What's Important Is Feeling: Stories (5 page)

On the walk to the clinic I’d asked Elizabeth if she was sure she wanted to go through with it. I’d seen enough movies to know I was supposed to ask.

“I’m forty-one,” said Elizabeth.

“That’s not too old,” I said, though I wasn’t certain of the science.

“I’m not against procreation,” she said. “But I’m not sure I’m in favor of it either.”

Two weeks later I will come home to find Elizabeth fucking my nemesis Brian Feldstein on the floor. He will be on top, arms clenching her neck in a not so gentle strangle. Elizabeth will moan, “Don’t stop.” When Brian sees me, he will turn and say, “Sup?” but he won’t stop strangle-fucking, and Elizabeth won’t even notice that I’m there. Shaking with anger, I will get back in the elevator, ride up to the penthouse, and trail a group of young women into the Host’s apartment. The room will be filled with people I vaguely recognize, and the Host will weave among these people, stopping for handshakes and back-claps before moving on to the next group. The Host won’t stop smiling, as if any change in expression might transform him into another, lesser being. When he approaches me, I will lean in and kiss his cheek as if I know him. His breath will smell of cough drops. His hand will grace my hip. A blogger will snap a photo from across the room, and in the morning I will be referred to as “Mystery Woman.” The photo will make it look as though he’s blushing at something I’ve said. Jenny and my other coworkers will ask for details, and I will tell them I don’t kiss and tell, but say it in such a way—slightly smirking, one eyebrow raised—as to imply that, yes, perhaps I am not so innocent as they might have imagined.

That afternoon, Elizabeth will come into the kitchen and ask if I am angry at her. I’ll lie and say I’m not angry, because I have no real right to be angry. Elizabeth will say, “Well, I’m starving,” and eat peanut butter from the jar with a plastic spoon. She’ll say, “Don’t you get it?” and I’ll say, “Get what?” and she’ll say, “I did it ironically. The whole thing was ironic.”

When we got back from the clinic it was already evening. The Apple Store’s sign lit the street, opulent white, iconic apple frozen in its bitten state.

Elizabeth plugged in the TV. There weren’t any channels, just fuzz. “Shit,” she said. “I never called Time Warner.”

The fuzz was antiquated, analog, a remnant of another era. Elizabeth left the TV on. She laid her head in my lap.

“I have you,” she said. “You’re mine.”

I took a long, deep breath. The A/C was cool against my neck. I wrapped a strand of Elizabeth’s hair around my finger.

“I’m yours,” I said.

Things I Had
For S.R.

M
y grandfather was an old queen, and when he was dying he would grab me through my pants and try to make it hard. He had Alzheimer’s and called me Sam, and sometimes I let him because it wasn’t his fault and I liked the attention.

There was a tenderness in the way his fingers moved—up and down like slow typing—that I’ve yet to find in any lover, a word I hate; it implies love, a condition absent from my life, though I’ve replaced it with the companionship of late-night television.

The problem with love is that I had it for my wife, but also for the one I was cheating with. Both were Latina, young, beautiful. One broke things—vases, wineglasses—the other cleaned up the mess (she was the maid). What I had was nostalgia for the things I’d never had. What I also had was money, which counts more when you’re older.

The thing with my grandfather started in the new house, which was not so different from the old house, except it was in a different state, one where the heat crept under your skin and lived in the space between your bones and your veins. Jane and I were at a school meant for Catholics. Our mother told us that after making the sign of the cross we should wipe over it with our palms in order to erase it. She was an old-school Jew torn between her fear of gentiles and her desire to get us into good colleges. St. Anne’s of the Divine was Miami’s best, and my father had to pull strings to get us enrolled.

As it turned out, half the students were Jews, also the children of string-pullers: textile magnates, software moguls, commercial real estate tycoons. The other half were the Cubano elite out of Coral Gables. The girls wore skirts hiked up so you could see the inward slant between the fall-off of their ass cheeks and their paler backs of knees.

In the cafeteria, Jane sat with her new friends and I was left alone, at the end of a long dining table, removed from the flirtations and legs, crossed and uncrossed, ad infinitum.

I mainly watched Celia Escarole, the light-skinned, dark-eyed Cuban Jew ( Jewban) who smelled like an ultra-earthly combination of oranges and baby powder. I liked the way she fit in with her crowd, content in the middle, content to let her eyes wander. She didn’t pay attention in class either, just played her click-pens like castanets and tapped her boots against the tile.

My grandfather taught me all I know about seduction, the way you start out slow, hands grazing, smiles short and repeating like blinking eyes. He didn’t say much, only “Sam,” in a way that barely involved his mouth. His fingers were wrinkled and felt like recently bathed skin.

The thing my grandfather didn’t teach me was how to start conversations. This was problematic; in high school, introductions are necessary. And though I hoped that by sitting alone—head in a book I wasn’t reading—I radiated new-kid mystique, in actuality no one looked at me.

