Florence Gordon (17 page)

“Where are you going, actually?” she said.

“I’m seeing an old friend. In the Village.”

“Who?”

“You don’t know him.”

“Does he have a name?”

“You couldn’t pronounce it.”

This was a
Star Trek
reference, one of the jokes they shared.

They took the subway and got off at Thirty-fourth Street.

“You really have someplace to go?” she said.

“Of course. You think I’d say I had somewhere to go if I didn’t?”

“I think you wanted to come to Penn Station with me.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

She didn’t know why. Because he was overprotective? Because he was going to miss her, even though she’d be gone for only two days? The one thing she felt sure of was that he wasn’t meeting anybody downtown.

Normally this might have made her annoyed with him, but she couldn’t be annoyed with him now. She felt too guilty. She had told her parents that she was going to Boston to see her friend Miranda, and that was true. She would make sure to see Miranda while she was there. But what she hadn’t told them was that she’d be staying with Justin, or that she and Justin had a plan to take Ecstasy and have sex.

She hadn’t had either of these experiences before—having sex or taking Ecstasy. It was time for both. She felt terribly behind in life: all of her friends had had sex, and most of them had done every drug there was.

She didn’t want to do every drug there was—drugs didn’t interest her—but she wanted to try Ecstasy. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to be with Justin, but she didn’t want to be a virgin anymore. It was embarrassing to be a virgin at nineteen.

But at the same time as she wanted to do these things, she couldn’t stop herself from feeling that it might not be a good idea to do them with a boy she wasn’t sure she wanted to get back together with.

She still didn’t know if she wanted to see Justin at all, let alone have sex with him, but he’d kept asking her to visit, and finally he’d just worn her down.

She had made her plans for the weekend rationally and calmly; she’d talked herself out of her second thoughts; but still, there was something horrible about this moment. She wished her father wasn’t taking her to the train.

She felt safe around him. She always had. She had always loved walking in the city with him—the city, up till now, meaning Seattle—because there was something delicious in experiencing the energy of the city while still feeling utterly protected at her father’s side. But now his nearness made her feel almost ill.

She felt as if she were lying to him—well, she didn’t
feel
that way: she
was
lying to him. What would he have thought if he knew what she was planning? She didn’t think he would have tried to stop her. That wasn’t his way. He would have asked her why she was set on doing these things, and he would have listened to her answers, carefully and respectfully, and then he would have told her what he thought (“This is my advice, not that you asked for it”), and then he would have let her make her own choice.

Her certainty that he wouldn’t have tried to stop her made everything feel worse. He trusted her—trusted her to be responsible, trusted her to take good care of herself—and here she was, heading off to have sex with a boy whom she knew to be unstable and to take a drug that, for all she knew, might be strong enough to put her own stability at risk.

Her father thought she was one thing and she was really another thing.

“Have you ever seen pictures of the old Penn Station?” he said.

“I didn’t know there was an old Penn Station.”

“It was beautiful. It might have been even more beautiful than Grand Central.”

“So what happened?”

“They tore it down in the name of progress.”

“Did you used to love it?”

“I’ve only seen pictures. They tore it down before I was born. In the sixties, or the fifties. I’m not sure.”

The fact that her father didn’t know this struck her as very sad, somehow.

When you’re young and strong and coming into your own, your parents can seem terribly vulnerable.

Maybe I shouldn’t go, she thought. Maybe I should stay here and take care of him.

He would have smiled at the idea that he needed taking care of, but she believed he did.

Walking through Penn Station by his side, she felt as if she were heading toward someone’s doom. Hers or his.

“I could stay if you wanted me to.”

“Why would I want you to stay?”

He was looking at her with an expression of amused dry distance.

“I don’t know. I thought maybe you had more valuable life lessons to teach me.”

They were at a ticket machine, and before she could get her wallet out, he was feeding it his credit card.

“I don’t think I have any life lessons I need to teach you this weekend. I think you’ve earned the right to relax and have fun.”

