ALTERNATIVE DECEPTIONS
(CHAPTER ONE OF THE NOVEL, ALTHERNATIVE DECEPTIONS))
COPYRIGHT 1999 BY AUTHOR, TIMOTHY HERRICK
BY: TIMOTHY HERRICK
My brother’s mini-van turned off the Forest Avenue Exit. The overpass curved over the highway, lined with stores, strip malls and gas stations. Then we headed down the two lane suburban street of our home town. I can’t remember when I had been here last. He had some classic rock station on and this Hendrix song was playing and the cigar, these small stubby things he had taken up went out and as I watched the last wisp of smoke curl and disappear, I had this image, this memory, of him driving me around in this hippie VW micro bus he had when I was a kid.
We were my parents only offspring. He was ten years older. He was a hippie, of that generation, and I was not. Back then, the cigar was a joint and he just blithely drove and smoked, eyes going blood shot, and an eight track of Hendrix playing. The sound system now was much better of course.
I travel for my job, usually to another city like Chicago or Los Angeles. Suburbia, despite my memory of it or maybe because of it, was just so alien now. The endless two story houses, ensconced by short trees and bright green lawns, which were so familiar by association in my memories yet so distant from my day to day experience, made me feel very weird. I was a tourist in my own memories.
I hadn’t seen my brother for more than six months. It was the fifth anniversary of our mother’s death. The plan was to place flowers on her grave and then we would drive back to his Connecticut house and have dinner with his wife and seven year old son. Then I would go back via train to New York city.
This was shortly before I met Mary. I was making good money at the job, but my personal life tended towards vacuous. I had moved into a new apartment, and like my old apartment, it had been burglarized. I was single. Stephanie had moved to San Francisco. I dated this other woman for a short bit, a very short bit. She’s an account executive who works in another company in the same office building as my job. We slept together, she left in the morning and I called her that afternoon. Her cracking voice said she just didn’t feel right. Feel right?
So, now, we pass each other once in a while to and from the elevator and no sign of recognition is made. We don’t work on the same floor. I guess there is a God.
We passed a garden and landscaping store, with bird feeders, lawn statues and bushes on display outside adjacent to its gravel parking lot. Our family had shopped there. Like all suburban dads, mine took the responsibility of lawncare as seriously as his generation’s unified sense of duty that defeated the axis forces. I remember lugging these bags of fertilizer and limestone to our station wagon. I was not a big kid. I dropped one of them and it burst open . Dad hit me, fast, open-fisted then screamed. His temper was immediate with violence-prone results—I cried in the parking lot. I had been forced into being a spectacle, crying and being loudly reprimanded for everybody to see.
Out of the mini van’s window, I watched houses, all two stories, lawns pedicured and verdant, then a bank, a gas station, a delicatessen then more houses. At one light was this red brick office building. Bergen County Medical Arts read the large metal sign by the entrance. I used to ride my bicycle, this gold sting-ray thing with a banana seat to the patch of woods that used to be here. I caught salamanders. The dank crimson creatures squirmed from the light after I picked up a log, then I grabbed them. I kept them in this large jar whose bottom I carpeted with dirt and pebbles. I dropped in saw-dust sized fragments of raw meat. They never ate. In a few days, they were all shriveled up, arid and lifeless and black. My parents never let me keep real pets, dogs or cats. The salamanders were it. I didn’t feel grief, I just felt like a failure. I couldn’t even keep freaking salamanders alive.
I pointed at the brick structure, which was only a five or so stories high but still towered over the split-level aluminum sided homes surrounding it. “The town has changed,” I said.
“Oh, that’s been here a while. I think Mom got her eyes checked there.” David took out his cigar and held it between his fore and index finger, his hand keeping the steering wheel steady. “The place has always been building up. You see a lot more of these office buildings. Guess they’ve built enough malls and stores.”
“It may not be as countrified as where you live, but it is still pretty countrified.”
“Guess you’d consider this wide open spaces now that you’re a city boy. Welcome to America, Tom.”
