The Bourgeois Ideal

FOR my date with Powell I decided to wear a pink and orange Marimekko dress. It was outrageous but had a high waist that made my breasts look even bigger than they were and big bell sleeves that gave the overall effect of a pink confection. There didn’t seem to be much point in going on a date with an older man if you didn’t dress like arm candy.

Saul had a warm, wintry feeling and was the kind of place that was so expensive you could imagine being proposed to there. When I walked in I saw some other couples, mostly middle-aged, but no Powell. I looked at my watch. It was exactly eight. I considered the option of leaving, walking around the block, and coming back to insure that I would keep him waiting, but he had told me to throw all that shit out the window.

A cute brunette waitress with thick but perfectly shaped eyebrows came up to me. I held up two fingers. I love being able to hold up two fingers; it’s a privilege I don’t often have. She ushered me to a table in the back and as I was taking my seat I saw Powell coming through the door. He was wearing a loose linen white shirt that looked expensive and hid his paunch. He scanned the room with an expression devoid of any first-date anxiety and when he spotted me he nodded formally and headed over. As he bent down to sit I got a clear view of the top of his head. He had a comb-back like my dad, but less loss.

“You’re on time,” he said.

“I usually never am,” I said. “I overestimated the length of the walk.” He shot me a questioning look and I felt like an idiot for posturing. The top three buttons of his shirt were undone and I noticed some curly black-and-gray hairs protruding from his upper chest. I wanted to rub my face in that gray lawn.

The waitress came over and set down some menus. “Good to see you,” he told her congenially.

“You too,” she said.

Here I was thinking I was the mayor of Cobble Hill when he was the big guy on campus. I wondered how often he came here, if he was in the habit of eating alone. New York was the only city in the world that attached no shame to solitary dining. I once saw Diane Sawyer eating a pastrami sandwich alone at a diner on Forty-third Street and it made my entire month.

“Can I get you two anything to drink?” said the waitress.

“I was maybe going to order a glass of wine,” I said hesitantly.

“Why don’t we get a bottle?” asked Powell. Again with the up-sell. Either he was into me or he was a lush.

“That would be fine,” I said, trying not to sound too excited. He looked at the wine list, reached into his shoulder bag, and pulled out a pair of bifocals.

“Do you prefer red or white?” he asked, perching them low on his nose. I wanted to yank them off and straddle his face.

“Red.”

“Hmmm. How ’bout the Côtes du Rhône?”

“Great,” I said, pretending I had a clue about wine when we barely served any at the bar.

When the waitress left he rested both arms on the table and said, “Have you been a victim of the Merlot crime?”

“What’s that?”

“Most bartenders force it on women,” he said. “Say you walk into a bar alone, you’re waiting for an inordinately attractive gentleman friend to meet you, champing at the bit to see his dashing silhouette”—he flashed his eyes—“and the bartender says, ‘Can I get you anything to drink?’ You say, ‘Yes, what kind of red wine do you have?’ Nine times out of ten he says, ‘We’ve got a very nice Merlot,’ and you wind up ordering it.”

“I have noticed that,” I said.

“There’s this assumption that women want a light wine, a smooth one, instead of something more complex and heavy. And often the Merlot is the more expensive. So they push it on the broads. And I think it’s a crime against humanity!” His eyes were wide and deranged. I wondered whether he felt this passionate about all things or just red wine injustice.

The waitress came back with the bottle, presented it, and poured some in his glass. He took a sip, cocked his head, and said, “Lovely.” I loved that “lovely.” Powell came across cultured but not stuck up. The waitress filled my glass, then his, and disappeared. He raised his glass and said, “To the death of Merlot.”

“To the death of Merlot,” I said. We clinked and I took a sip. It was rich. “That tastes good.”

“What did I tell ya?” he said. He put his down and moved the base around in a circle on the table before taking his next sip. As I watched him swirl that base I felt as though I was on a bona fide date with a bona fide man, not a boy, not a pansy, not a pushover. I wanted to be his trophy wife.

I imagined him taking me to the theater and introducing me as his little rabbi. We could go to art galleries and independent film awards and whenever we went out he’d know the right wine to order. As soon as he became my boyfriend he’d start sending a black limo to pick me up from Roxy and take me to his place. When he opened the door I’d fall into his arms and tell him the horrible stories of the married men and yuppie snobs. “There, there,” he’d cluck as he kissed away my tears and carried me onto the bed for some CAT.

One night as I was telling him about the evil Italian guy who liked the way I shook, he’d get a look on his face that I knew meant inspiration was about to strike. He’d race to his Herman Miller chair, stick a sheet into the typer (he’d be too much of a purist to use a computer), and write the opening scene of his most brilliant film, about a rabbinical-school dropout bartender who kept crying on the job. Chai-ote Ugly. It would be sad and funny, true yet surreal, a really good cartography of the unique concerns of My Generation.

He would write one scene a night, as I sat on the bed and watched his back, and when he reached the last page he would yawn, “I’m a genius,” and throw me to the bed, where I’d joyfully let him violate me. When he finished he’d send it to his agency, Undertake, the hottest in Hollywood (I knew it was his because I’d seen his name mentioned in a recent New York Times article about them), and they’d set it up immediately.

Within an hour Kirsten Dunst would sign on to play the lead role of Reva the bartender, and the producers would insist she wear a prosthetic ski-jump Jewish nose, even though mine isn’t ski-jump at all. Penny Marshall, the world’s most raging quasi-Jew, would sign on to direct, and it would wind up getting nominated for three Oscars—one for Penny, one for Kirsten, and one for the makeup woman who did the ski-jump nose.

The night of the awards they’d haul a TV into Roxy and all the morons who hit on me would stare slack-jawed as I came down the red carpet with Powell on my arm, wondering why I never took them up on their offers when clearly I had a fetish for old ugly men. I’d return from LA to a huge parade on Smith Street, so elaborate it would rival the opening ceremony for the Gowanus Canal, and I’d be hailed as the Neighborhood Gal That Inspired an Oscar-Winning Film.

