Close Relations (23 page)

I went three blocks farther and finally found a store that sold me a blue-and-white checkered tablecloth. I would have bought daisies to strew on the bed, but, sensing that Jerry might construe any overtly romantic act as pressure, I scurried back to the apartment, the spring chill nipping at my arms and legs.

“A picnic!” I announced, spreading the cloth over the blanket that covered Jerry.

“Hey, this is really nice. What a fuss! I love it. I may become a professional invalid.” I tucked a soft paper napkin under his chin and combed his hair back with my fingers. “Will you darn my socks for me too?” he asked.

“Invalids don’t need socks. But I’ll buy you coloring books and Hershey bars.” I dragged two chairs in from the dining area, one for me, the other for the wineglasses.

“Marcia,” he said, “this is inspired.”

“Thank you.” I sat on the chair next to him and reached over for a fast stroke of his hand.

“Do I get lunch too?” he asked.

“Yes, of course. You’re just too distracting, lying there like that.”

“Helpless.”

“Stop it.” I hurried into the kitchen and returned with the cheeses and pâtés on a cutting board. I discovered a pear in the refrigerator and placed it there, water-beaded and glistening, and tucked the French bread under my arm.

“You’re trying to weaken my defenses with this home-maker routine,” he said.

“Right. Pretty soon I’ll make lace curtains for the living room, and maybe I’ll buy a pair of his and her madonnas for our dressers. You’ll be totally besotted, putty in my hands.”

“You really wouldn’t want that?”

“The only thing I want is lunch,” I remarked, and tore off a piece of bread for him. “Watch out for the crumbs. Now, do you want me to fix up a plate for you?”

“Sure. I’m going to milk this thing for all it’s worth.” I cut small wedges of cheese, little squares of pâté, even broke his bread into bite-sized bits. Then, tilting the wineglass, I let him take tiny sips. “This has to be one of the best lunches of my life,” he said. I leaned over and licked a crumb from his lip.

“Stand up,” he said, a few minutes later. “Take off your clothes.”

“It’s too bright in here.”

“Off.” I did, but turned my back to him as I unhooked my bra.

“Come on. Turn around.” I did, but with my arms hugged in front of me, as though I were cradling a litter of kittens. “Marcia, put your hands down.” I felt the warm flush on my face seeping into my neck and shoulders. I was embarrassed. I knew Jerry knew my breasts were small, but I didn’t want them viewed in bright afternoon sunlight. “Sweetheart, come on. Hands down.”

I complied, but looked away from him while he studied me. He examined me for a long time, not speaking, not breathing hard, and I felt stiff with anxiety over whether I would pass his test, but also soft inside, moist and receptive to the helpless man in the bed who was controlling me.

“Come closer,” he said at last. I stepped nearer, to the edge of the bed. I looked at him finally, but only at his hand; I could not meet his glance. His fingers reached out and began a feathery massage of my stomach. My muscles contracted in response. I placed my hand over his and tried to push it lower. “No, Marcia. Just stand there. Don’t do anything.” His light touch continued and finally his hand moved lower, but it was only to touch my legs, to run from my ankles slowly up my calves and all around my thighs. Each time I moved or tried to maneuver him, every time I moaned, he pulled his hand away.

He reached up, but the stretching made him wince. “Kneel on the floor,” he ordered. He traced my midriff and chest and neck over and over, until my breasts began to ache from not being touched. Finally he caressed them too, but lightly, as though he were immune from the roughness of passion. His fingers then reached for my face, probing my ears, moving around and around my lips and inside my mouth, over my tongue. “Stand up now. Come on, Marcia.” My knees wobbled and my legs shook a little, but I stood. “Open your eyes. That’s right. Now look at me. Not down at the blanket. At me.” I met his eyes, hard, cold, blue stars. He ran his hand across my hip but then withdrew it. “Keep looking at me. What are you going to do now?”

“What?” I whispered.

“My arm is tired. What are you going to do with yourself? Don’t move. Stand there. What are you going to do?”

“What should I do?”

