I wanted to say yes. Yes, no one has ever taken care of me, and I need you to be the one.
But I couldn’t.
“I can take care of myself,” I responded. “I don’t want a man to be with me because I need him. I want a man to be with me because he loves me. Do you want to be with me?”
“I don’t know how to be in a normal relationship.” He looked into his soup.
“I need to feel secure,” I said.
He stared at me and put down his spoon. He took a deep breath and sighed as if this news was a personal affront. “It’s starting to bother me,” he said, “that sooner or later it always comes to this. That I am asked to make up for all the shitty things other men have done. As a matter of fact, I’m sick of it.”
“This isn’t about you.”
“It is now,” he said.
“I think you are using me as a Band-Aid to keep your marriage together,” I blurted out. “If I had a spouse who was using, I’d grab my kid and get us the hell out of there. If you decide you want to do that, you can come here.
Mi casa es tu casa
. In the meantime, I need a break.”
“I understand,” he said.
I walked him to his car. I knew this was the last time I would ever see him. I put my arms around him and felt his body stiffen. He glanced up and down the street uncomfortably while he tried to undo my arms.
“Take it easy,” he said, “this isn’t the last time we’ll ever see one another.”
“Bullshit.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the wraparound sunglasses. Then he climbed into the front seat of his car. I turned around and headed for the house. I could hear the engine rev, could hear the gears shift, the grinding of the tires on the gravel, and I was determined not to turn around and wave. I would not allow him to see my tears.
* * *
Now, when I think of him, I remember not our lovemaking, but the dramas we staged for one another. And as I relive them, they transform from the once playful taunts I’d believed them to be, into war exercises, our weapons dishonesty and disrespect. I longed to turn into the selfish man-killer I’d imagined myself to be when we met.
The kind of person who could do things like phone the house to talk to his wife, or appear in his driveway.
But I kept thinking about the kid. About what her issues would be when she grew up. I didn’t want to be a part of what she went into therapy twenty years later to get over.
I really couldn’t understand how Michael could be happy with this arrangement, as a father or as a man. So eventually it seemed that the only helpful thing I might do would be to exit.
Later that winter, my health improved. I did not have a hysterectomy. Simply getting rid of Michael was enough.
One morning, long after the affair was over, I ran into a mutual acquaintance in the parking lot of a local eatery. It had been awhile and Paul seemed eager to talk. He and Michael were working together again and Paul’s need to gossip was overwhelming.
“You know,” he said, “his wife committed suicide recently. And throughout the entire ordeal, he’s such a horn-dog you know, he chased and fucked anyone he could get his hands on. I mean, do you know Marcie? Well, he was all over her the week after his wife was buried …”
“What did you say?”
“He was all over Marcie …”
“No, before that. About his wife.”
“She committed suicide.” He looked at me blankly. “You mean you didn’t know?”
“No.”
“Took pills and put a plastic bag over her head.”
I inhaled.
“What a blessing that you were well out of it by then,” he said.
“You don’t need to tell me any more.”
But he continued: “He had moved out. Then their daughter moved out to join him. They were in couple’s therapy together, and the last time she just didn’t show up.”
I needed to get away from him. He was talking and licking his lips, his big brown eyes bulging out of his head with each detail.
Sweat broke out on my upper lip. Goddamn it. The bead started rolling into my mouth. I caught it with my tongue.
I didn’t want to know how ugly it had been, and yet I did. Paul couldn’t stop talking about all the women. How many? No, don’t tell me. I knew that no woman really meant anything to him. We were pitchers of martinis; we numbed him to his existence. As soon as he was done drinking one pitcher, he simply tossed us in the trash and went on to the next. We all wanted him precisely because
no one
really mattered. Stupidly, I believed that I had been
the one who would make the difference
. It was that old cliché; if only he would open his heart, my remarkable love would redeem him, enabling him, so to speak, to transcend the crap of his life. I think Freud would have called mine a savior complex.
