Trophy House (11 page)

While I was educating myself in the new edgy aesthetic, I was thinking of David Lipsett with guilt and a longing of the sort usually embraced by girls just into puberty. Did I consider myself to have stepped over some line not endorsed by conventional society? Not at all. As a matter of fact, I was sure I was joining those women—and, according to
Newsweek,
there were an awful lot of them—who felt that if they had to have sex with the same man for the rest of their lives they'd kill themselves.

Briefly, I had considered going to see Ground Zero, getting a ticket and standing in line, maybe for several hours, along with hundreds of others whose motives for looking down into the enormous gash in the ground were murky at best. It wasn't clear to me at all what makes people visit places, once perfectly ordinary, but now covered with the patina of the sacred. I've done it myself. The year I graduated from college, I went to Aix, where Cézanne lived for a while, looking at his house and trying to take in something from it, as if he were still hanging about the place, giving lessons to gifted students. But I hesitated about Ground Zero. There was something ghoulish about; it would be like viewing an operation on your own abdomen after being shot. My imagination—along with the television and the
New York Times
—had provided me with enough visual stuff to fill my mind for the rest of my life. So I didn't go.

Besides, I was nervous and impatient. I went back to my hotel, slipped the card into the slot—who would have thought, fifty years earlier, that a plastic rectangle would replace a brass key?—undressed and took a shower. The cake of soap smelled like generic flower, the shampoo came in a bottle the size of a container of baby aspirin. But the towel was nice and big and soft. I wrapped it around me, pulled back the cover on the double bed and lay there for a while, watching the news. I like to watch the New York City news when I'm there, things you're not apt to see elsewhere: a delicatessen in Queens robbed by two little girls with fake handguns; the kid who dropped his girlfriend's baby out of a fourth-story window; the mayor cutting a ribbon with a theatrical pair of shears at the opening of a Wal-Mart in the South Bronx; Bill Clinton, caressed by a crowd in Harlem. Everything very specific, and the cameras right there, just minutes after the crime or on the spot with Clinton and the mayor. There's a sort of small-town intimacy to these TV images, the guys in the studio doing a minimum of chitchat. There was no minibar in the room—what did I expect for under a hundred and thirty-five bucks?—or I would have treated myself to a ten-dollar, eight-ounce bottle of wine, to take the edge off. David said he would pick me up. When the phone rang, I was dressed and putting on my makeup with shaking fingers. I told him I'd be down in five minutes. I was ready in three but held back for another two.

When the elevator door opened, he was waiting right there; I nearly bumped into him. “You look great,” he said. He seemed to say that a lot. Did he really mean it, or was he nervous like I was?

“We're going to Benno's, a sort of bistro. Is that all right with you?”

“Sounds fine,” I said. He could have said Burger King and that would have been all right too. At that moment, putting a hand on my right ear, I realized I had forgotten to put on my earrings.

“Is something the matter?” he said.

“I forgot my earrings.”

“You don't need them.”

“I do.”

“Do you want to go back for them?” he said.

“I guess not.”

“You have lovely ears.” He wasn't looking at me when he said this. The force of his feeling for me was like the flash of heat when you open the oven door to see how the roast is doing.

He was wearing a gray shirt with a banded collar, buttoned up to the last button, khaki chinos and a black jacket that could have been cashmere, something very soft-looking anyway. To me he looked New York cool.

“Would you mind walking?” David asked. “It's about eight blocks.”

I told him I loved walking in the City.

Throughout most of the meal—and it was very good, portions just the right size, exotic marinated fish—we talked about work, mine and his. He enjoyed his job, that was obvious. I asked him if he had ever tried to write a book himself and he said, “When I retire. I've got a couple of ideas I'd like to try out.”

I could hardly swallow the incredible food in front of me. All I could focus on was, when were we going to jump into bed together? His tongue darted around when he took a bite off his fork, like a lizard. I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted him to kiss me every little where.

