Matt
I woke up the morning after my blind date feeling like I’d drunk a bottle of Love Potion Number Nine. Lucy was bright, sexy, funny, everything a guy could want. All my caution was gone. I sang in the shower, dressed in my uniform, and danced my way out the door. People on the street smiled at me as if they knew. It seemed almost cruel that I would have to wait for two and a half days to see her again.
It didn’t take long for doubts to set in. I regretted having talked so much. Women like guys who are reserved. Mysterious. The ones who keep them guessing. The evening must have been boring for Lucy. Maybe that’s why she drank so much. Still, I was certain I’d done the right thing by not letting her entice me up to her apartment. There probably weren’t many men who could have resisted the temptation. Then I started wondering if that was something she did often, get wasted and try to screw some guy on the first date. The thought made me sick to my stomach. I’d had several long-term relationships in my past, even lived with a nurse for a year, but there was only one other time in my life that I’d felt like I was in love.
In my travels after junior college, I went on vacation to Puerto Rico with Carlos Tacoronte, a guy I knew from my job on a golf course in West Palm Beach. Carlos introduced me to his cousin Enid, who was a freshman at the university in Mayaguez. Enid was gorgeous. She could surf as well as any of the boys on the beach, and she delighted in my clumsy attempts to learn. The last night I was there we walked in the moonlight and she let me kiss her. A month later I was back on the island working on a construction crew for Carlos’s brother. We dated for seven months before she dumped me for an Argentinean graduate student, and I went back to the States with a broken heart. It seemed like puppy love in retrospect, but I had kept my feelings closely guarded ever since. Now, after one evening with Lucy, I was ready to do cartwheels on the edge of a cliff.
The workday was long and slow, but I was looking forward to playing softball that night. We usually started at seven, but the weather was so hot they’d moved the game back to nine, hoping it would cool off after dark. After work I went home and washed my car. It was a classic yellow ’56 Thunderbird with a V8-312 engine—removable white hardtop with porthole windows on the side, black and white upholstery, a pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror. The car had originally belonged to my uncle Joe. I was a toddler when my dad died, and my mom’s younger brother Joe stepped in as a surrogate father. He took me bowling and fishing and duck hunting, to Pirates and Steelers games. I loved to go riding in the T-bird, squeezed in between him and one of his girlfriends on the bench seat. I told him I was going to get a car exactly like it when I grew up, and Joe said maybe he’d give me his. One day my mother heard me pestering him, asking how old I’d have to be to get the car.
“Now listen here, young man,” Mom said, looking at me but scolding us both. “Your uncle Joe had to work hard in the mine to
buy
that automobile, and I’m telling you right now there are two things that are never going to happen as long as I’m on this earth. Number one, you’re never going to spend a single day working in a coal mine. Number two”—she held up two fingers—“I am not going to let Joe or anyone else
give
you something you should have earned for yourself.”
Uncle Joe never married. He kept the T-bird in his garage in pristine condition and drove a junker to the mine. Four years ago, he called and asked me if I wanted to buy it. He said he was having a hard time getting in and out of the low seats with his creaky knees. I told him how much I loved the car, but there was no way I could afford it. He asked me how much I had in my savings account, and I said about twelve hundred dollars.
“What do you say we make it ten percent?”
“What?”
“Ten percent of your savings. A hundred twenty bucks.” He laughed. “I won’t take a nickel less.”
The car was worth at least four grand. I tried to say no, but not very hard. When I went home to pick up the T-bird, I told my mother I had to hock my soul to the credit union to buy it from Joe. I know she didn’t believe me. Her bullshit detector could have been certified for use in a court of law. But she didn’t ask me about the car again. Maybe it was enough for her that I’d followed her first rule about not working in the coal mines. I know she wished I lived closer to Butler, but she loved telling people I was a
police
officer
. She never said “cop.” (I think she was one of those women who get starry-eyed over a man in uniform.) Occasionally she worried about the dangers of my job, but she knew they were negligible compared to being a miner. My father was a Marine who fought at Guadalcanal only to come home and get crushed by a coal car.
