The Need to Know and
the Fear of Knowing

IT was nine o’clock at work and for the past half hour a Greyhound and a Stella Artois had been dishing about men. In general women customers were less annoying than men but they drank more slowly and tipped worse. Still, given a choice, I liked women better because they left me alone and I didn’t have to worry about fights.

I was pretty sure Greyhound’s name was Alex, but not positive, so I always made a choice never to speak it aloud. I had mastered the art of the warm, seemingly intimate “He-ey!” when someone whose name I didn’t know walked through the door. She had cateye glasses and bangs and lived on Dean, around the corner from the bar. She told me once that she was a grad student at NYU but I could never remember in what. Her friend had a hot figure and a butterface—great body, but her face—and they were talking about Greyhound’s most recent dating fiasco. She had met this seemingly amazing guy on Nerve.com, a skinny Vespa-riding Web programmer, and after a great first date he completely flaked out. She kept calling him and he lost her cell phone number twice, and when they arranged their next date he showed up on Vicodin because he’d thrown his back out. He wound up passing out in her bed without so much as a kiss.

“So we didn’t speak for the next two weeks,” Greyhound said, “and just as I was thinking I was over him I ran into him at the theater. He was with a date.”

“Oh, sweetie,” said Stella.

“You know what’s worse? She was totally mousy!”

“Generigirl,” said Stella. “I hate those.”

“Exactly,” said Greyhound. “Empty smile, no soul. And then he had the nerve to come up to me and introduce me to her. We haven’t spoken since and that was three, no four, days ago. So the question is,” she said, drawing in her breath, “do I call him tonight or wait till tomorrow?”

Stella and I exchanged a grim look. The girl was a PhD candidate and when it came to love she had no IQ. There was zero awareness. It was as though she was so fixated on it working that she was willing to ignore every single red flag. I had never considered myself the luckiest girl in the world in the man department but now I was grateful that the guys I dated did one thing right: liked me.

Stella put her hand on top of Greyhound’s. “I don’t think you should call him at all.”

“Why not?”

“The guy’s a dick! And he has a girlfriend!”

“What if she’s just a friend?”

“Alex!!” she shouted, with a withering look. “You gotta Palmolive.” She rubbed her hands together under an imaginary faucet.

Greyhound’s face fell as she seemed to accept, at least for a moment, that her friend might be right. “So you think I should just…forget about him?” she asked. Stella nodded somberly. “I guess it’s over,” Greyhound said, trying to look resolute and strong.

Suddenly her cell phone rang, piercing the relative quiet of the bar. She gave Stella a meaningful look as she fumbled for it and stared down at the indicator. “It’s my mother,” she said, sighing. “How do they always know when you’re at your lowest?” She shut off the ringer and slurped the rest of her drink. “Could I get another?” she said, but I was already on my way to the bottle.

 

THE next night around seven, I heard Liz having an orgasm. She wasn’t saying “Fuck my Jew beav!” this time, though. She was moaning something muffled and unintelligible into her pillow. I craned my neck to hear the guy but he was a silent fucker.

I wondered if it was Shittner, which would have explained the lack of self-hating pejorative. When Liz came it was fast and soft, which was atypical for her: “Oh, oh, oh!” It was so quiet I concluded after some deliberation that it wasn’t a man at all, but her vibrator, The Gun. She had shown it to me once. It was white and shaped like a big water pistol and you inserted it into yourself and turned it on by pressing the trigger. I always felt the symbolism was a little backwards, since she was a female ejaculator.

In the morning for my Powell rendezvous I opted for a white and red flowered silk dress I bought at the Village Scandal, a vintage store on East Seventh Street. It was cap-sleeved with a V-neck and high waist and it hung sleekly and smoothly around my body. It seemed designed for a sleazy secretary from the 1940s and every time I wore it people said, “That dress looks like it was made for you.” I wore it with knee-high black boots with silver buckles to give it more of a modern feel.

As I was heading to my door I remembered Powell’s caveat. I slipped my underpants off, feeling very afraid. Although it wasn’t cold I felt that without underwear I needed added protection from any potential leerers, so I chose a 1970s tan trench coat, also high-waisted, with red trim, to wear on top. Whenever I wore it I felt like the Morton Salt girl.

On my way down the stairs I heard footsteps, high-heeled and aggressive, behind me. I waited at the landing below mine and when she saw me she screamed like she’d seen a ghost, then said, “Oh, hey, Rach.”

“Are you OK?” I said.

“I didn’t see you there.”

“You sounded like you were having fun last night,” I said.

“What?”

“Were you diddling the dai dai?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I heard you moaning but I couldn’t hear a guy.”

“Oh. Yeah. It was The Gun.” She headed down the stairs to the foyer. She blinked rapidly like a squirrel on speed and held the door open for me.

Outside her eyes looked off balance and nervous. She was acting so moody. Maybe she’d blue-binned with Shittner and didn’t want to tell me.

“Are you sure it wasn’t Shittner?” I said.

“It wasn’t Shittner!” she shrieked. “It was The Gun, OK?”

“All right, all right,” I said. “Don’t be a freakazoid.”

“You’re the freakazoid,” she snarled, then brushed past me and walked briskly toward Boerum Place.

I looked down at my dress and party coat. I was annoyed at her for acting strange but I was also insulted that she hadn’t noticed my outfit. I was all decked out and she hadn’t said a thing. Something was fishy.

I headed left toward Court Street and as I passed CVS it occurred to me that it might be a wise idea to go Boy Scout. I walked through the electronic doors, went downstairs to the pharmacy section, and had just pulled a box of LifeStyles Ultra Sensitive off a hook when I heard a voice behind me say, “Rachel? Is that you?”

I would have dropped the box but it was already in my hand so I clamped it under my arm and turned around. “Stu Zaritsky,” I said.

Stu Zaritsky was one of my former classmates and represented the worst that the Reform rabbinate had to offer. Though he was not the precise reason I had dropped out he definitely had something to do with my overall disillusionment with the program. He was thirty pounds overweight, wore tight chinos like Pat on Saturday Night Live, and breathed through his mouth. He came from Roslyn, Long Island, and had gone to Brandeis, and like many rabbinical students he had been president of his regional Reform Jewish youth group, which in our world was the equivalent of being homecoming king.

On the first day of classes, when we gathered in the sanctuary for the welcome speech by President Levine, Stu slipped into my pew and introduced himself. Within five minutes he had informed me that his father was a rabbi and his grandfather too.

He never asked me out—he had a young wife he’d known since freshman year of college, and a baby boy—but he got under my skin. What bugged me about Stu wasn’t his pomposity, poor rhetorical skills, or tendency to kiss up to professors, but his irritating habit of Halachic one-upsmanship. He was the kind of guy who would ask me what I was doing for the weekend as a way of finding out if I rested on Shabbat, which I didn’t. So if I said, “Studying and going to a party,” he’d raise his eyebrows like I was a bad Jew. I had always felt that observance was more about the spirit than the letter of the law but Stu saw everything as an opportunity to prove his holiness.