He hadn't told me what he did for sex. Did I really want to know? Did he do it with Ashley? When I was very young, my mother assured me that all men slept with their secretaries and I believed it for the longest time. No secretaries today. Today they were “assistants”; everyone wanted an upgrade. Ashley had no meat on her bones, skinny little thing. Her bones stuck out like a pre-corpse's. But even that wouldn't keep her boss from doing it with her, though he might have liked something more to grab onto. I wondered if David was browsing in the same general area that I was. Then I realized I must have been nuts. Why me when there were so many delicious younger, juicier morsels within arm's reach. Why me? What did he want with a woman deep into middle age with tired lines around her mouth, a vertical crease on her brow and about fifteen more pounds than she needed. I didn't get it; it was a near-impossible leap for me to believe that if, in fact, sex was his plan, I was the target.

“Would you like some dessert? The biscotti's great. Or espresso?” David asked me.

“I couldn't eat another thing,” I said. “And coffee keeps me awake. No. I'm all set, thanks.”

David got the bill and paid with an American Express card. I wanted to ask him if he was putting this dinner on his expense account, but didn't have the nerve.

“Well,” he said as we left Benno's and stood outside on the sidewalk, “where would you like to go now?”

“We probably ought to go to my place. It's closer,” I said.

A
S DAVID CLOSED THE
door of room number 1208, I began to imagine us as two characters in a movie, and this put me at an awkward distance from the scene, as if I were sitting in the audience, making judgments: Were the characters “realistic”? Did the plot follow some basic understanding of cause and effect? How about “motivation”—did we have a clue as to why they were doing what they were doing? Then I leapt back into the action, where the clichés made me extremely self-conscious. The camera had focused on me, and beyond that sat an unseen director watching my every move and telling me what to do. Was this going to be a teen flick, where you rip off your clothes willy-nilly, tearing buttons from their anchors, leaving your things in a heap on the carpet, flinging yourselves onto the bed and going at it like two beasts? Or would it be an “autumn of life” story, with nostalgic background music, up, while you do a languorous mating dance, with whiskey sipped to help you bury the shyness and trepidation?

“Nice room,” David said.

“It's okay.”

“I don't suppose you have anything to drink?”

“As a matter of fact, I don't.”

“No minibar?”

I shook my head. We were standing motionless, waiting to be cued, the hesitancy factor about equal in each of us. “Well.” Hesitancy was now joined by reluctance. “Do you get high?” he said, reaching into his coat pocket.

“Once in a while,” I said. “But right now it seems too much like
Annie Hall
. I think I'll give it a pass.”

What was I doing here? The wild and windy attraction had lost some of its power, downsizing from an outright hurricane to a tropical depression.

“Why don't I order something from room service?” David said.

“There's a package store just down the street,” I said.

“What's a package store?”

“A liquor store,” I said.

“Hmmm.” Was he reminded, as I was, that two hundred and fifty miles lay between us, as authentic an obstacle as a tree, fallen across the road?

“Do we really need it?”

“I guess not,” David said. He looked as if he felt exactly as I did. The oddest element of my hesitation had, I think, to do with the way I looked undressed. While David had the slimness of a person who never had to worry about calories, I was a “before” picture, familiar to readers of diet pill ads, lumpy around the thighs, heavy-breasted, my abdomen, once flat, now rounded like the second trimester of pregnancy.

“I feel silly,” I said.

“Don't,” David said. “You're anything but.”

“Do we really want to do this?”

“I do. I was hoping—given plenty of evidence, as a matter of fact—that you did too…” He trailed off. Next, he would be accusing me of being a tease, the ultimate male put-down. I suppose you can't blame them—their dicks are all dressed for the party and they have nowhere to go.

We sparred for a few minutes more, and then, like some old married couple, we offered to let the other use the bathroom, then quietly took off our clothes and, me first, got into bed. The sheets were smooth and cold, like water when you first lower yourself into the pond. David talked to me softly, close to my ear. He told me I was a lovely person inside a lovely body.

