MARK CLAIMS his problems began when he reached puberty and his parents moved from his secure, tree-lined corner in Brooklyn to a crossroads in the Bronx where Cummings Avenue intersected Seaman Road. How, he used to say, could a young boy in his family grow up normal with such street signs glaring him in the face? He lived on a lewd corner and pornography was embedded in his soul. At night Mark touched himself as he stared down at the street signs, flickering in the green neon light, foreboding years of self-abuse and a licentious longing for women.
I never intended to sleep with Mark that night. Actually I’m not sure what I intended. Perhaps simply getting him to come over was a victory for myself over Lila. But it was clear when I opened the door that Mark had come over with the intention of sleeping with me.
I thought of all the nights and weeks and months when I would have given anything to have Mark standing at my door in a flannel shirt, clutching a bottle of wine. But now at that moment I didn’t really care very much. “Hi.” He kissed me on the cheek. “You look taller.”
“Maybe it’s the shoes.” Mark had always loved the fact I was tall. “But I’m sure you’re taller.”
“So, how’ve you been?”
“Oh, you know, busy. Let me open this.”
He walked into the kitchen and went right to the spot on the peg board where the corkscrew hung. My heart sank. He still knew where everything was. “We’ve got a new case in the office. Some mad subway slasher. A disgusting guy. I have to defend him, but I hope they send him up the river for good.” He had very smoothly inserted the corkscrew into the cork and now he was extracting it from the bottle. “So how goes the South Bronx?”
“Oh, you know. I keep waiting for funding. I’m thinking of going back to school in historic preservation.”
Mark reached for the wine glasses and poured me a glass. “You don’t have to go back to school. You could just start working in historic preservation. Oh, I guess you could use an M.A. in architecture.”
“Cheers.” We clinked glasses. “Mark, I didn’t really call you to discuss my career.”
He walked with me back into the living room. “So why did you call? Did that guy jilt you or something?”
“Oh, no. We’re seeing each other. We’re just seeing less of each other. He was living here for a while but now he has his own place.”
“Oh, he was living here . . .” Mark’s voice trailed off.
It was strange, having him back in the apartment. I didn’t quite know what to do with him. I felt as if we should go and check into a motel somewhere. “So how are things with you?”
“Oh, O.K. Lila’s in California, finalizing her divorce, I think. We’re getting along all right. I don’t know. She can be moody.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Things are O.K.”
“You look tired. Are you still taking all those vitamins?” I don’t know really why I asked him that, but I found myself struggling for anything to say to him at all.
Mark must have felt at a loss as well, because he answered the question in some detail. He was still taking his multiples and a lot of C’s, but he’d quit taking the stress formula and all those E’s. “Why?” He ran his hand over his cheek. “Do I look older?”
“Oh, no, not older. Just tired.”
“You look pretty good. Your cheeks are rosy.”
“We spent the weekend in Nantucket.”
“Nantucket.” He sat back, surprised. “Who goes there now? It’s cold.”
“Oh, my friend wanted to get away. He’s working very hard on a film and he wanted to go there, so we went.”
“Seemed like a nice person. I liked his manner.” Mark spoke quickly and I knew he was jealous.
“He’s been very nice to me; it’s just that . . .”
“What?” He knew me well enough to know I was about to talk about more serious subjects.
“I’m just not over it yet. It’s taken me a long time to get over what happened with us.”
“And, are you over it?”
I paused and thought for a minute. If I wasn’t over it, I was almost over it. I’d been fairly certain on the widow’s walk in Nantucket, as I held Sean’s trembling shoulders, that I was more over it than I’d ever been. The mere fact that I could see Mark at all meant that I was well along in the process of getting over him. “I’m getting over it.”
I knew that somehow I was in control of him, that I could have whatever I wanted from him. For the first time in years with Mark, I had the upper hand. When he kissed me, I kissed him back. He took my hands, curled them in his hands, and kissed me. It was clear to me then that he’d spend the night, that we’d make love, probably for the last time, and that I’d be free to go on. That I’d somehow have the last word. I knew I could make love with him, not so much because I wanted to as because I wanted to see how it felt, the way a doctor pokes an old wound just so that you can let him know you no longer feel a thing.
Mark flicked out the light and kissed me again. His breath smelled of Binaca. He reached under my shirt and undid my bra. I reached under his shirt and felt his fur. He was covered with thick, black fur and in the dark his one continuous eyebrow with the arching points made him look devilish. He took off my shirt and dropped it in front of the sofa. I took off his shirt and dropped it on a chair. He put my bra near his shirt. He kicked off his shoes, and his feet still smelled as if they entered into some chemical reaction with his socks.