He didn’t answer. His face remained somber, almost sullen.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Make yourself come, Marcia. That’s it. Slower. Much slower. And keep looking at me.” I watched him staring as my fingers worked. “Very nice.” Then he looked up and merely blinked as he saw the tears in my eyes. “Come on. Finish up. Finish up. That’s it.” I continued, his eyes holding mine, until the final releasing shudder that let me close my eyes. But still I stood there, waiting for him to tell me what to do. “That was fine, wasn’t it?” I nodded and began to turn away. “Come on now, sweetheart. Come into bed, under the covers. I want you next to me.”

“Jerry,” I said as I felt his warmth across the sheet.

“Touch me now…. Oh, that’s wonderful.”

Later I said “Jerry” again, after I had touched him to his satisfaction.

“Shhh. Close your eyes now. We’ll have a nice long afternoon nap.”

He slept until evening, occasionally letting his hand drift lightly over my bare skin in his sleep. “I love you,” I whispered when I was certain he was in a deep dream.

Jerry wanted everything light. Just as he would not commit himself to marriage, so he would not enter into a liaison where he might be pushed out of control, even for only a half hour. Maybe it was his latent Catholicism, his sense of sin, his feeling that great sweats and orgasmic shrieks and purple teeth marks would not benefit his immortal soul. He may have held back from me, specifically, because he knew all about me. Jerry was a politician; it was his business to know people. I have no doubt that when I visited his office for my job interview, he knew with nearly as much precision as I the number of men I had slept with. It was not that he was inquisitive and loved gossip, although almost all politicians do. If he was hiring a speech writer for Paterno, he wanted to know about any potential kinks that might interfere with her work, any entangling alliances that might divide her loyalties. He had not been forced to ferret out the information. No doubt he knew about me just as I knew about him before I met him, by sitting back and letting late-afternoon chatter flow around him.

He was too sophisticated to be shocked by my level of post-Plotnick promiscuity, for it was certainly not unusual among the women he dealt with. And I don’t think he recoiled at the thought of his friends, colleagues and adversaries who preceded him. I’d been around, and he took comfort in my ability to care for myself. We coupled casually. With me he had no fears about permanence or paternity. After three nights of drinking with the boys he would return to a receptive woman, diaphragm perpetually in place, always welcoming. He appreciated a woman who knew very well what other men had to offer.

But Jerry was conventional too. Even if he suddenly had dreams of picket fences and babies, he would have trouble trying to fulfill them with a fast woman by his side. He was too Irish to go the whole route with a divorced Jew with a racy past.

Perhaps he did not trust me. Why, indeed, should he give me his all when I might take up with a state assemblyman from Chinatown on a whim? Or when my family might finally succeed and convince me to run off with the first circumcised pharmacist who proposed?

But that evening was fine, and so was the next day. I lay beside him, talking, gazing at the black hairs rooted in the satiny white skin of his chest, making him meals and snacks, emptying his jar. He refused to discuss current events; Paterno, LoBello, his status in the campaign were classified objects. He wouldn’t contemplate his future.

“We’re not going to talk about any political shit,” he announced.

“Do you think that by ignoring the problem it will go away?” I demanded, smoothing the blanket.

“No.”

But since Jerry’s definition of “political shit” applied only to the current campaign, we chatted about old battles and old flames. Since we both reckoned our personal history by public events, we thought of the two together. For me, 1969 had been a horror: Procaccino ran for mayor against Lindsay and I had run through Mitchell Rosten, Harlan Falkowitz, and Michael Smiley; all four campaigns were disastrous.

For Jerry, the campaigns were far more memorable than the cuties. He could report how each election district in Queens had voted in the 1968 Humphrey-Nixon contest, but all he really recalled about 1968’s Joan O’Day was that she got sleepy by ten at night—a serious defect for a political operative—and that her sister had been a nun.

“Was she bright?” I asked, as if she were dead.

“Yes.”

“Pretty?”

“Yes. But I think she was too short.”

I, on the other hand, knew that Harlan Falkowitz was six foot two and three quarters, that Mitchell Rosten had the hairiest backside I’d ever seen, and that Michael Smiley was morose and hated his last name. If encouraged, I might have quoted entire conversations with Harlan or Mitchell or Michael—insipid as they were. But I wasn’t encouraged. Jerry wanted to know Procaccino’s media budget.

