Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Page 21

  Henry sauntered out of the men’s room just as the waitress handed me the coffees.

  “You okay?” he asked. “You don’t look too good.”

  “Just don’t leave me like that again,” I said in a low voice, motioning toward the door. “Can we just get out of here now, please?”

  “Why? You uncomfortable?” he said with some concern.

  I nodded.

  “Well, goddamn it,” he bellowed in his Texas twang, loud enough for an entire group of truckers to hear. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d reckon someone’d put semen in those dispensers instead of liquid soap. It sure as hell looks like it, and it sure as hell smells like it. Here, you’re from New York. You’re the expert. Smell my finger,” Henry boomed, thrusting his hand in my face. “Sniff. That’s semen, iddin’t it?”

  Out in the parking lot, he couldn’t stop laughing. “Oh my Lord. I wish I’d brought a movie camera. The look on your face. I’ve never seen you so freaked out in my life.”

  “That wasn’t funny,” I hissed, though it was, in fact, funny.

  Henry cackled and shook his head. “Henry, get me out of here. Henry, stop it right now. Oh man. That was priceless. What’s wrong, Ms. Noo Yawk?” he laughed delightedly. “Southern hospitality too much for you neurotic Yankees to handle? Neurotic. That is what y’all say in the North, isn’t it?”

  “Okay,” I said. “TouchÉ.”

  After that, we were pretty much played out. It was ridiculously late. Even Henry was sick of his tapes, so we drove on in silence. I was ready to be at Duke already, ready to tiptoe into Jeremy’s room and slide in beside him.

  Jeremy had been two years ahead of me in high school, where he’d been a Frisbee champion as well as captain of the track team. In one of the school musicals, he’d played Tarzan leaping around the stage hammily in a loincloth while girls in the audience screamed ecstatically. He was silly, but he knew it, which only made him more adorable. Playful, good-looking, and up for anything, he was hard not to like. Every time he came home from college, he’d called me up as if he’d only seen me yesterday. “So what do think, Susie-Q? Margaritas and a make-out session on Friday?” I was secretly amazed he went out with me.

  By the time Henry and I arrived in Durham, it was 4:30 A.M. The sky had downgraded from black to inky blue, and it was raining slightly as we pulled up outside Jeremy’s fraternity house. Henry got my bag out of the trunk, carried it up the steps to the porch, then waited while I felt around under the mat for the key.

  “Do I look okay?” I asked him. “Not too exhausted or puffy?”

  “Nuh-uh. You look great. What about me?” He adjusted his jacket, squared his shoulders. “Not too psycho?”

  “No. Totally cool. Kitty’s going to love the flowers and the song.”

  Henry had brought his guitar along. He’d written a song for Kitty, which he’d sung for me a cappella on the ride down. It was actually pretty good.

  We glanced at each other on the darkened porch. We’d been together almost seventeen hours straight, but it seemed like much longer. Just the morning before, we’d been sitting before our typewriters in the student lounge, but recalling it now was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

  “Well,” I said. “Maybe you want to get together for dinner in a couple of nights? The four of us?”

  “Sure. That would be good,” said Henry. “Well. Okay.”

  He turned and hurried down the steps.

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t,” I called after him.

  “Well, that leaves me plenty of options,” he teased. Then he swung down into his car and was gone.

  Inside the darkened fraternity house, Jeremy had left a piece of paper taped to the banister: “Susie—Up. 1st Door Right.” The house was an old Victorian, and I could tell it hadn’t been kept up. Every step creaked underfoot, and paint flaked beneath my hand on the banister. Before entering Jeremy’s room, I felt in my bag for a brush and ran it vigorously through my hair. Then I eased the door open slowly. As soon as I stepped inside, I nearly banged into a ladder. I hadn’t realized Jeremy had a loft bed. When I’d envisioned arriving, I somehow imagined him sprawled on a king-sized mattress and pulling back the covers seductively, with a flourish. Now there was a shifting and thumping overhead. Jeremy leaned over the edge of the loft sleepily, his hair standing straight up with static, his eyes barely open. “Hey,” he croaked faintly. “You made it.”

