Crossroads (15 page)

Sean seemed to be almost as stunned at seeing Jennie as
Jennie was at seeing Sean. “What're you doing here?”

“I got myself a baby sitter and came in to look at graduate programs in biology.”

“Yeah, I bet. I need a beer.” And he stomped into the kitchen.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Zap stared at the ground. “Can we go for a walk?”

“I don't want to go for a walk. I just got back from a long weekend. What are you doing?”

“Zap asked me to meet him,” Jennie answered. “And I wanted to get away. It's no big deal.”

Zap looked as if he were suffering from permanent jet lag. His hair was frizzled, his beard stubby. “She wanted to get away.”

“Did you tell Tom?”

She grew nervous and began rubbing her eyes. “No, no, I told him I was coming to see you and look at schools.”

“I don't think I like this . . .”

“Look,” Zap said, “would you please take a walk with me?”

It was dark as we strolled, both of us with our arms folded across our chests, toward Central Park. When we reached Central Park West, we walked along the parkside on the brick sidewalk and I was aware of how unsmooth the brick was beneath my feet.

“You can't just do this,” I said. “You don't seem to understand. There are others involved.”

“I'm not doing this alone,” he protested. “Jennie wanted to come and I don't even know what's going to happen.”

“I don't think I can tolerate this in my house.” And suddenly I felt a terrible rage grow in me, as if I were being invaded by thieves. “What'd you do with Anna?”

“Anna's in Pennsylvania. That's over with. But if you can't tolerate this in your house, all right, we'll go to a motel. We'll check into the Plaza. But I want to spend a little time with her and she wants to spend time with me.”

“When are you going to grow up? You can't always have everything you want.”

Now he was shouting. “I'm almost thirty-one. I want something concrete in my life.”

“I'll get you a cement mixer.”

“I'll go to a hotel.” He kicked a stone. “I'll get right out of your life.”

I raised my hand, prepared to strike my brother, and he looked at me with a strange look I'd never seen. “You were always the favorite.” He lowered his voice. “It was always Debbie this and Debbie that and why can't you be more like Debbie.”

I stopped. “Are you crazy? That was Renee. You don't know what you're talking about. I was the one who was like you, remember? Peas in a pod?”

“Well, you aren't like me anymore.”

Zap had always been rebellious. Even before he was born, three doctors with stethoscopes resting on our mother's womb shook their heads at one another, and my mother was certain she carried a dead child. The doctors reassured her. Not dead; just misplaced. They resorted to an x ray and found the baby upside down with his right hand raised high above his head in a posture one doctor prophetically noted resembled the Statue of Liberty.

By the time we got back to the apartment, we weren't speaking. I've thrown alarm clocks and forks at my brother in moments of adolescent rage, and he's been known to clobber me for general stupidity, but this anger was different to us. We had nothing more to say.

Sean was nursing a beer in the kitchen and reading the back of a cereal box. Jennie leafed through a copy of
Progressive Architecture
in the living room. I wasn't absolutely certain that either knew the other was in the house.

She smiled at me, then grimaced, pointing toward the kitchen. I went into the kitchen, where Sean had just eaten a
bowl of Rice Krispies. “No nutritional value,” I said.

“Tom's my friend. What am I supposed to tell him?”

I patted him on the shoulder. “Do you want to go to bed?”

“Look, this is serious. What am I supposed to tell Tom? He's my friend.” He crushed the beer can with his hand and tossed it into the wastebasket across the room, missed, and cursed under his breath.

I really didn't know what he should tell Tom, but we both wanted to get out of the house. Even though it was late, we decided to see a film. We went to see a disaster of a disaster film in the neighborhood, something about a volcano, and all Sean did was criticize the special effects, cross and uncross his legs a dozen times, refuse to eat popcorn, and when he held my hand, he tapped his finger on my fingers.

When we got home, they'd gone to bed. Or at least they had disappeared into the spare room. Sean and I crawled into bed. He pulled me close to him and asked me if he could stay with me for a while. “You mean live here?”

“Just until I find a place . . .”

