Ordinary World (23 page)

            He didn’t answer me for several minutes. Just sat there, submerged. When he finally spoke, he was barely audible, still miles away. He sounded vulnerable, pained, almost like the night we first slept together following his father’s funeral.

            “I couldn’t do it.”

            I looked at him, confused. “You were impotent?”

            “No. I couldn’t bring myself to cheapen them like that, or myself, for that matter.”

            “You let them pay you to cheapen them in other ways, though. The desperation they felt… talk about cheap!”

            “I know,” he said, his voice remorseful. “I sold myself, and them, into believing otherwise. That I was giving them something more valuable, more respectful by not going all the way with intercourse. That giving them the attention and pleasure they wanted was the noble service.” 

“I think there’s more to it than that,” I said after a beat, sounding rather cold without meaning to be. He sat still and quiet for several minutes before leaving the room and coming back with the Matisse journal I had given him so many years ago for Christmas. I took in a breath when I saw it, flooded with memories.

            “Here,” he said, opening the book to a page he was marking with his finger. Not wanting to fetch my glasses, I took the diary and held it close to my face, reading his bold handwriting, like that of a designer’s or architect’s:

My father used to constantly call me a fag. God, I hate that word. That word goes first on the ‘most hated words list’. He also thought I wouldn’t amount to anything.
            I stopped and looked up at him, then started reading again.

On the night of my brother-in-law’s bachelor party, when I was about nineteen, someone had hired a stripper. When she came to me, I got up and left the room. I wasn’t into it because I thought it was disrespectful. Well, that did it. In front of everyone, my father called me a fag yet again and made me sit down while the stripper did a lap dance on me so he could check to see whether I got an erection. The rest of the guys were so fucking drunk that they laughed and egged him on. It was the single most humiliating experience of my life.              I stopped reading again and sat there, horrified.

            “Oh my God, David. I am so sorry. I had no idea. I mean, I’d always suspected that you were trying to prove something to your father. But how could you think being an escort was the answer, especially when you found that experience so degrading?”

            “Think about it, Andi—it was the
perfect
answer. I proved to him that I could get any woman I wanted. Not only that, but I could give them pleasure in ways that he wouldn’t ever dare do with his own wife. I out-dicked him. And better still, I’d get
paid
for it. I’d get laid and rich at the same time. I’d
be
something. And it at least stopped him from calling me a fag, finally. I was twenty-eight when Christian and I started the business. Can you believe that? I did it for almost ten years.”

            A silence passed between us before he continued.

“I wasn’t entirely honest with you back then, Andi. In the early years, I had slept with my clients before the guilt got to be too much. That, and I was afraid of getting caught, either by the cops or a disease. And sometimes it was just unavoidable. It would just happen.”

            “You wanted it to happen?” I asked, trying not to feel betrayed—after all, he and I had never been together in those days. Still, he lied to me.

            “Sometimes. Sometimes not. Anyway, I didn’t tell you back then because I guess I was trying to protect you, just like your brothers used to.”

            “You mean you were trying to protect
yourself
.” Again, my words sounded colder than I had intended.

            A myriad of feelings washed over me: foolishness for having been duped by his charm from the very beginning; anger and disgust for having been used along with all those women as meaningless objects in a ploy to get back at his father; compassion for the wounded child who just wanted his father’s love and respect; empathy for knowing all too well a father’s rejection, especially when it came to sexuality (and growing up so fucked up as a result); guilt for my present selfishness and for the past five months.

            If I had known then what I just found out, I wouldn’t have touched Devin the Escort with a ten-foot pole. And yet, without Devin, I don’t think I would have, could have had the happy, sexually satisfying marriage I’d had with Sam. Who was sitting next to me at this moment? Devin? David? Which of them was with me in Rome? With which did I want to be?

            David responded, “I convinced myself that as long as I didn’t do it, then no one would really get hurt. From a business point of view, it was a great selling point. We cornered the market, so to speak. It forced us to be creative. And you know the rest—the women we serviced loved it.”

            “But at what
cost
,” I said more as a statement than a question.

            “Then you came along,” he said, looking at me and smiling wistfully. “When you walked into that room, that was it for me—I fell in love with you that instant.”

            I opened my mouth.

            “Are you saying you loved me from the beginning?”

            “I tried so hard not to let it show.”

            “
Why?
” I asked, exasperated. “Do you have any idea what you put me through? How I fought to hide my attraction to you, when all along…” Again I wanted to throttle him. “Were you out of your mind?”

            “Because then everything would have had to change, and I wasn’t ready for that. Even though I tried to treat you like another client, I especially couldn’t bring myself to take advantage of you in any way. And I couldn’t bring myself to let my feelings out. That’s why I never let you kiss me, kept you at arm’s length.”

            “Didn’t you know how
I
felt? Didn’t it show?”

