By Alexander C. Kafka
There were a few men, mostly lawyers. Gary's professional connections, his acquaintances from Yale and the law review. Now they were in his or other government agencies, or federal alums who'd gone to private firms.
But there were mostly other women there. Some of them lawyers, too. But overall, a more eclectic bunch. The preponderance of women was embarrassing, thought Joana. But it also figured. He was the kind of man who related best to women, who dated them once or twice, then built a friendship out of talking about dating, organizing mass outings that were sexless not just in fact but in feeling.
"Hey," a typical message would say. "This is Gary. Long time no see. Listen. A bunch of us are getting together Saturday at Glen Echo for ballroom dancing and it would be great if you could join us. Bring someone or come alone. Either way. No need to call me, but lemme know if you need a ride or something. We'll meet at the entry to the Spanish Ballroom around nine.”
The chemistry wasn't right, women would say about him, but he's a really nice guy. "I don't know why—he’s not bad looking," they'd report. "But I'm just not that attracted to him." Maybe they could fix him up with a friend, they'd say.
So, Joana mused, looking around the room. Here they were, assembled. The starters from when Gary first moved to D.C. The friends they set him up with after their own tepid date or two. The friends' friends. A little convention of professional women in their late twenties through mid-forties. A few now with boyfriends. A recently acquired husband or two.
Everyone was tense and earnest, gathered in the dim living room. The sofa, the chairs, the floor all covered with FOG—Friends of Gary—making self-consciously casual chitchat, waiting for a few stragglers. The host, Arnold, welcomed each guest with a sober smile. "Glad you could make it. Just put the food over there on the table. There're sodas in the fridge."
Finally, the group settled down and Arnold introduced his sister, Laura, an obese woman rabbi from Pittsburgh who'd been planning to come to town anyway to see her new niece and offered to sort of get things rolling, Arnold said. He asked a man in a wheelchair to turn off the little air conditioning unit so everyone could hear. That made the room even closer, the air that much thinner. Joana felt that she would suffocate.
"Why don't we get started?" Rabbi Laura said, squinting through thick glasses, brushing alarming clumps of hair off of her front, a displaced dining room chair creaking beneath her bulk. How nice would a dress have to be to look nice on this woman? Hard to imagine, Joana thought, edgily eyeing the smock-like outfit, the acres of blue denim. She knew better than to talk about it, but ugly things, ugly people, made her physically ill. It was a true hardship. Not the kind people felt sorry for you about, but nonetheless real. Like bad allergies or an ulcer.
"I didn't know Gary," said Rabbi Laura. "But if so many friends took time on a beautiful Saturday afternoon to pay tribute to him, he must have been a remarkable man." The rabbi sighed a lot between sentences, a kind of stagy, emotional sigh, somewhere between spirituality and asthma. It gave Joana the willies. She wondered if she were the only one.
Her own absurdly reform congregation, growing up in Potomac, had put a higher premium on guitar sing-alongs than sermons or prayers. Lots of "Blowin' in the Wind" and "If I Had a Hammer." Every now and then a half-baked "original drama by the children." And even these artsy agendas were an annual phenomenon around the High Holidays. Weekly services were for fanatics, she'd been sure.
Sunday school in Rockville had been a joke, an excuse to flirt and discuss TV shows and eat bagels with cream cheese. A chance to compare the fits of everyone's new jeans and blouses or the gaudiness of their mazuzas. When every now and again a hapless teacher actually tried to impart knowledge—the Hebrew alphabet, a Bible story—the efforts would be met with surly stares, muttered conversation, passed notes, and even stupored heads on crooked arms, faces down on the plastic, wood-grain, fold-up tables beneath the overbearing fluorescent lights.
To her parents' quiet, head-shaking dismay, Joana had declined the bat mitzvah. Some of her friends memorized their torah readings phonetically, approximating the thin, Oriental melodies they'd heard a thousand times on their tapes. But what was the point, chanting this gibberish? Becoming a woman? She thought not. She wasn't sure then how that would happen, but she knew a bat mitzvah wouldn't do the trick. She didn't want to be tutored for a year by some glum, cagey Israeli University of Maryland grad student while her friends went out for track. It seemed so medieval and cultish. Religion—any religion, but her own most of all—made her skittish. And listening to this awful woman rabbi was close to unbearable.
"When someone dies," the rabbi said, "particularly when they die in the manner Gary did, there are many emotions." Sigh. "There is sadness." Sigh. "There is frustration." Sigh. "There is anger." Sigh.
