The Year of Pleasures (26 page)

I headed for the stairs, Matthew following me. As we passed Jovani’s door it opened and he stood squinting out at us, my cashmere throw over his shoulders. “Why you don’t make her go, Matthew?”

Now came Melanie’s voice: “Mind your own goddamn business, Jovani!”

Jovani straightened indignantly, then stepped out into the hall to say loudly, “Listen, Melanie. I am educated man. I don’t want fire.” He smiled at me. “Good night, Betta.” He closed the door quietly.

Maybe he didn’t want fire. But I did.

The next morning I called Lorraine. It was early enough that I got her, and late enough that she didn’t sound crabby. “I need you to do me a favor,” I said.

“Yes?”

“It would involve coming back here again, but I’d buy your ticket.”

“I’ve still got miles. And I can come anytime—I’ve got no work at the moment. What do you need?”

I told her about Matthew and Melanie, and the impromptu scheme Jovani had come up with. “I’m in,” she said. “I love it. All except for the Tom part.”

“Well, but I think the double-date idea is really smart. It makes it not so obvious.”

“So I have to go out with some jerk? Can’t you find another guy?”

“Tom’s not a jerk!”

“Well, you haven’t make him sound particularly appealing, Betta.”

“First of all, I’ve exaggerated a few things. Second, he’s just going to be a . . . prop. And Matthew is
adorable.
”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

She yawned, then asked in an overly casual way, “How old is he?” If she were a cat, she’d be lying on the windowsill, slit-eyed, flicking her tail.

“Too young for you,” I said.

“How young is too young?”

“He’s barely over twenty.”

“Mmmm! A challenge!”

The last thing poor Matthew needed was another challenge in the world of women. But here was call-waiting. I told Lorraine to make arrangements to come the Friday after Christmas, and to let me know the flight times. I’d straighten her out when she got here.

It was Tom on the other line. “I’ve got a favor,” I said.

“Done,” he answered.

Oh, he was a nice man. I needed to loosen up. Next time, I’d sleep with him. I would. Maybe I would.

That night around eight o’clock, too restless to read, I flung down my book, went into the kitchen, poured myself a glass of wine, and downed it quickly, standing at the sink. Then I went upstairs and took off the pajamas I’d put on an hour earlier. I showered, brushed my teeth again, and dressed in black underwear, black pants, and a low-cut green sweater. I applied my makeup with great care. Then I drove over to Tom’s house and knocked at the door. When he opened it, I said, “Surprise!”

“Betta!”

I moved in closer. “I brought something for you.” All the way over, I’d been thinking about a time I went to John’s office at the end of his day. I’d sat in the waiting room wearing nothing but a trench coat. When the last patient had exited, her eyes reddened, a bouquet of Kleenex in her hand, I’d knocked on the door. “One moment, please,” John had said, and then, when he’d opened the door and saw me standing there, he’d said, “Betta!” And I’d said, “Surprise!” And I’d come in and waited on his sofa, getting more and more aroused, while he finished making notes. Then I’d stood and dropped the coat.

And that is what I wanted now. I wanted it. Sudden sex, immediate gratification, no prelude.

“What did you bring?” Tom asked, looking around for a package of some kind, I supposed.

“Me.”

“Well, that’s lovely.”

“Well, no. The surprise is . . . can we go up to your bedroom?”

He actually blushed. For a terrible moment, I thought he was going to say, “Well, I’m sorry, Betta, but I’ve got someone here. I wish you’d called.” But he didn’t say that. He let me in and gestured, boylike, toward the stairs. I started up.

My heart was racing in the loveliest of ways. And for the first time, there was no ambivalence in me. John used to call me controlling sometimes, even in affection, and I supposed I was. I felt much more comfortable being the one to initiate things. But I was still alive, I still wanted all the things I could have. And here was one of them, an attractive man moving up the steps behind me in the slow and measured way of someone who knew exactly where he was going.

I took off my coat and lay down on his bed. He hesitated, then stretched out beside me. He smiled and stroked my cheek. “This really is a surprise.” He dimmed the bedside light. “I’ll need to . . . get ready.”

At first I was confused, thinking he didn’t want to undress before me. But then I realized he meant condoms. I felt deeply embarrassed. I had no diseases! But of course condoms would protect me, too. They were the modern version of walking on the street side. Oh, I hadn’t counted on this. I’d forgotten how dangerous the times were, how far from the time when I’d met John. “Okay,” I said. “Well, I’ll just wait for you!”

“You might get undressed,” he said.

I thought of the care with which I’d selected my underwear, how I’d imagined his appreciative eyes on my breasts held just so inside the brilliantly designed brassiere.

“All right,” I said.

But it came to me, as I pulled my clothes off and put them in a neat pile on the floor, that all of this was not so much about sex. Despite the racy images I’d revved myself up with on the way over, this was about something else. When I was in sixth grade, I had a textbook that showed two Neanderthals, a man and a woman, standing at the mouth of their cave. Outside a storm raged. Wild animals roamed. Danger was everywhere. The man and woman offered each other a naÏve and specific sense of safety. They held hands and stared out at all they seemed to protect each other from, at least for the moment. On their faces were wonder and relief.

At 4
A.M.
I heard the clock on my mantel strike again. I lay wrapped in my tangled sheets for a while, then gave up trying to sleep and went downstairs to look for the book I was currently reading.