He led me toward the bedroom and we dropped the rest of our clothes on the way. When I passed the phone in the hallway, I quietly removed it from the hook, certain that my mother would have some telepathic vision in Illinois and phone to make sure I was all right.
Sean probably started trying to call me at around eleven. He called for an hour but the line was busy. Then he asked the operator to see if I was talking. The operator said there was trouble on the line. He lay on his back, thinking. He had an early shoot in the morning but there was something that made him feel he had to get into a cab and come uptown. What if something had happened? He grabbed the keys to my apartment and caught a taxi heading up Sixth Avenue.
“Sixty-eighth and Broadway, fast,” Sean told the driver, who, sensitive to intrigue and desperation, stepped on it. On the way up, he alternated between visions of me, disconsolate, having swallowed Valium with whiskey as a chaser to calm myself down, to me filled with desire and the recognition that we were right for one another.
I heard the doorbell ring, but the kids on my block often ring the bell and run away. I figured whoever it was would ring again if it was important. I certainly was not expecting company. When I didn’t buzz him in, Sean made a snap decision.
In his hand, he was clasping the keys to my apartment, which Zap, with the words “Take care of my sister for me,” had tossed to him the day I threw Zap out. Sean felt it was his duty to let himself in and go upstairs to see if anything was the matter. He knocked gently when he reached my door, and when I didn’t answer, he let himself in.
In the light from the hallway, it was easy to see the pile of clothing trailing across the living room floor—the blouse I’d been wearing next to a pair of men’s shoes, my bra draped across a man’s flannel shirt. He hesitated for a minute, unsure of what he really wanted to do. Then he shut the door quietly behind him, without my ever suspecting that he’d been there at all.
I woke early, feeling lightheaded, while Mark slept on, curled in a circle, looking vaguely like a defused bomb. I brought him some coffee. “Why’d you get up so early?” He glanced at the clock.
“Oh, you know, early bird catches the worm.”
“Oh, yeah.” He reached across the bed for me. “I’ve got a nice little worm for you to catch.”
It amazed me how at another point I would have found that line seductive, but at this moment it had the opposite effect: I was repelled. I got up and walked toward the shower.
“Hey,” Mark called, “where’re you going?”
“I’ve gotta get ready for work,” I called back from the bathroom.
I was enjoying my shower when Mark came and got in with me. He grabbed the bar of soap and began rubbing me. I surprised both of us when I turned to him and said, “This is my shower. This is my apartment and my shower and you’re a guest, so act like one.” In a huff he grabbed a towel and walked back into the bedroom. I washed my hair and conditioned it at my leisure. I rinsed for a long time. When I went back into the bedroom, Mark was sitting on the bed, wrapped in a towel, looking like a lost sheik. He looked up at me, miserably. “What’s the matter with you?”
I shrugged. For the first time in months nothing was wrong with me.
“Deborah . . . I think I still love you.”
I felt incredibly victorious as I replied, “Mark, I’m afraid you’re a little late.”
When we left the apartment, we shook hands on the street as if we’d met at a singles bar the night before. I walked away from him, knowing he was watching me as I walked toward Times Square, toward the great mural of the man chainsmoking, ready to give Sean a real chance.
When I arrived at work, the secretary handed me a note saying Sean couldn’t meet me for dinner that night but he’d phone later to explain. I tried to reach him at home but remembered he had an early shoot, which was why he hadn’t wanted me with him the night before. I sat down to work but there was a nervousness in my stomach, and as the day wore on and Sean didn’t call, I found that nervousness turning into distress. I wanted to go out to lunch but I was afraid I’d miss his call, so all afternoon I sat at my desk.
I did color work because coloring didn’t require much thinking. At three, Sally called and asked me to have dinner with her that night. I said yes, but I didn’t really want to see anyone. At around five Sean phoned. He said he’d been running around all day and hadn’t had a chance to call. He had to work late that evening, and the next night some friends were arriving from California. “Well, I’m free tomorrow,” I said.
“Oh, it’s just a group of Hollywood people. You’d be bored stiff.”
There was a silence for a moment. “Is anything wrong?” I asked him.
“No, why? I’ve just got a lot to do.”
I knew something had happened, but the worst I could imagine was that he’d tried to phone and found my line off the hook. “Look, can we meet for a drink tomorrow night before you go to dinner?”
Sean was quiet. “If you want to meet us for dinner,” he said at last, “we’re meeting at Hisae’s on Astor Place at seven.”