“So how are you?” he asked weightily, like I had dropped out because I’d gone insane instead of because I’d chosen to. He was holding a jumbo bag of Pampers under one arm.

“Fine, fine,” I said. “What are you doing in my neighborhood?”

“I was just visiting some residents over at the Cobble Hill nursing home, for Prof Dev.” Prof Dev was Professional Development, a hands-on training course we had to take every year in order to graduate. “They’re so brave, those old folks. They’ve got so much ruach.” Ruach meant spirit and it was one of those words that the teacher’s pets all loved to say with an exaggerated Hebrew accent.

“Really?” I said. “Every time I pass by and look down in the window they seem kind of catatonic.”

“Oh no,” he said. “They’re filled with life.” Stu was the kind of guy who had to ennoble everything he did. He shifted the diapers from one arm to the other and said, “Shoshanna just called to tell me to pick these up. She’s down to one diaper and she goes a little batty when she gets so low.”

“How is Zev anyway?” All the rabbis that had kids gave them biblical names even though they themselves had assimilationist ones like Randy or Mitchell.

“Oh, he’s a terror. Eighteen months and getting into everything. What are you buying?”

“Cold medication,” I said, shoving the box up into my armpit. He nodded and then surveyed the wall, which, in addition to condoms, held hemorrhoid ointment, suppositories, and diaphragm jelly.

He cleared his throat, swallowed, and said, “So is it true that you’re a bartender? Sharon Margolis thought she saw you through a window but said you were dressed so provocatively she was convinced it was someone else.”

I debated my options. I could tell him I was a contract killer or Jew for Jesus but all I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. “That was me,” I said.

“That’s a shift, huh?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you spend all your time with misfits.”

“It’s actually not that different from being a rabbi,” I said tersely. “I mean, people ask for advice. I provide counseling.”

“So why’d you drop out? I heard one of your patients died while you were sitting with him and you completely freaked out. Is that why?”

“I think my reasons for dropping out are between me and God, Stu.”

He stared at me coldly—annoyed I wasn’t giving him any good dish to report back to his friends, even though gossip was against Jewish law—and then he sighed and said, “You know, I should probably thank you.”

“Why’s that?”

“I won a hundred bucks because of you.”

“I’m sorry?”

“A few of us had a pool going on how long you were going to last.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, wanting to belt him.

“I had you leaving in the second semester, Sharon had you leaving second year, and Joe Slotnick must have had a lot of faith in you because he thought you were going to make it to ordination.”

I wanted to take out one of the rubbers and slingshot it into his pimpled face. “And why are you telling me this?”

“I thought you’d get a kick out of it,” he said.

“How sweet of you,” I said. “It’s nice to know my colleagues had faith in me.”

“Rabbinical school really isn’t about having faith in each other,” he said. “It’s about having faith in HaShem.” He pointed to the sky. “It was obvious to me from day one that your faith was shaky.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You were always looking out the window during services and you seemed to pray without ruach.” There was that word again. “Plus you wear clothes that look like they’re from flea markets.” He eyed my tan trench coat and the bright print peeking out from underneath it.

“It’s called vintage!” I snapped.

“You always struck me as more of an art school student. I knew you were hoping to revitalize the rabbinate but somehow I could never picture you on a pulpit.”

I took in his oily hair and side part, his paunch riding over his high-hiked pants, his smudged glasses. He was the putz calling the kettle black. It was people like him who caused the declining rate of American Jewish affiliation. Who could entrust their soul to a rabbi who couldn’t even take care of his own skin? I wanted to tell him it was better that I’d left than stayed on like morons like him, who were in it for the power and the narcissistic high, who had no creative thinking capacity whatsoever. I wanted to tell him that if he’d chosen the internship at Memorial instead of the cushy one up at Temple Shaaray Tefila working with nursery school kids, he might have had an opportunity to do some soul-searching himself. But Stu was a third-generation rabbi with a messiah complex. Arguing with him about anything was a waste of breath.

I was about to head out of the store when something strange happened. I thought about the way I’d let Stu walk all over me, and I imagined Powell being in this situation. What Would Powell Do? Before I was completely aware of what was happening, I pulled out the LifeStyles and said, “Great running into you, Stu, but I gotta get going. I have some fucking to do.”

“What?” Stu gasped.

“I said, ‘I have some fucking to do.’ ” He reddened and looked as though he was about to combust. “Great seeing you. Listen, come by the bar sometime. Roxy, on Bergen and Smith. Have you heard that Yiddish saying? ‘If you’re at odds with your rabbi make peace with your bartender.’ ” He gaped at me and I bounded up the stairs.

 

THE first thing Powell said when I came in was, “Ya late.”

I looked at my watch. “Only five minutes,” I said.

“If I had been in a different mood,” he said, “I wouldn’t have let you up. I consider tardiness the worst of all sins. Ya lucky the trickster isn’t more active in me right now.”

“I thought the trickster was active in you,” I said.

“I said the devil’s active. The devil and the trickster are two very different symbols. The devil seeks evil; the trickster seeks play.”

This wasn’t the most romantic opener. Then again, I had arrived without underwear; it wasn’t exactly candles and incense to begin with.

“I brought you something,” I said, and handed him the bag from the store. He looked inside, pulled out the condom box, regarded it as though it was a small dead animal, and deposited it on the mail table by the door.

“Let me take ya coat,” he said. He hung it up in the closet and gave me a once-over. “You cut a fine swath,” he said.

“They’re different decades but I feel they work together.”

He took the hem of the dress in both hands and lifted it slowly up above my waist. I felt like I was being unwrapped on Christmas morning. “Very good,” he said when he saw. “You obeyed.”

He kissed me and I went liquid in his arms. I imagined a war going on outside, explosions and catastrophes, and us still kissing with the world swirling around. I didn’t think about his paunch or the flabbiness in his upper arms. He was a 1950s stud and I was a Tennessee Williams heroine who always had trouble breathing.

I felt him kicking the back of my leg. I wasn’t sure what he was trying to do so I resisted and stood firm. He pushed his foot into the back of my knee and I realized he was cuing me to kneel. I wished he had just said it. I sunk down, banging my right knee against the floor as I did.

He stood in front of me and as though on pornographic autopilot I unbuckled his pants. It was terrifying and pale. I took it in my mouth and squeezed the base. He seemed to sense my inner blow slut. He patted the side of my face and said, “Good girl,” and right away I got crazy inside. I sucked him deeper and then I reached up under my skirt and started playing with myself. I wasn’t sure if he could see and I wasn’t sure I wanted him to. I hoped he wouldn’t think it was too Gen X.

When I looked up he was watching my hand. I stopped, ashamed. “Keep going,” he said. He patted my hair and let me control the force. He kept saying “That’s right” and “You’re my little hoo-ah,” and this time I didn’t laugh.

