Cherries In The Snow (3 page)

I got off work early the night of the concert and changed
clothes in the ladies' room before making the slog to the stadium. No one would come with me. No one my age gets Bruce Springsteen. I tried to get my dad to fly over and he thought about it – he researched all kinds of Internet deals – but in the end he was too busy. I bought him a Springsteen key ring from the souvenir stand and planned to e-mail him a full report as soon as I got home, but then Isaac got in the way.

Why Isaac? Perhaps the idea of meeting your lover at a Springsteen concert was simply too intoxicating for me to pass up. What a story to tell your grandkids. Except Isaac told me he didn't want children. And though I never said it out loud, I knew we weren't in love. And that we had no future together. How could I be so sure? His stomach slapping against me when we did it. Let's get this straight. It wasn't the weight. It was the noise. He never fucking shut up, not even in the sack.

Springsteen looks like he only works out onstage, which is the ideal. When straight men primp, I feel so embarrassed for them, I lose my erection immediately. Isaac worked out with a personal trainer twice a week, but he never lost his tummy. Sweaty against me when we, ugh, made love. Cringe. Really, really cringe, like origami folded up into a million corners. C'mon: younger girl, older man. Successful writer shagging a girl who yearns to be a writer. I could see how it looked, and how it looked was the truth. There wasn't a whole lot of depth. I never met his friends. He never met mine. But the other truth was, I found being with a great writer exciting.

I'd read his column almost every week before I met him. In the gym, between credit cards and scowls. He's a hell of a writer. I'd look at his unimpressive, white dick and think, ‘Hey, this is a genius penis.' And me to him? Well, he was bathing in the blood of a young virgin. No, that makes the relationship sound dramatic, which it really wasn't. He was bathing in the saliva of a young virgin.

I thought about breaking up with him a number of times. But before I did, I had a secret wish that gnawed at me each week. I wanted to be in his writing. To influence it somehow. Just a name check like in a rap song. Big up to Brooklyn! One love to Biggie Smalls! But in Isaac's language, so that one of his sentences began: ‘In the words of an upcoming young writer Sadie Steinberg …' or ‘To borrow a phrase from my friend Sadie Steinberg …' I knew I was being crazy, but there you go, that was my dream.

When he called Al Gore a douche bag live on air, I thought, Well, is there a message in that? By saying ‘Al Gore is a douche bag,' does he actually mean ‘Sadie Steinberg, you are the smartest'? I didn't love him, but I wanted him to love me. It's hard to find too many secret love signals in an editorial on Iraq, although I tried. I also didn't like sharing attention, not ever, not with other children, not with other women, and especially not with the world. It was easier when I was with an actor or a comedian, someone flip, as it didn't matter, their silly world of velvet ropes and borrowed suits. But Isaac's world did matter: the real world, adult as could be, other adults looking to him for guidance, reading his writing for signs. I felt competitive with the world. The worse the state of the world came to, the more dazzling Isaac's columns became, the less time he had for me, the more makeup I wore. The day war broke out I went to my bathroom and put on everything – primer, foundation, blush, brow gel, eyeliner, mascara, gloss – before I called him.

‘I'm busy. I'm on deadline.'

‘I bought a new lipstick.'

‘Uh …' He hung up, the typewriter in the background an affectation I found affecting.

My dad wanted me to be a writer. His mom said he had to be an accountant and, being from a generation of assimilated
Jews grateful to be accepted and taught never to rock the boat, that's what he became. She and my grandfather died of cancer and a heart attack, respectively, a few months apart the year my father turned twenty-four. And he was stuck. So he wanted me to be a writer, to be as far from his constricted office life as possible. I wrote great stories when I was a kid, really advanced. And then I just stopped.

I told Isaac all the ideas I had for my novel, or a short-story collection, or a biography of Rasputin, or, somedays, a biography of John Travolta. ‘It's going to be this and this and this,' I said excitedly, literally shaking with anticipation at the blockbuster I was going to write. He'd kiss me and say, ‘That's a sensational idea! Do you want me to hook you up with my literary agent?' ‘Uh, well, I haven't written any of it down quite yet,' I'd say, trying to distract him by placing myself on his lap. ‘So do it,' he'd say, hugging me close, ‘and we'll send it over.'

