Double Fantasy
Friday night was Taco Night at Tanner’s house.
Mr.Potts cooked the meal.
An investment banker at Morgan Stanley, he arrived to the apartment in his suit and overcoat.
We saw him appear at the front door, shopping bag in hand, from where we sat watching TV off the kitchen.
He placed this on the countertop, disappeared down the hallway to his bedroom, and, absent the tie and jacket when he returned, donned an apron, took his place behind the range—from where he cooked, he had a perfect view of the screen—aimed the remote, and then changed the channel to the news, which I knew not to protest but which Tanner always forgot.
“It’s my TV,” said Mr.Potts, “so I get to watch what I want.”
It was day 398 of the Iran hostage crisis.
At the kitchen counter, Mr.Potts began by preparing the stew beef, and while it browned, he chopped the onions, garlic, and peppers; as these sautéed, he opened a beer and took a sip, and he grated a block of cheddar and Monterey Jack cheese.
He added canned tomatoes to the pan, poured the remainder of his beer into it, and, while all this simmered, he cooked each tortilla individually in vegetable oil, the hot liquid shining and then foaming at the circumference, out of which he tonged and then flipped them, arraying the finished stack on a baking sheet where, after popping them into the oven, they took on their final clamshell form.
The Pottses’ Upper East Side apartment was as big as the one we’d lived in before moving back to Lincoln Towers, maybe even bigger, certainly longer, the lengthy hallway running down its center, branching off of which were, in order and to the left, if you walked it as Mr.Potts just had, Tanner’s elder sister Gwyneth’s room, followed by his younger sister Melissa’s room; to the left again, as you made your way back, was the Pottses’ master, Tanner’s bedroom, the dining room, and, once again, the sitting room off the kitchen—this where nearly the majority of our time was spent and a fact that I found ironic, given all the space it enjoyed.
This hallway was the apartment’s spine and terminated in a living room, which I’d never once seen anyone sit in, though it was decorated with their most expensive furniture and was the only room with west- and south-facing windows—by far the brightest in the entire place.
By now the chili’s smells had lured Tanner’s sisters from their rooms.
Gwyneth, who was a senior at Spence and the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, sat between Tanner and me on the couch, Melissa—an eighth grader—on the rug at our feet.
Mrs.
Potts had just arrived home, also in her overcoat and business suit (all three of the women were blond).
She too reappeared, having lost her jacket, having unbuttoned her collar to reveal a string of pearls.
Her contribution to the meal was to make the margaritas, and while she concentrated on squeezing the limes, I stole a glance at her.
She was, my father liked to say, “a very handsome woman,” a phrase I tried to decode, something he remarked upon after the annual parents’ nights at Boyd.
(A banker like her husband, she called on my father once a year, over the phone, to invest money with her, and he responded to her pitch with several “uh-huhs” as if he were in a rush to be somewhere else.
“Sharon,” he said, and his eye twitched, “I’m working with someone else right now, but if I make a change, I’ll be in touch.”) Mrs.
Potts, balancing her margarita, joined us on the couch, seating herself to my left, and now, with a Potts woman to either side of me and Melissa at my feet, I was in a sort of heaven.
To Tanner, Mrs.
Potts said, “What happened to you?” and gently took his injured hand.
He explained he had dislocated his middle finger in practice today; it was buddy-taped to his ring finger and the size of a hot dog.
“I’m going to splint that,” she said, and, after asking Tanner to hold her margarita, excused herself, upon which Tanner took a sip and then offered me some.
She had been a nurse before she became an investment banker.
True, she couldn’t keep anything sports-related straight in her head: she called a home run a touchdown, a touchdown a goal.
When we watched games and she joyfully screamed these aloud, her family heaped upon her endless derision, but I admired her for having multiple careers.
If my mom became a nurse, I figured she and Dad might not fight about money so much.
Tanner took another sip of his mother’s margarita.
“How psyched are you we don’t have a wrestling tournament this weekend?” He offered the glass to me again.
“No making weight.
No Kepplemen.
We can just pig out and sleep in.”
“Cheers,” I said, and took my sip.
Soon we were called to the dinner table, which everyone helped set.
The Pottses had a custom dining nook off their kitchen.
It felt like eating in a restaurant, enclosed and intimate.
“…but preferences,” Mr.Potts was saying to me, “preferences are measurable, quantifiable, and therefore somewhat predictable, at least in terms of market behavior,” and I, who very much enjoyed listening to the ticker of Tanner’s dad’s talk, said that was true, that some people preferred The Brady Bunch to The Partridge Family, McDonald’s to Burger King, Marvel to DC Comics, the Osmonds to the Jackson Five.
Then I asked for another taco.
“Exactly, Griffin,” he said, and passed the platter, “you are absolutely right, and among other things, it is the job of investment bankers to identify the companies that have cornered the market on these preferences or that know the consumer’s preference before he or she even knows what that preference is.” Gwyneth said, “I thought the job of an investment banker was to determine a company’s value,” and Mr.Potts replied, “It is, but I’m trying to make a finer point to Griffin.
Why is it,” he continued to me, “that we remember certain slogans? Crazy Eddie, his prices are insane.