Strangers often stopped me to admire the T-bird. I refused to listen to offers when someone asked if it was for sale. The car was a legacy I felt honored and duty-bound to preserve. I changed the oil and tuned the engine myself, rented a garage to keep it off the street. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a chick magnet for me like it had been for Uncle Joe. I wasn’t a cool guy like him. I could never pull it off. I was too sincere with girls, too eager to please.
Actually, I was that way with everyone. When I got in trouble or mouthed off and acted like a smart aleck, my mother would get angry and dole out some punishment, but the worst punishment of all was for her to say she was
disappointed
in me. Mom was the bookkeeper for an insurance agency. I knew how hard she worked to raise me on her own, and I wanted her to be proud of me. That meant being good, not cool. A cool guy didn’t raise his hand in class or mow his neighbor’s lawn. Didn’t hurry or get agitated or put himself out. A cool guy would never call a girl the day after a blind date to tell her what a great time he had. A cool guy would never go on a blind date in the first place.
***
Our softball team was called the Lobsters. We took an early five-run lead on the Uzis then let it slip away. The ball carried well in the thick night air, but guys looked like they were running underwater. After the game I gathered up my things and walked to the parking lot with Terry. He said Jill hadn’t come because it was too hot and she wanted to stay home in the AC. I told him I had been hoping to talk to her about Lucy.
“Oh yeah, you went on that blind date with her. How’d that go?”
“Good. She’s amazing. We’re going out again on Saturday.”
Terry nodded noncommittally.
“What?” I said. “You think I should stay away from her?”
“Look, don’t get me wrong. Lucy’s great. She’s Jill’s best friend. The two of them would kill for one another. She thinks I’m a total stiff, but I don’t mind. All I’m saying is,
caveat
emptor
, my friend. Women like her come with a price.”
We stopped next to my car. I said, “She muttered something over dinner about falling in love with assholes. Can you expand on that a little? Jill said her last boyfriend was a total shit.”
“Griffin? Yeah, Jill hated him from day one.”
“What was he like?”
He shrugged. “Guess it depends on your perspective. He’s a smart guy. Cocky, seems to be well connected. He’s a good storyteller. To me he’s like a character out of a Tennessee Williams play, one of those handsome rakes. Women know he’s trouble, but that’s part of the appeal.”
“That’s the kind of guy Lucy wants?”
“Like I said, it’s part of the appeal.” I grimaced as Terry leaned up against the Thunderbird, and he stepped away without my having to ask.
“Maybe I’ll have to adopt a new M.O. Treat her like dirt and show her who’s boss.”
Terry smirked. “That might work.”
As I drove home, I gunned the engine and cranked the T-bird up to eighty. Hand-me-down cool from my uncle Joe. I had a feeling I was going to need it.
***
Friday morning after roll call, I was told to report to Captain Antonucci’s office. I had never been called in by the captain before, which made me a little nervous, but I couldn’t think of any reason to be concerned. I saluted as I entered the captain’s office. He waved it off and told me to close the door and take a seat.
“I’m going to get right down to business here, Drobyshev.” He had my personnel file open on his desk. “I see from your record you got a community college degree?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s good, good. It says here you speak Spanish?”
I smiled. “
Sí, capitán
.”
He smiled too. “Schoolbook or street talk?”
“Street, sir. I studied it in high school, but I got pretty fluent living in Puerto Rico.”
“Good, good. Let me tell you what I have in mind.” He started talking about the school busing problems, how the department felt like it was under siege. Damned if we do and damned if we don’t. The captain leaned forward and dropped his voice. “The commissioner wants me to put together a small task force. Officers who can go out into the neighborhoods and get the people back on
our
side. You know, talk to the priests and ministers, really get to know the merchants, spend some time at the boys’ and girls’ clubs. Cops used to do that kind of thing every day. We need to get a dialogue going, come up with some fresh ideas. Speaking Spanish will come in real handy.”
“Sounds like a great opportunity, sir.”
“It is, it is. I got some good feedback on you, Drobyshev. I think you’ll be a great addition to the team. But I want to caution you—we’re still in the planning stages for the next month or two. We don’t even have a name for the task force yet. Everything I just told you is confidential. Not a word about it leaves this room. You understand?”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
I left his office and practically jumped up and clicked my heels. The job was a plum. I wished there was a way I could tell Lucy. Things were definitely turning my way.
