You're Married to Her? (2 page)

But I blew it as usual. I started to babble. “You like theater? I love theater.” I launched long mindless riffs in a compulsive attempt to keep her amused. “But theater makes me sneeze. You know why?” She didn't bother to
answer. Nor did she seem to care. “Because I only saw Broadway shows with my grandmother and her theater lady friends who wore beaver coats and feather hats and heavy perfume and as soon as I got in the car with them I started to sneeze. You ever see a Broadway show?”

She sighed as if having calculated she had another half mile to walk in the company of this simpleton. “My father's office is next door to the Shubert Theater.”

“That's where I saw
A Chorus Line
! You ever see
A Chorus Line
?”

She removed a tortoise shell beret, shook out her shoulder-length hair and twisted it into a ponytail with an elastic band. “My father is the director's lawyer.”

Allison lived in the only house in town with a swimming pool. She wore A-line skirts and cashmere sweater sets in winter, culottes when the weather warmed, and had a miniature Lhasa Apso named Cimba. (“It's Tibetan,” she explained. “For ‘small.'”) She was an only child of parents who traveled everywhere, the kind of kid whose term paper described her spring vacation in the Fiji Islands. My family had recently moved to a four-and-a-half room apartment across the street from the boardwalk. When the windows were open it smelled of boiled franks. I slept on a convertible couch in the living room.

“You must be very proud of your father,” I said.

“Of course. Aren't you proud of yours?”

A bland and predictable “well, sure” would have sufficed, but just that morning my dad and I had gone at
each other again outside the apartment's one bathroom, the family
sanctum sanctorum,
the only place anybody could be alone. My mother sat on the toilet seat and cried; my brother locked the door to spread out his collection of Civil War memorabilia. The baby was left on the potty chair for hours with a bowl of cheerios and milk. My father went to the bathroom with a newspaper under his arm, a pack of cigarettes and a transistor radio, like someone leaving for a day at the beach. This morning I thought I might explode if I didn't get in there in time. “Please, Dad!” I rapped on the door. “There's only one bathroom in this place.” I was doing jumping jacks when the toilet flushed and the door flew open. I had no idea what to expect. Since his last business had gone under and we'd had to sell the house, he was unpredictable. He might pass me by without a word. He might talk about me in the third person, have a conversation with himself as if I wasn't in the room. He rarely raised his voice. His preference was to try to extract confessions that enabled him to feel even worse about himself.

“You're trying to remind me it's my fault we lost the house.”

“I'm trying to go to the bathroom.”

“The
one
bathroom.”

“Can I please get in?”

“Can you tell me something? Do all your friends think your father is a loser?”

“Of course not.” I closed the door.

“Which ones do then?” he called through it.

“I don't have a father,” I said in frustration. Allison stopped in her tracks. She had round hazel eyes with long lashes the color of white gold and she held my gaze demanding information.

“He's dead,” I said, and for a moment I even shocked myself. Who even
thinks
a thing like that?

Allison touched her hand to my chest. It felt as if she held my beating heart in her palm. “I'm so sorry,” she whispered. Her eyes shone silver in the moonlight. “But,” she swallowed. She could barely bring herself to ask, “Your mom?”

Oh, what the fuck. In for a penny, in for a pound. I bowed my head. I didn't actually
say
she was dead but the implication was clear enough.

We were holding each other now as the surf pounded. “You poor baby.” Her lips touched my ear. I felt a shiver in my groin and my legs were weak. This was an intimacy I had never known with a girl, never felt with anyone in my life. I had no desire to do harm to my mother and father. Their deaths were a kind of drama I was constructing as Allison allowed me to kiss the tears from her cheeks. Bits of movies I had seen, books I had read, comics, newspaper stories provided the details of what was becoming my first major work of fiction.

