A Round-Heeled Woman (25 page)

John laughs. “Oh, really, you had a lover,” as if that's how I spent my entire life. I give his penis a little tug. “I'll behave,” he says.

“This man had a bend in his penis, right at the tip,” I say. I hold up my index finger and bend the top joint. “Like that.” John's penis is straightening out. I will have to pick up the pace of my story. “I thought it was cute. But he was embarrassed, wouldn't talk about it, didn't want to acknowledge it.”

“Which way did it bend?” John wants to know.

“Down, just a little bit,” I say, not sure of the accuracy of my memory of those years before, on the rug, in front of the television, in Minnesota.

“Actually, if it bends up, it's good. It's more likely to hit the G spot.”

“If you say so,” I answer, and I let go of his penis so it can find where it is the happiest. But this G-spot thing is still driving me nuts. The G spot is supposed to give me a vaginal orgasm. The vagina is where I'm supposed to have an orgasm, right? The other kind, the clitoral orgasm, is what it's okay to have when no man is around to give me the right kind. And John is into giving me the right kind.

“Take me on the outside,” I whisper. He strokes me very nicely. “Don't stop,” I say, “I'll come with you there.” But I am whispering so softly, so shyly, that he doesn't hear me, and he does stop and straddles me, putting his penis where he believes it will do us both the most good. And it does. I stop this stupid worrying about how and where and if I should come. The fact is, I like everything about sex—the kissing, the touching, the whispering, the entering, the filling of me, his collapse on me. If what this man and I do in bed doesn't culminate in vaginal orgasm, then so be it. The pleasure of what the two of us are about up here in his bedroom is mutual. That much is clear. The closeness of a man I like, and right now that's John who likes being close to me, is sometimes overwhelming; sometimes I am just plain grateful. So I give up on my G spot; it's been dormant too long or I was born without one, who knows. If it happens, fine; if not, there's so much more.

ON OUR LAST EVENING, John takes me to dinner in the village and tells me a story; only this time it is not out of the past, it is not about historical figures. It is about now and it is about him. Sharon is the name of John's consort who lives in a town not far away. “I decided, when I answered your ad, that if you and I met and if we got along, I would give up other women, I would remain faithful to Sheila.”

“And did we get along?”

“We did indeed.”

I am confused. “What if we hadn't?”

“I would have continued seeing other women.”

I don't get this. Nothing in these three days has prepared me for what seems to me to be an assault on all that is logical. It is so illogical that there is no arguing against it. “So, then,” I say, “I am a milestone.” John is pleased with my response. I am not. I do not like being a milestone—for him, for Jonah, for Robert. “Gee,” I continue, “I should get a marker, a historical marker. Where would I put it, here?” I tap my lower tummy.

John laughs, he thinks I am funny. “I think of a milestone as an honor.” And then he sees my tears. “You surprise me. We hardly know each other. It's only three days—”

Of course. “It's not you,” I say. And it isn't. It's that for just about every man I have met on this journey I am a swan song, a test case, a last hurrah, the tail end—“You came in on the tail end,” said Robert. I would have liked someone to want to keep me. Would I have stayed? I don't know. But the truth is that no one wants me as a consort. I am a bend in the road. I am the dusty pile of stones along the road marking the site of an accident. I am an unmarked grave in the cemetery. I am feeling sorry for myself. What the hell did I expect from men my age or older? Well, I expected this, but, more and more, I wanted to be wanted and for more than three days and, if I must tell the truth, by Robert. Falling out of love is a lot harder than falling in.

Outside the restaurant, I tell John this. John puts his arm around me and, for the first time, has no story at all.

THAT NIGHT I touch the scar on John's belly. “What's that from?”

He lowers himself gently onto me and says, “I used to have a bit more colon than I do now.” He raises himself off me and begins anew, and I notice that the skin on his face is loose, it falls forward, it is freeing itself from the bone, just the way the skin on my upper arms and inner thighs is loose. Our bodies are dying. Soon we will be no flesh at all, just bones. I reach up for him, to pull him to me, to hold him against the dying of us both. But I am not skillful enough and John falls,
whap,
onto me. I feel a slight ping but no real pain, nothing to cry out about.

