Authors: Lynne Tillman
Abigail’s clients loved her, she helped them, a few lost big, there was some ruin, some bankruptcies, but, bottom line, she made money for the firm. A partnership came next. There was hardly time for sex, though Nate persisted in wanting to add to Abigail’s orgasm account, as they called it. She turned him away once, saying, I’d prefer you made money, like, Make money not love. He was shocked and angry, and she took it back, but he was hurt, even wounded. You’re soft, his father used to say, toughen up. Abigail tried to soothe him, but really she wanted him working, back on his feet, emotional support was one thing, financial another. She saw him retreat a little, but he’d come back, he’d understand. She didn’t notice his drinking, he hid it, doing it only when she was at work or asleep. Now, less and less, he wanted to have sex, and she was too tired anyway.
Nate’s best friend at Princeton called with a brilliant idea, and since Nate owned the sharpest biz head he knew, he wanted him as a partner, if Nate liked what he heard, and he did—an environmentally important and scientifically significant venture to develop microbes that absorb waste in the ocean. Nate needed a couple of million to invest, not much really, but he didn’t have it. He would borrow it from Abigail, be told his friend, he’d pay her back when the business saw its first profits. She trusts me, Nate told him.
Later, Abigail unlocked the door to Nate’s embrace. He repeated the conversation, every word, with embellishment more bubbly than the champagne he’d opened. She looked into his olive eyes, at his too-handsome face, and her friends’ and his father’s admonitions returned, as if written upon that face. He would use her, leave her, he’d take her money, he was a playboy. She fought her fear, an instinct maybe, after all she must love Nate, her husband, she should help him to succeed. Even so, she told him she needed time to think, because that kind of money was serious. Nate was stunned. Abigail saw disbelief in his eyes or weakness, like in her father’s eyes, a beaten dog’s eyes, in bed, far from Nate, Abigail dreamed someone was trying to kill her. Nate couldn’t sleep.
Some days later, Nate said there’s gold in the security box, grandmother’s jewelry, take it as collateral. She hated his pleading, his putting her in an impossible position, he knew she had to protect her future. What if, she thought, what if… and she wasn’t being selfish, life was unpredictable. She wondered why she’d ever fallen in love with him, he didn’t know her at all. A hardness insinuated itself inside her, and a space opened between them that was palpable to Nate. He appeared to wither before her eyes, too insecure, she realized, he’s nothing like his father. She couldn’t name what he was doing to her, but it was wrong, everything about him and her felt wrong. Meanwhile, Nate’s potential partner waited, an intrepid humiliation returned, and Nate even drank in front of Abigail.
Still, Abigail suppressed her nameless protests and went with him to open the security box. It was strange walking down the hall where they’d first talked and fallen in love, but more terrible she felt it was her death march. The guard opened the door, and Nate and she entered the vault, where two straight-backed chairs were brought to them and then the gray steel box. There was some jewelry, she could have it appraised, some certificates, gold, and bonds. Nate lifted one up to show her, and beneath it lay his little black book. When Abigail reached for it, Nate put his hand on her arm.
—It doesn’t mean anything, I kept it like a scrapbook.
She shook his hand off.
—You lied to me.
She rose, his address book in her hand, evidence of everything she’d been thinking, no one could blame her, she wasn’t responsible, leaving him wasn’t selfish. But it meant nothing, he repeated the next day. It means everything, she repeated, she could never trust him again. He claimed she already didn’t, she wouldn’t lend him money, she insisted that he wouldn’t have asked for it if he really loved her. She wanted a divorce.
—You never loved me, he said.
—That isn’t true, I can’t ever trust you again.
To Nate, her abandonment confirmed his father’s bad opinion of him, and also that his past had caught up to him, it always would. Abigail had to protect herself, no matter what, he didn’t understand.
