After tennis, we go to a bar on Columbus Avenue. It’s four fifteen in the afternoon, the sun couldn’t be brighter, we’re sitting in our damp tennis clothes at a bar-café on the sidewalk. Our bare knees are touching, and neither you nor I is pulling back. We could make small talk. But I’m older, I cut to the chase.
“Tell me about your partner,” I say. Something in the way you react to my words shows you want to pretend they come from out of the blue, but then you change your mind. Not the time for evasive maneuvers; our cards are on the table.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Nothing?”
“We’ve been together since college.”
“But?”
“No buts. I know this may not be what you want to hear.”
“So you’ve known. About me, I mean.”
“I am not sure. But I think so.”
How delicately you phrased this.
“And?”
“And nothing. I think about you.” And then you added, “A lot, actually.”
Yours, I realize, is the first real card on the table. I admire this. Mine had been just a joker.
I lower my right hand under the armrest of my chair and grasp your left hand, which is also dangling below your armrest. You didn’t expect this, and I can sense that part of you wishes I hadn’t done it. But I don’t want to let go, not now.
“I’m living with someone too,” I said. “But everything you’ve said, I could say too.”
“So say it.” This is how you fought back, something catty, touchy in your voice. I like it. Your hand relaxes and is actually holding mine. I am so, so glad I never let go.
“We’ve been together for almost a year,” I say, “but it’s you I think of—even when we’re making love.” Nothing will shut me up now. “Especially when we’re making love.”
“And?”
I grow silent.
“I want to know.”
“And nothing. Do you really want the graphic details?”
“No,” you say. “Actually, yes, I do.”
I loved how you said this.
“I’m always thinking of you. Even when I’m not looking at you, I’m with you all the time. I know everything about you. I know where you live, where your parents lived in Germany, I even know what high school you attended in Virginia, I know your mother’s maiden name. Want me to go on?”
“I could say the exact same thing about you.”
“How so?”
“I know your tennis schedule, I know what train you take after tennis, I know where you live, I can go on and on. I know all about Maud too, she’s also on Facebook.”
I’ll never forget the moment when it finally dawned on me that we are mirror images of each other. And yet … so many months, so much time wasted.
“What else do you know about me?” you asked.
“I know what clothes you wear, I know the color of every single tie you own, I know that you put on your socks after, not before, putting on your trousers, I even know that you occasionally use collar stays, that you button your shirt from the bottom up, and I know that I want to know you for the rest of my life. I want to see you naked every night. I want to watch you brush your teeth, watch you shave, I want to be the one to shave you when you don’t want to shave, I want to be in the shower with you, I want to rub lotion on your knees, your arms, your inner thighs, your feet, your dainty little toes. I want to watch you read, I want to read to you, I want to go to the movies with you, I want to cook with you and cuddle up and watch TV with you, and if you don’t like chamber music, I’ll drop my subscription and watch action films with you, if that’s what you’re into. I want to lie naked with you now. All I want is to be with you, to be like you—”
You did not let me finish. “I want to call you tonight.”
Your words hit me in the gut. You could have said, We’re fucking tonight, and it wouldn’t have stunned me more.
“I’ll put my phone on silent,” I said.
“So will I.”
As you withdrew your hand from mine, you let it rest on my knee.
“On second thought, I don’t think I’ll call you tonight,” you said.
“Why?”
“Messy. I don’t want anyone hurt.”
A moment of silence threatens to erase everything that has just happened between us and seems to throw us back to where we’d been last week, last month, last year. I had to say something.
“I don’t want this afternoon to turn into nothing,” I said. “I don’t want to lose you.”
And as though this would prevent you from changing your mind, I took out my cell phone and showed you the picture of me as a twelve-year-old.
“This is who is speaking to you now. Earnest, horny, so scared.”
You looked at the picture and nodded, and I know you understood that I was desperately trying to build the flimsiest pontoon bridge between us.
“Will you think of me tonight?” you asked.
I snickered to show there was no way that I wouldn’t.
“Will you?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
This threw me off.
“Just teasing, Pauly, just teasing. Tennis tomorrow?” you asked.
“It might rain,” I replied.
“But you know I’ll be here. You know I’ll wait. And you know why.”
“Why?”
“You already know why.”
I couldn’t resist. My hand touched your face, and better than in my dream, this time you didn’t just smile, nor did you just lean into my palm. You cupped your hand over mine and let our hands rest there together.
“I have so much to say.”
“Me too.”
Once home, I go online to look for your picture again. I stare at your face. You are smiling, faintly, possibly at me. I want to close the page but I can’t stop staring. All I want is to look at you, touch your face, I want this face to be in my house, my office, my life. I want it so much that I am suddenly gripped by the worst fear: tomorrow morning you won’t show up. I’ll be there, waiting, and you won’t come. I’ll wait for you, and keep waiting, even if you’re two, three, four hours late, I’ll wait in the afternoon and by evening still say I shouldn’t stop waiting. I don’t know why I’ll wait or what I mistrust and fear so much.