Powell was inspecting his menu. Even though he had on his glasses he was holding it a foot away, which seemed to defeat the point of wearing glasses. As he read he reached his hand up and stroked the ends of his mustache with his index and middle finger. I wondered if he knew he’d made the Universal Sign for Cunnilingus. He closed the menu with a loud contented sigh and said, “I’m ready.”

“What are you getting?”

“The ribeye steak. You?” I inspected the fish choices. They all looked kind of bland. Except for the lobster.

The last time I had eaten shellfish was tenth grade, when as president of BReaSTY I arranged a lecture by a Staten Island professor who’d written a book on Judaism and vegetarianism. I was so inspired by his take on Judaism’s mandate of kindness to animals I became a vegetarian the next day, which made me kosher by default. I never ate much shellfish anyway and I hated the smell of bacon, so going kosher was easy. By senior year of Wesleyan I had gone back to meat eating but I never went back to shellfish because it made me too uncomfortable. The thought of eating a fish that could walk made me ill, like a form of evil so gross I wouldn’t be able to take one swallow.

But now it all seemed stupid and pointless. I hated the idea that what you ate made you a better or worse Jew. The point of kashrut was to make you think about being Jewish every time you put something in your mouth and tonight I wanted to put something in my mouth that wasn’t Jewish at all.

The waitress came over. Powell ordered and I announced proudly, “I’m going to get the lobster.”

“Lobster?” he said. “I thought you were a rabbi.” The waitress raised a brow and then moved away.

“I told you, I dropped out. Besides, the motto of Reform Judaism is ‘choice through knowledge.’ ”

“I like this branch,” he nodded. “No kosher, and broads can preach. So tell me exactly what happened.”

I took a big swig of wine and told him how awful and out of place I’d felt at school those first few months. I told him how drippy and nonartistic the other students were, and how most of them were Judaic studies majors with bad skin and huge, unjustified egos. I told him how even the gay students were by the book and obsequious and how all anyone seemed to care about that first year was jockeying for position with professors. Then I told him about my inadvertent murder at Memorial and how it had been the final straw.

He didn’t say anything for a while and then he nodded and said, “Better you dropped out than lip-synched your way to leadership.”

“I know,” I said. “I just wish my parents weren’t so disappointed.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“What do you care what your parents think?”

“I shouldn’t,” I said. “But they live really close by and they’re overinvested in what I do.”

“Because ya letting them!” he cried. “You’re drawn to the security and complacence of the well-traveled path! And now that you’ve stepped off I guarantee you will pay a price. When I told my mother I was going into the movie industry she came down with pneumonia she was so brokenhearted.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“Of course it is! What a thrilling time this must be for you! How lucky I am to meet you now!” I nodded gingerly, not sure whether he acted like a lunatic with everybody or just with me. “Lemme tell you, it’s no easy process to tear off the shackles of the bourgeois ideal.”

“What exactly is the bourgeois ideal, Mr. Powell?”

“You gotta stop calling me that,” he said. “It’s annoying.”

“Sorry. What exactly is the bourgeois ideal, Hank?”

“The bourgeois ideal is an inability to think for oneself. A commitment to a lifestyle of pointless, mind-numbing domesticity without any thought as to the implication of the choice. Look around the neighborhood at all these women selling their asses. Shacking up with rich men so they can be spared the process of having to work for a living. It’s a dangerous new trend, this gentrified prostitution, and it frightens me.”

“Does this have something to do with your divorce?”

“Of course it has something to do with my divorce! You know how much money I made last year? About a million dollars. You know how much money I have right now? None! Because my ex-wife got all my money in the settlement!”

“How’d you make a million dollars?”

“Uncredited rewrites.”

My career curiosity had overtaken my romantic curiosity. “Really?” I said. “What did you rewrite?”

“I’d rather not say. But if the Writers Guild weren’t run by a bunch of smog-headed imbeciles I’d have my toilet paper rolling off a platinum statuette. The point is my ex-wife was a feminist when I met her. She didn’t shave her pits. But as soon as the marriage ended she played the damsel in distress. There is no telling what a scorned woman will do under the counsel of a good Jewish attorney. Money turns individuals into animals. My ex-wife is only one of them. The pursuit of bourgeois values corrupts the human soul.” I imagined his wife as litigious and frightening, with humongous fake breasts, triceps of steel, and a fake Catherine Zeta-Jones–esque sheen.

“What does she do?” I asked.

“She lives off her alimony!” There were no illusions here; this man would never marry again. “I don’t know why I’m even talking to you,” he said, waving his hand. “You grew up in this neighborhood and liked it enough to stay. Which means you must have a very strong domestic urge yourself.”

I felt totally attacked. Here I was trying to be a nice piece of ass and he was lumping me in with the Ubermoms. “Hey!” I said. “You live here too!”

“That’s because I couldn’t afford to buy in Manhattan. You know why? Because my ex-wife got all my money in the settlement!” He sighed, seeming to collect himself slightly. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you’re like those mother whores. You just have a strong bourgeois leaning. That’s why you wanted to be a rabbi: to make your parents happy.”

“That’s not true!” I said, a little too loudly. “I became a rabbi because I thought Reform Judaism needed more women, that I could stand a chance of actually changing things.”

“That’s just white noise,” he said. “You have the obedient mind of an only daughter mixed with the hyperambitious striving of an only son. You’re torn between the feminine and the masculine. You have a real animus about you.”

“You mean in the Jungian sense?”

“Yes. I, on the other hand, have a very strong anima, which is what continually ruins me in relationships. I have a maternal urge, an urge to take care, so I seek out women in turmoil. I’m drawn to violent women. Violent and crazy.”

“I’m not violent or crazy,” I said sadly.

“Who said I was drawn to you?” I jerked my head up, hurt. His face was deadpan and he gave no sign of reassurance. “Deep down you’re a gullible innocent but on first meeting you project a very strong animus. That’s why I bit into your cookie. So you knew that when it came to me, you could never be the bigger man.”

