The Tender Bar (30 page)

She gave my cheek a peck and waved over her shoulder as she sailed out the door.

I bought a six-pack and sat on the window seat, drinking, listening to Sinatra, watching students in the courtyard below. They were saying goodbye, hugging, rushing off to Union Station. I felt the campus emptying like a balloon losing air. The phone rang. My mother calling to see how I did on the exam. No. Sidney, calling from the car. A phone in the car? I’d never heard of such a thing. “Hey you,” she said. “Come have dinner.”

“Together? Tonight?”

“Together. Tonight. Call me back and let me know what train you’re getting. I’ll meet you at the station.”

I hung up, took a swig of beer, and burst into tears. The first time in my life I ever wept with joy.

Standing on the platform as my train pulled in, she was wearing a white overcoat and her hair and eyelashes were sprinkled with snowflakes. She’d made reservations at a waterfront restaurant, where neither of us touched our food. Plates came and went, unnoticed as our breath. Then we were speeding through deep woods in her sports car. We roared up to her parents’ house and sat in the car, the heater blasting, Phil Collins playing on the radio, each of us waiting for the other to speak. Through the falling snow, through the trees, I saw a silver river flashing in the moonlight. I thought with a wince of the canal in Arizona.

She took me inside. All the lights were off, everyone asleep. She led me upstairs to a guestroom. “What about your parents?” I whispered as she shut the door. “Won’t we wake them?”

“They’re very liberal,” she whispered.

The lamp beside the bed gave off a harsh light, like a lamp at Grandpa’s, but I didn’t want to turn it off. I wanted to see Sidney. I slipped one of my argyle socks over the bulb and turned just as Sidney was unhooking her bra and dropping it to the floor. She stepped out of her pants, and her panties, and came forward, suffused in an argyle glow. She took off my clothes, put a hand on my chest and pushed, once. I fell onto the bed. She slid on top of me, under me. Ooh, she said softly, then again, louder. Then much louder. Your parents, I said. They’re cool, she said. Ooh, she said again, then yes, then ooh and yes in breathless combinations. I didn’t think there could be so many combinations. I concentrated on the combinations, numbering them, using them to block out all other thoughts, including any thought of enjoying myself, because I was determined to hold on, to perform, to last. The feel of Sidney beneath me, the sight of her body, was a dream, and if I enjoyed it, paused for one half second to take any pleasure in it, the dream would end. Yes, Sidney said, through clenched teeth, yes, yes, until the word lost all meaning, becoming a sound on which we both concentrated, then a soft whoosh of contentment that was a counterpoint to the wind outside.

Lying together we said nothing for so long that I thought she was asleep. At last she said, “Do you smell something burning?” I looked at the lamp. My sock on the bulb was smoking. I grabbed it, knocking the lamp over, making a tremendous racket. Sidney laughed. I then made the burned sock into a hand puppet, “Sockrates,” who offered a philosophical commentary on the shocking behavior he’d just witnessed.

“You’re trouble,” she said, laughing into her pillow.

“Why?”

“You just are.” She hugged me. “I’m not sure I need your kind of trouble.”

I woke to find her standing over me with a mug of coffee. “Morning, Trouble,” she said.

She wore a billowy white satin robe that was falling open. I took the mug from her and as she turned away I grabbed her and pulled her onto the bed.

“My parents,” she said.

“They’re liberal.”

“Yes, well, the liberals are awake, and they have expressed some interest in meeting the man in the upstairs guestroom.”

Since my suitcase was still in Sidney’s car, I put on my clothes from the night before and followed her downstairs. Her parents, though white-haired and a good deal older than my mother, were liberal as advertised. They didn’t seem at all scandalized. They poured me a cup of coffee and invited me to join them at the breakfast table.

Each had Sidney’s husky voice, and like her they fired questions at me. I wasn’t sure they would find my stories as entertaining as Sidney had, so I deflected their questions with questions of my own. I asked about their interests. They were passionate about Italian opera, hothouse orchids, and cross-country skiing. I knew nothing about these subjects, and felt as if I’d failed my second exam in twenty-four hours. I asked about the family construction business.

