Crossroads (9 page)

Couples lay in each other's arms. A bleary-eyed boy passed me a joint and I took a toke. This isn't a good idea, a small voice somewhere in the middle of my pituitary gland said. The girl who'd been lying in the arms of the bleary-eyed boy, a tiny, red-headed child, got up and walked away and began kissing a rather tall, gawky boy who leaned against a wall. They walked outside. The Village People sang “YMCA.” Then Kansas sang “Dust in the Wind,” making me feel mortal, vulnerable. After that, I didn't recognize the music, and the bleary-eyed boy sat stupefied and looking lonely in the corner. I asked him what the music was and he knew all the groups. They had space-age names. Flying Saucer, Satellite Returns, Lunar Module, Jet Stream. Pink Floyd sang “Dark Side of the Moon,” which put the bleary-eyed boy into a trance until the red-haired girl returned and, no questions asked, the boy took her back.

Other couples drifted in and out of each other's arms with equal facility and I felt like an anthropologist, trying to understand how these primitives bonded. “Hey, how'ya doing?” Bobby flopped down on the mattress beside me, squeezing my left biceps.

“I'm a little sleepy.”

“Oh, that's the punch.” He took a joint out of the air, it seemed, puffed it, and passed it back into the air.

“What's in it?”

“It's easier to tell you what's not in it.”

“Oh, great.” I leaned my head back against his arm. It took me a few moments to realize he was rubbing my arm with his index finger in a gentle circular motion whose intent could not be mistaken. After a few complete elliptical orbits, he whispered, “Wanta see the house?”

“Maybe we could just go for a walk?”

“Naw, too many mosquitoes. You'll get eaten alive.” He was pulling me to my feet with a jerking stroke, as if he were raising a flag.

“I need some fresh air.”

“We'll open a window.” But I was adamant and finally he agreed to take a walk. “Let me get a little ice for this drink first, O.K.?”

We passed Jennie. “I'm going for a walk,” I mumbled. She said something about when we were leaving but I didn't quite catch it and she didn't repeat it. The ice, it turned out, was in the kitchen of the house. Bobby fumbled in the freezer. I wouldn't go beyond the kitchen, I told myself. The house had become in my mind some dark force of evil and corruption, some den of iniquity. Bobby hit the ice tray on the Formica and ice fell onto the counter. He plunked a few cubes into our glasses. The kitchen lights were bright and I didn't want to look at him and be betrayed by a few white hairs, a wrinkle on my brow.

When he started to lead me toward the living room, I protested. “Look, you wanta go for a walk? The door's that way.” For some reason that made sense to me, so I followed, but when we got into the living room, which was very dark with only the light of the street light, he paused. “Boy, am I tired. Let's sit for a minute. I wanta talk to you.” Why is darkness sensual? I asked myself. Why is it we never want to make love in a kitchen under fluorescent lights?

But no one was going to make love here. I'd made that decision as we sat down on the sofa, and once I make a decision, I stick to it. The living room seemed like a good compromise, except after a few moments I felt uncomfortable there. The walls were covered with bad art, Jersey kitsch, and all the lamps had plastic slipcovers. The furniture was covered with white sheets, as if someone had recently died and the rooms weren't to be used again.

I sat beside Bobby, twirling my glass in my hands and feeling very much the awkward age he thought I was. “I like you,” he said. I kept turning the glass, faster and faster like a globe, and Mark's mother with her endless motion of hands came to mind. I stopped. “Let's go upstairs,” he said.

I didn't want to go but I found myself walking, climbing the stairs. We entered Rupert's parents' room, which had the biggest king-size fake brass bed I'd ever seen and yellow wall-to-wall carpeting. The whole house, I suddenly realized, was done in yellow wall-to-wall carpeting. I thought to myself, I can't make love with yellow carpeting everywhere. And suddenly it was the carpeting and not the arms of an eighteen-year-old boy I couldn't bear.

The bedroom had the whole family photographed above the bed in various stages of development and ecstasy. Baby pictures, wedding pictures, graduation, a football victory, a million shots of the family dog, usually with a blunt object between its teeth. We lay down beneath them, and Bobby began to move across my body in a perfunctory and predictable fashion. It made sense that this rather pure, simple boy would be the one to shatter Mark's hold in a rather simple, meaningless act. No real man could do it, so I submitted and began to breathe deeply, the way I do when I go to the dentist.

