“And the bathroom was freezing. I was naked and shivering and those glass shelves Hugh put up looked to be bursting with the life of my family—deodorants and foot powders, shampoos, bubble bath, brushes and combs, Stimudents, a plastic frog, those hand-muscle flexers Sammy liked to squeeze when he soaked in the tub. It all looked so immense and beautiful; I stared at it with my mouth open, like a miser gawking at his gold. I never felt that way about the family; I wasn’t in my normal mind. My diaphragm always was on the second shelf, next to the shampoos, and there it was, as always. Encased in a maroon plastic pouch. I zipped it open, and my heart flipped out. My diaphragm was missing.
“I wasn’t confused over this, at least for not longer than a moment. I remembered hearing Jade going to the bathroom earlier and I realized that she’d gone and taken my diaphragm. Before you came along and relations got a little strained between me and Jade, we used to talk about how alike our bodies were and I suppose she figured what was good enough for me would hold the fort for her. And you, Jewish-radical-rock-and-roll-pot- head, you didn’t even have the brains or the cunning to carry a Trojan in your wallet. God, David, even Sammy was carrying a rubber around, and he was eleven. Look, I was proud of you, even if you were too stupid to plan. At least you were both too steady to risk her getting knocked up. Good for them! I thought, like a ruddy camp counselor. Yet I had to wince. Quite a world of difference separated my battle-weary cervix from Jade’s. It must have hurt like hell and done her no good at all. I mean it was obscene, hilarious, but mostly it was pathetic. I zippered up my little case and then I felt a flash of resentment: how dare she assume I wouldn’t be using my birth control! I ran the water over my hands, dried my hands, and I was trembling with the cold and the damp and from everything I was feeling. I made my way back to bed, wondering what I’d tell Hugh.
“If I’d told him the diaphragm was missing, he would have wanted to know why, and then there was every chance of him thundering down the stairs and doing something about it. And maybe that would have been the best thing. Don’t think I don’t often wonder. If I’d let Hugh in on what I knew about you two, I mean right from the beginning, then maybe everything would have been different. Maybe he would have chased you out of the house. Maybe he could have organized his feelings better when you slowly started moving in with us. He wouldn’t have had to wait until it was too late to take control and then suddenly become a father figure and ban you from our house. Then, it was too late, but that night if I’d told him—who knows what would have changed? But all I thought about was the preciousness of what I’d seen, the two of you holding each other in the corny glow of the fireplace. I wanted that memory and I wanted it to myself. I didn’t want Hugh charging down the stairs. I wanted Hugh to make love to me.
“Which is what he did. We made love and I risked getting pregnant, just as you and Jade made love without any useful protection. What a night of risks! How the souls of the unborn must have hovered over that old house, waiting for the act of inception.”
“I wish she had gotten pregnant that night,” I said and then, surprised by the sound of my own voice and surprised at what I’d said, I let out a sob and covered my eyes. The room was moving, not with drunken abandon but slowly, as if the room really was moving, through space and time, as all things of course do but which only mad people see.
“I’m sure you do,” said Ann. “But that’s your story and this is mine. It changed everything, that night, everything I believed about making love and Hugh. Because it was never complete, you know. I never ever came and mostly I never got close. Only when I masturbated, but never with Hugh. And of course I blamed him—blamed men, not just Hugh, but the boys I slept with before him and when he was away making the world safe for democracy, all of them, and myself too, but Hugh, mostly I blamed Hugh. For being too small, too fast, too eager, too gentle, too selfish. What difference does it make? I didn’t even try. But that night, I was on fire. And the image of the two of you downstairs burned behind my eyes. Oh God, I was pornographic, moving beneath Hugh and knowing that beneath the two of us were the two of you. I knew I was going to make it and I’d never be able to blame Hugh again because he was perfect. He wasn’t doing anything different; I don’t even know if he was fully awake, but he was perfect. There was no hurry. I knew I was going to come. My legs were turning to water and stone at the same time. For the first time in my life, I was truly indiscreet.”
Abruptly, Ann was silent. She finished the little bit of wine that was left in her glass and then took mine, but it was empty. She looked exhausted. A slight film of perspiration made the powder on her face look porous. For all the fineness of her features, the straightness of her posture, and the persistent delicacy of her gestures, she looked like an abandoned middle-aged woman in a dark warm bar, known by the bartenders and the waiters, short on cash, lonely, garrulous, and letting go.
“There’s a simple law,” she said, leaning forward on one elbow and tossing her napkin onto the table. “Whenever you tell the truth, you’re also confessing. No confession, no truth.”
The waiter had probably been watching us, waiting for a drop in Ann’s intensity. He was at our table now, clearing the dishes and making a point out of checking if any wine had been left at the bottom of either bottle.
“Coffee, dessert?” he said. He was looking at me.
“What time is it, Carlo?” Ann said.
His hands were filled with our dishes but he turned his wrist so Ann could read his watch.
“Oh. Ten to ten. I’ve stood up my date.” She looked worried, even a little scared, but then she said: “Good for me! I haven’t stood anyone up since I was sixteen years old!”
We walked back to her apartment on the chance that her friend was waiting. When we were beneath the awning in front of her building, Ann said, “I’ll faint if he’s still here,” but I couldn’t tell if that would mean joy, surprise, or disappointment. As for me, my own preferences lay buried beneath fatigue and a familiar, yet exhausting, self-envy: the boy who had lived through the evening Ann had described at Pete’s Tavern still reigned within me, but, increasingly, he was not me. While I still believed the self who had made love to Jade that night was my best self, it also existed as a kind of younger brother whose exploits, whose flights of ecstasy I was condemned to admire with a kind of brittle, helpless awe.
“Well, he’s not in the lobby,” Ann said. She was walking with a very faint wobble. Every once in a while she touched my arm, as if to right her balance, but there was a shyness in those touches that made each of them noticeable. There was no doorman in sight. Ann opened the door and glanced once over her shoulder. It disturbed me that the habits of caution were now second nature to her. I’d always thought of her as being so safe.
I was feeling lopsided from the wine as well. In the elevator—we stood very far apart—I said, “When we first started smoking grass we never would drink and we put down people who did.”