I protested that I was too fat and he said most women in New York were too thin. That's all they thought about, staying a size eight. “Eight?” I said. “It's more like a four.” I told him I knew someone who was a size zero. All the while his hands were skimming my body, landing one place, then another. He brushed me lightly with his penis, back and forth, barely touching me, and taking me to a pitch of excitement so taut I made a kind of screeching sound, as if I were being strangled; it was a noise like none I'd ever made before. “You like that?” he said. “Oh my God, yes,” I said, no longer looking on self-consciously, but right in the thick of things. He entered me easily, smoothly, then quickly pulled out. He did this several times, with no apparent effort, and each time, I rose up on my hips to meet him, then fell back as he withdrew. This was exquisitely inflammatory. “My God,” I said. “What are you doing?” “Getting you ready,” he said. “You weren't ready before.”

“I am now,” I whispered. He lay square on top of me, supporting himself on his elbows and leaving me plenty of room to thrash around in and to let my body answer whatever question his body asked me. Then, at his urging, we reversed roles, with me astride his hips, with my poor old breasts hanging down. I looked at his face; he was grinning, his eyes squeezed shut. “You're amazing,” he said. His arms and legs were thinner than Tom's, his torso longer, his chest hairier; it was covered with hair, curly black, thick as weeds. His penis was smaller than Tom's, not much but still enough for me to be aware of the differences. Nevertheless, we fit as if we had been custom-ordered for each other. We fell briefly asleep, then, waking, made love again. “You're crying,” David said.

“I'm not.”

“What's this, then?” He had lifted a tear off my face; it glistened on his finger like a tiny pearl.

“Because to be this happy is to know what you don't have most of the time—and that's terribly sad.”

He made it clear that this could go on for a long time. It was up to me. Then he told me that I was astonishing, adorable—there was that word again. I suggested that he just might be especially horny. “No,” he said. “It's you.”

I accused him of flattery and he said he didn't want to ever hear me talk that way again. He was so serious. He said I should be able to accept a compliment without turning it on its head. “I suppose you're right,” I said. “But I really don't know what to do with praise from the outside.”

Then, out of the blue he asked me if I knew that he was Jewish.

“Well, I guess I just assumed it,” I told him. “Why, does it bother you?”

“No, not really. I guess I'm just a little sensitive.”

“Nobody gives a hoot anymore—except maybe my mother.” He asked about my mother and I gave him a thumbnail sketch, bathing the picture in a faintly rosy light.

“Okay,” he said when I was finished. “And my mother would call you a shiksa.”

“So we're even?”

“We're even.” He smothered me with passionate kisses.

I didn't give a hoot whether or not David was Jewish. I had, years before, assumed he was, because his name said he was. But it hadn't even occurred to me to view his Jewishness as of any more consequence than his shirt size. My mother, on the other hand, would have said something like “Oh,
really
?” had I been foolish enough to tell her I had a Jewish lover. She was born in the so-called Roaring Twenties—although it's not clear who was doing the roaring. People like my mother didn't know any Jews back then, except maybe the man who owned the local pharmacy. Did I care that David was not a Christian? Not a bit. And then I realized that maybe it did add a little something exotic to the mix, a spice I found tasty, like fenugreek. So, basically, his Jewishness was a plus, not a minus.

“Why is it so important to you? It's not to me.”

“We're sensitive—no, ‘oversensitive' says it better. It's like an atavistic shudder. But you haven't answered my question,” David said. He was staring at the ceiling.

I told him I'd answer if he didn't let it become a thing between us and that I didn't know what was going to happen or if these few hours would ever be repeated. He interrupted me with assurances that they would be repeated. I told him I couldn't go on cheating on Tom. “And you're not even Jewish,” he said. “It's not how I want to live,” I said. “Besides, everyone I know who's had an affair says it wrecks your work, all that sneaking around and telling lies—it takes too much time and energy.” I turned on my side and lightly touched the hair on his chest—what a novelty! “You're my first,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. I thought for a moment that he was going to ask me how he compared, but thank God he spared me that. Men are so hung up on their dicks—but I knew that already.

I told him it was my turn to ask him a personal question.

“I guess it is,” he said. “What would you like to know?”

“How did you lose your little finger?”

