“So don’t think it was so easy for us. Because what they say is so. The course of true love doesn’t run smooth. Or when we were at the Art Institute together standing in front of the nudes. (That’s when we knew. That’s when we first actually realized we were going to need either a car or an apartment.)”
“What is this? What am I listening to here? I’m your father. I’m her father,” I told my wife. “Why is she talking to me like this?”
“So what do you think he did?”
“What do I think he did? He took your cherry. That’s what I think he did.”
“Jerry!” Shelley said.
“Come on, Dad, guess what he did.”
“What did he do?”
“Marvin’s got a friend, Larry. Larry’s big brother works at this motel in Skokie. (It turns out we didn’t even need a car. We decided to take the bus. It took three buses and two transfers to get there. People worry for nothing.) He’s the one who let us into the room. We had our own key and everything. We could use the TV. We could use the air conditioning. He even said we could use the telephone. So long as we didn’t call out and only used the phone to check the time with the motel operator. The only thing, the only thing we weren’t supposed to do was take the spread off the bed, and when we finished we weren’t allowed to use the shower. Because the maid had already made up the room? But it worked out okay. Guess how?”
“You found an extra blanket in the closet and laid it over the bedspread. You decided to use the shower anyway and cleaned up the bathroom yourselves.”
“That’s right!” Connie said. “What did we do about towels?”
“You used that extra blanket. You wiped each other off with it. Then you wiped up the inside of the tub. Then you wiped up the floor.”
“Guess what we did afterward?”
“After you surrendered your cherry and cleaned up the bathroom?”
“That’s right.”
“You thought about calling room service, decided it was too risky, and got a couple of candy bars and some ice and Cokes out of the machines instead.”
“That’s right! Then what?”
I wasn’t trying to be a wise guy and, though she was my daughter, it’s not that I even had any very particular curiosity about it. It was simply clear to me, plain as the nose. As if, yes, this is what a couple of underage twerps would be doing at a time like this. This is how they would kill the time until their embarrassment settled and they felt calm enough to go home.
“That’s right,” she repeated. “Guess then what?”
“You dialed other people’s rooms. You found the motel’s writing paper and envelopes and wrote love letters to each other. You wrote Diane and Beverly postcards and circled your room on the front. You read them out loud. He said ‘Wish you were here’ on his. You laughed but were too frightened to send them and tore them up.”
“Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?” she said. “Then what? Then what?”
“You got more candy out of the machine and watched HBO on the television.”
“Uncle Al Harry told you all this.”
“Al Harry knows all this?”
“Cousin Diane told him.”
“So,” I said. “Your cousin found out what you did. Sure,” I said, “Larry’s big brother. He’s the one who told Larry, Marvin’s friend.”
“She’s not my real cousin.”
“Larry told Diane about your boyfriend.” I was tired now. A seance really takes it out of you.
“He’s not my real boyfriend,” Connie said. “He told her himself.”
“Oh, Connie,” Shelley said. “Oh, my poor dear Connie. Do something, Jerry. Can’t you see her heart is breaking?”
Do something? Do something what? My daughter was stretched across her mother’s lap, the two of them composed like the little Pietà of Connie’s deposition, Shelley stroking Connie’s madeover, layered hair and crooning her There-theres and consolations.
“That’s right,” she comforted, “it doesn’t. It doesn’t run smooth. Of course not. Not for anyone. How wise you are. Isn’t she, Jerry? Isn’t she wise? How proud we are, sweetheart. What a level-headed heart you have on your shoulders! Such a love detective! Isn’t she, Jerry?”
“Sure is.”
“To have learned what you’ve learned? At fourteen? And to have found out our secret? Your father’s and mine? Not back in the house an hour and you discover we’re not sleeping together anymore. That Mother moved into the spare bedroom the minute you left. Wasn’t that clever of her? Wasn’t it, Jerry?”
“Absolutely.”
“Yes,” Shelley said. “And we thought we could fool her.”
“No way.”
“Well, tell her,” said Shelley.
“Hey,” I said, at once exhausted and as suddenly and frightfully free as a man who has just been in a stupid and devastating accident, “we’re happy to have you back in our funny little town where death drags down the neighborhood and kicks shit out of the property values.”
“Really?” Connie said.
“Hell, yes,” I told her, “cherry or no cherry, we’re just pleased as all get-out to have you back where you belong.”
eleven
BUT NO, I had to end it on a sour note. No sense of timing, when to get out. If I’d — so to speak — turned off the lights when she got to the part about the real uncle, real cousin, real boyfriend business, we could all have kissed and made up. Even if we’d brought down the curtain when the big lummox, all tragic and cozy, was crawling up and down my wife’s lap, we might still have been able to bring it off, music, swelling, up and out. But no, I had to hit the kid with my cherry-or-no-cherry speech. I just don’t know when to get out. Or where I get off.
So instead of all is forgiven, nothing was. Shelley huffed and puffed, fussed and bothered, preening her car-pool temperament and conscientiousness like nobody’s business. The very picture of a mother right down to the last detail. As, before Connie came along, she’d been the very picture of the brand-new bride and, after, the perfect picture of a wife and lover. Or, throughout, had the rebbitzin, if not letter-perfect — I never said Shelley was letter-perfect — down pat, at least in the sensibilities. And, as now, she had become some vehicle of born-again reproach to me. We didn’t sleep together. Oh, we shared the same room, even the same bed, but we might, absent and yearning, have been in different cities. It wasn’t even as if she felt a sexual antipathy toward me. (I know my Shelley.) No, this was the judgment of the court. She was serving time, waiting until the next down-to-the-last-detail down-pat picture came to her.
Connie, God bless her, harassed me with attitude while she — I thought — thought up new ways to go public. I asked if she meant to run away again, and she said, “Where would I go?” Sealing the ménage. Locking us, forever could be, into her tight, airless little game plan.
And me? What about me, the Rabbi of Lud?
Well, to tell the truth, I was in love at the time and couldn’t be bothered. I don’t know, maybe it was my problems at home made it happen, one of those cause-and-effect, chicken-or-egg deals that make you crazy trying to fathom. Connie had already revealed God’s plan for her in the scheme of things, split Lud, and sent Shelley off packing into the spare bedroom with her jewels and lucky porcelain, so I was probably already half a goner anyway when I ran into one of my wife’s singing sisters in the hospitality suite of a nearby Best Western when I was working the interment circuit for Klein and Charney. Of all the musical Jews, God knows she was the one I’d always found the most attractive.