Flings (6 page)

So I admit that, yes, I sometimes fake with him. Not often, I'm quick to add, trying to be kind here and pulling it off, I think, though this is admittedly something I've been looking for a way to talk about.

“Well, when was the last time?” He isn't looking at me. He's at the counter, fixing us fresh drinks. Gin and tonics with zests of lime, because even though we can joke knowingly about “the peculiar institution” and “the War of Northern Aggression” we are still people who live in Philadelphia with their citrus zester. Anyway, I give him the truthful answer about my faking: “Tuesday.”

“I see.” His tone is relaxed. Casual introspection. If he's hurt he hides it well. Or, also plausible, I'm too drunk to read him.

“Your turn,” I say. It occurs to me that we're doing our truth session backwards. In the story they have this great night out—it's the guy's birthday—and then they get into it the morning after, when they're sober, after ditching a party and reaffirming their love. But it's too late to offer this observation, with him already in the middle of talking about Bridget, the girl he dated before me. How it only lasted a few months but was super heavy while it did. I already know all this, I want to say to him. Well, here's some news. Bridget used to be into some rough stuff—she liked to be choked and held down, tossed around. Your average rape fantasy, it sounds like. And he's got his hands in the air, palms out, preemptive defense, saying how he didn't even want to do it at first—refused to role-play the oppressor, was worried he might injure her, etc. But then he learned that simulating violence in a safe space can be a valid way of gaining psychological mastery over trauma. (One wonders what ol' Bridget's truth session might have sounded like.) Long story short, he came around.

I'm wondering, Is this a real story, or is it more like his own roundabout way of asking for—Oh, but I shouldn't be stupid. Besides, if he wants it, he's going to have to say so, or else make a move. Not that I'm in a huge hurry to be gagged with my own underwear, but being pinned at the wrists and bent over the coffee table might make for a nice change of pace. What I won't stand for, however, is this “I'm sending you a signal to make me the offer” shit. Of course, he's gotten pretty good about asking for what he wants—which, by the way, I credit myself with having taught him because I remember what it was like when we first got together—so maybe this is just the drunken truth slopping out. Speaking of which.

“I gave Evan Stanz a blow job,” I say. Evan is Zachary's best friend. They grew up together, and both did their undergrad at Wesleyan. Now Evan lives in Chicago. He works in real estate and on the weekends plays bass in a grunge nostalgia band. The first time Evan visited after we had started dating, he slept on Zachary's couch for four nights. We'd been together about three months at the time.

My fingers are drumming on the table. Zachary drains his drink. Would you believe that I did not engineer this whole conversation to lead up to betraying myself in this way? At least not consciously. But it's worth stressing that even in retrospect my confession does not feel inevitable—it has taken us both by surprise.

“That night was the first time I was ever really, like
really
mad at you,” I say, exponentially more amazed with myself every moment that words keep coming out of my mouth. “You remember how we fought? And I was thinking I was going to break up with you, that's how mad I was, and—oh, fuck it, I wanted to.”

“Were you trying to get caught?”

“God, no. I waited until you were asleep. Evan was asleep, too. I had to wake him. I told him to be quiet, and that if he ever breathed a word of it I'd deny the whole thing. We didn't fuck. He didn't touch me at all. I did what I wanted to do, and then it was over.”

“Did you swallow?” he asks, trying to do the ice-cold thing, though to sell it he'd have to be able to look me in the eye.

“You're taking this rather in stride,” I say. “And also, fuck you.”

“Just tell me if you did.”

“You're being disgusting.”

“I'm curious.”

“Well, I wasn't going to spit it on the floor, was I?”

“Lacey Anne,” he says, and it's like, Okay, so we're done being hard-asses now.

“If I had it back, I mean if I could do that night over—”

“He told me.”

“Excuse me?”

“He told me.”

“Told you.”

“When I told him I was going to propose. He said he couldn't live with himself if he didn't.”

I feel the bottom drop out of my stomach. Here I've been keeping this terrible secret close, nursing it with my guilt. And then it turns out that the boys have long since settled the matter among themselves. How nice for them.

