Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (38 page)

Days passed without any word from Andy. I braced myself for the letter in which he would explain why our relationship could never work out, that we had a good friendship and maybe that’s how we should leave it. Was he that kind of man? Trust topped my latest list of values to strive for in a relationship. Still, I had to be honest with myself: trust had nothing whatsoever to do with my initial attraction to Andy.

When I first saw him in his charcoal suit at Geila’s party, he had been leaning against the buffet table, the
Freudian Dream
painting at his back. I thought, “This is a man who knows how to position himself well.” (Position, I said to myself now as I glanced back at the hole in my window. He’d come to DC to
escape
a dead-end position.)

Maybe it was his dark mustache, or his manner: the way he crossed one ankle over the other, casually, while folding his arms authoritatively and telling me that I was completely wrong when I quoted a poem by Berryman and attributed it to Eliot. Or maybe I connected his having worked on a farm to earn money for college with my father’s youth. Honestly, though, I’d have to say it was his looks. With his thick hair, dark brown streaked with silver, and his mustache, he dominated the room without opening his mouth. “Sublime” was how I saw him; trustworthy wasn’t even a consideration.

At the time, though, Andy was more in the market for a job than a girlfriend. In that first year, we swam laps in the basement of my high-rise, went to films—after which we argued their merits—and walked his dog, Polly, a chubby mix of beagle and basset hound. I understood that we were friends, and yet deeper feelings stirred. I had no idea how to bring them out. On a fall evening a year later, while we walked Polly, he mentioned that he’d learned to read tarot cards in Cincinnati.

“Tarot cards,” I said. “In Cincinnati?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, when will you give me a reading?”

“Did I mention that Polly peed next to James Carville’s King Charles spaniel last week over in Lincoln Park?”

“Yes. Maybe three times. How about now? Will you give me a reading tonight?”

“I’m just an amateur,” he said, waving it off.

“I’ll take my chances,” I said.

At this point his fellowship had been extended for an extra six months and his lease was up, so he’d moved into the spare bedroom in Geila’s house. We came home and Geila was upstairs. I called up to her bedroom, “Geila, come get your tarot reading.”

“Oh, please,” she said from behind a closed door. Whatever she said after that we couldn’t make out. “I guess that means she’ll pass,” said Andy, who was already taking his tarot cards from a drawer in the buffet. We sat at the dining room table. He untied the silk scarf that bound the cards. I wondered, “Who gave him this silk scarf?” And he laid out my cards.

I took a frantic look at cards that made no sense and blurted out, “Well, am I ever gonna have a baby?”

Andy had looked at me and blinked, not so much out of shock as out of understanding. He said, “The cards are pregnant with optimism.”

Three weeks after Andy left for Brazil and I was still without word from him, my optimism waned. Then I received a postcard. I read it in my high-rise apartment. In teensy print, he explained that the university had put him up in an apartment suite with visiting professors from around the world who rotated through at varying intervals, some for two days, others for a month, still others for a year. Some were there and gone before he met them. The telephone in the rotating suite could not place long-distance calls; a naked electrical wire hovered over his shower; power outages made a sham of the computer lab; and he loved Brazil!

He added a PS with a phone number and asked me to call him. I raced to the phone and dialed the number. Another man answered my call. In an accent I could not pinpoint, he said he’d never heard of anyone named Andy. That seemed to be the extent of this man’s English. I hung up, confused and teetering on heartbroken. I dropped the postcard into the basket of mail on my counter and told myself that while it was true that Andy had put himself through college by inspecting tomatoes, it was also true that he’d played in a band. When I put the pieces together it did not look promising: a handsome poet, former band member, now in Brazil. Was this a man ready to make a commitment?

I took that question to my closest advisors. Jackson never held back on his assessment of my relationships’ chances of survival. “I’d give it about ten percent,” he’d say when feeling optimistic. About a previous boyfriend he’d said, “The odds aren’t so good.”

“How bad?” I asked.

“Less than zero.” Then he added, “You choose guys based on their looks, then you complain that they’re conceited.”

“Not true. I choose men who are intelligent.”

“Hmm,” he’d said, closing his eyes as if ready to go to sleep.

