At least she never had to see him again, really, after their final special day. She never had to hear his voice ask her Why? Why would you do that to me? Why would you lie?
The fish emerges again, eyeing her. Its tail fin bumps a drifting, laden leaf; ashes float down and the fish catches them in its mouth as it glides past. She wonders how long it will glide there, along a shallow river current. Perhaps it will live to be a hundred. Always lurking, just waiting to bubble up, to emerge thrashing again and again.
No, she tells herself, eventually it will stop. Unfed, and all alone in the cold like that. She takes a deep breath, exhales. It has to die. It has to.
MUSICAL CHAIRS
“They call her the Senator’s Wife,” he tells me.
“Oh. So, you still want to be a senator?” I ask.
“Well, yeah. Eventually.”
“And that’s what your friends call her? ‘The Senator’s Wife’?”
“Mm.”
“She’s supportive. Well groomed. Law-abiding.”
“Yeah.” He shifts his weight, peeling himself away from me.
“She’s beautiful.”
“I think so,” he says.
No. He doesn’t need to affirm this; it is an objective analysis. She looks down on us from a cheap frame propped on a bookshelf, a shelf that still holds his adolescent and teenage books, here in his parents’ house. I knew him in high school but never came to this house. There would have been no reason to, then. Now he is back from law school, pre — his own apartment, and we are having sex beneath a photo of his by-any-standards-beautiful fiancée, left waiting with pearls and chignon back in Georgetown.
I hate that I have to ask. “So, what about me? Why are you here, with me? What am I?” I am the Senator’s Concubine, I’m dying to say, but that is too cute.
“You. .” he says, tenderly stroking my sweaty hair, “are ambitious. You are going to achieve. You are going to do fucking amazing things, all on your own.”
This is cruel, his faith in me. And inappropriate. At sixteen he was gawky and spotty and too smart for his own good, hyper-political, a frenzied blur. Debating Club, Junior State, the ranting editorial section of the school paper. All the soft and non-threatening civics of high school were mowed flat by his senatorial drive. I smiled indulgently, everyone did, then, at Chas’s panting, socialist need to Do Something, at his angelic blond curls and beige corduroy slacks. I would have shunned a crush with cruel and condescending sweetness. I would have dismissed him, thoroughly. I have now made the mistake of layering that memory onto this present man, reencountered five weeks ago in a bar I thought him too unhip for, and have wound up here, naked in bed with someone who is no longer who he was. Who now calls himself Chuck. Who has, in sneaking a new self past me, into me, lied.
“Can I kiss you?” he asks in a skilled whisper, like it is a meaningful thing. This man could, will, become a senator. He is well beyond me and in total control, cool and self-assured as a fascist.
“Yes,” I whisper back, grateful and hating myself, hating him.
It is October. His wedding is scheduled for June. In January, a sweater for him half-knit (yes, I knit, you asshole, I think), my hatred frayed as used yarn, I pick up some other guy I truly don’t know in the hip bar, have sex in his car, and later call Chas to tell him he’s fucked, that I never want to see him again, and to please return my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude sometime when I’m not home. Because of this, I don’t hear, a month later, of his engagement to the Senator’s Wife abruptly ending when Chas decides he’s just not ready to get married. She had moved here from Georgetown, bought the Vera Wang dress, registered at Williams-Sonoma. The cream-and-roses invitations had already gone out. I also don’t hear of it because Chas doesn’t call me again for three years.
SOMEHOW, THEN, WE become friends. Once every eighteen months or so we wind up in bed, resulting in six months of revived snarl and separation, but we always work our way back to close-knit. He always has an excuse, and it is always Timing. He might have fallen in love with me, yes, but the timing was always wrong: He was engaged, I was seeing someone else, he was seeing someone else, I was being a lesbian, he was living in San Francisco, one of us moved and couldn’t find the other’s new address or phone number. To him it would seem merely a matter of temporal misalignment. That we simply never fell into the solitude gaps in each other’s lives. I think this is bullshit, but I let it stand; the truth doesn’t flatter me. Years go by, and we go to the Frolic Room for drinks, to El Coyote for nachos, to the Nuart for Scorsese retrospectives. We applaud each other’s successes and lacerate each other’s antagonists. We riffle through other lovers. At some drunken point one evening he concedes that if we ever were together, really tried being together, yes, we’d wind up wanting to kill each other, but no, we wouldn’t ever be bored. This is a tiny victory, shallow and insignificant though it may be. I burrow into it like a hastily dug grave.
I finish the sweater I once started for him and wear it myself. I wear it for years in front of him, carry it around, leave it lying in the hatchback of my car or draped over a chair until, finally, one chilly night we are sitting outside on the new balcony of my new condominium, and he is cold, and I can offer it to him. A retroactive, conceptual offering. Hey, this is great, he says, fondling it, Did you make this? For you, I tell him. A long, long time ago. He looks surprised, then abruptly seems to remember a meaningful thing. He nods, puts the sweater on, admiring my skill. Zosia, my new little dog, nudges him. I named her after my grandmother; I’d finally decided I was saving the name for no reason. Chas picks her up and nuzzles her in his lap. His fingers massage little circles in her fur; she closes her eyes blissfully and I am uncomfortably reminded of his fingers once touching me like that, those same little massaging circles.
MY NEW CONDO is beautiful, a result of my doing fucking amazing things, all on my own. High ceilings and hardwood floors. Stunning appointments, a desirable neighborhood south of the Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. I am the youngest person in the building, and the residents, many of them immigrants of forty and fifty years, still speaking with German and Polish and Yiddish accents, who came here with nothing and are now comfortable, treat me like a successful granddaughter and tell me they are happy the building has fresh blood. The next youngest are the two women who live next door, LouAnn and Bev, in their early forties, with Brooklyn accents and a lot of condo-oriented spirit; the three of us are elected president, vice-president, and secretary of the Homeowner’s Association Board, which entitles us to receive late-night, distraught, heavily accented calls about plumbing problems and being locked out. LouAnn and I post friendly if slightly directive notices on the lobby bulletin board, announcing Please Note: The Lobby Floor Will Be Waxed This Wednesday A.M., Watch Your Step!, or Please Note: Residents Must Park In Their Assigned Spaces — Visitor Parking Is For Visitors Only! A gentlemen couple in their fifties sneak treats to Zosia and insist I let them take her for walks; they tell me she is very ethereal for a poodle. One time I hear an old lady shrieking “Fire!” across the hallway, and I race to her aid with a fire extinguisher; her tea kettle, forgotten, had boiled out its water and the kettle’s burning bottom was filling the kitchen with acrid black smoke. This sweet old lady, Mrs. Steinman, has a leg brace and a crumpled left arm, neither of which prevents her from taking out her own trash and doing all her own grocery shopping. In thanks for my blasting her kitchen with fire extinguisher foam, she leaves at my door three six-packs of Diet 7-Up, which she has wheeled upstairs to our floor in her little wire cart. She is from a tiny village in Poland, the same, we discover over 7-Up, as my grandmother Zosia. But my grandmother, daughter of the village rabbi, had fled the Russian pogroms; Mrs. Goldberg escaped as a limping, polio-afflicted twelve-year-old from the Germans. The village no longer exists. Her family no longer exists. I feel for her, having to live all on her own. I make it a point to engage with her in long chats when we meet.