He dug his tongue into my mouth about as far as a tongue could go and squeezed my breasts. “Take this off.” He tugged at my green T-shirt. His clothes, mine, were pulled off. Shoes fell like bombs. Two bewildered goldfish in a nearby bowl watched, wide-eyed but apathetic. Then he assumed what must have been his posture for a racing dive and proceeded to plunge. “I don't have any birth control with me,” I said, suddenly brought back to my senses. “Don't worry,” he gasped. “I'll pull out.” Which is what he did, seconds later, spilling himself over the fake quilted spread, which matched the color of the indifferent goldfish. “Jesus,” he moaned, gritting his teeth, and I looked at him with the somewhat mesmerized expression of a person watching a television program for the hell of it.

“You were great.” He sighed, rolling over, embedding his sperm into a round stain on the polyester spread, and I fell
asleep beside him, more as a result of the punch than of his prowess.

When I woke, someone was calling my name. I looked out, and in the driveway I saw Jennie, confused, calling me as if she'd lost a puppy. I shook Bobby as I left. “Gotta go,” I said. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Don't go, babe.” He tried to pull me back down but I pulled away. “When can I see you?”

“In a week or so.”

“O.K., gimme your address.” I told him where I lived and gave him the phone number of American Airlines, confident he wouldn't remember a thing.

The air was cool and fresh as Jennie and I walked to the car. “I'm afraid you'll disapprove of me,” I offered as an apology.

“I've never disapproved of you in my life. So you went to bed with him, so what? Probably did you good.”

“I think it was the punch.”

Jennie put an arm around my shoulder. “I think it was the body.” We reached the car. She was also a little drunk, and Victor had gotten weird with her. That was when she'd begun looking for me. “Is that the first time?”

“First time.” I crawled into the front seat.

“How was it?”

“Awful.”

I turned on the radio. It was “Oldies but Goodies.” As Jennie drove, I wrote letters to Mark, informing him of my new involvement with Robert Jones. “Dear Mark, I hope this letter finds you well. I've been seeing someone for a while now, a younger man, not as smart as you but certainly more potent, and I think it would be best if we finalized things between us . . .” That didn't seem strong enough. “Dear Mark, I hope you and Lila are well. I'm living with someone as well. Rob coaches swimming at Princeton, where he is finishing his graduate work in international affairs. We are incredibly happy . . .”

Jennie was speeding. “You should slow down,” I said.

“It's really late. I didn't know it was this late.” Her face seemed compressed into her eyes, her eyes squinting sharp on the road.

“I'll talk to Tom. Don't worry.”

“I'm not worried.” She wasn't convincing.

The streetlights on the road rushed past me, and the road was bright, reflecting the lights. I thought about my body. How it felt raw and exposed, barely satisfied, and only half awake. The lights on the road, all evenly spaced, held me.

I
'D BEEN BACK
in Manhattan only a week when Sean called. He was going to be in New York for interviews and asked if he could see me Wednesday night. I probably would have said no if the apartment hadn't smelled like Mark and felt like Mark when I returned. There were tennis racquets, dishes we'd bought together, and other reminders. My sense of rage and injustice came back. Mark was living only a few blocks away with Lila, and I still wanted to hurt them as they'd hurt me. I tried to stay busy. I spent time with my upstairs neighbor, Sally, who worked for
Women's Wear
, and with other friends, but still I couldn't forget. So when Sean asked me to go out with him, I said yes.

I had just stepped out of the shower when the doorbell rang. Glancing at the clock as I wrapped myself in a robe, I saw he was an hour early. I hate people who are early, so I buzzed him in and prepared myself to tell him I wouldn't go out with him. When I looked through the peephole, I saw Bobby Jones standing in the hallway.

I opened the door hesitantly. “Hi.” He beamed. “Remember me?”

More than I cared to. “How'd you find me?”

“You gave me your address and some crazy phone number, remember? What'd you think? I'd forget you?”

