Then She Found Me (14 page)

Dwight took a sheet of white paper from the student and read it, frowning. He slapped it with the back of his hand and said, “Here you go—
Call It Sleep
. Great novel.”

The student turned the paper around and studied it. “Do you know how long it is?” he asked.

Dwight looked up at me and said,
“The
single most important criterion when choosing a book for a book report.”

“It’s due Friday,” said the boy.

Dwight laughed and pointed to the card catalogue. “Under title or author. Go.”

“Thanks,” said the student.

Dwight waited a few seconds and said quietly, “Next.”

“Hi,” I said.

He reached inside his V-neck to his shirt pocket, flashed our note, and returned it to its hiding place. “Is this from you?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Disguised your handwriting.”

Didn’t mean to, I said.

He patted his breast pocket. “Were you serious?”

I nodded.

“I accept,” he said. He looked at me then the way I imagined we’d look at each other away from school, weeks from now.

“This Saturday?”

“I’m free,” he said.

“Good.”

“Where are you taking me?” he asked.

“What do you like to do, besides drink coffee?”

“Go to movies. Eat pizza. Same things you young folks like to do.”

I smiled.

“What?” he asked.

“You’re funny. No one gives you credit for that around here. But you can be quite … I don’t know.”

“Droll?”

“You don’t let everyone see that side.”

“Just you,” he said lightly.

I checked to see who was watching. “Why do you suppose that is?”

He pushed his glasses up, pretended to be reading a notice taped to the circulation desk, and quietly intoned, “Let me count the ways.”

Another student, a girl wearing several gold wires through each earlobe, approached with a note. Dwight read it and said, “Fine.” She thanked him and left, smirking at me as if I’d understand.

I muttered, “Not a conflict for Saturday night, I hope?”

He laughed. “Just my type.”

“Because I asked first.”

He touched his breast pocket again. “I wasn’t sure you had. I thought it might have been a trick … Anne-Marie intercepting my note and toying with me.”

No trick, I said. Absolutely not.

“Good.”

“Besides, you should have recognized a behavior pattern here. It wasn’t the first time I asked you out.”

He shook his head.

“No?”

“That was different. That was an accident. That was when you were a Kennedy.”

“That was before,” I said.

“Before what?”

I smiled. He stared at my hair for a few seconds and then lowered his gaze to smile back. I said, “I’d better let you get back to work.”

“Why?”

“You know.”

I moved a half-step backward, but returned. “Come for dinner?”

“I’d like that.”

We said bye, just mouthing the word. See you tomorrow.

Maybe I’ll give you a call tonight, he said.

Dinner at Bernice’s tonight. But tomorrow night? I’ll give you directions, I said. We’ll set a time.

We’ll talk, he said.

B
ernice peered critically into my face across her dining room table and said, “You look different.”

I said my hair had been trimmed a good half-inch. She shook that answer off impatiently and said, “That’s not what I’m seeing.”

I shrugged.

Bernice pushed her empty dinner plate toward me to make room for her elbows and assume a position of greater intimacy. “How’s Dwight?” she asked smartly.

Fine, I said.

“It’s him. That was a lie detector test and the needles went haywire.”

I asked what it was she thought I was not telling her.

Bernice touched her cigarette briefly to her lip and peered again through a squint. “You’ve slept with him. That’s what’s coming across.”

I said, “I know this is your favorite topic of conversation, but it’s not mine.”

“How do you know? We’ve hardly touched on the subject. You might enjoy it.”

I said no. I wouldn’t. And just for the record, Dwight and I had never even had a date, let alone sex.

“I have a very good reason for asking you if you’ve consummated your relationship. It has nothing to do with prurient interest.”

“What’s the reason?”

“Don’t jump down my throat.”

I said I wouldn’t.

She straightened up for the announcement. “I think Dwight’s gay.”

I didn’t answer immediately. Then I said, “I used to think that before I knew him.”

“Something’s missing—a male-female connection. You know what I’m talking about? It isn’t there.”

“Where?” I asked.

Bernice held out her hands and interlocked her fingers. I was supposed to know what that symbolized. “The connection,” she repeated. “A look that men send out. An attitude. Something in the way their pupils dilate.”

“Dwight’s not at ease around women, if that’s what you’re picking up. I think you’re used to ladies’ men.”

“Ladies’ men! That’s such a dated term. In my experience—and I see a lot of men in a lot of different contexts—they look at you and you know. Not that they’re coming on to you, but that they would if they could. I’m not talking action, either. Cardinal Law was on the show once and I felt, even there, a certain
presence
. A muted sexuality.”

I asked if she was saying this so I would testify to Dwight’s heterosexual activities. Because, actually, I had only recently—long after that dinner at the Ritz—acknowledged
that I have feelings for him. We were going out Saturday night. For the first time.

“I’m only telling you what concerns me. Men can make friends with women for appearance’s sake. Let’s say they have a high-visibility job and want to have the trappings of a heterosexual life. Men marry women for appearance’s sake. And have children.”

“And you think you’re the litmus test? No man can resist you and if he doesn’t drool when he talks to you he must be gay?”

Bernice clucked in annoyance. “Why do you think I brought this up?” she demanded.

Because. This is how you think, and view the world, and this is how you carry on conversations. I said, “I have no idea. Tell me.”

“Because I don’t want you used and I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“You don’t think it hurts me when you characterize Dwight as a closet gay? Or worse—as a conniving closet gay. Or at best, a sexless heterosexual?”

Bernice got up and went into the kitchen. I could tell she wasn’t mad, but that for her things were just getting interesting. She was doing something about dessert and coffee so she could return to the conversation undistracted. I followed her into her Pullman kitchen, all black in startling ways: black porcelain sink, black granite counters, black marble tiles on the walls.