I rolled my eyes. My brother doesn’t approve of me. I mean, sibling resentment certainly is part of it. But mostly, he just hates the city, New York city in particular, resenting me for not only living there, but actually preferring it. Maybe, also, it’s because I’m not married and don’t seem to be on the way to being married any time soon. I think being from that baby boomer generation, all that sixties long hair stuff, he’s just more inclined to conformity. He rebelled back then with everybody else and when society calmed down and everyone married and had kids, he did likewise. Since I never had to personally rebel against a war or oppressive government or engage in a social revolution I guess he thinks I just should have conformed the other way from the get go.
“Well, I’m glad I don’t live here. Everybody’s the same. All these white faces. When I was on the bus here, all the men had the same kind of blue suit on, white shirt and red tie.”
“You got a suit on. Everybody wears a suit these days.”
“It’s a lot more stylish. Look, the shirt is dark blue, the suit is olive green. It’s a good suit, you know. You need a sense of style in my business.”
“My brother, the sophisticate. Don’t worry, you look like a city-ite to me. You could pass for gay, if you were only a little better looking.”
“Driving this van, you could pass for a soccer mom.”
“Hey, I am a soccer dad. I help coach Joey’s team.”
“What do you know about sports training? You spent your high school years smoking pot and going to Allman Brother’s concerts.”
He hates it when I remind him he was not always a republican. “Welcome to the 90s, Tom. It’s all about the kids.”
We both became silent as we approached the Cemetery and passed through the immense iron gates. Grief burns things into the library of recollection. I felt an acrid and familiar loneliness, momentarily as searing as it was that day we buried my mother. I focused on a tree, parchment colored bark and branches empty of leaves, then on this rich family’s plot that had a huge Christ-on-a-cross crucifix and a woman kneeling at the foot of the cross.
David parked the van. We both remembered the location of mom’s spot. Our shoes crunched the brittle leaves on the slate path. It was late fall. The sky glowed yellowish red, the breeze made hush sounds. Across the vast lawn and head stones, interspersed with pine trees so ever green and other trees, just stark, leafless branches. On the perimeter, columns of weeping willows swayed like decrepit medusas. We came to the grave stone. Beloved brother, husband and father and beloved sister, wife and mother chiseled beneath a nimbus and cross. I brushed off dirt from the letters. David dropped the small bouquet on the grass. It was just some carnations and daises. Then he crossed himself, which surprised me. He bowed his head and murmured some stuff. By now, I was sniffling tears. He crossed himself again, then took out a lighter from his pocket and lit the stub of the cigar.
I felt his hand on my shoulder. “We better hit the road.”
“I just wish she was still around. Things would have been worse with Dad without her. I wonder if she ever knew.”
“She knew, Tom. She changed her tune with you, became more protective. Dad was a son of a bitch, you know what I mean. I had it a lot worse. The Depression, World War II made him that way. But you should be happy you had it easier.”
“You were gone by then, how do you know how I had it?”
“I knew.”
My brother always had the last word. Not because of his insistence, it was me. I always backed away from either cursing him or shouting contrary evidence. I could never be sure if he thought that I didn’t suffer as much, or that I was so weak and sensitive that the little suffering I did endure was nothing compared to his experience.
I followed him back to the mini van, the smoke of his cigar wafting in the breeze. He opened the back hatch, took out two beers from the plastic cooler and made some joke about being prepared for the road and how the distance from New Jersey to Connecticut is nearly a six pack.
In the center of the cemetery was a tall flag pole with a huge American Flag. It had to be the biggest flag I ever saw. One of the workers began untying the ropes to lower the flag.
The sky was cobalt, getting darker. A fragment of the moon hung in the sky like chipped pottery. The can made an angry kissing sound when I opened it. The push top didn’t seem to press in right, the hole’s edge sliced the side of my thumb. A small line of blood oozed out. I sipped the beer. It was so cold it hurt my teeth. I scraped the beer residue off my mouth with the back of my hand. There was blood on the back of my hand. My mouth still felt wet. David was laughing at me. I tasted blood and with my tongue detected I had cut my lip as well. David said there was Kleenex in the car and opened the door.
“I don’t feel like driving by the house this time, do you?”
I shook my head no.
The wind had increased. I watched old glory ripple during its descent.
* * *
I didn’t fight with my brother. We never do. We seem to always fall short of verbalizing our mutual resentment. Once it surfaces, we wait in silence until it begins to fade, then dissolve it by talking about politics or the stock market or what his son is doing. Stuff like that. We don’t even talk that much about our parents or our upbringing.
