How to Love an American Man (24 page)

“But I have yet to pack a picnic.”

When we get back to her house, Grandma puts both pairs of our shoes by the heater and goes to get me warm socks. When my brother arrives and stands in the entryway, Grandma holds me long and tightly in a hug, until she pulls away and stares into my eyes. “You saved me today.”

“I wouldn't have had it any other way.” With Grandma's phone call to the doctor—and her lifelong philosophy on her body—she saved herself.
Anything for my health
, she'd shrugged. Her simple approach is a good lesson. In her relations with a man or when she's completely on her own, a woman has a duty to herself to keep a sound body and mind.

Grandma may have saved herself, but maybe today she saved me too.

Chapter 11
No Angry Goodbyes

T
HROUGH THE OPENING
in my curtains it's clear this is one of those Saturdays most people wait for all year. A bird bounces from a high branch to one lower and sturdier, its tiny voice narrating its wings.

My clock says the day is creeping on noon, and when the neighbor's lawn mower stops, there's the hum and happy splash of boats on the lake. It's been ten years since I've witnessed Memorial Day at home; this perfect few days that epitomizes the concept of
weekend
and marks the start of the Treasure Lake summer.

The weather outside would make the last two hours that I've spent crying in bed totally uncalled for . . . except this feels
so good
. Tears trail consistently from the corners of my eyes and drop fast like pinewood derby cars over the slope of my temples, landing in the ditches of my ears, or when I look up at the ceiling, in the pool that's collecting in the back of my hair and soaking through my pillow. These sobs are both torturous and fantastic.

I know this feeling: I'm in love.

I didn't know what to say yesterday at Chris's satellite office when his partner Joe invited me to the farewell dinner he was holding at his house for Chris. “You're welcome to join us,” he said. “You've been important around the office these last couple weeks.”

“Oh, thanks, Joe.” I played it off casually, but my eyes shifted to Chris, whose jeans and Italian vest didn't exactly lend themselves to the hunt for files he appeared to be conducting on all fours. “That's very generous.”

“So are you coming?” Joe coaxed. “Come on, I'm barbecuing!”

I wanted to discuss it with Chris first because I really didn't know whether I belonged at a Friday evening dinner with his full office staff. Logistics-wise, however, it was the only plan that made sense. Chris was my ride home. “I'd love to,” I said.

A month ago when Chris arrived home from his last trip abroad, he'd mentioned treating me to a glycolic facial peel. I was surprised, given that I've seen his patients spend anywhere from three to five hundred dollars for a peel or two. When he first offered, I was cautious in assuming he planned to do it for free. “It'd be right up my alley,” I told him, “and it's generous of you to offer. I just don't know that I can afford it right now.”

He paused from studying an X-ray he was examining to look up at me. “Kris, I'd be insulted if you thought I would ever take your money.”

It was gentlemanly! When I told Grandma about it, she shrugged and said, “Why not take him up on it, you know how many women would line up for that?” Of course I'd do it, I figured, while Grandma excused herself to the bathroom. Wait a second, it occurred to me. Just why does he want to give me a chemical peel? Is my face screaming for help so loudly that it's going to keep him up at night when he's on the other side of the world? That's it, isn't it? When he's looking at me, he's picking apart my flaws. The bump across the top of my nose, the lines that are starting to indent my forehead after I've been sitting at the computer too long; and now this, my chin, eternally inflamed with breakouts.

I felt my face flush in anger until I caught the photograph plaque of Grandpa, smiling in his suit and tie, inside Grandma's curio cabinet.
Krissy, Krissy, Krissy,
he sighed.
How many more meals will you have to share with your grandmother before you realize that there are men walking this earth who simply want to do kind things for you.
I imagined his signature Italian shrug-and-frown:
It's a facial! An hour at the spa! You and Emma applied sillier solutions to your skin with things you pulled out of the back of the refrigerator when you were eight!

'Twas true. So after we wrapped up Chris's very last day in the office before his weekend of packing and then his flight to Asia, I cheerfully obliged him by sitting in the reclining exam chair as he stirs a large blush brush in a porcelain bowl. “You're gonna love what this does for you,” he said. “It's going to peel away all the dead skin cells on your face to reveal your healthiest layer.”

“My youngest layer, right? That's why women pursue this as an antiaging tactic?”

