Sugar in My Bowl (23 page)

“So that made you go off with another person?”

“There was no other person. It was a fantasy world.”

“Why can’t you explore your fantasies with me?”

“I want to, but you’re so in your head, Juliet. Every second. Everything has to be analyzed and processed. I just wanted to fuck you. Look”—he took my hands—“you’re my wife. I don’t want my wife saying things to me like why can’t I have ‘normal’ sex.”

“I asked you why you couldn’t go down on me like a normal person! I felt ugly!” I took a breath and said, “I’m sorry I ever said that.”

“You say shit like that to me all the time. It hurts my feelings. Maybe I thought you were incredibly sexy right then.”

“I didn’t feel sexy.”

“But you were sexy, and you’re sexy right now.”

I looked at his gray eyes looking back into me, the darker gray outline around his iris, his furrowed brow.

“It was nice walking in the house and seeing you here.”

He kept looking at me, studying me, all his attention on me. Time slowed, each of his movements a separated frame of an old film.

“I always had a fantasy of walking in on a girl. A girl that looks just like you. She doesn’t know I’m there. Skirt hiked up. Silky panties. She’s touching herself. By the time you notice me, you’re too horny to stop. “

I couldn’t help smiling. ”Makes me wonder where this is leading.”

“Let me rub your head for a while.” He undid my hair from my ponytail, dropping the elastic on the floor, pushing his fingers down past my ear to my neck. “I’m really happy you’re home.”

Herman and Margot

Karen Abbott

H
ow could Herman not notice Margot? Look at her: silver hair sculpted and sprayed into miniature mountain peaks, lowered lids flashing bolts of blue liner, origami skin freshly powdered and brightly rouged. Jeweled rings blink from fingers and a gold bracelet slinks around a tapered ankle. White linen slacks hide a pair of dancer’s legs that kicked across every stage in the Catskills. Hot pink blazer and orthopedic sandals—not shoes—stacking enough heel to make a difference. She fairly glides in her walker. She’s lived eighty-seven years, and nothing suggests she couldn’t handle eighty-seven more.

He spots her in the lobby of Kittay House, a senior living community in the Bronx, and she looks like she needs him. Everyone at Kittay House has needed Herman at one time or another: to serve as president and treasurer of the board; to teach gin rummy; to make intricate, customized birthday and bar mitzvah and sympathy cards; to offer nips of grape wine from the Sprite bottle he keeps stashed in his closet. As the unofficial patriarch of the place, it would be rude and neglectful of him not to approach this fine lady and find out exactly what she wants, and so he aims his walker in her direction.

“How do you go about ordering an air conditioner?” she asks.

“I’ll do it for you,” he says, and it is settled.

In the beginning they take things slowly, reveling in the irony of teasing time when they have so little of it left. Margot invites him up to her apartment to watch
Dancing with the Stars
. They sit side by side in matching recliners, legs kicked up, overstuffed arms close enough to touch. He’s gorgeous, by far the best man she’s seen here, clean-cut in his polo shirt and black trousers and spotless white sneakers. Herman, too, looks young for his age—ninety-two—and no one doubts him when he boasts he can easily pass for eighty. They discover they share a birthday, March 13. How clever of fate to pair them now, near the end, with someone who began from the same place, a cosmic alignment that both comforts and provokes. They revel in their similar virtues—both are spirited, funny, adventurous—and neither recognizes that they also possess the same faults. She obstinately insists that he is too opinionated; his strong opinion is that she’s too obstinate. Being with each other is like de facto introspection, soul searching without either angst or epiphany. It allows them to explore the nature of desire, at any age, and what a person is obliged to do with it.

One day Herman presents Margot with a bottle of cologne and waits for her reaction, his wide smile pushing his brows into a furry white
V
.
I have to retrain him,
she thinks and decides to tell him the truth. “You don’t give me cheap cologne,” she says, “something you buy over the counter for three or four dollars. A little bottle of
perfume
costs fifty dollars. It has to be name brand, Estée Lauder. I won’t use that junk.” He has an irritating habit of speaking for her, and interrupting her, and bringing her food—cakes and cookies and plates of cheese—when he knows damn well she wants to lose ten pounds. He calls her—
all
women, really—“dame” and “pussycat.” Worse, his romantic technique lacks preamble and subtlety. No caressing of her arm, no whispering in her ear the words she’s heard all her life: You’re the prettiest girl in the room. It seems he has fourteen hands, clutching her arm and grabbing at her neck, and when he kisses her his mouth lands heavy on hers, as if it dropped from stories above. She calls him The Wolf.

