A Round-Heeled Woman (26 page)

On that cold and blustery March day, our very first meeting in the flesh, I have a more immediate question: “Here is something that has puzzled me since arriving in New York. People seem to look at me, and I don't think I'm making this up.” Sidney has said, “Of course, they would be aware of you. New Yorkers are always alert to the possibility of being mugged or mishandled by strangers.” Robert has answered, “Are you certain?” Not long after, Dr. V will answer with, “People recognize the libido when they see it.”

Graham says, “Appearance, how one dresses, is the only way New Yorkers can announce our status. We don't have cars or houses, so it is dress that tells others where we live on the ladder of class. I am,” he adds, “a cynic.”

“You are not old enough to be a cynic.”

“All right, then, I am a disappointed romantic. Besides, all my friends tell me I have an old soul.”

Back on Wall Street, at Graham's escalator, I hold out my hand and—well, how does one thank someone for a perfectly lovely time?—I lean forward and kiss him lightly on the cheek. It is clear from his grin that Graham has all his own teeth. “Write to me,” I say. “I will,” he answers.

Over the short time we had been together, Graham had gotten older, and I had gotten younger. By the time he returned to his skyscraper we were just about the same age.

“ARE YOU LISTENING, Dr. V?” I ask, slip-sliding away on his genuine leather couch like Freud's. Dr. V has mastered several kinds of silence: one in which he is totting up my bill, another in which he is restraining himself from throttling me, and this one in which he is intent upon what I am saying. I go on. “Graham is an absolutely wonderful . . .” I cannot say “man.” I cannot say “boy.” I burst out finally “. . . person. But he is thirty-three years younger than I am, he's thirty-three, for god's sake, this is ridiculous. And not only that”—here comes the confession—“I think he might want to sleep with me.” This cannot be, of course, but I have learned here on this venerable couch to say that which comes to mind.

Dr. V speaks: “Do you like Graham?”

“Yes.”

“Does he like you?”

“Yes.”

“Then I fail to see the problem.”

“Did you hear me? He might want to sleep with me.”

“As I said . . .”

“Okay, okay.”

THAT WAS THEN. This is now. That was March, this is May.

I have designated myself to bring food for a picnic. Graham will bring dessert. Or, well, screw this, shall we just get to the hotel? Shall we just get to the part where Graham makes love to me?

Out in the harbor, the white sails of boats skim along the surface of the blue water. The grass has never been this green. Today we are having a picnic, a French picnic,
déjeuner sur l'herbe.
To that end, Graham is wearing a beret, a black turtleneck, and Basque sheepherders' socks. I try not to look at the middle part of him, and fasten my eyes on his socks. “Ah, yes,” he says, “I see you're interested in my socks. They're quite long.” He pulls up his pant legs to show me just how long they are and how far up they go. The photograph of his legs in Spain didn't begin to do them justice. As he pours wine into my glass, water into his, he says, “You're fun to write to.” I mutter something about the pleasure being mutual and he says, “How is your visit going?” On every meeting, Graham will ask me this question and every time the tears will crowd into my eyes, a simple matter of overflowing when a person is nice to me and the fact that my visits to New York include hope, despair, exhilaration, and frustration, along with a soupçon of trauma relieved by ecstasy. I sniffle. I can barely look at him. Graham has been to Majorca on business and is a lovely color. He just gets better-looking all the time, and I look like hell, no makeup, why bother to hide anything from this young man. I start to blubber. Graham hands me his handkerchief. “My grandfather always carries three, but I find one quite sufficient.” His grandfather! My god, I'm probably older than his grandfather! I don't care.

When Graham is not dissecting me with his eyes, when he looks off into the distance and talks about Nabokov and butterflies, I look at him, at his long, oval, currently light-brown face, his very red hair swirling around his head like a halo, his very straight nose, his perfectly molded lips, his long and slender neck, and wonder what goes on in his mind when he thinks about me. What kind of mental and emotional and aesthetic gyrations has he put himself through that would allow him to want to spend time with me? How has he managed to free himself from the fact that I am old and look it and that he is young and looks it, that he is beautiful and I'm not? How on earth has he brought himself around to the notion that he wants to sleep with me? Because he does. Every so often, I peek at him and catch him looking at me in a different way. His face gets lustful. It looks a little bit like those paintings where there is a satyr lurking behind a temple. I am totally embarrassed when I see it and terribly afraid and utterly excited.

