The Encyclopedia of Exes Read online

  “But should I be concerned that he was so willing to lick me? I mean, could that prove to be a problem?”

  “Well, ma’am, licking is very much a sign of affection and trust. It signals a desire to care for you and comfort you, but also a willingness to let you be close to them.”

  “You’re speaking of dogs, of course.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “And what does it say of humans?”

  Now, there has yet to be a grammatical symbol in the English language made to designate a particularly pointed question dripping with innuendo asked, not by just any old person, but by a flirtatious older woman in a short skirt and heels. The normal punctuation of a sentence just doesn’t convey what actually happens. There are times when a question is clearly not just a question. And here’s this kid, I have to call him a kid really, all things considered, looking at me slowly realizing that in fact I am asking him if he’d like to hike up my skirt and run his tongue up and around whatever he might find there. Now, I don’t think his three years of college and whatever outdoor training NOLS had provided for him in Peru quite prepared him for such a head-on collision with a woman. And I just said to him, “Honey, can you come out to my car with me to make sure that my backseat’s big enough to get the beast home without endangering him or myself?” And of course he said sure, and once I had him out there I pressed him up against the passenger door, tilted my head, pulled his down, and slid my tongue into his daily-flossed mouth, then pushed with both hands on his shoulders till he got on his knees, and lifted the front hem of my skirt above his eyes. I could tell he was a little embarrassed kneeling in the parking lot of his day job with his face in the muff of an older woman in morning-shift whore attire. But he survived. And soon I had him in the backseat, me lying on my back with my feet up behind his head and one of my heels caught in the neckhole of his sweatshirt and each snowy molecule of him aimed at my deepest point. Boys, as every comparative shopper knows, are like cinnamon gum: they don’t cost much and they taste great, but you can’t blow bubbles with them and the flavor doesn’t last long. After ten minutes, I was sweaty, rumpled, more than a little embarrassed, and happy. I sat up and arranged my clothes, and seeing myself in the rearview mirror, felt the perfect emotional cocktail of You Still Got It Baby and What the Hell Am I Doing Here? And then I went back in to get my new dog.

  “Uh, hello Ms. Masterson, uh, I mean Susan. This is Patrick from the animal shelter. I know you probably weren’t expecting to hear from me since you didn’t give me your number or anything, but I got it from the Provider’s Information sheet you filled out when you took your Lab. Cadbury. I’m calling because I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened the other day—I mean, to be honest, it’s been kind of hard for me to think about anything else. I’m not really sure I understand what happened, or, I suppose, what it meant to you, but I assume you got something out of it. Anyway, I would kinda like another chance, I mean, maybe for you to get to know me a little bit or something. To like . . . Well, whatever. Maybe we could get a beer or something—you know. Anyway.”

  And then he left his number. And said his name again. And said animal shelter again. Then left his number, again.

  I called him three days later and told him I’d be happy to meet him for coffee on his day off. It happened to be a Sunday, and we were to meet at three o’clock. My plan was airtight. I picked a place where I could park in the adjacent lot and have a decent view of the entrance. He arrived seven minutes early, walked up to the door, then turned around again and went away. He came back fifteen minutes later. I was sure he hadn’t seen me, and I just kept sitting in the car. He waited exactly sixty-one minutes, staring out the window, going to the door, calling his voice mail—twice. When he came out the door looking agitated and was getting ready to get in his blue Fiat, I pulled around beside him and said to get in. He did. Nor did he protest, the little caver.

  “I thought we were supposed to meet at—”

  “Yeah, we were. You waited an hour. Do you think I’m not going to make it worth your while?”

  “Ms. Masterson, I don’t know if I can just . . . I mean, I thought we were going to have coffee and talk. And now—”

  I leaned over and kissed him to shut him up, then told him stay still and to keep his cool. And then I leaned over and gave him what probably would prove to be the most efficient—and perhaps the most public—blow job his long life would ever know.