“Some companies build houses,” Sidney’s mother said. “We build
dwellings
.” She said this word, “dwellings,” in the same rapturous tone Professor Lucifer used when he said “POY-um.” Her voice rose and her cheeks pinkened as she spoke about the human need for shelter. I told her about Manhasset’s mansions and Shelter Rock and what they symbolized to me as a boy. I could see that she liked this story.

Sidney’s father stood, put his hands in the pockets of his chinos and asked casually about my family. I bragged about my mother. He smiled. “And your father?” he said.

“I didn’t really meet him until recently.”

He frowned. I couldn’t tell if it was a frown of sympathy or disapproval. Sidney’s mother changed the subject and asked what I was studying at Yale. What do you hope to be? I mentioned law school, and both parents looked relieved.

“We’d better be going,” Sidney said. “I have to drive JR to the airport.”

Along the way, however, Sidney had a change of heart. She said she’d decided to drop me in Darien, where I could catch the shuttle the rest of the way.

“Why?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

“I just think it’s for the best.”

“Tell me why.”

“Look. I’m seeing someone else.”

“I know.” I mentioned my friend, the one who had introduced us in Constitutional Law. No, Sidney said. Someone else besides. My stomach dropped, and I felt a lump in my throat.

She spun off the highway at Darien and when we reached the shuttle stop she jumped out. I sat motionless while she grabbed my suitcase from the trunk and ordered me out of the car. I refused. She set my suitcase on the pavement and waited. I didn’t budge. The standoff lasted five minutes. Finally she put my suitcase back in the trunk and got back in the car. Neither of us said a word as she raced south on I-95, weaving in and out of traffic like an Indy-car driver. By the time we reached the airport, however, she wasn’t angry anymore. I even sensed some grudging admiration on her part when we kissed good-bye.

“Merry Christmas,” she said. “Trouble.”

The first nickname I ever liked.

I knew less about love than about constitutional law, but on the flight to Arizona I decided I was in love. Or else I was having a stroke. I was sweating, shaking, suffering pains in my chest. It didn’t help that I could still smell Sidney on my hand, and in my pocket I found a crumpled napkin that bore her lip print. I held my hand to my nose, pressed the napkin to my mouth, and the flight attendant asked if I was ill.

My mother asked the same thing as I stepped off the plane.

“I think I’m in love,” I said.

“Wonderful!” she said, throwing her arm around me as we walked out of Sky Harbor. “Who’s the lucky girl?”

In the car, over dinner, late into the night, I tried to talk with my mother about Sidney, but I found the conversation unexpectedly complicated. I wanted to question my mother about love, but I felt the need to be careful, because I didn’t want to stir unpleasant memories of her romantic disappointments. I wanted to ask if our apartment by the canal disqualified me for a goddess who lived beside a silver river, but I didn’t want to disparage the home my mother had done her best to make for us. Finally I just said, “Sidney’s so up here.” I held my hand above my head. “And I’m so down here.” I dropped my hand to my knees.

“Don’t say that. You have so much to offer.”

“Yeah. No money, no clue what I want to do with my life—”

“No clue?”

“I mean, besides becoming a lawyer.”

“Look,” she said. “It’s not the worst thing in a relationship if the man puts the woman on a slight pedestal.” She smiled and gave my shoulder an encouraging rub, but I couldn’t force a smile in return. “JR, falling in love is a blessing. Try to enjoy it.”

“What if I get my heart broken?” I asked.

She stared over my head.

“Mom?”

Blank.

“Mom?”

She lowered her gaze and looked at me.

“You’ll live,” she said.

Sidney met me at the airport with a bottle of champagne, which we passed back and forth as she sped north on I-95. It was a Sunday night, the temperature below zero. There wasn’t another car on the highway. We had the world to ourselves.