A sudden snowstorm. The week before Christmas. Just after midnight. The roads slick with black ice. They were driving home from their wedding anniversary party when their car was side swiped by a truck
on the Long Island Expressway. The driver had been drinking. My brothers and I were awakened by a plainclothes detective in a heavy tweed overcoat. His breath smelled of peppermint. He gave us each a stick of gum. We were separated for months, sent to different homes, eventually taken in by my grandparents. But they were old. It was a hardship for them to raise three boys. We were finally adopted by a poor but well-meaning couple who lived in a small apartment across the street from the boardwalk and weren't able to have children of their own.

“You never got to say good-bye to your real parents.”

“They died instantaneously.”

“It must be so hard for you.”

What was hard was establishing a double life. Because I could never bring Allison to my home—How could I be sure she wouldn't call them my
step
parents?—I contrived to spend all our time together at hers. Nor could I ever allow her parents to cross paths with mine or even speak to them on the phone. Because my father considered himself a failure he assumed I felt the same way about him and was resigned to losing a son, while her parents were delighted to gain one.

My presence seemed a positive relief, proof that their moody, big-boned daughter was not only interested in boys but attractive to them. Although her father had a Manhattan law practice that catered to famous names in show business, he was more than generous to a lower middle class boy like me, especially an orphan boy.
He liked to give me his old dress shirts and cashmere sweaters and teach me how to line up a putt. A tall pear-shaped man, he wore tortoiseshell half-eye readers on the bridge of a long proud aquiline nose over which he appeared to view the world with an imperious bemusement. He was fond of squeezing my funny bone when he thought I was down, bellowing “
Nil Il-legitimus Carborundum,
my boy!” and ticking off the names of famous orphans who'd become successful. It was like Allison hadn't brought home a boyfriend but the United Way.

Her mother called me “the Foundling.” A sun-wizened ex-Broadway chorus girl with a cigarette-raspy voice, she spent most of her days at the club playing golf and evenings, whenever she felt she could get away, in the city, meeting her husband for dinner at Joe Allen or Sardi's, and leaving Allison to the care of Marina, their live-in housekeeper and cook.

When her father was detained at work I was invited to stay to dinner. Her mother sat with her elbows on the dining room table, tanned brittle forearms with sun spots, the wings of a crisply roast duck. She barely picked at Marina's pork dumplings and poppy seed cake, but made comments to Allison as she ate. “Perhaps we want half as much, Dear?”

“I'm fine, thank you.”

“I wonder if Ricky would think so?” Ricky Fox was a favorite on a weekly TV show for kids. Allison told me they had gone to summer camp together.

“I don't really care.”

“Obviously not.” Her mother enjoyed watching me eat, however, and chose to see my gluttony as deprivation. “Have more veal. Pass him the mushroom sauce. I think those step-parents of yours are trying to starve you.” She was full of stories from her days on the stage, tales in which she danced in rhinestone g-strings and was chased by a certain married producer who offered her bracelets and hats for, and here she would wink, “You know what.”

“Mother, I think that's enough.”

“The Foundling doesn't think so, do you?”

“Don't embarrass him.”

“At least I don't bore him.”

“I'm going to leave the room.”

“When did you become so grumpy?”

In spite of their skirmishes I loved Allison's mother's stories of theatrical New York in the fifties, one big opening night party, one friendly neighborhood overflowing with the most eccentric and generous people in the world. Allison's mother was happiest when she had an audience. “Put another shot of rye in this drinkie, would you, Dear?” Early on she had taught me to make Old Fashioneds. “And a double dash of bitters? Good boy.”

But when she was bored she could be malicious. One long rain-swept afternoon when a game of hearts turned to bickering Allison ran from the table and slammed her bedroom door so hard an entire shelf of antique
ceramic dolls crashed to the floor. She wept as we knelt to sweep up the mess. “I can never live up to that bitch's expectations.”

“Of course not,” I said. “You're only one person. Your mother needs a roomful.”

That was the first time she said, “I love you.”