Geila shared Jackson’s opinion about the men I dated, and neither was enthusiastic about Andy, who was intelligent but suffered from reasonably good looks and a touch of arrogance. Both were quick to admit that he was a fabulous cook. Jackson had even said, with a lick of his lips, “I hope he comes back.”

“You’re thinking of that African stew,” I said. “Aren’t you?”

“The peanut sauce was a brilliant move,” he’d whispered.

Not long before I met Andy, I’d quit seeing my therapist. She’d been a patient listener but she shied away from challenging me. Because I missed my old therapist in Boston, I started up again and chose a male therapist, but when I told this new therapist that Andy played guitar and sang songs to me that he’d composed himself, the therapist winced and chuckled boyishly.

Eventually I would see that it wasn’t my therapists, my friends, or Andy that I didn’t trust; it was me. Back when I was contemplating leaving my marriage, I kept asking for everyone else’s opinion. Someone would say, “How could you do that?” And someone else would say, “Do you know what you’re in for?” Finally I’d complained to my older friend, Queen of Subtlety, who said, “When you start making decisions without the vote of everyone in the room, then you are officially a grownup.”

Once again, I was without many votes. There was nothing about Andy to recommend him as a serious boyfriend. First, he lived in another hemisphere; second, he did not have a permanent job; and third, he’d been divorced as long as I had—a sign that I interpreted to mean that we were both meant to be thrown back in the pond. And wonder of wonders, he was Jewish. How many times had I been down that road?

A couple days passed when a second postcard arrived. Andy gave the same phone number. He’s got to be joking, I thought. Then I read the ending, in which he’d squeezed in a sentence about his plane trip to Brazil, confessing that he’d cried over the movie
Babe
. “Please call me,” he wrote in even smaller print at the bottom.

“
Babe
?” I could just imagine my therapist’s wince.

Once I’d seen a tear fall from Andy’s eye. It happened after he met me at the Metro station during a blizzard. By then I had taken and passed the licensing exam and I was in my first year of private practice, which included mostly adult women, a few couples, and enough teenagers to keep me alert. Since our office had closed during the blizzard, I was bored in my high-rise. I called Andy from my apartment in Arlington to ask what was going on in town. “Come down to the Hill,” he said.

An hour later, he and Polly greeted me at the top of the Eastern Market escalator. Polly was squeamish. Andy explained that he’d rescued her from the streets of Oxford, Ohio, where fraternities would abandon their dogs for the summer. I remembered Brandy the one-eyed dog and wondered what plans had been made for her after the Water Street boys left Williamstown. I hoped they had found her a home. Had I worried about that back then? It was too long ago to recall.

We started walking back to the house and Polly dragged her heels in snow that was up to her chin. A freezing wind cut through the Seventh Street corridor, sending a tear down Andy’s cheek. “My eye leaks in the cold,” he explained. Polly hunkered down and refused to budge, so Andy hoisted her over his shoulder and carried her four blocks. She weighed about ninety pounds.

That same afternoon, we cuddled for the first time during a movie. Andy was stiff and awkward. I assumed he had no interest in me romantically. But we met up every day that week while our offices were shut down by the blizzard. One day, after we swam laps in the basement of my apartment building, we went out to lunch and swapped stories about being young and stupid. “Once I jumped from a bridge into a river on a canoe trip with my sorority,” I told him. “Actually, I asked Gretchen and Pam to shove me off because I was afraid to let go.”

“And they did?”

“Yep. You should have seen the man who was fishing on the riverbank with his son. He looked up and there was this girl without legs getting tossed from a bridge into the Little Miami.”

Andy’s face turned somber and I thought he was going to tell me that my story was pathetic. Instead he said, “I jumped off a cliff once. But into a lake. I never felt so free. Are you a risk-taker?”

I didn’t know how to answer because I thought that was obvious, but his serious face demanded a response, so I said, “Yes. I’m a risk-taker.” As soon as I said it, I regretted my answer because I was hopelessly in love with Andy, and I chided myself, “Caretaker, you dope. Men want caretakers, not risk-takers.”

Andy looked up and said, “I think we’re in dangerous territory.” Then he returned to staring solemnly at the table and added, “I think Geila is in love with me.”