“You think I want to be a man?”

He nodded solemnly like a shrink. “You’re textbook if I ever saw one. You don’t want to accept the things about you that make you female. You want to reject them. That’s why you chose a male occupation. You can never progress until you stop being ruled by your animus. Women can never win. They must be won.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in The Rules.”

“I don’t. But I do believe in different sex roles. Twenty years ago I had this dream. I was working as a short-order cook, living in a walk-up in Astoria that overlooked an air shaft. I drank a quart of Jim Beam a day and fell asleep each night on the floor of the kitchen, my mouth pressed against the refrigerator grate. One morning I woke up, my head spinning. I had dreamed that a pigeon and an ant were having a fight, and then the pigeon flew away and shat on the ant’s back, and the ant died, crushed by the weight of the crap. As I awoke I heard these words on my tongue, as clear and vibrant as if God was whispering them in my ear: ‘Women are sin, men want sin. Men are soul, women want soul.’ That’s Aphorism Number One of Powell’s Aphorisms.”

He stared at me triumphantly as though he’d told me the meaning of life. “I’m not sure what it means,” I said.

“It’s men who have the connection to the spiritual world!” he exclaimed. “Women want to but they don’t have it. They are anchored, they are sensual and earthy, but they resent it. Men have their heads in the clouds but seek out women so they can be vicariously anchored in the life of the body.”

I got this image of Priya, my Indian resident advisor frosh year at Wes, staring down at me with disapproval. This was not the kind of stuff you could get away with saying at a left-wing college.

“Don’t you have it backwards?” I said. “I think it’s women who are more in touch with nature, more spiritual.”

“No!” he shouted. “Women think they’re in touch with nature but they’re not. They’re not!” His face was red and his eyes were gleaming.

“What does this have to do with the dream?”

“The ant was the woman, the pigeon the man.”

“What does it mean that the pigeon killed the woman with his crap?”

“There was someone in my life at the time, someone I was angry with. Also, I was having a number of digestive problems as a result of my poor drinking habits.”

“I think I’m beginning to get it,” I said, grinning. “Women are fire, men are sand. Women are water, men are ice. Women are nature, men are nurture.”

“Don’t mock my aphorisms,” he said. “That’s Aphorism Number Two of Powell’s Aphorisms.”

“How many are there?”

“Five.”

I wolf-whistled. “That’s a lot.”

“I’ve been alive a long time.”

“What are the others?”

“I can never remember them all at once. That’s one a the downsides of being alive a long time.”

Though I wasn’t sure how I felt about Powell’s philosophy of the sexes, I loved listening to his stories. With guys my own age we got through all our stories early on because we hadn’t lived long enough to fill more. That’s why everything went downhill from there—once you tell all your stories there’s nothing left to do but dissect movies, reference Seinfeld episodes, and complain about your friends behind their backs.

Powell was a raging narcissist and had read too much Jung but he was awake. Half of me wanted to tell him he was full of it and the other half wanted to keep listening because it was more fun to be with someone crazy than someone wrong.

So he wasn’t a Jew but what did that matter? We could still make a go of it. At rabbinical school there was an unwritten policy that you couldn’t be ordained if they knew you were living with a goy, but now that I had left, nobody was watching. I could sleep with an insane Gentile, marry him, even.

Maybe the entire reason Neil Roth had croaked before my eyes was so that I could stop having the wool pulled over them. Maybe he died so I could meet Powell and know not to turn the other way. I wasn’t a flounderer; I was responding to a message from God, a different kind of God than the one I had always envisioned. He wasn’t sitting in a throne but a plush leather armchair and he looked sort of like Hugh Hefner, with a burgundy robe hanging open over his fat naked frame. Instead of yelling at me for having walked out on my calling, he was saying in a complacent Yiddish accent, “Do vat you want. Hev a good time. Don’t answer to anyone but yourself.”

The waitress came over with the food and set it down in front of us. My lobster looked like it was suffering in that sea of sauce. I tore into a claw, the least sympathetic part.

“How you doin’ over there?” said Powell.

“I’m having some trouble with it, actually.”

He reached over. “You use the nutcracker like this. Then you ease out the flesh.”

The meat released, I raised the fork to my mouth. As I bit in I felt nauseous, certain I was going to die or pass out as punishment for violating the Torah. But I kept chewing and the nausea passed, and…nothing happened. I didn’t throw up or faint. I didn’t even feel guilty. I took another bite, waiting again, and because I was not struck down I felt defiant. The meat was salty and rich and I felt like an idiot for not eating it all these years.

“So Hank,” I said, chewing slowly, “how’d you get so perceptive about human nature?”

“I’ve always been that way. When I was a kid in Jackson Heights I got beat up every day because I would look at a thug and he would see that I could see him. It would scare the crap outta him. Though I didn’t say it aloud he knew what I was thinking was Why are you afraid? or How come you think you’re ugly? As a result I was a magnet for bullies. The constant blows are what made me decide to pursue the life a the mind and not the body.”

“I could give you a lot of constant blows,” I said.

He chuckled. I felt woozy and elated and leered at him, buzzed. It was one of those looks that feel sexy in your own head but if you could see it on a videotape you would howl in pained shame. I took my napkin off my lap, leaned forward, placed it on top of his hand, and squeezed his fingers.

“Are you a Hasid?” he said. “You can’t touch me?”

“I’m Reform.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Swathing you.”

“Why?” he said slyly. “Am I injured?”

“No,” I said, “but even a healthy man can use a good nurse.”

His mouth spread wide in deference to the line. He reached forward with his free hand and grabbed my upper arm. His grasp was firm but not violent, like a period at the end of a sentence, and as he held me he looked at me with mysterious intensity, as though communicating some telepathic message. We stayed like this for a few seconds and then, just as abruptly as he’d reached, he placed both hands in his lap, scooted his chair back, and said, “What do you want for dessert?”

We ordered two slices of Key lime pie. As he was licking the back of his fork he said, “You wanna get a drink somewhere?”