His wife always treated me sweetly, made me feel more like family than he did, and the nephew liked the Sega games I brought him. But when I got back to Manhattan, back to my own life, I couldn’t shake this feeling. I guess it was inadequacy. I wasn’t living up to something. But I never wanted to be some min-van driving sort with kids and the lawn, the only issues besides the job to take up my thoughts. Yet, sometimes it seems that I should want to want that and the guilt that comes with not wanting to want makes me feel useless.
I don’t talk to my brother or his wife about my personal life. Hell, he never asks and I don’t mention. Like most women, his wife says you have a girlfriend and I make some kind of joke or something—“Not this week”—was the one I came up with I think, and she doesn’t press.
My buddy, Peter seemed to be my main confidant. He’s always easy with the opinion and advice. I was in a slump. Happens to everyone, even to me. That’s what he said. Of course, Peter doesn’t have the same worries as I do, has a three room apartment with a great rent control lease and makes a solid six figure salary as a lawyer. He’s adapted the expert on everything attitude of most New Yorkers. He has had a lot of girlfriends too, always getting action. So, we’re not the same, but I suppose he’s smart about some things.
In terms of my love life, the slump seemed to be akin to a musket company’s sales after the introduction of the repeating rifle.
* * *
I met Peter at Victor’s art opening. Peter was with a date, Cheryl, a twenty something who I had not yet met. Blonde, thin,she worked as a paralegal in his firm. She wore a belly shirt and leather mini dress and large hoop earrings. There was a yin yang symbol tattooed on her upper arm and a rose tattoo around her pierced navel. “She’s wild,” Peter told me, whispering it out of her hearing, and I just smiled and pictured her in a conservative blue suit, playing the career oriented underling during the day and exploding in Basic Instinct in the New York night.
Victor is a drinking buddy. I go to museums and I like art and all, but the only gallery openings and art events I go to are in support of him, or one of his friends that seem to come in and out of the vague circle of people I know as regulars in the East village dives where I spent most of what passed for my night life.
He kept his hair long, fancied silver earrings, had a half dozen in each ear lobe and three in one eye brow. I never saw him dressed in anything but jeans, but there was no attitude about him. I mean, he’s just a nice guy. He didn’t have the snob thing going, and didn’t look down on me for coming from New Jersey.
I was glad he was getting some recognition for his “found art.” That was the latest trend. Most of its practitioners lived in the Lower East and the galleries were located in the East Village, or on the outskirts of Soho or Tribeca.
Found art meant mixed materials and taking ordinary items and transforming them into art. It reminded me of primitive tribes who worship a discarded Coca-Cola bottle, or picture of Howard Stern. Funny, how simple juxtaposition or removal of context makes something art where before it was just some thing without meaning.
The gallery was located on some shadowy street where the buildings were old and short. The neighborhood seemed lifetimes away from the Wall Street or Midtown and even the West Village where bohemia and integrity are long deceased. I liked it though, but I just like the neighborhood or maybe I just like any neighborhood that’s relatively safe as long as it is a city neighborhood, where I don’t have to drive everywhere and there’s concrete and people of different races and cultures who leave me alone. In short, it’s different from where I grew up.
Some New York state vineyard sponsored the award. There were some runner ups, who each got a wall to display some pieces and only a thousand bucks, while Victor got five grand and an entire room, adorned with his found art. There was a naked store mannequin impaled on this large cross made with two automobile fenders, this lawn statute of the virgin Mary covered in sponges and in a bucket, this Jesus and twelve apostles sculpted, and I use the term loosely, out of what seemed to be cans and wood and wire. There were some non-religious themed pieces, but those didn’t seem so striking. They did remind me of my catholic school upbringing, although Jesus and all that stuff was rarely mentioned at home. I guess it’s good for the imagery.