Herman won’t hear any of it. The thing is, even if he were a young man, he wouldn’t marry Margot. He takes her to City Island for dinner, and all she does is complain they never go anywhere else. During a trip to Las Vegas he buys her a necklace from a shop at Caesar’s Palace. “I don’t like it,” she says, her lips (
but God, those lips!
) sputtering in disgust. “If you gave me a hundred dollars I wouldn’t wear it.” She is difficult and contrary. She has her own ideas. She won’t listen to him or deviate from her structured but nonsensical path. Not wife material, but she’s the kind of dame he’d “have a fling with,” that’s for sure, and as he pays more visits to apartment 12H he dares himself to go further and further, both old enough to know better and too old to care.

Margot reminds herself that comparisons do no good, that, at her age, the now never quite equals the then. Yet she can’t help but think of Bill, her first and only husband. They met in 1938, the winter after she turned twenty, when she and a girlfriend took a train from Manhattan to the Bronx for a party. Her girlfriend whirled off into the crowd, and Margot noticed a tall, thin man with a glorious head of hair, thick and black as her own. He sat alone on a piano stool, taking up only half, as if he’d been expecting her. She approached him, bold and brazen, and said, “Is this other half being occupied?” and sat down before he had time to answer.

They eloped two years later, on New Year’s Eve. She wore a sleek black satin dress embroidered with white gardenias, and Bill took her on a honeymoon to Lakewood, New Jersey. They checked into a motel, the first one Margot had ever been inside, and rented a room. A heater cackled and hissed from one corner and a jukebox loomed in the other. Bill told her she deserved romantic music and dropped a quarter in the slot; somehow, Bill’s selection was thwarted in favor of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” They laughed and he carried her to the bed, lowering her by inches, with excruciating care. All night long the heater belched a sooty gray mist that blackened the sheets and coated their bodies, and they didn’t notice till morning.
My God,
Margot thought,
he’s killing me,
and tucked herself tight and safe inside the pain until she found the sweet, secret pleasure around its edges.

She holed up in that spot Bill made especially for her for fifty-six long years. Every night, as soon as the kids were put to bed, he pulled her back there. When her sister visited and slept in their bed because they had no place else to offer her, Bill didn’t care; he reached for Margot anyway, laughed when she closed her mouth against his kisses and returned his hands to his sides. Toward the end, when he smoked nearly all of his insides away, he still had the strength to want her. She’ll never forget, helping him up the stairs after surgery, not five minutes home from the hospital, and there Bill was, yanking at her skirt and pulling at her buttons. “He was quite a lover,” she says, and she never had anyone to compare him to, until now, until Herman.

It’s funny, Herman thinks, how Margot is a precise amalgamation of his two wives. The first, Yetta, was stunning, but ornery and temperamental. He had to see the movies she wanted to see, eat only at her chosen restaurants. She refused to help him with his department store in the Bronx, where he worked ten hours a day, seven days a week. He realized, during the thirty-five years of his marriage, that he didn’t exactly hate her, but he certainly didn’t like her. What he did was grow used to her, tolerate her for the sake of their three children. When he retired in 1968 they moved to Miami, and six months later she was dead—“female trouble,” he says, back when you couldn’t detect it.

He met a widow, Min, who lived a few doors away. They began taking nightly walks on the beach, holding hands. She made him his favorite breakfast, lox and eggs, and told him any movie he wanted to see was fine by her. She was a dancer, with the same legs now that she had as a kid; she kept that figure until the day she died. She intuited his thoughts almost before he had them, acted before his body gathered the nerve. One night they were in her house watching TV. He leaned in to kiss her, looped his arm around the curve of her shoulder. Abruptly she stood, and he lost his grasp. She pulled him up, facing him, walking backward to her room, and at the click of the door she revealed herself, piece by piece, the soft rasp of her skirt hitting her blouse hitting her bra the only sounds in the room. Every part of his mind shut down, from the sophisticated to the puerile, and he could not generate one thought that his body might hear and obey. It remained wholly still, trapped inside itself, unable even to tremble. She looked at him; he looked down at himself. The room bulged with his failure. “Don’t worry, Herman,” she said. “We have time.”

