Old Love

“Jeanette Girot, he-he, ooh! She was hot in love with seven men at the same time, yes” grandpa told me, nearly in a boast, “one for each day a the week.”

He slowly unfurled seven leathery fingers at me, not the normal way but split into four and three, no thumbs. I wondered if that was European or elderly, it was difficult to tell with him…but the realization struck me: grandpa has an accent even in sign language.

“Were you one of them?” I asked.

“I was.” He folded his fingers back into a ball, but slowly, not all at the same time.

“How…is that possible?”

“Ahh” said grandpa triumphantly, like I had fallen into his trap. “You don’t know Jeanette Girot!” And a great smirk cracked onto his face which meant that I had to admit he was right, I didn’t know Jeanette Girot.

Grandpa told an incredible number of stories, though in all other things he was stingy and sparse. He’d give up a limb sooner than overpay you a cent, and die before tipping an extra dollar. Measured and meticulous! For him that was part nature and part necessity, working close to fifty years as a furrier. The bodies of women from Madison and Park Avenues, from Tribeca and Newark and Long Island, needed to be measured exactly – though their shapes, lumps, and curves shifted almost from breath to breath, like clouds.

He earned a remarkable reputation among these women, who paid handsomely. They spoke of his fine craftsmanship in mink, his gift with rabbit and fox, and how he could make a coat for a woman which so naturally suited her you’d think she was born a chinchilla. In the 80’s, however, when all those women and loyal customers began to die and, unexpectedly, left no wills asking to be buried in new fur, grandpa went out of business and retired.

“Can you tell me about her, grandpa?” I prodded. Because while he was indeed generous with these things, a semi-philanthropist of stories, he would always wait to be asked (unlike some great philanthropic foundations, as I would learn later in life when I had graduated college and law school for a career in non-profit work, who bestow their cash upon those who never wished it or asked…any more than the peaceful, eerie moon asked to be pricked with an American flagstick…).

“Sure, sure, ahh.”

I could tell from his eyes and how he began to rub his bulky knees – both hands and knees trembled, so when he rubbed them together they resembled two pairs of dragonflies mating, side by side – that he was pleased to think of her. And also pleased to tell me.

.

“They put me down there in New Orleans,” he began. “Down there in eh, how do you call it? Next to New Orleans, you know forty five minutes, an hour away, by car.”

“At the army base?” I asked, knowing he’d served in the army during the war.

“The navy,” he corrected me. “Every Sunday we would go to New Orleans. A nice city, very nice city, it’s like New York – on the water. There was another Jewish person with me, Abe Segal – he was from Staten Island, and American born. Ooh-ah! He used to rail on me, the way I spoke, and all the American things I didn’t know. Abe was loud and sharp, a very sharp boy. He loved to make trouble and whenever he got the chance, he’d be the first one to New Orleans and the last one back to the base. And then he’d make sure everyone in the base, including the sergeants, and me especially, knew exactly what sort a mess he’d been up to.

“Well, Abe…”And grandpa, pausing, flashed a sudden deep frown. “Come one Monday morning and Abe was nowhere around. He didn’t show up a whole week! He-he! And all that week everyone was looking at me asking, Where’s Abe? Where’s Abe? because they knew that we were the only Jewish people down there. Even the sergeant screamed at me a little. And a week later Abe snuck back into the base just like nothing had happened, and boy did the sergeant give him hell! He had to clean every-little-bitty-thing on the base a hundred times, a million times! Ooh!

“But he was very quiet, not a word about nothing. So finally I asked him. I went over to him and I said, ‘Abe, where in the hell were ya out to all this time, eh?’

‘What’s it to you?’ he said. And ptew! He spit on the ground by my boots.

“So I just said to him, ‘So now you are not talking, eh?’

“You see, I realized that if he didn’t want to talk about it, this was something out of the ordinary. You know, something very lunatic. So I said to him, ‘Where could you have been, Abe? What, did you stay with a girl the whole week?’