“There’s a dive bar down by the expressway,” I said. “It’s called Montero. They have a pool table and it only costs seventy-five cents.” I had gone there with David a few times, but opted not to mention that. You have to make every guy think he’s the first to see the places you like, even if he’s the twelfth.

“I like the sound a that place,” Powell said.

“It used to be a sailor bar in the fifties. They would come and drink, get into a fight, go out on the street and maul each other, then come back in and have another beer. The owner told me about it. Pepe. I asked him once if anyone had been killed there and he said, ‘The person didn’t actually die inside the bar. He died in the hospital.’ ”

“I really like the sound a that place,” Powell said, and raised his hand for the check.

 

WHEN we got outside we went to Pacific, turned, and headed up Court Street. As we were crossing Atlantic, I spotted my mom coming toward us, carrying a bunch of shopping bags.

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“What is it?” he said.

“Nothing.” Before I had time to hide she saw us, waved, and shouted, “Rachel!”

Feeling like a complete idiot for running from my own mother like she was an ex-boyfriend, I waited for her to come to our side. “Hi Mom,” I said, as her eyes veered to Powell with confusion.

My mother is a conservative liberal, which means that she supports the library and votes Working Family but gets deeply disturbed if she gets a waitress at a restaurant who’s pregnant or has visible brastraps. Before she could ask who he was, he said, “Hello, I’m Hank,” and reached for her hand.

She transferred one of her grocery bags to the other side and raised her hand to meet his paw. “I’m Sue,” she said. “Rachel’s mom.”

“I was certain you were her sister,” he said.

“That won’t work on me,” she said. “But I love it anyway.” No one said anything for a while, we all just smiled awkwardly, and then my mom asked how he knew me.

“She came to see a play I wrote. The History of the Pencil.”

“Oh,” she said, playing it completely cool. You can’t say you’ve seen a play when you’ve only seen the first half. It’s setting yourself up for disaster.

“Hank’s a screenwriter,” I said deliberately. I turned to Powell. “The only one of your movies she’s seen is Flash Flood.”

“My greatest fear is that when I die, that’ll be the flick I’m remembered for,” he said. I could tell this wasn’t the first time he’d used the line.

“Then I guess I’ll have to catch up on the others,” she said, as I winced. “Well, I’d better get home before this ice cream gets cold. Nice to meet you, Hank.”

I started walking as quickly as I could in the other direction as Powell skipped to catch up with me. “Ya mother’s lovely,” he said.

“You should have just gone on ahead,” I said.

“Never! It’s not often you meet a girl’s mother on the first date.”

“You don’t understand! You give my parents an inch and they take a mile. Now she’s going to tell my dad she saw me with an older man and they’re going to ask me a million questions about you.”

“You don’t have to answer,” he said.

“I know,” I said, “but I wish I could have a little privacy sometimes.”

“If you want more privacy,” Powell said, as we turned and headed toward the water, “it’s obvious what you gotta do.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“Move.”

 

THE bar was a sad scene. Six sixtysomething Hispanic men were listening to Sinatra, with wounded eyes, drinking from shot glasses. As we walked in they eyed us with calm hostility. A hipster and a cradle robber; they had no respect for either.

“This is a dark place,” said Powell, without lowering his voice. “It’s like the Puerto Rican lonely hearts club here.”

We ordered two Budweisers and went into the back room through an old ornate black wrought-iron gate. The pool table was in the center of the room and all over the walls were sailor paraphernalia—oars, lifesavers, paintings of seascapes, and huge framed photos of Latin social clubs from the fifties. A sign by the pool table said, “This is our OOL. Notice there is no P in it. Please keep it that way,” and I wondered whether something had happened to make them feel the sign was necessary.

Powell put some quarters in the table. The balls tumbled out with a satisfying series of thwacks. “Are you gonna break?” I said, as he racked up.

“No, you.” I had to kick Powell’s ass. All the women in his movies were good at pool and I wanted to remind him of one of his protagonists.

I looked over at the rack. The order was crazy. “You don’t do it like that,” I said, coming around to his side of the table. “Haven’t you ever heard of a New York rack?”

“What’s that?”

I stuck out my chest and said, “You’re looking at one.”

“I liked that,” he said. “That was good.”

“In a New York rack you gotta put the yellow up front,” I said. “That’s ’cause it’s the easiest to see. Then you alternate around the perimeter, stripe, solid, and so on.”

“That’s not how we used to play when I was a kid,” he said. “All that matters is the eight in the middle. Everything else should be arbitrary.”

“Well, this makes things more fair and trust me, when I whup your ass you’re going to be grateful we started out even.”

He sighed and fixed the balls, as I watched over his shoulder. “You happy now?” he said. I nodded. He lifted the triangle off but didn’t do the flip. It was a thrill to be on a date with a guy mature enough to refrain from the triangle flip.

I put the cue an inch behind the dot, placed all my weight in the center of my body like I was taking a shit, because that’s how you get power, and measured up eight times. “You look good,” he said.

“Don’t distract me,” I said. I measured up another eight times and hit the sucker as hard as I could.

The balls separated OK but nothing sank. “You’re all bark and no bite,” said Powell.

“What are you talking? I’m very bite. It’s just hard for women to break.”

“Oh, so now ya pleading poverty? How quickly they turn.” He sank a stripe, and then another.

“You’re all right,” I said. “How long have you been playing pool?”

“Let’s see, since I was seventeen.”

“Wow,” I said. “You’ve been playing pool longer than I’ve been alive.”

“That’s right,” he said, and missed his next shot.

“You’re totally over the hill,” I said as I lined up. “You’re old enough to be my old man.”

“I know I am,” he said. “But you know what?” He came over to where I was standing and put his mouth by my ear. “I’m not your old man. And that’s all that matters.”

I giggled and sunk the three. “You’re definitely in good shape for a geezer,” I said. “You have excellent hair.”

“I do have nice hair,” he said, running his fingers through it. “I’m lucky. But I’ve had two ulcers and a herniated disk. So it all evens out.”

