28
To be totally honest, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I realized deep down what age I truly am. Not that all this time I’ve been in some annually recurring version of Alzheimer’s—I am aware what year this is and how that relates to my birth—but a few years ago I discovered quite accidentally that in bed I still thought of myself as seventeen.
Not consciously. I wasn’t removing my clothes thinking years were being shed at the same time. Other than a vague, off to the side, sort of still-in-my-Catholic-school-uniform feeling, I had no idea I thought of myself as still seventeen until one night right in the middle of having sex, the man I was with said, “Woman.” Just “Woman,” as if that was expressive enough. Growing up in the South, I was used to being called “sweetie” and “sugar pie,” or at least “honey” here in L.A., and, okay, this man was a Yankee, but other than wondering if his last girlfriend was Betty Friedan, it took me a good minute to figure out that he was talking to me. That I was the “Woman.” I think I even looked around, worried it was one of those “Surprise! Ménage à trois!” moments—which actually did happen to me once, making me forever doorbellphobic during sex.
Anyway, what I wanted to do was stop what I was doing, climb off him, and say, “Oh, my God, do you know how old I am?” But I did not because he did, in fact, know how old I am, I mean, was then. He was forty-two and well aware of our respective ages. I guess it was just me who wasn’t.
But I’ve never been very clear about all this. When I started seeing widow-man in Pass Christian, I would forget how much older he was than me. Not that he didn’t know the real difference in our ages. He did. And I did when prom night came around and I tried to picture how he would look on the dance floor with his wide chest that definitely did not come from high school football practice. He had one of those adult male bodies that just worked for him. I remember one day he decided to go for a five-mile run, just decided and went. He was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, but he came back, had had a great run, that was it. I will never forget looking at him and wanting that. To be able to just tell my body to perform some physical feat and have it simply comply.
I was still trying to figure out how mine worked. I had only recently started getting my period when I met him, then I immediately went on the pill to stop it. Well, not to stop it, but to stop its effect. Once I could get pregnant, and was doing what you do to get pregnant, I would avoid getting pregnant by making my body think it was pregnant. Which is how I was told the pill works. Like having some constant ghost baby inside my womb, which honest to God, I never even knew I had. I thought only Mary had a womb for Jesus, but clearly I did, too. Just one with nothing in it. Even though my body thought there was, constantly experiencing a false physical reality as if it were true. Like me and my age, I guess. Anyway.
It’s my birthday today. On a Monday this year, which is a horrid little day to have a birthday, though it is starting out okay. I went shopping at Barneys, which I rarely do, mostly because I rarely do, so I figured it’d feel special, like Easter Sunday mass after a year of not going. I found some pretty pastel sweaters that I loved, picked out two, then agonized over getting a third with the salesclerk who I immediately liked because she had a name that was unpronounceable when you see it and unspellable when you hear it. I left with only two, but made a silent vow to go back more often—a kind of Lent in reverse—instead of giving up going to Barneys, I decided to give up not going to Barneys.
What I wish I had given up was the massage I am getting now. It is at a natural hot springs spa in Korea Town that I’ve been to quite a bit, because for some reason I keep forgetting that I don’t like it here. The idea of it is so nice—warm water, all naked, hands kneading my body—but the reality is being in a cold echoey room, forced to wear a rubber cap like some cranium version of “socks in the shower,” and a rubdown that consists more of slapping and shoving than anything else.
After enduring twenty minutes of this while alternately calculating how many sweaters this session is costing and admonishing myself to get back in the moment and “Enjoy this, goddammit,” I sit straight up, look the masseuse in the eye, and say, “Okay, it’s my birthday, but stop spanking me.” She looks completely shocked, as am I, so I try to diffuse things by laughing, which helps not at all, then I realize that she has in her favor both being fully clothed and able to hit while I do not, so I grab my towel and leave.
Suzanne and Matt are giving me a party this evening, but I don’t know if I want to celebrate being thirty. The number sounds frightening, but I can’t keep saying I’m twenty-nine because, for one thing, I’m not, and what would I do about the events of whichever year that I’d have to erase? And for another, the whole time I was officially twenty-nine and would tell someone that in response to their horrid question, it always felt like a lie. “I’m twenty-nine” begs the unspoken thought, “She must be thirty.”
As I drive to Suzanne and Matt’s house in one of my new sweaters, which is not making me feel as fabulous as I had thought it would when I tried it on in the Barneys dressing room, I want to call Suzanne from my cell phone and tell her that I can’t make it after all. But I know I can’t do that, so I console myself with the fact that at least it’s not a surprise party, thank God, just a regular one.