“He was always talking talking talking about this girl and that girl, only girls. But he was never quiet about it, and this time he was dead quiet. It was unusual. And then slowly, very seriously, Abe nodded at me…” (Grandpa nods his head the way he remembers Abe’s, with a frozen face, like a statue forced to nod its head but trying not to rupture or disintegrate.)

‘Yeah? A girl?’ I asked him again.

‘Yeah , a girl,” he said.

“Ooh-ah! How I laughed at him! He was standing there like he had a tail between his legs! So I said to him, ‘What did she do to you, Abe? Did she tie you to the bed with chains or something for a week? Come on! Did she hit you with the voodoo and poke some pins in you, eh? She go and pin your putz to the bed, eh?’ Because you know down there in New Orleans they are all voodoo, from the Caribbean Islands. He-he!

“But I’ll never forget it. He looked me dead in the eye like a snake and said, ‘Worse.’

“Ah! That was Abe Segal, the loudest boy on the base, who would give you a whole megillah about anything in the world, and not once in his life answered with even a simple Yes sir. And all he had to say was that, and then he just walked away!”

Grandpa seemed exasperated even now by the curtness of Abe Segal’s reply. He was getting worked up, bouncing in his musty green armchair. But his agitation lasted only a moment; he quickly turned easygoing, back to being comfortably old, like a calm Buddha. And he grinned.

“And you know who that girl was, yes?” grandpa said to me. I did and I didn’t. He bellowed her name.

“Jeanette Girot!”  

  

The Separation of Meat and Milk

Judah Stein drove towards Lindsey’s apartment building on Pearl St., one block and a half beyond the cemetery. It was a small Christian one whose bodies tanned on sunny days under their tombstones and crosses set like beach umbrellas – and kept tanning just the same by night. As Judah drove past it that night he held his breath, intensifying the pressure of his toes on the accelerator. He had learned that habit as a child when the schoolbus passed the huge cemetery in Flushing, Queens and a boy told him severely, “You have to hold your breath,” showing him how with two pink bulbous cheeks. The implication being that if you didn’t hold your breath you’d lose it for good. Judah no longer pumped his cheeks but still never breathed. On the rare occasions when he caught himself at this he wondered, is it a Jewish or a general superstition? He would have to investigate. And if it turns out to be Jewish, he would have to stop. But always he waited until he cleared the last of the yard’s overhanging elms before exhaling.

            Lindsey’s building, typical for Middletown, Conn., is an old, skinny, three story brick box with no elevator. A teenage boy and his girlfriend, maybe sister, sat like hobbled pigeons on the front stoop smoking cigarettes. Like imps they stayed put as Judah walked by, forcing him to pass narrowly between them; the only tribute he received was the boy’s cough and a floating puff. Those two were there always, without fail, every time he visited Lindsey. They never even spoke to each other; as far as he could tell, they communicated through puffs of smoke like Indian chieftains. Judah squeezed between.

Inside the building Judah climbed the stairs slowly as he took in the peculiar animal scent. Forty minutes earlier she had texted him to come and here he was, coming just as he was in his jeans and steel grey fleece; Lindsey was not a girl he dressed up for. Because of strange nerves, because of his hyper-preparedness and boredom, he took out his phone and reread the message. It said: Come over please? Soon as you can, I need you – with no closing period, which signified a critical something waiting to be done. And shadowed beneath the glowing text: Received at 7:22 PM.

            It (the message, the summons) was written in what his roommates Mike and Brandon called Lindsey-speak, or “classic Lindsey-speak,” a terse yet theatrical, provocative style that rolled eyeballs (of others; hers were frigid blue despite her dark hair, which added to her drama). Both she and Judah were majoring in Biology at Wesleyan and had no interest in theatre or art, whereas Mike and Brandon acted in the play; Brandon also wrote messy poetry in a green spiral journal, which he sometimes left in classrooms for a day and imagined that people read. When each time he reclaimed it he felt the excitement of reunion, but also tiredness, sameness, repetition. Judah wondered how Brandon could leave his journal unguarded; if he were ever to write poetry, he would sure as hell hold onto it somewhere safe.