Is it crazy—even dangerous—to feel like a kid again, to be as thrilled and terrified as he was his very first time? Here is Margot, sweet, sassy Margot, finally giving in to his granite kisses and lurching embrace, moving, ever so slowly, cautiously, from the matching club chairs to her bed, the sleek ceramic cats perched atop her armoire keeping curious watch, and all he can think about is what happened nearly eighty years ago, back in 1930, when he was seventeen and foolish and decided, one summer night, to take a train from the Bronx to somewhere in New Jersey. There were five of them, Herman and four of his best friends, and they walked close in a pack, taking and giving one another’s heat, reciting aloud the street names, counting down the house numbers. There it was, and the door opened, unleashing delicate fronds of smoke and the metallic scent of sweat. A girl beckoned—she couldn’t have been much older than he—and he followed the pendulum taunt of her rear as she climbed the stairs. A click of the door, the rasp of piling material, and a voice scything through the quiet: “One dollar,” she said, and his fingers shook when they scraped her palm. “I got on top of her,” he remembers, “and I was so excited, instead of going in her, I came outside of her, all over her.” The girl hoisted herself to her elbows. “Give me another dollar,” she said, “and I’ll give you the best you ever had.” Couldn’t she tell, he thought, that he’d never had
any
? He surrendered another dollar, and it happened all over again. Sorry, no refund. Next time, he stayed in Manhattan, visiting a whorehouse on West Seventy-ninth Street, and got a blow job instead.

So now here’s a truth it will always take a lifetime to discover: your last time is no easier than your first. Margot is yielding to him, casting off her blazer, stepping out of her slacks, kicking her orthopedic stilettos across the floor. He does what she likes best, and caresses her arm, gently, with studied focus, as if that were the only part of herself she cared to offer. His dentures graze her neck. He finds her lips, whisks his tongue inside her mouth. They tousle in slow motion; her artfully arranged hair doesn’t move. His hands know well what they’re doing, “touching her breasts, touching her behind, maybe even going a little further than that.” His fingers move with experience, now, with precision, and he feels that she’s “enjoying it, enjoying it very much”—a passionate girl, his Margot, in all senses of the word, for better or for worse. It is hard to get hard now, there’s no other way to say it, but his body knows the stakes and anticipates the reward: a few minutes, maybe, a timid climax with scant evidence, the pale but prideful hope that he will earn his place in her memories. Something melancholy in the capture, at once a brilliant awakening and irrevocable loss. She lets him find her and there is nothing between them now, not the slim, uncertain wedge of their futures, nor the long tangled sprawl of their pasts.

Somewhere I Have Never Traveled, Gladly

Meghan O’Rourke

W
hen I was sixteen, my mother sat me down at the dining room table and told me, “You can never do anything this year as bad as what I did when I was sixteen.” She said it as a warning, leaning forward in her chair. I had been cutting classes, smoking cigarettes (she found a pack in my coat pocket), and developing a “bad attitude.”

I took the warning as a challenge. How could I not?

I was a junior in high school, and I was unhappy because I had been dumped the previous summer by an older student—“seventeen going on thirty,” as my father would moodily describe him—with whom I had decided not to have sex. (I was a young fifteen.) A month later, he had sex with another girl. A month after that, he broke up with me, shruggingly saying he was not that into girls at the moment. Now I was recklessly trying to achieve some level of sophistication, a quality I had been indifferent to a year ago. Beset by existential dread, I took acid one day, wearing my mother’s old halter-top summer dress. With my best friend, I read Sylvia Plath and drank bitters and lemonade; on a lonely afternoon, I went to an East Village gallery to look at bleached-out photographs of Jesus figures crucified in suburban backyards. Once, coming home high from Roosevelt Island in the middle of the night, I got lost on a subway and wandered through the fluorescent cars, consulting my watch as if it would help. Would I ever get home again?