Broken (11 page)

I sneer, getting up in his face. “I’d like to see you try.”

My thighs are trembling. My tootsie’s gone all hot and soft and I think about his fingers inside me. If he did that again now, I’d be wet for him.

I lift my hand to hit him again, but this time he catches my wrist. His grip is tight and it hurts just enough to make me gasp. Is he going to hit me? Oh, is he going to push me?

Joey lets me go. I stumble back, just a little and look up at him. Disgust has twisted his face, and I realize I’ve gone too far. I reach for his hand, but he’s backing away.

“Joey, wait, wait. I’m sorry. I wanted to move too fast, I know. We could take things slower…”

“Honey, I don’t want to go out with you. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I don’t want to date you, be your boyfriend or marry you.”

“Well, why not?” I cry suddenly, feeling more naked than when he had his hand in my panties. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing is wrong with you.” Joey puts his hands in his pockets. “But you really don’t even know me.”

“I know everything I need to know!” I step toward him, and he steps back. It’s a dance I don’t like.

“No,” Joey says. “You don’t.”

Then he leaves me in the middle of the maze and I have to find my way back to the party alone. When I get back, he’s gone. So is the redhead.

“Did you leave with the other girl?”

“No. That would have been a good ending to the story, though, wouldn’t it?”

Joe’s grin was unabashed and I had to return it.

“Are you on Daddy’s shit-list, now?”

He shrugged, tipping his head up toward the warm spring sunshine. It shot threads of yellow across his face. It was our first lunch outside of the atrium since last October, and the fresh air and flowers gave everything a festive air.

“I doubt she told him. What would she have said?”

“True. You’d better hope she didn’t tell him you touched her tootsie, though, or else it sounds like Daddy might show up at your door with a shotgun.”

Joe cracked open an eye to look at me. We both started laughing, which escalated into a flurry of guffaws. Sunshine and giggles. It felt great.

“Tootsie,” I said again, just because it sounded so ridiculous.

“Lot of good touching it did.” Joe’s laughter is like a stream chuckling over rocks, swift and strong, dipping down every so often. “She didn’t even get off.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sadie,” Joe said. “I might not always be able to tell when a woman
does,
but I sure as hell know when she
doesn’t
.”

We laughed harder. My sides started to hurt. I had to wipe away a tear. I caught his eye and we both sobered a bit.

“She sounds like maybe she still thought of herself as that chubby girl with braces, even though she’s done a lot to move away from that image.”

“Is that your professional opinion, Doctor?”

We rarely discuss our careers. I didn’t, in fact, even know what he did for a living. His words sobered me further, brought me back to the reality instead of letting me stay in the fantasy. I cleared my throat and cut my gaze from his.

“I can’t possibly analyze someone I don’t even know.”

Joe stopped laughing, too. He wadded up a napkin and threw it toward the garbage can. “I liked her when she was that chubby girl with braces. She was a good kid.”

“So why not go out with her? It sounds like it would make your families happy.”

Joe gave me a look. “Daddy might be thrilled, Sadie, but I could assure you Mommy would throw a shit fit.”

“Ah.” I hadn’t thought about that.

“Besides, I could never go out with a woman who calls her pussy a tootsie.”

That set us off again. I felt bad for laughing at poor Honey, who sounded like she had real issues, not the least an Electra complex. Leave it to Joe to get jerked off in a garden at a baptismal party.

“Everywhere you go,” I said when the laughter again had died down. “How do you do it?”

He was quiet for a moment or two. “I’m a good-looking guy. It opens doors.”

I’d been staring at his profile, fascinated by the way the sun cast shadows on his skin. He looked up and caught me and I looked away.

“You don’t always have to say yes, Joe.”

“Sadie,” Joe murmured. “I don’t always say yes. I only tell you about the ones I say yes to.”

Which was enough. I laughed again, but it sounded fake after the true guffaws we’d shared. I wrapped up my trash, disappointed as always that the hour had passed and I had no more excuse to linger.

“They’re like sharks. Circling. Cute, single guy, good job, nice car. It’s all they know about me.” His tone was light but his expression serious.