Young men carrying trays were offering everybody plastic goblets of white wine. Larry, the new girlfriend, Victor and I were drinking the wine as the room got more and more crowded, real diverse too, downtown, uptown, art crowd. You had the tattered jeans types in purple crew cuts next to the Armani suit types in two hundred dollar hair cuts, gallery owners, art world types and then there were different suits, pinstripes and banker blue indicating investment bankers, although junkyard apostles and weird catholic mythology formed out of consumer culture flotsam may not be the best art investment bet. Maybe they were part of the wine marketing program that included art patronship, or maybe they were just making a scene. But it seemed to me, that despite the cross section mix of cosmopolitan types, they didn’t seemed to be fraternizing. They all came together to appreciate new art movements, but did not stray from their predetermined circles. Some lines just are not crossed.
I noticed Mary before she walked over with her then room mate. I noticed her because of her clothes. She had on black tights and a tweed jacket. She was standing next to this woman with pink streaks in her jet black hair, who wore a black mini dress and was chatting wildly—lots of gesticulation—and Mary sort of nodded. It was apparent she was not adding anything to the conversation and did not know the grungy downtown pair listening to the pink streaks.
Mary’s hair was chestnut, thick and flowing far below her shoulders, out of control enough to hint a nonchalance about her appearance. She seemed to be ignorant of how pretty she really was, like it didn’t matter to her and was indifferent to choosing whether to play it down or play it up. I was uncertain if it meant insecurity or confidence. I liked being uncertain. That attracted me.
It seemed in the span of fifteen minutes, three dozen more people had moved into the back room and the waiters were having a tough time keeping the wine glasses filled. My elbow tapped the Cheryl’s glass and as it fell to her feet it stained her blouse from cleavage to navel. She accepted my apologies, but I could tell she was pissed. Peter shook his head at me. She said let’s go.
Peter leaned over to say something only to me, and I half expected some kind of comment about my typical clumsiness. “I’m doing her butt tonight, I know it.” he whispered.
The next thing I knew, I saw the pink streaks and behind her, the long red hair and tweed jacket. Pink streaks was saying something to Victor. They knew each other. One of the waiters offered to refill my glass and I said no. Didn’t want to take any chances.
I moved closer to Victor, waited for the introduction.
I said this thing to Peter a month or so before. “I’m not good on the make. It happens when you’re not looking for it. Sure, you have to be open, aware of the signs and all that.”
“Patience is either a virtue or a an excuse for inaction,” he opined.
But now, in a brief flicker of clarity, I realized, the virtue was paying off. Pink Streaks was her room mate. Pink Streaks name was Jane.
Jane said, “And this is Mary.”
* * *
Jane was interested in chatting up Victor. I don’t think Victor’s that interested in women, but I don’t really know. For some reason, I talk to Peter about women, and with Victor, the friendship is not like that. Just bar room buddies.
Mary and I, well, we wound up talking and it was apparent that she and Jane, weren’t really friends, just room mates. I asked her the right questions, I had her talk about herself. I can do this deliberately without being deliberate about it. She was from Teaneck, which is in Bergen county and one town over from Paramus. There was instant ‘you from Jersey, I’m from Jersey,” affinity.
She had moved to Hoboken, and was a grammar school teacher, special Ed students. My fascination grew. I never met a teacher, outside of school of course. Seems most, no make that all, of the women I had been meeting since Sheila where either career track women who complained of a glass ceiling or a the graphic artist types who really want to be film directors. Mary, she just had a job, a useful job.
I was nervous and excited thinking about calling her, and even refrained from phoning Peter. I didn’t need his advice. I felt a tenderness towards her, there just seemed to be chemistry. What the hell. I had to be careful to distinguish that chemistry –the kind between two people—separate from my internal hormonal chemistry. I was in a season of need. I had a deep longing, a need for a warm body, any warm body with two breasts and three holes Not that I’m that bad, of course, but Jesus Christ, loneliness is loneliness and a man needs to put it inside a woman and that’s just the way it is a, a fact of life, the fact of life!
It’s compounded by thinking of women I’ve had relationships with, passionate intimacy, knowing that while I was alone trying to dredge up some memory that I could turn into a fantasy free of associations of despair and being let down by somebody I thought cared for me as much as I cared for her and simply masturbate, I thought of them with their new men, wondering if they were acting more uninhibited, pleasing them more than they did with me. Getting laid meant getting back at them.
