Crossroads (20 page)

I knew that somehow I was in control of him, that I could have whatever I wanted from him. For the first time in years with Mark, I had the upper hand. When he kissed me, I kissed him back. He took my hands, curled them in his hands, and
kissed me. It was clear to me then that he'd spend the night, that we'd make love, probably for the last time, and that I'd be free to go on. That I'd somehow have the last word. I knew I could make love with him, not so much because I wanted to as because I wanted to see how it felt, the way a doctor pokes an old wound just so that you can let him know you no longer feel a thing.

Mark flicked out the light and kissed me again. His breath smelled of Binaca. He reached under my shirt and undid my bra. I reached under his shirt and felt his fur. He was covered with thick, black fur and in the dark his one continuous eyebrow with the arching points made him look devilish. He took off my shirt and dropped it in front of the sofa. I took off his shirt and dropped it on a chair. He put my bra near his shirt. He kicked off his shoes, and his feet still smelled as if they entered into some chemical reaction with his socks.

He led me toward the bedroom and we dropped the rest of our clothes on the way. When I passed the phone in the hallway, I quietly removed it from the hook, certain that my mother would have some telepathic vision in Illinois and phone to make sure I was all right.

 

Sean probably started trying to call me at around eleven. He called for an hour but the line was busy. Then he asked the operator to see if I was talking. The operator said there was trouble on the line. He lay on his back, thinking. He had an early shoot in the morning but there was something that made him feel he had to get into a cab and come uptown. What if something had happened? He grabbed the keys to my apartment and caught a taxi heading up Sixth Avenue.

“Sixty-eighth and Broadway, fast,” Sean told the driver, who, sensitive to intrigue and desperation, stepped on it. On the way up, he alternated between visions of me, disconsolate, having swallowed Valium with whiskey as a chaser to calm
myself down, to me filled with desire and the recognition that we were right for one another.

I heard the doorbell ring, but the kids on my block often ring the bell and run away. I figured whoever it was would ring again if it was important. I certainly was not expecting company. When I didn't buzz him in, Sean made a snap decision.

In his hand, he was clasping the keys to my apartment, which Zap, with the words “Take care of my sister for me,” had tossed to him the day I threw Zap out. Sean felt it was his duty to let himself in and go upstairs to see if anything was the matter. He knocked gently when he reached my door, and when I didn't answer, he let himself in.

In the light from the hallway, it was easy to see the pile of clothing trailing across the living room floor—the blouse I'd been wearing next to a pair of men's shoes, my bra draped across a man's flannel shirt. He hesitated for a minute, unsure of what he really wanted to do. Then he shut the door quietly behind him, without my ever suspecting that he'd been there at all.

 

I woke early, feeling lightheaded, while Mark slept on, curled in a circle, looking vaguely like a defused bomb. I brought him some coffee. “Why'd you get up so early?” He glanced at the clock.

“Oh, you know, early bird catches the worm.”

“Oh, yeah.” He reached across the bed for me. “I've got a nice little worm for you to catch.”

It amazed me how at another point I would have found that line seductive, but at this moment it had the opposite effect: I was repelled. I got up and walked toward the shower.

“Hey,” Mark called, “where're you going?”

“I've gotta get ready for work,” I called back from the bathroom.

I was enjoying my shower when Mark came and got in with
me. He grabbed the bar of soap and began rubbing me. I surprised both of us when I turned to him and said, “This is my shower. This is my apartment and my shower and you're a guest, so act like one.” In a huff he grabbed a towel and walked back into the bedroom. I washed my hair and conditioned it at my leisure. I rinsed for a long time. When I went back into the bedroom, Mark was sitting on the bed, wrapped in a towel, looking like a lost sheik. He looked up at me, miserably. “What's the matter with you?”

I shrugged. For the first time in months nothing was wrong with me.

“Deborah . . . I think I still love you.”

I felt incredibly victorious as I replied, “Mark, I'm afraid you're a little late.”

