Sex in the Title (24 page)

“Really?”

“If I gained fifty pounds, became homeless, and lost the hair on the sides of my head, she’d still be with me, as long as I could put up with her meshugas…There’s something really compelling about that. The only problem is that we might just be fundamentally incompatible on certain things, including the cat issue.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Heeb. Every relationship has its own rules. Had you asked me back in college if I thought that I could ever have a girlfriend who would take two years to quit smoking and who would expect me to sit in therapy until I overcame my mysophobia, I’d have told you that it was impossible. But Carolina and I confronted the impossible. And now we’re both better off. As individuals and as a couple.”

“So what are you saying?”

“That being in love can change almost anything: from your expectations and limitations to your very life plans. It’s a completely unpredictable force. And how it operates within any particular relationship is a total mystery to anyone outside of that relationship.”

“But I don’t know if I’m in love with her…She’s definitely in love with me, and on our good days, I feel like I might be falling in love with her. But on our bad days, I feel like if I stay with her we’ll both end up institutionalized.”

“It’ll work itself out, Sammy. Just give it some time.”

Chapter 17
Love me, Love my Katz

On Sunday, five weeks into their relationship, Melody decided that she would confront Heeb about the cat issue the next time they spoke. The day before, the two had argued over the fact that she always came to his place. But because Heeb had had a lot of work to do at home and would need to wake up extra early the next morning, he acquiesced much more readily than usual when she refused to come over. The fact that he didn’t call back after their fight to make up and charm her into coming over only further angered Melody, particularly since she hadn’t seen him since Friday morning. Deep down she hoped that Heeb might get enough work done to accompany her on her Monday morning dog walk. But if he couldn’t join her, she would also welcome the opportunity finally to excoriate him as needed, and air all of her accumulated grievances.

The exceedingly muggy Monday morning, towards the end of the summer of 2000, got off to a bad start for Sammy. In his frantic rush to get to the office by 6 a.m. so that he could finish a report expected by forty people, he quickly grabbed the many objects he needed to take but no bag in which to carry them: his apartment keys, an umbrella for the expected afternoon downpour, an assortment of documents and floppy disks, his cell phone, his walkman, his calendar, his wallet, some bill payments that he had to put in the mail, and the trash that was stinking up his apartment (his residence always deteriorated after any three-day period in which Melody hadn’t been over).

To maximize his morning efficiency, Heeb had developed the habit of first calling the elevator, then dropping the trash in the building incinerator, and then locking his apartment door, by which time the elevator would arrive. As Heeb dropped the trash down the incinerator, while holding his keys, umbrella, phone, wallet, documents, calendar, mail, and disks, he thought about how bad it would have been had he accidentally dropped his only pair of apartment keys down the incinerator with the trash. This thought tempted him, as he was locking his front door, to run back inside and look for his bag, but the elevator arrived, and he decided just to opt for efficiency over convenient carrying. In the elevator, he organized the assorted objects as follows: he put his keys, wallet, and disks into his various trouser pockets, his walkman onto his belt with the headset around his neck, his cell phone, and mail in his right hand, and the umbrella, calendar, and documents in his left hand.

As Sammy exited the elevator and began walking towards the train, he debated whether to call Melody and tell her that he wouldn’t be able to join her 8 a.m. dog walk. If he called now (at 6:15 a.m.), he risked waking her up, if she had forgotten to turn off her ringer, and – even worse – he risked getting into a heated argument with her over the fact that he couldn’t make their walk. On the other hand, there was a chance that at this early hour he would just get her voicemail, which would be ideal. Another consideration in favor of calling so early, during his walk to the train, was the fact that from the time he entered the train station until after his 11 a.m. meeting was over, he wouldn’t be able to call Melody, and this might look to her as if he had just flaked on her dog walk.

Heeb was cranky from lack of sleep and stress related to his upcoming meeting, his hands and arms were uncomfortable from schlepping so many loose objects while walking at such a frenzied pace, and he was unsure of how exactly to manage Melody’s potentially explosive reaction (particularly since they still hadn’t made up from the previous night’s fight). Nevertheless, he concluded that calling her during his walk to the subway station was the lesser of evils.

