In Case We're Separated (19 page)

Another pause, and he began to talk about a second concert he thought he might come to in Boston. “I'll be in touch.” Then he said, “Who else are you going to tell?”

“I have to tell Jo,” I said. “Jo and Josh. Warren.”

I got off the phone and went searching for Jo and Josh's phone number, looking in my agitation in all the wrong places. I looked again. I still couldn't find it. I sat down in Warren's oak chair and held on to the arms. Anger, I saw—this time the discovery counted—had waited for me all my life.

Pastries at the Bus Stop

A
s I told my sister later, any reasonable person would have made the same remark. I was standing at a bus stop on Madison Avenue when a woman came out of a bakery carrying a little wooden table. She put it down near the curb and went back inside. Then she brought out a tray of French pastries: the chocolate was dark and glossy, the glazed strawberries fat, the crusts flaky. Whipped cream swirled and swooped. The woman set the tray on the table, right in front of me. She opened the rear doors of a van that was illegally parked in the bus stop, slowly slid the tray inside, shut the doors, and carried the table back into the store. I looked around, and saw nobody but an old man walking a brown dog. I said to him, “Did you see that tray? Makes you want to rush to a hotel and go to bed, doesn't it?”

“You
didn't,
” said Ruth, when I told her about it.

“I did.”

“You went to a hotel?”

“Oh, no, he probably didn't even hear me. But I did say it. I—”

My sister yelled, but my point was that I had changed. My reason for speaking, and for telling Ruth about it, was not to bring humiliation and pain on my head, as it would have been not so many years earlier. I said it—and I described saying it—to celebrate the sexiness of French pastries at the bus stop. Ruth and I were meeting at Bloomingdale's to pick out a dress for her to be married in, and the wedding was five days off. I wouldn't have gone to a hotel with the man walking the dog, even if he'd been attractive, had wanted to, and wasn't accompanied by his dog, because Ruth urgently needed a wedding dress. Also, I had an appointment later with the man I loved.

The bus arrived as the woman came rushing out of the store again, waving car keys apologetically. And then life became a little complicated, because as I got on the bus my cell phone rang. I was the director of an organization with the innocent name of Neighborhood Helpers, and the caller was my assistant, Georgiana, who was still at our office downtown, where she'd received a phone call from a client's daughter. We were a nonprofit agency—so nonprofit we were always about to go out of business for lack of money to buy a new ink cartridge for the printer. We placed ex-crazies, ex-junkies, and reformed alcoholics—sometimes known as psychiatric survivors and recovering substance abusers—in part-time jobs assisting old people, and then we kept track of everybody while the old people's lightbulbs were changed, their library books returned, or their bathrooms cleaned. Our goal was to stay out of the papers except for one schmaltzy story every year. That wasn't too hard: we picked our employees carefully, and I could give you pages of statistics on the rarity of violence among former drinkers, drug users, and mental patients. The greatest risk, ordinarily, was that a recovering addict would bore an old lady to death explaining the more obscure steps of a twelve-step program. A typical newspaper story showed a tall, shy depressive taking a box of cornflakes off the top shelf in the supermarket for a smiling old woman leaning on a walker, but now and then people's peculiarities coincided in some unpredictable way and an obsessive-compulsive who spent her days washing her hands was paired with an early-stage Alzheimer's victim who couldn't remember whether he'd washed his hands that week. So I worried because Georgiana, when she called me, sounded worried. The client was Mrs. Cohen, a diabetic who injected herself with insulin. Mrs. Cohen's daughter had said her mother was now too confused to do this properly, and our worker had provided more help than the daughter considered acceptable.

“Who's the worker?” I asked Georgiana.

“Bernadette.” Bernadette was an ex-junkie who maybe knew too much about needles.

“I'll talk to Bernie tomorrow,” I said. I got off the bus and walked over to Bloomingdale's. “Wedding-dress time!” I greeted Ruth.