His kindness undoes me. I weep into Graham's handkerchief my woeful tale of maybe being a prostitute because Sidney won't kiss me and how Robert said he bought Viagra but where is it, and about John who might be dead. At the end of my tale, I blow my nose—oh god, I can't hand this dirty handkerchief back to him—and he takes the handkerchief from me and says, “I have to see someone at least twice before I believe in their existence. You definitely exist.” He brings from somewhere two madeleines.
“Un petit gâteau, madame.”

On the walk back to his office, he tucks my arm in his and says, “I'm free weekends, after work, for lunch.”

What do I do now?

Fate intervenes. Caroline calls to announce her early return from Malaysia on the following day. She has the flu. She is miserable. We agree she will be fine with orange juice and a lot of sleep. She puts up no fight at all when I suggest moving to a hotel. That's the plan. That night I don't get exactly drunk, just woozy enough on wine to call Graham for a bit of conversation. I ask, “Do you think Fred Astaire ever had sex?” Graham answers, “Occasionally. But he never enjoyed it.” And he asks me, “Have you ever slapped anyone in the face?” No, I have to say, “though once I pushed a plate of potato salad into a boy's face.” “That's even better,” he says. And then I invite him to the hotel. I can't believe I did that, but hell, nobody's touching me; I might as well be back in California instead of here, where promises are made and broken hourly. Besides, how can I refuse what might well turn out to be an extraordinary interlude with a man whose ass, so far clothed yet nonetheless terrific, promises delights of the highest order. Graham had written in the very beginning,
“This could be a lot of fun.”
So far he had been right. What if I didn't do it? What if I missed it? What if I got to be ninety and all I could think of was what a fool I had been in my youth? At the end of our phone conversation, I say, “Graham, my body is every inch my age. I am sixty-six years old all over.”

“I find you interesting on many different levels. I'll see you tomorrow between six-thirty and seven.”

I check into my hotel three hours early, plenty of time to pop a twenty-ounce can of Sapporo to freshen my breath. Graham does not drink, nor did he ever do drugs. “I have no inhibitions,” he explained, “so nothing to release.” If I try really hard—so far nothing seems to have discouraged him: not my tears, not my wine-swilling, not the lines in my face, spots on my hands, yellow on my teeth, bifocals on my eyes—maybe this Japanese beer breath will scare him off. If not, never fear. I remain in possession of my secret and most powerful deterrent: my body.

At 6:45 there is a knock at the door. I open it and Graham hands me a parental frown and the room key, which I have left in the outside lock.

In my hotel room there is a bed and a chair and a footstool and over there a desk. I take my place in the chair and knock back a few ounces of Sapporo. Graham pulls the footstool close and sits down facing me, watches me squirm, and says, “What are you afraid of?” His face has that look on it. And I say, “I'm afraid you won't like me. Maybe if we just . . .” I lean forward to just sort of kiss him maybe on the cheek. He leans forward, turning his head so that my lips miss his cheek and land squarely on his mouth. He kisses me back, raises me from the chair, ever so quickly lays me down on the bed, and before I know it my clothes fall off. “You are sexy,” he says.

How did he get naked so fast? On his knees, he straddles me and I gasp. “Oh, my goodness!” He is prodigiously affixed. “I know,” he says, “my hands are small. The old saw about hands being the telltale of a man's intimate parts doesn't apply, does it.” My cervix is in for it this time. “Come here.” I reach for him. He does not fall on me. He does not hurt me ever. Somewhere in the first lovely hour I cry out, “Oh, Graham, this is joyous.” It is as if he listened carefully to my woes and has set about to cure every one of them right here in bed. And then, when it's time, like the gentleman he is, he takes me home. He holds the door open and, at just the right moment, nudges me gently inside. “May I come with you?” he whispers. “Please,” I say, and presently he does.

