Love Me (22 page)

After watching Domingo’s failed seduction of Clover Williams, I was so desperate for company, I went to a comedy club called Goober’s on 112th, where a stand-up lady was performing to a bar thinly populated with Columbia students hitting the Cosmos. “Great to be in New York, a city where something is always happening, most of which you wouldn’t want to be involved in personally,” she said in a husky lady-comedian way. I ordered a beer and sat and watched it fizz. She stood on the tiny stage in brilliant light, tall and lean, jeans, T-shirt, a thatch of wild blond hair flying around. “Some New Yorkers go around the city with imaginary friends, and it’s not necessarily an imaginary friend they get along with real well—they have to yell at them sometimes.” There were little pinpricks of laughter, but she didn’t care, she went careening along, punctuating the jokes with a sneer, a toss of the head, a twitch of the microphone. “People say that New Yorkers don’t know their neighbors, but this depends on the construction of your building. Some newer buildings like mine—your neighbors are a radio show you can never turn off.” My eyes got focused in the dark: she was working a crowd of sixteen people, but her eyes betrayed no sense of failure. She barreled along like a true artist, enjoying her own sense of timing, the perfection of the jokes, the purity of the act of doing comedy for no good reason: “You see all these dogs running around with people chained to them scooping up their poop, like slaves. The dogs look really prosperous, the people look sort of embarrassed. No question who’s in charge there.” A guy my age sat alone at a table in front of her, working on a drink. A faded guy who looked like he’d been camped here awhile. “No speed limit signs in New York. I guess they figure it’ll work itself out.” The sadness of drink and solitude was loud in this man, his slump, his hands plucking at his sport coat and tie, his fingers toying with the lit cigarette in the ashtray, trying not to smoke, taking a puff, not wanting to, smoking some more, not wanting to be alone, not wanting to drink so much, drinking more. I sat directly behind him, looking at Miss Wonderful, who was peering at me in the shadows. Was I an agent scouting for someone for a movie for HBO? A friend of Steven Spielberg’s? The sport coat man was peering up at her, and when she stepped off the stage, his face brightened and he sat up straight, and then she walked past him to me.

Comfort comes in many forms, including the intercession of strangers. The comedian sidled over my way and I smiled and offered her a chair and she sat down and asked where I lived and I said, “The Bel Noir,” and she said, “Oh, I used to know someone who lived there,” and I said, “If you don’t have other plans, come up and we’ll have a drink—I’m a writer—I’d like to talk to you about television—” And she came up, and we drank some Scotch, lying in adjacent chaises, looking at the city lights, talking in a languorous manner, and I leaned over and kissed her. A sweet simple kiss. A kiss meant to unlock the doors and send you skipping and dancing into never-never land to do things you were told never never to do and enjoy them.

So into the bedroom we went and everything was fine. Better than fine. Exquisite. And then her cell phone rang.

“I’m sorry,” she said. And she answered it.

We were both naked as jaybirds and our bodies were entwined but she reached over and snagged the phone out of her jeans pocket and flipped it open and said, “Yes? Oh, hi. No. No problem.—It went fine.—Yeah, it was pretty crowded.—Oh, really?” Then she whispered to me:
My agent.

Meanwhile, my unit was making itself scarce.

She yakked with whoever it was for a good long time, rolled over and lay on her belly, looking out the window, and discussed some movie project involving someone named Packer or Parker. And when she was done with whatever it was and clicked off her phone, I was done, period.

She surveyed the situation and said, “I know a good sex therapist,” and before I could say, “I’ll be all right. Just taking a break”—she whipped her cell phone out and—“Dr. Liebestod? Diana. Remember when you told me you make house calls?”

There’s New York for you. You can pick up a phone and get anything you want at any hour of day or night.

Dr. Liebestod arrived fifteen minutes later, carrying a duffel bag. She was a large lumpy woman with black horn-rim glasses. A real potato. “Let’s have a look,” she said.

“I think we can figure this out ourselves,” I said. I tried to tell her, I’m up for casual sex, but to me, casual implies easy. You know? Not something laborious and complicated—

“I assume he’s been fellated,” she said to Diana, who nodded.

“It’s important to get a good seal,” said the doctor. She opened my bathrobe and stared at my dormant member.

“Oh boy.”

It was the sort of thing you would say if you found three inches of water on your basement floor and the cellar door open and a big raccoon up on a shelf, eating your mom’s raspberry jam out of the jar.

“I like to get paid in advance,” she said. “When things get hot and heavy, people sometimes forget.” So I made out a check for $220 to Liebestod Real Life Therapies, Ltd. She folded it and thanked me and gave me a long penetrating look.

It was 3:30 A.M. I was regretting the whole evening. In fact, I was way beyond regret. I was thinking seriously about celibacy as a way of life.
Older Man seeks monastery. Temperate climate, Christian preferred, vow of silence a big plus.

“Hey, we’ll get you operative in a jiffy,” she said. “Heat. That’s the surefire aphrodisiac.”

“Maybe I should take a rain check,” I said.

“Nonsense. When you fall off the horse, get right back on it.” And she reached into her bag and pulled out a leather skirt. “Put it on,” she said. I did, and sure enough, there was a definite sense of warmth in the underworld, a stirring, an indwelling.

“How’s that doing?” said Dr. Liebestod. “Just fine,” I said. She leaned down to look up my skirt. “Looks good,” she said. “We’re almost ready for the condoms.” There was definitely some uplifting going on. A wonderful feeling of manhood. I was ready to go. Diana lay on the couch and nickered.