He was gazing down at me so meanly, like one of those huge talking trees from The Wizard of Oz. I thought about his sternness, how he knew me, and how we were animus and anima, meant to be together. I felt that if I could just be with him like this every day, dress up and come over in the broad daylight, then it wouldn’t matter what I did for a living or how long it took me to get a real job. He would be the most important thing and all the other stuff would be meaningless. His eyes were so knowing, so slanted. It was as though he understood everything about me even though he hardly knew me, and his cool knowledge made me so moved that I came.

“I came,” I said. I am a very demure comer and if I don’t make noise they just don’t know.

“That’s it,” he said, like he was patting a good horse’s flank.

He pushed me down onto the floor on my stomach and lifted my dress and after fumbling around for a few seconds, he was in.

“What about the box?” I asked lamely.

“We’ll just do it like this for a minute,” he said.

He moved in me and made his savage sigh. I found myself angling my pelvis up toward him. It was risky and stupid but we had passed the prophylactic point of no return, the point at which you feel that if you were going to get pregnant you already are, in which case all the other sex is icing.

The floor was cold against my face. I felt some drool trickle out of my mouth and form a small puddle by my lip and I moaned gutturally like a little retarded girl. I felt raw and weak and low-IQ. I noticed a coin on the floor under the couch and as I was trying to determine whether it was a penny or a nickel I heard a triumphant roar and felt a warm mess on my back.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, and went into the bathroom. I stood up, brushed myself off, and wandered over to the window. Three boys were playing hockey in the street and I wondered if they would grow up to be as ruthless as Powell.

He came in, picked up his pants, and started putting them on. I walked into the bathroom silently to wash my butt and then I went to the sink and threw some water on my face. My hair was a mess and my eyelids droopy and worn. As I dried my face I saw that the collar of my beautiful dress had ripped along the neck. I wondered what would be left of me when he was through, if I would just be a pile of scabs and ratty threads. He had kicked me out of his apartment on the first date and fucked me on the floor on the second. It wasn’t exactly an upward curve.

I wanted to sleep over, to meet his kid. I wanted to have sex on the bed again, to move up in his life, not down.

When I came back Powell was sitting on the couch fully dressed, listening to bossa nova and sipping from a glass of wine. There was an empty glass on the table, and next to it an open bottle of red. “You all cleaned up?” he said.

“Yep,” I said.

He pointed to the empty glass and said, “You want some?” I nodded and he poured me some. It was Côtes du Rhône, and there was a tag on it that said $17.99. It looked like a new bottle, that he’d opened just for us, not one he’d had lying around. Maybe I was making too big a deal of the floor thing. At least it was hardwood. It could have been parquet.

I drank the wine and we sat there quietly in the evening light. But as I watched him aerate it seemed like his face had turned frosty. I heard Liz saying, “How come when we make them come, they like us less?” and it was like a negative mantra hovering over us, mingling with the smell of our sex. Was Powell like those guys who hated women as soon as they had them, or was he old enough to know that a woman you could have was the best kind there was?

“Look what you did to my collar,” I said. He held it by the corner and flopped it up and down like a child with a light switch. “What should I do about it?”

“What do you mean what should you do?”

“Do you have a needle and thread?”

“You should leave it like that. It looks good.”

“But I’m going to my mother’s book group.”

“Exactly,” he said. “You’ll give ’em something to be nostalgic about.”

MY parents’ brownstone was on Warren Street, between Clinton and Court. It was a modest building painted dark red and came off more heimish than stately. They’d been renting the ground and first floors since 1975. Even after the neighborhood got more gentrified, they continued to rent, and although they only paid a rent-stabilized grand a month, these days they kicked themselves for never having bought.

As I came up the stoop I saw my mom and her friends through the window. There were five of them scattered around, on the couch and on floor pillows, chatting and laughing in pastel Eileen Fisher, like the cast of a General Foods International Coffee ad. “I’m so glad you made it!” she said, greeting me in the entrance hallway. “Did you finish the book?”

“Uh—almost,” I said. “So are you nervous about leading?”

“I’m used to it. I did The Corrections and Things Fall Apart and they were two of our most heated discussions.”

“Where’s Dad?” I said as we came in the door.

“In his office. I told him he was banished until I gave him the signal he could come up.” We started to head into the living room but she pulled me back. “Listen. He told me he told you about his job situation. Don’t mention anything about it in front of my friends. He’s very self-conscious about the whole thing.”

“I won’t,” I said. “How are you doing about it?”

“Fine,” she shrugged. “I don’t like having him around all the time, but I don’t have much choice.”

As soon as I walked into the living room I was greeted by a loud chorus of “Racheleh!” My mom had been friends with the same group of women for the past thirty years. They all had kids around the same age—in the early seventies they had a rotating playgroup at different women’s houses—and since then they’d stayed close, getting together regularly to gossip and kvell, and starting the book group a couple years back, when they became empty-nesters.

There was Nina Halberstam, a tall go-getter corporate attorney and our across-the-street neighbor; Carol Landsman, a curly-haired social worker; Joan Ibbotson, an ESL teacher with a bad red-hair dye job; and Shelly Katz, a hot divorcée and the only smoker. Nina was pouring red wine into their glasses and I could tell by the tint in their Semitic faces that this wasn’t the first bottle.

“How’s the waitressing going?” Nina asked, getting up to embrace me.

“Bartending,” I said.

“I thought you were a waitress.”

“Nope, not that classy,” I said. My mom gave me a dirty look as she headed into the kitchen.

“I bet you get picked up all the time,” Carol said. “I was a waitress at the Caffe Cino in the early seventies and I went home with a different man every night.” She looked out the window nostalgically. “Of course, there wasn’t any AIDS back then.”

My mom came in from the kitchen with two baskets, one filled with French bread, the other with grapefruits. As she set them down on the table she spotted my collar. “Oh my God,” she said. “What happened?”

“It must have ripped when I was putting it on this morning,” I said, holding it up. “That’s the problem with vintage. It just doesn’t wear well.”

“That’s a bad rip,” Carol said, running her finger over it and giving me a dubious look.

“Why are you serving grapefruit and bread?” I asked.

“It’s not grapefruit,” my mom said. “It’s blood oranges. And day-old bread.” We all looked at her blankly. “In honor of menopause,” she said, giggling like a mischievous schoolgirl.

“You are too much, Sue,” said Joan.

“What? I’m just trying to be theme-driven. We had New England clam chowder for The Perfect Storm, why can’t we have day-old bread for The Silent Passage?”

“That chowder was delicious,” said Joan. “More memorable than the book.”

“We’re all here,” my mom said, “so why don’t we get started?” She grabbed a copy of the book from the coffee table, and a page of typed notes. They all got exuberant eager faces, like this was the highlight of their week, and pulled copies of the book out of their totes. Carol sat on the couch and patted the space next to her. I didn’t want to be in her proximity because she always leered at me like a lez but there weren’t any other seats so I did.

