“Your experience of working with me will be the antithesis of what occurred at your previous job,” he said, “I promise.”
I didn’t quite know what he meant by that remark, but feeling that it required a response, I said, “Okay.”
The next morning we began working together. I agreed to produce two to three stories a week. We spoke on the phone every day. We e-mailed jokes to one another along with stray thoughts and poems. I acquiesced to lunch once a week. Before I knew it, it was July. The temperature was up in the nineties, even at night.
Then he started stopping at a phone booth to call when he’d take the dog out for a walk.
“Hey.” The greeting was always the same.
“Hey.”
“What are you wearing?” he’d ask.
“A pale pink silk nightgown.” It wouldn’t matter if I were wearing gray flannel men’s pajamas, he couldn’t see me.
“Describe it,” he’d say, breathing heavily. And telling me that he adored me. That he wanted to make love to me.
“Not like this. Not the first time.”
One day he refused to stop. “I’d start at your toes and work my way up. I want to make love to you tomorrow. I’ll be there at one o’clock … I’ve fallen in love with you.”
The sun rose over hundreds of parched and windless lawns in a season of cloudless skies. The fan had been pushing hot air around all night long and the oppressive lack of a breeze was crushing. We were entering the eighth day of a heat wave.
My next door neighbors had spent the last two days screaming at one another, taking intermittent breaks to beat their five-year-old son. The child’s screams would sear the air, piercing my heart. I considered running across the street to save him, but believed his parents would have me arrested if I interfered. Eventually the slaps ceased, or I turned up the music sufficiently to mute the sounds of his cries, while praying for the breeze that would liberate the dark and heavy lethargy into which we had all descended.
I pulled on a white Indian shirt that came to my knees and drove to Peter’s Pond Beach. I was a lone black sedan on a recently paved asphalt road. The windows and roof were open, the hot air a giant hair dryer against my skin. I parked at the end of a long, sandy street hidden between fragrant beach grass, nestled in a cornfield alive with stalks, motionless in their brackish inertia.
Walking barefoot to the edge of the water, the ocean appeared flattened by the weight of the sun. I slipped out of my shirt and dove naked into the strangely peaceful surf, the blindingly sunlit water like a sheet of aluminum foil. The empty beach was my temple, the ocean my god. Only submerged could I forget myself. There was a bit of time before the others would arrive with their dogs. I remained immersed, floating, diving, skimming, until I heard a Rhodesian Ridgeback’s familiar yelp and knew my neighbors had arrived, and it was time for me to go home.
After coffee and a shower, I slipped a silk chemise over my head and headed downstairs to the tune of tires grinding in the gravel driveway, followed by jaunty footsteps on the kitchen stairs. As I stood next to the fridge little beads of sweat formed behind my knees, and my heart started to beat faster when the door swung open. Michael was wearing unspeakable sunglasses. They were a cross between
Goodfellas
and
Miami Vice
, early drug deal gone bad, purple and mirrored, blue plastic wraparounds. He put his arms around me and we kissed. Then, without talking, he took my hand and led me up the stairs to my bedroom.
The fan blew the ninety-eight-degree air. He pulled the silk dress over my head. Then he hurriedly removed his clothes, and left them lying on the floor. Our bodies were dripping with sweat. Finally, he removed his sunglasses.
He was lean, but the muscle tone was gone. His pecs did not stand at attention, and the little hair that grew on his chest was gray. His buttocks were soft and small, and his legs long and thin. He was attentive and sensual, somewhat nervous and overly intent on making me orgasm first. He asked whether I’d like to come again, and I said of course, who wouldn’t? We kissed while he was inside me and even though it was the first time, or perhaps because it was the first time, I was overwhelmed with feelings of love. When he said he was ready, I said, “Oh yes.”
I wanted to feel his body shake and hear him groan.
“Yes,” I whispered, “do it.”
Afterward, we lay on the wet sheets lightly touching one another.
“There are some things you need to know about me,” he said. “The first is that I am a liar.”
I laughed.
