Matthew says, “Just the check, please.”
I say, “Let’s split it,” but Matthew shakes his head, and I don’t argue; it is just a drink.
He puts some bills on the little tray.
The waiter says, “Do you want change?”
He doesn’t.
Before getting up, Matthew says that he’s sorry for the problems he’s caused between Dena and me. “I feel responsible,” he says.
I say, “Don’t,” and I mean it. After all, he barely did anything.
TEEN ROMANCE
EVENBEFORE I really saw Bobby, I sensed him, as a sheep does a wolf. I could feel him maneuvering around the easels and stools toward me. This was in Mixed Media I, Wednesday evenings, 6:00–9:00, at the New School. The only other man in the class was a retired principal.
Bobby was good-looking enough—boyish and a little scruffy, with meaty shoulders, dark eyes, and a square jaw—but that didn’t explain his magnetism. When he sat beside me, my shell gave way to feathers.
“Bobby Guest,” he said in a hoarse voice.
I said, “Sophie Applebaum.”
Then our teacher stood up. She was wiry with muscles and had long, thick, auburn hair. Her name was Maureen and she was the kind of fifty that made getting older seem like a reward instead of a punishment for living. She spoke with a Midwestern accent and said “you guys,” like a camp counselor; meanwhile, you could tell how smart she was.
Her teaching style, she confessed, was loosey-goosey and had become even more so since she’d adopted a three-year-old insomniac from Vietnam. If we wanted serious instruction, she said, she’d give us the name of another instructor. She seemed to know exactly who she was, and this made me want to copy her.
After telling us her hands-off theory of teaching, she asked us to go around the room and introduce ourselves.
First up was the woman on my right, whose face and neck were beiged with foundation. She was younger than Maureen but seemed older; she reminded me of a hotel lobby with overstuffed chairs, thick rugs, and no natural light or air. “Margo,” she said. “I’m in PR.”
I said, “Sophie,” and hoped that was enough. Maureen, friend to all the Earth’s awkward, nodded that it was.
Bobby was the only one in the class who provided both first and last names. Then he coughed, changing his voice from rough to smooth, so that when he said, “I’m a waiter,” I was reminded of Mel Tormé’s nickname, the Velvet Fog.
We had a cancer survivor, an accountant, and a sexy squirrel who was an actress and told us her name was “Cheryl with a C.” The oldest member of the class was a great-grandmother, the youngest a twelfth grader who didn’t turn down the volume on her Walkman when she introduced herself. She practically shouted, “I want to design CD covers,” and Bobby said, “For the deaf,” just loud enough for me to hear.
Maureen said, “Talk amongst yourselves,” and from a grocery bag, she produced the objects we were to draw—an old boot, bottles, a chiffon scarf, apples, grapes, an umbrella.
Bobby opened an old tackle box of art supplies, and I opened my brand-new one. He squeezed paint onto his palette like he’d done it a thousand times before. I was sharpening a pencil when my neighbor Margo sighed in my direction.
She said, “Can you believe this?”
“What?”
She said, “I only took this class to meet men.”
Bobby reached his hand out to her and, for the third time in less than an hour, said, “Bobby Guest.”
Margo said, “Age-appropriate men,” but you could tell she was flattered.
She turned back to me and said, “It’s crazy, right?” and I realized that she saw herself and me as one and the same, two lovelorn peas in a manless pod.
She started sketching. He started painting. I stared at the boot and bottles.
Without looking up, Bobby said, “Get to work.”
I dug in. Soon I forgot myself and him; it was just the boot and my drawing, the boot and my drawing.
I started at the sound of Bobby’s voice: “You want to smoke a cigarette?”
. . . . .
The brisk evening was turning into a cold night, and Bobby took off his black leather jacket and said, “Here.”
I said, “Thanks, I’m okay,” even though I was cold.
“Come on,” he said, and I put it on.
He offered me a cigarette, a Camel non-filter, but I took out one of my own Benson & Hedges.
