Ordinary World (10 page)
Authors: Elisa Lorello
They both looked at me in shock and spoke at the same time. “How could you even think such a thing? Of course they did!”
“They treated you both differently,” I said. “Don’t pretend you never noticed. You’ve protected me—and them—long enough.”
“You may have been a surprise,” said Tony. “I really don’t know. But you know how they were raised. They didn’t talk about things like that. They loved you, Andi. I think you just… I don’t know. You were the only girl, and you had a fire in your eyes when you were really little. I think it scared them. Where they came from, a fire like that spelled trouble later on in life. They just went too far to keep you safe.”
I nodded my head. Just like what Melody had said.
“Then why did it feel like love from you but oppression from them? You guys at least hugged me and let me tag along with you.”
“How could we not?” said Joey. “You were so cute. But we wanted to keep you safe too. You were our precious jewel. I know that’s all sexist now, but we just didn’t want anyone to hurt you. And neither did Mom and Dad. They just fucked it all up the way parents do.”
I couldn’t help but laugh, my brothers joining me.
“How’s that for therapy?” said Joey.
“I wouldn’t put it on a fortune cookie,” I said. With that, my brothers picked up their guitars again and broke out into The Beatles’ “Oh Darlin’”. I swooned, tears streaming down my cheeks.
They left the next day. We held each other, in tears, and I begged them not to go. I felt like a child seeking their brotherly protection from the big bad world all over again. It’d been ages since they’d had their little sister all to themselves, they said. We exchanged genuine I-love-yous, and as they drove away, I re-entered the empty house, restored to its former state of sullen silence. I’d become so used to that hollow feeling before they’d arrived that I never even noticed it. But now that they were gone, it physically hurt. I took the leftover pizza crusts, crushed them in a plastic bag, and headed to the lake at EdmundCollege to feed the ducks who were grateful for the bounty but oblivious to me sitting on the bench, mourning for what I’d lost as well as what I’d never had.
***
A few days later, Jeff called to tell me that everything was “squared away” with the dean. “You’ll take unpaid course waivers and focus solely on directing the freshman writing program. And you’ll have one performance evaluation. Come January we’ll check in again. Fair enough?”
“Are you sure?”
“The dean’s behind you all the way. So is most of the department, with the exception of the usual grotesques. Face it, kid: we can’t live without you.”
I hesitated. “I don’t know…”
“Kid, I’m not gonna let you do any damage to yourself or anyone else. I promise. Mainly ‘cause Jerry’ll beat the shit out of me if you do.”
I smiled; he suddenly reminded me of my brothers.
“I thought you said he was behind me all the way,” I said.
“He was after I suggested the
unpaid waivers. Besides, if Jerry can’t at least
threaten
to beat the shit out of me, then he starts moping around and brings in his banjo.”
“Eek,” I shuddered at the thought. I’d heard Jerry Donnelly play the banjo. “Okay,” I said in a surprisingly confident voice. “See you the day after Labor Day.”
“I can’t wait, kid. Welcome back.”
Chapter Twelve
October
L
IFE MOVED AGAIN.
When I returned to school, I found myself refreshed—the workload no longer felt like the heavy blanket trying to suffocate my grief, but rather was like a sieve that I could pour myself into and strain out the unwanted muck. What’s more, if Jeff’s visit that day of the Yankee game was the crack in the wall, then my brothers’ visit broke the floodgates open. They had awakened my craving for
company
. I started spending more time with Miranda, and Jeff and Patsy had me over every other week. Heck, even I made dinner for them at my place one day. I had to take away the chair where Sam would’ve sat—seeing the empty seat was too much for me.
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling of living in someone else’s skin, or on a backwards planet. Anything but an ordinary world.
I saw Melody twice during the week of the anniversary of Sam’s death, which was also our sixth wedding anniversary.
“So, it’s been a year,” she said.
“Yeah,” I replied. You’d think she said “nice day”.
“How does it feel?”
“Well, considering that I went through it in a semi-conscious stupor, it doesn’t really feel like anything special.”
She let out a cynical laugh. “Were you always this sarcastic?”
“I used to be. Actually, I was just uptight.”
“When?”
“Awhile ago. Before I met Sam.”
“What softened you up? Or who? Was it Sam?”
“No. It was New York, of all things. And Devin.”
“Who?” she asked.
“This guy I knew when I lived in New York.”
A flood of memories suddenly washed over me: Versace suits. Sienna eyes. Vibrators.
“Were you dating him?”
“Sort of. It was a complicated relationship.” I paused and looked at the poster of a coastal beach with a sunset on the wall behind her. “Wow…Devin. I haven’t thought about him in ages.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Well, when I met him, he was an escort. He knew a lot of the women that I worked with, if you get my drift. We sort of had an arrangement. I shared my expertise in writing and he shared his expertise in sex. He was an unusual escort in that he didn’t actually go all the way with his clients.”