“Who remembers things like that?” I huffed.

“How could you forget something like that?” Jerry demanded.

“How could you forget whether Joan O’Day was short?”

“I said she was too short.”

“You said you thought she was too short, not that she definitely was. And what is your definition of too short?”

“Shorter than you. Anyhow, why is Joan O’Day’s height so important?”

“Because you were sleeping with her.”

“We were lying down, for Christ’s sake.”

Jerry had had brief encounters and long love affairs. As far as I could gather, his ladies were all reasonably intelligent and passably pretty. There were no stars; he chose a councilman’s clever secretary, a mayor’s deputy assistant, a pollster’s junior statistician. He kept away from the rare high achiever as he kept away from the nice girls Saint Agnes had been wanting him to meet for the last thirty years: sweet Moira or darling Maureen or lovely Mary who lived with her dear old mum in an apartment in the Bronx.

But his women seemed to be a frame around his life; the real picture for him was politics. And now the picture was out of focus.

By Sunday, he grew weary of proclaiming old triumphs. The present was intolerable. And he couldn’t look forward to anything. “I don’t feel like talking,” he said. But he was able to get out of bed by himself, although this was accomplished with complex, minute twists and low staccato grunts. He shaved, losing the rakish air that had been increasing proportionately with the length of his beard. He took a hot shower. I dried him.

“You smell like a lilac,” I said softly, patting the backs of his legs.

“You’re the one who buys this goddamn faggot soap,” he barked.

I put the towel back on the rack. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” he snapped again, reaching for the towel, folding it in half vertically, and placing it back on the rack. “Can’t you do anything properly?”

“I’m going to get bagels.”

“Aren’t you going to help me back to bed?”

“Not if you talk that way.”

“Oh, excuse me, princess. Believe me, I’d bow if I could.”

“I know you’re depressed, but you don’t have to take it out on me.”

“I’m not depressed.”

“Of course you are. Admit it. You’d be abnormal if you weren’t.”

“All right. I’m abnormal. Does that make you happy? Or would you feel better if I was depressed?”

“Of course not. I’d feel better if you were happy.”

“I’ll be happy if you just lay off. I can manage by myself now.” Naked, he shuffled toward the bed, his torso twisted, so in stance he resembled a comma. “All weekend you were hovering over me, playing nurse. Or mother. That’s what you’re really after, isn’t it? I told you—”

“You were flat on your back, for God’s sake! What should I have done, left you alone to starve and mess the sheets? You have no right to make those kinds of accusations when it was you—
you,
Jerry—who asked me to take care of you.”

“Well, I can take care of myself now,” he shouted, bracing himself with one hand on the night table. “When you go back to work tomorrow, you don’t have to come home for lunch. I can manage myself.”

“Is that what’s bothering you? My going back to work tomorrow? Look, let’s talk things over.”

“Let’s not talk things over. Is that the way you think problems are solved? By talk? Maybe it’s your writing all those goddamn speeches, that you think problems can be solved with words. Let me tell you something, it’s actions that count with me. If you think things will get better just by having a good heart-to-heart, you’re living in a dream world, sister.”

“Don’t you think it would be more constructive to deal with your problems instead of attacking me?”

“You think I’m not dealing with them?”

“Well, Jerry, you haven’t exactly confronted anyone.”

“Well, Marcia, maybe I’m a little more knowledgeable about handling these things than you are. Did that ever occur to you? You sit playing with a typewriter all day while I’m managing people, making hard decisions. Do you think you could give me a little credit for being able to run my own life? Just a little, sweetheart? I don’t ask for much. I know how much better at these things you are, but I like to try.”

I slammed the bedroom door as I marched out, then strode around the living room several times. Finally, I sat on a floor pillow picking at my cuticles, waiting for him to call out an apology. I waited about ten minutes. There was only silence. I opened the bedroom door and asked, in a haughty Duchess of Windsor voice, “Do you want bagels?”

“No. Come in here, will you? I want to talk.”

“What is it?”

“Come on. Sit down. I know you’re mad at me.”

“Of course I’m mad at you. I’m under control of your whims. One minute I’m taking my clothes off, the next minute you’re throwing me out. I’m trying to help and you call me a princess and—”