Sally and I went to a Korean restaurant around the corner from our building. She wrote long articles for Women’s Wear on fashion coordinators while secretly doing research on the history of the labor movement in the garment district for her doctoral dissertation at NYU. Sally used to live with a research scientist who joined a monastic order in upstate New York and shaved his head. She chain-smoked Carltons until our boul-gooki arrived. “Look”—she took a drag—“who knows what makes men tick? I go interview gorgeous women, right, and all through the interview they tell me how they can’t get a man to love them. They’ve got the world at their feet, but love, that’s what they can’t get.”
I waved smoke out of my face. “You really should quit.” Sally extinguished her sixth Carlton. “I’m not trying to ‘get’ someone to love me. I’m just trying to lead a decent life.”
“Oh, yeah.” She waved her hand, clearing smoke away from me. “I tried that too. Forget it. We’re children of the sixties.”
Over dessert, Sally said to me, “Why don’t you give him a call tonight? You know how men get moody when they’re falling in love.”
Convinced that Sean was falling in love, and not out of love, with me—though the two states sometimes seem remarkably similar—I tried phoning him when I got home. At one in the morning, I gave up. At seven, I called again and this time woke him up. “Listen,” he mumbled, “I went to bed very late. I don’t have to go to work until the afternoon. I’ll call you at eleven.” I went to the office, and at nine minutes past eleven I phoned him. “I was just going to call you,” he said.
“Well, I don’t know that, do I?”
“I said eleven.”
“It’s after eleven.”
He sighed. “It’s only a few minutes. I was going to call you. I just got up.”
“But I don’t know that. I can’t know that for sure. You didn’t call me when you said you would. You’re always on time. You canceled dinner last night. You’ve never done that before. You always call me when we aren’t together at night . . . did you phone me Sunday and you couldn’t get through? Is that the problem? Just tell me what’s the matter, will you please? Look, this is going to sound crazy, but will you do something for me?”
“What?”
“Will you hang up and call me right back so I can know you would have called me? That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But if we just hang up and you phone me back, then it’ll be as if you called and we can start this discussion over again.”
“Debbie, that’s crazy.”
I said I knew it was crazy, but would he do it anyway.
When the phone rang two minutes later, Sean said, “Is this better?”
“Much better. So, did you try and get through to me Sunday night?”
He lowered his voice. “Something like that.”
“I took it off the hook.”
He sighed. “I know. Look, let’s talk tonight, all right?”
Sean was right about my being bored at dinner. We ate with five of his friends from Los Angeles who knew hundreds of people in common, all of whom had had unbelievable things happen to them since Sean came back east. Someone named Mitzi had gotten a huge part in a pilot but then the funding fell through. Victor got married and, no one could believe it, to a white girl. Sean seemed more surprised by the “girl” than by the “white.” When I let my knee press against him, he moved his leg away. The only person who talked to me all evening was an actress named Roxanne. When I told her I worked in urban renewal, she said, “Oh, you’ll like L.A., then. They need a lot of urban renewal out there.”
“L.A.?” I asked.
“Oh,” she murmured, “aren’t you going . . .”
Sean cut in. “I’m going to Los Angeles after the first of the year to cut the film and start another.”
“Oh,” I said.
The rest of the meal faded into a kind of haze for me. I drifted into the silence most people think comes from lethargy after eating and watched them chatter away as if they were speaking Kurdish. My high school language entrance exam had been in Kurdish. They gave us fifty words like exger or irdas and told you they meant horse or leader. The words didn’t look anything like words we’d ever seen before, so it was hard to memorize them. It wasn’t until years after that exam that I learned Kurds were real people with terrible problems of their own. Even Sean seemed to disappear as I drifted . . .
When we got back to my place, Sean rubbed his brow, then his hands. He seemed very tense.
“When did you find out you were going to L.A.?”
“Just yesterday. Nothing is very definite as yet.”
“Is that what was the matter?”
He shook his head. He rose and began to pace. “I came over here Sunday night.” And he told me the whole story of the cab ride after trying to phone, ringing the doorbell, the pile of clothes. “I never should have.”
It was a while before I moved. I felt so stupid, not having connected the ringing doorbell with Sean. I waited to see if he would go on and was relieved when he did. There really wasn’t much I could say. “I came over because I wanted you to know how much I cared. It was really a dumb thing to do . . .” He touched my hand. “Listen, you have a right to do whatever you want. I realize now that I’ve been putting pressure on you. I mean, you’re just getting over a marriage. I had no business using the key and coming in like that. I got what I deserved, but I’ve had to do some rethinking.”
“Don’t you care who I was with? Don’t you care what happened?” I interrupted.