“Maybe that’s because it’s all you show them.”

“Maybe it’s all they want to see.”

I stood to put my garbage in the can. I brushed some crumbs off my hands. “Maybe you need a mesh suit. Or a shark cage. Or maybe you just need to stop tossing out so much chum.”

Joe smiled. “Then what would we have to talk about at lunch?”

I didn’t have an answer for that, and it was easy to see he knew it. “So, what was the rumor about you and Mindy Heverling?”

Joe scuffed the gravel with the toe of his shoe. “Mindy was my brother’s girl.”

There was a story there, one he wasn’t telling. One I had no right, perhaps, to hear. “And?”

He ran a hand through his hair and shifted on the bench, all part of the ritual I’d grown used to seeing when I dug too deep. Most of the time it was enough to get me to back off and change the subject. These times weren’t about analysis, after all, not about pushing buttons.

“Never mind,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“Eddie was a year younger than me. He was the smart one, I guess you could say.” Joe laughed.

“And you were the pretty one?”

I liked the fact he knew when I was teasing, and he took it. “You got it.”

“So, what happened?” I thought I could guess.

Joe leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands linked. The gravel seemed suddenly to have captured his interest quite thoroughly. “She got pregnant.”

“Oh?” I hadn’t expected that answer.

He turned his face toward me. “Yeah.”

It took me a second to understand. “Oh. Oh!”

Joe nodded. “More like, ‘oh, fuck.’”

“What happened?”

“She had an abortion. I had to borrow the money from my dad to pay for it. He told me I was a disappointing bastard, and he was right. Eddie never knew about it. By then he was sick. He had leukemia. Anyway, he…died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Joe,” I said softly and waited until he looked at me. “I’m still sorry.”

I might have reached for him, but we didn’t touch. We never touched. He nodded slightly.

“Thanks.” He got up, the story told, our time spent. “Oh, I almost forgot.”

Joe pulled a tissue-wrapped package from his inside suit pocket. He held it out on the palm of his hand. “Happy birthday.”

I was already reaching for it with the automatic response most people make when an object’s offered. At his words, though, I hesitated. The package tipped from his hand and missed mine, hitting the ground, where I bent to pick it up with a hasty apology.

“You didn’t have to get me something.” I blushed. Hard. “I hope it didn’t break.”

“I think it’s okay. Open it.”

I did. It was a small hand-dipped candle from a local boutique. A pale purple, it smelled distinctively of lavender.

“How did you know?” I asked, lifting the candle and sniffing it.

“You told me.” Joe sounded surprised, as if my question made no sense. “You said it was your favorite scent.”

“I did?” I wrapped the candle back in the tissue and held it close to me. “Really? It is, actually.”

Joe smiled. “I thought you did. Anyway. Happy birthday, Sadie.”

“Thank you.” I reached into my bag and pulled out the gift I’d decided not to give him, and gave it to him anyway. It was a book, the latest hardcover thriller from a well-known author. “Surprise. I hope you don’t already have it.”

He didn’t. We beamed at each other until our smiles said too much and we had to look away. Joe took a few steps back before turning and heading off down the path. I stared after him, the faint scent of lavender surrounding me.

Much is said about brilliance. Less attention is paid to those who live next to it. Spouses, children, assistants…if anyone thinks of us at all, it’s generally to remark upon how lucky we are to bask in the light of genius.

In the first years of our life together, I basked in Adam’s brilliance. At parties, I was proud to introduce myself as Adam Danning’s wife, to accept compliments on his behalf. I was often asked if I, too, was a poet.

“No,” Adam always said proudly. “My Sadie is a doctor.”

Not once did anyone seem surprised I wasn’t also a literary whiz, but I always enjoyed that moment of expectation in their eyes while they waited to see if I was. I never wished for the sort of creative brilliance Adam had, nor envied it of him. There wasn’t room in our house for another Adam. We’d have been like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, colander helmets and all, prepared to battle.

Sylvia Plath gassed herself. Ernest Hemingway shot off his face. Richard Brautigan apparently grew tired of trout fishing and also took the way of the gun.