“
Please
let's not call it a wedding dress,” she said. “That's what Mom keeps saying—wedding dress. Mom's being impossible.” Ruth was almost sixty and it was a second marriage for both her and the man, whose name was Bob and who had a number of rough little places in his personality upon which Ruthie seemed to thrive. They chewed on each other like people who grab the crustiest part of the turkey skin at Thanksgiving dinner. “And let's get coffee first,” Ruth said.

“Okay,” I said. “Coffee. But then we're buying a dress. Not a wedding dress, all right, but a
nice dress.
” While Ruth and I had coffee I told her about the pastries at the bus stop and she yelled. Ruth's usual take on me was that despite marked improvements (no suicide attempts in many years, useful employment, a cat who was up to date with all his shots) I was still self-destructive and the main way to tell was that the man I loved was married. Then I told her about the woman who'd called about Bernie, and Ruth objected some more. “You're asking for trouble, sending these people into apartments unsupervised.”

“When we started,” I said, “the employee and the client met at the senior center and went shopping, but the old people started sneaking them home.”

“And now your worker's sticking needles into somebody. Needles!”

“I'm sure it's fine,” I said. I said that Bernie had been clean for three years, was taking community college courses, and had all but managed to get her kids out of foster care.

“I'm in a funny mood,” said Ruth, putting down her cup.

We picked out a blue silk calf-length dress with long sleeves. “I'm not telling you to become
respectable,
” she said in the dressing room, slithering into it. Ruthie had long tangled gray hair and she was shedding on the new dress, even before she had it on. “I hate
‘respectable.'
” She spoke while it was bunched over her head and I had trouble making out what she was saying.

“I know,” I said. The dress looked good.

“Can I walk in it?” she asked.

“You don't need to walk in it.”

“I walk in everything.” It had a slit up one side, so she could walk in it, she demonstrated, squashing me against the mirror as she took an exaggerated long stride across the dressing room. I put my arms around her and held tight, wondering if it would be harder to see her alone once she was married, though she and Bob already lived together and I seemed to be seeing her now. I'd never been married, and she'd been divorced for years and years.

Ruth paid for the dress and said she was going back to her office—she was a magazine editor—though it was past six. As we were standing in the street outside the store, about to go in separate directions, she started to cry. I put my hands on her shoulders. “What?” I said.

“I don't like the dress,” said Ruth.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“No.” Then she said, “Let's rent a car and drive to California.”

“You'd want to take Bob along.”

“I don't need him,” said Ruth. She was joking but tears were sliding down her face. I patted her arms and let her go.

“And I don't need Mom and Dad showing up,” she said. In their late eighties, our parents still lived independently and could fly up from Florida for a wedding. For years in my difficult twenties and thirties I didn't talk to them, as I made my way in and out of emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, and day programs. When I let them call me again I had had a long enough vacation, and their peculiarities bothered me less than they bothered Ruth, who'd been dealing with them all along. Our parents seemed sweet and frail to me, passive-aggressive and exhaustingly anxious to her.

“I'm late,” I said. The man I loved was named Brian, and we were meeting downtown. Though Brian and I ate dinner and performed ordinary sex as well, we called our evenings oral-sex dates because I loved to be licked. Some guys will, some won't, but he loved it, too, and his wife didn't. All I could think of was my mouth by the time I saw him, my mouth and his mouth. We met at a little restaurant on Second Avenue, ate paella with mussels and clams—which seemed like a rehearsal—then took a taxi to my place on the Lower East Side. I told people I lived in the building where my grandparents lived when they came to America, though I had no idea where they lived.

It was fall, cold out, and Brian and I were chilled. We hurried into bed, dislodging my cat, and pressed our hands together, then ran them up and down each other's legs and arms and buttocks and back, swiftly and roughly, to get warm. Brian not only liked licking, he liked fat women, and I was one; his wife had been fat but had lost weight. Once we were warm and laughing we got to the business of mouths.

“My sister's getting married on Sunday,” I said sometime later.