  Weeks had passed, and the big question, of course, was whether I was ever going to bring him back to my house. Fucking Patrick in the car, in the park, in the bathroom at Wendy’s, at the drive-through car wash: these were all okay; I knew what I was doing and could keep it all in perspective. But home—home is home, and the heart hadn’t been ready to be there in a long time. There had been a lot of men since Charlie, but none of them had ever made it to my place. And, I will admit, there was the issue of his age. It wasn’t fun to do the math. No way was I going to tell him the truth about me; he’d probably never even heard of the president who was in the White House when I was born.

  When I explained the situation to my shrink, she asked me what I was avoiding. And when I said nothing, she asked when I was going to go back to dating men my own age. I told her that men my age only want women half it, and not just because of the tits but because those poor girls haven’t been alive long enough to know what they’re missing being with some hairy old washed-up wannabe playboy with stunted emotional development. And I was feeling pretty good about that riff, but she conceded no victory and just said, What about Charlie? And I said, yeah, Charlie. Look where it got him.

  But, like always, she just stared at me silently till I gave in. It was time to ante up; if I wasn’t going to let Patrick go, I better let him come over. At least if I scared him away he’d be gone and I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. But what if he wanted to spend the night? I think I’d have to tell him that Paco and Silver and Cadbury all sleep in the bed with me and they’d get jealous if I shared it with a biped.

  I invited him at dinner time and then made sure I had nothing in the house to eat but Tater Tots. But he had brought an eighteen-pack of Stroh’s and didn’t seem to mind. And sure as shooting, one thing led to another and there we were on the couch watching my well-worn video of Thelma and Louise (which he said he liked but didn’t seem to remember too well), and then Brad Pitt comes on and Patrick’s beginning to put two and two together and he says to me, Susan, How old are you?

  And I don’t know what got into me, but it just all came out in a ramble, all the sad, long, melodramatic truth of it. I turned to him and said, Patrick, in days of old if someone found out something the gods didn’t want him to know, he met an untimely and entirely unpleasant fate. You know what I mean? Suffice it to say that I’m old enough to know that what I know is a burden, and you’re young enough to wonder what I mean. And that’s that. If I knew at your age that I’d see so much sadness and feel so much sorrow, I never would have let it go this far. But life’s tricky that way. It unfolds only as much as you can take, one day after the next. And after a while it’s like when the customer service rep has you on hold for an hour and a half and you’re sitting there thinking fuck this, but then you’ve already been sitting there so goddamn long you just keep holding and keep holding. Now I have you over here because you are one of the few joys in my life and one of the only ones that I think has a chance of remaining relatively uncomplicated, as long as I don’t fuck it up, so please lead me to my bedroom and let me pluck the crocus of your youth and please don’t ask any more questions. You are beautiful just as you are, and if you can find me beautiful just as I am, then we’ve got a lot more than most people get. And we should be thankful. Now come on; make me happy.

  Patrick seemed different. He walked me into the bedroom and stopped me next to the bed, gave me a shush sign, stooped down like he was going to get on his knees, grabbed me in a bear hug around my thighs, lifted me off the ground like I was one of his debutante
cheerleaders, and laid me on the bed as gently as King Kong would have, his head tight against my crotch. And he kept hold of me that way, while his tongue teased and tried between my legs, down my calves, my ankles. Then he turned me over and started licking the back of my knees. It tickled so goddamn much I thought I was going to die, but I was also thinking that no one had ever licked the back of my knees, in all my years, and this kid was all right.

  And that’s when he saw the picture of Charlie. It was above the bed, all enlarged and gilt-framed and us at our happiest. I had completely forgotten about it.

  “Is that your husband?”

  “Was. He died seven years ago, but he’s with me every day. I’m sorry. The photo’s been there so long I didn’t even think about it.”

  “It’s okay. It’s just kinda weird looking up and seeing the woman I’m doing it with smiling back at me from a photo arm in arm with another man.”

  “His name was Charlie. He was the great love of my life. I was married once before, but my life began when I met Charlie. I wouldn’t have known what love was if I had never met him. Charlie was the only thing I’ve ever known that made it all worth it.”

  “Thanks a lot. That’s nice to hear, that I’m not even on the chart.”