I sunk four straight balls but then one went in that I wasn’t going for. “Your turn,” I said.

“Whaddaya mean? You got the six in.”

“I didn’t call it. If I didn’t call it I don’t deserve another shot.”

“That’s not how I play,” he pronounced. “In my game, you sink you get another turn, regardless of intention. I prefer to leave as much to chance as possible.”

“Why?”

“Because it makes life more interesting!”

As I chalked up he strode up to me and put his hand on the back of my neck. “C’mere,” he said, and turned me toward him. He held my hair, and tongued me firmly like he already owned my mouth. As we kissed he took the cue out of my hand and leaned it against the wall. It toppled to the floor with a loud clatter. I opened my eyes and bent to retrieve it but he yanked me up and said, “Never mind that.”

He lunged for my mouth again. He wasn’t a biter but he seized me like a man. I felt like a shiny new puppy. I wanted him to lift me into the air by the nape. He pulled my body close and made a high-pitched moaning noise. The pitch of the moan, though high, was savage, a “Huh huh huh” first cousin to his “Heh heh heh” laugh.

With each pull I felt smaller and like more of a victim and Powell grew more menacing and big. He knew what he wanted and didn’t need or care to ask my permission. He made me feel like a woman and I was too used to feeling like a man. I didn’t know how much was his age and how much his hubris but I loved his outsized-ness, his running the show. With guys my age I felt like a movie director, exhausted by the ingénues who wanted to please. It wasn’t their sensitivity I minded so much as their willingness to kowtow.

“I didn’t expect this to happen,” I said softly.

“Of course you did.”

“I really wasn’t sure,” I said. “I wanted it to but I wasn’t sure.”

“Couldn’t you tell in the restaurant when I grabbed you by the arm? It was a moment, an articulation. I was trying to tell you you’d been seen.”

“You couldn’t have just said it?”

“Getcha bag.” My lips felt raw, like someone had just walked on my face.

“Where we going?” I said.

“Don’t ask silly questions.”

WHEN we stumbled out of the bar the streets were empty. It reminded me of the scene in Leon and Ruth where Julia Roberts and Don Cheadle are walking together in Jackson Heights the night before he’s leaving for Vietnam and Julia turns to him and says, “I can’t think of you going away, Leon. Without you I’m like an ant somebody stepped on but didn’t kill, toddling around, half broken and afraid.”

I looked at Powell and felt the instinct to quote but decided it was best not to overemphasize my fandom on my way to the boudoir. When we got to Baltic Street he went halfway down the block, looked around, confused, and said, “Where the hell is my street?”

“Which one do you live on again?”

“Strong.”

“It begins at Kane,” I said. “We gotta loop around. Don’t you know your own neighborhood?”

“To you it’s a neighborhood,” he said. “To me it’s a subway stop.”

We did an about-face and as we made our way down the block we passed a middle-aged woman walking a dog. She was wearing a short-sleeved tight tee and had the thin tan arms of a woman who tries too hard to stay in shape. She took him in, and then me, and scowled.

“Did you see that?” I said.

“What?” he said.

“She gave me a dirty look. What did I do to her?”

“Isn’t it obvious? She thinks you’re taking me off her market.”

“Am I?” I said.

“We’re not even at my door,” he said, “and already you’re moving in.”

His block was a beautiful two-block street that stretched from Kane down to DeGraw. All the brownstones were pristine and well kept. It was one of the most bourgeois-ideal streets in Cobble Hill.

His apartment was a regal floor-through, one flight up. We entered in the kitchen and the rest of the apartment was laid out to the right—a huge dining area in the front, a spacious living room in the middle, then a pair of closed French doors with purple curtains. Powell beelined through the doors, saying something about “using the facility.” The apartment was more feminine than I would have imagined from his movies, and more classily decorated, chic antique. Evidently what he’d saved from moving across the river he’d spent on interior design.

There were about twenty paintings on the walls, all 1950s-style pinups of women in various states of undress. Each painting featured ass in a prominent and unapologetic way—in one a woman was bent over, standing, peering out between her legs; in another a librarian type was bending to retrieve a book from the floor.

There were no records, videos, CDs, or papers to be seen, and no clutter. I had always imagined he wrote in a separate office but on one wall of the living room was a black simple desk with an old Macintosh computer on it, and a plain wooden nonergonomic chair. I noticed his mouse was smudged with fingerprints, which made me less intimidated. Even superstars had trouble keeping their mice clean. He had three floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, which contained the complete diaries of Casanova, some Kafka, some Céline, the Klaus Kinski autobiography, and Moby-Dick. He also had three full shelves of Scratchiti, The Stoop Sitter, and Powell: Six Screenplays. I heard him coming so I scurried back to the couch and sat down. “How ya doin’,” he said, as he came in, yawning.

“Pretty good,” I said.

He turned on a lamp. The light was warm, the kind I can never seem to accomplish in my own apartment, highbrow and soft. I don’t even have a dimmer. He loped around the couch, opened his armoire (there was a stereo inside), and pressed a few buttons. A few seconds later this sad, familiar-sounding folk came on.

“What is this?” I said, as he sat next to me.

“Marc Cohn,” he said.

“You listen to Marc Cohn?”

“What can I say? His music speaks to me.”

“I just never expected someone as tough as you—”

“Marc Cohn has been through a lot of pain at the hands of evil women,” he said, “as have I. You could tell he was about to lose his wife on this album. Every song speaks ‘troubled marriage’ but what makes it so moving is that he didn’t know it at the time. His subconscious did before he did. After this one came out she left him and he went to pieces. The next one is considered the breakup album but I prefer this one because he was anticipating his own demise. I find anticipation of demise far more interesting than demise itself.”

He blinked at me twice, pushed me down onto my stomach, and got on top. As Marc Cohn crooned in the background he slid my underwear down and put a couple fingers inside. The undies were white and cotton and on the front they said “Brooklyn Rocks.” I was glad to be lying on my belly.

