A Round-Heeled Woman (16 page)

What the heck is going on? Am I that different from the women he must have known? Then I remember his description during our phone conversation of New York women with their sharp-cornered baggage and know that this elegant man has been knocked about more than once. I like him, solvent or not. “Tell me about your work,” I say. “When will you retire?” The Norwegians at the next table have been replaced by the French. I relax; the French are used to outrageous behavior.

Sidney puts two hands around the coffee cup—a good thing, too, all that rubbing of my wrists, the inside especially, has got me sort of very warm; apparently the pimple is not putting him off. “I will retire in a year or two. I'll probably have to.” He looks at me, knowing I retired years before, and says, “What do people do when they retire? I have no idea.”

“They travel,” I answer. “They see the world. You could do that.”

“I am not fond of flying,” he says.

“You're afraid of flying?”

“Not afraid, just anxious.” And then, in tones so urgent, he says, “You've got to come to New York, you've got to live here. Move closer.”

I do and so do my breasts and so do his hands and it feels very, very good. “Stop now,” I beg. “Please, a little conversation.” I am melting, I will soon be a pool of squish. Surely, the French are totally comfortable with this public passion, but maybe not. Is that Gallic tittering I hear? Do I care?

“Of course.” He smooths his hands down over my breasts and returns to stroking the insides of my wrists. I am feeling faint. It is so hot in here and stuffy. Sidney says in a very normal, very matter-of-fact voice, “Tell me how things are going with the man you're staying with, this Robert.”

I know that if I cry the tears will drip into my open pimple and it will hurt; worse, it could start bleeding again. “Well, there are a few problems,” I say and continue to twist my napkin into a rope.

“Is the problem personal?” I am silent, afraid of crying. He persists: “Do you think the problem has to do with you or is it . . . mechanical?”

“Physiological,” I answer, not sure of anything.

“So why are you crying?” he asks. “Here, give me your hands.”

“Well, Sidney,” I say, “there is a certain level of frustration I bring to this table.”

“Me, too,” he says. “Come, I'll show you a secret entrance, the Morgan family's entrance. And then I'm going to kiss you.”

I follow dutifully as Sidney winds around the gift shop and out a rear door onto a small porch overlooking the street. It is early evening and the rain pounds the pavement. From behind me, Sidney puts his arms around me and cradles my breasts in his hands. “What do you think of New York?”

I look across the street at the huge apartment building whose many, many windows look down on us. “Look up there, Sidney . . .”

“I'd be willing to bet that not one person in that building is looking at us.” He takes my hand and guides it to his fly. “Look what has happened,” he says. “Feel what you've done to me.”

I do that, too. I am a woman after all. I, just me, have inspired this truly impressive erection and I swell with pride.

“Touch it with your hand,” he says. “Just a little, so I can remember what your hand feels like.” I feel the rough texture of his jacket, the soft wool of his shirt, and beneath everything the part of him I have brought to life. It feels good just like everything else about this man. I remove my hand. All those windows across the street, all those people peering out from behind the blinds, the curtains, the shutters. My grandmother, having left the café, is in there somewhere.

“Tell me what you'll do,” he urges. He struggles with his zipper. And you know what? I am so relieved, so goddamn happy to be wanted, I don't care if the whole city of New York hears what I'm about to do and say. I place my hand on his bare-naked penis, which throbs like what I read somewhere a red-hot prick is supposed to do.

“I will start at the tip,” I say, “and suck just a bit, then move my mouth down you and twist you gently with my tongue.”

“You will?” The whole East Side must hear his breathing.

I am not turned on by this erection, sizable though it is. But I am turned on by being able to turn him on. I say, “And you know what I will do then?”

“What?” he groans.

“I will open my throat and take all of you. I can do that.”

“Really?”

