Crossroads (11 page)

“So am I,” I replied.

I don't know how long we held one another, but it seemed like a long time, long enough for the tourists from New Jersey, those shell-shocked housewives from the Oranges and their husbands in green leisure suits, to stop and stare at us, as if we were the show they'd paid those exorbitant bridge tolls to see. After a while, we walked slowly. “Look, what do you want to do?” Sean asked me.

“I think I want to go home.”

He agreed to take me home, but only after I agreed to see him again the next night.

 

That was the night we ran into Mark and Lila. We had gone down to MacDougal Street for Indian food and were on our way to the Lone Star when I saw them walking toward us. It was too bad, because Sean and I had been having a fairly good time that evening. He'd done an imitation of a Hindi accent in the restaurant and folded his napkin into a mouse so that it
frightened the woman seated next to him. We were laughing as we strolled up Fifth Avenue and my arm rested in his.

I squeezed Sean's elbow gently. “Listen,” I mumbled, “I'm not sure what I should do, but my husband and the woman he lives with are walking toward us.”

Sean looked up discreetly. There were a lot of people on the street but somehow he knew who I meant immediately. “Do you want to avoid them or do you want to say hello?”

I looked up, expecting they would have disappeared, turned off down the block, or, rather like phantoms I'd just conjured, vaporized and floated away in the air. They could not have had any real substance; they seemed more to be figments of some perverse side of my imagination. At times I have thought we invent the world with our minds, that the weather, the people, what we do with the people, can all be controlled with some simple act of will and that if you will evil, you will have it, and if you will good, you will have that.

I knew I wanted to avoid them but I refused to just cross over. The age of gladiators, of knights and great heroes, is long gone and the great battles are now being fought quietly at home or in the heart, but they also require enormous courage. I said, “I think we have to say hello.”

“Then just keep walking.” Sean folded his free hand over my fingers. “And act like you're crazy about me.”

Mark and Lila had seen us as well and they seemed to be having a similar conversation. They were reaching the same conclusion. They kept coming toward us. If Sean hadn't been with me, I think I could have killed her. I'd spent months fearing this encounter, terrified to walk into the Museum of Natural History, to ride the 104, not knowing what I'd do when at last I ran into them, as I knew I would. I think I could have killed her not only because she was with Mark, but because I'd helped her conjugate French verbs back in high school, when she could hardly spell her own name, and it seemed to me that
people with that kind of history owe one another, if nothing else, an apology.

They stopped first and acted surprised. “Well,” Mark said, “small world.” He pecked me on the cheek. Lila was silent, morose, though forcing a smile. I could tell I'd ruined her evening. It was difficult to know if they were happy. Lila looked a little yellow to me, as if she were recovering from a disease.

Everyone was uncomfortable, so Sean picked up the ball and carried it marvelously. “We were just going to hear some music. You folks going to dinner?” They were going to eat “something.” They'd just seen a double feature at the Waverly. Mark looked as if he needed to eat. He seemed thin to me in his khaki pants, and Sean seemed strong beside him in his jeans and workshirt.

Mark sneezed into a handkerchief with ML monogrammed on it. He liked having his initials on his belongings, as if he needed to be reminded of who he was. Lila said “God bless you” twice. She seemed a bit uneasy, the way Helen must have felt when she realized what she'd done to Troy.

“Got your allergies early this year,” I said. Lila flashed my way, as if I weren't supposed to know that my own husband had hay fever. But I looked back at her. I wanted her to know that I knew about more than his hay fever. I knew about the two little moles at the base of his spine, the scar below his nipple where he'd been stabbed in a street fight with a pocket knife; I could find his circumcision scar in the dark. I knew him as well as I knew Manhattan. I knew his body as well as I knew anything.

“How's the Bronx project going?” Mark sneezed.

Lila said “God bless you” again.

“The council keeps pushing us back. I've written all the reports.”