“I think you can skip the details.”
“I called Mark when I got home. I was so mad that you just dropped me off. I saw how I’d been pushing you away for so long, but then when I came to you, you just didn’t want me. I had to see him. It was the only way I could see how I felt. And I felt that I want to be with you. I’d like to give it a try.”
Sean shook his head. “I think we should just be friends.”
“You don’t understand. I don’t even know him anymore. I don’t even like him anymore.”
He sat back down. “Deborah, I’m not being judgmental. I’m really not. I’m sorry. I was wrong, putting pressure on you. You have a right to do whatever you want. And we have no agreements, so you weren’t breaking any agreement.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s agree not to see other people.”
But Sean had reached the opposite conclusion. “No, I think we should agree to see other people.”
“But I don’t want to see other people. I wanted to see Mark the other night and I saw him. But I don’t think you should judge me for it.”
Sean raised a finger and pointed at me. “I’m not judging you. I’m just telling you, I’ve been through stuff like this before. I’ve had this kind of thing happen to me before.” His face was all contorted with rage. “This isn’t the first time I’ve made a dumb mistake and walked in when I wasn’t invited.” I recalled Sandy’s words to me, how he went away when he was hurt. “And I just can’t give it another try right now.” He got up and walked across the room. Leaning against the bookcase, he went on. “You don’t understand. You could have had anything from me you wanted. I would have waited for you to work things out. If you’d just leveled with me.” He pointed his hand at me again. “If you’d just . . .” He tightened a fist and struck it into the bookcase. The books shook in alphabetical order and Sean grimaced with pain.
“So why can’t I level with you now? Why can’t I just say now that I’d like to give us a try?”
Sean looked at his hand and massaged the fingers he’d just smashed. “Because,” he said softly, “it’s too late. I’m not the kind of person who can go back.”
We decided we needed time to think and that we wouldn’t see one another for a week. Though we spoke almost every day on the phone, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about Sean. At night I slept fitfully, imagining him with other women. In the morning I’d boil three-minute eggs and stare at them. They’d become breasts, smooth and bouncing, bubbling breasts, the kind Sean had suckled the night before. I knew it was a vision. Morning after morning I’d eat my eggs hardboiled.
At work in the middle of meetings, while Bill Wicker droned on about supports, openings, jackhammers, and studs, I thought of Sean’s peachlike body, his slender fingers, his sturdy arms. While the architects revealed models for low-income units, and planners rerouted traffic, I pictured Sean and me with Eurailpasses on swift trains through the Alps, making love on the upper berth. On the subway I missed my stops. One morning, certain Sean had sought solace elsewhere the night before, I almost missed my stop and had to dash off the train. As the doors closed behind me, I realized I’d left my entire South Bronx development project in a briefcase on the train. “Stop the train,” I shouted as it pulled out. I ran to the token booth. “Please, I left my work on the train.” As I began to describe the light tan briefcase with the brown handles, a small crowd formed. An elderly man shook his head. “Poor thing,” he said, and people pointed at me. Soon I looked to see that they were pointing at the briefcase I held in my hand, the one I’d just been describing to the token taker, who was phoning ahead to halt the train.
I had fantasies of Sean walking right into my office. I’d be in the middle of reviewing working drawings for traffic islands with the landscape architect, and he’d come stand in the doorway. “Deborah,” he’d say, “I’ve got to speak with you.” I’d raise my hand—“I’ll only be a minute, dear”—but he’d shake his head. “This can’t wait.”
After not seeing one another for a week, we met for coffee on a Monday evening. I had a speech prepared but forgot it the moment I saw him. “I made a mistake. I’m sorry,” I said. “I missed you all week.”
He held my hand. “Deborah, you didn’t make a mistake. I don’t think you should feel that way at all. You have some things to deal with and I guess I do, too.”
We ordered cappuccino and pastry. “I’ve decided to tell Mark to file.”
“I think that’s a good idea.”
“I want to see you.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I have to think about this . . .”
Even though Sean wasn’t the kind of man to go back, he agreed to give us another try. On Christmas we drank Irish whiskey and went ice skating at Wollman Rink, and on New Year’s Eve we went to a party given by a cousin of mine in New Rochelle. The guests were mostly dentists and importers of rare objects. Sean seemed to be having a good time with the sister of my cousin’s wife, an ex-hippie who ran a pottery mill in New Hampshire. After talking to him for about fifteen minutes, she said, “You know, you’ve changed a lot since last year. You’re easier to talk to and I like the beard.”
“I’ve never seen you before,” Sean replied.
She looked at him from all angles. “But aren’t you . . .”