  “Uh huh,” I said hoarsely. I was suddenly overwhelmed with exhaustion. “I’ll be up in one minute, lover,” I whispered. Then I set my bag on the sofa beneath his loft, plunked down beside it, and proceeded to fall asleep.

  Later that morning, Jeremy nudged me awake. He stood over me fully dressed with a knapsack slung over his shoulder and an apple in one hand, clearly on his way to class.

  “I was going to let you sleep,” he said, “but you’ve got a phone call.”

  He helped me off the sofa and led me across the landing to the common room. One of his fraternity brothers stood by a wall phone, holding out a receiver.

  “Chem test,” Jeremy whispered. “Back in an hour.” As he disappeared down the stairs, I took the receiver and put it to my ear. For some reason, I had a terrible headache.

  “Hello?” I said groggily.

  “Mornin’, princess.” It was Henry. “So,” he exhaled, “you about ready to go?”

  “Go where?” I said.

  “Back to Providence,” he said. “Kitty broke up with me.”

  “What?”

  “When I got to her dorm room this morning, there wasn’t any knee sock. She got out of bed and told me to sleep in the lounge. She said she didn’t want to see me anymore.” Henry gave the same helpless guffaw he had the day before, talking to his father. “My fucking luck,” he said.

  I sat down on the floor beneath the phone and tried to get my mind around what he was telling me. “Well, why—I mean, if she didn’t want to see you, then why did she have you come all the way down here?”

  Henry snorted bitterly. “Here’s the real kicker. The really beautiful part. She said she, quote, ‘respected me too much’ to break up with me over the phone. She said she wanted to wait and do it in person.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Apparently not,” Henry said caustically. “She respects me enough to want to look me in the eye when she kicks me in the teeth. So,” he exhaled trying to sound chipper, “how are you doing? Get any action yet?”

  “I’ve barely seen Jeremy. Last night I was too tired, and now he’s got a chem test.”

  “Then I’m guessing you’re not quite ready to leave yet,” Henry said miserably.

  I knew that as his friend, I should tell him it didn’t matter—that we should just go. But horniness didn’t tend to bring out any of my better qualities.

  “Look,” Henry said after a moment. “I have one more night before they kick me out of the lounge. But frankly, I don’t think I can take it here much longer.”

  As soon as Jeremy returned from class that morning, I eased his knapsack off his shoulder and told him we had to work quickly. “You won’t believe it,” I said, pulling him against me playfully and unzipping his jacket. “But Henry’s girlfriend just broke up with him.”

  “Really,” Jeremy said, staying my hand. He sounded genuinely interested.

  “Yeah, she locked him out of her room as soon as he got there,” I giggled, nuzzling his neck. “She said she wanted to break up with him in person. Can you believe that?” I reached for Jeremy’s fly, but he grabbed my hand again. A strange look passed over his face then, like the shadow of a cloud sliding across a field.

  “What?” I said.

  Carefully, Jeremy disengaged himself, then paced a few steps and sank down on his couch. He sighed and fixed his gaze on the floorboards.

  “Look, I thought maybe once you came down here, once I actually saw you in person, maybe I’d feel differently,” he said uneasily.

  “But the fact
is,” he continued, “I simply respect you too much to do this over the phone.”

  Twenty minutes later, Henry pulled up to the house in the silver Toyota while I stood on the porch trembling. Out of some perverse sense of gallantry, Jeremy insisted on escorting me to the car and holding the door for me as I settled in. “You’re a great girl, Susie,” he said gently, setting my bag on the back seat and kissing me perfunctorily on the cheek. “Try not to take this too hard.” Then he actually went around to the driver’s side and shook hands with Henry as if they’d just completed a business transaction. I felt like a mental patient, like a rejected game show contestant, like some public official who’d just been indicted and was being led away in handcuffs before a crowd of onlookers.

  “Well goddamn it,” Henry said, as soon as Jeremy was back inside. “I can’t believe we drove twelve hundred miles to get dumped. Hell, we could’ve just stayed at school for that.”