We drifted onto separate pillows. “It's just that . . . I don't know. Sure, you can stay here while you look for a place but I need more time . . .” I heard dry leaves swirled on the street outside. I'd never really thought it could be winter again. “It's just that I keep thinking . . .”

“About Mark?”

I sighed. “That's right. I keep thinking maybe I should see him. Oh, I don't know.”

“Don't worry about it.” Sean rolled over to the other side of the bed. “I'll have a place in twenty-four hours.”

 

The Trim Time Health Club is located in the basement of an office building. Specifically, it is located on the third-level basement in one of the darkest, most mildewed, drain-clogged dungeons ever to go by the name of health club. It has the honor of being rated by
The New York Times
as the worst health
club in the city. I've been a member for the past three years.

It's a kind of health club for derelicts. Huge women with breasts that droop to their waists like the ears of a floppy dog emerge from cloudy vapor and disappear somewhere into the dressing room. Identical black twins, who look as if they've been cut from the same cookie cutter, move in unison. Ballerinas and homosexuals float by in the pool on red kickboards. A miniature madwoman in her seventies does a pas de deux to silent music in front of the mirrors of the equipment room.

Jennie and I undressed discreetly in the main locker area with the other women, women with snakes tattooed on their spines, women with scars on their breasts and bellies, women who hid themselves in a corner so that the rest of us couldn't see, women who stood nude in the two public phone booths, making calls with anxious faces. Jennie and I slipped out of our clothes, careful not to look at one another. I'd always admired her shapely yet firm body, and I could tell from the corner of my eye that she hadn't lost it.

We shuffled down the stairs in our clogs. At the Trim Time, you don't want to walk around barefoot for fear of slipping in the slime or contracting some vile growth between your toes. We jumped into the pool just as someone sailed over our heads. “Jesus!” Jennie exclaimed, watching the man usurp our lane. “You've gotta be quick around here,” I replied, trying to keep her gaze away from the dead cockroach that was floating past us in the wash drain.

We'd gone about ten lengths when we both paused to notice a little, rather terrified-looking man standing in a corner in a pink bathing cap, jerking back and forth, his hand groping for something in front of him as if he were trying to catch a fish. But whatever its flaws, there are no fish in the pool at the Trim Time Health Club.

“Look at that,” Jennie said, a little perplexed and intrigued. “That's disgusting. Do you think he's dangerous?”

Is a masturbating man dangerous? Only if he's doing it in public, I guess. I was fairly certain he wasn't dangerous, but I thought perhaps I should inform the guard, who weighed in at about two-eighty. Her name was Agnes, and when I told her that a man was playing with himself in the pool, she frowned, put down her copy of
Mademoiselle
, rose on her elephantine legs, and peered down at the man. “This is a pool, buddy, not a peepshow.”

The man raised his hands, trembling, looking terribly apologetic. He said he couldn't find the tie to his swimsuit.

I slipped back into the pool beside Jennie. “God,” I said, “I don't know why I did that.”

“You never can tell.” She tried to console me.

“He was harmless.”

I felt depressed and the water suddenly felt cold and filled with chemicals. My skin broke out in bumps. I looked in the direction of the man, who had ceased to jerk but was standing perfectly still, dejected, facing the corner of the pool, and he looked at me and stuck out his tongue. Jennie stuck her tongue back at him, defending me. “He's nuts,” she said.

What does it mean when our private acts are suddenly made public? Or when a private act is inadvertently observed? The bathroom door is left unlocked and we are caught on the toilet. Or touching ourselves. Or touching someone we shouldn't be touching. There seems to be no end to the secrets we need to keep.

In the steam room I lost Jennie in a thick, white mist; all I could observe was a vague, ghostly form. I was pretty certain I could get her to talk to me in the sauna as soon as the twins and the other women left, but we stopped to get a drink of water on our way from the steam room and she screamed because she almost stepped on a Japanese water beetle that lay dying on its back near the drain. She was a little revolted by the time we got to the sauna.

