Dating Big Bird (6 page)

“Unfortunately, I don’t think the same would be true for Malcolm.”

“Doesn’t sound like it.”

“And three,” I continued, and here was the clinker: “While he’s brilliant and funny and weird and interesting and confused about everything, of one thing he is absolutely certain: He does not want any more children, given what happened to the last one.”

“I don’t even know where to begin,” she said finally.

And neither did I, really.

I ran my hands through my hair and tried to get a handle on how to explain him and our relationship—not just for Amy’s sake but for my own as well: Whenever I tried to deconstruct the complicated elements of our situation and examine the sum of its parts, it always left me confused and a little sad, as if I’d lost something I wasn’t sure I’d ever really had.

“This is going to sound crazy,” I said, “but despite the downside—the rather obvious, inescapable, problematic, and deeply ironic downside—we’re really good together, I think. We eat together. Sleep together. Spend weekends together. And since we don’t have sex, we talk all the time. So I mean, except for feeling like I’m dating Big Bird—a big, large, funny, weird, kind, strange, generous, sexless sort-of-boyfriend—”

“Who’s walking down Sesame Street schlepping an awful lot of baggage—” she added.

“I’ve actually never been in such a normal relationship.”

“Or been so well rested.”

“Or well fed.”

Or unafraid
.

Malcolm hadn’t always been frozen—just since he met me.

Or so he says.

Which is not as bad as it sounds, since he met me right about the time he started taking the libido-deadening anti-depressants and also around the time that his career took one last big nosedive plunge into has-been obscurity. But I suspect his intimacy problems began long before me, sometime after his son died and sometime after his marriage collapsed under the weight of all that grief.

Which led to his drinking.

Which led to his profound writer’s block.

Which, as it turned out, led to me, when I took his night course at The New School on the history of print journalism last winter semester.

And so we met.

Ours was, by anyone’s standards, including my own, an unremarkable beginning: a question I asked one cold, cold night after the second class, which he answered; then a self-deprecating
remark I made about my job, to which he responded more directly than I’d expected.

“So why do you do it?” he asked.

“Because I don’t know what else to do.”

He smiled ironically, and when he did, it made me feel as if he’d chosen me to share in some secret private joke. “I can understand that. And why else?”

It was mid-February; bleak. I looked out the third-floor classroom window past our glassy reflections into the cold blackness beyond. “Because I can’t do anything else.”

“I can understand that, too. Only in your case, it’s clearly not true.”

“Why in my case?”

“Because in your case, as opposed to mine, you’re young.”

“I’m thirty-five. That’s not so young.”

“Oh, yes it is. When you’re staring down the barrel at fifty, it’s very, very young.” He rubbed his face where his beard would have been if he’d had one—a face that, at most, could easily have passed for forty-two or forty-three—the skin lined only between the brows and around the mouth; his eyes deep brown surrounded by clear whites; his thick straight hair still dark, with only a few strands of gray here and there. “And obviously you’re quite capable, otherwise you wouldn’t have the job that you have—distasteful and repulsive as you’ve just told me you think it is.”

I looked at him sitting on the edge of the desk with his arms crossed in front of him. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened, I could almost imagine what he would have looked like, been like, fifteen years ago at the peak of his career—commanding, consumed, impassioned.

“You’ll figure it out,” he said. “When you’re ready. You’ll quit this thing and find something else to do.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, though what I really
wanted to know was how he could see my future when I couldn’t see it myself.

“Because.” He turned and started collecting the notes and books he’d spread out on the desk at the beginning of his lecture. “Because I suspect you do know what you want to do next, but you’re not ready.”

I felt myself blush, not only from having been found out but from the secret thrill, the flattery, of being read, of being seen so clearly.

“Maybe,” I lied.

He turned back to me and hooked my eyes, daring me to tell him what it was. But I didn’t. I didn’t know him well enough to admit that what I wanted to do next was have a Pickle.

“Any guy
that
old who
isn’t
married is either a wacko or a fag,” Renee declared when I told her about the previous night’s rare verbal exchange with a man.

It was seven-thirty—early for our office and early for me, since I usually came in around ten—and that was on good days—but not early for her. Renee was always in by seven, and her work ethic and obsessive need to be organized at the beginning of every day was only part of her arrival time. She had the kind of insomnia where you wake up in the middle of the night—four
A.M.
, you could set your watch to it, she always said—so after the early morning back-to-back episodes of
Perry Mason
, she’d go to the gym and then head to work, where, once she’d straightened up her already-straightened office and desk, she’d make a list of things she needed to do that day. Seven cups of coffee and ten cigarettes later, I’d arrive and she’d torture me. And then she’d really wake up.

Coming in so early, I’d thrown her off. She took an extralong drag from one of her Marlboros and raised her eyebrows
when I walked into her office, explaining that the reason I’d gotten to work way before I normally did was because I hadn’t fallen asleep. I sat down in one of her twin pea-green wool-upholstered armchairs and drank my take-out latte.

“These things are so”—I looked at the white sip-lid on my paper coffee cup—“infantile. I mean, look at this—this gigantic plastic—”

“Nipple,” Renee finished.

“Exactly. People walking up and down the street, in offices, airports, sucking, sucking, sucking. It’s unseemly.”

She looked completely uninterested. “So?”

“So what?”

“So which is he?”

