Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions (6 page)

Danny catches my eye and his face is
hard.

.

I visited Aunt Shirley two months before she
died. By then she required round the clock nursing, but she looked
almost like her old self, again, makeup in place and her hair set
and colored. In her steel blue silk dress and the pearls Uncle Joe
gave her for their thirtieth anniversary she looked like Civic
Virtue after a trip to the beauty parlor. Stately and hollow. Most
of her mind was gone but the data retrieval systems were still in
place. She recognized me and called me by name, but not like it
mattered to her.

.

A bright woman lives with a dull man by
holding herself in check. And then, one day, she can’t. At first it
feels like euphoria. Layers of restraint and propriety fall off.
You mock the rabbi’s daughter and who cares if she overhears you.
You burn the roast on purpose. You tell your husband you don’t love
him and never did; say unforgiveable things to each of your
sons.

Everyone says I look like her. .

Brian and I were tenants in the same rundown
Greenwich Village brownstone. His apartment was on the second
floor, down the hall from mine. This was in 1972. Back then it
seemed like everyone I knew got paid off the books, lived in an
illegal sublet, or was having an affair with a married man. I was
23 and desperate to get into law school, which seemed my only
chance to escape a life of moral drift and group therapy.

.

Brian often showed up in my dreams disguised
as Governor Nelson Rockefeller or Supreme Court Justice William 0.
Douglas, each of whom could have gotten me into law school on a
phone call. In real life, Brian was 47, old enough to be my father.
He thought
The Greening of America
was
deep stuff. I forgave such a sentimental lapse because he was
English, and I was in love with his ravaged face.

There was twenty years difference between the
right side of Brian’s face, where all the stitches were, and the
unlined left side. It was beautiful, like driftwood. He’d wrecked a
car once, back in England, gone head first through the windshield
and had to be put back together again.

I was in love with his voice, too; his
English accent all weathered from years of New York City, and his
gruff, matter of fact tenderness. He muttered endearments to his
calico cat as he ground up the beans for his morning coffee. Old
Bum, he used to call her, and made it sound sweeter than
sweetheart.

.

Brian used to read fortunes from left over
Turkish coffee grounds. The design the grounds made on the inside
of your coffee cup was supposed to be you intersecting with the
cosmic order. Coffee grounds were good for grand designs but skimpy
on details, which is why I don’t remember Brian’s fortunes the way
I remember my stranger dreams.

By now, some of them could have even come
true.

.

During the day, Brian stayed home, working on
his dissertation while his wife supported him. Brian’s wife was a
graphic designer who earned $10 an hour off the books doing free
lance paste-ups. She wore long skirts and leotards like a modern
dancer.

.

Group said the wife was Brian’s problem, not
mine.

Group was real encouraging where affairs were
concerned, just down on guilt. A major premise of our particular
therapy group was that we all suffered from excess guilt and were
cut off from our feelings. We were hard on people who didn’t share
their feelings with the group. I didn’t share feelings with the
group that I knew they’d disapprove of, like guilt. I wondered how
much longer they’d let me get away with it.

.

Group said the affair was my idea, I just
didn’t want to take responsibility. But wasn’t it Brian’s idea to
begin with? He was the one who spoke first that spring day when he
found me crying by the mailbox.

“We regret to inform you,” said the law
schools of Western New England, Eastern Ohio State, and the
University of Nevada at Las Vegas.”

“Come upstairs,” Brian said, “I’ll make you
some Turkish coffee.”

I stared at him in wonder, all the while
babbling about not wanting to put him to any bother, how I didn’t
even drink coffee.

“Turkish coffee doesn’t taste like ordinary
coffee,” he said. “It’s a whole different experience of
coffee.”

.

Brian’s apartment smelled of fresh ground
coffee. Old Bum, the calico cat lay belly up on a small, worn rug,
bathed in the charitable peach tones of late afternoon sun. And
there was Brian himself, with his face full of hard living and
willed innocence. There was even a blue bowl of apples on the
kitchen table. I had entered the set of a French movie. All that
was missing was the existential girlfriend; disheveled, with bangs;
slightly sullen, fundamentally opaque. The eternal feminine, pure
mystery and faintly perverse. In French movies you never know what
she’s thinking.