“Oh this?” he said, holding up his hand and looking at it as if seeing it for the first time. “Fireworks, when I was a kid,” he said. “I got too close, the thing went off before we were ready. I was with my brother, Freddie. He got his eyebrows singed off. They never grew back.”

It was a pretty good story, although not quite on a dramatic par with alligator or thresher or chain saw.

“You don't really need your little finger,” he said. “I've stopped noticing.”

I asked him how old he was when it happened. “Nine,” he said, “and fearless.”

David spent the night with me in the Rhinelander Hotel. The next morning, after making love a third time, we took a shower together, soaping each other's best parts, then dressed and went out for some breakfast. We found a deli cafeteria a few doors down the street, the sort of place that doesn't exist in Watertown or Truro, where you fill your plate with chunks of melon, berries, salmon and cream cheese and whatever else looks good from bowls sitting on ice on a steel buffet counter, and bring it to the cashier who weighs it and charges you accordingly. A swift river of people on their way to work came in to buy breakfast to go, coffee in paper mugs, bagels slathered with cream cheese, a cup of fresh cut-up fruit. “Are you sad?” I asked David. The sex magnetism was still severe; it was all I could do to keep from leaning over and kissing him on the mouth.

“I'm sad. Because you're leaving.”

“I'm too old,” I said, leaving most of what I was thinking unsaid: We're not kids. I have a husband and a life I've constructed out of a medium-sized talent and true grit. What I feel might be love. On the other hand, it's just as likely to be a sudden rush of passion, mixed with a sense of going nowhere and desperate to move—any-where. The bottom line was, whenever sex is involved, you don't know what you feel—except that you want more sex. You have to engage in the daily comings and goings for months, maybe years, before you know whether it's love or just sex that's gluing the two of you together. Do you really like the guy? Do you both think the same people are weird? Do you both dismiss New Agey thinking as stupid? Can you stand his nasty habits? Does he genuinely care about what happens to you?

“Too old for what? Not too old to make me your slave.”

“You're kidding, yes? I don't want you to be my slave.”

“I
am
kidding,” he said. “But I mean, after last night, we've got to be more than working friends. I see us together. Or rather, I want us to be together. You have a lot of thinking to do, I know that. It's easier for me.”

Neither of us had said
I love you,
among the most delicate phrases in the English language—unless you're a sociopath who wouldn't hesitate to use it to secure any number of things you fancy. For most of us, it's a sacred phrase, to be employed only when the mixture contains exactly the right amounts of its assorted elements: sex, pleasure, warmth, reciprocity, humor and, above all else, the appetite—and stamina—to spend years together without descending into boredom, resentment, betrayal, ill will. I tried to imagine eating breakfast with David Lipsett for the next twenty-plus years of eight o'clocks. It was pretty hard, mainly because he was—I faced it—a stranger. That I felt, at that moment, drinking the remarkably good coffee he had bought me, that we were somehow suited to each other in ways that even Tom and I, at the beginning, had not been, that our sensibilities dovetailed, was only an index of how I felt at that moment. How would I feel next week, in six months, in three years?

“You're certainly not making it any easier for me,” I said.

David looked at his watch. “It's after nine-thirty,” he said. “I've got to get to work. What are you going to do?”

“I was thinking I should be getting back to Watertown.”

“I'm going to miss you.”

“I'm going to miss you too.”

 

We left the question of “us” hanging. When I got back to Watertown, my mind started working properly again; its parts having been silently realigned. I hardly knew David. What was I thinking? Half my life had been spent with Tom, and I could let it go more easily than I could a lost wallet?

For the next week or so, Tom seemed to be a shadow in the house, arranging his schedule so that he only came home late at night and left, most days, before I was fully awake. Where he worked, rocket scientists were a dime a dozen. Although there were none in the house on Whitman Street, there was no need: I would have had to be comatose not to realize that
he was trying to avoid me
. Nevertheless his shirts and underwear appeared daily in the bathroom hamper, waiting for me to put them in the washing machine and return them, clean and folded, to their owner. This was my marriage.