I felt silly saying the last part—it sounded so junior high.
She looked surprised. “Why didn’t he go all the way?”
I shrugged. “Don’t know. And yet, that didn’t seem to bother any of them. He was very popular.”
“What made you form this arrangement? Did he come to you or did you seek him out?”
“I called him.”
“You thought you didn’t know enough about sex?”
“I thought I didn’t know anything about sex.”
“Why?” she asked.
I paused for a minute, trying to decide whether I really wanted to go back to this place. Sure, Melody was my therapist; but my old, self-conscious behaviors kicked in and I worried what kind of nutcase she would think I was if I told her the truth.
“Well, I was inexperienced,” I answered.
“In what way?”
“In the way that I’d never technically had intercourse with anyone until Devin.”
Melody’s eyes widened. That was enough to get me to pull my knees to my chest and curl up in the chair in attempt to get lost somewhere in it.
“Was that a choice you made?”
“To not have sex, you mean?”
She nodded.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Do we really have to talk about this?”
“Why do you feel uncomfortable?”
“Funny, Devin used to push my buttons like this. He was determined to make me less inhibited, less self-conscious. And he succeeded, too. Or, I succeeded. I don’t know. Anyway, when I met Sam, I wasn’t so worried about it anymore, and we had a
fabulous
sex life.”
“Whatever became of Devin?”
“His name is David, actually. Devin was his escort name. He left the business, moved to Boston, and bought an art gallery. He was a real art buff. Talented, too. The guy could make you look at Picasso in ways Picasso never saw it.”
“Did you keep in touch?” she asked.
“Sam and I went to one of his gallery shows—I mean, I didn’t know Devin was going to be there. That was a total shock. We met for coffee a couple of weeks later and that was that. This was all years ago. Sam and I weren’t even married yet. But I would occasionally look for him on the T or the streets whenever we went to Boston. We never went back to his gallery, either. I don’t know why. Sam didn’t know anything about the nature of Devin’s and my relationship.”
“You never told him?”
“Not exactly. I mean, I never gave him specifics. He never put Devin and David together as the same person.”
“Why didn’t you tell him?”
“Didn’t seem to be a need to.”
Melody contemplated this. I expected her to push me on the subject, the way Maggie had countless times.
“I can’t believe you’ve never told him! What if he finds out? Things like that can wreck a marriage, you know,”
Maggie would say.
“What good comes out of it?”
I would shout back.
Instead, Melody asked, “Why didn’t you and Devin keep in touch?”
“Like I said, it was a complicated relationship. I had feelings for him, and then he had feelings for me…it never quite clicked, I guess.”
Melody looked down at her pad. I wasn’t sure if she’d written anything. She looked back at me while I took a sip of water. Silence filled the room.
“When was the last time you and Sam had sex?”
The question took me by surprise, but in an instant my mind raced with thoughts about Sam’s and my sex life. It was like great jazz, the way our bodies were in perfect syncopation, the way we knew and improvised and explored each other with our lips and fingers, the way we so thoroughly lost ourselves in our lovemaking, be it through bouts of heavy breathing or moaning, or giggles and laughter when we were especially playful. It was hard to believe that I had gone so long prior to knowing him without having known such pleasure, that I’d been so afraid. Then again, maybe I had just simply been waiting all along for Sam, even though Devin was my first.
Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that sex could be like this, or that
I
could be so free, so uninhibited, so secure with my lover, my best friend, my Sam.
I’d occasionally wondered how much Devin had to do with this, or whether it was Sam’s doing simply because he was just so good in bed, so caring and accepting and wanting and respectful and appreciative of my body and me. God, how my body hungered and ached to feel his heat, his firmness, his hands and lips and body intertwined with mine…
I wiped my mouth with my hand, feeling a hot flash followed by a punch in my gut.
“You wanna hear something really stupid?” I asked. “We decided not to do it for almost a week, to wait until our anniversary celebration night. We thought it’d be fun to get so horny and frustrated that we wouldn’t be able to keep our hands off each other and would just ravish each other that night. It was working, too. I was so ready to jump his bones—forget dinner and the damn cider. We were gonna do it all night and then play hooky the next day. Do you know how pissed off I am that we did that? Do you know how idiotic I feel?”
“How could you have known?” she asked.
“That’s just the thing—how does anyone know?” I looked away, wistful. “It’s so clichéd, but we take life so for granted.”
“Have you had any kind of sexual stimulation since?”
“Are you kidding? I haven’t had any kind of stimulation, period. I’m a blob. I eat Malomars at nine p.m. and watch TV all day and surf the net occasionally. I’ve all but stopped reading and writing.”
I paused for a moment in reverie, my breath seemingly stuck in my throat, before uttering, “Sex with Sam was fucking fabulous,” more to myself than Melody, who seemed to ignore this utterance and asked her next question.