Good In Bed (13 page)

Always a child, I thought, looking at Bruce through the haze. For a minute, I caught his eye, and we looked right at each other. He tilted the bong toward me: Want some? I shook my head no, and took a deep breath into the silence.

“Remember when the swimming pool was finished?” I asked.

Bruce gave me a small but encouraging nod.

“Your father was so happy,” I said. I looked at his friends. “You guys should have seen it. Dr. Guberman couldn’t swim…”

“… he never learned how,” Bruce added.

“But he insisted— absolutely insisted— that this house have a swimming pool. ‘My kids aren’t going to sweat for another summer!’ ”

Bruce laughed a little bit.

“So the day the pool was finished, he threw this gigantic party.” Now George was nodding. He’d been there. “He had it catered. He ordered, like, a dozen watermelon baskets…”

“… and a keg,” said Bruce, laughing.

“And he walked around all afternoon in this monogrammed bathrobe that he’d bought just for the occasion, smoking this gigantic cigar, and looking like a king,” I concluded. “There must have been a hundred people here…” My voice trailed off. I was remembering Bruce’s father in the hot tub, a steaming cigar clenched between his teeth, a Dixie cup full of beer sweating on the ledge beside him, and the full moon hanging like a circle of gold in the sky.

And finally I felt that I was on more stable ground. I couldn’t smoke pot, and he wouldn’t let me kiss him, but I could tell stories all night long. “He looked so happy,” I said to Bruce, “because you were happy.”

Bruce started to cry quietly, and when I got up and crossed the room and sat beside him, he didn’t say anything. Not even when I reached for him. When I put my arm around his shoulders he leaned into me, holding me and crying. I closed my eyes so I only heard his friends getting up and filing out the door.

“Ah, Cannie,” he said.

“Shh,” I said, and rocked him, moving him back and forth with my whole body, easing him back onto the bed, beneath a shelf lined with his Little League trophies and perfect attendance plaques from Hebrew school. His friends were gone. We were finally alone. “Sshh now, shh now.” I kissed his wet cheek. He didn’t resist. His lips were cool underneath mine. He wasn’t kissing me back, but he wasn’t pushing me away, either. It was a start.

“What do you want?” he whispered to me.

“I would do whatever you wanted,” I said. “Even… if you wanted that… I’d do it for you. I love you…” I said.

“Don’t say anything,” he whispered, sliding his hands up under my shirt.

“Oh, Bruce,” I breathed, unwilling to believe that this was happening, that he wanted me, too.

“Shh,” he said, shushing me the way I’d quieted him moments before. His hands were fumbling with the many clasps of my bra.

“Lock the door,” I whispered.

“I don’t want to let you go,” he said.

“You don’t have to,” I told him, tucking my face into his neck, breathing in the smell of him, sweet smoke and shaving cream and shampoo, glorying in the feel of his arms around me, thinking that this was what I wanted, was what I’d always wanted— the love of a man who was wonderful and sweet and who, best of all, understood me. “You don’t have to ever again.” I tried to make it good for him, to touch him in his favorite places, to move the way that I remembered he liked. It felt wonderful to me, to be with him again, and I thought, holding his shoulders as he thrust himself into me and moaned, that we could start over; that we were starting over. The Moxie article I was willing to write off as water under the bridge, provided he’d swear a solemn oath to never again mention my body in print. And the rest of it, his father’s death, we’d get through as a couple. Together. “I love you so much,” I whispered, kissing the side of his face, holding him close, trying to quiet the small voice inside of me that noticed, even in the throes of passion, that he wasn’t saying anything back.

Afterward, with my head on his shoulder and my fingertips tracing circles on his chest, I thought that nothing had ever felt so right. I thought that maybe I’d been a child, a girl, but now I was ready to step up to the plate, to do the right thing, to be a woman, and to stand beside him, holding him up, starting tonight.

Bruce, evidently, had other thoughts. “You should get going,” he said, removing himself from my arms and walking into the bathroom without looking back at the bed.

This was unexpected. “I can stay,” I called.

Bruce came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. “I’ve got to go to temple with my mom in the morning, and I think it would, um, complicate things if…” His voice trailed off.