“I’ve never known anyone who smokes Camels,” I said. “I think of it as a cigarette you’d smoke in the desert.”
He said, “Whereas you’d smoke a Benson and Hedges at your babysitting job.”
“So,” I said, “what do you do besides wait tables?”
He said, “You know, not every waiter in New York aspires to something else.”
“So you’re a career waiter?”
He said, “I do this and that.”
“Like name one thing.”
He said, “I smoke cigarettes.”
I wasn’t sure why I was uncomfortable, but I thought facts might help. “How old are you?”
He said, “How old do you think I am?” and I thought, Actor.
I said my age: “Thirty-three?”
He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue. “Why do you want to know?” he said. “You want to pin me down? You want to say, ‘Bobby Guest is a thirty-three-year-old waiter’?”
“No.”
He said, “What do you really want to know, Applebaum?” and his calling me by my last name made me feel like we were ninth graders. I liked that. He said, “You want to know if I’m seeing anyone? I’m not. Are you seeing anyone? Sorry. Don’t answer that.”
“Okay.”
“You can ask me one question,” he said. “One question, and I’ll answer truthfully.”
“Okay,” I said. “What are you trying to do now?”
He gave me a wolfy smile. “This minute? With you?”
I said, “What’s your goal in life?” and winced at how corny and earnest I sounded.
He looked away. He thought. “I guess I’m trying to become a better man than the one I’m hardwired to be.”
He seemed surprised to hear himself say something he meant. Then he put the cigarette out with his boot and kicked it into the gutter. “I’m thirty-seven,” he said.
. . . . .
Upstairs, Cheryl was standing in front of Bobby’s painting. He said an elementary school, “Beep, beep.”
She turned around so that when she went by him her breasts skimmed his chest. She said, “Your painting is excellent.”
It was. It reminded me of Hopper’s lonely landscapes of Cape Cod. I said, “What are you doing in Mixed Media I?”
He said, “Same thing you’re doing here.”
“Really,” I said. “Why aren’t you in Advanced Painting?”
He said, “Wouldn’t be the best in there.”
. . . . .
On our second cigarette break, he offered me his jacket, and I took it without a word. He said, “So, what line of work are you in, Applebaum?”
When I told him I wrote advertising copy, he asked if he’d seen any of my ads.
“Live live live girls girls girls?” I said. “That’s mine.”
He seemed to know that I’d made this joke before; he went right by it. He asked if I enjoyed my work.
I said, “The important thing is that at the moment I don’t hate it.”
“Ah,” he said. “Aiming high.”
“Excuse me,” I said, “you were saying how much you enjoyed waiting tables.”
“Waiting tables is a day job,” he said.
“Until you make it big as a smoker?”
He moved closer to me, as though for warmth. He was looking into my eyes, but I got the feeling that he wasn’t trying to see who I was as much as gauge his effect on me. I said, “You’re an actor, aren’t you?”
“What kind of thing is that to say?”
I said, “I di
dn’t mean it as an insult.”
“Yes you did.”
. . . . .
Upstairs, Maureen walked around the room, looking at everyone’s work. Her face was as impassive regarding my muddy sketch as it was Bobby’s masterpiece. When he and I walked out of class, though, I saw her gazing at his canvas.
The elevators were crowded and slow, so Bobby and I took the stairs. He was carrying a helmet, and I said, “You ride a motorcycle?”
“I do,” he said.
“Isn’t it really dangerous?”
He shrugged.
Outside, he asked where I lived, and I told him the Upper West Side. He lived in the Village.
He was looking indistinctly down Twelfth Street. “You want to get something to eat?”
I did. “Are we talking about a date here?”
He laughed.
He made me feel both younger and older than I was, both inexperienced and past experience. I said, “I try not to go out with guys like you,” a line for a junior-high or a nursing-home cafeteria.
He said, “What do you mean ‘Guys like me’? Waiters? Actors? Writers?”