As I sat down I felt my dress against my ass and remembered I wasn’t wearing underwear. I crossed my legs tightly so I couldn’t flash and held my collar up with my hand to cover the bra. I felt like a trailer-trash ho who’d accidentally wandered into an Anti-Defamation League benefit.

“Why don’t we start with general comments?” said my mom, leaning back to survey the group. “Gail Sheehy says menopause is about the need to know and the fear of knowing. Reactions?”

“This goddamn Gail Sheehy made me want to put a hole in my head,” said Nina. “It’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever read in my life. If we go on HRT we’ll die of breast cancer and if we don’t we’ll die of osteoporosis. What are we supposed to do?”

“I have a problem with the way you categorized HRT, Nina,” Joan jumped in. “I’ve started talking about it with my ob-gyn and he says that given a history of osteoporosis I should stay on the hormones. I know it’s politicized but it’s a personal choice.”

“You gotta be out of your mind!” Nina snapped. “When the Women’s Health Initiative study came out I knew I would never do it. For years the male medical establishment told us hormones were safe and now we know they were lying to us! Why am I going to take something that could give me not just breast cancer, but heart attacks, strokes, blood clots?” Joan answered back, and then they both started talking at once. They were the middle-aged Jets and the Sharks.

“Hey!” my mom bellowed. Usually her voice was pretty soft but she had these power-lungs from teaching and once in a while she’d show them off. “No interrupting during Open Comments!”

“She’s such a good leader,” Carol clucked.

My mom blushed and looked down at her notes. “I think Sheehy’s best point is that what’s right for one woman isn’t necessarily right for another. And it seems the reason these discussions get so polarized”—Polarized? Had she been taking correspondence courses at Brown?—“is because any discussion of menopause, at bottom, is a discussion of mortality.” They all got hushed and nodded reverentially like black ladies in church.

“What gets my goat,” my mom went on, “is how little research there is about it. The medical world has done so little to look into what it means and ways to treat it and as a result women are left completely at bay.” I’d never heard her speak so strongly about anything. When she presented me with a tallis made by blind Israelis at my bat mitzvah she was so nervous I could hear the spit crackling in her mouth. “We need to feel free to talk to our ob-gyns, and not be ashamed, because menopause is a normal part of life.”

“If it’s normal then why is it so harrowing?” Nina said. “Gail Sheehy says women report the best sex of their lives between forty-five and fifty-five! Where on God’s green earth did she get that from? If I can stop barking at Larry long enough for us to try, then I’m too hot to be in the mood, and other times it’s so painful I have to make him stop.”

“Maybe I should go,” I said.

“This is important,” my mom said. “You should listen.”

“It’s like my body won’t pay attention to my brain,” Nina said.

“You’re like a man!” Joan shouted, and they all broke up in laughter.

“You see, this is why I’m glad to be divorced,” Shelly said. “I don’t have to worry about any of that.”

“Nina,” Carol jumped in. “Didn’t your doctor tell you about the Estring?”

“I’ve never even heard of that.”

“It’s an estrogen ring that sits inside the vagina right below the cervix. You put it in for three months and it very slowly releases a small amount of estrogen directly into the canal…” I tuned them out. My deafness was instinctive and adaptive. The thought of Carol Landsman with a little cock ring inside her made my stomach weak. I didn’t have any need to know; I just had a fear of knowing.

Suddenly I felt a spoonful of discharge slide out. My twentysomething vagina must have felt the need to make itself heard. I jumped a little and inched forward. If I wasn’t careful I’d stain the couch.

“Are you all right?” Carol asked, slipping an arm around my shoulder. Another blob came out.

I leapt to my feet. “Can you excuse me?”

“Where you going?” my mom called after me.

“To the bathroom.”

“Wait till you get older!” Nina called. “You’ll have to go every ten minutes!”

 

AS soon as I got down to my bedroom I beelined for the dresser. All my teenage posters were still on the walls—Johnny Depp from 21 Jump Street, Sean Penn in Fast Times. My old particleboard Work-bench desk was in the corner and the Kelly green wall-to-wall carpeting still had the huge bleach stain I’d made when I tipped over a tray of Jolen I mixed for my mustache in ninth grade.

I opened the top drawer of the dresser and after rummaging through about a dozen stretched and malformed nightshirts that said things like “Jenny Stein’s Bat Mitzvah—10/20/87,” I came to the unsettling conclusion that there were no spare pairs of undies. I couldn’t go back upstairs pantiless when I might leak all over again and if I left the meeting my mother would think I wasn’t being supportive. There was only one recourse.

My parents’ bedroom was adjacent to mine, and my dad’s office was next to their bedroom. A thin stream of light was coming out of his office door. If he was working on his computer I didn’t have to worry about him coming out; even a nuclear war couldn’t pull my dad from the screen of a PC.

I pushed open the bedroom door. Their room had a dark homey feel and always smelled the same. My dad’s mystery books and computer stuff were strewn all over the place and his dresser was littered with nails, bolts, and eyeglasses with lenses missing. My mom’s dresser was opposite the bed and her underwear drawer was the top one, to the right. There was a divider in the middle and her bras were stacked on one side and the panties folded on the other. She’d worn the same kind since I was a kid—white satin three-panel control-top with total coverage in the ass—Full Dorsal Fashion. I lifted the top pair out and inspected the cotton patch to see if they were clean.

The patch was dingy but unstained. Trying very hard not to breathe through my nose, I stepped in and hiked them up. They were baggy and slipped down to my hips but the leg holes were tight, which was kind of a downer: it meant my thighs were as wide as hers.

As I walked out I noticed something on my mom’s nightstand. It was something completely incongruous, more frightening than a glow-in-the-dark dildo or transsexual porn. Wedged between her glasses case and tub of Clinique anti-aging cream, sitting there as nonchalantly as if it had been there forever, was Mars and Venus in the Bedroom by John Gray, PhD. I opened it up and read the first line: “He wants sex. She wants romance. Sometimes it seems as if our partners are from different planets…” I dropped it to the floor with a horrified gasp.

Menopause brought on slight insanity, I knew, but this meant my mom was truly far gone. She was doing the middle-aged equivalent of The Rules, taking love advice from a sexist idiot. It was so unlike her. The only other book she owned that was even slightly self-help was Fat Is a Feminist Issue and she’d had it thirty years.

Why was she reading John Gray in plain sight of her husband? Was it a signal to my dad to lay off, and stop hitting on her? Maybe he was the one having sexual problems. Was he too depressed about his unemployment to get it up? I shuddered, unsettled by every possible visual.

As I replaced the book on her nightstand I heard a noise coming from his bedroom. It sounded like panting and it was rhythmic and determined. I walked out and stood outside his office. Beneath the panting was the faint sound of Terri Gross, interviewing Paul Auster about his newest book. I turned the knob and pushed the door open. He was on his back on the floor, his feet wedged under the couch. My fat father was doing sit-ups.