Their prenuptial agreement made divorce relatively easy, and she was so calm, her friends believed she was in shock, but his betrayal had been awful, they all agreed. When Abigail heard he’d returned to all his old ways, proving her right, that he would’ve just dragged her down, she felt sad but also secure in herself. And she was herself again, her friends thought, especially because Abigail volunteered at an animal shelter on weekends and fed strays on the street as she had during law school. When people at the office asked why, she’d explain she trusted cats and dogs, humans domesticated them, so they’re defenseless without us. But people, she occasionally added, people usually deserve what they get.
More Sex
There were many men she wanted to have sex with, some days more men than other days, though she’d already had sex with many men, but those were the ones who were easy to have sex with or to find for sex, since they lived in the neighborhood; she could meet them at parties or in clubs, even in grocery stores, especially near the beer, wine, and cheese displays, probably because they’re often served at parties. It was easy to find men for sex, because she knew that men think about sex all the time, or every seven minutes, so they’re always ready for sex. She had read the seven-minute statistic in the
Times
science section some years back and wondered about it. Then she experimented with herself. She set a timer for seven minutes throughout five hours, when she was home, and, whatever she was doing, reading, eating, washing dishes, looking at the ceiling or out of the window, when the alarm went off, she thought about sex. Every seven minutes, she realized, was very frequent, and, if she were feeling sad, it was hard to think about sex, and also she realized she didn’t think about sex, maybe she didn’t know how, and she managed poorly or inadequately to concoct an image or something or someone to fantasize about. Every seven minutes was hard, she didn’t know how men did it, because she didn’t have that kind of imagination, and also she didn’t know for how long men thought about sex every seven minutes. And what did they think up? Their penis entering a woman’s vagina, if they were heterosexual, while she’s moaning, Fuck me, fuck me hard, and was it always the same? Her lack of sexual imagination was one of the reasons she liked going to the movies. There was usually sex in the movies she saw, sometimes lots of it, if it was unrated or X-rated, and sometimes there was soft-core porn-like sex in movies, in so-called love scenes, which activated her dormant, lackluster, or empty fantasy life, but then she often became infatuated with the lead actor and, for a while, she pictured having sex with him. Many of the men she wanted to have sex with were actors, especially those who were good lovers in movies and sometimes on TV. They appeared to be good at sex, although that was hard to define, she didn’t know if it was similar to being good at tennis or some other activity; anyway, to her, inexactly, it was the way they held a female actor, the way they looked into her eyes, the kind of passion they exuded, and, manufactured or not, the sex or passion seemed real to her. She hoped they were really good at sex and not just acting, although actual people do act when having sex, too, though why they do and for what purpose, she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t only faking orgasms, which women were said to do to make men feel better or just to get them to stop, since they really weren’t having any pleasure anyway. Men acted during sex, too, she knew several, some were worse actors than others. But the men she wanted to have sex with, the actual actors, were not available to her, they were in Hollywood, or London, or they were sometimes on the streets of New York City, like Sean Connery, but he was old when she saw him, and Michael Imperioli from
The Sopranos
, but she had never wanted to have sex with him, he was weaselly, even if she felt sorry for him in his part, and Al Pacino, she’d seen him in an Italian restaurant where he walked around in dark glasses as if he didn’t want anyone looking at him but made such a show of it everyone recognized him, though no one said hello or anything to him, because few do that in New York, mostly people don’t. But none of these actors she had seen in person appealed to her. She wanted to have sex with Daniel Day-Lewis, but only as he was when he played an American Indian/Caucasian in
The Last of the Mohicans
, not in any of his other roles, he was never again a barechested, mostly silent Indian, and now he didn’t want to act, she heard, and was a shoemaker, and then for a while she wanted sex with David Caruso, when he was on TV in
NYPD Blue
, because he could do tenderness and seemed gentle and also lusty, but then he quit the show, and she heard he was the opposite of that role, an egomaniacal asshole, and she did not want to have sex with George Clooney, Sean Penn, Tom Hanks, Ralph Fiennes, countless others, even McDreamy in
Grey’s Anatomy
, because everyone wanted him, and that made him much too common, and in her fantasies, when she could cook one up, she would have had to compete with too many women—and men, probably—for him. There were so many she didn’t want to have sex with that sometimes going to the movies was as disappointing as real sex with actual non-actor—though, on occasion—acting men. But wanting to have sex with men she couldn’t have, because they weren’t around ever, and would ignore her in favor of another actor, male or female, was also all right, because she could easily have sex with men she didn’t necessarily want, and they weren’t so bad, really. She could ask them about what pictures they had in their minds every seven minutes, and she didn’t think she could do that with movie stars.