Regarding Mary, I had to keep a lot of emotions in check, suppress the explosive commingling of anxieties and motivations. So, after a breeze through the Village Voice to find out what was around to do, I decided on some sort of music, instead of a movie, and dinner. See, a movie is a very adequate date, just not a good first date. Why? You don’t talk to the person for two hours plus and then you just talk about the movie. Too much a teen scene. And just dinner, there’s no distractions at all.
So, there was an interesting saxophone player who played bluesy jazz at a village club—also very important, since it was close to the PATH train, the subway that ferried folks from New Jersey beneath the river to New York City. See, jazz was a good choice, because the sets last about an hour, so it doesn’t eat up the whole night. You can talk before and after and it would also show that I knew things, jazz had a kind of intellectual clout. Art scenes, music scenes, I was a happening guy, not just some white collar slob with a roach infested over priced shoe box in the shadows of the capital of the western world.
One last issue the jazz club solved was the timing. I wanted to see her as soon as possible after we met, but I had to make sure all the planets in my often pathetic universe were in line. Now, this also meant I had to not come off as a looser and if I asked her out for the coming weekend, and she couldn’t make it, the implication would be I had nothing to do. Which was the truth, of course. Then we would make plans for the next weekend or something and maybe the excitement would have worn off, or I would be thinking that no matter what sort of reason she gave for not being able to go on a date with me, the fact was she was on a date with somebody else. This musician, who plays in the village like every other week— naturally, she didn’t have to know this—was only playing at this particular club this particular weekend. I was sort of asking her to join me—an added benefit of making me appear cool and collected while also reducing the date pressure of this has to be a an occasion—and best of all, I didn’t come off as having nothing to do, an unfilled appointment calendar. The perfect crime, or date, whatever.
So, I deliberated through most of Monday, moving between nervous glee and subdued panic, planning the evening, and expounding on the contingencies in my mind. I decided to call her about six. I picked up the receiver, put it down again, picked it up, dialed the number, put the receiver down again. No, it had to be now because if I left the office without making the call I would think about nothing else, and it seemed to me, I had solved everything already. My shaking hands knocked into my paper clip container and the metal oblongs swarmed into my computer keyboard, which slipped from my hands when I picked it up to shake the clips from the keys. The keyboard bounced on the floor, but luckily I grabbed the monitor and stopped it from plummeting. Some keys had popped off the keyboard, the spacebar, a few letters. I sighed, dialed her number.
From the tone of her voice, she was glad to hear from me. We chatted a bit, I asked her what she thought of the opening.
“I guess it was Jane’s scene, a lot of interesting people. Victor’s a nice guy.”
“He really is, compared to most artists I know especially. I was there mostly to support him, as a friend.”
“A lot of the art was funny. Some of it was stupid.”
I chuckled an agreement. My nervousness ebbed in increments. I cleared my throat. “So, Mary, I was wondering…”
* * *
The only awkward moment of the date was when I asked why she lived in Hoboken and she talked about her divorce. “We had a house and I lived there until it was sold, so I lived with my mom for a while, and then, I hooked up with Jane.”
“You didn’t know her before you moved in?”
“It was through an ad, we’re not friends. She’s okay though.” She seemed nervous. I sensed a hint of shame, discomfort, embarrassment. She no longer owned a house, she was in some Single White Female living situation and she didn’t like admitting to a failed marriage.
It was an awkward moment, but it was only one, and it passed soon enough and for a date, a first date especially, that’s not bad, you know. It’s a good sign, basically. She asked, “have you ever been married?”
“Not yet,” I smirked. “I lived with a woman for a while, but we broke up a couple of years ago.”
“You’re smart.”
“Smart?”
“To not get married. Getting out of a marriage, it’s an ordeal. I thought it was wrong to live together. I wasn’t smart.”
“She had some substance abuse problems, we just got on different tracks.”
“I can understand different tracks. I felt I was too young to get married, but my parents got divorced and I think I formed a very naive philosophy about it, like I wanted to show them or something. I was being rebellious by being straight laced.”
“I was in love, whatever that means, but I was also pretty uncertain about my career. I wasn’t making much money and so I was, uncertain and desperate, you know. She didn’t give me any support. It’s easy to be confident when you’re in a relationship. You always have some sort of reinforcement.”
“But it’s not that real.”