Paul’s lips kept moving, but I no longer heard anything he said. I was thinking of a story Michael told me at a diner one afternoon, about a girl he had dated in college, a married woman who had left her husband for him. Once she had actually split from her husband, Michael decided he didn’t want her. Two years later she and both her children were dead in a car crash. After relaying the story, he said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” He chuckled. “You’ll be thinking all these women go around killing themselves over me.” Then he went on to add, “You know how I want to die? Shot by a jealous husband while I’m screwing his wife.”
“You’re looking a little pale,” said Paul.
“I’ve got to go.”
My hand was shaking as I tried unsuccessfully to put the key in the lock of my old Volvo. Finally slipping into the car, I slumped down in the seat and gripped the steering wheel with both hands.
My palms were sweating and my hands kept slipping. I couldn’t breathe. I imagined a woman I didn’t know, an attractive forty-year-old brunette with shoulder-length hair, lying on her living room rug, her face blue, spittle coming out of her mouth and nose, the plastic bag over her head tied in a bow at her throat. I thought of her daughter, her parents, her grandchildren, and the Christmases they would now endure.
The car was hot and airless and a swarm of enormous flies were playing tag on the windshield. I hit the open button and the windows rolled down.
M
ary hated driving so close to the water. She couldn’t even see it—an incoming storm blackened the sky and the sea beneath it—but she could sense the Atlantic pulsing out there, just off the passenger side, moving like some great predator teasing its prey. “Out of the cradle endlessly stalking,” said Mary to herself.
She stepped on the gas. There was no traffic to weave through that early in the morning. She took Dune Road to the reservation, then turned onto Old Point Road.
Tommy Hawk’s Trading Post was just where Lawrence said it would be. A weathered cigar-store Indian leaned on its side in front.
When Mary shut off the car, her hands were shaking.
Inside, a Shinnecock man sat behind a long counter. Brown skin, slicked-back kinky hair, red-rimmed eyes. The Shinnecock had intermarried with local African Americans so much over the generations you could barely see any Native American in them anymore, unless you got very close. Behind the Shinnecock man were pallets and pallets of cigarettes.
“Hello there,” Mary said, trying to sound regular, trying not to sound like a professor. He mumbled a “Good morning.” There was no heat in the store, and she was shivering.
“Eddie sent me,” Mary said. “You know—Eddie.”
The Shinnecock gave her a once-over with those redrimmed eyes, said nothing.
Mary pointed. “Let me have twenty cartons of those, the menthol, please, um, fella.”
Lawrence chain-smoked those menthols. His mouth stank of it. Thinking of it gave Mary an erotic surge. She blushed, despite the cold.
Oblivious, the Shinnecock moved with glacial speed. He put the cartons in cardboard boxes.
Mary paid him quickly in cash. “I bet my guy and I’ll make a bundle reselling these in the city.” She wished Lawrence were there with her. She knew she would be believed more if she had a man with her.
Still, the Shinnecock said nothing.
“Thank you, then,” she said, giving up the ruse. “You have been singularly helpful.”
Mary took the boxes to the trunk of her car. When she set them down, she couldn’t help sweeping her hand over the wrapped-up plastic bag behind the pile of textbooks. Of course it was still there. She didn’t want to think about what it was, what it could do.
As she got in the car, her cell phone rang. A text from Lawrence. With a picture of himself, just smiling, no doubt naked under the frame. She stared at it for a while. She wanted to speed, but the rain had started and made it slow going.
She took County Road straight up to Riverhead. With the rain, it took most of an hour. She hated being late.
She parked behind the Peconic Bay Diner on West Main, hoping she had arrived on time. It was an average diner, detached from the buildings on either side. A Greek flag and an American flag hung side-by-side limply on its roof. Her former brother-in-law came here every morning without fail, like an elephant returning to its graveyard.
And there he sat, a plate of pork chops in front of him. Still in his Suffolk County Police Department uniform. Mary remembered when he graduated from the academy—“I want the world to see that the Shinnecock people can be more than just hoodlums from Riverhead,” he’d said. He was proud then. And much thinner.
“Eddie,” she said, going right up to his table.
“Mary?” His brown bulldog face had once been handsome. But now his features were thickened with age. He kept his coarse gray hair short. He had a big smear of sauce on his cheek. “You’re sure far from your hunting grounds.”