Here’s what I was thinking: my conversation
is too inane for this beautiful man to be appreciating my mind; he
must want me to kiss him.

“Well?” said Brian.

My first kiss was an offering, like the
slightly stale coffee cakes my Brooklyn relatives always brought
when they came to dinner. More decorum than passion.

Not the second, though.

.

Back then, I worked for the New York City
Department of Social Services as a welfare caseworker. My clients
were mostly unwed mothers and heroin addicts. What I saw of their
lives seemed dreadful and hopeless. Two days a week I made field
visits. I preached the gospel of uplift through job training to
teenage mothers and their mothers. “A person needs vocational
training if she doesn’t want to get stuck in some dead end job,”
I’d tell them, straight from the heart.

My own job was drab and thankless, but ideal
for a person having an affair with a married man.

I shortened my field visits so Brian and I
could spend more time together. Some visits I skipped altogether
and made up reports, stories that I hoped would turn out to be
true. “Anna Rodriquez showed me her rent receipts. Expressed
interest in the WIN Program.”

I was cheating on the City of New York.

.

The sex part took place in my apartment. In
Brian’s apartment we listened to music and drank Turkish coffee in
small cups. He loved Mozart and Ravi Shankar while my taste ran to
the harsh and apocalyptic: Pre-Nashville Dylan, Velvet Underground,
the Doors, stuff Brian hated. I often lingered in his apartment; it
was so much nicer than mine. My bed was a mattress on the floor
covered by my old dormitory bedspread, while Brian’s apartment
contained real furniture. The pictures on his walls were framed.
Sometimes Emily got home early, which was awkward.

Emily was Brian’s wife.

“If you two became acquainted,” Brian said,
“We’d be able to spend more time together.”

I promised to try, although I didn’t think
Emily and I would have much in common. She was into health
food.

.

It turned out Emily’s mother and my father
had graduated Far Rockaway High the same year. That made us almost
cousins. Once Emily explained how the medical establishment, a
branch of the same patriarchal conspiracy that made it so hard for
women to get into law school, tried to prevent us from gaining
control over our bodies, I became slightly more interested in
nutrition. Emily used to whip up in her blender yeast and lecithin
milk shakes which tasted like medicine but were supposed to
counteract vitamin B deficiency.

Summer nights the three of us sat out on the
stoop and talked politics, Brian, Emily, and I. None of us ever
went north of Fourteenth street so we actually thought George
McGovern could be our next President.

Being with Brian and Emily was different from
being with Brian alone. In bed with him I felt like an unskilled
actress who’d landed a big part by fluke, one that didn’t suit her.
I’d been accustomed to the rough equities of sex between consenting
college students, which spoiled my appreciation for the old
fashioned tenderness of illicit passion. There wasn’t a word for
what Brian and I did in bed together that seemed right.

“Fucking” was too harsh and didn’t take into
account the love letters he left slipped under my door. “ “Making
love”, which is what Brian said we were doing, was sentimental,
saccharine and false. Love was a serious business. You built your
house on it and raised a family. Love signed up for the long
journey through the ultimate tundra. How could I be in love with
Brian? I didn’t make enough money to keep him. My apartment was too
small. But when the three of us were out on the stoop together,
Emily was my friend, Brian was my friend’s husband, and I was my
old familiar self: the sort of girl you could trust with your
man.

“My parents think it’s unnatural the way
Brian and I are still so in love,” Emily said one night on the
stoop. “Like, it’s immoral to be in love when you’re married.”

Was she on to us or just testing?

Brian gave her a little hug but he looked
straight at me.

.

The next day I received my final
rejection,the one from Memphis State.

“Aren’t there any law schools you haven’t
heard from yet?” said Brian.