Here and there – stored on his phone, archived in his email, memories firing off in his medial temporal lobe, and even in an actual handwritten letter with a thousand pounds of weight hidden in a desk drawer – Judah still had the relics of another’s elaborate and beautiful communiqués. Comparing this trove with Lindsey-speak was a lesson in the evolution of language: Lindsey showing the primitive symbols and roots, while in Dana’s notes you had the modern pinnacle. Except, perversely, Lindsey was now the real and the present while Dana had become the speculative and the history. Judah paused before the peeling maroon door.

            Suddenly he was worried – was there still some chocolate in the crease by his lips, or on his cheek? He licked his lips and wiped with his sleeve. Maybe on his teeth? He took out the phone again, this time only to use the blank glossy screen as mirror to smile and preen into. The hallway by the door was not very bright but he satisfied himself that he was clean – clean enough for Lindsey. In the mirror-phone he acknowledged the stubborn, dark, brutal bags under his eyes.

            “You have some shmutz there,” Mr. Schreiber had told him only about an hour earlier outside the supermarket near campus, pointing with a long accusatory crooked finger. Judah was surprised and stared first at the finger, then at Mr. Schreiber; neither made much sense to him, so the latter went on to explain: “Chocolate on your cheek.” Judah began licking blindly, in radius and circumference, but he quickly felt uncomfortable – it was grotesque and awkward to wiggle his tongue like that while Mr. Schreiber watched and pointed. Judah wanted to ask, What are you doing here, but couldn’t summon the focus or nerve fast enough. He was embarrassed; on his cheek, under the alleged chocolate, he burned and blushed. He wanted to shake hands but in one there was a shopping bag of groceries, in the other a bright orange package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, diminished by one Cup melted on his face.

            “Thanks,” he muttered.

One of Judah’s best friends from high school was Jake Schreiber, whose mom divorced his dad in the middle of 10^th grade. Everyone suspected some kind of philandering but Mr. Schreiber was soft-spoken, warm, and very religious. He didn’t seem especially lustful, but that judgment is as easy as detecting polyps on someone’s colon without doing the colonoscopy; with these things you have to go inside to really find out. Yet ever since the divorce Judah’s adolescent mind had imagined him as incredibly lustful, beyond all scale: the nice Mr. Schreiber became a man boiling like a soup, a cholent of testosterone, pheromones, inconvenient erections, indomitable sexual prowess. Judah had not seen him since 10^th grade, when he left New York for Hartford, where his children visited him for holidays and some weekends. It was amazing that Mr. Schreiber even recognized him.

“I’m here for my daughter – you remember Sarah? She’s thinking about coming to Wesleyan next year, so I told her I would swing by and check it out for her. I live in Hartford now.” Mr. Schreiber spoke softly and candidly. Judah was surprised to be treated almost as an adult, an equal, belying the heroic male persona he had invented for him; of course, divorce and exile are humbling.

“Oh, really? That’s great. I’d be more than happy to give her some information or answer any questions she has.” Jake’s little sister Sarah had always had an obvious crush on Judah, which greatly annoyed and embarrassed her brother. Judah wondered if, maybe, his presence was part of her motivation for wanting to attend Wesleyan.

“Great. I’ll have her call you – I think she has your number.” What this meant, if there was something hinted here, Judah could not guess. Mr. Schreiber’s voice was warm, sharing a texture with his full, greying hair. His nose rose and fell at the bridge; it was the same nose which looked fine on Jake but marred Sarah.

“Definitely.”

“So, how are you? You must be almost graduating. Do you still keep in touch with Jake?” Judah felt Mr. Schreiber’s eyes sweep over the top of his brown hair. There was a circular patch of hair which was hidden for years beneath a yarmulke; this patch, having been carved out since boyhood so methodically, never blended back with the rest of his hair; Judah still felt its separate dimensions and weight, like an overthrown king who continues to strain his neck as though balancing a crown. Mr. Schreiber’s glance at the naked tuft caused Judah, oddly, to shiver.

