The Encyclopedia of Exes Page 23

  In a third-floor apartment, New York’s under-thirty left-wing elite celebrated the birthday of someone who wrote for Street News, the paper sold by the homeless, which had recently celebrated its first issue. At the time, I was very much involved in saying that I was involved in leftist causes. My friend John possessed more centrist views, but he was also, somehow, hornier than I. Smart, attractive women, dressed sincerely, roamed the unfinished wood floor, plastic cups of keg beer and low-rent vodka in hand. We decided to stay.

  After a while, I found myself pickled but chatty, sitting on a couch between two good-looking, right-thinking Stanford girls. John had spotted them earlier, but I tended to be gutsier in my approach. The one to my right smelled smooth. She had short, tightly curled hair that stood on her head in a modified flattop, big, deep, nut-brown eyes, and smooth bittersweet chocolate skin. Either she and I knew someone in common or we had something in common, or both. The conversation went well. I leaned over and kissed her and she was more than receptive.

  John was black, too. Still is, as a matter of fact, but I didn’t mention that before now because before now it wasn’t relevant.

  “I’m going to kill you,” he said.

  But he said it laughing, more out of disbelief than anything else. He’d had his eye on that one. I’d pounced first.

  The girl wanted some. Her hands moved with intent. Yes! I thought. Action!

  The last two years had been a sexual Gobi desert for me. I’d lost my virginity on New Year’s Eve, 1988, barely. My girlfriend had been justifiably terrified of getting pregnant. She used foam and a diaphragm, and I had to wear a condom. Nerves overtook me that night. I believe I managed to make the insertion for a few seconds, but it didn’t feel like I’d lost anything, or gained anything, for that matter.

  Since then, nothing. College hadn’t delivered on its mythical sex promises. I got occasional dry kisses and once received a drunken blow job from someone in my dorm. She subsequently fled in terror and spent the night weeping in the room next door to mine. The one time it looked like things might progress, I took a girl to a showing of Rebel Without a Cause at the student film society. Things got pretty heavy on the way to the movie. We stopped three times to make out in doorways. But then during the movie I drove her away with an unnatural display, even for me, of lactose-intolerance-induced flatulence. Yes, I was a stereotypical Jewish man. And I was also a de facto virgin until that night in New York.

  The Stanford girl turned out to be the daughter of a Kenyan diplomat. That excited me. She was more than the forbidden fruit of the other; she was black aristocracy, a queen of the Nile.

  This particular member of the black aristocracy lived in a two-room Hell’s Kitchen walk-up with someone that I never met. The apartment possessed a frightening lack of decoration. She kept all her clothes in one milk crate. Otherwise, the only objects present were a few books, a digital alarm clock, and a red-and-blue exercise mat, which she said served as her bed.

  “You sleep on that?” I said.

  But for the moment, it had its function. We got naked. We kissed and rubbed a little bit. Either I had a condom or she did, but regardless, I was soon inside her and wriggling around.

  What you are about to read is a bit off-putting, but relevant to the narrative.

  When I’d finished, after not too long, I pulled out. Blood, dotted with little hairs, covered the shrinking condom. That moment marked my true sexual coming-of-age.

  “Oh God,” I said. “What is the matter with you? Are you OK?”

  “It was my first time,” she said.

  “Really?” I said, but what I was thinking was: With me? Why?

  As I flushed the evidence of what amounted to a mutual virginity loss, I felt disgusted, with myself, with her, and with the world. Sex was vile beyond imagination. I definitely wanted more.

  We did it several times that week at my place. She always left instead of spending the night. I didn’t blame her, as I stayed in a room on Avenue A at the corner of Sixth Street, never a quiet corner during the best of times. That summer, my room overlooked a biker bar called King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut. The motorcycles roared from 10 P.M. to dawn. I had no air conditioner, but I couldn’t open the window because of the noise. So at night I lay on my lumpy frameless futon mattress, fan whirring behind me, as I tried to drown out the bikes with a Leonard Cohen album. I was nothing if not pretentious.