“Exactly. And when I'm back in the fall we can proceed with the next step. I'll put you under the UV lamp to sterilize your skin down to its deepest layer.” It sounded so delightfully Dr. Oz. In relaxation, I settled into the chair till I realized: there's an unspoken understanding that I'm not to tell anyone else he's doing this for me. “You took off all your makeup, right?”

“Yes.” I'd done so reluctantly, the thought occurring to me that I've never really let a guy see me without makeup, until, well, I wake up next to him in his bed.
You're moving kinda fast, Chris!
I joked in my head. I wish.

Then he touched lightly on my jaw to tilt my head backward.
Oh, if every man understood the appeal of hand cream the way he does!
He stroked his fingers slowly over my forehead to clear my hair out of the way; then carefully, so carefully, swabbed the area above my eyebrows with a cotton ball, sweeping down my nose and in the crevices around it. He doused another cotton ball to wipe my chin. “Is that witch hazel?” I asked.

“Yes. You like it?”

“Mm,” I told him as he swabbed around my mouth. I've always loved witch hazel's fragrance; a combination of floral and therapeutic. I kept my eyes on my feet so our gazes wouldn't lock, then while he stood upside down over me, he took the sides of my face in his hands. “Are you ready?” he said.

I smiled up at him. “You act like this is a serious procedure!”

“Well,” he said calmly, “I want to make sure you're comfortable.”

“Yes,” I told him, settling farther into the chair. “Ready spaghetti.”

He began stroking the solution onto my face with his brush. I tried to pretend I was someplace else to ignore the awkwardness of his closeness.
Relax
, I inhaled and told myself.
There is nothing dangerous about being so taken care of . . .
So, I imagined my face was a canvas, and almost immediately his brushstroke turned so calming that I wanted to fall asleep. I remembered being little and not wanting to miss out on the adults' late-night, wine-and-laughter-filled dining room conversations until Grandpa would wave to me to sit on his lap so I could rest my head on his chest. Then he'd trace his pointer finger around my face until I fell asleep.

“Ann, do me a favor,” Chris whispered. “Turn out that fluorescent light.” His nurses had been hovering in the doorway, having packed up the last of their materials.

“Dr. Chris,” I heard Ann say over my head, “you still have some papers to sign downstairs. Do you want me to do this peel so you can finish up?”

“Thanks, Ann, I appreciate that,” he said. “But I know Krissy's face well. I need to get this just right.”

I know Krissy's face well.
I know Van Gogh's
In Arles
well because it hangs over my bed and I get lost in its beauty every day. The way he said that stays with me. I wonder . . . could it be that he pays more attention than I
allow
myself to see?

I tapped my fingers lightly on the chair's armrests, relinquishing my always-has-it-togetherness for one vulnerable moment to feel like a child in this man's care.

“Look at that,” Ann said. “She doesn't even have any wrinkles.”

“Her grandfather was Italian,” Chris explained. “I think that's why.”

He remembers, I thought, and suddenly it was clear: he understands where I come from.

Chris, I love you.

What? Where had that thought come from? His wheely stool creaked as he stood to rinse the bowl and place it inside the auto-clave oven. I peered around the back of the exam chair, studying his every authoritative move, then sat back when he took the stool again. “Does it burn at all?”

“No.”

“Good. No itchiness?

“Nope.”

“Excellent. I want you to relax, okay?”

“Yes.”

“Ann, we're good here.” I heard her remove her weight from the door frame and walk down the hall. Chris wheeled his stool closer. I could feel heat from his face on my ear. “You want to try a relaxation technique that I use with my sleep apnea patients?”

“Sure.” His proximity was nerve-wrackingly intimate.

His presence was warm. Again I tried to distract myself with my thoughts:
There's no way he does this with his patients, he'd get sued!
But, oh, why was he getting so close when he was about to move away? I breathed steadily, consciously loosening my hands and shoulders. I imagined his breath on my mouth, his lips on mine. Secretly I wanted that. I inched my head a degree closer to him.

“I want you to imagine that you're wrapped up in a hundred blankets,” he said. “They're warm and light and loose enough that you're free to move. Can you feel them?”

Somehow I feel completely normal answering yes.

“Good, Kris. And there's a soft light shining above you, but second by second it's disappearing, and soon the room will go completely dark.”