  I tried to smile, but at that stage in my life, the only default mode I had was crying. I should have ordered Henry to drive the Supra straight through the front porch of Jeremy’s fraternity house, but instead I sat there, drenched in shock, weeping from the campus all the way to the waffle house downtown where Henry stopped to have us fuel up for the long drive back. I couldn’t eat. I just sat in the booth with the fork limp in my hand, shielding my eyes from Henry while tears and mucus ran down my nose in highly attractive spindles.

  “He said he wasn’t into me anymore,” I choked. “He said I was ‘overly sexual.’ Those were his words. But he’s only the second person—” I threw down my fork and sobbed baldly. Henry got the check and hustled me out.

  I cried from North Carolina to Virginia, and from there all the way to D.C. In my head, I began hearing not only Jeremy, sitting on his couch, thoughtfully outlining for me a concise list of my shortcomings, but everyone else in my life who’d ever rejected me. I heard the boy back at college who wanted un-serious breasts. I recalled the guy at Stuyvesant who said “Making out with you is one thing, going out with you is another.” I heard Nathaniel Eggers nicknaming me “Flatsy” and every guy in New York who’d ever said “I’ll call you,” then suffered an amazing paralysis of both his index fingers and his vocal cords.

  Then, horrified, I thought of our friends back at school. Wait until everyone in our dorm heard how Henry and I had driven seventeen hours—arguably one of the longest booty calls in recorded history— only to be ceremoniously dumped by our lovers. After all our boasting and carrying on, I could only imagine what was in store. All Burr would have to say was, “Hey, anyone want to take a road trip?” and everyone on the entire hall would crack up. We were going to be punch lines for the rest of the semester.

  I knew that the drive back would be brutal—long, deflated, tedious. I knew that the pain of rejection would linger, forming a fine little keloid scar on my ego, making me second-guess myself anytime I flirted with a guy, as if the first year of college didn’t fuel my insecurity enough. And I knew that strangely, inexplicably, I wanted to go home, to be surrounded by people whose pathologies were at least familiar and predictable to me, the bunny slippers of weirdness. When Henry and I pulled into the Vince Lombardi Rest Stop on the New Jersey Turnpike at daybreak, I knew that I would reluctantly eat half a banana split for breakfast, then slide off the stool and wander back to the pay phones. Sheepishly and humiliated, I would dial. And as I listened to each ring, my heart would constrict wildly with nervousness, with shame.

  What I did not know was that when she answered, my mother would say simply, “Well of course, sweetie. What time will the two of you be here?”

  I did not know that even before we crossed the Hudson, my father would move the sofa and the bookcases back into the living room. That my mother would run out to Key Food to stock up on steak and roast beef, stuffing virtually half a frozen cow into the refrigerator. “Well, Henry is from Dallas, so I assume he doesn’t know from vegetables or miso soup,” she’d say brightly.

  I did not know how elegantly my family would smooth themselves out for the occasion.

  I did not know that Henry would not be repulsed by them at all. Rather, he’d be charmed, even impressed. “Boy, your folks are cool,” he’d say. “For starters, they’re sober.”

  And I did not know that for the entire week we stayed with them, not once would my mother mention that you could cure emphysema with soy beans. She would simply sit beside me at the edge of my bed, quietly stroking my hair. The sex lives of their children, parents might not want to know. But heartbreak, they understand.

  PART III

  Reality Says “Hello”

  Chapter 10

  Picnic at Treblinka

  SO HERE WAS THE PLAN: after graduating from college, I’d return to New York City and walk around Midtown radiating talent and intelligence. Dazzled by my aura of competency, the editors of the New York Times and Vanity Fair would dash out of their offices and run down the street calling after me, “Stop! You’re a genius! We’ve got to hire you!”

  In no time, I’d be mentioned in the gossip pages of the New York Post as a “hot young novelist.” New York magazine would profile me as “one of those under-thirty Wunderkinds who make you question what you’ve been doing all your life.” The New York Review of Books would declare me simply “a revelation.”