“Well, did he think I was good?” I ask.

He ignores my question. We bask in our silence, maybe zone in on the green of the microwave display clock—if you squint hard you can make the LED quiver, the numbers swimming apart into fragments before your blurring vision, your watering eyes. I can hear cars idling at the light. Someone's blasting dance music.

Then he breaks the silence, says, “You want to know something funny?”

“Something funny? Oh, yeah. I mean, you bet.”

“Maybe ‘funny' isn't the word. I don't know, I never expected to say this, but since we're talking I guess I might as well tell you that when you told me the thing about you and Evan—well, I mean when he told me the thing, but then, seriously, again when you said it just before—both times the first feeling I had wasn't anger or hurt. I swear to God, Lacey Anne, it was straight-up jealousy. I was in love with him for a long time. The whole time we were growing up, I guess. I'd have done anything for him, I really would have, or with him, not that I ever tried, or I mean there was never any question of—but it's like, if just once, you know, like if I could have ever put it out there and had to own it, maybe my whole life would have been different. I don't know. And not that there's anything wrong with my life now, but—well, it made me feel bad for that past version of myself, that's all. That kid. He ached so fucking much.”

“Baby,” I say, meaning it.

He stands up and so I do, too, though I'm not sure where we're supposed to be going. It's as if I'm watching myself—watching us—from somewhere else, not like the God's eye view from the ceiling but maybe like a pervert on the fire escape, peeping in. As Zachary rounds the table I grab my dress by the skirt and in one fluid but graceless motion pull it over my head and off my body. I ball it up and chuck it at him. He catches it and throws it down. We end up on the couch, tangled, neither one of us speaking but both of us thinking the same thing: Is this the spot where it happened? Is this?

There are several competing theories about where Stonewall's arm might be. Marauding Union men is the popular one, though considered unlikely by serious historians. It may have been stolen in the 1920s; there's a whole school of thought about that. The notion I find most compelling postulates that the original marker was never meant to designate the exact burial plot but rather the field of battle where the injury was sustained. Everything else, says this theory, has been one long misunderstanding.

At the winery we took the tour and then spent some time tasting. There was a Cabernet with a blackberry thing happening that I liked. We bought three bottles and asked the sommelier if he knew of a decent place in town to eat. Zachary would propose to me the next day beneath an oak on a green slope at noon, and I would of course say yes, and we would kiss and start ourselves, our lives, careening toward everything that I've already shared. But let's stick for a minute with the night before the proposal. In our suite at the Red Roof Inn there was a little coffee maker by the sink. I took the two plastic cups out of their plastic packaging while Zachary opened one of our bottles. We shut off the overhead light, then turned on both bedside lamps and the shower. We left the bathroom door open and the bathroom light off. The water was warm, then all of a sudden too hot. I wanted to get it perfect. A little steam's okay, but nothing scalding. We climbed in. Zachary worked the soap between my legs, exploring me as if for the first time, as if he didn't already know me by heart. I reached back. He said, “Lacey Anne.” He loves to breathe my name when he's inside me, and it is the only time that I genuinely enjoy hearing it said, because it's like everything I love and hate about myself somehow comes together, and I feel exposed and completed, named and found.

Which is a good line to end on, though it must be obvious by this point that neither of us is the type to leave well enough alone, so I may as well tell what happens next.

He picks the boy out—a student from the 201 class he taught last semester. He says there were hints dropped, inklings. They've kept in touch.

The boy, Blake, comes on a Wednesday. He knocks on our door even though we cracked it open for him when we buzzed him into the building. Zachary is sitting on the couch, watching something on TV he doesn't care about. A sport. I'm checking the spaghetti sauce. It's sauce, all right. “Nearly done,” I say as I turn toward the knocking, which has nudged the door fully open. He stands in the doorway, obviously nervous but trying hard not to show that he is. I do not try to hide that I'm sizing him up. He ought to know it. He's taller than either of us, and somewhat bedraggled-looking in dirty white jeans and a pair of beat-up Converse All Stars. He wears a thin yellow T-shirt with a mud-colored corporate logo, a red bandana tied loose about his neck. His beard is patchy. He's holding a six-pack of PBR in a plastic bodega bag with a black-eyed smiley face above the blue words
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
. The smiley face is the same color as his T-shirt must have been when it was new.