He was in a white V-neck undershirt and snot-green sweats, and he was counting, “Thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight…,” loudly, over the interview. When he saw me he jumped for a second in surprise but instead of stopping he held up a finger and made me wait till he got to fifty.

“Arrghhh!” he said, collapsing back onto the floor.

“What’s going on?” I shouted.

“What do you mean what’s going on?” he said, panting. “I’m getting in shape.”

“Since when have you cared about exercise?”

“I figure it could help with my search. Didn’t you see the article in the Job Market section about how men are taking personal grooming more seriously now that so many of us are unemployed?”

“I don’t read that section. I’m not looking for a job.”

“I’ve got to do everything I can to tip the scales in my favor!”

The plot thickened. Maybe my mom was reading Mars and Venus because she was the Mars in the relationship. Maybe he was the one trying to woo her back, by getting in shape. She was the one who was more masculine on the surface—she never cried like he did at movies, and she was totally unsentimental. Maybe he was afraid she’d leave him unless he cleaned up his act.

“This is so unlike you,” I said. “You’ve never cared about looking good before.”

“You see?” he said. “This is why I need to do it! Because people like you say things like that.”

“That’s not what I—”

“It’s all right, Rach! I’ve let myself go and I don’t have much time to make up for it!” There was a loud laugh from upstairs and he pointed to the ceiling. “How’s the hen party?”

“They’re talking about estrogen rings,” I said.

“Ugh,” he said. “I don’t even want to know.”

“You should take an interest,” I said. “Gail Sheehy says that after menopause there’s this thing called postmenopausal zest. It was named by Margaret Mead. Postmenopausal women have a love of life and a vim and vigor stronger than any they’ve felt before.”

“She’s right! The vim is killing me!”

“Why are you so insensitive? Maybe you should go upstairs and eavesdrop. You might learn something.”

“You know what, Rach? I think I have enough on my plate right now.” There was something new in his face: contempt. I’d only seen flashes of it before when I was young and they fought over stupid things like my mom throwing things away. He’d say, “Why would you throw out something labeled taxes? Are you retarded? Are you a six-year-old?” and she’d yell back, “You shouldn’t be such a slob!” and then he’d yell some more and eventually she’d run into the bathroom and close the door.

But since then it had seemed like things had leveled out. He’d been placid, kind, even, and it frightened me to see the coldness in his eyes.

“I just don’t see why your abs are so important,” I said.

“I’ve told you before,” he said. “It’s a horrible market. I’m twice the age of my competition and I have to do something that gives me an edge. You should be happy for me. Feel how much harder my gut has gotten.” He took my wrist in his hand and lowered it to his belly.

“I don’t want to feel your gut,” I said, jerking it away.

“Come on,” he said. “Hit me.”

“I don’t want to touch your stomach!”

“Suit yourself,” he said. “But don’t come begging to touch it three months from now, when I can bounce a dime off my six-pack.”

He grimaced and started his next set. I stepped over him like he was a dead body with chalk around it.

 

WHEN I got home from the meeting the phone was ringing. “So how was the passage?” Powell murmured.

“Dark and depressing,” I said, slithering out of my mother’s panties. I tried to chuck the underwear into the wastebasket by my desk but they missed. “How are you?”

“Exhausted,” he said. “I just put Nora down. She was wired. Her class went on a field trip to the Tenement Museum. Since when did poverty become educational?”

“Where does she go to school?”

“Montessori.”

“Am I going to meet her someday?”

“I dunno. I prefer to keep my private life separate. I’m very protective over what she sees.”

“What’s so scary about me? I’m good with kids. I used to babysit a lot.”

“Exactly. You were the naughty babysitter. I don’t need her under your influence.”

“Do you like me?” I asked suddenly.

“Jesus,” he said. “Now why would you go and ask a question like that?”

“I just meant, the way you insult me. I said I wanted to meet your daughter. I’m aware that day might not come. But why wouldn’t you just say yes? Don’t you have any social graces?”

“I want you to listen to me, Rachel,” he said softly, “and I want you to listen very carefully. I understand you, maybe better than you understand yasself. I understand that instinct to ask these questions, these ugly and predictable questions—‘Do you like me?’ ‘Can I meet the child?’ ” He put on a whiny high-pitched voice, the kind women cringe at when they learn that’s how a man thinks they sound. “I am deeply aware of your animus problem so I know how hard it must be for you to wait to see me. I know how instinctive it is for you to keep saying and doing the wrong thing. But if you keep down this road, and I say this not as a threat but as a neutral statement of fact, we will have no further interaction.”

I saw the whole thrilling future of Powell and me burning to my oak floor. There was an ugly intruder into whatever was beginning between us and I didn’t know if it was my anxiety or his callousness. Whatever it was I wanted it out and so I did something I had never done before: I kowtowed.

“I understand,” I said. I hated how high my voice sounded in my throat.

“Good,” he said. “Can you come over Tuesday at four?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like you to wear your hair up off ya neck.”

“Why?”

“So I can see the veins.” I was dating Dracula. At least he liked my veins, though. Most guys got weirded out when they saw them. I have a perfect W across my chest that stretches from my left shoulder all the way to my right. “I’d also like you to wear shoes with a little more heel than the last time. Shoes that raise the back of your foot and reveal the shape of your calf.”

“Those boots were my highest pair!”

“So ya cancelling?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said, and hung up.

 

WHEN I got in bed I put the covers up to my chin but couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about my first date with David. He had taken me to an expensive Asian fusion restaurant on Mott Street but the service was really slow and the waitress was incredibly tall and hot, with this weird hard-to-place accent, and we joked about the inverse relationship between server attractiveness and quality of service. We called it the hot ratio and said Zagat should include it as its own category, and even though the whole thing was stupid, at the time I thought it was really funny. In the middle of dinner he put his hand under the table and held mine and I spent the rest of the meal struggling with my chopsticks because I didn’t want to let his hand go.

I wasn’t sure why I’d given up on him so fast. He was a good person and he was funny and he cared about me. If David had been a dad when we met he would have introduced me to his kid right away.

Maybe I should have given him a chance, and gotten married to him so we could have worked at the same congregation, him as a cantor and me as a rabbi. We had fantasized about that a little when we lay awake at night after sex, the way some people fantasize about building a home or moving to Paris. We both wanted to live some-place rural and liberal, so we always imagined Burlington or Montpelier, both of which had big Jewish populations. We’d live in a farmhouse with a cast-iron stove, drive pickup trucks to the synagogue, and raise kids that could chant Torah and milk cows.

In those moments, lying on my bed with David, cuddled up under the comforter, I never felt aimless or confused about anything. I didn’t mind the fact that I spent half my day learning modern Hebrew because the program was so pro-Israel. I didn’t care that I hated most of my classmates, or that sometimes I got really bored during services, or that some of the professors were drones. I felt like I was on my way to doing what I wanted and spending my life with someone I loved.