“But now I must go.” I remove my hand. I could get to be a real bitch if I kept at it. But Sidney will never let me. I will discover that he is too sweet, too loving, to make me into anything but my nicest self. Here, though, now, with Robert far away on the Upper West Side, Robert who said he loved me, then, no, he valued my friendship, then, “Perhaps we could just cuddle,” finally not even that, here was this stranger named Sidney, who thought I was desirable, who couldn't keep his hands off me, who didn't mind at all looking at me and my pimple and my big, sweaty sweater. With Robert, it just had to be that the sight of me was more than he could bear. Sidney was bearing the sight of me just fine.

“See that awning?” says Sidney, pointing to a building on the next block. “That's where I live.” He pulls me close.

“Come,” I say. “I'll walk you home.”

He puts his hand on the back of my neck and with the other holds the umbrella over us. “You're not going to sleep with me, are you?”

No, I'm not. And I'm not sure why. Robert, maybe, difficult as he was making life for me. Maybe it was Sidney's eagerness, so immediate and urgent. “No,” I say. “Not now.”

Is it my imagination or does he seem ever so slightly relieved? “Oh, well,” he says, “we'd probably drive each other crazy.” He opens my coat, slides his hand around my waist, and pulls me close. “But if you lived in New York, oh, how I would pursue you.” We stop in front of Sidney's building. “This is it.”

I look into the cool, ivory interior of the lobby, just the right floral piece on the counter, just a single painting, large but not too large, on the wall. It looks like a place where a notably solvent person might live.

He stands still on the sidewalk and looks up at the vacant windows of his building. He says once again, “My apartment is being painted. Otherwise . . .”

Something is odd here. Impassioned as he has become over the long afternoon, surely he would not let a little paint interfere with what would normally come next. But something secret is going on inside this quite wonderful man. I am guessing that someone lives in his apartment with him. Whatever the reason, he is not going to ask me to come in, and even if he did, I wouldn't go. Too much too soon, too mysterious, maybe even too solvent. “Sidney,” I say, “will you get me a cab?” As the cab draws to the curb, I turn to him, take his face in my hands, and kiss him on his beautiful mouth.

“Will you come to New York again?”

“Yes. And when I do, I am going to sleep with you.”

“Next time.”

“Yes.”

Next time I do.

MY WOMANHOOD RESTORED, I return to Robert's apartment, where I watch him continue to fall out of love with me. It will be one of the most painful experiences of my life. On this visit, Robert is dyspeptic; his back and leg are not so painful, but indigestion plagues him. Viagra especially makes him queasy, and since his libido has taken a hike, no sense in popping the pill. “The questions keep changing as one ages,” he tells me. I don't agree. I want to say to him but don't—I've got a whole week of this friendship left—Robert, you are preoccupied with aging, with answering the questions you claim change as one ages. But there is only one question and it never changes: How will I live with the life force? Will I adapt? Deny it? Repress it? Ignore it? Oh, Robert, I want to say to him, I am the life force, and you don't even know it. You are a fool to let me go.

New York is a wonderful place to cry. In the park, along the river, behind the apartment building, all over town, I cry and no one notices. I must thank Robert, whom I have been careful not to let see me cry. New York is not a small gift. The tears come with fatigue brought on by heartbreak. They will never stop.

But I have decided something. I have decided to do what I have been good at my whole life—being a friend. I know how to do that and, as I wrote in my journal, “All of my usefulnesses, farmed out to groups, individuals, causes, have found a home in Robert.” So get on board, Jane. Don't fuck up a free place to stay in New York.

Thank god for March Madness. Sports is my friendship métier. I learned from my mother and from my dad. Near the end of my father's life, he and I found a way to talk. We talked about NCAA basketball and professional football. My sister took over golf and tennis—she actually played them—so my father lived a full conversational life in the years before his death. Of course, my sister and I were not the chosen two; my father much preferred my brothers, but they had preceded my father in death, as had our mother, who was the queen of sports on and off the field. My father's third wife participated actively in buying and redecorating houses, a hobby that left my father confused and broke. So my sister and I won by default: we had been brought up well, that is, with a speaking knowledge and appreciation of all things sport and, most important at this stage of our father's life, we were alive.