“Satyrs,” I said.
I noticed his eyebrows then—they slanted upward—and I realized they said what he couldn’t or wouldn’t; I’d hurt his feelings. He nodded, as people do when they get a joke and don’t think it’s funny. “I was just hungry,” he said.
I was pretty sure we were headed toward a restaurant, but I didn’t know. We weren’t talking. We walked down Fifth Avenue like two pedestrians who happened to be moving at the same pace.
Almost to myself, I said, “I knew you were an actor.”
He shook his head.
At his motorcycle, I said, “What do you write?”
“This is my stop,” he said. “Good night, Applebaum.”
. . . . .
I thought about him during the week. I didn’t want to, but I did.
I called my friends. I said, “I mean, what kind of thirty-seven-year-old calls himself Bobby?”
One said, “Hockey player?”
Another said, “Bobby Kennedy?”
I repeated the question to my older brother, who said, “Can we get to the point of this conversation?”
Just a minute into my description of Bobby, my younger brother imitated a robot in a television program from our childhood: “Danger, Will Robinson.”
. . . . .
I got to the New School early and sat in last week’s seat, across from Cheryl with a C, whose jeans were so tight her crotch was a rounded W.
I pretended not to see Margo walk in, though I sent her an ESP message: Please don’t sit next to me.
She sat next to me.
“Hi,” I said. “I sort of thought you were dropping the class.”
“Why?”
“You said you wanted to meet men.”
“Well,” she said, “art for art’s sake, I guess.” She opened her tackle box. “I might meet somebody who knows someone.”
I was trying not to watch the door; when Bobby came in, I hunted for nothing in my tackle box.
I heard the scratchy metal static of a Walkman and looked up to see the twelfth-grade CD designer sitting on the stool I’d thought of as Bobby’s.
Bobby was sitting next to Cheryl.
I told the twelfth grader I’d forgotten her name, and she said, “Michele.”
I wanted to ask if she’d mind turning her Walkman down; instead I heard myself say a friendly, “What are you listening to, Michele?”
She said, “Zeppelin.” She was wearing the outfit she’d worn last week—an oversized sweater with holes, a long black skirt, and army boots.
I said, “I didn’t know anyone still listened to Zep.”
“My dad does,” she said. “He’s a DJ.”
“What station?”
She said, “Parties,” and let her wavy black hair fall in front of her face.
I wished I had hair I could disappear under.
A fainting couch on a platform had replaced our still life, and Maureen announced that we had a model. In the hallway I heard whistling—I have always been partial to whistlers—and in walked a portly man in a plaid flannel bathrobe and yellow flip-flops. His thinning hair was dyed an unfortunate maroonish brown, though not, as I would soon see, everywhere. He held his clothes in a bundle.
“This is Bert,” Maureen said. “He’s a painter himself.”
We all watched as she opened a locker for him, and we all saw his big white underpants fall to the floor. I felt like my own underpants were suddenly on display, or worse, my father’s. But Bert just stooped and grabbed them and threw them in the locker, whistling.
He untied his bathrobe and flip-flopped over to the couch, where he settled his big belly and small penis into a pose.
“Is that comfortable, Bert?” Maureen said. “Can you hold that?”
It was; he could.
Instead of a pencil, I took out brushes and paints, which allowed me to portray the subject more impressionistically. I started with Bert’s head and left a big blank space for his body. I concentrated on his eyes and nose.
I needed a cigarette as badly as I ever had, and when Bert stood up to stretch, I grabbed my jacket and headed out.
As I passed Bobby, he leaned back and said, “Hey.”
I said a flirtless, “Hi,” and kept going.
A few minutes later, he joined me outside. He lit his cigarette, cupping it against the wind.
When he held out his jacket to me I said, “I have a jacket.”
He said, “Why are you mad?”
“I’m not mad.”
He said, “I’m the one who should be mad.”