“I’ve got some Girl Scout cookies in the freezer, unopened,” she offered.

I said, “No thanks, just coffee.”

“One of the cameramen nailed me for his kid. I said, ‘Sure, one of each.’ I couldn’t believe they get two-fifty a box. I figure it’s a write-off, though.”

As I listened I experimented with speeches:
I know you don’t find him attractive—I didn’t either at first—but I feel this
… this tenderness when I see him. Part of it has to do with the way he looks. Those bones sticking out. It turns my heart inside out when I look at him now. Same face, same long arms, everything I used to find homely
… I said, “I feel as if you’ve spoiled something. That it’s your own vanity and it has nothing to do with Dwight.”

She turned around, surprise making her expression friendly and inquisitive. Then: “What makes you so insecure? You certainly don’t get it from me.”

“Criticizing you makes me insecure?”

“You need one hundred percent approval. You want me to like everything you do and love everyone you love: your brother, your dead parents, Dwight,
Latin
. A really secure person doesn’t need positive reinforcement for everything.”

“I’m not looking for your approval. I just want to have a conversation with you that makes me feel as if we’re moving forward and not circling each other like wrestlers on the mat. It’s incredibly frustrating because you never just listen and say, ‘That’s nice, April.’ You always have to make a big deal out of everything. Sometimes I don’t care, but this one really offends me.”

Bernice looked excited, even happy. “Just tell me I’m wrong, then. Say: ‘Dwight is incredibly sexy and you don’t know what you’re talking about!’”

“I will.”

“Good.” She handed me a molded plastic tray, black, with cups, saucers, and packets of Equal. I followed her obediently into her living room, which was dominated by an immense curving sectional sofa unholstered in fawn-colored suede. Bernice sat down and faced me, still looking happy and expectant. We sipped coffee. I asked her what bean it was.

“Bean?” she repeated. “How do I know?”

“It’s very smooth,” I said.

“Doesn’t all coffee come from Colombia?”

I said, God, no. Africa, Jamaica, Sumatra, Hawaii, Costa Rica … Didn’t she go into coffee specialty shops?

“Since when did you become a coffee maven?” she asked.

“Dwight got me interested. He mail-orders his beans.”

Bernice was not impressed. What did one expect an effeminate librarian to get through the mail if not coffee beans?

I said, setting my cup down first on the coffee table, “Ever think about where Jack Flynn might be?”

I thought I saw a flash of confusion in her eyes, as if the name Jack Flynn didn’t match any signal in her brain. She said quickly, “Ah, the handsome Jack Flynn.”

“Do you have any ideas?”

“In jail, probably, for statutory rape.”

I confessed I sometimes looked in the phone book under John Flynn, just to see how many there were. Maybe to see if one might jump out at me.

“You wouldn’t be interested in him.”

I shrugged—for my medical history. Maybe I had some half sisters or brothers.

“You certainly haven’t demonstrated any great interest in your birth
mother,”
she said. “Are you hoping something will click with him?”

“You don’t think I’m interested in you?”

Bernice released a forced “ha,” then clamped her hand over her mouth as if such rudeness had escaped against her will.

“You think I’m cold?” I asked.

“You’re pretty goddamn Germanic.”

“Trude and Julius’s fault, of course.”

“Let’s just say you’re not the cuddly type.”

I said I knew. I had always been sarcastic. Dwight made me laugh, though, and I was laughing more these days. Had she noticed Dwight had a very dry sense of humor, even a zany streak?

I couldn’t bring myself to stop. She seemed to sink farther into the cushions of the couch. Usually a silence meant she was pouting, but this seemed different. I asked if something was wrong.

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “And I’ve got vegetarian cookbook authors coming on tomorrow.”

“You look more sad than tired,” I said. Then I saw tears in her eyes. She looked away.

“What is it?” I asked.

She rubbed the nap on the suede seat beside her, forcing it one way, then the other. “I get sad at night,” she said. She abandoned her design and sipped from her mug.

I said, “I know. I used to get sad at night, too.”

“But not anymore!” she sang with a false brightness. “Now you’ve got a date Saturday night. And your marvelous family memories. Everything’s peachy keen.”

I knew what would cheer her up. I paused a few moments and volunteered: “My parents would have been upset about my dating Dwight.”

Everything about her brightened: her eyes, her posture. Her grip on her cup changed as she tried to subdue her excitement. “Why?” she cried.

“Not Jewish. German-American.”

“He’s
Ger
man?” she breathed.

“Way back.”

“But they were German- and Austrian-Americans, too!”

“Big difference,” I said.

She put her cup down on the smoky glass coffee table and lit a cigarette. “Do you know this for a fact, that they’d disapprove?” she asked.

I nodded gravely.

The fingers holding the cigarette formed a V in front of her nose; her thumbnail was caught between her teeth. “What haven’t you told me?” she finally asked.

I slipped off my shoes and pulled my legs up under me on the couch. I held my mug with both hands. When I was twenty-nine, almost thirty, I told her, when they were both still alive, when Freddie was in his early twenties, living at home, I had this boyfriend, Peter.

“Not Jewish,” said Bernice.

“Polish,” I said. “Pieciak.” I went home for dinner on a Friday night by myself to tell them I was seeing him. I worked it into the conversation—my friend Peter this, my friend Peter that. They didn’t react. Finally I said, “He’s a brother of someone I knew in graduate school. We’re dating.”

My father asked what his name was and I told him. They consulted their plates, pushed some brisket onto the backs of their forks. Not a Jewish name, their food seemed to tell them. Not a Jewish boy. Not right for April. Or us. I said something like “Sorry to have to bring you such sad news.”