“Okay,” I said, remembering my vow, to be an adult, to think of what he needed instead of what I wanted, even though what I wanted was more along the lines of a long, slow, sweet snuggle, followed by both of us drifting gently off to sleep— not this hasty retreat. “No problem,” I said, and pulled my clothes back on. No sooner had I straightened my panties then Bruce was grabbing my elbow and walking me toward the door, hustling me past the kitchen and the living room, where, presumably, his mother was waiting and his friends had regrouped.

“Give me a call,” I said, hearing my voice trembling, “whenever you want.”

He looked away. “I’m going to be kind of busy,” he said.

I took a deep breath, willing the panic to subside. “Okay,” I said. “Just know that I’m there for you.”

He nodded gravely. “I appreciate that, Cannie,” he said, as if I’d just offered him financial planning advice instead of my heart on a platter. I went to kiss him. He offered me his cheek. Fine, I thought, getting into the car, gripping the steering wheel tightly so he wouldn’t see my hands shake. I can be patient. I can be mature. I can wait for him. He loved me so much, I thought, speeding home through the dark. He’ll love me again.

SIX

When I took Psychology 101, the professor taught us about random reinforcement. Put three groups of rats in three separate cages, each equipped with a bar. The first group of rats got a pellet every time they pressed the bar. The second group never got pellets, no matter how often they pressed. And the third group got pellets just once in a while.

The first group, the professor said, eventually gets bored with the guaranteed reward and the rats who never get treats give up, too. But the random rats will press on that bar forever, hoping each time they press that this time the magic will happen, that this time they’ll get lucky. It was at that moment in class that I realized that I had become my father’s rat.

He’d loved me once. I remembered it. I had a handful of mental pictures, postcards that had gotten soft around the edges from being handled so often. Scene one: Cannie, age three, snug in her father’s lap, her head against his chest, feeling his voice rumble through her as he read Where the Wild Things Are. Scene two: Cannie, age six, holding hands with her daddy as he led her through the doors of the elementary school on a warm summer Saturday to take her first grade readiness test. “Don’t be shy,” he tells her, kissing both her cheeks. “You’ll do great.”

I remember being ten years old spending whole days with my father, running errands, meeting his secretary, and Mrs. Yee at the dry cleaners who did his shirts, the salesman at the clothing store who looked at my father with respect as he paid for his suits. We’d pick up brie at the fancy cheese shop that smelled wonderfully of freshly roasted coffee beans, and jazz records at Old Vinyl. Everyone knew my father’s name. “Dr. Shapiro,” they’d greet him, smiling at him, at us, lined up in a row, from oldest to youngest, with me at the head of the line. He’d put one big warm hand on my head, stroking my ponytail. “This is Cannie, my oldest,” he’d say. And all of them, from the clerks at the cheese store to the security guards in his building, seemed to know not just who he was, but who I was, too. “Your father says you’re very smart,” they’d say, and I’d stand there, smiling, trying to look smart.

But days like that became rare as I got older. The truth was, my father mostly ignored me. He ignored all of us— Lucy, and Josh, and even my mother. He came home late, he left home early, he spent his weekends in the office or on long drives “to clear my head.” Whatever affection we got, whatever notice he paid us, was parceled out in small doses, administered infrequently. But oh, when he loved me, when he put his hand on my head, when I leaned my own head against him… there was no feeling in the world that could beat it. I felt important. I felt cherished. And I would do whatever it took, press the bar until my hands bled, to get that feeling again.

He left us for the first time when I turned twelve. I came home from school and there he was, unexpectedly, in the bedroom, piling undershirts and sock balls into a suitcase. “Dad?” I asked him, startled to see him in the daytime. “Are you… are we…” I wanted to ask if we were going somewhere— a trip, maybe? His eyes were heavy and hooded. “Ask your mother,” he said. “She’ll explain.” And my mother did explain it— that both she and my father loved us very much, but they couldn’t work things out between the two of them. I was still numb from the shock of that when I found out the truth of what was going on from Hallie Cinti, one of the popular girls. Hallie was on my soccer team, but in a completely different league socially. On the field she frequently looked as though she’d prefer that I not pass to her, as if my foot on the ball could transmit my own personal taint and send nerd-germs creeping through her cleats. Three years later she’d be infamous for administering restorative blow-jobs to three of the five starters on the boys’ basketball team during half-time of the state play-offs, and we’d all be calling her Hallie Cunti, but I didn’t know that yet.

