The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (20 page)

“I thought you always knew exactly what you were doing,” she said. “To have married someone nice to support you while you perfected your craft as an artist. To have had children with someone who supported you and them. Oh,” she continued, “the list was long.”

I was amazed. “It was all instinct,” I said. “I had seen so many women married to men who squashed their development. Any hint of such a personality turned me off. And of course,” I said, “I never seriously considered women.” Nor had I understood I could.

“Well,” she said, “you wouldn’t have done any better with the one I found. Libby is just the man her father was. Domineering, bossy, a real pain in the neck.” She sighed. “And after the first couple of years, no sex.”

“No sex?” How could sexy Marissa not be having sex?

Marissa shrugged. “It’s a curious thing to encounter the father of your woman leering out at you. Which is what happened when Libby drank. She’d forget we’d argued and that I’d been humiliated over some outrageous behavior of hers. She’d get
sentimental in her drunkenness and want to make love. By force if necessary. I was repelled.”

I too had enjoyed making love with Tripper for many years. Then it seemed to me my sexual rhythm was broken. I no longer experienced any periods of horniness, as I had earlier in my life. Eventually I realized it was because over time Tripper’s sexual needs set the times of love’s occasions. I was never able to say no, but my body did. It withheld its pleasure, since its own desire was not permitted to set the pattern of celebration and release.

Why didn’t either of us speak up? Marissa and I often asked each other. We agreed that we’d tried, but habits, once formed, had proved hard to break, and retreat and silence had offered a spuriously virtuous comfort. Our mothers’ behavior, probably, copied while we were very young, too early to recognize it for the depression it was.

The week I left Tripper he was still interested in making love to me, and suggested a “good-bye fuck” even though my body had not for many months expressed the slightest desire. In fact, it had expressed just the opposite, with its pancake-flat nipples and a vulva so dry I’d thought I’d prematurely entered “the change.”

When Marissa came to pick me up Chung was in the kitchen attempting to repair the toaster. His straight black hair, with the dapper streak of gray on the left side, hung in his eyes, and his somewhat paunchy torso, sans shirt, glistened with sweat. When we’d met I’d practically drooled over his body. I still admired it, but in a more critical way. I loved the fact that he was short, and that when we kissed, we could look squarely into each other’s eyes. Also that my arms reached easily around
him—Tripper had been both large and tall—and I could grab a nice handful of his butt. Marissa took a beer from the fridge and sat gap-legged at the table sipping it and watching him struggle with the toaster as long as she could stand it. By the time I was ready to go she’d ripped it from his fingers and declared it dead and therefore inefficient. Chung, who has a sense of humor if not much vitality at this stage in his life, grabbed a beer for himself and was still laughing as we went out of the house.

I backed my battered pea-green Karman Ghia out of the driveway and then stopped to put down the top. Marissa and I flew down the streets giddy as teenagers, serene as the old friends we were.

At the dance, as I suspected, Marissa was queen. The best dancers sought her out and she outdanced all of them. It was the kind of dykey joint that still intimidated me. The kind with lots of women in all manner of dress and an obligatory three or four men. I was always wondering about the men. Who were they? Why were they there? Were they bouncers? Were they brothers of some of the women? Lovers of some of the women? Straight? Bisexual? Gay?

What men? was always Marissa’s response when I asked her about them.

Tonight as always I sat quietly in a corner hoping not to be approached. Unless it was by a particular woman across the room who attracted me by the sexiness of her dress—I’d discovered I liked femme-looking women, with their low-cut dresses and light, pinky-plum colors. But butches too—like Marissa, who wore tight jeans, a leather jacket and a scarf around her neck—could be almost unbelievably alluring. Marissa would dance with me until my lack of wildness bored her. Then she’d whirl out on the dance floor dancing only with partners who, in their
abandon, reminded her of herself. Or, she’d dance alone, a voluptuous brown-skinned woman with dreadlocks to her ass, and everyone watching her imagined her dancing just for them, in silvery moonlight beneath a canopy of ancient trees, naked.

After sleeping together once or twice why hadn’t we become lovers? I often asked myself. Perhaps because you can’t recall whether it was once or twice, said Marissa, when I queried her. I certainly loved and admired her. Yet she seemed somehow beyond me, freer. I felt I’d never catch up. Her “way” seemed natural to her. I would have to learn it. This frightened, irritated and depressed me. I tried to imagine Marissa in a heterosexual relationship and it made me laugh. I tried to imagine the two of us as a couple and it made me uneasy.

Sitting in my corner drinking a margarita I was for a moment unaware I’d been watching a woman standing by the door holding a baby in her arms. This was so incongruous—the loud music, the energetic dancing, the drinking and smoking—that I immediately rose and walked over to her, offering her the seat next to mine. She could not come over just yet, she explained, because she was selling some articles of apparel from Guatemala which I now noticed she carried in a large denim bag at her feet. I was shocked by this, I don’t know why. But within minutes I was holding the baby, a fitfully dozing black-eyed boy, who was not an infant but a two-year-old, and she was squatting beside her merchandise where much to my surprise she seemed to make sales by simply rummaging for a particular item in her bag and then briefly flinging it over a cleared spot on the floor. Money changed hands rapidly and soon she’d sold enough colorfully striped cotton trousers, headbands and vests to satisfy her for the evening. Dragging what was left in her bag she hurried over to us. The baby strained against my arms as she approached,
and resolutely wriggled off my lap and toddled up to her. When they met, on the fringe of the whirling dancers, who any minute I expected to stomp on him, she smiled down at him and stopped to swing him up in her arms. At that moment the Drifters or some other old group was singing the golden oldie “With Every Beat of My Heart,” and the two of them danced a moment cheek to cheek. Her hair was in short, thick, warrior erect dreadlocks. She was wearing pants that looked like a skirt, and a light blue denim shirt with an open collar. Beneath the shirt was a peach-colored tank. She wore earrings. Bracelets. And on her feet, sturdy brown boots.