“You write terrific reports,” Mark said. Lila was displeased. She didn't like it when someone else was praised. She had her thick hair pulled back with a red ribbon. She used to
wear it that way when we were teen-agers, and all the boys pulled the ribbon. Once I thought she was cheating off my paper during a French exam. I moved my arm away so that she could see. I always wanted to cheat off her paper during European history exams. Lila knew the dates of all the big battles.

I looked at Lila with all the objectivity and scrutiny of a judge about to hand down a terrible verdict. I looked at her jaundiced features, her chestnut hair, her thin legs. She was transparent and tough as a spider's web and with about as much substance. I memorized her, the way a spy memorizes his instructions before setting them on fire.

“Where do you work?” Lila asked Sean.

“In film.”

“You look like an actor.” She smiled.

“Thanks,” Sean replied, uncertain if it was really a compliment.

“So, how've you been?” I asked Mark. I didn't care so much to know the answer as I cared to detain them more, in the face of Lila's discomfort and desire to move on.

“Busy, busy, busy. The wheels of progress turn slowly.” Had he always spoken in clichés? I tried to remember. He used to always repeat himself for emphasis. Once he repeated himself so many times in court “for emphasis” that the judge finally said, “Mr. Lusterman, I believe you've made your point.”

“We've got a big rape case in the office now,” Mark continued, seeming to free-associate. “Lila refused to defend the guy. She took one look at him and said, ‘That's a rapist if I ever saw one.' You should see this guy. Nobody wants to defend him.”

“Isn't he entitled to a defense?” Sean said. “Isn't that what you guys do?”

“Where'd you go to law school?” Mark asked.

“He went to Yale,” I broke in. Mark had done his undergraduate work at Queens College and had always been
jealous of those who had Ivy League educations.

Sean squeezed my fingers, trying to divert a fight. “I didn't go to law school. I know a great little Indian restaurant, if you guys are hungry.” They weren't particularly hungry.

“It was nice running into you.” Lila turned to me.

“Wait.” I'm not sure what I was going to say, because Sean tugged me and led me away, but I know I was prepared to insult her. He put his arm around me and we went on down Fifth Avenue. For a few moments we walked in silence. “I want to go home,” I finally managed to say.

“You always want to go home.”

“This time I mean it.”

But Sean bought the
Voice
and decided we had to go to the Village Gate, which was in the opposite direction, because Howlin' Wolf was playing the eleven o'clock set. I didn't want to go but he led me, and I followed numbly, not caring very much where I went. We found a table in the back of the smoke-filled room. I felt as if it were happening for the first time. As if Mark had just left me and it was happening again.

“I just want to go home,” I said.

“In a little bit.” Between sets Sean said, “Do you want to talk now or do you want to just forget it?”

“I want to forget it.”

“You don't want to talk?”

I shook my head. I never wanted to talk again.

“You know, you're completely transparent. It's so obvious what you're feeling.” I didn't know that. “Interesting thing about polar bears. They have no facial expressions. That's what makes them so dangerous. You never know if they're going to attack. You're different. You can't hide a thing.”

I was getting involved in the analogy. “Does that mean I'm not dangerous?”

He paused for a moment. “No, it just means you're different from a polar bear.”

Someone came up and asked him if he was Robert De Niro.

“Robert De Niro doesn't have a beard,” Sean said.

“You do look like him.” I examined Sean's face. That was when I decided I would go to bed with him. Or rather, that I should go to bed with him. I could not, after all, continue being faithful to a man who no longer loved me, except for an occasional encounter with a hitchhiker half my age.

Sean turned back to me. “Why do you let other people run your life?”

I didn't answer. I didn't see how anybody was running my life. “I don't know what you mean.”

“I mean you're letting them make you miserable.”

I shrugged my shoulders, not really seeing that there was any alternative. “I suppose you've got control over your life.”

“I have some control.” He asked the bartender for the bill. “I'm controlling myself right now.” From what he would not say. “I mean, I can understand you'd be upset after running into them, but why don't you just call her up and tell her what you think?”