Although, actually, maybe the party should have been a surprise because then everyone who’s going to come has arrived by the time you open the door. But with a regular party, guests can show up anytime they want, if they actually remember to come. I spent the entire blessedly short soirée praying that more people would walk through the door, as I tried to be a happy and appreciative birthday girl for Matt, Suzanne, and the few obviously date-book-proficient guests who remembered to attend. Maybe it being on a Monday night confused people and it got erased from their minds somehow. Or Suzanne didn’t call everyone, but I doubt that. It was the first time I had seen Reggie since our day two weeks ago in Santa Barbara, and though we’ve been talking on the phone to try to ease past our blowup, the moment we hugged hello felt weird. Like it was uncomfortable to hug, but also uncomfortable not to hug, so we ended up having one of those don’t-know-the-other-person-too-well, quick, sideways hugs. I know he felt it, too.
I considered telling Suzanne that I was too tired for the cake, but I knew that wouldn’t fly with her, especially since she had made my favorite German chocolate cake like Momma used to. Even with that, I could not get out of there fast enough when the party was over—rather early, thank God.
Driving home on the PCH to get to the 10, I look out my truck’s windshield into the night. There isn’t a heavenly body in sight. In fact, the entire sky is completely blank, as if God had dragged a blanket along on His way to bed, catching every object in its hem. I wonder if some huge erasing phenomenon is going on—the entire zodiac of stars and calendars obliterated forever. I decide to feel lucky that the erasing hadn’t gotten around to everyone’s date book before my party began; at least some people came. And maybe it means that this birthday doesn’t have to count. Maybe the universe is giving me a little gift for all my teenage years in bars when I looked older but really wasn’t, so now I can truly be younger and not only when I have sex.
It is too early to go to bed when I get home and I have a feeling I won’t be tired for a long time anyway, as if I am destined to be awake for every hour of this dreadful birthday. So I sit on my couch, wondering if Momma is thinking of me wherever she is, if her spirit is sending me birthday love. Maybe Daddy thought of me today. But probably not, considering that the last birthday of mine that he was around for was sixteen years ago. It seems more probable that Momma did from beyond the grave.
The ringing of the phone is such a jolt that it makes me jump. As I pick up the receiver, wondering whose date book the erasing possibly could have passed over, I hear “Happy birthday” in my ear. It takes me a minute to believe who it is.
“How did you get this number?”
I realize that isn’t the friendliest greeting in the world, but I am in shock. Andrew’s perfect vocal shield wraps me in close as he tells me that he’s been calling it for quite a while, which really is not an answer, but he has just never left a message. For over two years since I moved into this apartment, I’ve had a different phone number from the one he used to call me at in my Beverly Hills apartment when we were seeing each other, so the only way he could have gotten this number was if he had called my old Beverly Hills number within six months after I moved to this one and gotten the referral for my new one here. Which means that some of those hang-ups I’ve heard on my answering machine in the past five years actually have been him, my fantasy confirmed. I can tell he is on a cell phone and driving in his car, moving through the city under the big, empty sky.
“You sure flew out of that theater fast,” he says. “Fuckin’ FBI couldn’t find you.”
“Yeah, well, I guess they didn’t look very hard.”
“I think about you a lot more than you think I do.”
“Well, considering that I don’t think you think about me at all, I guess you do.”
Which makes him laugh, which makes me laugh, and there it is. One second of mutual time between us yielding and spreading until it connects our now with when we were before. A highway in one hello.
“Do you still love me?”
“Still.” And I am back, as if the five years apart are five seconds and our breakup had never happened and all I know is that I have to see him, have to have him, have to feel him fill me the way his voice is filling the emptiness inside.
“You wanna come over?” For a split second I worry about his personal obstacles to being with me, but I erase them from my mind when he asks for my address. For all I know, they are separated, I rationalize, though I know they probably aren’t because it would have been in the news, but I am like water rushing to Andrew’s shore, unable to do anything but be with him.
I give him directions and run around frantically trying to straighten my apartment and myself as he announces over the phone every major intersection he drives through. I feel like a small boat listening to the radar of an oncoming sub. When he pulls onto my street, Andrew sounds completely flummoxed that a parking space isn’t waiting for him in front of my building. I suggest he look a bit farther down the block, but for an irrational moment I think he might leave. Maybe it has become standard in L.A. for late night trysts to include valet parking. He declares triumph as he pulls into a space, sounding astonishingly proud for so simple a feat. I tell him that I need to hang up now, but he sounds hurt, so I explain that my line has to be open for him to call me from the gate. How long had he intended for us to stay on the line? Maybe there is some new kind of in-person phone sex he wanted to try.