Now I was a professional Rheingold girl and Stu Zaritsky was right at this very moment probably gabbing to all my former classmates that he’d run into me in a drugstore buying condoms. I wanted to feel like I’d done the right thing by telling him I had fucking to do but instead I just felt ashamed.

Deep down despite what I said to my parents, to my customers, to Powell, I felt pathetic. Maybe my dad was right and I really was losing all common sense. I was something I had never imagined I’d become in a million years: a screwup. Screwups were children of my parents’ friends, the ones who were spoken about in hushed tones. They were the ones who got into drugs and tattoos, smoked cigarettes, the ones who had learning disabilities and trouble with authority. They weren’t smart Jewish girls from Cobble Hill.

I felt stranded, and stagnant. It wasn’t the lack of direction I minded so much as how hard it was for me to romanticize it. That was something that was very hard to learn. I’d been bad at being good but so far I wasn’t very good at being bad. Maybe I just needed a little more time.

 

THE best—and worst—thing about working in a bar is that you are constantly reminded you’re not the only one in the world who is lonely. Around eight o’clock on my next shift a regular named Matt came in, went right to the jukebox, typed in some numbers listlessly, and came back. “What’d you put on?” I asked cheerily, hoping his dismay might make him drink more.

“Badly Drawn Boy,” he said. “Can I get a Corona?”

We’d chatted a little before. He played in a band called The Changing Subject and usually came in with his girlfriend Sidecar, who worked as a waitress at Patois. This was the first time he’d come in alone.

As soon as I put his drink in front of him his song came on and he let out a long, laborious sigh. I looked straight ahead. The potentially dangerous consequence of striking up conversations with customers is that if you’re not careful you inadvertently wind up stroking them the rest of the night.

“A few days ago I was shopping at the ABC Carpet in DUMBO with Jenny,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” I said, standing up straight so he wouldn’t think I was too comfortable.

“And I saw her see someone across the store. It was this good-looking guy—built, tall, whatever. Jenny looks like she’s seen a ghost and right away she’s like, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ I’m like, ‘Why?’ and she’s like, ‘I don’t want to go into it. It’s just some guy I went to high school with and I don’t want to see him so let’s go.’ ”

I washed a glass unnecessarily so I wouldn’t seem too engaged. “So as we left,” he said, “I was trying to get a good look at the dude from across the store and I could see he had this shaggy brown hair. The next day I’m at yoga and this shaggy-haired guy takes the spot next to me and I realize it’s the same guy. I wasn’t sure at first but he kept staring at me the whole class, and at the end as I’m on my way out he comes up to me and says, ‘You look really familiar.’ I said, ‘Sorry. I don’t think I know you.’ He says, ‘Wait a second, you know Jenny Ross, right?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I do. I’m going out with her. How do you know her?’ He says, ‘I used to date her. We broke up about six months ago.’ ”

“So? She probably didn’t want you to know this guy was in her life.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “Jenny and I have been going out for two years!”

“Oh my God,” I said.

“Yeah,” he sighed. “So I started asking him all these questions and it turned out she started sleeping with him like a year into our relationship. She had both of us thinking we were the only one.” It was beginning to seem like if I wanted to maintain even a smidgen of romantic idealism, I was in the wrong profession. “You know what the worst part is?” he said, pulling at his beer. “After I told her the whole story and had totally given it to her for lying to me, she said, ‘It looks like you need space. Maybe we should take some time apart.’ She cheated on me and then she dumped me!”

He started to sob right there in the bar. If I hadn’t been so shocked I would have marveled at the beauty of a cute guy crying. I put my hand on his back and handed him a bev nap. He sniffled noisily into it. “Fuck, this is embarrassing,” he said.

“It’s OK,” I said. “My dad cries a lot, actually.” He wiped his nose and smiled faintly, like a kid who’s momentarily forgotten both knees are gushing blood.

“Look,” I said, “sounds like she wasn’t cut out for you. Sounds like she was psychotic.”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” he said, frowning. Insulting a guy’s ex-girlfriend was like insulting his mother—it’s one thing for him to do it, it’s another thing for anyone else to.

“I know it’s hard right now,” I said, “but time will make it better. The only part that sucks is that you can’t rush it. Just try to be active. Watch bad TV. Get out and do things.”

“Like what?”

“We have three-dollar drafts every Tuesday.”

“Thanks,” he said dryly. He took a swig and set it down, fingering the label. “I guess part of the reason I’m so mad is that I was so blindsided. I wish I’d had some inkling. But even when she was two-timing me there weren’t any signs.”

“Come on—you didn’t find any gifts? She never came home smelling funny?”

“No. The only thing that ever made me wonder was, right around the time she started seeing Shaggy, she got really into working out.”

The bar started to feel a little stuffy and it wasn’t because it was crowded. “What do you mean?”

“She was going to the gym all the time and working on her obliques. She’d never been into any of that stuff—she was always curvy but I liked her that way. And suddenly she started losing all this weight. She dropped like ten pounds in a month, and then she got a six-pack.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“I was such an idiot,” he said. “I told myself it was a good thing that she was starting to care about her health. She even quit smoking. I thought it meant she was growing, not cheating on me.”

His Corona was finished and he asked for another. I bent into the cooler, glad to get away so I could slow my thumping heart. I had to think logically. None of this could apply to my father. He’d told me why he was doing his sit-ups: for the job market. And despite the fact that he had never taken any interest in exercise beyond bicycling and squash, I couldn’t jump to any conclusions.

But what other logical explanation was there for his newfound interest in his abdominals? Maybe he was getting something on the side. But with who? A person could only cheat if they could find someone to cheat with and there was no woman in all of New York City besides my mom who could possibly find my dad attractive. The woman would have to be a hag and a half. She’d have to be old, and desperate, and very very lonely.

Maybe it was Shelly Katz. She never talked to me as much as the other women did and when I really thought back on it, she’d been distant the whole meeting. He’d bumped into her in some local bar and gone out to join her for a smoke when he suddenly realized just how firm her tits were. If she was tipsy enough, and lonely enough, and my dad was turning into the most active bar crawler in Cobble Hill, then it wasn’t totally inconceivable. Maybe this was why he’d stayed downstairs during the meeting—so he wouldn’t act suspicious in front of my mom.

But no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t make the image of a scoundrel mesh with the image of my father. As long as I’d known him the only things he’d gotten really orgasmic about were New Yorker cartoons and spackle. He had forty pairs of nonprescription drugstore reading glasses. He wore extra-wide shoes.

And men who cheated had to at least have a modicum of confidence. When I ran into him at the movies he’d seemed more down in the doldrums than he ever had before. I had to keep my head on straight and think about just who I was dealing with here. If I identified with every story my alcoholic customers told me I’d go insane. I had to compartmentalize, just like Bill Clinton.

I slipped my badly dumped boy a new bottle. “I shouldn’t even be drinking anyway,” he sighed. “It’s really bad for my kidneys.”

“You can make an exception,” I said. “Look, just think of her rejection as a favor.”

“How’s it a favor?”