“No,” he said flatly, and I dragged him away to meet a dentist who puts caps on famous actors’ teeth. He’d done Doris Day. “She thought I was Mark,” Sean complained. “I don’t even look like Mark.”
“And you certainly don’t act like him, so forget it.”
“But doesn’t your family know? I mean, shouldn’t she know?”
“I’m not even related to her. She lives in a commune up north.”
“But shouldn’t she know? Shouldn’t someone have told her?”
My cousin, Chuck, caught me by the arm and said he wanted me to meet some people. I left Sean with the dentist, who was telling him how he did Lana Turner. Chuck introduced me to two importers, one who stood on the bow of ships and watched native boys dive for pearls and another who trudged through the streets of Tokyo in search of something that sounded about as mysterious and plausible as the Maltese falcon. I glanced over and saw Sean with his mouth open wide while the dentist pointed to certain teeth.
One of the importers said, “Tokyo’s just impossible. Do you know they number their houses according to when they were built?” Someone handed us a platter of caviar. Chuck, the tall, Russian-looking redhead on my father’s side, had married the daughter of a caviar king. “That’s amazing,” I said.
Ilene, Chuck’s wife, “the caviar princess,” as Chuck liked to call her, tapped me on the shoulder. “Ah,” she whispered, “your friend . . .” She pointed to the punch bowl. Chuck had put seven kinds of hard liquor into the punch. Then she pointed toward the backyard.
I went to the window and, peering out, I saw Sean, in his jacket and tie, rolling what looked like the bottom section of a snowman down the hill toward the ravine. I sighed, excused myself, and grabbed my coat. When I reached him, I saw he was making not a snowman but a snow fort, and he had begun a small arsenal of snowballs for himself. “Hey”—I caught him by the arm—“what are you doing?”
“Fighting the enemy.” He sounded as if he meant it.
I tugged on his arm. “Come on, put your coat on. You’ll catch cold.”
“Who gives a fuck.” I tried to persuade him to drive back with me to Times Square and watch the ball drop. He tried to convince me that there were gooks behind the shrubs and he was going to fight them with little snowballs. He sank down to his knees in the snow. “Those people think Asia is pearls and caviar.” He pounded the snow with his fist. “It isn’t.”
I drove home while Sean slept in the back. He would never remember the car ride home. The last thing he’d remember about New Year’s Eve was the dentist looking at his teeth. As I drove, I listened to the radio, playing hits from the early seventies—mesmerizing space-age and hard-rock songs I found indistinguishable from one another. It was the music I’d heard at the party with Bobby Jones, a night I preferred not to think about. I switched stations until I found something more familiar, the Beatles, Martha and the Vandellas, music I’d grown up with. The early part of the decade seemed a blur. All I remembered was Mark. The disc jockey reminded us, in case we’d already forgotten, what had happened in the last few years. Nixon had resigned, the war in Vietnam had ended, oil prices were soaring, inflation was out of control. The night the war in Vietnam ended, Mark was asleep on the sofa and the bells began ringing. He opened his eyes and looked at me.
“No, dear,” I replied. “Christmas was last month. The war just ended.”
And now at midnight of a new year I was driving my drunken, jealous boyfriend home on Riverside Drive, on the brink of a new era, when nothing was going to be clear-cut anymore, and certainly not love.
Sean was sick with the flu for a week and I let him stay with me. He left Kleenex all over the place, squinched-up mucky balls of it, which he wanted me to pick up. He wouldn’t bathe or brush his teeth and he sent me to the store at all hours for orange juice and magazines. He called me Andrea and refused to say who Andrea was. When he felt better, he grabbed me in the middle of the night and kissed me passionately while the January winds whirled outside.
Then I was sick for a week. Sean stuck by me, but it was clear he didn’t like taking care of me as much as he liked being taken care of. He felt restless being in a room with a sick person. One night he put the word “xerox” down on the Scrabble board and I challenged it. He lost and then said he didn’t want to play anymore. “What’s the matter?”
He sat at the edge of the bed. “I’m going to L.A. in two weeks. Just for a month or so, but I might move out there.” He ran his hand over the covers. “Do you love me?”
I patted his hand. “I care about you a lot. I don’t know.” I grew sad. I knew that deep down inside me something had changed. I wanted Sean. I probably even loved him, but I knew I could do without him. I knew I could do without anything, if I had to.
As I reached up to touch his cheek, he grabbed my hand. “Come with me for a week or so. Maybe you’d like it.”
I thought of all those miles of freeway, all those traffic jams. I kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Thanks, but I hate L.A.”