Joana wanted to giggle. In order not to, she concentrated on her San Tropez panties beneath the cooling sheen of her short, black sundress. The breezy feel of the frail, delicate silk at her crotch. The waxy string sides, more naked than nakedness. The delicious pull of the back—not thong, but sensuously narrow. She closed her eyes and hoped the others would think it was regret and sorrow.
Since her late teens, she'd reveled in owning lingerie. Through college and her master's and the years since, her tastes had become more costumey and erotic. She didn't wear it always. She had the Hanes, the Fruit of the Loom, the Jockey, for everyday. Just now and then, when she needed its emotional, visceral reinforcement to shore up her confidence or take her to sweeter places. During exams or job interviews. Waiting in line at the motor vehicle department. Accompanying her sister Maureen on errands.
But the lingerie was particularly vital when contemplating death. It had gotten Joana through her grandparents' funerals—a teddy with lace at the midriff for grandma Bess, red Moulin Rouge culottes with a matching camisole for grandpa Hal. Tastefully concealed, mind you, beneath proper dresses knee-length or longer. Her mom's passing was particularly difficult. Mrs. Schuler had died relatively young of multiple sclerosis when Joana was a senior at Tufts. For that, a tarty purple French-cut bikini bottom framed by garters and thigh-high stockings, and topped with a semi-transparent bustier.
As their bodies were lowered into the ground, Joana had indulged in wild sexual fantasies involving the outlandish outfits, several men, and feathered masks. She'd felt awful about it, but also blessed that she had this strange mental apparatus. The bodies meant nothing to her. She'd loved them all when they were living and in her reserved but sincere way, she'd let them know that. But the corpses had nothing in common with the living people who'd shared their features, and she was unable and unwilling to cry for them. The mourners would offer her condolences, then, as if embarrassed to mention it, tell her how strangely beautiful she looked. How she had a lovely glow even at such a sad time. How strong she was. They didn't realize.
But Gary she'd known only casually. Besides, it was hot. So today, the simple pastel blue panties, made in Italy and delivered Federal Express by catalogue from a boutique in Toronto, were her only escape from the dour here and now. She pictured their minute waves and folds, their sheen and delicate effervescence as she twirled gently around in front of the closet mirror.
"Sometimes when words aren't adequate," Rabbi Laura said between the obnoxious sighs, music can help us to contain … and to confront … our conflicting emotions. If you'll all focus on the candle and the bowl of water on the coffee table … I thought we could start off by singing a negun, just a melody with no words."
With that, the rabbi started la-la-ing in a hoarse, slightly hammy alto. The group hummed along, with a few bold la-la-ers taking the lead, the loudest of them—a man with sweat soaking through his Oxford shirt—utterly off-key. If he'd tried, he couldn't have been more distant from the cloying tune. It was an actual tritone away, a hoarse, hideous organum, almost wailing, as if from some crazed monk. Joana stared at him and shuddered.
Then they went around the room introducing themselves and saying how they knew Gary. Sure enough, the few men knew him professionally and not terribly well. And the women—a teacher, a stock broker, a TV news producer, an ad firm account manager, two attorneys, a dentist, a general surgeon, a restaurant manager and Joana—had either dated him, fixed him up with other women, been fixed up with him by other women or otherwise counseled him on his love life. They chuckled uncomfortably at this farcical element of the gathering, for it was too striking and too absurd to simply ignore.
This was a morbid social house of cards built on the hollow ego of a lonely man, Joana thought. And now it had collapsed into this ungainly pile of strained emoting. She wished herself elsewhere. God was it hot. The backs of her knees felt sticky and a little raw against the sofa's stale-smelling, rough upholstery.
Joana knew—all these women knew, they must have—that they were just the tip of the iceberg. At the thought, she shook her head and looked up at the ceiling. There were so many others, she was sure. (This time she didn't care if anyone noticed her, but if they did, they likely thought she was overcome with grief, appealing quietly to the heavens.) Cindy, for instance. Cindy, the banker friend who'd gone out with Gary and suggested that he call Joana, wasn't in the group. Had she not been told? Had she washed her hands of him? Joana hadn't thought to call her, figuring that the secretary who somehow had Joana's number would certainly have let Cindy know. And she was just one, Joana was positive, of coutnless missing links in this romantic Ponzi scheme. Surely there were other Cindy's. Lots of them. Even if they weren't on a readily apparent phone or e-mail list. Gary had taken in all womankind.
