Nothing moves this morning. I can’t remember my dreams but when I wake I expect to be surrounded by rubble, the ceiling ripped off or caved in, cars tossed around the yard like Tonka Toys. Instead, a soft breeze eases through the window. I can smell the world and I wonder how cold it is back home, wherever that is. California, alien with its scents and prolific sun, is too bright for witches and ghosts. Howie and Carly are still asleep in a tight knot on the other side of the curtain. Together.
The phone rings until the machine picks up.
“Hi everyone, it’s Phyllis. It’s Mom.” My stomach backs up to my spine. “I just wanted to say hi. Hi and I miss you all. And Lou, I miss you so much. Your brother and sister miss you and we can’t wait for you to come home.” Wherever that is. “So just call back. We’ll see you soon.”
I lie looking at the ceiling for a time, wondering what will happen when I do go back. Mama’s apartment in Brookline, so small and unfamiliar, loud with the old C-line trolley cars clanging along Beacon Street.
Papa’s new place—a basement apartment on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay—is worse: two tiny bedrooms side by side at the end of a narrow hall that opens onto a living room/dining room/galley kitchen framed at the end by a door of wrought iron. On the other side of the bars there’s a small brick sitting area walled off from the Dumpsters and the fancy cars parked at senseless angles alongside one another. The apartment has two windows, one in each bedroom, also protected by black bars. In Salem the wrought iron was decorative. But we’re not in Salem anymore.
“Huevos?” Howie opens the french doors, smiling in Carly’s nightgown.
We eat together while Carly showers and scoots out of the house to a meeting.
“So?” I ask, watching him dump salsa on his eggs.
“Yup?”
“That’s gross.”
“I beg to differ. But we’ve already agreed to disagree when it comes to palate, haven’t we? And I’m a hungry motherfucker.” He spoons even more salsa on the plate.
“Are you going to tell me about it?”
Howie nods, chewing and swallowing, slurping coffee. “It’s complicated,” he begins slowly. “It’s a new kind of experience. Didn’t go exactly as I imagined.” I shrug a casual acknowledgment, as if I understand what he’s talking about. As if I have some kind of experience that can relate to this. “It’s one thing to pose for a camera, by yourself, when you’re the center of attention and you’re the focus. It’s arousing in a nice way. But when you’re fucking a woman, your attention is turned toward her and toward yourself. Then there are these cameras and people and they’re telling you how to move and what position to get into and when to come…”
“Sounds tough.” I snort.
“Tougher than you think. They pay you for two things: to stay hard and to come when they tell you. And to look pretty. I did a decent job of looking pretty. But the other stuff was harder. I have this beautiful woman and she’s dressed like a nurse in a hot little white uniform with the pink pinstripes and she’s sucking me off … and I can’t make it happen. Look: I can do sit-ups for my body, memorize all my lines, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll have a bone in my boner come game time.”
“So you…?”
“Lost it.”
“No.”
“And I got hives.”
“No. Really? No!”
“Sí.”
“So you … you didn’t do it?”
“No, I did it. It just took forever. And the funny thing is, the only way I could make it work was to not be Marc Howard the porn star. I actually had to be Howie Gordon, the fat Jewish kid from Pittsburgh again.” His eyes meet mine and find utter confusion. “I had to go back to when I was that guy—that guy who was nervous and hot for the hottest girl in my class. And I had to work for that gift because I was fat and when I finally got with Mary Beth Scanlon…”
“The shiksa goddess?”
He laughs, my favorite laugh of his, as if the world just got unexpectedly brighter. “Did I tell you that?” he asks, grinning at me.
I raise my eyebrows, smile back. “On the roof. Magical mystery tour of fantabulousness and first vagina you ever touched.”
“Well, yeah. Alright, compadre. That’s it. Me and the shiksa goddess. You know, I thought I wanted to have this experience of getting blown by a porn star, but in the end the thing that got me hard and kept me up and made me come was the one thing I could always count on, my fantasy of fantasies, Mary Beth Scanlon and her hot little mouth. We never did it. I could never get her to go all the way. So every time I have sex, I’m thinking about her a little, about what if? What if this were her? That was so much sexier than the professional on her knees trying to fluff me back to life and get a wrap. And in the end, it was me that got me off. Me and Mary Beth. And that’s how it ended. And they gave me a check for two hundred dollars and I went home.”
“It does sound like fun. I mean, not all the people watching, but…”
“Well, they asked me to do another one. So we’ll see if it gets better. But enough with the one-way confessional. What about you? You writing in that book I gave you? Laying down some truth?”
I get my journal and let him read at random, anxious but ultimately feeling safe in his hands. He finds the dream entry.
“I think the part about suffocating in the spongy wetness is scary as hell,” he says, rubbing his face. “Did you really have that dream?”
I nod. “I dream about food a lot,” I say, realizing it for the first time. “That one, about landing in the cabbage. Then this one.” I read him a different piece, about being in a restaurant, starving, but only finding carrot cake on the menu.
“Hmmm … Suffocating in food. Nourishment and sustenance turning against you … You really have something there, Sigmund.”
“I just don’t know why everything—including my dessert—has to be made with vegetables.”
“I hear that. But you’re in the wrong town, compadre. Ever hear of Chez Panisse?” I shake my head again. “Big on veggies.”
“Well they can suck my panisse.”
“Good! Now you’re freeing the muse. What else you got?”
I jump ahead a few pages. I know where I’m going, I just don’t know if I can read it aloud.
“This one’s a little…”
“This one’s the one I want to hear,” Howie says gently, as if he already knows what’s burning on the page.
I start to read.
“‘One of the hardest things for me to admit…’” My voice cracks a bit and I start again.
“‘One of the hardest things for me to admit to myself I will now try to admit to you. Pause-think-be kind. At the moment my father finds sexual release with a woman named Danielle Heffernan. To my knowledge my father had been doing this only weeks after my mother had moved. He told me that this was true. He told me that there was no connection to their separation with this. My father has outright lied to me. I will never again believe him under any circumstances. I will never forgive him.’”
I look up at Howie. His eyes drive into mine, hard. He doesn’t say anything but he is willing me on and I want to be strong for him.
“‘His is a sad case. He uses his affair to purposely hurt my mother and I will not see her deliberately hurt by any man. My father is in deep trouble when it comes to associating with me. He neglects me, he pushes me past any fair expectations, and in no way repays me. His is the illusion that my hurting him is the most terrible thing I could do. He may be right but hurting me is worse. He has to understand. I am old enough to understand a situation but too young to do anything about it. Why my life has come down to so few words is a question unanswered because there are so many words but my hands have failed to yet write them. But one day. One day I will.’”
I close the book and we sit in silence. Howie doesn’t take his eyes from mine but he doesn’t say anything, either. He nods almost imperceptibly, shifts in his seat, pushes away the huevos detritus, and sighs. My face contracts with the wave of salt water I am trying to hold back. I need him to say something.
His face is sad, arms crossed. All his fiery intensity has fallen in on itself, crushed under its own great weight like a star going black.
“Come here,” he says suddenly, his voice so soft, but still it fills the room. He opens his arms and I am sucked into them, his gravity pulling me away from my own desperate singularity. And as I tear from my decaying space in the universe I feel the months of withheld tears rain down against his chest and I am choking to stay above it all, gasping not to talk but just to breathe.