Or certain taglines.
The American Express Card, don’t leave home without it. ”
“Sometimes you feel like a nut,” I said, and asked him to pass the guacamole.
“Sometimes you don’t,” said Mr.Potts, and handed me the bowl.
“It sticks in the mind .
Stickiness is the advertiser’s modus operandi.
His holy grail.
What’s your dad’s line in that commercial? Treat your dog to Liv-a-Snaps.
We don’t even have a dog, but I pass one on the street and I want to blurt it out to its owner.” To which Tanner said, “This is boring,” since he thought any grown-up talk I engaged in was bullshit ass-kissing.
“Well then, you’re an idiot,” his father said, “and your friend here clearly has what we call ‘business acumen.’?” Which, I realized, Oren also had, and also that Tanner wasn’t completely wrong.
I was only half interested in the discussion.
I felt I owed the man something for eating ten tacos, a fact that Mrs.
Potts clearly did not approve of (“Clearly,” she said, echoing my father, “someone is growing”) but one that Melissa marveled at and Gwyneth welcomed, if only to prevent a scolding about her refusal to eat.
“The onions give me bad breath,” she announced, then directed her gaze at her father, “and I plan on getting kissed tonight.”
Gwyneth tried to shock her father whenever possible, but Mr.Potts, usually quick with a retort, merely sipped his drink in response.
With some scorn, Tanner asked Gwyneth, “Going to Stu dio tonight?” and she replied, “Going to Dorrian’s first.” (We had heard vaguely of both but were yet to visit either.) Melissa invariably launched into a long story that had no clear point—it was something we suffered, Melissa’s tortuously digressive stories, which usually began with “You’ll never believe what happened in math today” but somehow managed to wend through each and every one of her classes before arriving at her stated subject.
During which Mrs.
Potts often did strange things, like brush something invisible from her chest while balancing her margarita in her free hand or lifting her plate in the air to look beneath it.
“Did you lose something?” Tanner asked her.
In response to which, Mr.Potts said, “Don’t talk to your mother like that!” and then “For God’s sake, Sharon, listen to your daughter.” In response to which, Mrs.
Potts said, “What did you say?” At which point Gwyneth, who had been examining a strand of her long blond hair as if she had a piece of gum stuck in it, caught my eye across the table and said, “Huis clos,” which was the title of a book I’d noticed sitting on her desk as I walked by her room, which I stared into any chance I got.
Gwyneth’s walls were painted an artic blue, and of all her room’s artifacts—a pennant from Yale, where her boyfriend was a freshman (she called him a “frosh”); her golfing trophies and regatta medals; her burbling aquarium, bejeweled with tropical fish—the one I admired most was her collage.
Hers was enormous and themed; it used, like so many other girls’ collages I’d seen, magazine ads and images, but instead of a random mash-up or agglomeration of interests, Gwyneth selected and organized her snippets by color, these the various shaded blues of Tiffany boxes, of Jordache jeans and JAG clothing, the Reagan for President campaign poster, the American Gigolo poster ( He leaves women feeling more alive than they’ve ever felt before, went Dad’s line in the promo), the Rive Gauche perfume glossy, the blue velvet background of the Crown Royal whiskey ad, and the cover of Billy Joel’s Glass Houses, all of which she cut into rectangular pixels to form a set of waves, from one of which, rising up, was the shark from the cover of Peter Benchley’s Jaws, the Club Med Neptune trident, and the blue whale from the Museum of Natural History catalog—a work of art atop which she’d titled in bright, foamy white letters made of cotton balls: If Life Is a Sea of Love, Dive In! If I fashioned my own, what would I include in it? And what would its mantra be? I had ideas, but just the fact that it had occurred to Gwyneth to make such a thing was what I most envied.
Or that I would never dream of such a clear announcement of self— that was what I lacked.
“What are you doing?” Tanner said.
And I hurried from Gwyneth’s door to join him in his room.
After dinner, Tanner and I did the usual.
To manage our food babies, we took off our shirts, put on the Stones’ Emotional Rescue, and then had a push-up contest—first to a hundred wins—followed by multiple sets of curls in front of his mirror.
Tanner had two beds in his room.
We played wall ball using lacrosse sticks, and whoever failed to make the catch on the rebound had to accept a dead arm.
Melissa appeared at our door and said she was headed downstairs to sleep at Buffy Biggs’s house, a classmate who lived on the second floor.
Tanner said, “Who cares?” and she left.
Mr.Potts, on the way to his bedroom, paused at our door, considered our toplessness, and said, “Kiss-kiss, ladies, nighty night,” because on Saturdays he and Mrs.
Potts ran the Central Park loop first thing in the morning and made it a point to go to bed early.
He pulled the door closed and then reopened it: “You’re making too much noise,” he said, so we dropped our sticks.
As soon as the latch clicked Tanner shot a double-leg takedown on me and we wrestled for the next hour.
When we rolled, Tanner would occasionally bury his mouth in my neck when he took my back and growl, “Try to get out of it, cocksucker, you know you fucking like it,” but it only made me madder and I’d Granby out of his hooks and stuff his face in his rug to let him know I was displeased.