Isaac and I did grown-up things together, drank grown-up coffee, had grown-up sex, talked about art and poetry and, of course, politics. He lectured at Ivy League schools. I dropped out of college after two semesters, but I've read two books a week ever since I was five. I waited for him to call and come to see me, but Isaac's a very busy man. He could get away only now and then, and even then it was only for the night and he would catch a 6 A.M. flight back to Washington.

Maybe it was that, like my father, Isaac's a Springsteen fan, for I see Springsteen as a lesson in how to be a good person. You swap your supermodel starter marriage for a Jersey girl, you hang out with the same bunch of friends for thirty years, you subvert the mainstream by becoming an icon of Americana while championing the rights of the workingman. The lovemaking technique of a Springsteen fan should mirror Springsteen's career pattern: introspective, then
bombastic, then introspective. Springsteen love should be wild and all-consuming, end-of-the-world-is-nigh passion. But that's not what we had. It wasn't bombastic – Isaac saved the bombast for his television interviews – and it was hardly introspective (although he sometimes cried when he saw the American flag). What we had, what he could give me, was well-choreographed cheerleading.

‘You can do it, kid!' ‘You're so smart. You're brilliant. Just write it down and you'll have a hit novel in no time.' ‘How's my little genius?'

Isaac won't smoke pot, but he does take pills. He says he sometimes has to have them to work through the night. When he's been on a binge, he often looks at the American flag framed above his desk and barks, ‘Born in the USA!,' his fist pumped in the air.

‘Okay, first of all' – I sigh – ‘you were born in Belgium.' Damn army brat. ‘Secondly, are you listening to the same Springsteen I'm listening to? He doesn't love the America you love. He hates it. Do you get it?'

‘Don't ask me if I get it. I get it just fine. I've been getting it for decades!'

That escalated into the biggest fight we ever had. I wanted to smash that framed American flag over his big fat head. But I didn't. I went to the bathroom and punched the wall instead. Then I sat on the floor and tried to calm down until I could remember all the good things he'd done for me.

I should tell you at this point that Isaac is a Republican. He says he's an independent. But he's freaking Republican. And he's Jewish. Jewish and black Republicans: What the hell is that about?

Perhaps being with a right-winger was the only way I could rebel. After all, I grew up with parents who said, ‘Smoke
pot at home so we'll know you're safe.' My father, the stoned accountant.

Isaac is an avid skier and it was always a bone of contention that I wouldn't go with him. I have maneuvered my life so that I only ever do things I am good at. It is a small life but a pleasing one. I have only three high school certificates – French, Spanish, and Russian – but all are A's. I walked out of every other exam and locked myself in the toilet or hid in the nurse's office, feigning stomach cramps. I am good at feigning stomach cramps. I never thought of excuses as cowardly get-outs, rather as opportunities to utilize my imagination and experiment with words.

‘Jews shouldn't ski,' I said, ‘or ride horses. Cossacks ride horses. And skis are basically thin, wooden horses.'

‘You're weird,' he answered, and went upstate for another weekend without me. He'd come back, exhilarated and tan.

‘You would have loved it!' he said, but I knew that I wouldn't have. It was only when he intimated it might be time for him to move on that I vowed to ski him right off that mountain despite the fact that not only had I never skied before, the last sport I had done was climbing halfway up the ropes in gym class when I was eleven. If I could triumph on the ski slopes, I could triumph over Isaac too. It was time for him to move on and time for me also, but I just kept seeing myself at age eleven inching farther and farther up that rope, willing the kid me on, seeing myself make it to the top. Forgetting that once you get to the top of the rope, you can only hold on for so long before you have to come down again. Once you are naked, there is nothing left to do but put your clothes back on.

So on my twenty-fourth birthday, we made the drive to Vermont. It hadn't snowed that week, and when we arrived at Killington, the run was icy. Still, Isaac wouldn't let me start on the bunny slopes. He insisted that I was better off throwing
myself off the deep end. Midway down the mountain, I sank onto the snow and started to cry.

‘I hate this. I hate you.'

‘Stand up,' he said, ‘you can do it.'