Does madness bring creativity? Or does creativity cause madness? Can an artist create without the ups so high and the downs so low? As a psychologist, I felt I should know the answers. I should be able to understand my brilliant, talented husband. Yet, I didn’t.

The mood swings baffled me. When I needed to work, I went to my desk. I read. I studied. I accomplished my goals steadfastly, each in a row so tidy I could literally check them off on a list.

Adam disappeared into his office for hours and hours to emerge with bleary eyes, cursing and moaning, saying he was unable to write. He sometimes wept and threw dishes against the wall, only to laugh himself hoarse an hour later at inane television programs. My lack of comprehension about his creative impulses infuriated him.

We clashed. We fought. We made brilliant, creative, genius love that sometimes left us both weeping.

I knew him, but I didn’t understand him.

I learned to ignore his moods as unrelated to me or anything I’d done, and to leave him alone when he was mopish. I read his poems when they were published, as they all were, to increasing popularity and acclaim. I went with him to parties where sycophants fawned on him and fed us champagne and caviar, where placards with his face and the cover of his books stared at us from across the room.

I loved Adam and he loved me, and we made a life that was full of ups and downs—but it worked. I studied. He created. He pulled me along and I was not his anchor, for Adam wouldn’t be anchored. I was, instead, his ballast. Something to keep him from bouncing quite so high or diving quite so low.

His first book tour didn’t land him on
Oprah
or
The Tonight Show
. His publisher booked him at colleges and bookstores where he appeared in his leather jacket and earring and read his poems to rapt audiences of suburban housewives and English majors. There was talk of his being considered as Pennsylvania’s next Poet Laureate, a possibility that might have been pulled from the thin air of his publisher’s hopefulness but had Adam floating on that high for weeks.

Then he hit a tree and woke up in a hospital bed, and everything was gone. If he’d written anything since then, I didn’t know about it. I was afraid to suggest it. Writing to Adam had been as necessary as breathing or eating or fucking. He couldn’t do any of those things on his own any longer. Maybe he couldn’t write, either. Writing had been Adam’s addiction. His high. There was no mistaking the fact he suffered from its lack, but he wouldn’t talk to me about it.

Much like the shoemaker’s children who went barefoot, the husband of the psychologist went without therapy. Adam was adamant he didn’t need it, wouldn’t have it.

“If I didn’t need it before, when I was half out of my fucking head, I don’t need it now,” he said. “I’m a quadriplegic, Sadie, not crazy.”

I didn’t bother to explain that I don’t deal with “crazy” people, and neither do my colleagues. Adam had made up his mind. His accident hadn’t made him any less stubborn.

So we focused on the chair, the hourly medical care, the minutiae of evacuating his bladder and bowels and caring for a body that could no longer protect itself even from its own weight. We labored under the pretense that nothing had changed when everything had, and I understood him, but I no longer knew him.

Adam had always been brighter. Stronger. I’d been content to circle him the way the earth revolves around the sun, dependent on him to lead me.

What happens when the weaker becomes the stronger? When my independence became a choice no longer, but a necessity if we were both going to survive? The places we’d built for ourselves no longer fit. Like poor Honey, we were trapped in the past, stuck developmentally, locked into habits that had served us in the past but weren’t allowing us to grow.

Once, it had been enough to be what Adam wanted. Now, I tried to be what he needed. The two didn’t seem to be the same. The night I got the call that Adam had been taken to the hospital, my first fear had been that I’d lost him. Four years later, I’d somehow lost myself, instead.

I’d never know the woman I’d have been if I hadn’t met Adam. Until I met Joe, I hadn’t wondered.

Who was I now?

May

T
his month, my name is Amy, and I’ve come in from out of town to be my college roommate’s maid of honor. The unwritten code of weddings says either the bridesmaid’s dress or the best man will be ugly enough to make you wish you were blind. Bonnie’s promised me something cute to wear and cuter to stand beside in the photos. I’ve been in enough weddings by now to doubt that will happen, but when I see the best man I’m prepared to forgive her for the dress.