When we left the apartment, we shook hands on the street as if we'd met at a singles bar the night before. I walked away from him, knowing he was watching me as I walked toward Times Square, toward the great mural of the man chainsmoking, ready to give Sean a real chance.

When I arrived at work, the secretary handed me a note saying Sean couldn't meet me for dinner that night but he'd phone later to explain. I tried to reach him at home but remembered he had an early shoot, which was why he hadn't wanted me with him the night before. I sat down to work but there was a nervousness in my stomach, and as the day wore on and Sean didn't call, I found that nervousness turning into distress. I wanted to go out to lunch but I was afraid I'd miss his call, so all afternoon I sat at my desk.

I did color work because coloring didn't require much thinking. At three, Sally called and asked me to have dinner with her that night. I said yes, but I didn't really want to see anyone. At around five Sean phoned. He said he'd been running around all day and hadn't had a chance to call. He had to work late that evening, and the next night some friends were
arriving from California. “Well, I'm free tomorrow,” I said.

“Oh, it's just a group of Hollywood people. You'd be bored stiff.”

There was a silence for a moment. “Is anything wrong?” I asked him.

“No, why? I've just got a lot to do.”

I knew something had happened, but the worst I could imagine was that he'd tried to phone and found my line off the hook. “Look, can we meet for a drink tomorrow night before you go to dinner?”

Sean was quiet. “If you want to meet us for dinner,” he said at last, “we're meeting at Hisae's on Astor Place at seven.”

Sally and I went to a Korean restaurant around the corner from our building. She wrote long articles for
Women's Wear
on fashion coordinators while secretly doing research on the history of the labor movement in the garment district for her doctoral dissertation at NYU. Sally used to live with a research scientist who joined a monastic order in upstate New York and shaved his head. She chain-smoked Carltons until our boul-gooki arrived. “Look”—she took a drag—“who knows what makes men tick? I go interview gorgeous women, right, and all through the interview they tell me how they can't get a man to love them. They've got the world at their feet, but love, that's what they can't get.”

I waved smoke out of my face. “You really should quit.” Sally extinguished her sixth Carlton. “I'm not trying to ‘get' someone to love me. I'm just trying to lead a decent life.”

“Oh, yeah.” She waved her hand, clearing smoke away from me. “I tried that too. Forget it. We're children of the sixties.”

Over dessert, Sally said to me, “Why don't you give him a call tonight? You know how men get moody when they're falling in love.”

Convinced that Sean was falling in love, and not out of love,
with me—though the two states sometimes seem remarkably similar—I tried phoning him when I got home. At one in the morning, I gave up. At seven, I called again and this time woke him up. “Listen,” he mumbled, “I went to bed very late. I don't have to go to work until the afternoon. I'll call you at eleven.” I went to the office, and at nine minutes past eleven I phoned him. “I was just going to call you,” he said.

“Well, I don't know that, do I?”

“I said eleven.”

“It's after eleven.”

He sighed. “It's only a few minutes. I was going to call you. I just got up.”

“But I don't know that. I can't know that for sure. You didn't call me when you said you would. You're always on time. You canceled dinner last night. You've never done that before. You always call me when we aren't together at night . . . did you phone me Sunday and you couldn't get through? Is that the problem? Just tell me what's the matter, will you please? Look, this is going to sound crazy, but will you do something for me?”

“What?”

“Will you hang up and call me right back so I can know you would have called me? That sounds crazy, doesn't it? But if we just hang up and you phone me back, then it'll be as if you called and we can start this discussion over again.”

“Debbie, that's crazy.”

I said I knew it was crazy, but would he do it anyway.

When the phone rang two minutes later, Sean said, “Is this better?”

“Much better. So, did you try and get through to me Sunday night?”

He lowered his voice. “Something like that.”

“I took it off the hook.”

He sighed. “I know. Look, let's talk tonight, all right?”