  One night I took my new girlfriend to a show called Spunk at the Public Theater. It was a musical based on the short stories of Zora Neale Hurston and it starred Danitra Vance, who’d been the first African American female cast member of Saturday Night Live, albeit during its worst season in 1985–86. Vance won an Obie Award for Spunk. She died of breast cancer in 1994, which isn’t relevant here, but it’s still sad. I enjoyed the show, because I had progressive politics and enjoyed anything that portrayed African Americans in a positive light.

  “Danitra Vance was so great,” I said to my girlfriend.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “In fact,” I said. “You know what? You sort of look like her.”

  “You white people think we all look alike,” she said.

  “What?” I said.

  That wasn’t what I’d meant! Jesus, what an idiot! Of course I didn’t think all black people looked alike. Besides, she really did look like Danitra Vance. To this day, I believe it.

  “Fuck you,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I thought: No way will I ever see this crazy person again.

  That weekend, on the phone with my parents, I told them about this relationship and how it had spiraled away from me.

  “You have to watch out for those Africans,” my dad said.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “You know,” he said. “Diseases.”

  “Her dad is an ambassador,” I said.

  “Just saying,” said my dad. “They come from a different culture. More primitive.”

  Thanks for the wisdom, Pop. That conversation alone stretched the relationship six weeks.

  A couple of weeks later, I called her. A movie was playing in Central Park. I wouldn’t mind the company, I said. She’d just scored an internship at Nightline, but she was free that night. Rereading that last paragraph makes me ill, but those are the facts.

  She sat in the rafters behind me. Fifteen minutes into the movie, I leaned back into her lap. She stroked my hair. I’m sure the people sitting around us really enjoyed our passionate necking for the next hour and a half, and the people leaving the movie probably really appreciated seeing me press her up against a tree. The game was on again.

  For the month of August, I lived in a small apartment at Fourteenth and Eighth, pet-sitting an enormous near-feral cat. The place stank of cat shit and menthol, but it had air-conditioning and a nifty bed that folded out from the wall. I found a diary and discovered that the woman who usually lived there belonged to a New Age cult that worshipped an Egyptian deity called Seth. No, I shouldn’t have read the diary, but I did. Afterward I only half-jokingly worried that her cat was Seth, god of storms and chaos, reborn, and that one night he would incinerate me in my sleep with his fire eyes.

  I didn’t tell the girlfriend any of this on the nights she slept over. We were busy having sex, or fighting, or both. She didn’t like the books I read. One of her tricks was to hold a book up and say, loudly, “Why are you reading this book? This book is terrible.” I would say something cruel about her clothing, and then we’d shout at each other, leading to her stomping away, or, if we were on the phone, me hanging up on her. Or she’d come over and ride me until we both collapsed.

  One night, a storm descended on Manhattan. I listened to Leonard Cohen on my Walkman, because that was the only tape I owned. She slept next to me on her stomach. I looked at the sky. The lightning and rain sheets matched what I imagined I felt in my soul. Sex suddenly seemed unbearably sad. Why did Seth haunt me so?

  Life, I realized, wou
ld bring me nothing but anxiety and disappointment. Enough of this crappy relationship, I thought. Summer is over.

  The next spring, I went to San Francisco, as the representative of my campus’s Hillel association, to participate in a Jewish college journalism conference. My flight out didn’t leave until Sunday night, so I took the train to Palo Alto to see my ex from the summer before. I must have walked three miles from the station. She met me in the cafeteria.

  “Aren’t you gonna give me a hug?” she said.

  I did. Within fifteen minutes, I was straddling her on her bottom bunk. We enjoyed ourselves OK, but neither of us seemed to understand why we were actually having sex. A few minutes after we were done, I got dressed. Her roommate came in from the lounge to give me a ride to the airport. We never saw each other again after that.

  Now, my joints throb and my bills tower. Scoring women at parties seems as distant and irrelevant to my life now as nursing at my mother’s breast. Still, once in a while, I Google the women with whom I’ve slept, not an enormous number, but enough to warrant an Internet search. Somewhere in the United States lives a human-rights attorney who lost her virginity to me on an exercise mat. Apparently, six years ago, she worked as a legal consultant to a report on domestic violence in Macedonia. Nothing else remains of the summer of 1990.