I burst out laughing. “Geila is not in love with you! She’s in love with me. She’s always been in love with me.”

“What?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’s one of those unrequited love stories between friends of the same sex.”

“I don’t think so,” he said, shaking his head. “I know when a woman is in love with me.”

“Oh,” I said. “You’re sure about that?”

That evening we watched
Pride and Prejudice
on the television in my bedroom, and afterward he kissed me. A day later he was back, this time pinning me to the bed, then the dresser, even a counter, anything he could balance me against to gain traction. Once he started, there was no shutting him off.

I might have told Jackson about Andy carrying Polly in a snowstorm, but I knew what he would say: “The old wounded animal act.” Then he would have closed his eyes like Yoda. And if I told Geila about the risk-taker question followed by the introduction of sex, she would have said, “And you didn’t see that one coming?” I decided not to bother weighing in on the
Pride and Prejudice
kiss with my wincing therapist. It was time to trust myself. I had never felt such a combination of comfort with and attraction to a man.

Now that he was in another country, I missed everything about Andy, including his dog. He’d sent Polly to his father in California for the semester, and I missed the click of her nails on the wood floors as she chased after Andy when he answered the door.

I finished reading the second postcard and ransacked the basket where I’d put Andy’s first one. I plucked it out and compared them. The phone number was definitely the same. “Doesn’t he know that number is wrong?” I said.

I picked up the phone and dialed again. This time a woman answered in an accent I would come to know as Portuguese. Then Andy came on the line.

“Who was that?” I asked, trying not to sound jealous.

“You called.”

“Of course. Didn’t you get my message?”

“No, I don’t know half the people in this suite, and I don’t speak Japanese, Danish, or even Portuguese. I’m so glad you called.” The line crackled, and he said, “When are you coming down?” Then he whispered, “I miss you.”

“When do you want me?” I asked.

T
hat April, Andy and I sat under an umbrella on Itapuã Beach near the colonial city of Salvador, which was once the capital of Brazil. I was finishing a book that he had handed me on the plane from Brasilia, Jorge Amado’s
War of the Saints
. “Read this,” he’d said, “if you really want to know Salvador.”

Now I tried to imagine my own visit from an
orixá
, which is what African slaves called the spirits they summoned through candomblé. In colonial times, slaves were required to take Catholicism as their religion, so they told their captors they were worshipping saints. These spirits were said to inhabit statues or even people. On my first day at the beach, I carved a mermaid in the sand. “Maybe she’ll come to life,” I said.

“Look at that,” said Andy. “Her tail just wiggled.”

That afternoon we visited the market and bought guava, papaya, cashew fruit, and acerola. At night we ordered
mucceca
, a dish made with palm oil and seafood. There was nothing we didn’t love about this city: its people, its food, its percussive music, and its dance, samba and capoeira. We visited reliquary shops near the church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim, where travelers come from hundreds of miles away to leave relics and to pray for a miracle. “I need to buy one of these statues for Ted,” I said. Ted was now a father and in his spare time he painted portraits of scowling martyrs, while his family decorated their lawn with bowling balls and saints. For Ted’s family, I chose Saint Sebastian tied to a stake with arrows piercing his body.

By nighttime the church of Bonfim was lit up, and even in the dark people waited on the steps to be healed. I told Andy about the time Frankie and I climbed the steps of Mount Adams to ask Jesus for a pair of legs. Andy didn’t laugh or write it off as naïve superstition, nor did he believe in miracles. His had been one of the few Jewish families in his small hometown, a place with farmers, prison guards, and schoolteachers. Like his brothers and his parents, he maintained his own beliefs while managing to fit into a Christian community. His father was now serving his fifth term as mayor.

Before leaving Bonfim, someone handed us a few souvenir ribbons. “Make a wish,” said Andy as he tied a red ribbon to my left wrist.

I wanted to ask for Andy to come back to DC, but that seemed too self-serving, so I prayed for him to get a job. Then I prayed he’d get a job in DC. I had never figured out whose God I believed in, if any, but I’d stopped worrying about it. Now I just believed in the universe, in the joy of life, and I was beginning to believe that the energy driving all of nature was love.