American Subversive (30 page)

AIDAN
 

I REMEMBER THE POSTPARTY SMELL, STICKY AND STALE, CIGARETTE SMOKE and alcohol. The TV was on, rerunning some MTV or VH1 awards show—a sea of pumped-up breasts bursting forth from cinched and clinging dresses into Cressida's otherwise dark living space. On the coffee table sat two glasses of red wine beside a half-full bottle left uncorked. And what else? Scattered heels, an unemptied ashtray, unopened bills, old invitations. Flowers wilted in carafe pitchers, fashion magazines stacked in piles on the floor, and against a wall near the windows, a surfboard, still pristine white, purchased by Cressida during some other boyfriend's regime. All of this was visible within the television's glowing jurisdiction.

I listened for sounds of life beyond the drone of air conditioners and the late-night voices wafting up from the street. A stereo played softly behind someone's door, one of those whimpering emo bands—Bright Eyes or Beirut—and with it, softer still, came a man's snoring, peaceful and rhythmic—the breathing of a boyfriend, not a one-night stand. It wasn't coming from Cressida's room, of that much I was sure. Even in my drunken state it never crossed my mind that she might cheat on me. She was tenacious and driven, and when she found what she wanted, she didn't let go lightly. It was a pure, almost Catholic kind of loyalty, and it both soothed and scared me. “Imagine the breakup,” Touché once said, and now I did, often.

I was outside her bedroom door. I'd called from the corner, and after five minutes of pleading she'd buzzed me in. I could picture her scowling as she sat up in bed, her jaw clenched, those cheeks of English rose all tight and drained of color. She was in there waiting to pounce.

I knocked softly and pushed the door open. The lights were out, the blinds drawn.

“Hey,” I said into the darkness. “The TV's still on out here.”

There was no answer. But I could go with this, use the silence to my advantage. I'd sneak up and kiss her gently, and that would be enough; we'd sort the rest out in the morning. I inched toward her bed, waiting for my eyes to adjust. It was probably what she wanted anyway, sex without apologies or complicated excuses, without the bullshit of the larger relationship. For sex, after a certain age, was something you could separate out. Why? Because older women enjoyed it more than younger women. A simple fact on the surface of things, and yet I'd come to believe it was the answer to a thousand mysteries of the female mind. It was a matter of experience. It was a question of need. It was years of wasted hope and disappointment, of saving sex for last, then realizing, as one's twenties ended, that the bedroom was the best part. The only honest part. You could take what you wanted and save the sniveling, the emotion, the messy issues of loyalty and attachment—of
life
—for later. Or never. The selfish modern woman joining the egotistical modern man in an attempt to stave off what was once inevitable—the slow melancholy of marriage and children—and prolong her golden, irresponsible youth.

And where did that leave us, guys like Touché and me, who once counted on the ticking clock as an ally? Time was no longer on our side, and this had rendered the map of modern love almost useless. We were confused, but also intrigued. We had a paragon now, an archetype—the chic, detached urban woman, perched on the slippery summit between youth and experience—and we chased after her, after
the idea
of her, endlessly. Of course, this being New York, we occasionally got distracted. By whom? By girls who were too young: fine-boned MFA students from the New School, confident and ambitious and impossibly busy doing nothing at all; by iron-haired junior publicists typing dirty texts into well-thumbed BlackBerrys as they cabbed it to the next event; by cherubic Sam Shepard devotees poring
over Xeroxed plays and agent call sheets before you'd even opened your eyes in the morning. And by women who were too old: slightly manic divorcées, still pretty but overcompensating, forcing themselves to stay out and drink more than they ever did in their twenties; and Botoxed former debutantes with famous last names that never quite excused them from the absurdity of their lifestyles; and wild-eyed Brooklyn artists with ink sleeves and lingering habits who seemed to never give a fuck about anything, and, it turned out, really didn't give a fuck about anything. These women came in and out of our lives in gusts of passion, if not love, because love was for the other kind. Love was for the one still out there, the one who'd lived but was not yet jaded, who understood pleasure but respected its limits, who came from someplace else but was making it here—on her own, preferably, but, hell, whom were we kidding, a nice family never hurt. We were looking for a woman who glided through life but paused to read the great books (or at least a few of them); who was social but slightly alternative; who knew all the places to go but almost never did. A woman who had great taste and nice tits and a bit of a temper. Touché liked curves. I wasn't so picky.

Cressida was as close as I'd come. I reminded myself of this every time our little two-car train derailed, and I reminded myself again as I advanced across her spinning bedroom.

“Cressida?” I whispered.

All this in-a-perfect-world shit, and yet we'd reached our early thirties, the great age of compromise, of finally understanding that the ideal was an abstract concept.

“Cressida?”

I reached out and felt for her—

“Ow!”
I'd stubbed my toe on something, the corner of her bed frame, and a second later the pain arrived.
“Fuck!”

“Shhh!”
Cressida hissed.
“You'll wake up the whole bloody house.”

“Well, turn a goddamn light on.”

“Only if you'll use it to leave.”

I collapsed onto the bed and rubbed my toe. I could see her now, the outline of her, sitting up much as I'd imagined, her arms tensed at her sides, palms digging into the pillows. She looked scared and angry at the same time.

“This isn't a good idea, Aidan. It's the middle of the night and you're—”

“I'm not drunk.”

“Oh, please, don't be boring.”

She said this sometimes and it drove me crazy.
Don't be boring
. Who the hell was ever trying to be boring? It was so condescending, especially with that haughty British accent.
Don't be boooring
. It was an insult, a warning, a dare. There was nothing worse than being told you were just like everyone else.