Some of the women recognized each other from the group outings—the karaoke sings at Japanomatic or the get-togethers at Twister Alley in Wheaton to dance to the Prairie Pals. "You're Jessica, right? We met at Bob's Billiards that night. Good to see you again." Then a resigned stare. "But I wish it were under better circumstances." That was a typical variation on the afternoon's mantra.
At least Joana had escaped those vapid group get-togethers despite Gary's best efforts to snare her. If she weren't his date, he wanted her as one of his outing groupies. But she hadn't succumbed to more than that one awful evening with him. She didn't become, she thought with relief, part of his now-abandoned, nomadic, platonic harem. She didn't need him, like so many others seemed to, just to say, come Fridays and Saturdays, that she had some place to go. She went where she wanted. She always had. More often than not, she preferred to be alone. When she wanted company, she wanted it to be finite and stimulating.
No one here knew her beyond her brief introduction, and now, especially, she was glad she'd said so little about herself. "I'm Joana. I went out with Gary once, and when I heard, well, it seemed like such a waste. I had to be here, I guess." She'd really told them nothing. She was a stranger. Anonymous. And that, she now saw plainly, was for the best.
Rabbi Laura suggested that anyone who wanted to speak say something they remembered or thought or felt about Gary. Her brother, Arnold, the host, read a passage from Bertram Russell that in its own windy way seemed to say you shouldn't feel guilty if everyone finds you totally unapproachable and distant and can't confide in you. The wording was a little baroque, but Joana liked the sentiment. Bertram wouldn't be here, she thought to herself.
The woman in advertising showed a video of a local news broadcast in which she and Gary were interviewed at Umbria Restaurant’s grape-stomping festival. Gary had invited Joana to the grape stomping, the restaurant's annual promotional gimmick, but she’d begged out with some feeble excuse. Watching the video, she was glad she had. It made her sad to watch. The group Gary had organized, the uneasy, fixed smiles on their faces as he sang the aria with the hired tenor. Gary knew the aria well. That was impressive. But there was something brash and off-kilter about his joyless spontaneity. It was that void beyond his work and noise and exhibitionism that had made Joana cringe on their one date—to Blues Alley in Georgetown. And it unsettled her again now watching him on the staticky, faded videotape of the schmaltzy opera performance at the dowdy Italian restaurant.
The dentist said she'd once counseled Gary about a personal ad he'd placed in City Paper. It was all wrong, she'd told him. "You'll never get a date with this thing," she said. "Let me rewrite it." She did, the dentist recounted with a straight face obviously destined for a punchline. Whatever the story’s kicker was, Joana knew she wouldn't find it funny because the tale seemed pathetic and sordid to her. She was humiliated she’d gone out even once with this desperate man who sought mates in the newspaper, and she was now sorry her conscience had compelled her to come to this morbid gathering.
The respondents to the revised ad, the dentist said, smiling with a hopeless mirth Joana didn't like, were an incarcerated woman and another who was in her late fifties and lived on an Eastern Shore farm with her ancient, ailing parents. The woman in her fifties emphasized that she was still a virgin, still waiting for her soul mate.
Gary struck up a long-lasting correspondence with both these women. “That's just the way he was,” the dentist said. But then he ran the ad he'd written and gotten "just dozens of dates," she beamed. “All great women.” Great women like these, Joana thought, looking around and feeling a little light-headed. Great women like me, sucked into this helpless man's vacuum of emotion.
The stock broker remembered how fond Gary was of brownies. How he was, in fact, a brownie connoisseur. When he bought, it was only from Tivoli. But the ones he made were even better, she said. She'd once glanced in his refrigerator and seen eight tubs of sour cream. That, she said, was his secret. "I guess I can reveal it now," she said, then laughed, then broke into sobs and someone handed her a box of Kleenex.
A couple talked about how Gary had sung "Mac the Knife" at their wedding. And not only that, they'd said, but it was the best rendition of "Mac the Knife" they'd ever heard. Better than Sinatra. That's funny, said another couple. He'd done the same thing at their wedding.
When the restaurant manager had been between jobs the summer before, she said, there was suddenly a flurry of outing messages from Gary. Sing-along nights at Mr. Henry’s. Alvin Ailey at the Kennedy Center. A Myrna Loy festival at the American Film Institute. She’d felt so lost that summer and Gary steered his social-life raft her way, she said. When she found a new job, the invitations just as quickly, and just as subtly, ebbed.