“And you're upset that you can't invite me,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I'm looking forward to seeing family. It'll be easier, not having to look after a date.”

“That's healthy of you.”

“I'm healthy.” I thought for a while and said, “But ordinarily you'd be right.”

“About what?”

“Women who date married men hate it that they can't take them places,” I said. “You knew right away because you've had quite a bit of experience with single women.”

“Is that a disqualification?” he said.

“No,” I said. We'd been dating for a year and I had a pretty good idea of his history. I thought for a long time, and something kept me from just moving on to another topic. It was something about the way he'd said, “Is that a disqualification?” What it meant was fine, but not the way he said it. It was weary, as if he'd known something for a while that I resisted knowing. I said, “But if you've done it so many times, why did you stop? What happened to them? Why aren't you in bed with one of them right this minute?”

“Sometimes they ended it, sometimes I did,” he said. “Isn't that how it's been for you?” He was quiet for a moment. “Sometimes it's time to behave for a while.”

I thought about what behaving might mean for him. “I see,” I said, and touched him again, and he responded.

Next morning when I arrived at the office, a former Chinese take-out place that always smelled of cooking oil, Georgiana—a light-skinned black woman with formidable multitudes of braids—was listening to one of the employees, Jerry, a Vietnam vet. “So I says to him,” Jerry was saying, “because he can't seem to hear me, Pete, you wearing your hearing aids? And he says, What? And I go, Your
hearing
aids, and he goes, What? and I go HEARING AIDS and he still doesn't get it, so I say, The things . . . you use . . . to help . . . you
hear
. And he says, Oh, my
hearing
aids, sure, I'm wearing 'em.”

Georgiana shook her head and we laughed, and then Mrs. Cohen's daughter phoned, just as I was thinking what a fine, friendly little project we ran. As we spoke I looked at a map of downtown Manhattan over Georgiana's desk. We put pushpins where we had clients. Each worker was supposed to have a different color pushpin, but there were more employees than colors, and Georgiana didn't bother to keep the map up-to-date. Still, it looked impressive, and I liked staring at it while I talked on the phone. At first I didn't mind talking to this daughter, who seemed to find her mother dear if exasperating. We laughed together; then she got more specific. Mrs. Cohen had injected herself with insulin for years, until her daughter had found a syringe on the floor and called in visiting nurses. But for some reason, Medicare had stopped paying for the nurses, and the daughter was glad, because she wanted her mother to move into assisted living. Once the nurses were canceled, the mother agreed to go, but Bernadette was spoiling the plan by reeducating Mrs. Cohen about injections—or doing the injecting herself.

“We're talking about needles,” said the daughter, sounding like my sister. “We're talking about practicing medicine without a license.”

“Well . . .” I said.

“I am a physician,” said the daughter. She'd chosen the right moment to say that, like a pilot choosing the right moment to push a button and bomb a picturesque village out of existence.

“I'll talk to Bernadette,” I said.

“Do more than talk,” she said. “I'm sorry. I know this Bernadette person means well.”

I was about to try to reach Bernie when the phone rang again, and it was Ruth. “I took back the dress,” she said.

“Why did you do
that
?”

“It was too appropriate,” she said. “If I have to get married with a rabbi and all my relatives, at least I want to look inappropriate.”

I wrote “Bernadette” on a pad in front of me, and underlined it twice. I said, “It wasn't white with a veil.”

“Still. But you're right—Bob says I'm crazy.”

“And didn't you tell me this is an extremely casual rabbi?” I said.

“Yes. A woman.” Ruth and I are Jewish—and so is Bob—but you'd never know it from anything we do, although I suppose you'd know it from what we think. Ruth's daughter had found this rabbi. “I don't dress up,” said Ruth. “I don't stand up before clergy.”

“You could change,” I said, becoming annoyed. I needed to call Bernie. “You've never been a complete mess, so you've never had to change. It would do you good to change, for once. I've changed so many times.”