  “Patrick, it’s not that I don’t care about who you are, it’s just that for the last few years I’ve been meeting men through the personal ads in the paper, being fully aware how little I should expect to get out of the deal and then not even getting that. And suddenly there you are, and I need to get laid so bad and to feel beautiful, to feel sexy, to feel anything at all, really. I’m sorry, honey. It’s not you. It’s not your fault. You met me at a time when I just needed to be close to someone without really being close to them.”

  “Yeah, well, you make it sound like I should have pity on you because you’re old. I should probably tell you to fuck yourself and go back to the personals.”

  “Patrick—”

  “No, I’m serious. You think you can be so fucking selfish just because you’re old and your husband died. Well, I see it differently. I can’t wait to be old.”

  “Wait as long as you can, baby. Hold on while you can. You’ll know all you need to know in due time; for now just try to go on knowing as little as you possibly can.”

  And that’s when Patrick saw me cry. And that, I think, is why he stayed. And why he keeps coming back. Despite all my predictions, we’ve crossed the six-month mark, but he finishes school in a few months and will go off to wherever he goes off to and I get to just stay behind, with my picture of Charlie still above the bed. It’s going to break my heart, that’s sure, but some part of me has always known that the writing was on the wall with Patrick, much as I’ve tried to ignore it. The good part is that I’ve still got a few months to figure out my two big questions: what I’m going to get him for his graduation and what new fucking personal I’m going to put in the paper. My latest thought on a gift, assuming the joke isn’t too corny, is to give him a really beautiful, really expensive, fifty-some-odd-year-old watch. And if it doesn’t run quite right, that’s okay; I think he’ll see it as part of the point.

  As to my ad, I’m not so sure that more is what I want anymore. With each week that passes, it feels harder and harder to handle all that there is. Every day seems so full that, trying to piece them back together afterward, they all seem almost empty. It’s hard to make sense of it all, the way that as I get older time keeps bending. I remember Charlie used to joke about how life was too much of too little. But it isn’t, Charlie. It really isn’t. It’s too little of too much. Far too little. Far too much.

  PROFANITY

  Darin Strauss

  (prō-făn’ĭ-tē, prə-) n 1: the condition or quality of being profane 2: a: abusive, vulgar, or irreverent language b: the use of such language

  Judge if you want, but I was in a pucker like everybody else by the tsatskeh I became. My problems started thirty years ago, a quiet night to hear the radiator wheeze steam and I wasn’t spying, why do I have to swear to you? My son, Bernie, was the type of sixteen-year-old who liked his bedroom door open, and are you going to tell me I can’t keep my ears alive when it comes to my own son? Listen to an old lady: acting swoony like a teenager, that’s what being in love with your children means.

  “Sure, you’re right, baby.” My son, Bernie, was talking on the telephone; for this call his voice was dipped in honey and minus all its Brooklyn. It was 1968. “Are you my sugar?”—just cooing into the receiver, Bernie was. You could vomit from this.

  Here I should explain that he had just met his first crush. Now, when a boy grows eyes for girls, what can that do but plague him right down to his untrimmed toenails? They don’t let you live! I wanted to tell him. But this was before Dr. Ruth, so why would he have taken a page from his forty-nine-year-old mother about the heart or other glands?

  “Kraselnik said he’d do that?” Bernie was still cackling into the phone at his new sweetheart. “That jackass wouldn’t know how to fuck a girl if one was growing off of his pecker.”

  Listen: don’t throw away a china plate because of one crack. Bernie was a good boy, I swear, you can probably see at least he had some imagination. But I couldn’t breathe, hearing that from his mouth. I didn’t care for any sex revolution those kids were having with the Beatles and all the rest of it—was that a way to talk to a girl? And more, what kind of maidel was Bernie’s new crush that she would let her boyfriend speak such words, I’m wondering? It might be a good idea to have this blondie—Susannah—over for dinner. Just to get to know her (she happened not to have been Jewish at all).