He waltzed into the living room, moving with an athlete's gait, that strange swagger in which the torso doesn't budge. “Is this your grandfather?” He was pointing to a photograph my father had taken of Albert Einstein.

“No,” I said flatly. “That's Albert Einstein.”

“Far out.” He looked at my head, wrapped in a towel, my bathrobe, as if noticing them for the first time. “Did I catch you at a bad moment?”

“I'm expecting company at six.”

“Oh, you've got time.”

Time for what, I thought. At the rate he made love, there was plenty of time. But Bobby was intent on scrutinizing the apartment. “You live here with your folks?”

I tried to recall what stories Jennie and I had told him that night, but I couldn't remember. Liars need good memories. “I used to live here with this guy but he split. So now a friend lives here with me but she's not around much.”

Bobby wasn't a complete fool. He glanced at the bleached-wood Scandinavian furniture, at the African wall hanging, the director's chairs, the potted plants. This was no college girl's place. Where were the beer cans, the papers piled high, the Indian-print bedspreads flung across everything you sat on? “You got any stash?” he asked, after a pause. Mark had walked out with the small funeral urn we'd picked up in Greece and I hadn't bothered to replace it.

“How about some Johnny Walker?”

“Sure,” he said, flopping down on the sofa. He was disappointed but consenting. I wondered if he was old enough to drink, as I poured two shots of Scotch and handed it to him.
“I'm just going to comb out my hair.” Bobby found the stereo and was content. He put on an old Stones album and lay back again into the sofa. I pulled on a skirt and blouse and ran a comb through my long auburn hair, which I then twisted into a knot.

Bobby sat up and opened his eyes when I walked into the living room. “Hey, babe, you look great. Come here.”

“Look, I have to tell you something. My friend just made up that whole story. I'm not in college. I'm not in graduate school. When you were learning how to tie your shoelaces, I was graduating from college. I think I'm old enough to date your father.”

“You mean you're over thirty?” He seemed despondent.

I nodded.

“I don't care. We can have a good time, can't we? I like the idea of an older woman.” I'd never been the older woman before.

“I have to get ready to go out,” I said.

He nodded. Then asked me somewhat sheepishly, “Who's Albert Einstein?”

I was in the middle of explaining the theory of relativity and Einstein's perception of space and time when the doorbell rang, and Bobby looked at me, a little stunned.

“Is that your date already?” I nodded solemnly. “Is there another way out of here?”

I felt saddened, as if I had tampered with someone's innocence the way someone had tampered with mine. “The front door will be all right,” I replied.

Sean passed Bobby Jones on the stairs, glanced at him with a somewhat suspicious look, and walked into my apartment. Bobby Jones winked at me as he left. “Who's the kid?” Sean asked as he walked in. He smiled and there seemed to be something different about him, which I attributed to his clothes. He wore a blue and white striped shirt, a blue blazer,
and white corduroys, and seemed more grown up to me than he had when I saw him at Jennie's.

“Oh, just someone. I'd better change.”

“You look all right.”

“But you're dressed up.” I pointed to the liquor cabinet and he poured himself a drink.

“Contributing to the delinquency of a minor?” he called as I walked into the bedroom.

“I think it's the other way around. Where're we going?”

“To a sneak preview.”

I don't remember much about the sneak preview except that Clint Eastwood starred and Sean took a fall off a roof. “That”—he pointed to the screen as a body tumbled down—“was me.” It was shortly after he fell that Sean took my hand. I'm not sure I remember him taking it but I do remember looking down and seeing his hand wrapped around mine. Sean looked to see what I was looking at. He whispered to me, “I'm just holding your hand. Is that all right?”

“I guess it's all right. Are you going to fall again?”

“A little later.”

“Do you get paid much for doing this?”

“More than you can imagine.”

Someone shushed us. I sat staring blankly at the screen for the remainder of the film, uncomfortably conscious of my hand resting in his, waiting for Sean to fall off the roof again.

 

Friday was the kind of night when you can see the air oscillating in front of you, when everything seems to be moving at the wrong speed. Sean picked me up at seven sharp, which is what he said he'd do when he phoned me that afternoon at my office to say he'd be in the city a few more days. I had decided, since I was back in New York, that I'd go in to work a couple of days a week and Bill Wicker said it was fine with him.