“All you have to do is say the word, Big Guy.”

He stopped and looked at her quizzically. Maybe it was occurring to him that she was upset about something.

“Why should I?”

She felt like a fool, suddenly.

“I don’t know. I’m just joking. You shouldn’t.”

The machine printed out her ticket, she removed it, and they walked on. She was going to have sex and she was going to do drugs. When she came back she’d be someone different from who she was now.

And he would be someone different too. He wouldn’t be the father of the same girl he was the father of now. He would be the father of a girl who was older and more worldly and sneakier and more cynical, and he wouldn’t even know.

How does this happen? How do you betray someone you love? Of the two of them, she thought, he was the more innocent, because he trusted her.

I’m sorry, Dad, she thought. I’m so sorry.

“Stay safe, kid,” he said, and he embraced her, and she felt something going on in her backpack. He was probably putting some money in, knowing that if he tried to hand it to her, she’d refuse it.

She watched him walking off alone through Penn Station. He seemed so small. He seemed so old. She needed to do what she was doing; she needed to grow; but she felt as if, by growing in this way, by taking up a different kind of space in the world, she was inching her father toward his death.

She could still stay home. She didn’t have to do drugs and get naked with a boy who was probably a little unstable. She could still stay home. She could go back uptown with her father—they could walk all the way, just for fun—and tonight they could make popcorn and watch
Star Trek,
just like they used to do when she was twelve.

He was still in sight. She wanted to call out to him; she wanted to run to him. She watched him until he disappeared.

After he said goodbye to Emily, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He took a bus to escape the ugliness of midtown, and got out at Seventy-second Street, a few blocks from where Janine worked.

He wasn’t sure what time her flight was leaving. Maybe he could catch her and they could meet for lunch.

It felt like a childish impulse—they’d already said goodbye—but he missed her.

Part of the reason he missed her was that they’d barely had sex since he got here. In the past, whenever they’d drifted away from each other, the intensity of their mutual attraction had brought them back together, but now, for some reason, this wasn’t happening. Instead they seemed to have settled into a disconcerting routine: an old married couple’s parody of romantic attraction. This morning, when he was taking a shower, she had come into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and she’d pulled the shower curtain aside and waggled her eyebrows at him Groucho Marxishly, and then she’d passed her hand over him, slowly, and then gone back to brushing her teeth. The implication seemed to be that if only they’d been free—if Emily weren’t in the apartment and if she, Janine, didn’t need to leave—she would have wanted to have sex with him. But every time they actually were free, they didn’t have sex. There was always a book or a paper that Janine needed to read or an email she needed to write. It was bad, and he didn’t want it to stay this way.

He called her office, and the friendly young woman who worked at the front desk told him that she wasn’t there.

He tried to figure out whether there was anything he needed to do in the neighborhood. A high-end toy store had just opened up on Seventy-ninth Street; he fleetingly thought it would be nice to get something for the kids, and then remembered that his kids didn’t play with toys anymore. He was ten years late on that one.

He couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do. There was a Richard Thompson concert at Town Hall that night. Maybe he could still get a ticket. But it wouldn’t be fun without Janine.

At the corner of Broadway and Seventy-fourth he was waiting for the light to change when something made him turn his head, and he found himself looking at a couple sitting near the window of a restaurant. The woman was familiar. The woman was Janine.

He got that feeling he always got when he saw her, that little lift.

She and the guy were holding hands.

He crossed the street against the traffic—away from them—scuttling awkwardly to avoid a taxi or two. At a newsstand he bought a copy of the
Daily News,
and then he turned around and held it up and tried to look around it, like some hapless detective in a movie. It was the first time, in all his years of copdom, that he’d tried to observe anybody without being seen.

When he was in retreat mode, trying not to get hit by a car, he’d allowed himself to doubt that it was really Janine. From his observation post behind the
Daily News,
he couldn’t deny it. She even had her hair in a ponytail, the better to display her glowingly beautiful face.