All through dinner at Pamela’s, I keep thinking of your voice and of how I’m never able to summon it in my mind. Everyone at the dinner table is talking, we drink too much, and as I keep rubbing the wristband of my watch under the table, I like to think that it’s your wrist I’m holding, not mine, and if not your wrist under the table, then it’s your hand gently cuffing my wrist, and the more I touch my wrist, the more I want to think it’s your hand squeezing my cock. It makes me happy. And it makes me miserable. By the fourth glass of wine, I become aware of myself struggling not to tell everyone at the dinner table, I’m luckier than all of you sitting here tonight, I’m in love, desperately in love, and this is total agony, and none of you is helping, because from the look on your faces, none of you knows a thing about love, and frankly, neither did I until now. I keep quiet, but if you walked in on our meal like a resurrected Jesus and said, Come, walk with me, Pauly, I would stand up, drop my napkin on my chair, leave my wineglass still full, and make the most perfunctory apology to Maud and the other guests before being spirited away by you. If I have to pay with my life to hear you say, Come, walk with me, Pauly, I would do it.
But you do not appear. And however I squeeze your wrist, I cannot make you stay. My smile fades, I stop talking, and am Mr. Mirth-Palaver no more. And I am the most miserable man alive, and more so because no one at this dinner table has the slightest notion of what’s tearing me up. And yet, what if each of us at this very table were a monsoon-ravaged island trying to look its best, with all of our coconut trees bending to the winds till hopelessness breaks their backs and you can hear each one crash and all their mealy, hardheaded coconuts pelt the ground, and still we’ll keep our
spirited good cheer and add a lilting sprint to our gait on the way to the office every morning, because we’re each waiting for someone’s voice to tear us out of our bleak and blistered lives and say, Follow me, Brother. Follow me, Sister.
I turn to my right and look at Pamela, and to my left at Nadja. Maud is speaking to the man at her right. Are they all looking for someone to take them away and save them from themselves? And there is Duncan getting old, and there is Diego, and as always Claire, who never laughs at anything I say, who always looks as though she’s struggling not to tell me what a dolt she really thinks I am—is Claire also waiting for someone to come into her life and say, Follow me, Claire, just follow me?
And suddenly I realize that you did ask me to follow you today and that you held my hand when I touched your cheek, and that what scares me more than going to the tennis courts tomorrow morning and not finding you is finding you waiting for no one but me, just me, Manfred. You’ll be sitting under the canopy, holding your two rackets between your knees, and, seeing me, you’ll say, The courts are wet today, they said it might even snow tonight, which is what I’d have said had I spoken first, and it would be my way, and possibly yours as well, of saying We have the whole day to ourselves and the night too, come, live with me.
STAR LOVE
I hadn’t seen Chloe in ages. We met at a party on the Lower East Side and were the odd, unpaired two in a roomful of people who had all stayed in touch since college and whose toddlers were now starting to attend the same preschools. It was only a matter of time before we found each other. We joked a bit about ourselves—Still unattached? Still unattached—then we joked about some of the guests who hadn’t changed—or, as she said, improved—since senior year, joked with an older couple who, seeing us chatting outside the master bedroom, asked whether the twins sleeping inside were ours, and finally found it strange that neither of us was eager to stay much longer at a party we’d both gone to for want of anything better that Friday night. All of it brisk and chipper talk that made you want to stick around and put an arm around her, which is why I waited for her and wouldn’t leave until she did, but then stayed on till we closed down the party around two in the morning, which is also how I ended up walking her home six or seven blocks away. She said she couldn’t believe she’d stayed so long. When I asked why she had, she looked at me with a duh! smile, meaning, For the same reason you did. I didn’t argue or put up a front or try to come up with some far-fetched reason to pretend I didn’t understand. She didn’t press the point. All she asked when we reached her building and stood outside in the cold was how long would it take me to ask to come upstairs, because, in case I was wondering, the answer was yes.
Blunt, curt, and snappy, like the swat of a frisky cat.
She had barely opened the front door to her building when I put both palms to her face and kissed her. I had forgotten that this was the feel of her mouth, of her tongue, of her teeth. I remembered noticing her taut, dark lips and their surly upward curve, which always suggested ill temper in our college days but were now signs of a far tamer, less daunting woman. We kissed and undressed by a settee under the bay windows facing her empty, snow-decked street. She poured wine in two iridescent glasses that had belonged to her parents before they moved to Florida. A large black fan, sitting on the windowsill, kept staring at us like a baffled raven that had never seen two people tear off each other’s clothes. “Look at me,” she pleaded in bed. “Look me in my eyes and don’t let go.” At first, I didn’t know what Stay with me, just stay with me meant, but she gasped these words with the bruised sensuality of a turtledove that wanted nothing more than to have its crown soothed, and soothed again with gentle, reassuring motions. “Yes, just keep looking at me like this, just like this, and look at me when you come, because I want to see it in your eyes,” she said as her eyes bore into me with a gaze that told me sex without staring was as paltry as love without sorrow or pleasure without shame. I wanted to see it in her eyes as well, I said. I’d never been like this with anyone before.
Later that night I couldn’t stop myself from asking how she knew I’d been waiting to leave the party with her. “Simple,” she replied, “because I kept hoping you would. You and I always thought on parallel tracks. Besides…”
“Besides?”