“Yeah, we do, but not so much. We really should be better at it.” After high school Jake went to learn at a yeshiva in Israel; he stayed there for two years, a streak of intense devotion, at the end of which he promptly disavowed religion and moved to Vietnam where he taught English. Jake had done that with everything – seizing and examining it too closely, too intimately, until it sickened him and he tried to hurl it out of the solar system: girls, old buddies, his parents, music, God, etc. Judah had not spoken to him in almost a year.

“Oh. Yup, he’s a good boy. Incredibly adventurous and–”

“Yeah, definitely.”

“We could all use more adventure in our lives, you know? We all could. It’s guys like Jake who realize it and have the guts to go ahead with it. I tell you what,” Mr. Schreiber said as he shook a finger, “he’s out seeing the world…”

Mr. Schreiber was obviously eager to speak to a familiar face from his remembered, wrecked life. Judah wondered at his comments: an adventure, like what – an affair? Like a divorce? He had the sense that Mr. Schreiber was looking to justify his own choices, his family, his manliness, his very existence. And he was brazenly using his son to do this. The whole act repulsed Judah; he smiled dumbly and looked down at the asphalt of the parking lot. The twilight air, cool and fast darkening into an insubstantial cloud, was perfumed with stale gasoline. Judah was desperate to leave.

“Do you want some?” Judah asked, offering his remaining Reese’s Cup. By this point he had nothing else to do or say. Mr. Schreiber held up his palms defensively and laughed. 

“No, I’m meat.”

Judah gaped at Mr. Schreiber, whose body blinked for a moment in passing yellow headlights, with all the grip of a simple, weighty mystery: You’re meat. Like how the captive chimpanzee stares at the scientist through the cage, asking: What are you? What do you mean? And then further: What do I mean? Plus or minus the fur, the chimp will consider, plus or minus the tail, we are both essentially meat –similar meat. So what is this cage? Judah looked at Mr. Schreiber and was confused, as if lost in the implications and sheer density of evolutionary theory. Mr. Schreiber sensed the confusion.

“I’m fleishig,” he translated into Yiddish, and Judah of course understood. He hadn’t forgotten from his days of observance that between eating meat and milk – you wait. Standard was three or six hours, unless you were of Dutch ancestry and waited just one: one measly hour, sixty minutes, a piece of cake. He knew the concept and the practice but had unexpectedly lost the English of it. For decades noted scientists have been trying to teach chimpanzees English with limited success.

“Oh.” Judah again had nothing to say. “How long do you wait?”

“Six hours. It’s forever, isn’t it? And at my age, you never know if you’ll even live that long.” Mr. Schreiber chuckled softly, almost to himself. “I might keel over and, kaput” – he rubbed his palms together twice as though, having dug his own grave, he now brushed off the dirt – “just waiting to be milchig.”

It occurred to Judah that he didn’t know how old Mr. Schreiber was; it was too hard to guess now that it was dark. The conversation was turning morbid, and was past dead anyway. Luckily Judah’s phone vibrated just then and he excused himself, wishing Mr. Schreiber and Sarah and Jake well, the best of luck. It was the text from Lindsey begging for help.

When he knocked on the door and Lindsey opened it, she had (like usual) already turned away and began walking down the long hall simply expecting that he follow. She didn’t smile or greet him – things were too desperate and grave for that. She strode ahead wearing a white tank top with one twisted shoulder-strap and a pair of bright green panties; her legs and ass were so skinny and they cut such edges in the air as they moved, they seemed like two golf clubs swinging themselves. Her shoulder blades winged out. Lindsey turned abruptly into her room and was already collapsed on her enormous high bed with a plush green cover, unmade, by the time Judah caught up.

“How are you doing?” he asked. Looking away from her, he surveyed the piles of books on her night-table and shelves, and the large wooden dresser with golden knobs. The wall on top of the dresser was a display of sticky-paper notes in her jagged handwriting which Judah had never bothered to read, though he was suddenly curious. They had been at this for over a month now, it was perhaps time to read those.

