And does it have something to do with the accident? Obviously something. I was blind to all of this before, it’s true. One day in spring I stepped into the crosswalk at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street and perhaps I was distracted by the thought of the Jenny Jones show, wishing it was the Oprah show instead, but Oprah doesn’t do the real sleazy subjects, bless her pure and, for the moment, top-rated heart. So when your author is a Manhattan psychologist with a practice in masturbation therapy and a book called Touch Yourself, Cure Yourself, you take what you can get. In this case she was to be the resident expert on an upcoming “I Have More Fun with Me Than with My Partner” segment.
I was thinking surely somebody watching that show can read and suddenly there was the cry of a horn and I saw a flash of yellow coming at me and I stopped and I started to turn away. Then there was a terrific thump on my butt and I was suddenly on my back, my legs spread, and every pore of my body was flared open with a heat that felt like it was coming from the center of me. Though it was probably coming from the engine that was beneath me. I was spread-eagled on the cab’s hood and looking at the clouds above me and my butt hurt, I guess, but other than that I was feeling pretty good. I reached up and brushed the hair away from my face, taking up a long strand and sort of twirling it around my finger.
Then a man’s face floated between me and the clouds and his eyes were from way beyond the clouds, it felt, as dark as the darkest night sky. “Oh, lady,” he said with an accent from somewhere on the other side of what was once the Iron Curtain. “You dream something when you cross, yes? A thousand miles away?” I realized he was the driver of the cab. His voice was gentle. He should have been cursing at me for walking against the light and causing him this kind of trouble. But he was making excuses for me.
“Remember,” I said, “one end of the Iron Curtain was in a trailer park and the other was in a nudist colony.”
“Oh my,” he said, thinking I was delirious.
Not at all. Not at all. I felt very clear inside. I knew what connections I was making. This Eastern European man with the beautiful eyes and the sweet impulse to make excuses for the woman who was causing him trouble: I saw him rising from a bath towel on the shore of the Adriatic Sea and he was naked.
“He doesn’t have a medallion,” a whiny man’s voice said.
“Please, mister,” dark eyes said, not angry even at this buttinsky. “I will do what’s right.”
“Is it true?” I asked him.
He turned his face to me again.
“What?”
“About what you are?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice violining into a whisper. “I am gypsy.”
“I think I’m all right,” I said. “Take me somewhere.”
Later, in a room at the Hotel Dixie, he kissed me gently all around the edge of the massive bruise from his grill. And he was naked. Though the roar around us was not the surf on the Adriatic but the traffic from Times Square, he was as gentle in his hands and in his maleness as he was in his excuse-making.
“What thing was it you dream today?” he asked after our bodies had pulled softly apart.
“That’s not the question to ask,” I said and I found myself sitting up and bending near and looking at that male part of him. I was a little surprised to find myself doing this. I had never really looked at a man there before, only by accident, only out of the corner of my eye, more or less unwillingly. Now I wanted to see this man, this Anatole, and it came from his interest in my dreams, his unexpected gentleness, I knew. I had a sense of him in these unseeable things: like I see the shape of a violin and feel that it seems just right for the sweet and sad sounds it makes, I looked at this man’s body to see his inner self. It was turning from a taut young man into a wrinkled old codger. Doddering now and incapable of response as it was, I grew tender for it, in a certain way, tender as if for a beloved father who doesn’t recognize you anymore, wanting only the best for him, in somebody else’s care.
“What am I to ask?” he said.
“What’s that?”
“If I am not asking what you dream when my cab hit upon you.”
I smiled at him. “Ask what I will dream from that moment on.”
“And so? Yes?”
I realized that I could not shape an answer to that, though something in me knew what to expect.
Is this nymphomania? I think not. I went to my apartment that night and I wanted nothing to do with my boyfriend. He’s a very good-looking man but he reviews books anonymously for a pre-publication newsletter and he’s got execrable taste and he’s working on a novel about the Trojan War because he learned Greek at Notre Dame and I think it was the idea of a man who looks like this that made me take up with him in my life before the accident. But I know him. We rent a car now and then and go to the Hamptons and whenever anybody makes the slightest mistake in their driving near him, he honks his horn furiously and curses them and when I walked into my apartment and he was lounging in his distressed Levi’s and flannel shirt on my couch and he looked up at me with what I know he intended as a sexy smile, I clearly saw his angry self-righteousness as a driver sculpted into his square jaw and curling up in his chest hair from the open shirt. And I had not seen this ever before in his body. I kept taking that body to bed and I never really saw it till that day when I was hit by a cab. Is that a symptom of nymphomania?
To myself I’m sounding entirely convinced about this. But perhaps not. Perhaps I’ve asked that rhetorical question about nymphomania too many times now and you’re thinking the lady protests too much. It is true that I’ve been to bed with quite a few men since that day in the spring. But each of them was naked with me as an individual. I insist that’s true. I know the alternative.
I was in a bar in Chelsea a few weeks ago. I’d been to a reading at Barnes and Noble by one of my authors, a first novelist, and I didn’t want to go home. The boyfriend was thrown out and starting to savage all my authors in his reviews and I hate to admit it, but that was a trade-off I could easily live with. But there was no one else in my apartment that night either. The bar was small and the neon beer names burned coldly in the smoky air and a man sat down on the stool next to me. He was handsome and the sly wobble of his head and his little pucker-smile said he knew it. If you’ve heard too much protest in me so far and suspect the tabloid story of being accurate, then you’d have to expect this man and I would get along just fine.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” I said.
“I just came over here to tell you how good you’re looking tonight,” he said.
“You appreciate women, do you?” I made my voice behave. No sarcasm. A straight question.
“It’s what I am,” he said and he leaned nearer. “Ontologically, I appreciate women.”