. That might not have been so terrible if my father hadn’t told us she was dead. Anyway, I flunked out of Yale . . . I’m skipping a few years. I went overseas and wrote to this girl back home. I was ready to marry her. She was sleeping with a friend of mine the whole time but writing me these terrific letters. She didn’t tell me until I got home that she was going to marry the guy. Anything else you want to know?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t in love with him, so what should it matter what had happened with him and another woman years ago? He was right. It didn’t matter, but something mattered as I rolled over and went to sleep. I dreamed of Mark. I dreamed of him as graphically, as poignantly, as I had since our parting. He is naked, in the dream, and erect by a riverbank and he is calling to me. Oh, God, Deborah, I’ve been such a jerk. I didn’t know what I was doing. Come to me, please. I can’t stand being without you anymore. I am naked as I make my way toward him. I cross the river and he is there, waiting for me, lying down beside railroad tracks that go nowhere. Gently I lower myself down on top of him.
I woke up, surprised and perplexed to find myself with Sean. “Can a woman have a wet dream?” I asked him. Taking this as encouragement, Sean made love to me again. Afterward, he reached down and pulled Earl’s grandmother’s quilt over us. I studied the pattern of the patchwork. The patches of the crazy quilt were in all colors, sizes, and shapes. An endless piecing together of mismatched scraps, and I thought what vision you need to be able to do that.
“Bet you guys needed your long johns last night,” Earl greeted us in the morning. He wore striped pajamas and was grinding coffee by hand.
“Oh, Sean wouldn’t let her freeze.” Sandy smiled, squeezing Sean’s arm. Then she squeezed me.
The next afternoon, as we were getting ready to leave, I helped Sandy cook a batch of chocolate chip cookies. “You know,” she said, “he really likes you. I can tell. I know him well and I know he likes you.”
I was beginning to like her; there was something sympathetic about her frenzy. “Anything I should know about him?”
“Oh . . .” She took cookies off the sheets with a spatula. “There is one thing. He goes away when he’s hurt.”
I committed that to memory. When we were ready to leave, Sandy gave us the entire batch of cookies. She kissed me good-bye and I found myself squeezing her. In the car home I fell asleep and Sean ate all the cookies but two, which he saved for me. “How could you eat all those cookies?” I asked him when I woke up. We weren’t far from my apartment. When we got there, both of us noticed the light on right away. “Did you leave a light on?” Sean asked me. I shook my head, and when I put my key in the door I knew it wasn’t locked. Sean and I looked at each other, perplexed, as Zap opened the door.