“Yes, how funny to bump into you here,” she said. “Pork chops for breakfast?”
“Nothing like gnawing on something to get your day started right. How are you, Mary? You look … good, good as always.”
“Fine. Fine. How are things with you?”
“Work is work. Best thing in my life now is Larry. Larry’s doing good. Very proud of my boy. In his second year at Stony Brook. You see him on the campus?”
She blushed. She decided to look intently at the sugar dispenser. “Never,” she said. “I mean, well, he was in one of my classes last year, but, well, his schedule is probably completely different than mine. He probably takes classes in a different building. What is he, a psych major?”
“An English major, I thought. Last time I heard. No money in it, but—oh, sorry, no offense, Mary.”
“None taken, believe me.”
“Have a chop,” he said, pushing the plate closer.
Mary was starving, but she was in a hurry. She picked up the remaining chop at the edge of his plate. She anticipated something salty and meaty, but instead it was cold and greasy.
“How is Brenda?” she said.
“She left me. She had it already. Two years now.”
“Sorry, I really didn’t—”
He stopped her by putting up a hand, like a traffic cop, sauce-tipped fingers. “What are you doing here, Mary? You didn’t come out all this way to see your old brother-in-law for nothing.”
“No, Eddie.”
Eddie was the best man when she married Ralph, his brother; was there to help after Ralph got killed, was a much better man than his brother had been. She hated what she had to do now.
But there was nowhere else to go.
“Listen. On the Shinnecock reservation, there’s a—I guess you’d call it a trading post, on Old Point Road.”
“Yeah.” He was using his tongue to work at something in his teeth.
“They sell cigarettes, tons of cigarettes, that they get taxfree. Selling them to anybody, who might resell them in the city for a big profit. They’ve been doing this for years.”
“The laws changed, Mary, what with that crazy New York mayor. The rez is getting taxed for that kind of stuff now.” He was digging at his teeth with his fingers.
“Yeah, but your little trading post is still selling cartons and cartons at special prices to special friends. I know, I was just there this morning.”
“What do you want, Mary?”
“Let me finish. I know that’s your beat and has been for years. I know you’re part of it all, and that’s how you get yourself a brand-new four-wheeler every year.”
He leaned closer. He was looking hard at her.
She went on, trying to stay focused. “You wouldn’t want the Shinnecock to get a reputation for filling the pockets of bootleggers and crooked cigarette dealers. Not when they’re on the verge of sealing a deal to build one, two, maybe three giant casinos on Long Island. There are billions of dollars at stake.”
He wiped his face finally. “The professor did her homework.”
“I’ll put it plain. I need ten thousand dollars.”
“You and your new husband both got jobs.”
“My husband can’t know about this.”
“Ahh, I see—”
“Don’t try to see anything. This is a private situation. I need the money. I had some of my own, but now it’s gone. I need more.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am. I need that money, Eddie. I am not fucking around.”
He stared at her. She had never cursed ever in his presence, and he’d known her almost tweny-five years, since she’d started dating his brother.
“Let’s go out for a smoke,” he said.
“But—”
Again the traffic-cop hand. “I know you still smoke. I can smell it on you. Remember how we used to sneak out and smoke behind Ralph’s back?”
“He hated the smell of it.”
“Let’s go outside.”
They went out behind the diner. Parked in the back was a brand-new SUV that she knew was Eddie’s. She took out a pack of cigarettes.
“Menthols now?” he said. “I thought you liked tougher cigarettes.”
“I—I just like them. It’s cold out there. Smokers seem to be sentenced to outcast status.”
“Well, that’s Long Island. All the inconvenience of the city and none of its perks. Let me tell you a story, Mary.”
“Okay,” she said.
“About us Shinnecock. See, back in the day, they used to hunt whales in these dinky little dugout canoes. Like twenty of these canoes, about a hundred guys. They’d go after a single whale. And you know how they would get it? They had harpoons, yeah, but still. How were they gonna get that giant animal back on shore, you see what I mean? But the Shinnecock were smart, very smart. They would stab the whale again and again. So the whale would bleed to death in the ocean. Just bleed. You know whales are warm-blooded? Imagine all that dark red blood staining the water.”