He’s an attorney. His teeth are straight and white and he wears his tux as easily as if it were a sweat suit. He’s just that cool.

“What did I tell you?” Bonnie whispers from the back of the church where we’re waiting for the wedding rehearsal to begin.

“He’s cute.” I crane my neck a little to catch a better glimpse of him. “What’s his name?”

“Joe Wilder.” The name suits him.

The rehearsal is a disaster, but Father Peck assures us that bodes well for tomorrow. The whole crowd of us head over to Angelina’s Riverside, where Brian’s parents have paid for a pretty extravagant rehearsal dinner. I manage to sit next to Joe.

He apologizes for bumping me. “I’m a lefty. Sorry.”

We switch seats. Now he’s on the end, and I don’t have to share him with the other bridesmaid who’d been sitting on his other side. She’s not happy about that, but I don’t really care, since I am the maid of honor, not her. Let her glom onto her own groomsman. The best man is mine.

“Nervous about tomorrow?”

“Oh, no. This is my fifth wedding this year.”

When I tell this to Joe, he laughs and sips water from his glass. I like the way the corners of his eyes crinkle when he smiles. “This is my first one.”

“Oh, a wedding virgin.” I lean a bit closer.

“Be gentle with me.” He leans closer, too. “Since it’s my first time and all.”

We laugh. We eat. And later, after dinner is over, we go to the bar and drink. A bit after that, we dance.

He’s an excellent dancer and holds me just close enough to lead me without making it seem like he’s coming on to me. I think he
is
coming on to me, but I appreciate his subtlety.

The wedding code says all hook ups need to wait at least until the reception. It’s only common courtesy to the bride and groom. I was at a wedding once where the best man and maid of honor hooked up at the rehearsal dinner, then with different members of the wedding party at the reception. They ended up throwing cake in each other’s faces and ruining the wedding pictures.

So I’m just about to regretfully tell him I have to get back to my hotel when he beats me to the punch and says he’s got to get going. He’s meeting the other groomsmen to take Brian out for some drinks. He’s already late.

“At a strip club, maybe?”

Joe’s got the grin of a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Maybe.”

“But Brian told Bonnie he wasn’t going to do that.”

Joe acts like he let the cat out of the bag. “Oops. Are you going to tell her?”

Bonnie swore there was no way she was going out drinking and carousing the night before she got married—not when she’d have a hundred people taking her picture the next day. We’d had our bachelorette shindig a month ago. We had, in fact, gone to see a male dance revue. I didn’t personally see what the big deal was about Brian going out to see a little bit of tit and ass before he got married. I mean, if you can’t trust your man, you shouldn’t be marrying him.

“I guess not.”

“Want to come along?” His grin got broader, as if we were sharing a dirty secret.

“Oh, right. The guys would so like that.”

“I’ll tell them you’re there to make sure I keep Brian in line.”

“Then they’ll really hate me!” I shake my head, but laughing. “Brian won’t want me there, Joe. I’ll ruin the fun.”

“Bet you won’t. You don’t look like that sort of girl. Besides, you know Brian, right?”

“Since college.”

“So, don’t you want to send him off to be married in grand style?”

This was a slippery slope, but it was either go back to my empty hotel room or go with Joe, and suddenly, all the wedding rules didn’t seem to matter.

“Do you really want me to come?”

He nodded and pulled me close for a dip. When he pulled me up, his breath gusted along my ear and made me shiver.

“Yes. I do want you to come.”

Fuck the rules. A nun wouldn’t have been able to resist him. I sure as hell couldn’t.

In the parking lot of the Sahara, which looked like any other bar from the outside except for the big sign in the window that said alcohol prohibited, Joe’s cell phone rang.

“Wilder.”

I giggled at the way he answered his phone. Joe smiled at me. I leaned forward to look through the front window at the building while he talked.

“What? No way. Really? Damn. You’re sure?”

That didn’t sound good. I looked over at him. He held up a finger, mouthing “one minute.”

I waited. Men talk so differently than women. Short, sharp sentences without the frills and furbelows we add to every conversation, no matter what it’s about. Joe listened, he spoke, once in a while he nodded. Finally, he closed his phone and looked at me.