We were naked under my paisley bedspread. I
tried not to cry. Brian had his arm around me.

“We’ll find you some more to apply to next
year,” he said. “In the meantime there’s us.”

A knock at my front door, and then Emily’s
voice.

“Hello? Are you home?”

We froze like rabbits stunned by headlights,
waiting for her to leave.

“She knew you were in here with me,” I said
after we heard her close the door of their apartment.

“You’re just being paranoid,” he said.

“What do we do if she finds out?”

“Don’t think about it,” he said, and reached
over to touch me.

How could you not think about it?

“I have a headache,” I said.

.

Later that evening I ran into Emily when I
put out my garbage. She told me she’d stopped by, hoping to borrow
some cigarettes.

“I thought you were at home,” she said. “When
I didn’t hear anything I got worried.”

“I was napping,” I said. “Awful headache. I’m
probably coming down with something.”

Emily said it was nervous tension from not
enough B vitamins. She said this in a nice way, of course; like I
was no more depraved than anyone else.

Lower Manhattan sucked the B vitamins out of
everyone.

The headache was with me the next day. Food
tasted bad. I couldn’t get rid of the metallic taste in my mouth no
matter what I drank. I came home early from work and crawled into
bed. The headache followed me into my dream. I remember the dream I
had that afternoon the way I remember certain movies.

In the dream I was 40 years old, and living
in a mansion by the sea. I was married to a lawyer, someone I knew
from college but he didn’t look familiar. For that matter, neither
did I. I was softer, more lady-like, not exactly myself. This
ladylike person wore shirtwaist dresses with Peter Pan collars, and
I don’t. On the other hand, she had my headache.

.

The most vivid part of the dream was the
woman with yellow hair. Her hair was the color of whipped pineapple
dessert. She wore it piled on top of her head, bangs drooping over
her forehead like frizzy tendrils. She was a loose woman from a
bedroom community, like the one I grew up in.

I was her only friend, even though she made
me uncomfortable.

In the dream we were on the third floor of
Bloomingdales when a teenaged boy on roller skates zoomed past us.
He wore a huge Nixon for President campaign button.

“How can you support that man?” I screamed at
the roller skating boy like he was everything wrong with the
universe.

He looked at me like I was some kind of a nut
and winked at my yellow-haired friend.

“You wouldn’t get so worked up over politics
if you had a more healthy outlet,” she told me. “Try shoes.”

She used to steal shoes from the wives of her
lovers. Evening sandals, alligator pumps, and once a pair of Old
Maine Trotters. “I take them for my husband,” she said. “I tell him
all about those other women, the wives. I betray their secrets and
make up the rest, as I wear their shoes. We perform unmentionable
acts...”

Just as she was about to describe these acts,
a knock at the door woke me.

.

The knock at the door was Emily, with one of
those foul tasting milkshakes.

“My marriage is in trouble,” she said.

The long dreaded confrontation was here. One
of the women from Group, a veteran of affairs with married
professors, had briefed me on protocol. Usually the wife invited
you out to lunch. First you made small talk. Then she’d say
something like: “He’s had others before you. Don’t think you’ll be
the last. I only wish there was more of him to go around.”

I didn’t expect Emily to be so relaxed. I
expected she’d remind me about our parents going to Far Rockaway
High together and our summer nights on the stoop and my commitment
to Feminism. How could I betray a sister, she would ask, and I’d
feel terminal shame. It would be as humiliating as getting caught
at shoplifting.

“You seem so happy together,” I said to
Emily, stalling for time.

Emily said, “It’s those long hours of
paste-ups. I work in this windowless room under florescent lights,
breathing rubber cement fumes. When I come home I’m too tired to
make dinner for Brian.”

I felt like a low thing. This in addition to
the feeling that my head was being gripped by giant tongs, and a
horrendous desire to go to sleep instantly and not wake up for a
few days.

“Brian would rather have Campbell’s soup
straight from the can for dinner just so long as he knows I heated
it up specially for him,” she said. “Men are funny that way.”