My fingers clenched the bar. “I wouldn't give her the satisfaction.”

“Satisfaction? What is this? The Middle Ages? If you're upset, get it off your chest.”

I stared into my drink. The ice cube had melted with a hollow spot in the center and I stuck my finger in. “You don't understand.” I turned the ice cube with my finger in the hollow spot.

Sean sighed. “Maybe they fell in love, maybe they were just right for one another. I don't even think you really want him back. But keeping it inside like this can only drive you nuts.”

“I've known that woman since I was a little girl. She used to eat peanut butter sandwiches that my mother made for her at my house. You just don't go and do what she did.”

“So tell her that. If you haven't talked to her about it . . .”

“You just don't understand. You don't get it, do you?” The bartender looked our way. “I hate her. Do you understand that?” The bartender motioned for me to keep it down. People at the bar were staring at us. “I hate her. I hate her.”

In the cab I sat far away from him, my arms folded over my chest. “O.K.,” he said as the cab sped up Sixth Avenue. “I can see why you hate her, but you're only hurting yourself.”

But I didn't understand that. My rage had suddenly become a precious point of honor to me. If I was hurting myself, it was only as the kamikaze pilot hurts himself in completion of the mission and destruction of the enemy.

When we got back to my place, Sean took off his shoes and made himself comfortable. I curled up beside him. “Listen,” he said, “I know you're upset, so I'll sleep here on the couch, all right?” I shook my head. “Oh, you want me to leave?” I shook my head again. “You want me to sleep with you?” I nodded. Sean got up and poured himself a cognac. “See that outside? That's morning. I think we should just get some sleep.”

“I don't understand.”

He came back with the cognac. “Listen, somewhere along the way I got to be a realist. If I touch a table”—he touched the table—“I want to feel the wood. If I touch a lamp, I want to feel the heat of the lamp. And if I touch a woman, I want to feel that woman.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“What I'm saying is, I don't want to make love to you when you're thinking of someone else.”

I'd never heard anything more ridiculous. “Is that very important?”

He laughed. “Not usually, but I'm afraid I care about you.”

Sean unbuttoned his shirt, and when he was down to his T-shirt, I saw a large gash, as if something had bitten into the side of his arm. I leaned forward and touched it. It was a smooth, cratered hole in his shoulder, running down the
biceps, and he'd gotten it in an explosion while doing stunts for a war film a few years back. “That's when I decided to do some serious work behind the camera,” he told me, fluffing a pillow.

Five blocks away Mark slept in Lila's arms, and that was the worst pain I'd ever known. Women don't usually go to war or to sea, and most of our adventures are of the heart. We all fought our own wars and Sean had almost fought in a few real ones. All the wounds I'd ever known were inside and had a kind of unreality about them. And suddenly the internal wounds seemed insignificant to me, the way all the people you've had crushes on are gone in the face of someone you can really love.

He tucked me into my bed and kissed me on the forehead. I tried to pull him down. “No, not tonight. I don't want it to be tonight.” But we were both exhausted, so he flopped down on the bed next to me and fell fast asleep.

It was almost morning, and the birds were just starting to sing. Five blocks away Mark slept with Lila, and I hadn't stopped wanting him back with me. The sky was a translucent blue, the color it turns just before they turn out the street lamps, but it seemed so very dark to me. I was thinking about Mark and Lila lying in bed together and I couldn't break away and the world was so very dark and empty as I tried to arouse Sean and have him make me forget. But Sean wouldn't be aroused.

The first night Mark and I lived together in our Cambridge apartment, we stayed up half the night. We cleaned the whole apartment, and when we were done cleaning, he pulled my shirt out of my pants. He lifted the shirt and unbuttoned a few buttons that exposed my belly. He touched the dark line that divides me, the one that descends from my navel to my groin. He followed the line up and down, then landed on my navel. He said because I love you, I know something about you. I know you have a light right here in the middle, a pilot light, and you can't let it go out. You must never let the light go out.