“She was letting you know she was wrong for you. Why would you want to be with someone who never loved you?”

“You think she never loved me?” he asked, panicked. I was trying to make him feel better but instead I was making him feel worse.

“Not if she could cheat!”

“I was harboring hope that she might come around.”

“What are you—outta your mind?”

He stared at me for a moment, incredulous, like he’d suddenly seen the light. I was about to pat myself on the back for being such a good motivational speaker when his look of shock collapsed into one of total pain. “How long have you been a bartender?” he said.

“Two months,” I said.

“That explains it.” He plopped down a buck and left.

“Come back!” I shouted. “The next one’s on me!” But he was already gone. I fucked the washer with a glass and set it upside down on the rack.

 

ON my way over to the deli for coffee on Tuesday, as I was crossing Court Street, I almost got run over. “Hey!” I shouted, leaping back onto the sidewalk.

“Sorry!” the driver shouted, as the car squealed to a halt and then pulled over. It was white and small and on the side it said US AUTO SCHOOL—WE HELP YOU PASS in bright blue letters. As I leaned down and looked through the passenger side I saw my dad sitting next to a bearded black man. “Hey, Rach!” my dad cried, waving.

This made no sense. He had resisted even getting a learner’s permit for twenty-five years. My mom, who hated the burden of driving him to the country all the time, would nag and nag but he always said, “At a certain point it’s just too late to learn something new.”

Now, suddenly, he was snapping into action. He was showing enough drive to learn how to drive. I didn’t want to believe it but maybe he really was kicking it to Shelly Katz. When you had an affair you had to be able to go for secret weekend getaways, so maybe he’d decided he had to step up.

I went to the driver’s-side window unsteadily. “Rachel,” my dad said, “this is my instructor, Mr. Goddard.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” he said, with a hint of a southern drawl, sticking his hand out the window.

I shook it fake-warmly, wondering whether my dad had told him things he hadn’t told me. I figured driver’s-ed guys got to hear everybody’s stories.

“Since when have you been learning to drive?” I asked.

“This is my second lesson. I got my learner’s permit last week.” He opened his wallet and passed me a card with a photo of him on it smiling as happily as if it was the first day of first grade. I broke out in a cold sweat.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I don’t know. I just decided there was no day like today.”

“Dad,” I said. “Are you quoting Rent?”

“I have all this time on my hands now with my unemployment, so I went over to the DMV, stood on line, and passed the written test on my first try! I missed the one about what to do when your front wheels skid in the rain.”

“Ease into the skid,” I said.

“How’d you know?” he said, like it was some sort of million-dollar game show question.

“I took the same test,” I said. “When I was fifteen.”

“So? Don’t I look good? I’m driving!” he said, jutting his elbow out through the door. “I feel like Harrison Ford in American Graffiti.”

“Try Charles Martin Smith.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

He looked at Mr. Goddard and put his palms up. “Is your daughter like this to you?”

“Daughters are difficult,” said Mr. Goddard.

“You see? You see?” my dad said. “This is a wise man here. We give our children all the love in the world and what do they give us in return?”

“Bubkes,” said Mr. Goddard.

“You know Yiddish?” I said.

“Sure I do. I’ve taught driver’s education for twenty-one years.”

“How can you even afford these lessons, Dad? Given your circumstances?”

“Mr. Goddard says half of his students are unemployed. It’s the only thing that makes people finally decide to do it. Mom is in full support of this and I thought you’d be too.”

“I think you’re making a big mistake. You’re not only a liability to yourself but to innocent people. Some people just aren’t meant to get behind a wheel. I thought you were afraid you were going to kill someone.”

“Mr. Goddard is teaching me to let the mind go.”

“You’re going to hurt someone. Tell me the truth, Mr. Goddard. Is he the worst student you ever had?”

“There was one worse,” Mr. Goddard said.

“You see? You see?” my dad cried.

“She was blind in one eye.”

I turned and made a wide circle in front of the car so he wouldn’t run me over. When I got across the street I heard someone shout, “Watch it!” and I turned around to see the car about six inches from a woman with a stroller. My dad was waving his hands sheepishly through the rearview as Mr. Goddard sank into his seat.

 

I DRANK two cups of coffee that morning and spent the afternoon feeling like I was going to bounce off the walls of the apartment. He had to be getting something on the side. Nothing else could make him care so much about his own well-being. People didn’t just change on their own, for no reason. Something was going on; I just had to find out what. But what could I do? Call Shelly Katz and ask her point-blank? I wanted to bring it up with my mom but how do you casually bring up your suspicions of your own father’s philandering? There’s just no way to do it. Powell would have a solution. I just had to wait till I saw him.

At three forty-five on the dot I left for the date so he wouldn’t complain that I was late. He had said to wear high heels and at the last minute I’d found these white vinyl stripper-style shoes with a three-inch platform that I’d bought online a few years before for a Halloween party. For attire I selected a polyester blue-and-white polka-dotted dress that pressed tightly against my boobs.

It took me five minutes just to get down the stairs of my building because I was so worried I was going to fall in the heels and break my neck. As I passed the Korean grocery at Kane and Court I saw a bouquet of mixed flowers in a vase out front. I knew that my job was to free myself from my animus, not burrow in it, but I felt an instinct to buy them for Powell. I wanted to bring him something beautiful, something the woman in him would appreciate.

On my way down Strong Place I passed a strange-looking man, a kind of man who didn’t look like he lived in the neighborhood. He had gaunt cheeks and messy grayish-brown hair that hung down over his face, a denim jacket, and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He looked like the kind of guy who, if he wasn’t a murderer, should have made a lot of money playing murderers in movies. As we passed he gave me a once-over, cool and even. When I was on the other side I turned around and looked at him over the shoulder and he was still looking at me.

Powell opened the door in a long turquoise blue robe. His hair was messy and he had a crazed though not drunk look in his eye. I had the flowers hidden behind my back.

“I saw a weird guy on your street,” I said.

“That was Abel Ferrara,” Powell said. “He directed The Bad Lieutenant.”

“What was he doing here? You working on something with him?”

“No, he left his heroin.”

His eyes were even and I couldn’t tell if he was kidding. “Do you do heroin?” I said.

“No! It fell outta his pocket the last time he was here! I been bugging him for weeks to pick it up.”

He opened the door. “For you,” I said, proffering the bouquet. He backed off like he was a vampire and it was garlic. “What’s the matter?”

“You brought me flowers.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said softly. “I just thought they’d look nice.” He yanked them out of my hand and strode into the kitchen. I followed unsteadily in the shoes.

He ripped off the paper and the cellophane and lay the flowers out on his cutting board like they were a nice loaf of bread, pulled a large knife from the knife rack, and began chopping off the heads. “Hey!” I said. He moved the heads to the side with the knife and then chopped what remained into one-inch pieces, shoved everything into a pile, and began cutting the other way. “What are you doing?” I said.