It was probably a good thing that no one looked at me. My boners came and went like the billboard ads I watched through the tinted window of our town car, the one my father had hired for Jane and me, complete with driver, just until we got our licenses.

We moved slowly, gliding beneath palm trees, watching bikinied skateboarders weave between cars. Our driver’s name was Luis, and he played Little Havana on the radio at a volume slightly lower than the sound of his hum over the music. Jane sat in her corner doing homework with a felt-tipped pen in girl-perfect freehand (she was no lefty like me, all smudged ink and oddly angled letters).

Luis also drove our grandfather and hated him because of communism—Grandpa was double pink, card-carrying. That’s how he met Sam. I know because he once asked me “Remember how we met?” When I said no, he took his thumb and rubbed it over my index and middle fingers, said, “Washington, DC, 1954, Joe McCarthy in our rearview. Bill Weiss’s party, that Elvis Presley record, which one was it?”

“
Blue Suede Shoes
,” I said, and he nodded. When he told these stories I tried to act like I remembered.

Once I asked Maria if she remembered how we met.

“I was your maid, stupid.”

“But when did you first have that feeling?”

“When you leaned over and rubbed your
pinga
on my ass while I was dusting under the coffee table.”

I come from a line of failed husbands. Grandpa had an excuse. His chemistry was XY to XY. My father was simply an asshole, a cheater. My mother knew but didn’t care, or cared but didn’t have anywhere else to go.

I guess that makes me an asshole too.

I’m not sure if my mother was a good wife. She mostly shopped and prayed. She’d never been religious, but in Miami she went to temple every Saturday. She spent the rest of the week touring the South Beach boutiques.

Jane got a different gene. Her kids are beach beautiful, born into California. Daniel, her husband, eats low-carb in the Google cafeteria. We speak every few months. How are the kids? Daniel rides a Segway! Andrea Solomon is divorced, you know? She invites me for holidays, but I don’t go. She’s still mad about Bianca.

“You loved her,” she says.

If I loved anyone it was Celia. First I had to get her attention. Since I was shy and terrified of females who weren’t my sister, my method involved staring at her for an entire class in the hope that she would turn around and that we would “accidentally” make eye contact. The plan was foiled almost immediately when Celia did notice me, raised her hand, and said, very flatly, “Andrew Stronifer is staring at me.”

It was a bittersweet moment—she knew my name!—but it was mostly bitter. The class laughed the way they laughed at geeks and nerds, which meant I was a geek, because I wasn’t smart enough to be a nerd.

After school, Grandpa was the only one home. My mother should have been there, but she was out buying shoes or makeup or staring sadly at the ocean in new shoes and new makeup.

Jane and I both looked like our mother. We shared her build: all bones, no booty.

Not many boys liked Jane. She was a wallflower who hadn’t grown into her face. It was strange being twins. If there was such a thing as a male wallflower I hoped that I was one. I felt like a part of the wall. Sometimes I felt like a flower, though I wanted to be something more manly than a flower.

Grandpa was a flower, and now he was wilting. He would be dead soon, and our secret would be erased. I imagined that when he died my body’s memory of his fingers would lift easily, like lox from wax paper, leaving only oily residue.

Grandpa lived above the garage in a small alcove that also had a bathroom and a room filled with items: files, sweaters, an exercise bike. These items had been accumulating dust in our old house in Boston, and we’d brought them to maintain a level of continuity.

He sat up in bed, facing the television. The Lakers were playing the Knicks.

“Beautiful,” he said.

“Beautiful,” I repeated. Grandpa turned to look at me. It was his nonrecognition face, different from his recognition face and his déjà vu face.

“Who are you?” he said. He wore flannel pajamas and was sweating.

“I’m Sam,” I said.

“You’re not Sam.”

Some days he knew I wasn’t Sam.

Before Sam died, Jane and I would go for weekends to their house in Vermont. Sam would walk with us through the woods, squeezing our elbows with his small hands. The two of them would spend mornings in bed, and Jane and I would climb in, watch television, bring them orange juice. I imagined their lives together in sepia-tinted montage: swirling strings carrying them hand-holding through fields of daises; across supermarket aisles with one in the cart and the other gleefully pushing; beneath an awning avoiding rain, Sam holding an unfolded newspaper over young Grandpa’s head. At the end of the montage the music becomes somber, the piano trills, the timpani beats a slow pulse. We see a hospital bed: now occupied, now empty. There is Sam’s gravestone. There is Grandpa in this bed, Sam’s pictures still in boxes, me lingering in the doorway.

“Then I’m your grandson,” I said.

“I don’t have a grandson.”

I looked out the window, saw a branched bird trapped in sunbeam.

“You’ll be dead soon,” I said, half to myself, still looking out the window.

“Who are you?” Grandpa said again.

“You’re old,” I said, and left the room.

In my own room, I put on the Cuban station and lay in bed with the lights off. I shut the curtains but sun holograms came in from the sides. The DJ didn’t play slow ones, just the tick-tick shakers with their long vowels and drums that sounded like chattering teeth. I couldn’t decide if the songs were replacements for sex or preparations for it. I couldn’t sleep; all I wanted was sleep.