It seems now that the candy rolls around his mouth in time to his rhythmic forays into my inner recesses. On a particularly deep drive—my cervix having moved to a more comfortable location—John cracks the lemon drop apart. When he comes inside me, the pieces make little sounds, like the pebbles that rolled around in the fishbowl I insisted on having when I was little.

IN THE MORNING, John is dressed early. “I don't mean to rush you,” he says, “but I have an appointment.”

“What could be more important than me?” I ask. I am bold with bitterness.

“A CAT scan,” he says. “The doctor wants to find out if my liver has cancer.”

“Have you had symptoms?”

“Yes.”

“Will you let me know?”

“No.”

BACK HOME in Berkeley, the doctor assured me that my rib— the right third rib at the mid-clavicular line—wasn't broken, just bruised, and would take some weeks to heal. Ribs are like that, he said, and shrugged, just the way John's doctor had shrugged when he told John, “Cancer of the colon is a random event.” John had never figured out if this was supposed to make him feel better. It didn't. As for me, I hurt only when I turned over in bed, wore a bra, or took a breath.

EIGHTEEN

A Merry Old Soul

I realize that there is a somewhat substantial age gap between us
(not quite Harold and Maude, but in the neighborhood).

—GRAHAM, January 2000

Graham is a gift I am happy I did not refuse. He is a joy, a delight, a treasure. He is exactly who I needed on my return from New England. He would be careful of my rib.

Five months before, back in Berkeley, in an effort to stanch the flow of blood from my cuticles and my heart, I lay on Dr. V's couch, where I gnashed my teeth over Danny the Priest, Jonah the Thief, Robert the Liar, Sidney the Peculiar, and now Graham the Younger. In March, after my second go-round in New York, I was still gnashing, and might be gnashing still had Dr. V not retired. A guy can take just so much. I had, by this time, met Graham in the flesh. And it was his flesh that unnerved me.

So I told Dr. V the following, though not in so many words:

Amid the Sturm und Drang of Robert, the contumely I heaped upon us both, the tsunami of emotions that left me gasping for breath, I accepted the invitation to lunch that Graham had offered in an earlier e-mail. In the beginning were the words and Graham had a way with them:
“I realize that there is a
somewhat substantial age gap between us
(
not quite Harold and Maude,
but in the neighborhood), but I'm unconcerned about age when it comes to
the people I care about.”
This, in his first letter, arrived in my mailbox in early January. I was in love—ahem—with Robert by then and immune to entreaties, even to the last one, as Graham's turned out to be, the final packet, number 7. So I decided not to answer. As you will recall, my cup was running over.

During the days that followed I kept remembering the end of his letter:
“I hope to hear from you soon. It could be a lot of fun.”
Nothing wrong with that. His letter had also included
“You should
know that sex is extremely important to me, and my proficiency is quite
good.”
Well, I would ignore that. We could just write, maybe even meet someday, though probably not, and in the meantime, his letters would entertain and amuse me. They would lighten the load of lustful e-mail with Robert under which I staggered. And so I wrote back.

Now there grew on my desktop an e-mail file that in length would rival Robert's. To Graham, I confessed my love for Sargent's portraits; he confessed the same. I queried him about Chekhov; he answered with a provocation:
“His characters su fer
from the talking disease, fatuously spieling away their lives, Chekhov's
point but oh so tedious to make.”
I disagreed but only with half. We agreed entirely, though, that Graham was having fun writing to me and I to him
. “On menus where numbers herald each dish—think
Chinese, Bangladeshi, Uruguayan—#1 is not very interesting. In fact, it
takes until #5 or higher
(
sometimes even #15
)
for the menu to brighten.
Why is this?”
And he knew all this stuff:
“I would love to take you to
the tomb of Scott and Zelda in Rockville, Md. It's the most appropriately
ironic place in America and thus perfect for the Fitzgeralds.”
And he had done such interesting things:
“After Yale, I spent my wanderjahr in
India where I was born. I took only Proust with me.”
I know, he sounds elitist, which, this being America, is okay for somebody to be but which Graham is not really. No elitist is going to write to a sixty-six-year-old woman who advertises for sex. He's discerning, let's say, though would a discerning young man write to a . . . ? He's curious. And brave. What in the world went through his mind when he read my ad?