My ex-husband had done me a tremendous favor, early in our relationship, by introducing me to the pleasure of male asses. He was a longtime and ardent football fan. In 1963 the San Francisco 49ers played in Kezar Stadium, a small stadium with a seating capacity of thirty thousand or so. Games were not sold out; one did not have to inherit the right to buy a license for ten thousand dollars in order to buy season tickets for even more; back then, the end zone was open and available right up to and after kickoff, and seats were cheap. Tom and I went often. Now, I knew the fundamentals: I knew about downs and running backs as opposed to quarterbacks and kickers. But I didn't know the fun stuff. The fun stuff was how the players, depending on the position they played, were built. Tom taught me. “Look at the players wearing numbers in the twenties,” he said, handing me his binoculars. “They're running backs. Look at their butts.” I did. “Now,” he said, “look for the guys wearing numbers in the eighties. Those are wide receivers. Look at their backsides. What do you see?”

I saw buns of steel, like cannonballs, on the running backs, and long legs and flanks on the receivers, small-butted, relatively speaking. They were all beautiful. I had never, ever looked at a male body clothed or otherwise. Always, I turned away, from Jack, from Tom, respecting, I thought, their privacy. In truth, I was scared. I wanted to make love with the lights off, the curtains drawn; and if, by some chance, we made love during the day, with the sun shining in through the windows, I did so with my eyes shut. That way, they couldn't see me either, a good thing because my body was so ugly, not that I had ever looked at it. Once, when I was very young, I walked past the open door of my father's dressing room where he stood naked. He covered himself quickly; and it seemed to me he looked not only surprised but embarrassed, if not ashamed. So I had brought that modesty, that ignorance of the body, along with me, too. But gee! Here in Kezar, the man I would decide to marry was not only giving me permission to stare at men's bodies, clothed in uniforms that accented them, but had given me a pair of binoculars to do it with. My interest in football remains to this day.

I grew up with basketball. My mother played it—center on an all-star team, what else—and in rural Ohio, so close to Indiana, high school basketball was king. At Michigan, I went to all the football games, as many basketball games as possible, hockey, etc., etc. And now, here in New York, my hobby was paying off. Big time.

Occasionally, Robert and I went out to the movies, dinner, but mainly we watched March Madness. Michigan's team out of the running, Robert was a Duke fan. (The following year, alone, I would watch Duke win.) I knew enough of Duke's history and about the game in general to make me a worthy companion, so with me and a little scotch, which Robert began to drink around noon, this tournament would be great.

My main friendship talent is knowing when to shut up. Over the many years of my life, I learned, in the company of men, when to be silent (most of the time), when to comment (“He should take Battier out now”), and when to jump up and down (not often). Men believe women don't know anything about sports and don't appreciate sports, and have no business hanging around sports and sports-minded men during sporting events. This is as true in the twenty-first century as it was in the fifties, no matter how many female sportswriters have fought and won the locker-room battle. One would think that men and women would share comfortably their passion for sport, and from the outside it might look as if that were what was going on— girls and boys, men and women, sharing the couch, the stadium seats. “Do you think Williams will stay in college or jump to the NBA?” Now, that question could come from either gender, and will be speculated on by the other. However, when talk gets technical—man-to-man versus zone, change-up pitch, that kind of stuff—boys turn to boys and men to men. So, ladies, practice restraint. Be cool. And yet, I will remember forever when, in 1963, at Kezar Stadium, in the end zone (the best place to sit— you can watch the plays open up) with Tom, I was livid over the play-calling of San Francisco's quarterback, John Brodie. (Those were the days when coaches shut up, except for Paul Brown of the Cleveland Browns; when quarterbacks called their own plays.) “Why is he calling a pass on second down?” I stamped my feet and cursed mildly. I continued to critique Mr. Brodie, who apparently heard nothing I said, because the 49ers continued to lose. Finally, somewhere during the fourth quarter, a man in the row in front of us turned around and said to Tom, “Boy, I wish my wife knew that much about football.” It was a compliment I will take to my grave.