“I mean it. I’m an alcoholic. I stopped drinking eight years ago, but there isn’t a day that goes by that I wouldn’t like to. I was drinking and taking drugs and saw God and made a terrible racket in the process. The outburst landed me in jail in what is my favorite place on the planet, Alabama. They arrested me with way too much cocaine on me.”
I was silent.
“Do you still want to be with me?” he asked.
“What was it like being in jail in the South?”
“I detoxed in a cell all by myself, no drugs, no help. They took away my clothes so that I wouldn’t kill myself and removed the mattress so that my dick would fall between the springs when I tried to lie on my belly. My parents didn’t bail me out, and all in all it was the absolute bottom of my life.” He took a deep breath and paused dramatically. “Oh yes. And my father committed suicide. Drank himself to death. So you see, there are reasons why I should stay away from alcohol.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I want to see you again,” he added.
It would have been so much easier to say no if we hadn’t had sex.
“Will you see me again after all the things I’ve told you?” he asked.
I wanted to say no. Go away, please. But I didn’t have the heart. “How can I possibly reject you when you are completely exposed and at your most vulnerable?”
He kissed me meaningfully. I couldn’t speak. We dressed and walked downstairs where I’d prepared lunch. The table was set with my best linen and family china. We ate salad and cold smoked salmon on blue-and-white plates edged in gold. He took my hand at the table. We were like an old married couple finally alone with the kids grown up and gone. A part of me wanted this moment to last forever, and part of me wanted to run from the house screaming. Inside my head my grandmother’s Yiddish words were going around and around:
You don’t lie in a sick bed with a healthy head
.
I must not be so healthy myself, I thought. Or else I wouldn’t be here, would I?
“So what did you think?” he asked.
“About what?”
“About me?”
“What about you?” I said.
“How was I?”
“You were wonderful.”
He wiped his mouth with the linen napkin, and said he had to go.
The sweltering days of July gave way to the warm and breezy days of August. Michael and I had phone sex every night when he went out to walk the dog. I wondered how he managed it standing in a phone booth. In a strange sort of way, we grew closer. I started wondering whether he needed this sort of distance and risk as part of the excitement? He told me that he loved me, that he was in love with me, that I was his oasis. I started bleeding uncontrollably. I was having a period that simply wouldn’t stop.
The gynecologist explained that I had uterine dysplasia and prescribed progesterone tablets for the next ninety days. He reported that the biopsy from the cells of my uterus were abnormal. If the progesterone worked, he said, the cells would correct themselves and the bleeding would cease. If not, it was cancer and I would have to have a hysterectomy. I wondered how they came up with the word dysplasia and contemplated the possibility that my uterus was merely articulating its displeasure at my choice of a lover.
The next day, Michael and I had an appointment for a rendezvous. In the morning I received an e-mail requesting that I not wear perfume. He arrived an hour late.
We sat on the front porch. I didn’t know which upset me more, his being late or the perfume request.
“You mean,” I said, “when your daughter asked you about the smell, you didn’t tell her you were in love?”
“How could I do that?”
“I see it as an opportunity,” I said, “to bring things into the open.”
He looked at me as if I had just stepped over the line.
“I can’t leave,” he replied in a restrained tone of voice, “it would destroy me financially.”
“And you could never take me to that club you belong to either.”
“That has nothing to do with anything.”
“Are Jewish girls among the exotics who WASPs reserve for fucking?” I wanted to fight. I wanted to scream my head off.
“What has gotten into you?”
“I’ve been bleeding heavily all week. The doctor says it’s something called uterine dysplasia. The cells are abnormal. There is a possibility that they could become cancerous. I’m taking progesterone tablets. If the tablets don’t work, I’ll need a hysterectomy.”
“I don’t want you to die,” he said.
“That’s good to know.”
“I still want you.”
“I can’t have sex for a week—the biopsy.”
“We can do other things, can’t we?”
I burst into tears. “I need to feel safe, to feel protected. Do you understand?”
“Ssshhhh,” he said as he wrapped his arms around me.
We kissed and I smelled freshly eaten garlic on his breath. We ended up in bed.