As Heeb dialed Melody’s number, he prayed that his call would go straight to voicemail.

After a few rings, he heard: “Heh…Hello?” He had awakened her.

“Hi…It’s me…I’m really sorry about calling so early.”

“What…what’s wrong?” she began groggily.

“I just didn’t want you to think that I had forgotten.”

“Forgotten what?”

“About the 8 a.m. dog walk.” By now, Melody had seen that it was just after 6:18 a.m.

“Sammy, why are you calling so early?”

“Because otherwise we won’t be able to talk until around 11 a.m.”

“But we can just talk during the dog walk.”

“No. That’s what I’m calling to tell you…I can’t make the walk today…I’m sorry.”

And that was it. By this point Melody, who was a light sleeper, was awake enough to recall all of the simmering gripes that she had wanted to express since their last tiff, and decided that it was time to unleash her fury. “So this is how you make up for last night?”

“I’m sorry about last night. I just had a lot of work and didn’t want to schlep – ”

“Don’t give me the schlepping shit. If I can schlep to your place every fucking time we meet you can schlep to mine once in a leap year. You don’t like my cats. That’s the only reason you’ve never been to my place.”

“That’s not true.”

“Admit it once and for all or I’m hanging up on you. I’m tired of the bullshit reasons about better restaurants, it’s closer to our jobs, you’ve got a better Bach collection, and blah blah blah. It all comes down to my cats. And that’s it. Period. Admit it.”

“Twelve cats is a lot for a studio.”

“But you’ve never even seen the place.”

“Look, four hundred square feet would be tiny for me without a dozen cats and another person…I’m just claustrophobic I guess.”

“And you don’t like cats.”

“That’s not true. I’m not just not crazy about being in a cat farm.”

“Admit that you don’t like cats so that I can hang up.”

“Did I just lose my right to dislike cats?”

“Love me, love my cats.”

“I can’t believe I just lost that right.”

“Love me, love my cats.”

“The right to dislike cats is an inalienable right.”

“Not if you love me it’s not.”

“Look, can we just talk about this later?” Heeb really didn’t want to suffer through this conversation just before an important business meeting and he felt very aware of three nearby yuppies who looked far too bored with their walk not to eavesdrop on his increasingly heated call. But deferring the discussion was unthinkable for Melody; she had finally mustered the courage to launch into a whole litany of complaints, and she wasn’t about to lose her momentum.

“And you don’t call enough,” she continued, ignoring Heeb’s plea.

“But we speak on the phone about eight times a day on average.”

Heeb saw that he was stuck on this call and began to move away from the yuppies in the direction of a lone morning walker – a man in his fifties with headphones on, wearing shorts and sandals, and reading the paper while walking. He seemed too busy to tune in to Heeb’s spat.

“That’s not enough. And I’m always the one calling you.”

“Yeah, during work, when I’m not supposed to be on the phone.”

“You spend too much time in the office.”

“Do you want to support me? You know I’ve always wanted a sugar mama. Or should we open up a dog-walking company together?”

Sensing that the conversation would only get more heated and irrational, Heeb glanced at the older walker next to him, just to confirm that he hadn’t yet taken any interest in Heeb’s conversation. He was still reading the newspaper with his headphones on.

“You’re part of corporate America for God’s sake. You don’t have enough edge,” she continued.

“What do you mean?”

“You wouldn’t commit any crimes with me. Or even misdemeanors.”

“You mean drugs? Or anal sex?”

They had had a fight over this issue about a week earlier.

“Either,” she replied.

“I can’t put my dick in anything that could contain parts of our dinner in it,” he rejoined, without noticing the fifty-year-old look over at him in disgusted disapproval. “It just grosses me out, OK? It’s against Biblical law.”

“I told you I’m an atheist.”

“Well maybe it’s time to rediscover your religion,” he retorted.

“I tried licking your toes once, like you wanted. Even though it was disgusting – especially with my sensitivity to odors.”