When Tom had come back to his bed, he’d been wearing a black, hooded bathrobe that I found both ominous and silly-looking. What was he, a boxer? He took off the robe before he got under the covers with me. On his half-erect penis, I saw a yellow condom, and for one brief moment, I felt like vomiting. But then I slid myself beneath him and sighed contentedly, relishing that familiar weight. We kissed, and this was enjoyable. We caressed each other, and this too was enjoyable. And then, when I thought enough time had passed, I tried to signal that I was ready. The problem was, he was not. Nor did he become so. No matter what I did, no matter
what
I did, he did not become so. After a while, he pushed me onto my back, laughed against my shoulder where earlier I had put a bit of perfume, and mumbled, “Sorry.” He hesitated, then started to move down, kissing my chest, then my stomach, but I pulled him back up, perhaps a bit too aggressively. “It’s all right,” I said, and then his phone rang and I felt sure, I was positive, that it was divine intervention, a throwaway favor in the face of scorching humiliation. “Go ahead and get that,” I said, and he said, almost at the same time, “I think I’d better answer that.”

He’d gone downstairs to talk, ignoring the bedside phone, and I realized that what I did not know about him was vast. How many condoms were left in the box, for example? I’d dressed by the time he returned and refused his offer of a conciliatory glass of wine. I told him I’d see him on Saturday night, when he would be posing as Matthew’s uncle.

“I’ll call you before then,” he’d said. “Maybe we can do something.”

I’d answered, brightly and insincerely, “Do!” but I’d thought,
The hell we will.
Then I’d thought,
I will never tell anyone about this.

I found the book I was looking for on the kitchen table. But before going back upstairs, I went to the Chinese chest and sat before it. I leaned my head against the deep drawer holding those many slips of papers, those words that I wanted so much to understand but, for the most part, could not. “John,” I whispered. “I need you.” The clock chimed the quarter hour—gently, it seemed to me, even apologetically—but that was all I heard. I looked around the room. The absence of movement was all I saw. Tomorrow, I would be so tired. Already, I was.

Late Wednesday afternoon I lay on the sofa reading. I could hear Benny sighing in the kitchen as he did his homework, and finally I went in to see what the problem was. I hoped he wasn’t doing math. Last time I’d helped him, we’d gotten an F.

“Benny?” I said. “How are you doing?”

“Terrible.”

“What’s up?”

He didn’t answer.

I sat in the chair opposite him, reached out to touch his arm.

“Deborah wants to break up with me,” he said.

“Deborah?”

“Yeah. My girlfriend.”

“The one who—”

“I never told you about her. Because she’s the one I really liked, and I just didn’t want to tell anybody about her. But we’ve been together for almost a month, and now she wants to break up with me.”

“I’m sorry. Is it because of those other girls?”

“No, she thought that was funny. But there’s this other kid? John Hansen? He really likes her? And he talks to her all the time even though he knows she’s my girlfriend? She told me a long time ago she can’t stand him. But now she likes him and not me anymore. That’s what she told me today. And John Hansen was, like, all watching us.”

He tapped his pencil rapidly against the table. He looked very close to tears. I supposed I should say something about time healing all wounds, that there would be another girl, that there would be many other girls. Instead, I said, “So . . . you really feel bad.”

“Yeah,” he said. “And I tried to be, like, so what, but it didn’t work.” He searched my face. “Do you think if you fall in love twice, the first one wasn’t real?”

“No. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. Most people love more than once in their lives. I think you will, too. And what I believe about love is that any kind is good. And the thing about life is, you never know what’s around the next corner.”

He sighed deeply. “Betta?”

“Yes?”

“Could you make prime rib tonight?”

I laughed. “Really?”

Finally, he smiled. “Yeah. It’s my favorite food.”

I stood. “Okay, Benny. Let’s go to the grocery store.”

As we were putting our coats on, I said, “What do you want with your prime rib?”

“Twice-baked potatoes and Caesar salad. If that’s okay.”

“It’s fine.” I grabbed my purse and we ran out to the car. “So, when they ask you what you want to be when you grow up, what do you say, ‘Gourmand’?”

“What’s that?” He shivered, and I turned up the fan, though all it was blowing out was cold air.
Turn up the steam!
my old-world grandfather used to say, never understanding that you had to let a car warm up first. His impatient genes lived inside me, insisting on repetitions of behavior without regard for logic.

“A gourmand is a food lover,” I told Benny. “Is that what you’re going to be?”

“Nah. I want to pitch for the Yankees. A-Rod made twenty-five million last year.”

As we drove down the street, he leaned back in his seat. “This is awesome,” he said. “Deborah could never do this.”

Do what?
I wanted to ask.
Drive? Cook? Listen to your troubles?
But I just said, “I know. She’s really a terrible person.”

“See?” he said. “You know that and you never even met her.”

“Sometimes,” I told Delores, “I feel like I’m forgetting him already. I remember what he looked like, I don’t mean that, but certain other things, little things. I just don’t remember anymore.”

“I know, honey.” She reached over to squeeze my hand. “Sorry. Got some egg salad on you.”

It was Friday afternoon, and we were out for what Delores had called our annual Christmas lunch. It made for a kind of panic in me, thinking about what the holiday would be like without John. Thanksgiving hadn’t even registered; Carol had invited me to come with her and Benny to her sister’s house; I’d declined and had spent the day in peaceful solitude. But Christmas was different. So pushy.