We reached Yale around midnight. Frozen trees clicked in the wind. Streets were solid chutes of ice. We stopped by my room, picked up my Sinatra albums, then went to her apartment and locked ourselves inside. Sidney laughed slyly when I moved a big chair against the door.

We didn’t leave for days. Snow fell, melted, fell again—we scarcely noticed. We never turned on the TV or the radio. The only sounds in the apartment were Sinatra’s voice and ours, his moans and ours, and the wind. When starved we ordered food from a restaurant on the corner. The phone rang off the hook, but Sidney never answered it, and she didn’t own an answering machine. If boyfriends were looking for her, she didn’t seem to care, and I took her indifference to mean that she was done with all men but me.

Time passed imperceptibly, then stopped altogether, lost its grip on us. We would lie on our sides for an hour, staring at each other, smiling, touching fingertips, saying nothing. We would fall asleep. We would wake, make love, then fall asleep again, fingers interlocked. I had no idea if it was morning, night, what day of the week, and I didn’t want to know.

At one point, while Sidney slept, I sat in a chair at the foot of the bed, drinking a beer, trying to organize my feelings. I’d been awed at first by Sidney’s beauty, I was honest with myself about that, but now it went deeper. This was more than sex, more than love. I’d experienced the power of sex with Lana, and puppy love with a girl or two since, but those were hasty rehearsals for this. This was big, this was going to change me forever, and this might just kill me if I wasn’t careful, because I was already desperate. Already I felt that I’d give anything to hold on to this feeling, this primal energizing force I’d been lacking for nineteen years. I’d always believed that sex and love were the great catalysts, the things that converted a boy into a man, and plenty of people I trusted had intimated as much, but until now it was all in the realm of theory. I’d never really believed how explosive those catalysts could be, how magical it might feel if sex and love occurred in one moment, one person. I’d been a cynic, I realized, but now, as Sidney opened her eyes, as I looked into those bottomless pools of brown, down to the taproots of her soul, I believed that she was capable of effecting a metamorphosis in me, and maybe pulling off a miracle. She could make me a man; more remarkably, she might make me happy.

When we did get out of bed I would mix a pitcher of martinis and we’d lie on the living room couch, talking. A boyhood spent listening for The Voice was paying dividends at last. I could hear things in Sidney’s voice—her hopes, her fears, the subtexts and master plots of her life. To show her how carefully I was listening, I would tell her story back to her, in my own words, and venture what I thought the meaning might be. She loved this.

Talking to Sidney about myself, I detected things in my own voice as well. All my life I’d censored myself. Now I said exactly what I felt, blurted it all out to this beautiful woman who listened as ardently as she made love. Caught up in this uncensored spirit, I told Sidney on our fourth or fifth day together that I intended to marry her. We were eating bagels in her kitchen. She stopped chewing and stared.

“Marry?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to give you a diamond ring and marry you. Someday.”

Her eyes widened and she left the room.

A short while later she said it was time for us to go back into the world. “I’m getting agita,” she said, pulling on a pair of tight jeans.

“What? Agita?”

“I need fresh air, Trouble. We have to sign up for classes. Yale? Life? Remember?”

“Because of what I said? About getting—?”

“I’ll call you later.”

I caught the next Amtrak train to New York, then switched at Penn Station to the Long Island Railroad, the local to Manhasset. Uncle Charlie was startled to see me walk through the door at Publicans a week after I’d left for Yale. “Who’s dead?” he said.

“No one. I just needed to see some friendly faces.”

He pointed at my chest. I felt better instantly. Then he reached for the gin. I frowned. “No,” I said. “I’m off gin. Please. How about scotch?”

He looked appalled. Changing my drink? An unthinkable breach of Publicans protocol. But he saw that I was hurting and didn’t press the point. “What’s the pitch?” he asked, pouring.

“Girl trouble.”

“Lay it on me.”

He slid the glass in my direction, as if moving a bishop across a chessboard. I gave him the quick overview, omitting the precipitating event—my gaffe about marriage. “She just threw me out,” I said. “Claimed she had agita.”