From the hallway, we heard Gwyneth say, “Bye,” and later, while we both lay on the floor, spent and sweaty and staring at the ceiling, we heard the buzzer ring and hurried to the kitchen to answer it.
It was Sean, the doorman.
He was maybe in his thirties.
He was a giant with a thick Irish brogue, and in something close to a panic he said, “Pick you boyos up in the service elevator, I need your help right feckin now.”
The door to the rear stairwell and service elevator was off the Pottses’ kitchen, and we waited until Sean rose into view.
His doorman’s coat was laughably short at the sleeves.
When he pulled open the accordion gate and waved us aboard, it wasn’t clear how we’d fit on the car.
“Mr.McAllister’s in a mess on eleven, so no gawking.”
Through the McAllisters’ differently furnished kitchen with the same layout as the Pottses’, down their hallway with different paintings but the same hallway as upstairs, into the master bedroom with floral wallpaper and sconces but the same bedroom, there lay elderly Mrs.
McAllister in her bed, in her nightgown, her white hair perfectly coiffed, her back perfectly straight against the headboard, watching us walk by as if we were pedestrians passing her on a street bench.
Sean said, “Cavalry’s arrived, Mrs.
McAllister, don’t you worry,” and led us into the master bathroom.
Bald Mr.McAllister, in broadcloth pajamas, sat stuck between the toilet and the sink, having obviously slipped, a bright pool of piss spread in a circle beneath him.
He appeared dejected, disoriented.
“Well, lift him up for Chrissakes,” said Sean, filling the doorway, and then watched as Tanner and I lifted Mr.McAllister, his darkened pants making a sucking sound as we raised him up, the small room heady with the puddled stink.
We walked him into his bedroom, his arms draped over our shoulders, his cuffs leaving a trail of drippings and wet footprints behind us that marked a path to the bed, whose covers Sean folded back as Tanner and I guided the old man into position (“It’s okay, Mr.McAllister, you got this, you’re all right,” Tanner said) and then sat him down.
Following this, Tanner made a great show of tucking him in (“There you go, Mr.McAllister, nice and comfy”), and now that Mr.McAllister was safely in place but still soiled, he too sat ramrod straight next to his wife, neither of them speaking, the pair at once wide-eyed and frozen-faced, as if we were burglars plundering their home, their expressions neither embarrassed nor grateful but closer to stunned.
“Okay, Mrs.
McAllister,” said Sean to her, “we’ve got your fella back where he belongs, we’ll be going now.”
After Sean dropped us off on our floor and thanked us and then ashamedly slammed the gate, Tanner and I stood in his kitchen, staring at nothing in the quiet apartment.
Tanner perked up.
“A good deed like that calls for a drink,” he said, and from the cabinet he produced a bottle of rum and a pair of shot glasses, the pair of which he filled to the brim.
“Through the lips and past the gums, watch out stomach, here it comes.”
We drank.
“Time for bed,” Tanner announced.
He killed the lights and was soon out cold.
He slept on his stomach, hugging the pillow to his smushed face and occasionally mumbling puckered nonsense.
As I lay awake, I could not shake the thought of Naomi and me, standing in her bathroom together.
Of her nails slowly sliding down my back.
From my briefs’ waistband, my cock emerged, hard as a policeman’s baton, and to banish the thought of her, I imagined Gwyneth and me, doing the Hustle at Studio 54, which I pictured as the dance floor in Saturday Night Fever.
“You sorta look like John Travolta,” Gwyneth said, but in Naomi’s voice, since she often whispered this to me.
Was there not some way to make the perfect girl? I wondered.
She’d kiss like Deb Peryton, have Gwyneth’s face, but be easy to talk to, like Naomi.
Did such a person already exist, and if we met, would I recognize her? If I recognized her, and we started dating, I was certain I’d be happy.
Without meaning to, I next replayed the scene at the McAllisters’ apartment.
Of the couple’s expectant muteness as they watched us march in and out of their bedroom.
Were they lying there now, I wondered, just as we’d left them? Was there really no one else they could call for help? I had no answers to these questions and found myself weeping a bit, but my erection had receded, thank God, and before I drifted off to sleep, I was strangely certain of this: for as long as I lived, I would neither forget those two poor people nor their sad tableau.
Morning, and I was up with the sun.
I heard Mr.and Mrs.
Potts pad down the hallway and out the door, off on their jog.
Tanner’s clock radio read 6:57, and I forced myself back to sleep.
I woke again at 7:43, hoping I’d overslept, but it was useless.
I had no excuse to miss my appointment.
I got up and went to get some breakfast.
I found Gwyneth in the dining nook.
She was wearing a black cocktail dress and her mascara was smeared—from sweat or tears, it wasn’t clear, though she seemed upbeat, in spite of the hour.
She smelled of cigarette smoke and limes.
She was reading the financial section of the New York Times, the Saturday listings of all the stock prices, several of which she’d underlined with a pen, writing out their arcane abbreviations and symbols on a small notepad.
On the table was also a plate with a half-eaten taco and a stubbed-out Marlboro Light, the pack with a Studio 54 matchbook atop it by her side as well.