I can hear his footsteps coming up the stairs and with each step my heart beats faster and faster like it is doing the tarantella inside me. Then a gentle knock is on the door and I open it and Andrew comes in as naturally and majestically as the sun rising on the day. We look at each other as his brightness fills the room.
“Look at you,” he finally says. “You look even more beautiful and younger now than you used to.” I have to stop myself from running over to a mirror; maybe that erasing thing is doing more than I thought. “I bet you don’t look much different than that when you’re my age and then—you die.”
He makes a little laugh, I think to make me laugh, but I don’t think it is funny. I am looking at his great face, and for the first time, I see the age on it and suddenly understand something I never contemplated before—what lines on a face actually lead to. Such an obvious answer—the end for us all—but one I never thought about until he spelled it out to me so clearly. I move to him and bury my face in his neck, kissing him again and again while I take off my clothes and undo his pants.
At first when he keeps his sweater on, I figure he is still warming up, but after a while I wonder if it is his body’s temperature or years he is trying to adjust. As much as I want to feel his bare chest against me, the cashmere screen of his sweater becomes another layer of his skin.
Our motions are one, and a kind of multiple time thing happens where past and future and present are here with us, moving with us, coming with us into one endless space where they can always be.
An air pocket of time has filled my apartment, floating us out of the usual dimension, letting us exist in our own realm. Lying with him afterward, rubbing his back as he lies on my stomach, I realize that I had always believed that at a certain predetermined age some other, different older body would descend on top of mine, taking over who I am and rendering me completely gone. That my life and self and sex as I knew it would end and suddenly “old” would begin. That isn’t true with Andrew at all. Everything is so much the way it had been, just a deeper, more layered continuum of his body with me and my body with him. I feel I am able to peek ahead at how growing older will be—experiencing through him a physical reality that I had always thought would erase me even before I was gone.
“How’re Momma and Suzanne?”
“Momma’s dead almost three years now.” I had wanted to call him when she died, but never could.
“Good God, how? She was young.”
“Yeah, fifty-one.”
“Jesus.” I know he is thinking that he’s seven years older than that.
“Car accident. Drunk driver drove straight into her four blocks from her house. Two o’clock in the afternoon. We couldn’t get her to go anywhere once Daddy left, then a drive to the grocery store ended her life.”
“I am so sorry. How’re you doing with it?”
“Fine now. The grief was horrendous, but—”
“Did your daddy ever show back up?”
“No.” We are quiet. The immersion of his time on me is a salve. “Suzanne’s married a few months now.”
He pulls his head up and looks at me with his chin resting on his hands and his elbows resting on the bed, straddling me. “Why aren’t you married?”
He has said it genuinely, but I have no idea how to respond. It reminds me of the times I’m driving my truck on Beverly Boulevard and I stop to offer a ride to one of the older, Jewish women waiting for the bus. They’re never going very far, Cedars Hospital usually, so they get in and we ride along, making small talk, but the only thing they ever ask me is, “So, are you married?” Then when I say, “No,” the only thing they want to talk about is that I’m not, as if every other part of my life has been erased, never to be seen again.
“I don’t know.”
“You are going to make a great mother and wife.”
That surprises me so much that my hands jump on his back, but I try to incorporate it into his massage so he can’t tell.
“When I first met you in New York…” I watch him look at the memory of me from back then. There is a kind, soft smile on his face that looks exactly the way it used to feel to speak to him in those days. “You were such a scared little bunny. Big eyes caught in the headlights. That’s one reason I didn’t have sex with you that whole time. I couldn’t, you were so innocent; that was rare. I knew you weren’t like all the others.”
His kisses my stomach, as my hands on his back rub deeply into him.
“Did you think about me, Andrew, during all these years?”
“What do you think?” He looks at me again, his eyes such a startling shade, peering into a depth of me that I don’t like going into alone.
“I don’t know. Did you? Miss me?”
“Of course I did.”
And all those years without him are gone, like some horrible dream I woke up wrongly believing.
“I had a dream last night that I was making love to you.”
When I answered the phone, jumped on it really in hopes it was Andrew, I had been dreamily stumbling around my living room, picking up my discarded clothing and reliving last night. I have forsaken my daily oatmeal—enough with those goddamn grains—but not my coffee and am still in the slip I pulled on after Andrew left around twelve-thirty A.M. I was too keyed up to sleep, too much wanted to feel the aftereffect of him in my bed and on my body before the physical imprints disappeared and while they were ingraining themselves in my memory.