  WINSTON

  Lewis Robinson

  1: City in Oregon, Location: 43.12043 N, 123.41136 W; Population (1990): 3773 (1459 housing units); Area: 3.3 sq km (land), 0.0 sq km (water); Zip code(s): 97496; 2: Name of a pet bird who incited a failed coupling

  I met Dayna during my short stint working for the veterinar-ian Stanley Perez. Stanley provided a delivery service for his clients, and I drove Stanley’s truck, returning healed animals to their owners. We did a lot of large animal work, lots of cows. I wore a uniform, white coveralls with a zipper from the crotch to the neck and the words Stan The Animal Man over the breast pocket. I had a radio, too, clipped to my side. I had held other jobs requiring uniforms—I’d worked at a Speed Lube, and as the mate on an island ferry, and as a prep cook at Robey’s Family Restaurant in Springdale. But I felt that wearing a uniform while driving a truck put me in a different league. I was the master of valuable cargo, I had a flexible schedule, I was identifiable as a man with places to go, a man with a distinct and enviable purpose. I was impatient with the animals, and wary of them, but otherwise I thought the job was aces.

  I didn’t know Dayna, but I was bringing her bird back. It was a parakeet that had been treated for parasites, and I had it in a cage on the seat beside me in Stanley’s rig. Typically, I’d have hung the cage from a hook in the back of the truck, but at lunchtime, I’d filled the back with finches. They were flitting around, uncaged.

  Dayna lived out the Sligo Road, in the sardine factory, a three-story chalk-colored building with a service elevator. Stanley told me she was from New York City, which meant a sardine factory apartment was the perfect place for her. You move up to Maine from a city like New York and you want to be reminded every second of where you are. There are many ways to do this: move next to a hockey rink, or across the road from a chicken farm, or within earshot of a sawmill. All of these options are available in Point Allison. But Dayna wanted to see the ocean, so she lived on the third floor of the sardine factory, where the bosses’ offices had once been—the landlord had taken out the walls, and through the six-foot-high south-facing windows you could see the Royal River widen into the bay.

  It had been raining for three days, but the sky was clearing. The mist had risen and clouds were gathering and rolling away to the east. I parked by the old loading dock at the factory, which hadn’t been used in years—lupine sprouted through cracks in the concrete platform. I sat in the quiet of the truck, letting the sun heat the side of my face. When I closed my eyes, I heard the parakeet scratching and fumbling in its cage, which I’d covered with a black felt blanket so as not to upset him in transit. The noises made me want to get the delivery over with, so I walked around to the passenger side and hefted the sphere cage in both arms. The service elevator was just inside the factory’s back entrance. When I stepped in and closed the metal gate, the bird spoke.

  “Up and down,” it said.

  “I suppose you think you know where you are,” I said.

  “Up and down,” said the bird.

  “I mean, that’s really great, you can sense where we are, even though you can’t see.”

  The bird’s wings clicked against the cage. I wanted it to say something else, imagining its expression under the black cloth, resolute and aloof.

  “Okay, fine,” I said.

  People loved getting their pets back. Like a magician, I removed the cloth when Dayna answered the door. “Oh,Winston, look at you. You’re a healthy little beast,” she said.

  “Winston, Winston, Winston, Winston,” said Winston.

  These are the differences I see between city women and women from Maine: city women eat vegetables, they can’t drive in snow, and they’re used to witnessing human indecencies of the public kind rather than the more horrifying private kind. Dayna was definitely from a different part of the world, despite her baseball cap, her bare feet, her tan arms. She moved in a practiced way; she was used to being watched. There was no hesitation in her gestures, nothing wild or desperate.

  The apartment looked like a yard sale—it seemed she had no interest in putting things away.

  “Oh, if you have a minute, you probably know a lot about this,” she said. I was still holding Winston’s cage as Dayna walked from the door to the window in her kitchen. There was a hole the size of a hockey puck in the screen. She raked at it with her fingers. “I’m having problems with my squirrels.”