Lucy
I went to bed Friday night thinking about Matt, telling myself I’d be a good girl on our date the next evening and not drink so much. The phone rang about two in the morning—Griffin calling from a hotel in Denver. It was almost like he had a sixth sense that another guy was circling, or perhaps I had summoned him with my extrasensory need. He sounded stoned, maudlin. He told me he had just lost out on a big contract he’d been working on. Also, his father was having some serious heart problems back in Cincinnati. I tried to be sympathetic but couldn’t think of much to say. He asked me how things were going and I said same-old same-old.
“You miss me?” he said.
“Every day.” I didn’t mean to be quite as sarcastic as I sounded.
“You’ve met somebody, haven’t you?”
“Of course. You told me not to wait.”
“Is he there now?”
“He just left.”
“Was he good?”
“Incredible. One of the best.”
“But you want more?” Griffin said.
“Always.”
“Tell me what you’re wearing.”
“Just panties.” The truth. “Nothing else.”
“Touch your nipples.”
A deep intake of breath, my pulse quickening. “Okay.”
“Squeeze them,” he said. “Dig your fingernail in a little.”
I let out a soft cry.
“Now slowly move your fingers down across your belly.”
And so on. I can’t explain why this made me feel like I had a hold on him. Wasn’t he simply proving the opposite?
The next afternoon Jill and I went shopping. When we stopped for a bite to eat, Jill put my hand on her stomach so I could feel the baby move. I asked if she knew if it was a boy or girl, and she said she had no idea. It seemed strange that the child could be inside your body and still be such a mystery.
Jill watched with disapproval as I tore a nub of skin from my thumb with my teeth. “You heard from Griffin, I guess.”
“No. Why? I can still be neurotic without him.” I smiled. “He hasn’t called in weeks.”
“Good. I hope he’s gone for-evah.”
“Me too.” I tasted a drop of blood. “I’m going to fall in love with Officer Krupke.”
“Maybe you
will
, Miss Smart-Ass.”
“Jesus, wouldn’t that be a trip?”
Which is precisely what I was thinking a few hours later as I took another hit on a joint and snipped the price tags off the new outfit I’d bought for my date. Matt was coming to pick me up at six-thirty. I showered and got dressed and went downstairs and sat on the porch to wait for him. We were going to see the new Woody Allen movie,
Annie
Hall
, then out to dinner.
The heat had finally broken, a soft breeze stirring the air as Matt came walking up the sidewalk with a bunch of flowers in a green paper cone. He had broad shoulders and a long, determined stride. He waved when he saw me, then stopped at the bottom of the steps and spread his arms wide.
“This better than the uniform?” he said.
“Yeah, you look great.” Still, it was a uniform in all but name: blue oxford shirt with button-down collar, khaki pants, polished weejuns, and a matching belt. “But, officer?” I said in my best Blanche DuBois. “How will you protect me? There are wicked men roaming the streets.”
He growled and raised the paper cone like a club. “Flower power.”
I fluttered my hand next to my cheek. “Oh my, how disarming.”
His laugh was a sharp cackle—
ack-ack, ack-ack
—like a volley from a machine gun. “You’re great at puns,” he said.
“A legacy from my father. We’d try to one-up each other at the dinner table while my mother and brother sat there and groaned.”
He handed me the flowers: calla lilies, white and rusty orange. I asked him to come up to my apartment while I put them in water. Halfway up the stairs I remembered the joint I’d smoked. I had a stupid grin on my face as I unlocked the door, the apartment still reeking, and imagined myself getting arrested
by
my date. Matt must have smelled the marijuana but acted like he didn’t. I looked around for something to hold the flowers. I’d had a French crystal vase, an heirloom from my grandmother, which would have been perfect, but that
objet
met its end a split second after it sailed past Griffin’s head. I think that was the time I found out he was screwing my friend Vanessa from work. The fight ended as usual with fevered sex, injury added to insult when I stepped barefoot on a shard of glass.
I found a ceramic pitcher I used for sangria, filled it with water, and put the calla lilies on top of a stereo speaker.
Matt was looking at Cody’s Tarot woodcuts, the photos of Griffin and me craftily hidden away earlier in the day. I felt shallow but couldn’t help thinking that Matt was rather plain, his face too round, nose too broad, deep-set brown eyes a little too close together. His best feature was his curly brown hair—and a big, easy smile.