But it is Reggie’s voice saying words I never thought I’d hear from him and certainly never wanted to. I wish they were from Andrew and really, really not from Reggie.
“Oh.” This comes out like the audio version of sneaking down a hall, trying to get from one room to the next while staying out of view. “Well.” I have no idea what to say. A wild fantasy of hanging up pops into my head, then when Reggie calls back, I could explain that I didn’t recognize his voice and thought it was some romantic crank caller, but for that to work, I would have had to do it immediately and still it wouldn’t have because Reggie knows I know his voice from anyone else’s. Fuck. My nonresponse and his obvious waiting for one are going on for too long. I have to say something, but what?
“I had sex with Andrew last night.”
It is all I can do to keep from adding, “So I guess he did remember my name after all.” And okay, there probably were gentler ways I could have broken the news, but it just jumped out, and even if it hadn’t, why can’t I tell Reggie like that? Because he goes ballistic and acts personally wounded whenever I have sex with any man, and in particular, stories about Andrew really send him through the roof. But Reggie’s my best friend, for God’s sake, so he shouldn’t tell me he wants to have sex with me and I should be able to tell him anything.
“I can’t believe you did that.” He sounds hurt, angry, and shocked—everything I don’t want him to be. “He’s married for Christ’s sake, Yvette, with children. How could you be such a common—”
“Don’t you dare use that word.” It’s a toss-up as to which one he was going to fling at me, but I don’t want to hear any of them spoken in his voice. I know that it is only a matter of time before my own head starts calling me every name in the book. This morning around five A.M., I finally let myself start wondering where Andrew’s wife was while he was with me, thinking of her by name feels too personal and depressing after being with him. I worried about her for a while, feeling guilty and dreadful, then finally fell into a fitful sleep for two hours.
“He’s never leaving his wife, he told me that—”
“Oh, well, that’s good. So it’s okay, then.”
“Reggie.”
“What?”
“Okay, yes, I made a mistake. I sinned technically—”
“Technically?”
“Jesus, yes, technically and in every other way it was a sin, okay? I admit it. I broke one of the big Ten and I feel horrible about it, but frankly, it wasn’t over between Andrew and me, it never really—”
“Here we go again.”
“Think what you want, Reggie, but that’s the truth. It never really ended with us—it was just put on hold, so maybe both of them should have made sure that what he had with everyone else was definitely over before they settled down.” I stop my pacing and sink onto the couch. “Christ, I mean, yes, it was wrong, but it’s not like I think he’s going to come back to me and we’ll live together happily ever after.” Though secretly, a part of me does want to think that, and I know Reggie knows that about me and I wish he didn’t. “Andrew never left my life and, obviously, I didn’t his.”
I can hear the protest in Reggie’s intake of breath before he can even voice it.
“Look, it happened, and, okay, it shouldn’t have, but…but…” Suddenly huge tears are falling down my face. “But he was like a father to me. For years, Reggie. God knows what I would have done without him; he was always there for me. Why can’t I have what other girls got? Why couldn’t I have that?”
“Because he wasn’t your father, honey. He had sex with you.”
“Fuck you.” I want to swipe at the air to tear his words out of it so they won’t hang in my apartment where they can be real. “Things aren’t always so black and white. People don’t always have only one set of feelings for someone they love. Sometimes boundaries blur.” As the words leave my mouth, I suddenly have a new clarity about Reggie’s feelings for me.
An emptiness captures the line. It doesn’t feel like our breathing will ever be in sync again. I look out the window at the tree in the courtyard, wishing its brown limbs and silvery leaves against the blue sky could transport me.
“I think we need to not have conversations about this anymore. I can’t hear you talk about him. I care about you, Yvette, and all I see is trouble ahead.” Reggie’s words are like a boat leaving me at the shore.
“That’s probably a good idea.”
The line is empty. I watch the second hand on my clock sweep through time.
“I’m gonna go; this is uncomfortable.”
I start to ask if we’ll have breakfast ma?ana, but it feels inappropriate. “Okay, well, bye.”
Reggie hangs up the phone.
“I’ve been thinking about how beautiful you are.”
I was nervous picking up the phone, afraid it was Reggie calling me right back to end our friendship.
“Oh, hey.” I immediately am thrilled that it’s Andrew, yet something about it feels like I’m running on wet tile around a pool.
“So beautiful. I can’t get your face out of my mind—you’re all I’ve been thinking about.” I can feel myself getting warm as his words bathe me.
“I have to leave for the airport to meet my family in New York. But I’ll call you when I get back.”
“Okay.”
“Bye, sweet-y-vette.” His voice is sweet and growly just like it used to be.