Sean was right about my being bored at dinner. We ate with five of his friends from Los Angeles who knew hundreds of people in common, all of whom had had unbelievable things happen to them since Sean came back east. Someone named Mitzi had gotten a huge part in a pilot but then the funding fell through. Victor got married and, no one could believe it, to a white girl. Sean seemed more surprised by the “girl” than by the “white.” When I let my knee press against him, he moved his leg away. The only person who talked to me all evening was an actress named Roxanne. When I told her I worked in urban renewal, she said, “Oh, you'll like L.A., then. They need a lot of urban renewal out there.”

“L.A.?” I asked.

“Oh,” she murmured, “aren't you going . . .”

Sean cut in. “I'm going to Los Angeles after the first of the year to cut the film and start another.”

“Oh,” I said.

The rest of the meal faded into a kind of haze for me. I drifted into the silence most people think comes from lethargy after eating and watched them chatter away as if they were speaking Kurdish. My high school language entrance exam had been in Kurdish. They gave us fifty words like
exger
or
irdas
and told you they meant horse or leader. The words didn't look anything like words we'd ever seen before, so it was hard to memorize them. It wasn't until years after that exam that I learned Kurds were real people with terrible problems of their own. Even Sean seemed to disappear as I drifted . . .

When we got back to my place, Sean rubbed his brow, then his hands. He seemed very tense.

“When did you find out you were going to L.A.?”

“Just yesterday. Nothing is very definite as yet.”

“Is that what was the matter?”

He shook his head. He rose and began to pace. “I came over here Sunday night.” And he told me the whole story of the cab
ride after trying to phone, ringing the doorbell, the pile of clothes. “I never should have.”

It was a while before I moved. I felt so stupid, not having connected the ringing doorbell with Sean. I waited to see if he would go on and was relieved when he did. There really wasn't much I could say. “I came over because I wanted you to know how much I cared. It was really a dumb thing to do . . .” He touched my hand. “Listen, you have a right to do whatever you want. I realize now that I've been putting pressure on you. I mean, you're just getting over a marriage. I had no business using the key and coming in like that. I got what I deserved, but I've had to do some rethinking.”

“Don't you care who I was with? Don't you care what happened?” I interrupted.

“I think you can skip the details.”

“I called Mark when I got home. I was so mad that you just dropped me off. I saw how I'd been pushing you away for so long, but then when I came to you, you just didn't want me. I had to see him. It was the only way I could see how I felt. And I felt that I want to be with you. I'd like to give it a try.”

Sean shook his head. “I think we should just be friends.”

“You don't understand. I don't even know him anymore. I don't even like him anymore.”

He sat back down. “Deborah, I'm not being judgmental. I'm really not. I'm sorry. I was wrong, putting pressure on you. You have a right to do whatever you want. And we have no agreements, so you weren't breaking any agreement.”

“All right,” I said. “Let's agree not to see other people.”

But Sean had reached the opposite conclusion. “No, I think we should agree to see other people.”

“But I don't want to see other people. I wanted to see Mark the other night and I saw him. But I don't think you should judge me for it.”

Sean raised a finger and pointed at me. “I'm not judging
you. I'm just telling you, I've been through stuff like this before. I've had this kind of thing happen to me before.” His face was all contorted with rage. “This isn't the first time I've made a dumb mistake and walked in when I wasn't invited.” I recalled Sandy's words to me, how he went away when he was hurt. “And I just can't give it another try right now.” He got up and walked across the room. Leaning against the bookcase, he went on. “You don't understand. You could have had anything from me you wanted. I would have waited for you to work things out. If you'd just leveled with me.” He pointed his hand at me again. “If you'd just . . .” He tightened a fist and struck it into the bookcase. The books shook in alphabetical order and Sean grimaced with pain.

“So why can't I level with you now? Why can't I just say now that I'd like to give us a try?”

Sean looked at his hand and massaged the fingers he'd just smashed. “Because,” he said softly, “it's too late. I'm not the kind of person who can go back.”