“That’s what I mean, you’re like living only for another person, or through another person. Isolation is not an aspiration, that’s not what I’m saying. But confidence should be a result from what you do with your own life, how the world or society or rather, your littler piece of that world or your little piece of society receives you, seems like a more tangible confidence than the one you get from relationships. I think having that confidence, the tangible stuff… makes relationships, better.”
She smiled at me, and she had a nice one, smile that is. She didn’t show much teeth, and her face didn’t ripple with dimples. The smile was simple, a very pale lipstick, not shiny at all. Bright red would not go with her hair, or fair skin which was alabaster and lightly freckled, the kind of freckles you notice only on second glance and certainly would get darker in the sun before her skin did. Her smile was similar in its subtlety. But it was there and I had caused it and that felt good. We were eating in this tiny west village place, pan-Asian food which meant a lot of rice and steamed shrimp and as her fork poked a prawn, she said without looking up, “you know, I’m having a good time.”
I said softly, “so am I.”
“I haven’t really dated much, recently.”
I touched her hand. We were soon talking about food and restaurants and stuff like that, then we switched to our families and she told me how she worried about her mother and how her alcoholic brother lived at home. I talked about my brother a little bit. Then I explained how my father died suddenly, had a heart attack in his office while talking on the phone and how my mother died a few years later from leukemia, a long extended illness.
“That’s terrible,” she said, consoling me by grasping my hand. I pretended I still required consolation after all these years. She looked at me and I noticed the light in her eyes made them golden. The eyes, the hair, the subtle smile, she just seemed so pretty, and had an honesty, or at least, an integrity that I hadn’t sensed in a woman for a long time. Maybe never. I restrained from kissing her. It was our first date after all.
But I did hold her hand from the restaurant to the jazz club. The village buzzed, locals walking their dogs and young adults talking about where they were going or where they had been or what they should do. The bohemian promise of the village had long been prefabricated, but however momentary or dim, dreams could still glimmer here and holding the hand of a new girl in a new night seemed to freeze time and expand hope.
We waited on line at the club and I explained how this guy was an extraordinary player, sat in on famous sessions.
“I like jazz,” she said. “I like music.’
“I don’t listen to a lot of jazz at home, but I like to see it live. It’s only blues but more cerebral It’s part of America, you know. You can see the sheer talent.”
They seated us at a small table alongside a Japanese couple. In fact, except for most of the staff and the musicians, we were the only Americans there. Japanese and Europeans filled the place. Foreign accents and languages inflated the din that preceded the show. We shared a piece of pecan pie and had coffee and cognac to make the ten dollar minimum and our knees and feet kept touching. Then the group, a quartet came on, two young white guys and two old black guys and they played for about fifty minutes. She squeezed my knee. And the last song, a standard, I leaned over and kissed her. She wasn’t startled. She kissed me back. We retreated. The sax player took his solo and the riffs tickled our spines and she leaned over and her lips were soft and her tongue was in my mouth and we were still kissing while the foreigners were standing and applauding the bowing musicians.
I felt my face go flush, and hers seemed just as red. My hand knocked over a glass. Waitress were hurrying over with the checks. I settled up and we wandered out with the crowd and that’s when I began an internal debate.
One side said: Don’t go for it, it’s just the first date.
The other side countered: I cleaned my apartment earlier in the week, the bed is made with fresh sheets.
I tried to remember if the condoms in my night table drawer were still within their expiration date.
Her kiss seemed too revealing, too inviting. I was aroused. Not a difficult accomplishment, for sure. But I tried to be collected. Dating happens in stages. From my point of view. From my male perspective, I suppose. It goes like this. First date—you get to know somebody—you talk and see what is in common, register an attraction, contrive an ease with the person. Second date, there’s kissing, maybe even some petting. You sort of judge certain willingness. And, if the willingness is high, for a guy at least, you can’t think anymore, or can’t think that clearly. So, somewhere between the third and fifth dates, those are the sex dates. One of them, at least. It has to happen. Cause a guy can’t think otherwise about the other issues. Part of it is cause you’re loaded, ready for action and an erection tends to erase the ability to analyze and reflect. Part of it also is, you both seem to be getting along so well, that in order to proceed, the sexual compatibility issue must be addressed, as well as the mutual attraction question, just how attracted? That answer must be measured then verified.