We are silent for quite some time, a long time for us. Finally, I say, “I know one is not supposed to be grateful, but . . .”

“You're welcome.” He perches on an elbow and looks down at me. “The greatest pleasure for me in making love is giving the other person pleasure.”

I am in bed with a fucking genius. It could be that the only real problem is that this man is too good to be true. If you need proof, listen to this: the light was on the whole time.

We lie in bed and talk and talk and talk. I tell him about my regard for Margaret Fuller. “Tell me about her.” “It's too long,” I protest. “Tell me,” he insists. He lies back onto the pillow, cradles his head in his hands, and listens. In return, he tells me about George Eliot's manuscript at the Morgan. “You must go.” “Tell me about the book you're writing,” I say. He does and then, “Tell me about yours.” He turns on his side toward me and smoothes my hair away from my forehead. “You can't imagine how long it has been since I have had a real conversation.” And then he whispers into my ear, “Shall we take another turn around the park?”

Afterward, Graham says, “I think your book just got a lot more interesting.”

“I'm not a good enough writer for this.” I feel him smile.

“You are cogitative. Tell me what you are thinking.”

“I haven't a thought in my head. It's wonderful.”

“Didn't you know? That's why intellectuals have sex.”

“I'm not an intellectual.”

He laughs. “Oh, yes, you are.”

It is late. Graham says, “Hemingway says the earth moved only three times for him.”

“I lost count.”

NEXT MORNING, I returned to Caroline, a goofy smile on my face, wondering if Graham had gotten to work on time. Caroline was feeling better. Even flu-ridden she was beautiful. She stood at the kitchen sink running hot water over her Steuben wine-glasses. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, her face, free of makeup, shone in all its natural prettiness. She wore a pink and white slip dress and looked like the little girl I had loved all her life. “Were you with Robert last night?” After meeting Robert over brunch, she had pronounced him “a nice man, good-looking.” She could have gone on and said “age appropriate,” which he is, and “safe,” which is what Robert looks like. He can even talk safe. He can make himself seem gentle and kind. He fooled me, too.

Without thinking, something I had gotten very good at, I answered, “I was with Graham.”

Caroline's smile became a grimace; her face paled. “Please, Jane, don't tell me you slept with Graham.”

I didn't have to. Caroline's disgust was visible. She said sarcastically, “So how was it?”

I could have said that it was a one-time thing, that Graham had been drunk, that I had forced him. Hell, I could have lied and said, “Yes, I was with Robert.” What in me, aside from a serious lack of imagination, made me tell the truth? I said, “He is a most generous . . .” Oh shit, now I had done it.

Caroline began to pace up and down the kitchen, wringing the dish towel in her hands as she went. I could feel my throat constrict; I could feel the towel around my neck. “So,” she demanded, “where do you think this is going?” As if it were going anywhere; I could read Caroline's mind, and in it I was a fool and no longer her aunt.

“Well,” I said, “I don't think he's going to take me home to meet his parents.” This did not help. Nobody was laughing.

Caroline's back was to me as she emptied the dishwasher. Suddenly, she whirled on me and said, “And what do you think your son—your thirty-two-year-old son—is going to say about this?”

“Nothing. Not if I brought him up right.”

“Oh, I think he will have plenty to say!” Her voice rose, I wanted to clap my hands over my ears, jesus, I was getting mixed up here, who's old and who's not and who did wrong and who didn't, and I was supposed to feel ashamed and I didn't. Caroline threw the dish towel over the back of the chair and banged on into the living room, kicking the kitchen door as she went. Ouch.

She was not finished. “So,” she called from the living room, “is Graham going to call?” I read her mind again: What's wrong with this Graham person, he won't call, he's got to be as disgusted as I am if he's got any sense at all. Is this guy a pervert, a weirdo? “Jane,” she continued, “he's so young!” She stood at the kitchen door.

“Actually, he's very old.”

Caroline's outrage had reached the corners of her mouth, pulling them down toward her chin. As her mouth went down her voice went up. “Is he smart enough? Aren't you smarter than he is?” The windowpanes rattled.