When we went back downstairs, my first-floor neighbor, Mrs. Stansbury, was standing on a chair in the hall, straining to change a light bulb in the fixture overhead.
“Here,” Matt said, “let me do that for you.”
He took her hand to help her down, then hopped up and changed the bulb. Mrs. Stansbury thanked him with a look in her eyes like he’d just carried her out of a burning building. She was an attractive woman in her forties (no husband in evidence), who blew hot and cold with me.
My cat Rory was sitting on the porch washing her face with her paw.
“There you are, little girl,” I said. “I’ve been wondering where you were.” Mrs. Stansbury or the Lindells, who lived on the second floor, let the cat in and out of the front door as they came and went.
“She’s beautiful,” Matt said. “What’s her name?”
“Rory. Short for Rorschach.”
He squatted down and held out the back of his hand. “Hello, gorgeous.”
The cat sniffed his hand, then ducked her head and began to nuzzle it.
“She likes men,” I said.
He started to tease Rory, and she took a swipe at him with her paw.
“Now, now, Rorschach, don’t get testy.” Matt glanced at me for approval.
“You, sir, have potential,” I said.
We walked down the street to his car, the yellow Thunderbird Jill had told me about. When we got into the theater, the only empty seats we could find together were in the second row. Matt hurried off to the lobby and came back with two sodas and a bucket of popcorn. The movie was wonderful, but I kept squirming in my seat with my neck craned up at the screen. Matt began to massage the back of my neck; his fingers were salty and greasy, but the gesture, like Alvy Singer’s bumbling attempts at romance with Annie Hall, was so artless and sincere it was impossible to resist. I gave a sigh of approval and leaned in for more. When he laughed his peculiar laugh, people nearby took a peek at him, amused or annoyed, but he didn’t seem to notice.
It was twilight when we exited the theater. We strolled through the Common to the Public Garden and talked about the movie. Matt said he liked it, but he thought
Bananas
and
Sleeper
were funnier. I said I thought it was Woody Allen’s best film yet. I liked the way he kept reminding you it was a movie, turning to the camera and talking directly to the audience, then stepping back into the story. Matt and I began quoting our favorite lines from the movie.
I said, “I loved the part where Annie and Alvy are walking down the street and he stops and suggests they kiss for the first time so they can get it over with.”
“Yeah, great line,” Matt said. “I wish I’d’ve thought of that with you.”
“When would you have said it?”
“When would I have had the courage? On the sidewalk after dinner, maybe, when you put that rose in your hair. When did I want to say it? About two seconds after I saw you crossing the street.”
“I probably would’ve slugged you.”
“Yeah?” He put his arm around me. “Then I would’ve cuffed you and taken you in.”
I laughed. “Promises, promises.”
We crossed the footbridge over the pond where the swan boats were tied up for the evening. A fat man was sitting on a bench playing “The Tennessee Waltz” on an accordion. I started singing along with the music, and Matt put a dollar in his instrument case.
“Milady,” he said with a deep bow.
I curtsied and took his hand, and we began to waltz. It could have been a scene from a movie, more Frank Capra than Woody Allen, Matt a little ungainly, but his spirit trumping his awkwardness. I knew at that moment he was not going to sleep with me tonight to get it over with; he wanted a storybook romance, an old-fashioned courtship full of restraint and longing. A week ago I would have scoffed at such a notion as artificial and demeaning to women. Now I found myself thinking,
Why
not
give
it
a
chance?
It would be something different, anyway. Like going to live in a commune, or being born again and putting your faith in Jesus. I had no illusions (or delusions) that this was True Love, not for me anyway, but it felt like happiness—pure, simple-minded joy. The trick was not to question it, or belittle it like Amanda; just put on my fool’s cap and follow Matt’s lead.
***
It was summer, the sun shone brightly, and I rarely felt blue. Matt called me every day. He took me to a Red Sox game and a Bee Gees concert. I went to a few of his softball games and met some of his friends; Jill and Terry had us over for a cookout with a bunch of other couples. Matt was at ease socially, and everyone seemed charmed by him.