“You’re so wet,” he said.

“That’s because of you,” I said. Guys love it when you say that.

“I can’t believe how ready you are,” he said. “Oh Rachel, my sweet little hoo-ah.”

Was Al Pacino in the room? I flipped my head around to look at him. “What’s a hoo-ah?”

“You know, a hooker.”

“A whore?”

“That’s what I said: a hoo-ah.” I was lying on a couch getting dry-humped by my idol but I couldn’t help laughing.

“What?” he said. “That’s how we grew up saying it. I lost my accent in the rest of my speech but that word still comes out Queens. Are you laughing at me, you little hoo-ah?”

“Yes I am,” I said.

He put his face by my ear, his mouth right into the hole and purred, “The laughing part is over now, Rachel. You are going to do as I say.”

He pushed my bra up without unhooking it and kneaded my breasts perfunctorily before sliding his hands down to my ass. He sighed loudly and openly and for once I felt good that I had something down there to grab. “Hank,” I said, over my shoulder. “Are you an ass man, a pussy man, a tit man, or a leg man?”

He turned his head to the side a second and said, “Ass, with pussy rising.”

There was some movement and it seemed like he was fingering me, a bunch of fingers all pushed together. Then he moved it in deeper and I realized it wasn’t a hand. I jerked my body away and turned over to face him.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“What do you think?”

“You’re supposed to ask before you put it in.”

“I wasn’t aware that was necessary.”

“Don’t you have a condom?”

He looked at me like I’d asked the dumbest question in the book, and said, “Pfff.”

“What?”

“I don’t use condoms. I believe men should take women the way they were meant to be taken. The natural way. Flesh to flesh and skin to skin. That’s the whole point of making love. I believe people should feel that every time they have sex they could die from it.” I stared at him dumbly, thinking of this safe sex pamphlet I read in high school that had comebacks for all the anticondom lines.

“A crying baby isn’t the kind of natural I need,” I mumbled.

“What?”

“You sure you don’t have any condoms?”

“I’m not gonna come in you,” he said, “so you don’t have to worry. I’m very good at not coming in women.”

Before I could calculate the comfort quotient of the comment he turned me back onto my stomach. I did some math in my head. My period was over. I’d be all right. If this was the way he operated on all first dates, God only knew where his dick had been, but I tried not to think about that. If one thing was clear about Hank Powell it was that when it came to sex, things weren’t really about a conversation. This was a lame rationale for risky behavior but an accurate appraisal, I felt.

He pushed up the dress again, looped his fingers against the waistband of my panties, and lowered them with one quick pull. Within a second he was in. I felt my body resisting, too nervous to open up. One thing I had loved about David was his never-ending supply of LifeStyles. It’s a big load off your chest when the guy does as he’s supposed to.

“You gotta put something on,” I said, flipping over.

“Why?”

“Because…I’m from a different generation than you are.”

“I know,” he said, sighing, “and this is exactly why I don’t have a lotta love for your generation.”

He stood up and headed toward the bedroom. His pants were off and he walked like a woman, his head pushed forward like a bird’s, his legs long and lean, his hand resting on his paunch. I watched him disappear through the doors and then I looked down at my own body. My dress was hiked up to my chin, my bra pushed halfway up my breasts, the underwire bisecting them so it looked like I had four. I lowered it and placed my boobs in, then fixed my dress so it was normal.

“The sheath is ready!” he called. I took a deep breath and went in. The lighting was soft and Powell was lying on his bed sporting wood.

I climbed up next to him. He put his hand on my face, and kissed me, open-mouthed and rough. I felt his erection bang against my thigh. He reached over to the nightstand and unwrapped a condom. I took the wrapper. Spermicided Trojan. “Is this all you have?” I said.

“What do you think this is, an all-you-can-eat buffet?”

He started to unroll it onto himself but an inch of the way down he stopped, flustered, and said, “I don’t know which way is up.”

“Lemme do it.”

I climbed on top of him, inspected it, flipped it the other way, and unrolled it in about two seconds. “How’d you get so good at that?” he said.

“Eighth grade health ed.”

“You wicked child!” he said. He tackled me and tossed my clothes onto the floor.

As he entered he started to growl. It wasn’t rhythmic along with the thrusting. It came out at odd intervals, from deep inside him like he was becoming someone else. His face was turned to the side, his eyes wild and strange, his hair messy with sweat. I felt like he was murdering me and I heard myself say, “It’s so wonderful and so terrible.”

“Grrrrmmm,” he said loudly, taking me with more venom. Half of me wanted to cry and the other half wanted to etch it all in my brain because I knew no other guy would wreck me this well.

When he came twenty minutes later, his face drenched, his armpits dripping, his hair wild and wet, he growled extra loudly and clawed at my shoulders with his hands. My eyes went wide and I watched him like a science experiment. He clawed, growled, and spasmed, clawed, growled, and spasmed, and then went heavy on top of me, his heart pounding against my own, his face resting in the crook of my neck.

I gingerly put my hand on his back and he spasmed again with a grunt. I eased him out. He lay next to me on his back and I watched his chest rise and fall. I turned over and inspected myself in the closet mirror to see what I was feeling. I looked violated but exhilarated. Suddenly he was in the reflection too, propped up on his elbow.

“You’ve completely transformed,” he said, his hand on my hip, the light so soft on my old-school body that I felt like that violin girl in the painting.

“How do you mean?”

“Look how soft your eyes are. You look so feminine, and tender.”

My contacts were kind of sticking so it was hard to see the expression on my face but even from a distance I saw what he meant. I was tranquil and liquid, my cheeks glowing.

“You calmed me down,” I said.

I got up and went into the bathroom. His toilet was standard-issue, but the shower curtain was cream-colored and gauzy and looked as expensive as everything else. As I was peeing I noticed something colorful behind the curtain so I opened it. In the center of the tub was a blue basin filled with dozens of Barbie dolls in various states of undress, their heads turned backwards like little Linda Blairs, many with missing limbs. Their little shirts and dresses were littered on top, along with buckets and bath toys, boats and Tupperware cups. As I went to wash my hands I noticed that by the side of the sink there was a colorful wooden step stool with the name NORA spelled out by a series of acrobatic clowns.

