Three weeks later on a glittering Saturday night in late April he drove her in her Jag to a belated celebration dinner in New York. Maggie, Ezra, Evelyn, Malcolm, Bo and Jonny met up with them. They reserved a round table in the middle of Union Square Cafe like knights of the Algonquin. It was a raucous, loud evening, and it wouldn’t be a get-together between old friends if there weren’t a passionate altercation about one thing or another. This time it was about altruism. But before altruism, Ezra proclaimed that Larissa was doing a bang-up job with
Much Ado
; once again, another tinge of remorse for Jared. There he was yelling at her, while the kids at home and at school adored her. He made a mental note to be nicer to her, to cut her some slack. Look how beautiful she was, with the diamond necklace, her face young and gleaming, laughing at some stupid thing Ezra said, or Malcolm, quoting verbatim from Shakespeare, her long hair shiny, silky, all of
her shiny, silky. She didn’t look forty, that was for sure, as her melodious soft alto sang counterpoint to the tune of Ezra’s argumentative reasoned tenor.
“Is that what you want to be?” Ezra was saying. “An altruist? You don’t believe you have any right to exist for your own sake, for the sake of existing? Must you only find value in your own existence by becoming a slave to someone else’s? Why is everything about self-sacrifice? You are not an animal, Larissa, why are you acting like a burnt offering? And why do I suspect you’re just being a devil’s advocate? Don’t smile. I know I’m right. What about
you
? Have you got no intrinsic value of your own? No worth inherent to you simply by the virtue of your own existence?”
Malcolm intervened. Malcolm loved to intervene. He had a mustache that he twirled, a disagreeable gesture that was very good for intervening. “But, Ezra,” said Malcolm, twirling the fervent brown ‘stache, making Larissa laugh from across the table, “Ezra, you’re talking nonsense, no?”
“No!”
“Wait.” Malcolm took the hand away from his face to raise it patiently to an excited Ezra. “You
have
to help other people. We are a community, this is what makes us a civilization.”
“Oh, please. Community is just a way for people to judge you. Doesn’t it matter what else you’ve done? You could’ve created the wireless radio. The wheel. The guy who spends all his time watching rabbits mate, you think he’s doing it for civilization? Or the guy who sits in a dank room pining after his dead child and writes a bitter treatise on the randomness of the beginning of life, changing the course of civilization—why didn’t they tell him to serve in a soup kitchen? The man thought organic matter could grow from inorganic things! Do we judge him? Civilization has always moved forward on the backs and with the sweat of those who recognized their internal needs as equally worthy of the community’s needs.
More
worthy.”
“Why can’t you do both?” Maggie piped up.
“That’s a woman’s answer,” said Ezra, looking at his wife with frank affection.
“Why can’t you do neither?” asked Larissa.
Ezra laughed. “That’s a Romantic’s answer,” he replied. “Is that what you are?”
“A woman
can
do both,” Maggie persisted.
“A woman can’t!” Ezra exclaimed. “From ancient times, the woman has made the choice that subservience for the greater good is more important than her own interests. You know this to be true, for biological reasons, for sociological reasons. Which is why women are to be found almost nowhere in the progress of civilization. Women defend the status quo. The nest. The offspring. Women have given themselves over to this purpose.”
“Yet without women all life would come to a grinding halt.”
“I’m not saying you don’t serve a purpose, Mary-Margaret,” Ezra said solemnly.
“Women have made a
choice
to do this, to take care of their young!” Maggie said. “Because it is for the ultimate good of mankind—so that bastards like you could spend all their time reading idiotic books and playing with your test tubes.” Maggie scored major points with the two women at the table.
“Yes,” said Ezra with amusement. “It
is
for the good of mankind. But what about the good of the woman?”
“Yes, for the good of her, too, Ezra,” said Evelyn. “Larissa and I were discussing this just the other day, right, Larissa?”
“Right, Ev.”
“Women are saved through childbirth,” said Evelyn, smiling, with Larissa blinklessly nodding.
“Exactly,” said Ezra. “But you know why they can be saved? Because someone else hunts and gathers. Someone has to get up each morning, slog to work, deal with people he doesn’t like, do crap things, answer to crap bosses, make boring phone calls, attend numbing meetings. Right, Jared?”
