Chapter 8 “Your Life Sounds Like a Novel.” #2
I held on to his card for weeks before calling him, staring at it as if it had totemic powers.
I’d be standing by the copy machine as it printed out pages and look at his name in the elegant cursive font; I’d be in the back of a cab and find myself pulling it from my purse; I’d be watching The Merv Griffin Show with my aunt and uncle, and I’d discover it in my hand as if it were rosary beads.
Finally, in the second week of December, I called him.
It was almost nine p.m. on a weeknight. He was home, he answered, and we agreed to meet that coming Saturday morning for breakfast at a diner on University Place.
I called Dennis for two unrelated reasons.
My application to Smith College was now in the mail, and I thought I should reward myself with something more interesting than travel-magazine coke or getting drunk (again) at a bar.
And my family and I had learned that I was going to be deposed in the lawsuit the Foster family was filing against the country club and the company that had manufactured the practice net, and if I was not yet frightened, I was unnerved.
Oh, I suppose there was a third reason, too. I’d read Dennis’s first novel, and I liked it. I wanted to know more about this older man who had written it. Looking back, perhaps I just wanted an excuse, any excuse at all, to call him.
We had a booth by the window at the diner, and there was a dusting of snow on the cars lining the street.
“You know,” I said as we sipped bad diner coffee (though it was only bad by today’s java standards), “I like the fact there is nothing clandestine about our meeting.”
“Why would there be? Because you’re younger than me?”
“Well, you’re not married.”
“I have coffee with my students all the time, Mira.”
“I’m not one of your students.”
“Fair.”
“And we’re having more than coffee. We just ordered eggs.”
“Nevertheless, eggs are not necessarily an indication I have motives beyond discussing your…experiences.”
“Not necessarily,” I agreed.
“It’s Saturday morning, and breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”
“Have you ever been married?” I asked him.
“Nope. No ex-wives. No children.”
“Are you lonely?”
“See?” he said, smiling at me in a way that made me happy. “That’s why I gave you my card. Writers ask meaningful questions.”
“I’m not a writer. And you didn’t answer my question.
Are you lonely?” I had learned with Theo that among the ways I could try to control the moment, despite the imbalance of power, was to ask the questions that caused him to look inward.
Men back then hated to look inward. (Of course, I could also blow Theo.
That worked, too. You’re scoffing because of how blow jobs in contemporary porn are filmed to degrade women.
But ask yourself: Is a man ever more vulnerable than when his cock is in your mouth and his balls are, literally, in the palm of your hand?)
Dennis put down his fork and nodded thoughtfully.
He was smiling in the way he was in his author photo on his first book’s dust jacket, closemouthed and pensive.
“Sometimes, I guess. Lonely might be too strong a word, but sometimes my place seems too big. It’s not big.
But my feet echo when I first get home—before I take off my shoes.
And when I toss my keys on the counter, they echo, too. ”
“Where do you live?”
“Four blocks from here. A loft. But not a big loft.”
“What does that mean, a loft? Is it one bedroom, two? Three?”
“One bed. No bedroom.”
I couldn’t envision it. But even if he wasn’t lonely, I was. “Can I see it?” I asked. I knew he’d say yes.
In 1978, you could still be what we sometimes (even now) call a midlist novelist and live in a loft that was probably twelve hundred square feet.
The ceiling was fourteen feet high, and the windows facing Mercer Street ran six vertical feet from sill to sill.
The only doors were the front door, a closet door, and a bathroom door.
The walls were brick, and the art on the walls included magnificent black-and-white photos of grain elevators.
When I was staring at one, he said, “That’s near Amarillo, Texas.
My sister took it. Infrared film. That’s part of the reason why the clouds and the sky are so haunting. ”
“Is she a professional?”
“Of course. Buy that in a gallery, and it will cost you more than my bed.”
His eyes went to his bed, and so mine did, too. It was in a corner opposite the kitchen, and, hanging above it, was another, equally arresting grain elevator.
“That one’s in Iowa,” he said, and then he took my hand and led me across the loft so I could see it more closely, and I knew, a frisson of arousal prickling my skin, that when we got to the side of the bed, he would undress me.
Pillow talk with Dennis was different than with Theo, largely because Dennis and I talked about Theo—and about Kenny. Dennis didn’t view it as surprising that I had walked away from golf, but he thought I would have been better off at Yale than at the travel magazine.
“That’s because you’re a professor,” I said.
I was resting my head on his chest. I scooted down slightly so I could press my ear against his heart and listen.
I liked the way my head would rise and fall with his breathing, as if I were on an inflatable raft on a very gentle sea.
(Years later, the first time I was pregnant, I thought it unfair that my husband could place his ear on my stomach and hear our daughter’s heartbeat, and I, the girl’s mother who was being forced to endure flatulence, hemorrhoids, and cankles, could not.)
“I am,” he admitted, a little rueful. “I prefer to define myself as a novelist. But, yes, I do teach. Still, you would be better off in New Haven.”
“Ah, but then I wouldn’t have met you, and we wouldn’t have just done that. And…” I stopped because I was content—which was rare—and didn’t want to break the spell.
“And what?”
“Never mind.”
“No, tell me. Please.”
“Fine. I couldn’t have done the work at Yale.
I couldn’t have done the work anywhere. Not this fall, not this winter.
I’m really not great at focusing on anything right now more challenging than remembering the bagel choices of the people at the magazine or following the jokes on Merv Griffin.
My concentration leaps around like a puppy with too many toys. ”
“A puppy can’t have too many toys.”
“You’re right.”
“And you read my novel.”
I ran my fingers down his sternum and then his stomach. Theo had loved it when I did this to him, and Dennis shivered now. I paused the tips of my nails at the edge of his pubic hair. “I did.”
“Well, that demanded some concentration.”
I considered teasing him and telling him it didn’t. The truth is, it hadn’t. “Reading for pleasure is one thing,” I said. “Deconstructing a text for a five-page essay is another.”
“Obviously, I don’t teach my own books. Even I’m not that shameless a narcissist. But I have read essays when friends of mine have taught them at other schools.”
“Your friends share the essays with you?”
“The funny ones, yeah. The loopy ones.”