I padded back into the bedroom. He was lying in the same position, his eyes closed.

“How old is your daughter?” I asked.

“Five.”

“Is her name Nora?”

“No, it’s Tuwanda. I bought her the step stool just to confuse her. Of course her name is Nora.”

“How come you didn’t tell me about her before?”

“It didn’t come up.”

“Are you ashamed to be a father?”

“I’m a multifaceted man. I don’t show all a my facets at every moment. I’m like a diamond that way.”

Clearly this was not the whole story. There had been half a dozen occasions when he could have said something about her but he’d chosen not to. Naturally, his reluctance to reveal her only made me want to meet her a thousand times more. “Where does she sleep?” I asked. He pointed to a door that I presumed led to a guest room. “How often do you see her?”

“Three times a week.”

“What’s she like?”

“She’s smart and she likes to raise hell. She’s impish. She loves dolls but she hates skirts. She’s a tomboy.”

“You better watch out,” I said, “because when tomboys grow up they turn into sluts.”

“Believe me, I know. I’m glad she’s only five.”

I wanted to ask if I could meet her but I decided his reticence was a sign I’d best not bombard. I felt Nora could be the answer to my own bourgeois predicament: it was a million times cooler to be a stepmom than a mom. You could deal with the good stuff without any of the bad. Nora wouldn’t be my responsibility so there was no danger I’d transform into an Ubermom, which meant I could maintain my piece-of-ass status. It could allow me to sample at the table of motherhood without actually taking a plate.

The gleaming thought of child meeting made me horny and warm. I put my hand on his head and smoothed down his hair. I snuggled my nose into his armpit and took a deep, loving whiff.

“Hmm,” I said dreamily, resting my head on his shoulder. “I wonder what I should do now.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“It’s so late. Maybe I should sleep here.”

He gazed at me intently and said, “For six months after my wife and I split up I would wake up in the middle of the night and feel around me on the bed. I was looking for her body. I would pat each portion of the sheets, on both sides of me, night after night until I realized I was totally alone, and then I would start to cry.”

“That must have been very upsetting for you,” I said, stroking his cheek.

“Are you kidding? I was crying from relief. It was a joyous, overwhelming flood of relief to finally be rid of that castrating bitch!”

“How long has it been?” I said, jerking my hand away.

“Three years. But I still have a hard time having anyone sleep over. I just can’t do it. My nature won’t allow it.”

“What do you mean your nature?”

“I have a very strong connection with my nature and when it tells me not to do something I have to listen. Otherwise I become a trickster—the trickster for many years has been a very significant figure in my subconscious—and you don’t want to be around when I’m him. Put on ya clothes. I’ll walk ya home.” He got out of bed and I leaned over the edge to look for my bra.

 

ON the way down my block we almost tripped over the PSB, the Pacific Street Bum. He was an enormous bearded Middle Eastern guy with a huge Buddhalike belly who lay on the sidewalk in front of the parking lot across from my apartment. He never asked for money, he just hung out horizontally, in varying degrees of consciousness. He used the green fence of the parking lot as shelves for all his stuff—I’d walk by and see shirts, shoes, individual socks resting in the nooks. Once I even saw a banana tottering but not falling.

I had asked the guy in the beverage center down the block from my building if he knew anything about him and he said rumor had it he used to be a millionaire but lost all his money gambling. It was hard to believe. He looked like a caricature of a bum, with grime all over his face, and he always showed a little bit of plumber’s crack.

From the corner it looked like he was sleeping but as we passed he raised his hand to the cigarette in his mouth and took a drag. I jumped.

“You see what I mean about this being a bourgeois neighborhood?” said Powell. “Even the bums are spoiled.”

When we got to my front door I said, “Thank you for dinner.”

“Ya very welcome.”

I wanted to race into his arms and kiss him a thousand times on the lips but I had a feeling it might not be the smoothest move. “I had a wonderful time,” I said.

“And you,” he said, “are one of the more intriguing Gyno Americans I’ve encountered.”

I nodded and waited for him to kiss me but instead he just said, “Awright. I’ll talk to you soon.” And before I was safely inside, insulated and safe from the PSB, he walked down the street.

 

WHEN I got upstairs there was a note on my door from Liz that said, “Knock me up.”

She opened the door in sweats and a T-shirt. Liz looks very different when she’s not dressed up. Her face seems skinny and frail and her body way too tiny. Her face was all blotchy like she’d been crying. “Are you all right?” I said.

She shook her head no and led me in. Her place had the same layout as mine but it was sloppier. Every spare surface was covered with feminist textbooks, pop psychology, hard-rock CDs, and modern Jewish philosophy. Her desk was a beautiful glass Corbusier table and though it was a mess she had a fourteen-inch PowerBook right in the center, glowing regally. On the walls she had posters of the Smiths, Patti Smith, and the White Stripes, and her couch was draped with stoner Indian fabrics, the kind Deadheads had in college dorms. Her coffee table was bean-shaped with a projection of wood on it and her white Flokati rug was always filthy with pennies and pieces of dirt.

She had a vinyl vacuum cleaner box next to the TV and inside there were a hundred pornos she’d collected over the years—many on DVD. Her favorite director was a guy named Joey Silvera, who she liked for his ass fetish and love of transsexuals. Together we had watched ten minutes of a film called A Clock Strikes Bizarre on Butt Row, but after an unsettling portion in which a Mexican girl with a mustache ejaculated on the camera I insisted we watch Double Indemnity instead.

“So I met a cute Jew,” Liz said, lying on her back on the rug and folding her hands over her stomach, as I sat on the couch.

“Isn’t that a good thing?” I said.