It happened in the moment they were dancing, the child closing his eyes in a swoon of delight. The woman a being I’d never seen before.

I did not know what the Brotherhood of the Saved had told her, but I knew they had told her something. She was sitting very straight in the green porch swing, as if prepared to do battle. I suddenly noticed that her eyes, which looked at me shrewdly, were old, and that the light in them was half of what it used to be. She was, otherwise, her usual stout and jaunty self, wearing a neatly ironed housedress and a pair of faded green flip-flops.

Hello Mama, I said.

Is that my daughter? she replied, her usual response. Except that now it seemed more of a legitimate question. As if she really wondered.

It’s me, I said, moving toward her and leaning down to kiss her forehead.

There were deep wrinkles across her brow. In a moment of vanity I wondered if I would have them when I reached her age. If I ever, in fact, did so.

We have great genes, she used to say, before mine began to be expressed in a problematic way. We don’t show our age until we die.

This always made me laugh, though she swore it was true.

That was before the ozone layer began to disappear, of course. Now we seemed to wrinkle at the same rate as everyone else.

Pretty hot, isn’t it, I said, taking a seat in the swing beside her.

It sure is, she said, in the way that Southerners comment on hot weather as if its hotness is a daily surprise.

How’s the patient? I asked, taking her left arm and beginning to gently manipulate it at the elbow.

You know, she said, I never would have believed it possible, but every bit of the pain and swelling was gone by the time you left the driveway yesterday.

I smiled, and asked her to make a fist.

Around here people think a chiropractor is just some kind of quack, she said. Out to get people’s money without doing them any good.

It works, I said.

How did you say you found out about it? she asked.

She always forgot this, no matter how many times I told her.

I learned the hard way, I said. I was always getting sports injuries.

Oh, that’s right, she said. Even as a little child you were the one to be falling out of trees.

That’s how I broke my arm, remember?

Oh, I remember, all right. She thought about it for a minute. That didn’t stop you from climbing trees, though. It sure didn’t.

Sitting there beside her, forty-five years old and ready to begin the second half of my life, I wondered why it hadn’t.

You were willful and stubborn, my mother said, reading my mind.

I shrugged. I loved trees and I loved a good high view, I said. Still do.

Um-hum, she said.

In high school I got banged up a lot, but in college is where I really got creamed.

They didn’t want girls playing; and especially not playing like a boy.

I wasn’t playing like a boy. I was playing like myself.

Too good, she said, grunting.

So what is the Brotherhood of the Saved saying about me now? I asked.

She paused. The foot that kept the swing moving was still.

You really want to know? she asked.

Yep, I said.

That you’re a sinner and bound for hell, she said, with a sigh.

They’ve been saying that for a while, I said. Nothing new they got? I asked.

They also say that what you do with women is a crime.

You mean sleep with them?

Yes.

Well, I said, pushing the swing so that it rocked a bit to the left, If sleeping with women is a crime it’s one for which the whole world is guilty.

What you mean? she asked, startled.

I mean everybody on earth has slept with a woman, even the two or three who started life in a petri dish.

She still looked puzzled.

You came here sleeping not only with a woman but inside one, I said.

Oh, she said.

It’s stupid to think sleeping with women is wrong, I said. What kind of jackass would have that opinion?

Yes, but you know what they mean, she said.

Oh yes, I said, SEX, the four-letter word. They can’t believe it can be enjoyed without a penis.

Trane
, she said, using the nickname she herself gave me because I loved John Coltrane’s music so much when I was growing up.

I wish these hypocrites would get a life! I said. They’re dying to see women sleep with each other. It accounts for half of the pornography they buy.

Oh, she said, the Brothers don’t watch that stuff!

How do you know? I asked. It’s available in every hotel they’re likely to spend any time in. It’s all over the newsstands and on the street. How do you think they keep up the passion to rail against it? If they weren’t watching it and getting turned on by it, they wouldn’t just automatically think of women doin’ each other first thing in the morning. They might instead be thinking of cirrhosis of the liver or heart disease. Crime in the streets. Poverty in the hinterland. The way the weather is all screwed up. What’s really going on.

I’ve never watched it, she said. Smug.

No, I said, you’re afraid.

Why am I afraid, she asked, after a long moment during which the swing’s creaking was the only sound.

Oh, I said, so you admit it. I put my arm around her.

With you I seem to be able to admit anything, she said, with
surprise. The more they try to make me not like you, the more lonely I feel.

That’s good, I said.

You’re a strange creature, though, she said.

Must be because of genes, I said.

Miss Mary was wearing a hat that appeared to support a complete crop of cherries. On top of her jet black wig. An ancient boater, the rest of it was made of straw and looked like something you’d only see in movies. Movies in which frivolous people flopped about on the dance floor. Or threw picnics in artificial wildernesses. A few local indigenous in the background looking impressed and eager to offer service. Beneath it, however, she wore a black Gap T-shirt, black pedal pushers and a pair of chartreuse espadrilles. Miss Mary had always had a sense of style and I commented on it now.

Wow, I said. If seventy looks like this, eighty must look fabulous.

Who said I’m seventy? she asked, looking at me over her aerospace-style glasses.