Outside, we walked with our arms around each other and I turned down one of those narrow, deserted slants of village sidewalk and in the first empty doorway I stopped and pulled her closer and we made out. I had to and apparently so did she. Soon, we were indulging in second date kissing. Her thigh rubbed against my erection and I touched her breasts—preliminary petting and dry humping—we now entered the domain of third date.
So, I forgot the internal debate. The traditional timeline no longer applied. She squeezed her hand between her thigh and my groin. We heard footsteps and murmurs. Her hand went away and we just hugged real close and listened to the sounds fade into the shadows. A car went by, its headlights brushed slowly against us.
“I really feel comfortable with you Tom, I wish tonight wouldn’t end.”
I cleared my throat. In the back of my mind, I knew I should have said let’s go to a bar for a nightcap. Instead, I whispered something like we could go to my place.
Mary said okay, without a microbe of hesitation.
Her mouth was against my cheek. My face could feel her smile.
We trotted to the corner, one hand holding hers, the other furiously waving in the air hoping to be spotted by the nearest cab.
* * *
I didn’t sleep very well. I guess I wasn’t use to sharing my bed. I grinned—a warm body next to me thinking about the sounds she made, the sounds I made her make—Damn, I had missed sex and it’s true, it is like riding a bicycle. You never forget how, and it always feels good.
I liked her very much, and I knew this was a special coupling. Even with Sheila, our first time wasn’t this pleasurable. In retrospect, I don’t know how or why it happened between Mary and I that night. I could blame destiny, but destiny is always prone to practical jokes and humiliation. I try not to give it so much credence.
She later told me, she never had a one night stand and this was after we were going out for a while and I said, “well, we didn’t have a one night stand, did we.”
She was not really happy when I saw her open her eyes and I said, “I could make some coffee.”
She coughed a little and asked what time it is. I said, “early.”
“I should get going, I usually don’t do this.”
“It’s not the norm for me, believe me.” I snuggled close to her, caressed her nipple and whispered, “I enjoyed… being with you… I mean, I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable.”
“I don’t feel uncomfortable.”
I began touching her other nipple. “How do you feel?’
“I feel okay,” she half coughed, half giggled, sighed. “I just haven’t been with a man, you know, since my divorce. I guess I’m not sure how to act.”
“I think you’ve done extraordinarily well.” She laughed at this, let my hand travel down her stomach. We heard traffic sounds, a bird whistle. She was wet. I softly rubbed her clitoris between my thumb and index finger.
“Tom,” she said, squirming. “I do feel comfortable with you, I just don’t want you to think.”
“I don’t think anything,” I said, pulling the sheet away and lowering my mouth to her breasts.
I called her that night. I called her the next day. She called me the day after that. I called her the morning after that day. She came into town during the week, she couldn’t stay over and instead of going to a restaurant we made love. She came in again on Friday and stayed until Sunday.
Our relationship continued to evolve. I showed her New York. We poked around book stores and shops, kissed in parks, went to museums. I remember how for several days, I wanted to tell her, I love you. I was deliberating over how, when and where without reaching any conclusion.
Then as we strolled through the Museum of Modern Art—it was after we saw the Van Gogh paintings I believe—I just whispered in her ear, “I love you.”
She didn’t comment, until maybe an hour later, when we were outside heading towards the subway.
“Tom, I love you.”
We kissed right there, in midtown, a Saturday, the city swirling around us, sidewalks jammed with tourists and shoppers, streets packed with automobiles, buses and trucks. When we continued walking, I guess I was in such a daze, that I bumped into a hot dog vendor cart. Cans and stuff fell on the sidewalk, and the guy screamed at me in Arabic and we laughed about it that night, eating Chinese food in the nude, a Troufaut film in the VCR.
Most of the time, when a relationship starts, at least one of the lovers has to break it off with somebody they are seeing. Sure, the dissolve might be evident before the new person came along. But more often than not, when love blooms, that’s the scenario. Somebody’s heart gets broken. Not with Mary and I. We were both completely single, thirsty for a relationship, new romantic experiences. I don’t know if this made it better or worse, or gave us a false kind of encouragement. I just don’t know. I do know, things just went very far, very fast.