I shook my head dismissively, the way I always did whenever she made some ridiculously overreaching generalization that I suspected, deep down, was completely true. At forty-five, Renee Friedman was the head designer of our new menswear line—still in production but getting ready to debut in the fall—and my closest friend at work. She was as cynical and jaded as it was possible to become without killing yourself or having someone else kill you—a personality flaw she continually blamed on “a lifetime of dating wackos and designing for fags”—and yet few people besides me knew that she would have given both legs and an arm for a man who loved her.

Wacko or fag?

Wacko or fag?

How was I supposed to know?

“Well, how was he dressed?” she asked, lighting another cigarette and blowing the smoke into my face for emphasis.

“Like a guy. A regular guy,” I said—
guy
being a kind of code word for
not gay
. “A suit,” though the jacket had hung on the back of his chair the whole class and not been worn. “White shirt. Armani tie.”

“Too bad it wasn’t Versace. Then it would have been a dead giveaway, since only pimps and fags wear Versace.” She paused to inspect a possible lintball on her black cashmere V-neck sweater that was tucked into gray wool men’s trousers. “So conservative, basically. Not self-conscious. No pleated pants. No Prada briefcase. No Gucci loafers.”

No. No. And no.

Yet she remained as unconvinced as always. To Renee, all men were fags until proven otherwise. “Then he’s a wacko.”

I shook my head again. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t
think
so. That’s definitive.”

“Look, he was a really famous writer once. And now he’s teaching.”

“At the Learning Annex.”

“No. At The New School.”

“Whatever.”

“There is a difference, you know.”

She shrugged. “So why don’t you just ask him?”

“Ask him what?”

“Ask him which he is. Just go up to him after the next class and say, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Whatever-Your-Name-Is: Given the fact that you’re
so
old and
not
married, are you a wacko or a fag?’ That’s what I would do.”

“You would not.”

“I would, too.”

“Bullshit.”

“Fuck you. Fine. Don’t ask him,” she said, clearly disgusted with me and turning to her to-do list instead. “Just don’t come whining to me when you find out he’s one or the other. Or both.”

I would have no way of finding out anything about Malcolm for the next two weeks. Karen had forced me to
attend a big AIDS-benefit silent-auction industry dinner she was cohosting with her nemesis Donna Karan on the following Thursday night—class night.

“I need all my friends around me,” she’d said with what could almost be called humility—rare for her. “You know how Donna hates me.” So I grudgingly attended, though I spent most of the evening ignoring the speeches and thinking about Malcolm.

Through the Internet, I had already searched for the books he’d written—
Broken Promises
, which he’d expanded from his
New York Times
series on education, and
The Bankrupting of Manhattan
—and had ordered them both in paperback. I had also done a Nexus search at the office and printed out a stack of material about him—reviews of his books; features written about him when he’d won the Pulitzer; articles he’d written over the years for magazines. Though inspired by innocent curiosity, my information-gathering made me feel as if I’d spent the week moonlighting as a private investigator, and when I walked toward his desk after his lecture, I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty.

“Where were you last week?” he asked after class.

When I told him, he smiled slyly. “I thought maybe after our conversation, you decided to go off and do the thing you wouldn’t tell me you want to do.”

“I’m afraid I’m not that impulsive.”

“That surprises me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged as if he’d revealed too much by letting me know he’d given me, and what I’d said the previous week, some thought. “I guess you strike me as being strong-willed. Someone who might, one day, out of the blue, walk away from something and never come back.”

Or walk away from some
one
and never come back, I later realized he must have meant, too.

“Who, me?” I said, making a big face. “I’m the exact opposite of that. I’m a clinger. I hate change. I’m always the last one to leave a job. Always the last one to leave a relationship. Always the last one to—”

“Leave class?” he said, leading me out the door. “Want to get a drink?”

It was unseasonably warm for a night in early March as Malcolm and I walked east across Twelfth Street and then down University Place to the Cedar Tavern, a dark old bar where all the great painters in the 1950s drank—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns. Now, though, it was just a slightly run-down, slightly seedy fallback place in the neighborhood when you couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. There were two empty seats at the bar, and he led me toward them, pulling my stool out slightly as I dropped my bags to the floor.

He ordered a Coke with lemon, and I ordered a mineral water with ice and lime, and when our drinks, or “soft drinks” as Malcolm referred to them, arrived, we got very busy with our straws and wedges of fruit, stirring and squeezing and stirring again.

“In case you haven’t guessed, I don’t drink anymore,” Malcolm said. “I thought I’d just mention it now in the spirit of full disclosure.”

“I guessed.” I didn’t drink much myself anymore. Somewhere along the line, alcohol had stopped making me feel young and happy and had started leaving me feeling very old and very tired.

“You’re observant,” he said with more than a hint of sarcasm. “What gave me away?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I turned to face him, close enough now to look straight into his eyes and see the resignation in
them. “Because most writers drink,” I finally said. “Especially journalists.” I didn’t want to say that his face had that slightly ravaged look of someone who’d been farther down the sort of road in life I always feared I’d end up on myself—the kind filled with pain and loss and solitude and grief. “It was just a lucky guess,” I added quickly.

He sucked an ice cube into his mouth and chewed it.

“You’re kind,” he said. “Maybe too kind.”

“You can never be too kind. Kindness is a rare commodity these days.”

“I’d agree with that. But it was kind of you anyway to refer to me as a writer when I’m really not one anymore.”

“Yes, you are.”

He sucked in another ice cube. “I’m a teacher.”

“You’re a writer
and
a teacher.”