“Noooo,” she moaned. “Remember that JCC–Manhattan benefit I told you I was going to? Well, it was last night. I’m standing by the bar putting on my glasses so I could read the bar menu, when the sweetest-looking Jewboy came up to me. He had this flap of dark brown hair and the most amazing upper body, with a real old-fashioned Jew ass. You know when it kind of curves out in the Dockers?”

“Bubble butt?”

“Yes! He had the most incredible bubble butt! So he says to me, ‘Someone with eyes as beautiful as yours should never wear glasses.’ ” I snorted. “I know,” she said. “Then he said I looked like Daryl Hannah. Racheleh, do you have any idea how many times I have been told I look like Daryl Hannah? And they all think they’re the first to say it.”

She didn’t look anything like Daryl Hannah, except that her hair was light and her eyes were blue. She always said she got her eyes from a slutty great-grandmother, who must have been raped by a Cossack.

“It’s because men type us,” I said. “They find it hard to distinguish, so they just see us in broad categories. Men look at women the way black people look at white people.”

“Exactly. But I was trying to be open-minded and patriotic and take what I could get. I said, ‘Yes, I’m the Jewish Daryl Hannah.’ He said, ‘The Daryl Hannah and Her Sisters.’ So we keep talking and it turns out he’s a lawyer for Skadden Arps. His name’s Brian Ittner and he lives on the Upper West. He’s into mountain climbing, dim sum, and this lymphoma charity. The male me. Could you die? We talk for like two hours, he asks me to his apartment for a nightcap, and all I can think in the cab over is, This is some first-rate BM.” That was Liz’s slang for Boyfriend Material. I had told her several times to pick a better acronym but she refused.

“As we’re riding over we’re quoting Annie Hall, debating Middle East politics, and when we got to his place, on Sixty-seventh, he kind of lunged for me. We went to the bed, and he banged the shit out of me. I came three times—in the position, I might add,”—she looked at me imploringly—“and then he did, and when he pulled out I immediately felt The Shift.”

“What’s The Shift?” I said.

“You know. That cloud that hovers over them as soon as they jizz. The one that’s like a mushroom cloud spelling out ‘STAY AWAY.’ ”

“Oh, that one,” I said. I had seen that look less than an hour before. Maybe this was a universal male quality I’d been lucky enough not to notice before because I’d always gone for men with the souls of women.

“So I stood up and put my dress back on and then I looked at him and said, ‘Brian? I’m gonna go.’ He’s just lying there, under the covers, all postcoital and droopy-eyed, and he says, ‘You don’t mind if I stay in bed, do you?’ ”

“Whaaat?”

“Rachel, I have had men not walk me to a cab. I have had men not walk me to the lobby. But this man did not walk me to the door.” She sat upright and looked at me as though I had to know something she didn’t. “If he didn’t want a wife, why did he come to a JCC event? If he wanted a one-night stand why didn’t he just fuck one of the girls in the Condé Nast building where he works, one of the shiksas, the blondes with the blowouts?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

She put her hands to her cheeks and moaned, “I let that Jewboy bang me and he wouldn’t even walk me to the door. Racheleh!” She grabbed both of my hands with hers. “I have to stop fucking!”

“So why don’t you?”

“Because I love fucking!” She started to tear up and pinched the bridge of her nose.

“I know what you mean,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder. “You want something more, something more ethereal and fulfilling, but men take one look at you and misunderstand. Women are sin, men want sin. Men are soul, women want soul.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she said, scowling.

It had sounded so good when Powell had said it, but so stupid when I did. I had to work on my execution. “It’s just something I heard somewhere.”

She eyed me warily and said, “If I ever run into him again at another event I will die. I will literally drop dead of mortification. I never want to see that Brian Ittner again.”

“Brian Shittner,” I said.

She laughed. “Yeah. I hope I never see Shittner again.”

She got up, pulled a Kleenex from the box on her desk, and sat back down. “Oh, Racheleh. I just can’t stand that look! That look! Right after they’ve rolled off, and they turn to you with this disdain, and you know all they’re thinking is, How do I get her out of here? When a man makes me come, I like him more. How come when we make them come, they like us less?”

“Maybe because every time they come they feel closer to death.”

“What’s that on your face?”

My hands flew up to my cheeks. “What do you mean?”

“It looks like a bruise or something, to the right of your mouth.” I jogged into the bathroom. She was right. I had a little shiner on my jaw, a one-inch circle of stubble scab that I must have gotten when Powell was kissing me.

I put my finger to it gingerly and spotted Liz in the mirror behind me. I jumped. “So what is it?” Her blue eyes pierced mine. She always got abrasive when she was seeking information.

“It must be a zit,” I said.

“It doesn’t look like a zit,” she said. “It looks like a bruise.”

She eyed me in the mirror like in a detective movie. She was trying to out-Columbo me but I wasn’t going to let her. There was something about Powell that made me want to keep him secret.

I did an about-face and brushed past her into the living room. “Is something going on?” she said, following.

“No.”

“Where were you when I knocked?”

“Having dinner with my parents,” I said quickly.

“This late?”

“Then I stopped at Roxy and had a drink.”

She eyed me suspiciously. “Really?” she said. “’Cause you look JBF.”

“What’s JBF?”

“Just been fucked.”

Though I was tempted to spill, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear what Liz had to say. As out-there as she was about her own romantic choices, I was afraid that if I told her the truth she’d tell me I shouldn’t have slept with him on the first date, or let him in without a condom, however briefly. And even if she’d be right I wasn’t ready to have Powell looked at just yet. I wanted him to be mine and mine alone, not a pair of underwear to be hung out on a laundry line for the whole neighborhood to see. He might turn out to be the biggest mistake of my life but I wanted him to be my mistake.

“I’m just really tired,” I said.

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

“I’m really sorry about Shittner,” I said, rubbing my chin. “Not all guys are like that.”

“Thanks,” she said absently. But she was no longer thinking about her own problems, she was thinking about me. There’s no quicker cure for misery than curiosity.

As soon as I got downstairs I went into my bathroom and flipped on the light. It looked like someone had punched me in the jaw. I ran my hand over the red spot and realized I was smiling.