And who was the guy?

The guy had to be Lev, of course. Had to be.

They were holding hands.

They were sitting behind big cups—those tall silver fluted cups they have in ice cream parlors.

They were having ice cream sundaes. Or maybe one was having ice cream and the other was having a nice fruit cup.

They were laughing. They were still holding hands. This seemed important, as though, if they’d held hands for only a minute, there might have been an innocent explanation.

He felt disoriented. He was afraid he was going to fall down.

He didn’t feel angry, which surprised him.

Maybe it was the ice cream sundaes. Somehow the ice cream made the two of them seem less tawdry. It made them seem less like adults having an affair than like high school students out on their first date.

How could she be doing this?

Daniel had met Janine when they were barely out of their teens. Both of them pretended to great sophistication, of course, but they were children. Everything they’d gone on to discover about life, they’d discovered together.

That was the deal, wasn’t it?—that they would go through
everything
together. Their children’s marriages, grandparenthood, old age . . .

Wasn’t that the deal?

He could trail them. It would be a piece of cake, since he was a cop, except that he’d never actually trailed anybody in his life, and had no idea of how to do so, apart from what he could remember from old episodes of
The Rockford Files.
And anyway, what would be the point? He knew where they were going: to the airport, and then to Pittsburgh, where they’d spend the weekend talking about the multiple nature of the self and fucking their brains out.

Maybe he should go into the restaurant and beat the guy up.

He was supposed to be someone who would do that sort of thing. He’d taken boxing lessons. He was an off-duty cop. Off-duty cops were always getting involved in street hassles, embarrassing the badge.

But he had no desire to.

When Mark was in first grade, some other boy in the class kept hitting him, and when Daniel suggested that Mark hit him back, Mark said, “I don’t
want
to hit him.” Not in a voice that suggested he was afraid, but in a voice that suggested that hitting someone was an absurd thing to do. Now he felt the same way.

They were still laughing, still holding hands.

He’d seen enough. He walked north, and after ten blocks, still feeling dizzy, he stopped at a coffee shop. He didn’t want coffee, though. He wanted to have something that he’d never normally have, as if to set this afternoon apart from his life. So he ordered a slice of cherry pie. Only after it arrived did he think about how close it was to an ice cream sundae, and he wondered why he’d ordered it. It felt as if he were trying to horn in on their happiness.

What do I do now?

He didn’t know what to do, with the afternoon or with his life.

I should ask Janine, he thought, and then remembered that he couldn’t.

He imagined trying to tell the children that he and Janine were separating. Which of them would be affected more? Emily usually seemed so poised, so imperturbable, but in her quiet way she felt everything. Mark, the explorer, never coming home for more than a few minutes, it seemed, would be the obvious candidate to be less affected, but you couldn’t be sure.

He wondered what Janine would say about how the children would react to a divorce.

Every thought led back to the family.

How could she be walking away from this?

He paid for his order without having touched it and left the coffee shop.

What kind of person, when he discovers that his wife is cheating on him, decides to get himself a slice of pie?

What kind of person sees his wife holding hands with some joker and just slinks off? Why hadn’t he walked in and punched the guy?

Why the fuck am I thinking about myself now, anyway?

He was thinking about himself because he had such trust in Janine that he thought that if she were turning away from him, then he must deserve to be turned away from.

He felt revolted by his self, his identity, his history. His act. It seemed to him that he was a fraud, and not even a successful fraud at that. He was a fraud whose fraudulence was obvious. Over the decades he had worked to transform himself into something that it was not his nature to be, but the transformation had never been effected. He’d tried to turn himself into a strong and silent cop; he’d tried to turn himself into some archetypal figure of calm, benevolent male authority—he’d tried to turn himself into Henry Fonda—but inside he was still a quiveringly oversensitive boy, and anyone who looked at him hard enough could see that. That was why the other cops called him “the professor.”