“Besides, it was written all over you,” she added seconds later.
This is what I remembered liking about her: volleys of dark mischief, and always a suggestion of danger that was never quite unwelcome, plus the taunting put-downs that were instantly taken back and buffed with a hasty apology that won you over with what you’d been craving to hear, because she always spoke your thoughts as if she’d been reading them from inside your head. I liked her barbs that poked and didn’t mince words and aimed straight for the bashful little truth she’d seen you hide and knew exactly where to find it when you claimed you couldn’t remember, because this is where she’d have hidden it herself. In the end I had to tell her: “You know I was crazy about you senior year.”
“Not true,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I was.”
“Now you tell me?”
“Now I tell you.”
There it was again: the impish taunt laced with the hurt avowal from the girl who in college had always kept me on tenterhooks. Even her smile had troubled me in those years. It seemed a veiled come-on shadowed over by a snarky Don’t even think of it.
That night the dream long given up years before was, like a borrowed book, finally being returned after sundry roundabouts and forwarding mishaps. Without knowing it, perhaps, we’d been waiting to turn back the clock.
We had a makeshift breakfast on an old dining table that had come from her parents’ apartment in Peter Cooper Village, made love again, then without showering walked around the West Village and the Lower East Side until early Saturday evening. We spent two nights together, had coffee and pastries on MacDougal Street and dinner twice at a small place across from her home on Rivington called Bologna, where the waiter took a liking to us and gave us a second Chianti on the house. I reached out and held both her hands from across the table and said that this was worth the wait. Yes, it was, she said.
Then, without explanation, she failed to return my calls and disappeared.
“I moved on,” she said when we met four years later at a party in the same apartment on the Lower East Side where we’d once again both drifted for want of anything better to do that night. Things turn sour, she said, they so often did with her, plus she hated the fallout, the postmortems, the rancid days when one or the other gets too close but the other doesn’t.
How could she call them rancid when they had barely blossomed? It—we, she corrected—belonged to that one Friday night. Saturday was touch-and-go. Sunday was a mistake.
So, four years later she remembered to the day exactly what we’d done.
“But Friday night?” I asked, clearly wanting to hear more about that one night, because I knew she’d have something good to say that I wanted to hear repeated now.
She didn’t need to search for an answer. “Friday night was meant to happen since freshman orientation week, if you care to know.”
I did care to know, I said. I had no idea.
“You don’t say!”
But the wave of irony in her voice, along with the implied barb, flooded over me and told me that, for years now, she’d been holding a muted grudge or something bordering on the kind of bitter pardon that never finds peace and hardens into a bile stone.
“I wish I’d known,” I said.
“You do now.”
This was still bubbly party banter, and I could see she was already trying to untwist the knife she might have accidentally plunged in. I attempted a quick comeback in flip, lilting, chitchat mode, but there was nothing I could say to undo or at least recast the past. “Besides,” she finally added, as though this justification might clear the air once and for all, “you yourself were already starting to backpedal that we
ekend. Perhaps we were both paying up long-overdue library fines.”
“It wasn’t a fine to me,” I said.
“Well, not to me either. But I wasn’t going to sit and wait for things to blow up in my face.”
I gave her a startled look.
“You weren’t exactly Mr. Available Forthcoming. You were growing moody and sullen. I can always tell when a man starts whiffling and waffling by Saturday afternoon and turns downright mopey and cries for space as if he’d timed out and violated undeclared furloughs. I’m sure part of you wasn’t so sorry to see the thing go.”
But then, in a move that still managed to catch me off guard, after turning the tables on me, she turned them on herself: “Maybe I wasn’t doing it for you. Or wasn’t what you expected, or wasn’t enough. Or maybe you wanted someone else, something more. We weren’t gelling. I’ve been there enough times to spot the obstacles ahead. As I said, we were terrific for a Friday night, no questions asked.”
“Well, maybe Friday itself was a mistake,” I said, eager to drive my own nail into the coffin, since this is where she was headed.
“No, not a mistake at all,” she corrected. “It just wasn’t going anywhere. All we were doing was catching up.”
“Perhaps there was nothing to catch up to.”
“Maybe. Which explains why we always chickened out.”
I looked at her and said nothing.
“We did,” she repeated.
“We did?”
“Okay, I did,” she corrected.
Like an old couple remembering their first dates to fan the embers of a dying fire, we were trying but failing to bring back the levity and the joy of finding each other again after so long.
I told her I remembered one night in particular.
“Which night was that?”
But I knew she remembered.
A day before Christmas break, senior year, as we were walking back from the library with loads of books each, she stopped, sat down on a freezing bench, and asked me to sit next to her. I had no idea what was on her mind but felt it had been waiting to happen a long time and finally it had come. I was nervous but I sat down. I remember her very words: “I want you to kiss me.” She did not give me time to react or even to get ready but kissed me right on the mouth, her tongue already searching mine. And then she said it: “I want your spit.” I kissed her as passionately as she kissed me, more passionately in the end, because I let myself go and didn’t have time to think and was happy not to think. She wants my spit, I kept thinking.