            “I was afraid. You knew Devin, not
me
. If you found out who
I
was, would you have still wanted me? Besides, I’d been Devin for so long by then. There was no David.”

            “Don’t you think your father would’ve approved of you getting into a serious relationship?”

            “My father demeaned me in front of every woman I ever got serious enough with to bring home. That’s why the women I slept with were nothing more than one-night-stands. Nothing would’ve been good enough. Not even you. Until the end. When he got cancer, he changed. And it wasn’t until he died, when you and I made love the night of the funeral, that everything changed for
me
. Then I wanted you to know everything. But by the time I got up the nerve to tell you, well…”

            This time, I mentally transported back to Sam’s and my courtship, to the night David—Devin—David and I spent together, to us saying goodbye in the driveway of my old East Meadow apartment. The guilt I’d felt for leaving him, the hesitation I’d had, for just a moment, of choosing
him
instead of Sam. What if I had made
that
choice instead?

            I looked down at my hands holding the diary and studied my wedding ring. A confounded regret added to all the other emotions jumbled inside. If only there had been a way I could’ve been with both him and Sam, I thought, but then dismissed the notion as absurd.

            “Why aren’t you married?” I blurted.

            He too looked at my ring. “I guess I never figured out how to get that far,” he answered, almost in a whisper.

            “Was it something you ever wanted?”

            “I don’t think I ever believed I was worthy of it.”

            “You’re wrong.”

God, I wanted to love him so much at that moment, but didn’t know how to reach out to him. There was a time when I could, when I wanted to. How do I let myself be as vulnerable as he just did? As he’s been all this time? Would I, could I ever be that vulnerable again?

I wanted to at least try.

            I put my arms around him and held him close to me. The warmth that I had experienced at the Fontana Di Trevi had returned momentarily.

            “Thank you, David. I’m so sorry about before. I’ll go on the trip, but only if you come with me. Please.”

            He released me from our embrace. “No. You need to do this yourself. You’ll see.”

            “What do
you
need?” I asked.

            The corners of his mouth turned slightly upward, as if attempting to smile. But his eyes remained dark and wistful, even glassy. He didn’t respond.

That night, I stayed over for the first time in almost two months. As we drifted off to sleep after making love, with David spooning me just like the night of his father’s funeral, he murmured in my ear,

            “When you’re in my arms, everything’s okay.”

            A shiver ran up my spine; Sam used to say the same thing, practically verbatim, to me. And yet, coming from David, I knew it meant something entirely different.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Last week in August through Labor Day weekend

T
HE ARCTIC BLAST OF THE AIR CONDITIONER shocked my body the moment I swung open the glass doors, and I tightly crossed my bare arms. It was one of those rare occasions when David asked me to meet him for lunch at one of the galleries for which he was a buyer. The recorded sounds of a string quartet echoed faintly in the otherwise silent space. David was nowhere in sight, nor was anyone else. Rather than sit in one of the strategically placed black leather chairs, I ambled around the open space, stopping at no one piece of art for long. The collection consisted of abstract motifs that looked more like what happened when you mixed all your finger paints together than anything remotely complementary. I made a face and turned my head to an invisible David standing behind me, as if to ask,
Did you select these paintings? What the hell were you thinking?

            Just then, I heard laughter—a woman’s and a man’s—and recognized the man’s. I turned my head again to see a visible David exit the gallery’s office with a woman whom I can only describe one word at a time: Tall. Tan. Blonde. Amazon. Riveting. Her open-toed stilettos came up to my calves; her fingernails were long and curved and lacquered in gold with colored rhinestones; her toenails matched her lipstick color. She wore a strapless, black and white sundress with a clutch bag to match. David, of course, looked more alluring than ever dressed in his usual Versace, smiling that electric smile and flashing those sienna sparks. I didn’t know which one was more breathtaking.

            “Andi!” I heard David say. But my gaze was so focused on this creature that it took me a few seconds to realize that David was talking to me, that I was actually standing there.

            “Andi,” he said again, “This is Carmen, one of my clients.”

            I looked at him, agog.

“What…when…” I started, but nothing else came out, my brain on communication delay.

            “She’s one of my art patrons,” he corrected, as if reading my mind. It then hit me why I was stunned: I thought he had meant one of his clients from his escort days.

            “Carmen,” he continued, “this is my girlfriend, Dr. Andrea Vanzant.”

A good foot taller than me at least, Carmen literally looked down at me, moving her eyes from my ten-dollar flat sandals to my Macy’s khaki capri pants and tank top and NPR beach bag to my makeup-free face and pale skin and Target sunglasses positioned like a headband. I held out my hand, and she shook it limply, as if she had just been asked to pet a toad.

“Hello,” I said, sounding mousy.

“You’re a doctor?” she asked in disbelief.

“I’m a professor.” 

She lifted her chin rather than nod. “Harvard?”

“NorthamptonUniversity,” David replied for me. “She’s also a published author.”