“Bonnie found out about Brian’s plans so now he’s not coming.”

“Oh…too bad.” I hadn’t realized how excited I’d been by the thought of going to see the strippers until just now. “Well, he’s got to keep her happy, I guess.”

Joe made a flicking gesture with his hand. “He’s whipped.”

I felt bound to defend my friend, though I didn’t disagree. “They’re getting married.”

Joe’s smile is like a sliver of sunshine. “Yeah. Lucky bastard.”

“You think so?” I’m at the age where most of my friends have been steadily taking the leap into the marital abyss. “I’m not so sure I’m ready to get married.”

“Everyone says that,” Joe answers. “Until they meet the right person.”

My heart skips a little, but I remind myself he’s not talking about me. We just met. Even though weddings can make people all starry-eyed, it’s not necessarily a good indication that it will last.

“So, what do we do now?” I ask.

Joe looks toward the Sahara. The door opens and music and light spill out, along with a crowd of pretty rowdy guys who head for a truck a few spaces over. They look like they’re drinking something out of a paper bag. They all look pretty drunk, already.

“Why don’t they serve alcohol?” I point to the sign.

“Pennsylvania law.” I hadn’t forgotten Joe’s a lawyer. “Any place that serves alcohol can’t have full nudity.”

I blink. “You mean…the girls in there are totally naked?”

He smiles. “Yep.”

I blink again. “Wow. I thought they’d have a G-string on or something.”

“No. Not a stitch. Want to go in?”

Somehow, being part of a big group of carousing boys watching girls in pasties and thongs dance seemed way different than Joe and I going in to see totally bare-assed women shake their stuff.

“Yeah, sure.” I sound more confident than I feel.

Joe reaches for my hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.”

I laugh at that, feeling silly. “All right, c’mon.”

My stomach’s jumping nervously when we go inside. I’m not sure what I’m expecting, but it’s not this. The inside of the Sahara looks something like a cross between a cheap hotel lobby and a frat house basement. Several small stages, complete with poles, scatter the area. Worn couches provide seating. There’s art on the wall, of the cheesy pin-up variety. I see girls dressed in typical stripper outfits circulating with money sticking out of their garters. Some of them stop to talk to the men sitting all around, and every so often, one of them will get up and go toward a back room with one.

Joe has to pay a cover charge for himself, but not for me. The man behind the counter doesn’t even seem surprised to see me. Maybe they get more girls in there than I’d thought.

At any rate, I’m a lot less nervous as Joe takes my hand and leads me toward a love seat near the front of the room. It’s right in front of the main stage, the one with three poles and a set of gymnasts’ rings.

“Hi, hon,” says the first girl to come up to us. Closer inspection reveals she’s not a girl. She’s got to be older than me. She’s thin but has stretch marks on her thighs, and I’m pretty sure she’s wearing a wig. Suddenly, I feel a lot better about myself.

“Hi,” Joe says. “How’re you?”

“Oh, can’t complain, hon, can’t complain. Either of you want a lap dance?”

She looks at me when she asks, and I freeze, unable to answer. Do I want a lap dance? And if I do, do I want one from a stripper who looks as though she’d be making a grocery list in her head while she does it?

“Maybe later,” Joe says easily. “We just got here.”

“Fair enough, hon.” She winks, and her smile shows several prominent gaps. “We got three girls starting in about two minutes, so you just enjoy, okay?”

She wanders to the next table where I hear her asking the same questions. Joe turns to me.

“I’m sorry, I should have asked you if you wanted one. Did you?”

“Uh…no…no thanks.”

He laughs and leans in to whisper in my ear. “Later, maybe.”

I think it’ll be a cold day in hell before I pay for a lap dance from a woman, but it would be rude to say so. The next moment, I jump at the blast of loud music that blares from the speakers. Joe takes my hand again, his thumb passing back and forth over the back of it and making me shiver.