I loved riding in the Thunderbird with the top down and the radio blasting, Matt shifting gears like a race car driver. One Sunday morning we were on the way to the beach at Plum Island—I was wearing shorts over a low-cut bathing suit—when a police car pulled us over in Ipswich. The cop was bald with a big potbelly. Matt showed him his BPD badge and the cop grinned. The cop’s eyes were crawling all over me as he and Matt made small talk, but if Matt noticed, he didn’t let on. Griffin would have reached over in mid-sentence and put his hand on my bare thigh.
Eat
your
heart
out, pal. She’s mine.
The thought made me wonder where he was right now, what he was doing. Probably tiptoeing out of some woman’s apartment the morning after, on his way to someone else. He hadn’t called in a few weeks. There were nights I wished he would.
The Ipswich cop patted the fender of the Thunderbird and tipped his hat goodbye. Matt said something to me as we drove away, but I was thinking about Griffin, remembering all the crazy places we’d made love: in a canoe on the Charles River, in the shadows at the far end of a subway platform, behind an armoire in a dusty antiques store while the shopkeeper and a woman haggled over the price of a Biedermeier chest. Sometimes I think we were hoping we’d get caught, as if we were trying to prove that our need for each other carried us beyond the usual boundaries of decorum and common sense.
Matt and I had been dating for a month and were still making out like high school kids. I made no initiatives and asked for no explanations, waiting to see how far he’d go. Close, but (alas, Dr. Freud) no cigar. Sometimes it felt like a game, silly and frustrating, but the anticipation kept my hormones percolating. The chemistry between us seemed fine, but I began to worry. What if it wasn’t worth the wait? What if, after this great buildup, our lovemaking was a dud? Not a full-blown fiasco—one of those spectacular misfires we could both acknowledge and maybe even laugh about somewhere down the road—but something numbingly pedestrian, the sexual equivalent of Muzak or instant coffee, a vapid facsimile that only proves just how great the real thing can be.
When we got to the beach, I spread a blanket out on the sand and took off my shorts, my white bathing suit cut high on my hips. When I’d tried it on in front of the mirror that morning, I noticed that if I raised my arms or twisted my torso, you could see a tiny portion of my tattoo, which was on my lower tummy near the bend in my hip. Griffin had talked me into getting the tattoo one night in Portsmouth. At first I thought he was joking, but he said he’d get one too. Neither of us was drunk or high.
“You mean we each get a heart with an arrow through it? Mine says Griffin, yours says Lucy?”
“Whatever you want. They don’t have to be the same.”
We looked at the samples on the wall and leafed through a sketchbook of the artist, who said he could draw anything. I saw some birds and butterflies I liked, but nothing that caught my fancy. I wanted it to be unique to Griffin and me; I also wanted it to go someplace on my body that only he would see. Griffin went first, agreeing to get his in the same place as mine. He chose his birth sign, Scorpio, which seemed a bit trite. I decided on a pink and green Chinese umbrella. The needle burned a little but didn’t really hurt. The artist covered the tattoo with a bandage and warned me not to itch it or pick at the scab. A week later it looked beautiful. Even after Griffin left, I couldn’t say I regretted it—in fact, quite the opposite—but I still felt self-conscious about Matt’s seeing it and asking the inevitable questions.
Matt tried to talk me into going into the ocean at Plum Island, but it was too cold for me. He had long, well-defined muscles and a thatch of dark hair on his chest. I watched him dive into the waves and swim far out. When he came out of the water, he toweled off and sat down beside me.
“Would you like me to put some suntan lotion on you?” he said.
I was lying on my stomach. “That would be wonderful.”
He dabbed some lotion between my shoulder blades, massaging my neck and shoulder muscles as he rubbed it in. His hands were strong and patient as he worked his way down my back and started on my thighs. I turned my head, one eye scrunched against the sun.
“You can do that all day,” I said.
“Maybe I will.”
I rose up on one elbow. “And night.”
He kissed me softly and said, “Okay.”
Walking along a secluded stretch of beach twenty minutes later, we detoured into the dune grass where we groped and fumbled and gasped. When we were done, we looked at each other and laughed with relief. It was far from perfect—sand where sand was never meant to be—but good enough to make me want to try again,
soon
. If he noticed my tattoo, he didn’t say.