He asked me to masturbate while he watched. Then he put a pillow beneath his head while I gave him a blow job.
He growled. “No one’s ever gotten me so hard.”
When sex was over, he stood and pulled on his pants.
“Afterward,” he said, “I want to stay with you. It’s getting more and more difficult to go home.”
He threw on the rest of his clothes. When I tried to hug him, he backed away.
“I’ll call you!” he shouted on his way to his car.
And as I watched him sniff his fingers and check his mustache in the rearview mirror, I knew that he was planning to leave me.
The next day, he didn’t call the way he had in the past. No emails. No nothing. Two days later, he phoned to explain his silence. His wife—who had a drug problem, he said—took pills that she purchased over the Internet. She almost overdosed. This was not the first time this had happened.
“I married my father,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“My father drank himself to death. She’s just like him.”
“What can I do to help?”
“Nothing. I’ve trained for this job all my life.”
“Are you sleeping with her?”
“Yes,” he whispered. “Do you think I’m being selfish?”
“I can’t believe you have to ask.”
He had not told me what she looked like, but I imagined his wife to be an attractive forty-year-old brunette with shoulder-length hair and a great figure. I was desperately jealous of her. He went home to her every night. She slept next to him. She had his child. They went out to dinner together, and to the movies and to the beach.
They did all the things that he and I could not do. And on some level, I think she knew about me. I think she knew about all of us. I was willing to bet that each time he had an affair, she tried to kill herself. What a merry ride this was turning out to be.
But the show had to go on. I was still cranking out three stories a week. I was on deadline. The stories were due the day after tomorrow. I sat at my computer pounding out the first of three, when I felt a migraine coming on. I made some espresso, took my medication, and got on with it. Michael phoned from the office. He wanted to have phone sex.
“Do you miss me?” I asked.
“I miss your pussy.”
“My pussy is attached.”
“But right now I miss your pussy, okay?”
I was starting to feel as if I were a drug and he needed a hit.
“Okay?” he asked sweetly. “Please? Call me when you’re ready to come.”
I didn’t know how I could have allowed this to happen to me. I phoned him as requested. After I came, he ran to the company bathroom to masturbate. When he was done, he phoned me back, whispering, “I love you.”
I tried to go back to writing, but I couldn’t. The pain over my eyes was too intense. I felt nauseous, I lay down. I closed the blinds. I threw up. A friend called to see how I was doing and I asked her to take me to the emergency room. Once there, they injected me with Demerol and sent me home.
The headache went on for two days and for the first time in my life, I missed a deadline. Three days later Michael came to see me. My hair was dirty. I hadn’t washed or eaten in three days.
“I don’t like to see you this way,” he said. “Let me get you some soup.”
I just wanted to put my head on his shoulder.
“I’m so jealous of her,” I said. “I’m jealous of her, and of anyone else you may be fucking.”
“There’s nobody else.”
But it was too late. He was a self-proclaimed liar. And each time he opened his mouth that was all I could think about. What was I doing with a liar? Did I actually believe that this man would change
for me
? He lied to his wife. What made me think he was suddenly going to speak the truth to me?
“Soup sounds good,” I said.
He kissed me on the cheek and asked whether I wanted chicken soup or cream of tomato. While I was making up my mind, he said, “I’m sorry I’ve been such a dick lately, but I needed to keep you off balance.”
“What?”
“Can’t have you feeling too secure.”
“Your need to keep me off balance is going to kill me,” I said, “so chicken soup will be fine for my last supper.”
When Michael got into his car, I wondered whether he’d be back. But he reappeared with chicken soup for me and cream of tomato for him. We ate in silence. Every so often, he’d reach out and caress my face. I had grown to feel something for him that I called love, but I knew it was the farthest thing from it. I realized that I knew nothing about him except what he had told me. Part of me thought he was an awful man, and yet I wanted to fall asleep next to him, and wake up with him the following morning.
I wanted to go to the movies and hold his hand in the dark. I wanted to see what he was like around other people.
“I’m worried about you,” he said. “Do you need me to take care of you too?”