Sleep is different for teenagers, more restorative. Now when I dream, my dreams are on the surface; when I wake I only rise inches. In sleep I can still feel the window breeze.

My family had stopped eating as a family. Dad went out with clients, and mom drank health shakes or white wine. Jane had friends and ate with them in her room or at their houses. I had become partial to ramen noodles, and Grandpa liked them too. There wasn’t much to clean up. We sat on the couch watching basketball. I didn’t care about the game, but basketball placated Grandpa. Maybe he liked the muscular bodies. Maybe it was televised timelessness. Watching the game with dinner, he knew who I was, said, “Andrew,” “Thank you,” “Your mother was such a happy girl.” After our noodles I lay in his lap and he stroked my hair.

Jane showed up sometime after eleven.

“Stop staring at me,” she said.

I gave her my
fuck you
eyes, the ones I’d been practicing in the mirror. She sat down next to me on the couch.

“It’s bullshit,” I said.

“Everything’s bullshit,” she said.

“Grandpa’s asleep,” I said.

“Mom,” Jane said.

“And Dad,” I said.

“Out,” Jane said.

I wanted her to sit with me, let TV make us children. Instead I said, “Florida sucks my ass hair,” and Jane went upstairs.

When Dad came home he was stumbling, but not too bad. His shirt was open to the third button. He’d recently acquired a thick gold chain with a Star of David the size of a throwing star. He wasn’t religious. I think he wore it the way gangsters wear crosses, with a mix of false humility and messiah complex. He passed me with a nod and headed to the fridge. He removed the leftover cake, shoved it in his mouth with his hands. I turned off the TV so I could watch him in the reflection of the blank screen.

“You’re getting fat,” I said.

“What?” His mouth was full. I stood up and walked into the kitchenette, stuck a finger in the cake, licked off the frosting.

Dad swallowed. “Don’t you have homework?” he said.

“I did it.”

“Good kid,” he said.

“Good cake?”

“That’s what I said,” he said. “Good cake.”

The next day at school I walked the halls with my head down.

“Stop staring at me,” someone said.

“Andrew Stronifer is staring at me,” someone else said.

Class was no refuge. When Ms. Castillo said, “Andrew,” I banged my head against the table. When Mr. Trund said, “Come to the board and try this equation,” I stood hunched, chalk in hand, and wrote the number 666 next to the equals sign. They sent me to Father Gutierrez for counseling.

His office was simple, adorned only with hanging rosary beads and a portrait of Mary cradling her young child. Soft jazz played in the background, a trumpet moving in short bursts, a clinking piano. I sat across from the priest. He nodded at me as though he understood, knew God’s world was a difficult one to navigate. I shut my eyes.

“How are you?” Father Gutierrez said.

“I’m Jewish,” I said.

There was a different counselor for Jewish kids, a social worker named Javier whose office was lined with science-fiction books and posters from
Star Trek
conventions. He had shag carpet eyebrows and miniature hands, and instead of talking about my family he lent me books with intricately designed covers featuring slutty space-babes and men whose heads were half robot.

I saw Javier after school on Tuesdays. Afterwards, instead of being picked up by Luis, who had already driven Jane home, I caught the number seven bus in town, riding it out of the Grove and back to Coral Gables. I liked the smell of the bus, and I liked the people on it who didn’t look up. My parents would have flipped if they knew I was taking the bus, but they weren’t paying attention to me. They hadn’t mentioned the increasing length of my hair, or the way I talked back in mumbles.

Summer became summer which became summer. There were no seasons, just heat and air-conditioning. Technically, it was almost Christmas.

One day while I waited for the bus with crossed arms to cover my armpit stains, someone called me from behind a tree.

“Hey, Triple Six,” the voice said. I kept my head down.

“Don’t worry, Triple Six, it’s cool.” There were two of them, lanky and pube-faced, peeking out. I walked over.

“Quick, hit this,” one of them said, and handed me the remnants of a joint. I’d never smoked pot before, but only because I’d never been offered it. I took the joint and held it to my mouth.

“You gotta inhale,” the other said. He was taller and pockmarked. I’d seen him around school, squirreling down the halls. I tried to push the smoke down and coughed.

“Quiet,” Squirrel Boy said. “We’ll get busted.” I passed the joint to the other guy, who I’d never seen before. His uniform shirt was unbuttoned to reveal a white T-shirt with Charles Manson’s face on it.

“Celia Escarole is a cunt fork,” he said. He had a man’s voice, almost Russian sounding it was so deep.

“What’s a cunt fork?” I said.

“You know,” Squirrel said. “A johnson scraper.”

“A toothed twat,” Deep Voice said.

“Oh,” I said. I was trying to figure out if I could feel the weed. We each took another puff and then Squirrel put out the joint with his foot.

“Squirrel Boy,” I said.

“Who’s Squirrel Boy?”

“You,” I said. “You’re Squirrel Boy.”