“Heard about your father,” she said, plunking herself down at my table, which was in a corner of the lunchroom where Hallie Cinti and her ilk rarely ventured. The chess club kids and my friends from Junior Debaters stared, open-mouthed, as Hallie and her friend Jenna Lind slung their purses over the backs of two plastic chairs and stared at me.

“Heard what?” I asked warily. I didn’t trust Hallie, who’d ignored me through six years of school, or Jenna, whose hair was always perfectly feathered.

Hallie, as it turned out, couldn’t wait to tell me. “I heard my Mom talking about it last night. He moved in with some dental technician on Copper Hill Road.”

I toyed with my peanut butter sandwich, buying time. Was this true? How could Hallie’s mother know? And why was she talking about it? My mind was fluttering with questions, plus the half-remembered faces of all the women who’d ever scraped my teeth.

Jenna leaned in to deliver the coup de grace. “We heard,” she said, “that she’s only twenty-seven.”

Well. So that would explain the gossip. Hallie and Jenna stared at me, and my debate-team friends stared at them staring. I felt like I’d been suddenly thrust onstage, and I didn’t know my lines, or even what I was supposed to be performing.

“So is it true?” Hallie asked impatiently.

“It’s no big deal,” said Jenna, evidently hoping to get me to spill via sympathy. “My parents are divorced.”

Divorced, I thought, tasting the word. Was this really what was happening? Would my Dad do this to us?

I lifted my eyes to the popular girls. “Go away,” I told them. I heard one of my debate friends gasp. Nobody talked to Jenna and Hallie that way. “Leave me alone. Go away!”

Jenna rolled her eyes. Hallie shoved her seat back. “You’re a big fat loser,” she opined, before scurrying back to the popular kids’ tables, where everyone’s shirts had little alligators, and all the girls ever had for lunch was Diet Coke.

I walked home slowly and found my mother in the kitchen, with about ten half-unpacked bags of groceries arrayed on the counters and dining room table. “Is Dad living with someone else?” I blurted. She shoved three packages of chicken breasts into the freezer and sighed, her hands on her hips.

“I didn’t want you to find out like this,” she murmured. “Hallie Cinti told me,” I said.

My mother sighed again.

“But she doesn’t know anything,” I said, hoping my mother would agree.

Instead she sat at the kitchen table and motioned for me to join her. “Mrs. Cinti works at the same hospital as your Dad,” she said.

So it was true.

“You can tell me things. I’m not a little kid.” But at that moment, I wished that I was a little kid— the kind whose parents still read to her in bed and held her hands when she crossed the streets.

My mother sighed. “I think this might be for your father to tell you.”

But that conversation never happened, and two nights later, my father had moved back. Josh and Lucy and I stood in the backyard and watched him pull the suitcase out of the trunk of his little red sports car. Lucy was crying, and Josh was trying not to. My father never even looked at us as he crossed the gravel driveway, the heels of his boots crunching with each step.

“Cannie?” Lucy sniffled. “If he’s back now, that’s good, isn’t it? He won’t leave anymore, right?”

I stared at the door, watching it slowly close behind him. “I don’t know,” I said. I needed answers. My father was unapproachable, my mother was no help. “Don’t worry,” she scolded me. Her own face was etched with lines of sleeplessness. “Everything’s going to be fine, honey.” This from my mother, who never called me honey. As much as I dreaded it, I would have to go right to the source.

I found Hallie Cinti in the girls’ room the next Monday afternoon. She was standing at the mirror, squinted as she reapplied Bonnie Belle lip gloss. I cleared my throat. She ignored me. I tapped her on her shoulder and she turned to face me, her lips pursed in distaste.

“What?” she spat.

I cleared my throat as she glared at me. “Um… that thing… about my father,” I began.

Hallie rolled her eyes and pulled a pink plastic comb out of her purse.

“He moved back,” I said.

“How swell for you,” said Hallie, now combing her bangs.

“I thought maybe you might have heard why. From your mom.”

“Why should I tell you anything?” she sneered.

I’d spent the whole weekend planning for this contingency. What could I, plump and unpopular Cannie Shapiro, offer sleek, beautiful Hallie? I pulled two items out of my backpack. The first was a five-page paper on light and dark imagery in Romeo and Juliet. The other was a fifth of vodka that I’d swiped from my parents’ liquor cabinet that morning. Hallie and her crew might not have been as academically advanced as I was, but they made up for it in other fields of endeavor.