  Instead, of course, after finding only two want ads for proofreaders (5+ yrs. exp. nec.) and absolutely none for writers who’d written political “prose poems” for their college newspaper, I lay around despondently in my bedroom for a month reading back issues of People. Until that moment, my life had been as pampered and well supervised as that of a laboratory rat. Now, suddenly, as a college graduate, it was just me, alone, facing the Void of All Eternity. Me, alone, facing the Void of All Eternity plus my student loans, which came in a deceptively cute little coupon book designed to make me think that, at 9.25 percent interest, I’d been getting some sort of bargain.

  Eventually, I mustered up enough effort to carpet-bomb the publishing industry with my inventive idea of a rÉsumÉ. This resulted in a handful of interviews—mostly for trade journals with names like Sheetrock Weekly and Kitchen Appliance Gazette. When the editor of Aluminum Siding Times asked me, “So, what entices you about aluminum siding?” I had to resist the urge to reply that it seemed like a topic you could write about regardless of how much recreational medication you happened to be taking.

  Much as I told myself that every writer had to begin somewhere, and that a paycheck was a beautiful thing, given the starting salaries I was being offered, this seemed like a stretch. At $265 a week before taxes, my paychecks would not only not be beautiful, they’d be things you wouldn’t even want to look at without the benefit of grain alcohol.

  In the end, it turned outs that only one newspaper was willing to hire me anyway. And this was primarily, I suspect, out of morbid curiosity.

  If I’d thought Shippers and Truckers Daily or The Paper Fastener Picayune were lethal, The Jewish Week, at first glance, didn’t strike me as a whole lot better. It was a musty-looking publication full of grainy photographs of octogenarian philanthropists and fuzzy-faced rabbis. “Torah Portion of the Week” was one of its regular offerings, along with something cryptic called “Federation Appeals Update.” What The Jewish Week did have going for it was that it was, in fact, a bona fide newspaper—in addition to “hard news,” there were features, movie reviews, and entertaining personal ads that began “Enough with the Dating Already, Make Your Mother Happy” and “Frum Mensch Seeks Kosher Cutie.”

  When I arrived for my interview, Sheldon, the managing editor, leaned back in his chair and looked at me wryly. “So,” he said, tossing aside my meticulously Xeroxed rÉsumÉ. “What do you know about Judaism?”

  The truth was, I knew about as much about Judaism as I did about aluminum siding. For most of my life, I’d been under the impression that Judaism had been created by three “lost tribes”—the Coins, the Levi’s, and the Israelites. The Coins, as I und
erstood it, had become bankers, the Levi’s blue jeans manufacturers, and the Israelites modern-day Israelis. Do not ask me where I got these ideas. It wasn’t until a born-again Christian clued me in that I learned there’d actually been twelve tribes of Israel, not three. Apparently, this wasn’t any secret, either: it was right there in the Bible for anyone who bothered to read it.

  Sitting in Sheldon’s office, surrounded by his journalism awards, I realized it was one thing to feign interest in hand-blenders and Sheetrock, but quite another to fake expertise in an entire religion.

  “To be honest, I don’t know a thing about Judaism,” I said plainly. “The only time I ever set foot in a synagogue was to attend Lloyd Goldfarb’s bar mitzvah in eighth grade. And mostly I went because his parents were taking us to see Beatlemania afterward.”

  “I see.” Sheldon exhaled. At that point, I expected him to end the interview and usher me out the door. Instead, he made a little tent with his fingers and said affably, “So in other words, you wouldn’t be approaching your subject matter with a lot of bias.”

  That my ignorance could be in any way construed as a selling point had never occurred to me. Yet somehow, I felt an almost pathological need to be candid—if not to sabotage my case outright. The truth was, I wasn’t exactly keen on writing for a Jewish newspaper.

  Ever since making my grand debut as an archangel in the sixth grade Christmas pageant, all I’d ever managed to learn about Judaism was that people could kill you for it for no good reason. As a result, I tended to regard it as a kind of genetic deformity. Whenever someone actively embraced their Jewishness, I couldn’t help but think that they were some sort of moron.