Okay, so watching
Showgirls
has in no way prepared me for what’s going on in the Sahara. Some raunchy hip-hop tune that’s all about oral sex has these three girls writhing and wriggling. They don’t seem to have any sort of real routine or anything, they just twirl around on the poles and strip out of their already scanty outfits. And, yeah, they get down to bare skin, all the way.

I watch as one girl gets on her back, crotch pointed toward the edge of the stage, and does a trick with her vagina that makes it look like some sort of underwater creature. I’m repulsed and fascinated. I look around at the men in the room, who are all staring at this woman’s cunt like it holds the secrets of the universe, until I turn to look at Joe and see he’s staring at me.

“Wow,” is all I manage to mutter.

He smiles and turns his gaze to the stage, where the girls are finishing up and heading into the audience to collect their dollars.

A few more take their place on stage and the routines begin all over again. I spot two of the girls heading our way and I’m determined not to look like an asshole, even though they’re both naked and their tits are about to poke me in the eye.

“Thanks, hon,” says one to Joe when he slips a bill into the garter on her thigh. “You let me know if you want a lap dance, okay?”

After about fifteen minutes, I’ve become numb to the sight of undulating cunts and flopping tits. Joe and I are getting a lot of attention. I’m not sure if it’s because he is, hands down, the hottest guy in the room, or because he’s with me and therefore seems less creepy than the guys who are there alone. At any rate, I’m warming up enough that I’m able to put a few dollars into garters myself, and to laugh a little at the women who flirt like it’s a job, not a pleasure.

They all ask if we want lap dances. Joe’s so good at declining, he makes it sound like he’d like to have a lap dance from each and every one of them. After an hour, I notice they’re talking about him. I know this because I know women, I know the way we gather and lean our heads together for discussion. The strippers are plotting something.

A new girl comes out on stage. She’s about my age. My height. Hell, she’s even got the same color hair, though hers looks like it came from a bottle. She’s wearing a skin-tight sheath dress that makes it impossible for her to use the pole until she takes it off, and she’s dancing to a slow, silky bump’n’grind instead of some loud song with dirty lyrics. It would be incorrect to say she’s subtle, but compared to the other dancers, she was.

She’s prettier than some there, but not the prettiest. She doesn’t have the best body, either. Still, something about her catches my attention.

Joe’s, too.

Together, we watch this girl shimmy out of her clothes. Then, it strikes me. This girl dances as if she’s enjoying herself. She smiles and makes eye contact with the men in the audience. She dances like she’s seducing each and every one of us with her eyes, which are a bright, liquid blue.

When she’s done and goes throughout the audience collecting her cash, I hold my breath, waiting for her to disappear into the back room with one of those ogling men. Surely, she will. Certainly, someone will want to pay for her to dance privately.

“Thanks, sugar,” she says to Joe when he tucks some money into her garter. She turns to me. “How about a lap dance?”

“Yes,” I hear myself say. I feel Joe’s eyes on me, but I’m too busy looking into the girl’s to pay attention to him.

“Well,” she says, her voice like smooth, hot caramel. “Let’s go, then.”

She takes me by the hand and motions to Joe. “C’mon, darlin’, you, too.”

Laughing, he gets up, too, and takes her hand. She leads us to the back room, which is painted like midnight and lit by black lights that turns our smiles and the whites of our eyes fluorescent.

“Three songs,” she says. “What do you like to listen to, sweetie?”

She’s asking me, her attention focused on me, her hand still holding mine. I’ve never held a woman’s hand before. Not like this, fingers linked, palm to palm. I hope suddenly my hand isn’t sweating.

“Whatever you like.” I feel like I’m speaking through a mouthful of cotton. Heat sweeps up and down my body in waves that make me shiver. She nods and lets go of my hand to move toward a small window set into the wall I hadn’t noticed earlier.

I look at Joe. He smiles and holds out his hand to me. I take it. He pulls me close enough to whisper in my ear.

“Good choice.”

I shiver again at the feeling of his breath in my ear. I don’t even have the benefit of alcohol to blame this on. What the hell am I doing? But I have no time to back out now, because she’s sauntering back to us.

“My name’s Cherry,” she says.