“My life is falling apart. I haven’t eaten a thing in two days.” Lindsey’s voice was muffled because she was face down – so she was starting to eat, Judah mused darkly, if only her pillow. He had seen her like this before and was not overwhelmed. Instead, he sat down on her bed and stroked her spine gently with his middle finger. All the vertebrae were countable, they responded to his touch; he studied her back like an animated textbook.

He told her things he had already said: how her lifestyle is incredibly unhealthy, how she should seek professional counseling, how she really must speak to her parents about this. She would respond bitterly, obstinately. A list of the biological effects of her eating disorder would follow, as though she were lecturing to a cavernous auditorium: my bone mass is decreasing rapidly; my body is consuming my muscles, especially my heart, so my cardiovascular system is forced to operate with far less power thereby starving my other organs of oxygenated blood; speaking of blood, my menstrual cycle has vanished entirely…

Lindsey was actually amazingly smart – when it came to biology she was “like a sponge,” as Judah’s mother would say of anyone with a good brain. He noticed this when she got an A on the midterm which he, by good fortune, narrowly passed. Over the course of three tutoring sessions she methodically caught him up to speed, while simultaneously seducing him with equal methodical talent; when the time came for her to lean forward offering herself, propping up her torso with a hand smartly planted at the angle of his thighs, he was already conquered: she had been steadily filling him with her knowledge, her smell, her voice, her chemicals, until he became the saturated sponge and all she had left to do was squeeze.

On this night, though, he was tired of her. The dialogue continued as if pre-recorded.

“Lindsey, please – you know this isn’t healthy. I’m worried about you.”

“You are?”

“Yes, of course. I care about you.”

“I didn’t know that. You never tell me.”

“How could you not know? Of course I care about you.”

He tried to convince her to see a professional but she refused. “Why not?” he asked. She shook her head: “I just can’t. You don’t understand.” When they had exhausted their useless conversation Judah decided they should simply watch a movie on her laptop in bed, so they scanned through Netflix and settled on a ghost story in Spanish called El Espinazo del Diablo – “The Devil’s Backbone.” The movie was not halfway done when she began nibbling at his neck, then bypassing his clothing with her hand to find his flesh. This meant the film would have to wait.

Sex with Lindsey was pretty boring, and abrasive (she was very bony), like performing on a chain link fence. Just like that, a memory popped into his empty, bored brain: the chain link fence surrounding the pool at summer camp, where as a child he would reach his arm through (his being the skinniest arm of the group, and sometimes he had a hockey stick attached for better reach) to fetch a stranded ball flown-over the locked fence or simply to touch the nice pool water, showing off his talent – his arm went inside the fence up to his shoulder socket. While stretching he would fold his lips in on themselves, pure concentration, and when he finally reached the pool his eyeballs would flash with pride; he, Judah Stein, was useful and needed, while the most athletic and charismatic boys, even Benjy Goldberg and Jake Schreiber, were helpless, not daring to hop the fence. What memories to be conjured up, at what times! While now, grown up, he thrusts through the fence with his outstretched skinny nether-arm seeking out the gratifying pool.

A few minutes of that and they once again divided up the space of the bed with one lying next to the other. She hardly needed space. They finished the movie, which turned out to be genuinely creepy.

Of Dana’s tangible love he remembered one thing most of all: how once, curled by his side, she kissed his shoulder, her pink lips, moist, handsome lips which blurred and ran over their edges like she was colored-in by a child – these lips formed the tiniest audible suction against his bicep then desuctioned. He watched her as she approached her target, with her eyes shut but scouting with her soft-sloped nose first brushing his skin. The movement lasted a second. Suction, desuction. It consumed all of him like a dry August brushfire. Judah never recovered.

