The Wonder Spot (35 page)

After our dishes were cleared, he said, “I feel so great with you.”

After port, he leaned over and kissed me on the lips.

After he'd paid the check, he led me out to the sidewalk and pulled me against him.

It seemed like the best and most natural thing to bring Neil home with me—if only my friend Kate hadn't said, “Make an effort not to be in the moment.”
What?
“Don't sleep with him on your first date.” When I'd said,
Are you crazy?
she'd named names.

In the cab, I told the driver, “Two stops.”

When I walked into my apartment the phone rang. It was Neil calling me from the cab.

. . . . .

I saw him a few nights later, and a few nights later and a few nights later. He called me at the office every morning and afternoon, and
for up to an hour after each call I said yes to everything. Yes, I would proofread another copywriter's copy. Yes, I could go to a focus group during lunch. Yes, Joe and I could meet with the client on Friday.

Joe came into my office and said, “Did you say we'd be ready to meet with the client on Friday?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you nuts?”

“Yes.”

“I told them to forget it,” he said.

“Great.”

. . . . .

When Neil asked me to go to a play, I tried to act as though many, many men had taken me to many, many plays; meanwhile, I felt as though he'd draped a floor-length ermine cape around my shoulders and handed me a scepter.

In my giddiness, I told the truth: “Sometimes I get claustrophobic at plays.”

“We don't have to go, Bugsy,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I want to.” I explained that I'd be okay as long as I had a Life Saver. “I don't know why,” I said. “It's like I'll be able to escape through my mouth.”

He gave me the name and address of the theater. “I'll be there with bells on,” he said.

My brain and nether region reacted as a single entity to Neil:
Yes,
they said. This was a general yes, however, and there was disagreement on the specifics. My brain, for example, wanted me to delay sleeping with him, not on principle but simply on the grounds of,
What's the rush?

My nether region answered what the rush was.

Once you sleep together,
my brain said,
you can never go back to how you were before.

My brain had a point: Why not prolong this happy stage? There would be years and years of sleeping together.

Mind over body, I didn't clean my apartment or wash my sheets—insurance against bringing Neil home.

. . . . .

Outside the theater, Neil said, “You look beautiful,” and from his expression I could see that he really thought so, which made me feel that I was.

I said, “You look nice, too,” and he did; he wore a red bow tie and a dark gray suit.

At our orchestra seats, he handed me a roll of cherry Life Savers. We held hands; we tickled each other's arms; we watched the play, or tried to.

Afterward, Neil took me to the white sofas and ottomans in the lobby bar at the Royalton for a late supper.

On my third glass of wine, I told him that I thought it was probably a good idea for us to wait to sleep together. “I think it will be better,” I said, though I couldn't remember why. “It will mean more,” I said, without conviction.

“I'll wait if you want to,” he said. “I can respect your wishes. But I'm ready now.”

Back at my apartment, I said, “Sorry for the mess.”

My nether region said,
Are you kidding?

He said, “I don't care.”

For a long time, we kissed on the sofa; we lay on the sofa; on the sofa, we took off his bow tie, we took off my camisole, we took off everything.

As a joke, I said, “Another reason I think we should wait . . .”

When we got up to go to my bed-sized bedroom I said that we could either sleep on dirty sheets or strip the bed to the bare mattress and pretend I was a crack whore.

He said, “Crack whore,” and I thought I'd never heard anything so romantic.

. . . . .

Adam was the busiest friend I had—by day, he worked in public television, by night he wrote plays—and I was thrilled whenever he called.

After we'd talked for only a few minutes, he said, “What are you taking?”

I told him about Neil.

Adam told me that he'd never heard me sound so happy, and he'd known me since I was twenty-two; we'd worked in publishing together.

“What about when I was with Chris—I didn't sound like I was on drugs?”

“With Chris you sounded like you were strung out on heroin.”

Then he told me why he was calling: I'd asked him to tell me if he heard about a job, and he had. “It's a nature series from the BBC,” he said. “They need writers to Americanize it.”

I admitted that I didn't know anything about science.

He said, “I don't think you have to know anything,” and I said, “Sweeter words were never spake.”

He said he'd call me when he found out more.

When we hung up, I thought,
I have a new job.

. . . . .

At some point, with every recent boyfriend, I'd become aware of all the girlfriends who'd preceded me in bed; I'd felt their presence, if only in the form of his expertise. It could be lonely, no matter what my nether region had to say about it.

With Neil, it was just us.

With Neil, I could believe I was the only woman he'd ever slept with, and I knew this wasn't far from the truth.

I am going to teach you everything,
I thought.
I will teach you how to be a hundred lovers to me and I will be a hundred lovers to you and we will never need anyone else.

In sleep, he was already an expert at what you can never teach: He held me all night long, his arms wrapped around me, his chest to my chest.

. . . . .

Neil and I stayed together for nights on end, lost in the Bermuda Triangle of early love.

Then I got a stomach flu. I told him I needed to spend the night alone.

“Do you have diarrhea?” Neil asked. “Loose stools?”

I said, “I'm not talking to you about my stools.”

He dropped off ginger ale and made toast for me. He took my temperature. He kissed my forehead and said, “Good night, Bugsy,” and I had never felt so cared for.