The twins and the two other women were in the sauna
when we got there. One of the women was very fat and had wrapped herself in a wintergreen plastic trash can liner. She was a glob of sweat. The twins were dancers with perfect, taut black bodies, and everything one did the other repeated. The fourth woman was black and had white cream all over her face. She looked like a frosted cake. The twins got up, stretched, touched their toes three times, and left. The masseuse came in to get the fat lady in the trash can liner. The lady with the cream on her face stood up after a while and said she was going to faint. She staggered out.

Jennie assured me that had she seen my health club, she never would have felt uptight about taking me to the Tall Grass. I told her Mark wanted me to join the New York Health and Racquet and that I told him I didn't think a civil rights attorney needs gilt mirrors with rotating strobes in order to stay in shape. But Mark liked the nautilus machine and the coed sauna, so he went ahead and joined Health and Racquet and I joined Trim Time and maybe that was when our problems first were made visible.

I rubbed baby oil on Jennie's back. She let her head float as I massaged her neck muscles. “Let me do you,” she said, turning around after a while. She began at the base of my neck, working into the muscles of my spine. I let my eyes close, then opened them quickly, thinking for a moment that I saw the face of the little masturbating man, staring at us scornfully, about to go and tell the masseuse what we were doing.

“You know,” Jennie said, “there are some things you just can't share with a man.”

“I know. Is there anything you can't share with a woman?” Jennie laughed. “Just one as far as I can tell, but you can probably do that for yourself.”

“Probably.” I laughed.

We sat naked now, facing one another, sweat in beads on our torsos and legs, with the glow of athletes about us, as if we were training for some important match.

I extended a leg, trying to put my head to my knee. “What do you think you're going to do?”

“About Zap?” Jennie was also trying to put her head on her knee, and I was stunned to find that our former drum majorette was as stiff as I. “I'm not leaving Tom, if that's what you mean.”

I nodded. That was what I'd meant.

It was one of those clear, cold nights that happen rarely in Manhattan, the kind of night they use in the fake sets for Fred Astaire when stars are light bulbs, mimicking the tall buildings, and Fred and Ginger waltz across some nonexistent footbridge in Central Park when no one in his or her right mind would be in the park. Those nights are almost magical and the streets can whisper as if they're calling your name.

I thought I heard mine being called as Jennie stopped in front of a folk art store on Columbus to admire a little vase she thought she'd like for her living room. It was a pale, earthenware vase, done in brown and blue. “Look.” She smiled happily.

“Jen, what happened last night?”

Both of us kept looking at the vase. “Nothing happened, I'm afraid. It's difficult to talk about . . . I couldn't . . .” Her voice trailed off and she kept her eyes fixed on the little vase. I raised my eyes, looking into our faces reflected in the glass. We were many years older than when I first saw Jennie walking a raccoon on a leash, and I almost expected to see two strangers on the brink of old age, but instead I saw nothing in our faces that wasn't completely familiar to me.

Jennie was starting to loosen up as we turned down my street. A homosexual couple in purple body shirts walked by us, hand in hand, and Jennie commented how times had changed. “Who would have thought I'd have a fling with your brother?”

“Oh, it's a fling?”

She laughed. “I'm not sure it's even turning into that. I'm
not very good at this sort of thing, I'm afraid. Maybe I'm too uptight. He just had this thing in his head about me. Anyway, it was lousy. Or at least I was lousy. And I told him, well, I let him know I was going back to Tom. He didn't put up much of a fuss.”

We both felt relieved and lightheaded as we walked up the steps to my apartment. We were laughing as we walked into my living room. We stopped laughing when we came into the kitchen and Sean motioned for us to be quiet because he was on the phone with Tom. “It's for you,” he said, passing the phone to Jennie, and he and I left the room.

Zap sat in an armchair in the spare room, reading an old magazine. Sean knocked on the door. “I think you better go to a movie,” he said. “Tom's coming over.”

Tom arrived almost an hour later. He looked awkward and strange, like the country mouse visiting the city mouse. “Well, hello,” he said. He looked around. “So this is where you live?” I nodded and I could tell from the way he said it that he didn't like my place.