The nurses told us to tell Grandpa to walk into the light when he was dying, I thought, remembering how he'd stop writhing in his bed in pain and discontentedness when we told him that it was okay to approach heaven.

Chris continued. “When the vision of that light is gone, it's replaced by a steady, placid sound that transports you. Don't speak, but think of what that sound is.” I heard waves at night on the Landing's shore with the echoed rumble of trucks over the mountain on the interstate. When I was little I swore that was the sound of the world turning. “Now imagine that sound blanketed by snow in the winter, and you're sleeping all season, with nowhere you have to be. Very well done, Kris,” he said. “As you've been relaxing, your body temperature's been rising. Your breaths are profound now. They're delivering fresh oxygen to your blood and muscles.” I felt almost hypnotized, unable to make a sound. I could only continue breathing. “I'm going to leave you alone a few minutes,” he said. “But I'll be back.”

Everything was black, until a clear thought surfaced: there are definitely moments when it's actually beneficial to a woman to let a man take care of her.

I'm not sure how long I lay there resting—five minutes? Twenty?—But when he returned he waited to turn on the light until after he placed a warm, damp cloth on my face and wiped away the solution. “I want you to stand up and rinse off your face,” he said. “Do you feel renewed?” I turned on the water of the stainless-steel basin and rinsed until I felt him hold a towel against my arm. After I dried off, he handed me a mirror and finished wiping the space between my ear and my jaw. In the mirror I saw that his nurses had returned. “It's beautiful, isn't it?”

I made a face like Mona Lisa, not wanting to draw more attention to myself in front of this audience. My face shone in the lucid way it used to in grade school, when I first learned to use Noxzema. The sensation was so clean, so deep down and thorough, that the tiny lines around my eyes had disappeared and the tone and freckles from the sun had evened out. I considered telling him,
You do good work,
but I understood that this wasn't for his ego—it was for me. And so I agreed: “It's really beautiful.”

When his assistants exited the room, he braced his hands around my shoulders and stopped me, standing belly-to-belly, so close that I couldn't tell if he was examining my forehead or staring straight into my soul. “Perfect.”

Perfect . . .
did he mean me, or his work? As we walked down the hollow hallway together, I slipped into a fantasy, pretending that he'd just created me; this modern Pygmalion sculpting my flawless femininity from his own vision. In an exam room where most patients go to have their teeth pulled, he'd just crafted art; he'd just restored beauty. This fluorescent-lit atmosphere left most people feeling clinical and cynical . . . but I felt gratitude and massive affection.

This is what it's like to be loved by a man. Before a woman falls in love, her beauty is the cause of a man's admiration, the carefree pull that captivates him. But then after she falls in love, even more radiance is the effect. I remembered that the Monday I went into work after I met Adam Hunt, my boss stopped at my cubicle with her coffee and said, “Dear God. You've met someone, haven't you?” When I spun away from her in my chair, she said, “There's no sense in denying it. Look at you, he woke you from the dead.” And in a sense, yes, he had woken me up from that lonely, self-conscious bad dream that I experienced as dating in New York, in which I could encounter men on the surface but felt embarrassed for wanting to give them my love. Adam Hunt had cleared away the cobwebs from the warm, loving space inside me that I'd kept locked up for all of my young adulthood. And so it goes: when a female becomes the object of a male's desire—no matter how primitive the concept may seem—it's as though he's kissed a sad, sleeping princess and breathed life into her from his own breath. And she begins, then, to see herself through his eyes, her every movement and glance and emotion turning passionately cognizant, as though she's watching the most womanly version of herself from some priviledged audience. Never before has she been more beautiful; and never before has she been more herself.

When you think of it that way, it's no wonder Grandma misses Grandpa so much. In these last few weeks, though, I have experienced that again. Allow me to backpedal just a moment: I certainly believe that I'm self-assured enough to live without a man's validation; I feel sufficiently lovable on my own. But having the attention of a man again—as subtly displayed as Chris's attention usually is—has made me excited to get out of bed every morning. On days when I dress a little glamorously for the office, I know that he notices; and on days when I dress more demurely, I know he appreciates it. For most of the year that I've known him, I've wondered whether he was even seeing me, even when I was standing right in front of him. So the offer for the facial . . . it showed me that he cared.