And so, in a dozen empty apartments, among several dozen hairy people, there is the happy exchange of sex to which I am not privy. Pleasantly stoned, headed to the bathroom, I hear light moans and giggles from one direction, bedsprings from another. I stand in front of the door, aroused, confused, trying to summon my Dr. Ruth knowledge. That sounded like a vaginal orgasm. That one, clitoral for sure. Out on the terrace, the sun is setting over the flaming fire-lookout tower of Jefferson Market and Fellow-Sufferer John is dismantling a turkey deli sandwich over a thing of beer. “Jew, wakka-wakka,” he says. “Hermeneutics.” And so on and so forth, for a good long while, until we take the Long Island Rail Road home.
Whom am I in love with? Let me count the girls. Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? I love indiscriminately and openly. A tall, classically pretty girl with circles under her eyes. I take her to the Central Park Zoo, my idea of romantic. She brings a friend. Then one of her long, alternative fingernails accidentally scratches my hand something terrible, a scar I still bear. There’s a fluffy buxom blonde with clear blue eyes who lives in a Village townhouse with her divorced mother. Mama opens the door, appraises my harmlessness, and allows Fluffy out for a date to the Bronx Zoo, where I buy her an elephant we name Gandhi. I take her to a French restaurant in midtown. “Let’s just be friends.” There’s Sara whom I have tantric sex with in metaphysics class. There’s a tall Korean girl, Jen, who lets me massage her feet. “You have to be greedy, selfish, and immoral to survive in this lifetime” is Jen’s yearbook quote. Mine: “ ‘Virtue has never been as respectable as money’—Mark Twain.” Soul mates. There’s curly-haired, skinny Alana (not her real name), whose Fifth Avenue apartment and permissive parents I will soon appropriate for my first novel. I spend many nights, head spinning, on her spare couch, next to a bathroom smelling of kitty litter and two actual cats, Midnight and Cinnamon. Past midnight, lovesick, Alana comfortable in her big bed elsewhere, I once again stare out of the kitchen window next to my couch at the spire of a brown Gothic church. A mutual friend of ours has told me that Alana thinks my nose is too big, so that’s not going to happen. Interesting about the nose: My father had always called me Yid-face, but he had said my lips were the problem. Now the nose, too. Anyway, I am in an apartment full of brilliant Manhattanites, next to a box of kitty litter, and outside a moon hovers over the church and the broad expanse of Fifth Avenue at the juncture where it leads up to the dramatically European flourish of the Washington Square Arch. The famous street is empty save for one beat-up old taxi. It is going to snow soon.
But someone does love me. His name is Paulie.* He’s in his forties. I have an after-school job working for his ____† company in the meatpacking part of town, although it’s hard to tell what exactly I’m supposed to be doing there. To bait me into his middle-aged clutches, Paulie puts up an advertisement on the Stuyvesant work board asking for a smart teenager and promising six dollars an hour. He first hires me and a Russian girl, but the Russian girl smells of meat and sweat, so she lasts only a few days. At my behest Paulie hires Alana, too, but it’s not her he wants! It’s me! Half of our days are spent tearing down city streets in his car as he leans out the window and shouts in his ____ accent‡ to passing women, “Hey, beau-tee-ful! Jew got a nice ass! Don’t deny it!” Over the course of several years, we get lucky, let’s say, never. “I’m no fag,” Paulie says, brushing aside the curly remains of his dyed hair, but he does talk about how he would like to bend me over the desk and do ____ and ____ to my ass.
I am incredibly flattered by Paulie’s attentions. Although he’s much older, he also wants to become a writer someday, maybe chronicle his escape from ____§ on a raft with the help of the CIA. At work, I’m in charge of getting lunch for the whole crew, mainly burgers from Hector’s Cafe or arroz con pollo from the Dominican place. He yells at me when I get it wrong, but when I get it right he calls me Prince Pineapple, along with some snatches of Spanish. “Nice going, Prince Pineapple, puta maricón.” I can smile for an hour after he says that. One day Paulie takes me down to Florida for a little vacation, a jaunt that will inspire a long, scary chapter of my first novel. On the morning before I leave, my father sits next to me on the couch while my mother rifles through the bag I’ve packed for Florida to make sure I have my asthma inhaler and sunscreen. “Your boss …,” my father says. He sighs. I flex my white winter toes. Does Papa suspect that my boss wants to pork me? “Sometimes,” my father says, “I’m jealous of Paulie because he seems like more of a father to you than I am.”
“Oh, no,” I say, “please. You’re my father.”
Several days later Paulie and I are sitting in a rented Buick in front of a deluxe Sarasota condo, his hand on my knee. Paulie points at the condo. He looks exhausted from pursuing me, as exhausted as I would be pursuing all those girls back at Stuy if I were his age. “Look,” he says. “That condo up there can be yours. Your family can use it anytime. Think of how happy you’ll make your parents. I just want …” And his hand creeps up my thigh.
I laugh the way girls laugh when I try to put the moves on them, and then I take his hand off my thigh, feeling its heat and heft. I’m a little scared and a little happy that my second father takes such an interest in me. If only I were at all turned on by him. This is just like one of those Tolstoy novels where X loves Y, but Y loves Z.
There’s a picture from that trip with someone’s arm over my shoulder. Not Paulie’s, but the Queen’s. I am standing there, curly haired, wearing some kind of Mexican blanket pullover along with the paper crown of Medieval Times, a dinner-and-jousting-tournament place near Orlando. The Queen looks like an advanced teenager in full medieval regalia. Off to the side, Paulie is laughing at me, making motions with his hand to show what I should do to Her Highness. My shoulders are slightly hunched, arms dangling beneath them, because it’s unusual for a woman to touch me, but my off-white, Soviet-toothed smile tells me that I am loved. It is one of the happiest moments of my life to date.
Time is speeding up. College is almost upon us. Almost one-fucking-third of our graduating class has submitted research papers in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. I, on the other hand, still haven’t been on top, beneath, or behind a woman. One of the few nights that I’m not out drinking and drugging with Ben, Brian, and John, or trying to get with Sara, Jen, Fluffy, et al., I’m lying in my bedroom with colorful American college brochures spread out around me. Downstairs, the razvod is looming. Aunt Tanya and her children have come to America. My lithe, pretty cousin Victoria, the ballerina, has been sharing a bed with my mother for more than a year, refugee style, while my father broods in his attic. Both her parents have died, including my mother’s older sister Lyusya, and the twenty-year-old Victoria is stuck with us until she can find her own apartment. My father offers her valuable advice: With her looks, she should work in a strip club. I pass Victoria shyly on the stairs or look at her across the dinner table, scared and confused by her presence, wanting to talk to her but worried about taking sides between my mother and father. It’s a little bit like when we were young and I stared at her across the glass of our French door in Leningrad, unable to touch her because of my mother’s fear of mikrobi (microbes). But there’s something else — for the past decade I’ve been working ridiculously hard at becoming an American, and now there’s this Russian girl in our midst, a reminder of who I used to be. In the room she shares with my mother, Victoria listens to country radio because the words spill out slow and easy, and she can pick up some English. “Country music sucks,” I tell her, rolling my eyes, ever the urbane, helpful cousin. Ever my father’s emissary.