“I know you love to mock what I do, Professor,” said Jared, “but I run the finances of a company that has global assets totaling $485 billion.” Malcolm whistled. Evelyn looked at him impressed. Maggie glared at Ezra with a “pwned!” expression. Bo glared at her Jonny as if to say, why can’t you get a damned job, even as a dishwasher? Only Larissa was playing with the umbrella in her Sangria and didn’t look up. “We have thirty-five thousand employees,” continued Jared. “That’s a lot of men and women I pay who hunt and gather for their families. I’m not even talking about all the money instruments we offer so an English teacher like you can put Dylan through college. That’s got to be worth something, isn’t it, Ezra?”
“It is,” Ezra assented. “Because of that, your wife is home. Larissa bakes, which smells good and tastes delicious. She takes care of your offspring, most of whom I assume you love because they do not bang the drums at two in the morning. Larissa, tell us—to take care of things you love, is there slog in that?”
“There is no slog, Ezra,” agreed Larissa, drink thoroughly stirred.
“But, Ezra,” said Maggie, “you were just arguing that the woman is a more pathetic creature than man because she lives to serve other people. Yet you paint man as also serving, except serving those he doesn’t love. So who’s got the better life?”
“Without a doubt, the woman,” said Ezra, and they all laughed. Voices calmed down, emotions ran slower, Jared poured more red wine, the music overhead switched to reggae jazz, quite the combo. When Jared glanced at Larissa sitting on his right, the smile was frozen on her porcelain face, her white teeth as if in a lion’s grimace, her made-up eyes glazed by—drink? And then she spoke in a non-sequitur. She said: “
We can do it on a sunny floor…Roll on our backs screaming with mirth, glad in the guilt of our madness
.”
Ezra and Malcolm looked at her blankly, but Jonny went ooooh, ain’t Lar so fly quoting Morrison, because Jonny was
a music freak and knew everything, and Evelyn responded by quoting Chesterton, and then Walker Percy. They had been talking about the angst of life, or perhaps the emptiness of living only for yourself, or what it meant to be a working man, a working woman, to be parents…and suddenly the little bug Jared had been searching for crawled out from wherever it was hiding, on Jim Morrison’s back, dragging the navigation system and the play and the secrets with it, because in the twenty years he had known Larissa, she had never quoted Morrison. Ever. And tonight,
voila
, a whole punctuation-ridden sentence, like a bawdy limerick, straight from the Lizard King’s mouth. Were The Doors and Shakespeare in any way related? But he couldn’t ask because the moment had passed. The waiter brought the cake, and it was her birthday celebration, after all—he didn’t want to seem churlish—and in the car Larissa slept, having drunk too much, and Jared drove home with the radio on, and of course, what else playing…
Of our elaborate plans, the end, of everything that stands, the end…
“I never heard you quote Morrison before,” he said to her that night in bed. “What made you quote him?”
And she replied, her back to him, “I’m reading
Wonderland Avenue
. A memoir by Danny Sugerman. You should read it; it’s the most fascinating book.”
“I don’t read about Morrison. I’m not a fan,” Jared said. “He is too self-indulgent.”
“Who? No.”
“Oh, it’s all so beautiful and lyrical,” continued Jared. “He free verses, he rhymes, he combines death and thighs, Mexico and storms. What does it mean? Ultimately he’s got no philosophy to hang your Mexican hat on. He’s just a gifted stoner, being pretentiously superficial.”
“He’s not pretentious—what are you talking about?”
“Who’s going to read Jim Morrison and say, ooh, man, that shit changed the course of my life? He doesn’t make a lick of sense. He’s about nothing. But unlike Seinfeld, he’s not even remotely funny.”
Larissa remained completely silent, her back to him.
“You know why?” Jared went on. “Because there is no there there. At its heart it’s empty. It’s shallow. Because in the end it’s nothing more than drug-addled lunacy.”
“Well, I like him,” Larissa said. “Why does everything have to be profound? Why can’t it just be?”
“Yes, but what does it
mean
?”
“Why does it have to mean anything?”
“If it doesn’t mean anything, then why write it?”