And fine, maybe this was a bad cliché, showing up loaded at 4 a.m. after disappearing for days with no explanation, but I wasn't there to talk or grovel or apologize. I was there to fuck my girlfriend. And this is what I set about attempting to do. I brushed off her comment—my actions would take care of that—and slid over to the middle of the bed. Then I pulled her toward me. She didn't resist. She didn't take me in her arms either. She just lay still, waiting. She was wearing a T-shirt and lacy—what did she call them?—
boy shorts
. I brushed a hand over her modest breasts, their firmness pleasantly familiar, the way they kept their shape as she lay on her back. I started sighing in her ear as my hand slid down her stomach, all the way down, over the lace and then . . . under. My sighs became words and I related them in a dry-mouthed whisper. Things we'd done, things we hadn't. And I had her now; her hand replaced mine, her fingers spelled my fingers. I moved quickly to catch up, disrobing in a tangle of pants and socks and boxers, then there I was, back in her ear, murmuring improbable ideas, impossible ideas. Concepts and geometry. We were under the sheet, fumbling, her hand on me now, and then she was on top, and then I was on top, and I was thinking of how long it had been since I'd gone down on her, and how, for a while—a month or two—she'd soldiered gamely on, pleasuring me without reciprocation until that, too, had ended, and the sex itself evolved from the main event to the only event. And to think . . . we'd started out gracefully, the naked hours filled with curiosity and communication, responsible exploration, pointed pleasure. It all ended: wore off, got old. Replacements were sought—not different partners, of course, but different
acts
. If it were drugs, we'd have bought more; if it were blackjack, we'd have doubled down, gone for broke; but with sex, it was something else, something
deeper and more carnal. What had begun as simple “lovemaking”—she on top, say, slowing writhing as I cupped her breasts, her hips, eyes locked on her eyes, entertaining vaguely spiritual thoughts of eternity, that life could always be so good—receded over many months or was, more accurately, intruded upon by more primal urges, the struggle for power and acceptance merging with a childlike desire to see how far we—how far
I
—could take things, what exactly I could get away with. The opposite of evolution. Animal instincts. Hard sex. She on the bottom, legs over my shoulders, over her shoulders, tits pressed together, the whole thing raw and sloppy and slightly embarrassing afterward. This is what lovemaking had become, and what it now became again. A sex columnist reduced to the act itself. There was no talk of the other, no sense of timing. We weren't in this together; it was the ultimate act of the self-involved. And the thing is . . .
it felt so good
. Good enough to forget for a time the various slights and frictions of our relationship. And that was exactly the idea.

Her eyes were closed as I pushed against her, so I closed mine as well. And a familiar film started playing in my head . . . the third part of a trilogy that had premiered more than a year ago. The first installment, at the beginning of things, had just one performer, an actress of exquisite talents and wonder, a supple, apple-cheeked woman captured in all of her sensual splendor—the fitted work shirts, the leather pants with the lace-up zipper, and the Halloween costumes . . . oh, Cressida's Halloween costumes, always adhering to the less-is-so-much-more principle . . . and yet these moments were more than a montage of short-breathed lust, for this first film was about the woman, too, the very best of her, and mixed among the visual stimulators were salient memories, the perfect early days of our romance—the rooftop cocktails and shared bathroom bumps, the cautious debates and giggly juvenility, the mornings in bed with our laptops as we read each other's work out loud . . . all of this captured in snapshots spliced into a dazzling reel that played as we made love, a movie so lifelike that when I opened my eyes—and I did open them back then, all the time—the star, lost in her own reveries, looked every bit as beautiful as her big-screen likeness. That first film played for months, and then the sequel came out. Though in many ways identical to the first, some new characters had been added. Scarlett Johansson, for instance, and the hostess
at the Spotted Pig, and certain beguiling coffee-shop regulars, bare-legged in short skirts, and even, now and then, an old flame, captured in close-up at the height of her sexual powers. These faces, these
bodies,
all found screen time alongside Cressida, and though they had lesser billing, they gave the star a run for her money, thus complicating what had been a happy, straightforward plot. But Cressida being upstaged seemed only a minor detail until the third and final installment was released. Because now she had all but disappeared, been banished, like so many starlets before her, in favor of younger, sexier upstarts, a breathtaking parade of skin. And the tone had changed, too: it was rougher, edgier, one man's vision of an increasingly stark, if stunningly beautiful, world. There was no plot anymore, no theme, only a high-speed collage, more flip-book than film, sordid pop culture and porn, chaos. Ah, but the choices! If variety was absent in my real life, it now governed my imagination, and so it was that drunken night in Cressida's room, as she softly moaned below me (no doubt lost in her own cinematic ecstasy). But I couldn't settle on anything, and soon I was having trouble with the physical act itself. I could feel myself fading. Cressida pulled me toward her and took charge, offering suggestions, giving orders. She was close, and so, in an act as magnanimous as I could manage, I tried to hang on until she got there. I sped up, the bed now hitting the wall, but the film was playing too fast for the projector. Desperately, I searched for a spark, an image to build around, and then there it was, a flicker of familiarity, brown hair and piercing eyes, a pretty girl crossing a busy street, and it didn't matter that she was clothed because I was onto something, had found an actress with staying power, and it wasn't hard to change locations, trade in Madison Avenue for beaches, for bars, for the bedroom, her outfit coming slowly off, the revolutionary uncovered, her gorgeous mysteries exposed—

We came together, Cressida gasping intensely, then catching her breath, and afterward we lay there in silence. Minutes passed. I could see her column now:
SHOCK & AWE—MAKEUP SEX WITHOUT THE FIGHT.
Finally, she began digging herself out of the dark corner of the mattress she'd been driven into. She peeled the sheets from her sweaty skin as if peeling a Band-Aid from a wound she hoped had healed. I rolled onto my back, thought briefly of getting up to find a towel, then didn't bother.