“Hi,” I say to Blake as I approach him. I open my arms and we briefly embrace. He smells clean and fresh, not like cigarettes. For some reason I'd thought of him as a smoker, which maybe is my way of saying, Kids these days. Zachary hustles over to join us, but I let the boy slip from my arms to his. A sort of handoff. I'm back at the stove. Let them have this moment, if they can wring a moment out of whatever is happening. I keep my back turned, one hand holding the wooden sauce spoon, stirring.

The boys sit. I serve dinner. We drink ourselves comfortable. Together we move to the increasingly storied couch, undressing one another, but Blake can't seem to get in the mood. Finally, he reaches down and eases Zachary's head from between his pale legs, his flaccid penis shiny like a slug. “Hey, it's okay,” he says to Zachary, as though he were the wiser of the two of them, the three of us. “Let me do you,” he says, but then instead of switching places with Zachary scoots over to the far end of the couch and draws his legs up under himself like a nesting animal. I reach out and take Zachary's hand, pull him over to me. Blake watches us as though we were a reasonably compelling foreign film. He waits until we finish, then gets dressed and says good night.

“It's better like this,” Zachary says when we're alone again.

“I think you're right,” I say and take him into my arms. As we rock slowly back and forth, heads on shoulders, I notice our reflection in the dark glass face of the TV. We look like we're bobbing in a rowboat, on a lake or out to sea. It occurs to me to wonder:
Is this what a marriage is?
And then a related question:
So what if it's not?

O
ver the sixth grade holiday break—1993, this would have been, heading into '94—my friend Isaac Adelman began to suspect that something was off about his twin brother, Jake. They were identical, but lately Jake had been getting short of breath when we played half-court in their front driveway, and when we went swimming—nothing special in South Florida in December—Jake wouldn't race with us or have a diving contest or anything. “I'll be judge,” he said, glum and defensive as he climbed onto the green raft and gave himself a push toward the shallow end of the pool.

So Isaac and I saw who of the two of us could jump farther (me), and who could hold his breath the longest (me), and who could do the fastest lap, which was such a close call that we really did need Jake to judge for us, but Jake had fallen asleep. He was lying on his side on the raft, half curled up, with his eyes closed and mouth open, one arm across his face to block the sunlight, the other arm dangling in the water.

The pediatrician took X-rays. A sarcoma was putting pressure on Jake's left lung as well as his heart. Everything changed in the Adelman house after that. For example, the twins had always shared one huge room upstairs, but now Jake was to be moved to the first floor, down the hall from his parents and next door to Claudette, the housekeeper, in what had been Mr. Adelman's home office. To offset the sickroom atmosphere, Mr. and Mrs. Adelman splurged on electronics and toys. They got a three-disc CD changer with speakers, a new TV and VCR for each of their rooms, and every game system you could think of—Super Nintendo, Neo Geo, Sega CD, Game Boys for the long hours in doctors' waiting rooms. They had lava lamps and Nerf guns and remote-controlled cars.

My mother encouraged me to spend time with the twins. They needed me, she said, to bring some cheer into the house and to offer my “moral support.” She said I made things feel more normal over there. And of course we would have offered to reciprocate, but Jake couldn't go on sleepovers, and she wouldn't want the poor sick boy to feel left out if just Isaac came over, besides which she imagined that Mrs. Adelman must not want to split the boys up more than they already were, what with their room situation and Jake's having been pulled out of school.

When I slept over we were allowed to stay up as late as we wanted playing video games and watching movies. If Jake had an appetite it was like a miracle. They'd have Claudette make anything he asked for. And there was always stuff to snack on—Fruit Roll-Ups and Kudos bars, fresh-made peanut butter oatmeal cookies and frozen yogurt. They had this big ceramic bowl—Mrs. Adelman had made it in a class she took—that sat on the breakfast bar and was always filled with clementine oranges. I would beg my mom to buy us some when she went to the store.