“Why do anything?”
“Good question. Morrison himself said all he wanted to do was to fuck away death.” Jared smirked. “How’d that turn out for him?”
Larissa had no response.
And on Monday Jared became mired in managed money and retirement accounts, and a pesky variable annuity that involved a nearly insolvent commercial real estate account in Hoboken. There was no time to think about the guilt of her madness.
It wasn’t a question of him reading
Wonderland Avenue
. The only thing Jared had been reading the last eight years of his life were the
Generally Accepted Accounting Principles
, the annual reports of the Fortune 500 companies, and the templates for auditing safeguards. By keenly analyzing the relationship between regulation, quality attributes, and diversification, Jared was sure he could keep at bay that most undesirable of events, a tax audit—an unwelcome intrusion by the public into your private business.
1
Glad in the Guilt
L
arissa was crushed against the hard white wall and her hands were up, perhaps around his neck, or flayed against the wall, like she was flayed, her gasping coming out in hot bursts of disbelief and ardor. One of his hands cupped her face as he kissed her, and the other…she was pawed, her dress, her arms, her hips; he raised her dress, put his hand under it, and if she breathed out, she wouldn’t know because his lips were on her, and she lost her head, everything was lost but the hand under her dress, his full palm pressing against her. She wanted to put her own hands up but not in surrender, perhaps in a maybe; say wait, too fast, not fast enough, say, I have to go, though not yet, move away from his lips? though moving away from his lips was impossible, or moving away from his fingers and his spread out hand under her whimsical spring dress, so when she moaned, she moaned into his mouth, barely able to stand up, clutching him as he was panting.
Oh, Larissa
, he whispered, touching her; with his body he stopped her from falling, he just kept her pinned and confined, his tongue in her moaning mouth, his relentless fingers troubling her into a climax so unexpected and intense, she was condensed to sliding down onto the wooden floor while he kneeled down
close by her, rubbing her thigh in earnest comfort, though there was no comfort for her.
“Oh my God, Larissa,” he whispered. “Come on the bed.”
Kai, I have to go
, she mouthed back, her eyes shut in shame and desire. She couldn’t believe what had just happened. What time is it?
“Please. Just for a sec.”
Time was the damper—the worry that her belated appearance at her child’s school might ring off a bell into the world, a warning signal she needed desperately to tamp down. Damper: a device to control vibration. His hands were trying to be dampers, pressing down on her legs. But her body was not cooperating. She was vibrating.
“You don’t want to go, do you?” he whispered, on the floor next to her, his mouth in her neck, on her shoulder.
It’s two o’clock
.
He glanced at his watch. “Two fifteen.”
“Kai!” Scrambling up, her knees liquid, her insides molten, she didn’t look at him, couldn’t look at him as she gathered herself together, straightened her dress, got her purse and keys that had fallen, her lipstick.
“I wish you didn’t have to go,” he said. It was Thursday.
“I know.” She held onto his forearm, his bare arm that had just been unfathomably wrapped around her.
He drew her back inside, into his arms. “What are we going to do?” he groaned. “I can’t…I need…”
“I know. But I have to go. Please…”
“Larissa…” Kai murmured in daylight, like a song, as he kissed her.
The aching nerves like twitching live wire, the aching insides full of fire and longing, the intemperate blinding desire to stay—nothing but the smallness of a waiting child could have made any woman take a step away from a man
that
inflamed, with lips that impassioned, his whole body begging her to stay.
“Tomorrow I’m supposed to work in Chatham till noon at the masonry yard, and then be at Jag by two.”
“And I’m casting through lunch.”
“I’ll call in sick,” he said, his hands squeezing tight her waist. “Come in the morning. Come,” he whispered. “Promise?”
She was out the door and down the stairs. Down thirteen wooden steps, into her two-seater, reversing out of the drive, trying not to glance up at him standing at his open door.
2
A Dance to Lighten the Heart
I
n movies, Larissa knew, right after this moment—there was nothing. She walked down the stairs, drove off, and the film director cut to—
Cut to what? The next day, the next breath, the hands on her bare body, lying on his white bed, cut to the following afternoon. But this wasn’t a movie. This was her life. There was nothing to cut to.