The remembrance was meant to show how profoundly generous and tactful Gary was. But, Joana thought to herself, looking down at her sleek leather-strapped espadrilles, Gary probably figured, with Sharon insecure and jobless, he might actually have a chance of bagging her.
Joana had fled Gary after just a goodnight kiss that one chilly October night. Gary had blabbed on and on about be-bop and what a brilliant bassist Ron Abner was, and how Reuben Blake, a local pianist, should have become rich and famous instead of being sidelined by a stroke. Gary made a point of going up to the players between sets and shaking their hands and asking about various D.C. jazz musicians he had heard and what were they up to now and where could he find this or that hard-to-find album. How the vinyls somehow seemed to have a soul the digital versions couldn't touch, and was that his imagination or did it have to do with the remixing? On and on.
Even the players, after a while, seemed to realize the talk had no real personality behind it. That it was like radio chat. Filler. White noise. Gary really did seem to know a lot about jazz, but it was knowledge in pure crystal form, undiluted, undigested and indigestible. Show-offy smarts. Despite it, he didn't really seem to find anything affirming in the music, and the players seemed to figure that out after a few minutes. The evening had left her cold and she’d been anxious to get away from him. When she'd gotten home, she had to decompress, take a bath, channel surf, and she'd felt, for no particular reason, like crying.
But though many of the women around her were balling away now, Joana couldn't have summoned tears if she'd tried. The stories, the recollections, kept coming. They were torture to Joana and she couldn’t understand why the group was putting itself through this. For whom? For what? What did it solve? Who would it help? Was it really solace to them, these acquaintances who'd known so little about Gary? Is that what they were crying about? That they'd been oblivious to his sorrow? That he'd been oblivious to so much, camouflaged by his bland extroversion and whirlwind of activity? These shallow recollections explained nothing, resolved nothing.
Were they crying, as Rabbi Laura suggested, because they would have been there for him if only he'd asked, if only he'd leaned on them, if only they'd known? Joana wasn't at all sure that was true. Gary was tiresome enough when being friendly and energetic. Imagine if he'd been a morose whiner as well as a fake.
He was so very meticulous, was a recurring theme. The neatest desk in the office. Never even a folderless file on his computer. He was meticulous even in doing himself in. Not only had he left the letters in his pockets—one to family, one to friends—and the will. But he’d left the vaccination records of his two cats, Romulus and Remus, stacked neatly on the dining table of his tidy little one-bedroom Roslyn apartment. He’d even left instructions on how often to change their flea collars, and when the next change was due. A note on the best combination of dry-to-canned food for the sake of their urinary tracts.
The strange thing, said a colleague named Matt, who seemed to have known Gary just a tad better than the others did, was that Gary had also made plans for the months ahead. Tickets to Wolf Trap and a local Democratic fund-raiser. Reservations—non-refundable—for a Chicago trip in the fall for his grandmother’s 90th birthday. Maybe it showed he’d had doubts about whether he’d really go through with it. Or maybe he’d decided absolutely to kill himself, but only after he’d decided absolutely that he had to hear Chaka Khan one last time. Then, maybe, he'd listened to “Through the Fire” on his stereo and figured that was good enough.
Or maybe the tickets and reservations were a lawyerly contingency plan in case there were some logistical problem—an unexpected relocation while his office was sprayed for bugs. Something like that. Maybe he just wanted it to go well, had rehearsed it down to the suit and tie and shoes he’d wear, gone over it again and again in his mind like “Mac the Knife.” And maybe if some chaotic chance event were going to interfere with this last flawless performance, Gary would have to postpone it and would want to sit at a table with a Kennedy and go to Chicago to toast his grandmother before he’d have another chance. Maybe he just didn’t want to be bored between suicide attempts, thought Joana. Maybe it was worth the money in his tight budget to keep himself entertained in case he had to live a little longer.
But it was all maybes. The speculation was a curse he'd left behind. The note to the friends explained nothing and offered no real comfort. It said he'd hidden his troubles and his pain too well, and that they shouldn't feel guilty for not realizing how despondent he'd become. But of course in denying their guilt, he'd assumed it would be guilt they felt. And the denial itself was an inducement and indictment. Like saying don't think about a pink dinosaur with heart-shaped spots all over it. The note was the penultimate fuck you, Joana realized. A lawyerly jab to the gut disguised as a final considerate gesture. Penultimate to the final fuck you. The fuck you to end all fuck you’s. The mother of all fuck you’s. The lunchtime swan dive from the roof of the Federal Trade Commission. In the midst of this posthumous lovefest, she felt the purest hatred. A hatred so unpolluted it gave her a sudden strength as she looked around at these silly women. They didn't even seem human to her, they were so misguided, so illogical.