He kept chopping and chopping, the sweat glistening on his forehead, like some sort of psychopathic Food Network chef, until the beautiful bouquet was nothing but a big pile of color. He opened his Cuisinart, dropped the entire pile in, slid the top closed, and hit the On switch. I watched with horror as they turned into a vomit-green mush. It was thick so he added some water until it was liquid, and then he poured it into a glass, drank it down, and wiped his mouth, panting.

“You just drank my bouquet,” I said.

“That’s right!” he screamed. “I’m a criminal! You bring me any a that crap and I’ll eat it up! I’ll eatchoo up!”

His eyes were blazing and insane. I cowered against the wall. “Now take off ya jacket and lay it down on the floor,” he said. His gaze was steady but not angry. It was as though telling me what to do calmed him down.

I did what he said. “Ya so much talla in those shoes,” he said. He walked toward me and ran his hand down the side of my smooth dress and then he cupped my chin in his hand very sweetly. He stared at my tits, which were pressing up against the material and then he lifted one out and bent his head down to suck it, kneading my ass with the other hand. It was too much too fast. Instead of relaxing I kept wondering how the bouquet would affect his bowels. “I wish my ass was fatter,” I said.

“It’ll do.”

“But you’re like an ass purist—”

“Don’t ruin this. The flowers were bad enough.” He moved his finger into me as my lips parted and my head went back. I started to get hot and then he lifted me up in his arms and carried me to the couch. I’d had no idea he was so strong.

He tossed me onto the couch casually, and threw the big pillows on the floor. He unzipped my dress, pulled it off and lay it on a chair. Then he squeezed next to me, on my right, waving his hand so I could see why he wanted to be on that side. I started to take off my shoes so they wouldn’t get the couch dirty and he said, “Leave them on. Why do you think I wanted you to wear them?” and moved my leg so it was splayed over the side. As he worked me with his hand he put his face very close and smoothed the hair on my head. From time to time he would put his mouth on my nipple and suck, moaning softly while he did it.

When I came it was long and intense, the kind that hurts your ovaries. This time I cried out and as soon as I did he pulled me close like he had female O envy. “Oh my God,” I said, putting my arm over my forehead. “You’re good at that.”

“I know.”

I leaned in to kiss him but he was getting up. He took off my bra, pushed my legs up so I was in pelvic exam position and kneeled on the couch, facing me. He unbuttoned his pants, took it out, and began stroking like it was some sort of magical wand. From time to time he said “Mmmm!” and “Ahhhh!” like he was listening to a very serious lecture that I couldn’t hear, and agreeing with various important points. After about fifteen minutes he cried out “Uhhhhh! Uhhhhhhh! Unnnnnhhhhhh!” and shot it onto my chest.

I looked down at the puddle of white that had formed above my breasts and as he massaged it into my nipples I said, “Do you think sometime we could go to Manhattan?”

He scowled like I had suggested something completely perverse. “Why would you want to do that?”

“I thought you might have some events to go to from time to time.”

“What kind of events?”

“Benefits. Like with Abel Ferrara.”

“You think I got the kind a money to be going to benefits? My friends should throw a benefit for me!”

“I just thought you might want to show up somewhere with me on your arm.”

He raised his eyebrows and nodded cynically. “Is that why you’re interested in me? You want to rub elbows with Abel and Harvey?”

“You know Harvey Keitel?”

“I guess that’s your answer.”

“No! It’s not that I want to meet famous people! I—I just want to meet your friends. I don’t know why we always have to hide. It makes me feel like you’re ashamed of me.”

“Do I look like the kind a person that cares what anyone else thinks?”

“No,” I said. “But why can’t we hang out in any other borough?”

“I am not hiding you,” he said. “I am a private person. I don’t feel the need to showcase what I do like I’m filing some kind a romantic status report. If you don’t like my rules I respect it and you are free to go find some otha cat. But if you want to be with me, I’m doing you the favor of telling you how it’s gotta be.” I was between a rock and a hard place. I could have him like this or not at all. I figured the former was better than the latter because he made me laugh and gave me a lot to think about but I had a strange dread in my stomach like it didn’t sit completely right.

He rose to his feet and headed for the bathroom. I watched his wide back, afraid he was going to tell me to get out right now, and I’d have to walk home alone in slutgear, toddling in my strappy stripper shoes in the broad daylight, the smell of his spooge on my skin. He came back with a warm wet washcloth, and as he scrubbed off his come he said, “You wanna come get something to eat?”

“Really?” I squealed.

“Hold the waterworks,” he said. “We’re not crossing the river.”

 

WE ate at a Mediterranean place called Sam’s that had opened up in a greasy spoon on Henry. They didn’t have a liquor license so on the way over we bought a bottle of Chilean Merlot (he said Chilean was different from other Merlots) and as we ate he was tender and not elusive. He told me he was struggling a lot with Who Killed My Wife? and I realized that not all his writing came as easily as I’d thought. When we finished he said he’d walk me home, which I thought boded well for our future, and as we headed up Clinton he put his arm around my waist.

As we passed Cobble Hill Park he said, “You wanna sit for a while?”

“OK,” I said.

The sky was glowing and blue and the trees were dark against it. In the day the park was like the town square but it quieted down early in the evenings, it was mostly couples and dog walkers. We sat on a bench under a tree, overlooking this huge grassy oval in the center, decorated with hedges and flower clusters, that kids played hide-and-seek on during the day. He put his arm around me and said, “You wanna sit on my lap?”

I hopped on perpendicularly and draped my arm around his neck. He rubbed my lips with his thumb and I sucked it. “Were you a thumb-sucker when you were a child?” he said.

“How did you know?”

“It’s written all over you. You’re very oral.”

“What were you?” I said. “A bedwetter?”

“An insomniac,” he said. “Even as a kid I held the weight of the world on my shoulders.”

“If I’d been your girlfriend when you were young,” I said, “you would have slept like a baby every night.”

“Because your presence is so calming to the male species?”

“Nope,” I said. “Because I’d deplete you of so much semen you’d never have any energy.” I couldn’t believe I was talking like this but with Powell it all came so naturally, like he’d turned some switch in me that no one else even knew was there.

He smooched me softly and when we broke for air we both stared up at the sky. “Isn’t that your friend over there?” I heard him say. I looked across the way at the bench on the other side of the park, and saw Liz sitting in another guy’s lap, kissing him intently and blocking his face.

“Yeah, it is,” I said.

She was perpendicular too, facing the same way I was. I felt that if I lifted a foot hers would magically rise too. She broke off and stared not at the guy, but off toward the side, as though contemplating some grand truth. His face was still blocked but I could tell by his hands that he was white.

“Is that her boyfriend?” said Powell.

“Liz doesn’t have boyfriends.”

The guy stroked the back of her hair and leaned forward into the moonlight to kiss her again. As I saw his face a wave of nausea rose from my belly to my tongue and I clamped my hand hard over my mouth.

“What’s the matter?” Powell asked.

“It’s my dad,” I said. “Without his beard.”