“I'm coming to New York in March,”
I wrote.
“Wonderful!”
he wrote back.
“Let me buy you lunch. We could even turn the whole week
into Jane's Birthday Week with a host of festivities and fireworks.”
And
“I think we're virtually guaranteed not to run out of conversation.”
Just in case, he included a list of conversational possibilities: odd integers, viz.,
“What were you like when you were seven?”
and
“Which of
the 9 muses do you like most? Least?”
Irresistible. Besides, it was only lunch, and the hospitality on the Upper West Side was wearing thin.

And so, on the appointed day, Graham's instructions clutched in my hot little hand—Robert would have pinned them to my mitten had I had one—I took the number 9 subway downtown, walked onto a very crowded street, stood on the street corner, my face turned up to the street sign that read WALL STREET—oh golly, I've read about this—closed my mouth, went into a skyscraper, and stood at the foot of the escalator. I was one hour early, ample time to faint and recover before Graham showed up. If he did. Surely he wouldn't. Please, Graham, don't show up, if you don't show up, I'll go right up to your office, no I won't, I'll go to the water, the ocean, out there and jump in, likewise if you do.

I rued the day I ever sent that damn photograph to him, you know, the one where you can't see one frigging line in my face. I looked about thirty-three, just his age, the age he looked—and was—in the photograph of himself that he scanned into his computer and e-mailed to me. In it he is on a mountainside in Spain: a sunburst of red hair, nonchalant in blue shirt open at the neck, which, even then, I could see, was lengthily attractive. And here, on my screen, came a second photo, this one of Graham's legs naked below his khaki shorts.
“I send you a picture of my
legs,”
he wrote,
“of which I am justly proud.”
I guess so. A guy who mailed himself with confidence like that was going to show up. Graham would show up and he would take one look and I would see “Mistake” written all over his face, flashing like the signs in Times Square, SHE'S OLD! SHE'S OLD! I prayed to god to give me a heart attack. No luck this time either. Here he came, he was smiling. For how long?

I have no recollection of getting to the restaurant or of the restaurant itself except that on the wall were multiple television screens with the doings of the market scrolling indifferently along; while, from their tables in the restaurant, multiple faces glued themselves to the screens. Good, they would not be glued on us.

Fortunately, no crimes were committed. If they had been, I would have been utterly useless as a witness to anything but my own discomfort and, I was certain, Graham's. My jacket kept pulling open and I felt Graham's eyes on the forty-five-dollar T-shirt underneath, which I had bought because it was loose and would hide my breasts but obviously didn't. (You realize, of course, that what used to be L for large is now XL, and what was S for small is now XS. Oh, women of the world, we are getting shafted again.) I kept pulling the jacket shut and Graham kept looking. He looked all over me and paused now and again at my hands. Those are liver spots, I wanted to say, and when he looked at my mouth, Teeth yellow with age. But I didn't. I didn't need to. Without any help from me, Graham was taking me in. He was digesting me. So far, he had kept me down. I ordered a hamburger and a glass of white wine. Classy. Graham ordered a spinach salad and tea. This wasn't going to work, it just wasn't. I twisted and turned in my stomach, knotted my napkin, wished it were long enough to put around my neck, then we could strangle me, at least it would give us something to do. From his knapsack Graham took a bottle of champagne, handed it across the table to me, and said, “Happy birthday, Jane. May you have many more, all of them as auspicious as this one. What did you read on the plane?”

“Thank you, Bartleby,” I whispered. “Bartleby, you know, the Melville . . .”

“Do you agree it is the most perfect story ever written?”

I did, and we fell upon each other, starved for talk. We feasted on a banquet made sumptuous by us, replenished by us, free for our asking, and portable so that we could take it with us wherever we went. We never got full. We got happy.

Outside the restaurant, Graham said, “I want to show you something.” I followed dutifully, and as we walked, Graham swung his arm wide and said, “Look at all these people! There are far too many people.”

“And they all live here or in California where I live,” I said.

“This is not good. Something must be done.”

I suggested that, since the Upper Midwest continues to empty itself of its native-borns, we go to whatever lengths are necessary to make that part of the country attractive, thereby inducing immigrants to east and west coasts to return home.

“Fine and dandy,” said Graham, “but there's still the problem of the weather.”

“We dome baseball, basketball, football, why not North Dakota?”