‘Fuck off!' I shouted as a three-year-old on skis whizzed by. ‘I hate you,' I reiterated, and realized for the first time, the sensation draining from my toes, that it was really true. I had no more love. It had gone off, like milk.

‘There's no other way to get home,' he said, ignoring my revelation, ‘except to ski to the bottom.'

‘Shut up,' I answered. That's what I used to say when I was a kid to things I didn't like. I'd take three bites of my carrots, then look at them and shout, ‘Shut up!' When Dad tried to teach me how to ride a bike, I was so frustrated, I knocked the bike over and spat on it, kicking its training wheels and yelling, ‘Shut up!'

I thought that being a woman meant knowing how to make love and breakfast. But I wasn't a grown-up. I couldn't be with Isaac. How could I? He was twenty years older than me. How could I ever be a grown-up if I stayed with him? I saw that we might have looked like father and daughter. ‘I have to get out of here.'

Standing shakily, I began to inch my way back up the mountain, tiny sideways pigeon steps. I kept at it for twenty minutes, though I was sweating so hard, I could feel it making its way through the supposedly impenetrable Gore-Tex of my ski suit, the sweat as determined as I to go the wrong way. Just then I was distracted by another whizzing three-year-old, this one zipped into an astonishing pink Barbie snowsuit.

‘Wow,' I said, forgetting my anger and humiliation, ‘what a beautiful outfit.' I whipped my head around to follow the pink blur down the mountain. In my head I heard ‘Follow the little girl!' as though she were a moving yellow brick road.

I followed her and I was perfect, as good as she, two elegant free spirits, the only people on the mountain. But near the bottom, somehow, the little girl and I became entangled. She was fine, not a scratch on her resilient little limbs. Not me. I didn't want to admit I was hurt. I held it in all the way back to New York, as though it was pee, as though when I finally got to go it would be worth the wait. Most masochistic thing I've ever done. Isaac played Abba all the way home and I really thought I might die. Last thing you want when you have a broken toe is a bunch of bearded Swedes sharing your space.

‘Seee that girl,' trilled Isaac, ‘watch that scene, digging the dancing queen!'

‘Enough!' I screamed.

‘Of what?' asked Isaac, alarmed.

Of this pain. Of acting tough. Of this relationship. Half a love, twice a month. Of Swedes with beards.

‘Enough of what, baby?'

I stayed silent. He turned up the music. Through gritted teeth, I reached into my purse and applied my Cherries in the Snow. Skin had torn off my sole. I tilted the rearview mirror my way. I could feel blood wetting my sock.

‘Hey, I need that mirror to see where we're going.'

I glared at him and he let it go.

I didn't say anything until we got into Manhattan, when I asked to be driven to the hospital and, as we pulled up to the ER, told him that I never wanted to see him again.

Holly came to the hospital armed with lipstick. Seeing me between the white hospital sheets with my Cherries in the Snow, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, thank God! You had some. Though this is not what they meant when they thought up the name.'

She was wearing combat fatigues and pink stiletto boots, a yellow T-shirt with Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross on the front. I stared at it, my vision a little fuzzy from the painkillers.

‘EBay. One hundred dollars. Stayed up all night for this. Sadie Steinberg, don't even think about stealing it.'

Her hair was curled. I suspect, despite the hoarse phone call I'd made to her on the hospital phone, that she had stopped to set it in rollers before she came. Her eyes were kohled to a smoky intensity. Her lips were a high-gloss neutral.

Holly smiled, revealing cute, big horse teeth, and rummaged in her bag, showcasing a small, high ass.

‘Sadie, your skin needs evening out.' And she came toward my metal bed with a powder-dipped brush.

‘I feel weird lying here while you even me out. You're making me feel like I'm dead.'

A handsome young doctor with a yarmulke came to take my blood pressure. Holly, who flirts with anything with a backbone, engaged him in chat, little flecks of glitter dancing off her as she laughed. He blushed and crept away sideways like a cheaply animated cartoon.

Holly is a heartbreaking beauty.

‘You need to stop using pencil and start using powder,' clucked Holly.

Holly took out a new thin brush and swept my browbone black, being careful not to touch my elevated ankle. She looked at the thick white bandaging. ‘You know, this could be kind of a Comme Des Garcons thing you got here. Very challenging.'