“I washed my feet for twenty minutes first.”

“Well you missed some spots. Anyway, that’s not the point. You should be willing to try anything once,” Melody countered. “Including a tongue enema, which I haven’t even asked for yet, even though I love them.”

“A tongue enema?” Heeb asked, in confused repulsion.

“Yeah. They’re amazing. And I’d give you one back in return.”

“A tongue enema?! I think that’s the most nauseating thing I’ve ever heard of.”

“How do you know you won’t like it?”

“You and your anything-once-philosophy! Next you’ll suggest that I make love to your cats.” The fifty-year-old next to him continued his look of appalled eavesdropping.

“It would be nice if you could love them.”

“See what I mean?”

“I was joking. You know that’s not what I mean.”

“Why not? Sodomy. Bestiality. Masturbating while skydiving on acid.”

The fifty-year-old looked up at Heeb, shook his head vituperatively and muttered loudly to himself: “You sick fuck!” Then he sped up to get away from Heeb.

Heeb reddened for a moment and continued, trying not to lose his point: “I mean, where does the search for new experiences end? Everyone has limits. Mine start with the anus.”

“You don’t even do ecstasy for God’s sake. How can you refuse to listen to Bach with me on ex? It’s the most incredible experience.”

“It’s illegal. And they do random drug testing at my work.”

“That’s corporate America talking again.”

“Would you stop with that corporate America crap? That’s my job, OK? One of these days you may have to go back to having one too.”

“Listen to what you’re saying to me! Can you believe what you just – ” Heeb blanked out on Melody for a moment as he remembered that he needed to deposit his mail in the mailbox a few feet away because it was the last one before he entered the Eighty-sixth Street subway station. He had been looking forward to this moment, after uncomfortably holding his mail in a stack that was sandwiched between his fingers and his cell phone, which was held down on the stack by his right thumb and pressed up to the side of his head for the conversation. He refocused on Melody’s rant: “…not fair…I mean, listen to how you communicate with me! I feel like that’s become our problem. That’s really what this is about now: we just don’t communicate like we used – ” And that was the last thing he heard Melody say. Heeb’s painfully cramped and over-encumbered fingers were so eager to release the stack of mail from his right hand into the mailbox that they released his cell phone as well.

Heeb stood there for a moment, in dazed disbelief, looking helplessly at the sides of the mailbox. Melody’s continuing diatribe could now be heard only as a series of strangely muffled, barely audible noises, emanating from within the metal mailbox, like a transistor radio that falls into a manhole and just gives off a faint, chattering buzz.

In absurd desperation, Heeb tried cupping his hands to the mailbox for a moment, and shouting into it, hoping that she might hear what happened and that he really didn’t mean to drop the phone in the mailbox just as she was complaining about how they don’t communicate as well as they used to.

“Melody! Melody! I can’t hear you! I dropped my phone in the mailbox! Can you hear me?! I’m sorry! It slipped!”

As several commuters walked by, looking oddly at this heavyset balding man in a suit and tie crouched down low and apparently talking rather urgently to a mailbox, Heeb felt that he may have reached the nadir of his follies in the New York dating scene. But it would actually get much worse.

Heeb was sure that Melody would call him at work that day and that the conversation would get even nastier because of how their last argument had ended. He had no promising strategy in mind for how to deal with her call at work, so it was with some measure of surprised relief that he reached the end of the day without having heard from her. He concluded that a Melody moratorium might do his nerves some good and decided not to call her that night. Sammy still couldn’t quite understand how someone who had been so timid that first night they met could turn out to be so ferocious over what seemed to him such trivial matters (particularly the cat bit).

The next day at his office was so hectic that it wasn’t until 7 p.m. that he even noticed that Melody still hadn’t called. He decided to call her as soon as he got home and before he even went shopping for a replacement cell phone. He found her number in his address book and then called her from his home phone.

“Are you still mad at me?”

“No. Actually, I should thank you.” There was a strangely amused and ironic tone to Melody’s voice.