To wrap things up, Rabbi Laura sighed some more and talked about the Jewish belief in hereafters. It was a common misconception, the hideous, loud woman explained, that Jews didn't believe in an afterlife. Perhaps not a heaven or a hell, she said. But they do believe—they have, since ancient times—that one learns some lessons in a lifetime, but misses others. And that in another lifetime, the person comes back and fills in those gaps. Again and again. Through time, through an infinite seminar of lives in different circumstances, he or she learns more and more of what makes up the whole of an ideal. The person, in his or her many incarnations, may never quite reach the ideal, but coming closer and closer, it is in the striving that the transcendence of the human spirit is manifest, the rabbi said pompously. We call this the rotation of souls, she said. And, she concluded, "It's clear that in this lifetime the lesson Gary learned so beautifully was how to give, and that what he'll have to work on next time is how to take."
With that, the rabbi lead the group in the negun again and the impromptu ceremony was over. After a few moments of awkward silence, people sidled over to the dining room table and loaded paper plates with pasta salads and squash soufflé and desserts.
"Wasn't he Greek? Wasn't he Greek Orthodox?" Joana asked the dentist. He'd gone on and on about it at Monte Carlo over their London broil before the jazz club. Not that Joana had particularly given a shit, but he was like that, fleshing out the random details of his life like a politician in a Barbara Walters interview. Get to know the Gary behind the Gary. Seemingly flustered and fueled by Joana's silences—she hadn't meant to be rude, but she was never chatty—he'd told her about Father Dmitri and the old youth group and how he still kept up with all of them.
"Technically. But he was really an agnostic. He was pretty adamant about that."
"Either way ..." Joana shrugged the implied question, looking over at Rabbi Laura.
"I think Arnold felt it was important that there be some structure to this," the dentist said. "Anyway, it doesn't matter. These things are universal."
What things? What are you talking about? Joana wondered. But she let it drop. "Why wasn't anyone from the family here?" she asked.
"They're coming in for the formal service at the FTC on Tuesday ... Did it really bother you that it was a rabbi?"
"No, I guess not," Joana said. Duh. Of course it bothered her. He was Greek Orthodox. It was ridiculous. But what was the point in arguing about it? Who really cared?
Joana looked at the food. She was hungry from the hour on the elliptical she'd substituted for lunch, but she couldn't touch it. It looked too rich. Poisoned. She had to get out of there. She said a quick goodbyethankyou to Arnold and fled to her petite convertible. She drove quickly from the depressing little Takoma Park house to her Biltmore Street apartment in Kalorama. She realized she'd left the Tupperware with the salad at Arnold's. Fuck it, she thought. That was one house she'd never go back to. And she hoped she'd never run into any of those people again.
She peed and brushed her teeth and splashed cold water on her face. She had some left-over pad Thai and sat down at her drafting table. It was a project for the symphony—a good, steady client for four years straight. She’d hooked up with them through Maureen, who was a third-stand cellist. Joana felt gleeful having something concrete and sensible to think about after the maddening waste of an afternoon. Lots of elements to work with. She fiddled with the brochure layout, trying different schemes for having the maestro peer out paternally over the inherently dull grid of the season schedule. Hmm, she thought, Yo-Yo Ma’s playing the Elgar. Maureen would like that. It was one of her favorite pieces, and Ma was her hero. He’d done the Dvorak the year before and Maureen had raved and run off to B&N to buy his latest recordings. The best soloists reinvigorate a symphony, she told Joana. And with Ma, there’s no bullshit. He’s a pro—humble and easygoing. That, of course, was also a pretty fair description of Maureen herself.
Joana sometimes hated to be with her little sister because of the air of disorderliness and hazard that clung to her. There were always crumbs and near misses at crosswalks. The stick didn’t seem to help. She didn’t think Maureen ever learned to use it right or something. Then there was Kaiser, who was adorable and dutiful. But even Maureen, despite her loyalty to him, was tempted to ask if he couldn’t be replaced with a dog that smelled better. The vets never knew quite what to make of it, but it really seemed that there might be something seriously wrong with his GI tract.