  And that was another thing: there was an immediate familiarity; she spoke to me as though she knew me. That’s from the city. She spoke to me as though she knew my name, knew my brothers, knew about the trouble I’d had with amphetamines in high school, and that nevertheless I’d made it to college, and that there I’d desired women but hadn’t had much luck with them.

  “I’m Lew,” I said.

  “Dayna,” she said, and she put out her hand, so I propped the cage on my thigh and grabbed her fingers awkwardly. “Here’s the problem. I started feeding them, and now they’ve chewed through my window screen. They even come inside to pee. I came back one afternoon and found a puddle on the counter, like motor oil. They must be sick, don’t you think? And they eat everything. They eat my soap and my ant traps and my paper towels.”

  “You shouldn’t have fed them,” I said.

  “But they expect it now.”

  “Who cares? That’s not your problem.”

  “But it’s my fault they expect it,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Just stop feeding them.” I felt very confident in this.

  “What about that?” she asked, pointing at the hole in the screen.

  “Rat traps,” I said. “That’ll do it.”

  “You’re a veterinarian?” she asked.

  “I drive the truck,” I said.

  Winston was glancing at me, craning his neck, then looking away, moving in that twitchy, nervous way birds do. I set the cage down, resting it against Dayna’s refrigerator. The job made me hate animals; they were always disapproving and disappointed with me. When they judged, they judged harshly. Those who spend only fleeting time with animals don’t notice the judgment—when you have a pet, a pet you feed and speak to in baby talk, it appears to love you. In my daily contact with anonymous animals, though, I learned otherwise. I found that animals have the same deep-seated resentments, the same nagging sense of failure that people do. They have less fear, less shame, but they are equally petty, equally irrational and loathsome.

  “Rat traps?” said Dayna. “But they’ve been like my pets. I just want to get them to behave.”

  “They’re taking advantage of you, Dayna,” I said.

  She stared at the hole in the screen and bent the frayed strands back to smooth
its edges.

  Before Dayna there was Andrea, when I worked at Robey’s in Springdale—we’d fool around in the walk-in cooler. I’d be sitting on a milk crate and she’d sit in my lap; we’d kiss, she’d bite my lips, then she’d pull down her black uniform pants and I’d pull down mine and she’d say will you park the pink Cadillac? and I would say yes. But I always felt as though she were very far away. I had no idea what we were doing together. We didn’t seem to have any real interest in each other at all. We’d gone to see The Karate Kid and she’d fallen asleep. She spent all her extra money on cocaine, which only made her nostalgic. Then she left town; she moved to Tucson without saying good-bye. Not long afterward, I got fired. Robey caught me taking a nap behind the restaurant, out by the Dumpsters.

  “Could you help me hang Winston’s cage?” asked Dayna.

  “My pleasure,” I said.

  Stanley rarely checked up on me, and when he did—by radio—I would sometimes claim engine trouble, if I was behind in the delivery schedule, or if I’d been wasting time. There were days when I took two-hour picnics on the rocks under the Point Judith Bridge. Stanley was getting somewhat suspicious. He questioned me more, which made me more interested in fucking off during the workday. That’s a problem I have, generally speaking: if people expect me to disappoint them, I’ll do my best to meet their expectations.

  “I had it in the bedroom, but I guess I could change that,” said Dayna.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Definitely.”

  “You don’t think I should have it in the bedroom?”

  “Doesn’t the bird talk a lot?”

  “But I like how Winston talks,” she said.

  “Winston, Winston, Winston, Winston,” said the bird.

  But then I noticed the progress I’d made. Dayna wasn’t looking at me, just quickly meeting my eye then turning away, toward Winston, or toward the floor. This was a foothold. She was acting less urban, less fluid; I saw a glimmer of loneliness; I saw her on a Sunday morning listening to the radio and content to be in this new town (which was all I’d ever known), looking at the mouth of the harbor, watching the lobstermen steam eastward, toward the outer islands, thinking This is good, this is just what I needed—when in fact what she needed was me.