  “Harriet, what are you, a moron?” my husband, Izzy, said to me the next night. He thought he had a green light on insults, my bald Izzy. Sixteen years together at that point and who’s to say we weren’t still in love, in our way? “What boy his age wants his mother around on a date, Harriet?” Izzy slapped the table. He liked to pretend he had a temper, that one. His forehead would go red, but the skin between his brows got paler. When we’d met, everyone had said we had the same personality. “No boy his age, that’s who,” he was saying.

  But what did he know? His own first love was a two-hundred-pound milk cow of a girl named Bella. (I hadn’t told Izzy anything about his son’s filthy mouth, it might have given him a coronary.)

  Now, he and I were playing no-stakes blackjack in the kitchen—while Bernie was off God knows where. “Hit me,” Izzy said, focused only on the rat-a-tat of his knuckles on Formica. The jack of hearts gave him twenty-two. Next hand.

  “Iz, the boy’s not a normal sixteen—” I said, flipping a card up, a card down. “I’m the kind of mother a boy’s proud to show.”

  My husband looked at me like I said I believed in Santa Claus or the mishigas President Johnson was in those days promising. “Please, moron,” he said. He had on the toothy smile of a man given more proof that he’s the one wearing the pants. I didn’t hate that smile. “For once listen to yourself, Harriet.”

  “You should get a stomach cramp,” I said. This was our sport, teasing just like Lucy and Ricky Ricardo had done every Tuesday 8 P.M., back when Izzy and I still pretended we were too in love to annoy each other.

  “Look at that face, like an angel!” I squeezed this Susannah’s cheeks the first time she came to our door. A little fancypants, she had painted lips made not for talking so much as for pouting, and—would I kid about something like this?—not for pouting so much as smooching. “My little darling!” I said, trying to sound American as any shiksa on the TV. “It means a lot, Susannah, you coming to dinner here.”

  She grinned. Her teeth weren’t any great shakes.

  “Okay, Ma,” my son, Bernie, at sixteen scowled the way a kid imagines is manly. “Let her in, for Christ’s sake, huh?” He spoke in a husky, Listerine-scrubbed voice, and his clumsy feet were toeing into the floor.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Levine,” Susannah said. “The pleasure is mine.” (Did she think she’d get an argument from me?) Most gir
ls would’ve needed heels to be so tall; what she wore on her feet I think they called sandals. And like some kind of golden-haired snake she kept licking her teeth.

  The four of us gathered around our little table, two couples eating brisket. The little big shot Bernie, telling his girlfriend it’s always dry, that’s just the style of this particular meat. Fork to lip, he didn’t look too different from the way he does now, with his dark eyes always wide open, but he was about as skinny as the plastic comb he’d recently attached himself to. In my head I still heard him say, how to blank a girl . . . how to blank a. . . .

  But now he was smiling at Susannah, and I had to admit she was perfectly fine—happy and sincere the way every first love seems. The way Heshie Green, my own first gelibteh and now a real-estate heavyweight in Park Slope, had seemed. On his account I knew how a heart unwraps. And that everything becomes a code only two people understand, et cetera.

  A hundred years ago, Heshie Green was the guy who taught me swing dance and a little tap—it was just after the war—at Mrs. Schmidlan’s studio on Coney Island Avenue. Heshie with the boot-black hair and his nose like a little arrow pointing down told me I did the prettiest turns in Flatbush. Heshie, like Sinatra (but a Jew), gave me a wink and my voice stopped working; I’d just nodded and blushed. You got a way with words, Harriet, Heshie had said, before all this life had passed.

  But in 1968 my son, Bernie, was laughing off that long-ago love story. “It’s not the same as me and Susannah, you and this guy Heshie.” The little pisher, this was one day after I’d cooked his girlfriend brisket. “We have desires you didn’t have in the old days, Mom.”

  What a fancy word from a son, I thought.

  I spent a second looking Bernie over. A little pisher, watching Ed Sullivan with his mama. Like a scrawny cat he was, sick for some milk. Maybe that’s how I’d been as a kid, too: walking by Mrs. Schmidlan’s studio every chance I could, nights and days. And then, Heshie had kissed me.