But though she girded her strength for visits and errands with Maureen, and often found her unrealistic and scatterbrained and hopelessly naïve, Joana also worshipped her and relied on her, easily as much as Maureen needed her. If their roles had been switched—if it had been Joana whose corneas inexplicably and suddenly peeled themselves off of her eyes like poor-quality shrink wrap—would she have fared a fraction as well? Hell no. She would have lost it. She would have become psychotic, taken to drugs or something. Sat in her room and gotten fat and refused to bathe until she forced her family to commit her to some kind of institution. No, she wouldn’t have continued at Peabody and incrementally adapted the way Maureen had. She certainly wouldn’t have become even wiser, even more mature, more compassionate, because of it. If it had been her instead of Maureen, she would have become terribly bitter. That it might some day happen to her, too, was her very worst nightmare. When that happened in the chronic bad dreams, she shot up in bed, the sheets soaked with sweat, shivering and sobbing.
Joana arranged and rearranged the iconic variables of the symphony brochure, played with color charts to find something resonant with the previous seasons’ schedules but with just a few refreshing distinctions. Comparing shades of salmon and flesh tones on the oversized screen, she suddenly remembered that Gary had different color eyes. One was brown, one a pale hazel. Weird the way these things come back to you, she thought. He’d been so physically awkward that night in Georgetown. Self-conscious, it seemed, about his posture, blushing when she’d happened to look over at him while he was chewing some ice cubes at the club. She didn’t give a shit if he chewed ice cubes. She’d just happened to look over at him, that was all. He ever so tentatively took her hand when he kissed her on the cheek before putting her in the Liberty cab.
What had he wanted from her? What had he wanted from anyone? Sex? Company? A listener? An audience? None of those seemed to be the right answer, though they were all true. There was no right answer, she supposed. And when he’d realized that was the right answer—that no one had anything he wanted—he’d killed himself. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to take. It’s that he was dissatisfied with the selection. It was the ultimate selfishness. Joana shook her head, pulled up a drafting program, and started playing with proportions.
After about an hour and a half, the cavernous two-bedroom apartment—rent control, a real prize—seemed unbearably still, the light the sad smoot-filtered low voltage of late summer dusk. She rested her eyes a moment and leaned back in the high, lumbar-support chair, then got up, brushed her hair, and walked the couple blocks to Soleil in Adams Morgan.
She ordered a scotch old-fashioned at the sleek bar, and cherished the numbing, earth-bound slowness it delivered, losing herself in the textured acid groove coming over the speakers. She basked in the powerful air conditioning. And she admired the smart, flattering lighting, the cutaway walls and expansive mirrors.
A woman sat next to her on the only empty stool and ordered a Pernod. Joana watched the clear liqueur turn its milky, pale yellow as the bartender added water to the woman’s tall glass. She wondered if the yellow were one she could use. How would you produce its density? She’d have to try to mix it on her Chameleon program.
“That filtered?” the other woman asked the bartender. “The water, I mean. Do you filter it?” The city had lead in its pipes. It had been in the news a lot.
“Don’t worry,” the bartender said. “It’s Poland Spring.”
“Great,” said the woman. “Thanks. Pretty, isn’t it?” She’d turned to Joana, who hadn’t meant to stare.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m a graphic designer, and I was just thinking about that color, if I could use it for a project I’m working on. Just spacing out.”
“No problem.” The woman sipped her drink contentedly. “You’re waiting for someone?”
“No. … You?”
“No. … But if you were waiting for someone,” the woman said, “who would it be?”
It was a very weird question, and the woman must have known it, because she laughed awkwardly, self-consciously, and played with the rim of her glass and looked down at her parachute-panted knees. Joana didn’t know what to say. Was it just nonsense nervous conversation, the way hyperactive boys with nothing to say blurt out, “How now brown cow”?
“Um …”
“It would be a man or a woman, is what I mean,” the woman said.
Oh. “It would—uh—it would be a man. I’m flattered, though.” And she was. “Sorry.”
“No. No, I’m sorry,” said the other woman, who, without even finishing the other two-thirds of her drink, laid down a ten-dollar note. She looked over for change at the bartender but he was helping someone else. Flustered, the woman just left the ten there, gathered her little pocketbook from the floor and walked out, muttering, “My mistake.”