“Why should you be mad?”
He said, “If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.”
We stood, smoking, and the quiet made me uneasy. “Just out of curiosity,” I said, “why do you call yourself Bobby?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, instead of Bob or Rob or Robert.” I tried to soften my tone by adding, “My brother’s name is Robert.”
“He’s probably a Robert, then.”
I said, “He is a Robert.”
Bobby said, “You know the poet Billy Collins?”
“No.”
“You should,” he said. “You’d like him.”
I nodded, as though I often read poetry and always understood it and would seek out the poems of Poet Collins at my earliest opportunity.
Acquaintance to acquaintance, he said, “How’re you liking the class?”
“I like it.”
He said, “What about Maureen?”
I was relieved to talk about her, and I went on and on; talking about her made me feel stronger and also looser, like Maureen herself. At the end of my appreciation, I said, “I hope I’m like her when I’m fifty.”
He said, “You don’t look that good now.”
When I could talk, I raised my hand and called out, “Medic! Medic!”
“I’m teasing you,” he said.
“You’re an asshole,” I said. “You’ll never get beyond your hardwiring.”
“You can’t do that,” he said.
“What?”
“You can’t take something I trusted you with and use it against me.”
“Why?” I said. “You just did it to me.”
. . . . .
Maureen was standing at my easel, her fingers at her mouth.
She said, “Sophie,” and I liked how she said my name; it was thoughtful, even affectionate. She suggested using the whole canvas, and, for the sake of composition, getting my subject down completely before focusing on any one detail.
Out of the corner of my eye, I focused on the detail of Cheryl’s lip-glossed lips smiling at something Bobby was saying.
I pretended not to notice them. I pretended to be lost in my art. I pretended to be a painter painting.
When I felt Bobby staring at me, I looked up. Our eyes met, and he held my gaze; he held
my gaze like he was holding me, and I held his as though holding him. Then he looked away, he was gone and it was over—a one-minute stand.
Before the end of class, Bert put on his bathrobe and walked around the room, pausing before each easel to regard the painting or drawing or collage of himself. He said nothing to the principal, who sat with his hands folded in his lap, and nothing to Great-grandmother, who beamed at her own sketch. Who knew what Bert saw or hoped to see? His face was expressionless, but I worried about how we all must have wounded his vanity.
I took a few steps back from my painting and saw it now as I hadn’t before. It had many failings, but I stared at the most glaring of them: I’d made Bert’s belly even bigger and his penis even smaller than life had made them.
It would be harder to shrink his belly than to enlarge his penis. The problem was, I’d avoided looking at his penis while I’d had the chance, and now I couldn’t remember its specifics. I tried to call forth penises I’d known. I’d stared at some of them, but even in front of me they’d seemed unknowable, and not a single one came to my aid now.
I mixed more skin color. Blindly, I added length and girth to the tiny stem. I painted frantically, while monitoring Bert’s progress around the horseshoe.
When he was only two easels away, I stepped back to see what he would see: His penis was now porn-long and log-wide, and even worse, waved up and sloped down like the trunk of an elephant.
I had just enough time to reshape it and stopped mid-stroke as Bert approached; I wasn’t about to paint his penis while he watched. Instead, I touched up his earlobe.
I held my breath. But Bert sauntered right by my easel and on to Margo’s, where he stood, watching her sketch.
“Well?” she said to him. “Say something.”
He said, “I like my chin.”
Margo laughed—it was a good, loud laugh—and Bert laughed with her.
In case they wanted to be alone, I got up to wash my brushes. En route, I glanced at Michele’s painting, a fantastical forest in which Bert, medievally clothed and pierced by an arrow, was bleeding to death.
Through her headphones I heard: “If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow . . .”
As I waited for the sink, I saw that Cheryl was reading a script with one line highlighted. Faintly, I heard her trying out various intonations under her breath—a cheerful, “Awesome pudding,” a blasé, “Awesome pudding.”