Dear Ollie
Dear Ollie,
It’s been a long time. I think of you sometimes, and I know you think of me. I take a perverse satisfaction in that, even in the jaded ways you disguise me in your so-called fictions. I really don’t care. But I just read your “manifesto against the past.” No one “votes for guilt.” I also have “funny mental pictures” of that mansion we lived in on the Hudson. It wasn’t “haunted,” except by an unghostly Timothy Leary. Everyone said he dropped acid there. Everyone said they used to have wild parties. Even back then the term wild parties bothered me. No one ever gave details.
You and I were the only non-psych students living in the mansion. You and they were older, graduate students, but they were all research psychologists and thought everyone else was crazy, so they devised experiments to prove it. There was that one sullen guy who worked with rats. He had a big room near mine. I used to look in as I passed it. He kept his shoes under the chair of his desk in a certain way, everything in his room had a specific order, and if his shoes were moved even a quarter inch, he went crazy.
Remember when he drove his car into a wall? Then he disappeared. Remember it’s my past, too, you want to “throw into the garbage, to be carted away by muscular men and sent floating on a barge to North Carolina.
One night, you brought a friend home from Juilliard, a fellow student. If you recall, our dining room had dark walls and no electricity. We ate by candlelight—there were many candles in different states of meltdown on the long table that night. About ten, I think.
Before dinner, one of the research psychologists suggested it’d be fun to put blue vegetable dye in the mashed potatoes. Your friend wouldn’t know. We’d act as if the potatoes weren’t blue, just the usual white, and even though your friend might protest and insist they were blue, we’d keeping insisting they were white. We’d just pretend he was crazy for thinking they were blue. We cooked this up in the kitchen. When you came in with him, someone took you aside and told you. You went along with it. Everyone has a streak of sadism, one of the psych guys said.
I don’t remember who brought in the potatoes, we all participated, though, and then we all sat down around the big wooden table. The blue mashed potatoes were served in a glass bowl. Even by candlelight, they were bright blue.
We passed the food. When the bowl of blue potatoes reached your friend, he reacted with delight. Blue mashed potatoes, he said. Someone said, They’re not blue. Your friend said, They’re not? They look blue. Someone else said, No, they’re not. You were sitting next to him.
The potatoes kept going around. Your friend said, again, They really look blue. Everyone acted as if nothing was happening. Your friend kept looking at the bowl. He became visibly agitated. He said, They look blue. Someone said, Maybe it’s the candlelight. The flames have a bluish tinge. Your friend kept looking, squinting his eyes. Then he insisted, They look blue to me. Someone said, with annoyance, Would you stop it? They’re not blue. Your friend turned quiet. He kept looking, though, and we all kept eating.
The coup de grâce, I guess you’d call it, was dessert. In the kitchen, someone decided to dye the milk blue. The cake, coffee, and blue milk were brought to the table. We served the blue milk in a glass pitcher. No one said much as the pitcher went around the table. Your friend watched silently. When it came to him, he stared at the pitcher and poured the blue milk into his coffee. This time, he said nothing. Nothing. At that point I ran into the kitchen. I couldn’t control myself.
Later, you told him. After dinner, when you were alone with him, you told him. But I’m wondering, after all these years, did he ever forgive you? What happened to him? Does he still play the trombone?
You were good, Ollie. But somehow, in “regurgitating the past and moving on,” I’m “the reckless prankster” whose “promiscuous heart” you broke. The only thing in that house you ever broke was your musician friend and crazy Roger’s green plates.