. . . . .

Adam called and said, “I don't think you want this job.”

“Why don't I?”

“It's a political series.”

I was about to say,
I thought it was about nature,
but then I realized what he meant.

“The executive producer is happy just changing teatime to coffee break,” he said. “The series producer thinks American audiences expect more drama from nature than the English.” It was a lot of work to apply for the job, he said; I'd have to write a completely new script for the first episode.

I said, “Bring it on.”

He asked if I could do it over the weekend, and I said, “Of course I can.”

He sent the tape and script over by messenger. I was happy just looking at my name typed on the address label. I thought of all the times I'd dreaded the question
What do you do?
Now I said aloud, “I work at PBS.”

. . . . .

Neil said that he wished he could help—he loved nature programs—but he was spending the weekend with Ella in Boston.

The episode was a day in the life of a pond.

The voice of an Englishman nearly dead with boredom deigned to narrate the program, deadening such dead lines such as, “A spider guards her precious eggs,” and, “The water boatman skims the surface in search of prey.”

For tranquil scenes, harp music possibly meant for a Japanese tea
ceremony was played; for violence, violins that reminded me of the score from
Psycho.

I called Jack, who suggested I look for the most compelling characters. I liked the water boatman, but he wasn't really on what you could call a journey. The frog was charismatic, but it was hard to forgive him after he'd eaten the eggs the spider had risked her life to produce. The rainstorm seemed like a climax, but of what?

I rewound, I pressed Play, I rewound, I pressed Play, and each time I said, “You can do it!” but I couldn't.

I was back in science class, taking a test I hadn't studied for, choosing (B) just because I thought there wouldn't be three
C
s in a row.

By Saturday night, the script was so marked up that even I couldn't read it, and what I could read made no sense. I decided on (E) None of the above; I erased everything.

Sunday afternoon, I was changing
murder
back to
kill,
when it occurred to me that I'd rather murder myself than press Play again.

I called Kate, who told me that if I couldn't rewrite the first episode I couldn't rewrite the next ten, and I wouldn't want to, and I shouldn't make myself. What I should do, she said, was meet her for wine and fries, and I did.

Afterward, at home, I wrote an apologetic thank-you note to Adam and was sliding it in an envelope with the tape when Neil called.

“How's it going?” he said.

I told him, and he offered to come over and help me with the script.

For a moment I was back in the pond. “Thanks,” I said, and, “That's sweet,” but my tone said,
No, no, a thousand times no.

“Maybe you just need a break,” he said.

I told him that a break lasting for all eternity wouldn't be long enough to make me want to watch the video again.

“Are you sure?”

I paraphrased Kate: “I couldn't do it and I didn't like doing it and I shouldn't do it.”

“Good point,” he said. “Can I still come over?”

. . . . .

I couldn't bear to watch the video again, though I imitated the voice-over for Neil. He was reading the script when my mother called.

I can still remember the exuberance in her voice when she said that she was finally getting used to living alone.

“I'm actually liking it,” she said. “I'm loving it.”

I laughed out loud, I was so relieved.

I think now that must have been the weekend of her reunion with Lev Polikoff.

. . . . .

When my grandmother had her first stroke, Robert drove down to Philadelphia. He called me once she'd been transferred from Emergency to ICU to a regular room in the hospital. He was calm and reassuring: It was a minor stroke, he said.

I said, “How's Mom?”

Robert sounded mystified: “Mom is . . . great.”

. . . . .

Neil tried to explain what a stroke was, but all I heard was “. . . blood vessel . . .” and “. . . frontal lobe . . .” until he told me that the kind of stroke my grandmother had was so common that residents abbreviated it to S.O.S.L.O.L.F.O.K.F.—“Same Old Story Little Old Lady Found On Kitchen Floor.”

But my grandmother had another little stroke, and then another, and another.

The next time I saw her, at her apartment, she was a little old woman in bed, clutching a white vinyl purse.

In truth, I'd been expecting her health to fail for a long time, and not just because of her age: She'd always regarded people who got sick or died as weak and negligent, which, according to the ironic dictates of fate, would call forth her own demise. After my father's death, when she'd announced, “I exercise and eat right,” my mother had grimaced, but I'd thought,
Look out, Steeny.

I was surprised by how old she looked, but the sight of her was nothing compared to the sound. She said, “Come on in, honey bun,”
with so much affection I turned around to see if there was a honey bun behind me.

I needed to sit down. The back of my legs found a chair, but the woman occupying my grandmother's body said, “Sit with me.”

Both my mother and I sat on the bed, and my grandmother held our hands. “What can I do for you swell kids?” she said. “Would you like tea or coffee? Maybe a glass of sherry?” She offered soup, sandwiches, cake, and ice cream. If she didn't have what we wanted, she said that Laura, the nice woman taking care of her, could run out and pick something up.

My mom said a stiff, “Thank you, I'm fine,” and I wondered if her mother's sudden generosity and affection reminded her of all the decades she'd gone without.

“I bet you'd like a scotch,” my grandmother said to me.

“I would.”

She called for Laura, and said, “You look wonderful, Joyce.”