“I’m glad to wait around in case you have any questions,” said Dr. Liebestod, but I had none and neither did Diana and I heard the door click shut as I climbed aboard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Anxious, Back when our hairy ancestors lived in smoky caves and fought with rocks and clubs and stank of putrefying sores, they liked to squat around the fire and eat extremely rare meat and exchange myths and one myth was that fermented grain alcohol is a sure route to fabulous sex. You have to be pretty drunk to believe this. For one thing, alcohol creates billows of gas, and passion is a fragile mood, and heavy tail-gun fire is likely to kill your chances. As the Irish say, “May the wind always be at your back but not coming out of you yourself personally.”

The matter of dosage is critical: a woman is a slight creature, not a Percheron, and a big glass of hooch may overshoot the mark and make her green around the gills and reduce her level of judgment to where her affection for you doesn’t mean all that much. It’s much smarter to make yourself appealing and win her interest: the reward will be greater than if she is limp and semiconscious. Making oneself appealing is what led to civilization as we know it: poetry, music, sport, learning—it all began as romance. Women sang, made food, wove fabric, grew flowers, men competed in footraces and jumping contests, composed odes, mastered bodies of useless knowledge, all in hopes of impressing the opposite sex. Seat the woman on your couch, offer her a glass of sparkling water, and beguile her with your wit and elegance, and see where that leads you. If you run into problems, put on a leather skirt. Without going into a lot of detail that might sound like boasting, let’s just say: it really works.

A few days after the adventure with Dr. Liebestod, I got a letter from Iris.

And then Mr. Blue got a letter from Iris. No doubt about it. [email protected].

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was flummoxed. My Iris, thinking about shacking up with some guy she meets in a singles bar? What kind of deal is that?

I wrote her a hasty letter.

 

 

 

Dear Lady Liberal, We all feel our youth slipping away and wish we were better loved. It’s sad about your husband. But don’t let his foolishness lead you down some one-way road to grief. You get liquored up and suddenly some wacked-out drifter starts to look like Cary Grant. Direct your attention to the home front. Get your hair done, rejuvenate your skin, learn the old art of seduction and one of these nights your old husband will walk right in and drive the shadows away You wait and see.

 

 

 

I pressed
send
and a moment later it bounced back,
undeliverable,
and I dashed off a note for the cleaning lady (“Water the trees on the terrace, Laverne”) and grabbed a cab to LaGuardia and paid a king’s ransom to get on the first flight home. It was packed. People shoving onboard and stuffing the overheads with bags the size of German shepherds. I took a middle seat between a lady with a small sullen dog and a big guy whose shoulder and arm were in my space. The dog’s name was Snuggles. We sat for forty-five minutes and I was worrying about Iris’s barfly friend and the pilot came on the horn to explain that we were experiencing a minor instrument read-out problem. “I can’t take this much longer,” said the big guy. Finally, we took off—shakily, it seemed to me—and the man in front of me reclined his seat back so that my femurs were driven a couple inches into my abdominal cavity. The big guy downed a couple beers and examined a pornographic magazine in which weight lifters humped women with breasts like artillery shells. Meanwhile, the lady with the dog complained to me about her sad life, the perfidy of her children, the broken promises of plumbers and electricians, a rare lymphoma that was eating at her vitals, the chemotherapy that had drained her of the will to live, her troubled children who were no comfort, et cetera.

I said, “My wife is out scouting for gigolos in the watering holes of St. Paul, Minnesota.” She paid no attention but went on and on about her lab tests.

The dog nipped at me when the plane ran into turbulence and the big guy fell sound asleep and his head lolled around and came to rest on my shoulder. He said things in his sleep that made me uneasy, like “I know you care about me” and “I’m your little muffin man.” The dog looked as if it might go berserk at any moment. The lady looked over at the man dozing on my shoulder and said, “I didn’t used to be okay about homosexuality but I am now ever since my brother Shelly came out. I think it’s up to you who you love and nobody should ever try to make you feel bad about it. If a heavyset fella is who makes your heart sing, then more power to you.” I said nothing. What should I say? If I can help a guy get his rest and serve as an object lesson in tolerance for a dying woman, then shouldn’t I accept this chance to be useful? I have nothing against homosexuals. I can even see the advantage to it. You could share clothing, you could pee together at a urinal and talk baseball and golf and enjoy rare steaks and none of this nonsense of Discussing the Relationship and one of you bursting into tears and saying, “Why are you this way?” It just stands to reason:
it’s easier to love someone who is more like yourself, such as same gender, for example.
And if he isn’t pleasing you sexually, you’d just say, “Shape up, clown.” And he would. When you think about the miseries of loving women, you wonder if there isn’t Another Way. Unfortunately, men have poor social skills. And their bodies aren’t as interesting. Show me somebody who is aroused by the sight of a man’s chest and I’ll show you someone who is wild about coffee tables. Doggone it, every time I put my hand in Iris’s shorts, I get a thrill.

I got home to Sturgis Avenue and she seemed pleased to see me. She was on the phone but kissed me and waved me toward the old wingback chair in which a pile of placards roosted that read: WIPE OUT COMMUNITY VIOLENCE: BE KIND AND RESPECTFUL TO ONE ANOTHER. I looked around the living room for signs of Another Man, as I filled her wineglass with a fine Vouvray I’d purchased for her. She was in the midst of a lawsuit against the city of St. Paul, something about the dignity of lunatics. She said, “I have walked into a wasp’s nest of lawyers.” She looked quite enthused at the prospect of battle. She fixed me a bean wrap and then we fell into bed and rode the Tilt-a-Whirl and afterward she said, “That was nice.” Which was high praise from Iris.