Maybe the woman had seen Joana looking around and thought she was, well, looking around. Joana sucked a cube, chuckled to herself, paid, and left. Eighteenth was teeming with the juvenile crowd. Eighties bubble-gum pop throbbed from Déja New across the car-clogged street, and grinding dance bass riffs pulsed from Vistas. Near the the three-way intersection with Columbia and Adams Mill, every narrow bar had a different beat—reggae, conjunto, jazz lite, blues. She withdrew some cash at the ATM and figured she’d go get a video when she passed Viva Cuba at its new location. The grand opening crowds of several months ago had disappeared. The doorman, nicely dressed in a svelte, tangoey black suit, eyed her appreciatively—a flirt too open to be objectionable—and said, for her, no cover. She smirked and kept walking. Then stopped and turned back. Why not?
Inside, she checked out the different floors. She had another drink in the third-story café. It was nice. Quiet Spanish guitar music, with interesting, teasingly sensuous photos lining the walls. She found a little round table a couple had just left, and sat on the high stool enjoying a sangria. Three men—preppy, young, and nice-looking—talked law school at the next table. One caught her eye, and his was caught in turn. Relaxed, undaunted, he asked her if she wanted to join them, and she did. Brent, Harry, and Scott were their names. While Brent and Harry seemed jerky and aggressive in a warmed-over adolescent way, Scott, who’d asked her over, seemed straightforward and pleasant. Final year at GW, he said. They were celebrating the end of their treacherous summer internships. Did she want another?
“Just water, please.”
“I’m sorry. They’re really not bad guys. They’re just fidgety or something tonight,” Scott apologized after his buddies had grudgingly been shooed away by him. He had a gentle squinty confidence about him. He was tall, and dressed nicely in Send slacks and a soft, maroon, short-sleeve polo that flattered his relaxed, broad frame. There was a little weekend stubble and fatigue that only accentuated his studenty youth and energy. She was very attracted to him.
“They want to get laid,” she said, enjoying the shock value.
“Well, yeah,” he nodded, taking her in. “I suppose they do.”
He looked bewildered and thrilled as Joana led him wordlessly downstairs to the salsa dance floor. It was crowded, but in a cheerful, celebratory way. Not pushy. Lots of excuse-me’s as the intermingled yuppies and workadays, Hispanic, black, Asian, and white, carried Coronas to their dates. Scott moved with an easy grace. And Joana knew that as he watched her own happy, angular gyrations, he was falling under her spell. She had a look of fun-overcoming-skepticism that captivated men and had since she was a girl. Pale with her thick, black page-boy cut, toned, with a cutely contained lankiness, she well knew her looks’ quiet, potent authority. And she could tell, as the DJ navigated the giddy crowd through its pressurized contortions, that Scott was cataloguing the breadth of his budding infatuation with her. She enjoyed his breathless, helpless scanning of her, as reflexive and natural as gooseflesh in cold.
“Will you walk me home, please?”
“Sure,” he nodded. The drinks had hit her, and the quick walk felt like slow motion. She’d stepped into the anti-matter of anticipated pleasure, feeling it grainily part before her and close again behind her in the humid night. And she hoped Scott felt it too. It was what she most liked to share in life.
At her lobby, she took his unsure hand, looked him over with a moment’s strange conscientiousness, as though she’d quiz herself later, then kissed him deliciously.
“Are you scared of me?” she asked without smiling, then smiled.
“I just didn’t expect this,” he said, and she was glad he didn’t pretend that he had. “Did you?” he asked.
“I did. And then I didn’t. And then I did again.” She grinned and looked down at their hot, joined hands.
He laughed a quiet laugh, shook his head, and they rose in the ancient, caged elevator.
Inside, she made them decaf cappuccinos—good, frothy and strong with traces of cocoa and cinnamon on top.
“These yours?” he said, looking over the vanity wall of framed posters, brochures, and ads she’d done. She nodded. “They’re … I don’t know much about what to look for. But they’re striking,” he said.
“That’s what to look for.” She joined him and studied him the way he did the wall. “Sometimes people look for too much.”
He bit his tongue in order not to say she, too, was striking. It would have sounded awful, and contrived. But it was true. Bird-limbed and coyly suspicious and hungry looking, her weight on one sharp hip, cupping the oversized Williams and Sonoma mug, blinking, basking in its homey warmth. She was something else. It was a great apartment, too, he thought. So big. Nice and dry and cool.
“You like Ella?” she said. “I’ve been listening to a lot of Ella.” She looked, for an instant, soft and reaching. But it vanished almost as quickly, displaced again by that unpredictable willfulness, that nameless edge that taunted and provoked him.
“I’ve only heard her a little, I think,” he said. “That sounds fine.”