If Allison felt tormented by her mother there was always the presence of Marina to make a home. A large silent Lithuanian woman who lived in the maid's suite off the kitchen, Marina was suspicious of all male mammals that had not been gelded. She wore a headscarf tightly knotted under her chin and a crucifix the size of a Bowie knife. Marina doted on Allison, whom she had effectively raised, and looked at me like I was a mouse turd on a white lace tablecloth. Softly spoken, demurely dressed, Allison was in all ways modest in front of Marina, doubly so before her father. Having fantasized more about sex than ever having had any, I was happy enough with our long wet good night kisses and the occasional backseat feel at the drive-in. I loved Allison and felt grateful simply to be accepted by a family like hers.

Every year on the weekend after Memorial Day Allison's parents prepared a barbecue for their closest friends, retired B movie actors and former TV variety show dancers who took the Long Island Railroad from the city, no one I had remotely heard of, but who were openly gay and played suggestive games of charades and broke into Cole Porter songs at the piano. This was the life I might have been born to had I been lucky, the
life I caught glimpses of in
The Thin Man
movies; the café society, the flip repartee, the urbane drinking, the cigarettes that seemed to punctuate conversation like a conductor's baton. I adored being included and would never have done anything to jeopardize my place in the family; then one day an odd thing happened.

Allison and I were in the pool. Her father was grilling porterhouse steaks at the far end by the diving board, her mother swilling drinks on the chaise lounge not ten feet away, telling a story about the first time she met Sinatra—when I felt a hand in my bathing suit. It was Allison's hand and it was no shy brush with temptation, but a determined attempt to milk the cow. Through the haze of Beefeater martinis and the rising smoke from the steaks, no one noticed. Later that afternoon in the pool house I tried to run my hand under her bathing suit and got a firm No! in response. But the following Wednesday on Marina's day off, while her mother was in the kitchen heating meat loaf, I felt Allison's fingers tugging urgently on my zipper. As her mother finished the better half of a bottle of Beaujolais and sang along to the original cast album of
South Pacific
, Allison stuffed her hand inside my fly. I told her about the empty cabanas at the beach club where my friends took their dates to make out. She had no interest. I begged her to meet me under the boardwalk. She said it sounded sordid. She suggested we do things that I had never imagined, she knew exactly what turned her on, but it was only when her mother might catch us. I
got my first blowjob while her mother was upstairs watching
The Brady Bunch
. It may be that for the rest of my life I will associate cunnilingus with the sani-rinse cycle of the dishwasher because I spent many evenings on my knees between Allison's legs as she braced herself against the kitchen sink while her mother was walking the dog.

I was terrified of being caught, of being thrown out of the perfect family, but on the last weekend in June her father asked if I'd like to be his daughter's date to an awards dinner for TV stars in New York City, to sit at the table with the family and all his most important clients. Her mother winked. “We'll see Ricky.”

Just some boy I used to know. A big jerk, was the way Allison referred to Ricky Fox. A freckle-faced redhead with a glossy pompadour and a lean, rubbery dancer's body, he was a fixture on National Educational Television, a kind of public broadcasting Mouseketeer. Nothing went on. Our parents were friends, was all Allison would say when I pressed her about sex. I had never “done it” with Allison, but I imagined Ricky Fox had. And the less she wanted to talk about him, the more I imagined.

Back at home my own mother and father were engaged in one of their prolonged periods of silence. They would occupy the same bedroom, stare at the same black and white television set while sitting at opposite ends of the same couch; eat at the same table, take slices of pizza from the same box, and pretend the other did
not exist. Important information was conveyed loudly enough to be heard but addressed solely to the children, so that if I, or my middle brother, were not at home my father might ignore my mother and tell the 3-year-old, “I'm getting a colon biopsy tomorrow. If they find cancer in the polyps, my will is in my top drawer under the socks.” But somehow the idea of their oldest son on live television awakened a shared sense of possibility, united them in a quest, and I became the family project.

My father volunteered to rent me a tuxedo while my mom prepared to remake me in the image of her favorite celebrity, an actor named George Hamilton, who had hair like Zorro and skin with the buffed polish of a goat-hide briefcase. As I more closely resembled Izak Perlman, it was to be a complicated makeover. A three-fold plan was devised. First, I needed a rich suntan. I also had to drop ten pounds, and lastly, my mom was going to straighten my hair.