He was thinking. “The problem continues to worsen in our North American continent. I have another suggestion.” He jammed his fists into his pockets. “We could get rid of the Canadians.”

We were now in front of the Customs House. Inside, the great room is a circle, its circumference lined all around with perhaps one hundred wooden desks. They are the desks of the customs agents, one of them Melville, who sat keeping the books on goods from abroad. “Which one do you think was Melville's?” I asked Graham.

“Can we be certain that he sat at the same desk? Were desks assigned? Is it possible he moved from one desk to the other?”

“If he sat in the same desk every day, which one would it be?”

“That one,” he said, and pointed to a desk very far from where we stood. The huge, round, marble room, domed and echoing our every movement, was empty of people save for the two of us and the hundreds of ghosts who had spent their days bent over these very desks. I felt the way I had when Lenny de Berg placed Trollope's Miss MacKenzie in front of me; I bowed my head in reverence, not the last time I would feel like that with Graham.

On the way out we passed a reception desk, where a few overly casual Native Americans sat ready to answer questions about how this monument to literary history, this triumph of architecture, had become a center for Native American studies. I didn't say to the Native Americans behind the desk what I was thinking: Sit up straight, button your shirts, mind your loud voices, show some respect, if not for a white society that failed you, then for yourselves and the job you have agreed to do. Silently, I reprimanded myself for thinking like my grandmother, who persisted in showing up at all the wrong moments.

Long ago I had made an observation which appertained as we walked toward the water, into which, only an hour ago, I had been thinking of jumping: very smart people lead with their foreheads. Graham is very smart; ergo, when he walks, his forehead precedes the rest of him, so it is not immediately apparent that he is tall, probably six feet, and slim as a reed. Ideas come to him so fast and furiously, he swallows them and chokes slightly as they tumble from him: “What books do you ex . . . pect will stay with you forever? Not the ones you'd take, say, to an island, the ones that are a p. . . art of you.” He is utterly charming.

His question was not hard to answer.
“The Canterbury Tales.”
Then, before I could say “and
Lear,
” Graham was running, galloping, occasionally leaping and twirling in midair, across the plaza as he recited with joyous and, need I add, youthful vigor from the “General Prologue.” “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote/The droghte of March hath perced to the roote” all the way through to “And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.” His Middle English was impeccable. He was a delight. He made me smile. He made me laugh out loud.

Graham was writing a novel. He worked at a job he detested but that paid him a lot of money so that in two years or so he could quit and just write. “You need a patron,” I said. “If I had enough money, I would be your patron.”

“Today, people with money don't support artists and writers; they give their money to universities and get a building named after them.”

Graham makes pronouncements like this all the time, and, mostly, they're true. I think about them, sometimes argue a bit, but by and large, well, like this: “Do you think there are any absolutes?” I ask.

“Yes,” he answers. “Cruelty is wrong. I am a fan of Kant— with a K, not a C.”

I argue a bit. “Surely, you know the categorical imperative is a philosophical sieve.”

“What Kant wants is for us to be nicer to each other. The world would be a better place. I'm all for people being nicer to each other.” He looks down at me. “Aren't you?”

“Mm-hm.” His eyes are almond-shaped, flecked with green.

Or this: “An appreciation of irony is necessary to survival.”

Now, I agree absolutely but wish to prolong our conversation: “Oh, Graham, irony is old hat; it went out with the sixties.”

He is so serious. “It is never out of date. Irony lives and breathes. Irony saves lives.”

“There are those who claim that California is irony deficient,” I say.

“And the Midwest?”

“The Midwest is irony.”

“Talk Midwest to me,” he says. He has seen
Fargo
nine times.

“Okay.” I summon the purity of the midwestern vowel, a sound untinged with remnants of British speech or fancied up by California for nationwide distribution via satellite, a sound I had spent years ridding myself of, embarrassed because it marked me a hayseed. It all came back to me here in this most sophisticated of cities in the company of this most sophisticated man and I say, “O,” and then, “O yah,” and I am back on the farm. Graham laughs delightedly.

I will speak midwestern for Graham again and he will make more pronouncements. But all this will happen over time— there will be four lunches—these conversations that tickle my brain. He is like a puppy determined to play, teasing me out of my dusty corner, tossing me high into the air. I am infused, enlivened, happy.