They danced and kissed and she felt his excitement. At that, he pulled away a little, but she pulled him back. “Don’t be embarrassed,” she said. “It’s nice. Me too.” That made him shiver, and that made her glad. Their bodies settled together and rocked to and fro to Ella’s cooing.
“Whoa.” She started undressing him. Every time is different, she thought happily. Every time recapitulates the blushing time. She felt very, very light.
“No, please,” she said. “Not yet. Just you first, OK?” Awkward and painfully exposed, he’d squirmed and wanted to slip off the straps of her dress, but she hadn’t let him. She kissed his chest and his stomach and his thighs, and from her purse on the futon sofa she pulled out some condoms.
“You checkin’ me out down there?” He sounded a little resentful. “…Hey, what’s the deal? Why not just give me a complete physical?”
“Don’t be offended,” she said. “I like to look at you.” It was true, and it was a lie. He was offended, until he forgot to be. She kissed him again and caressed his face and then did slide out of the little, black dress, which fell to the wood floor as quietly and lightly as a rose petal. She let him tug off the panties and watched the vein in his neck throb. And she helped him with the condom. The she opened another of the square packages.
“Two?”
“Don’t worry.” Narrowed eyes. A temptress grin. “You’ll still feel it.”
Double-wrapped, he pulled her toward him and her mouth toward his. They kissed for a tender, weightless spell. Then she turned her back to him and kneeled on the futon-sofa, her hands on its back. Scott reached around and rubbed her tentatively. She smiled.
“How much do you know about female anatomy?” she asked.
He pulled back a little. “Well, I thought quite a bit. But if you’re asking, maybe not.” He was hurt. “I’m not proud. Show me.”
She was glad he wasn’t proud. And she showed him. “It helps if you pull this back a little, gently, like that. Mmmm. Yeah. Like that.”
Again, he chose to forget the offense he’d taken, captivated by her long neck, the mild sweep of her back graduating supply to the taut underneath. He mapped them with one hand as she moved against the fingers of his other.
She braced her knees broadly, reached beneath herself and guided him.
In the morning, Joana was unfazed by his watch alarm. He had a tennis date and no number to cancel it. She looked content and sweetly ruffled, makeupless and robe-wrapped, and they had delicious brioche from Rise Bakery with Café Busto from the Americana Grocery. As they sipped and stared, the phone rang. Joana pursed her lips in a fun, knowing way and didn’t answer.
The machine came on. It was an unaccompanied cello playing “Happy Birthday.” Scott started to ask, of course but Joana put her finger to her lips. It was a family tradition, one her mom had started when they were little girls. Early morning, weekday or weekend regardless. For the rest of them, it was singing. Her Dad would call soon from Geneva and croak the tune in his own wonderful, artless way. But for Maureen, it was playing, and beautiful, sonorous playing at that. The last notes echoed from the machine’s peewee speaker through the big room. Maureen didn’t say anything. But then that wasn’t uncharacteristic. Played and hung up, leaving just the whir of the dutiful, oscillating fan by the TV. Joana savored the moment.
“I didn’t know it was your birthday.”
“How could you?” Joana said. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“How old are you?”
“Older than you.”
“Hmm.” Scott gulped the rest of the cup and chugged the orange juice from its little teardrop-base glass. “Well, many happy returns.”
On his way out, he said, “I’ll call you.”
“Please don’t.” She knew it was like a sword thrust, but meant it and knew it would go easiest if the thrust was steady and straight.
“I don’t understand. … Did I say something? Did I do something?”
He looked at her, wounded, his face flushing. She didn’t want that. She couldn’t prevent it.
“No,” she said. “You were fine. You were wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for being with me.”
“'Thank you for being with me?’ That’s it? So … I’m not going to see you again?” He looked incredulous, his forehead creased. He waited to find out she was kidding.
She shrugged an I’m-sorry shrug, and they stood there awkwardly.
With a grim little exhaled laugh, he finally looked away from her, then got into the elevator, letting the quaint cage door slide shut after him with a decisive clang. She watched his slow, mechanical descent, his averted eyes and stonily fixed expression as he disappeared beneath the edge of the worn stone flooring where it met the shaft.
She went back inside her apartment and finished off her coffee. She opened the French doors to the little balcony. She sat in the sturdy Ikea chair she always left there. In the girding, close heat, the Post on her lap, she pushed back against the brick. Braced, she wrapped her toes around the iron railing, and read.
Original photo of woman is by Sacha Leclair.