When Dana finally told him it was over, that it “just [wasn’t] working” and she couldn’t “wait around” any longer for “it” to “work,” Judah didn’t quite understand – did she have to catch a train? Those were actually the words which occurred to him then, as she double-wrapped his hand with two of hers and looked smack into his eyes, but almost not looking, more like modeling for him as a final courtesy her sympathetic, swampy emerald eyes, eyes cut from a lime peel, allowing him to photograph her in his head one last time for nostalgia’s sake or masturbation or proof of her reality, because she must have known that she was already transforming into a memory, and must have known as well that being a memory she was far more dangerous to him, and still all Judah could think to say was, “What, do you have a train to catch or something?” His Mom would ask him that as a child whenever he whined or got antsy about doing a chore like he had somewhere to go. Luckily he didn’t say those words out loud because he was embarrassed to blurt out a phrase so infantile and irrelevant at such a moment, and anyway he was shaking too fiercely to speak, as if they were standing on a subway platform while the train hurtled by with a terrific clamor and rumble, snuffing out the conversation. You just had to wait for the train to pass before trying to speak again.

Turns out she was catching a flight. Less than a week after breaking up with him she was off to Egypt, taking a semester abroad at Cairo University to study Arabic and Political Theory. Judah of course knew that she was going; they had discussed and planned it and, though very nervous about transitioning to long-distance, he was even excited for her. But he hadn’t realized that she was making those plans without him, that she was arranging all along for him being out of the picture. When this dawned on him the thought hollowed out his stomach, replaced it with gigantic spleen. Beforehand he had invented a kind of romantic notion, imagining himself as attached to Cairo through Dana, almost as though she was his beautiful emissary or ambassador to that country which made him a sort of political personage, a member of the ruling class. And then she cut him off and went on her own – it was like the popular revolution which had drawn her there in the first place: he felt overthrown and outcast and, most of all, betrayed, almost by the Egyptian people themselves in all their protesting masses. He should have known better, what a fool, trusting women and Arabs.

   

Judah, in his unclothed furry chimp-body, got up from Lindsey’s bed and began to pace around the room: from bed to dresser to closet to mirror-in-closet and back. He picked up his jeans from the floor where Lindsey had tossed them into an almost perfect pretzel shape. He was preparing to leave; with Lindsey, unlike with Mr. Schreiber, you could just go, without pretexts. Meanwhile she produced from somewhere, he didn’t notice where, an off-white 9½” envelope. She held it out to him like a boarding pass.

“I need a favor from you. Can you drive to Kristen’s and give this to her? Please?”

“Now?” His jeans and underwear were stuck at his knees, which seemed like a much more urgent problem.

“Yes. Now,” she said tersely.

“Can’t you give it to her tomorrow?” Kristen lived in the dorms; it made sense to deliver it tomorrow when they would all be in school anyway. But Judah saw she was insistent, and the drive wasn’t far. He took it from her and examined it; she had sealed it and written on the back in green, Kristen: FYEO. Judah, weirdly, didn’t have the slightest curiosity about its contents. He put it in his pocket unfolded so it stuck out.

“Tell her I’ll be there soon,” he said. And for the first time that evening, even through the lovemaking, Lindsey smiled.

As he left her building he almost didn’t notice the teenage couple on the stoop; instead of forcing his narrow passage they had split apart so wide. He thought that perhaps he had finally earned their respect, or they thought he was someone else, or they somehow sensed the importance of his letter. Then he heard soft sobs coming from the girl, who was wearing a dark sweatshirt and rubbing the toes of her sneakers against the concrete. As he strode between them he glanced at her face: small nose; wide, full lips; her forehead and chin wrinkled with her crying. The boy kept on smoking like nothing had happened. Whatever trouble or fight had occurred, it hadn’t hoisted either of them from the stoop. Judah wondered if the two edges of this concrete stoop, for these kids who settled it and knew all its inches and nothing else, could feel like worlds on opposite points of the solar system. Could it feel as far off as Cairo?

Judah often imagined Dana’s trip, but he really had almost no actual information to work with since they stopped speaking. The result was that, entirely by accident, unconsciously, he invented for her two experiences which were completely different from each other. Irreconcilable stories. In one line of imagination she was in university and roomed with an English girl, Mary, whose father was Egyptian so she understood Arabic pretty well, and a German guy named, what else, Dirk, who was handsome and steadfast but not intelligent, and frequently hit on Dana with mixed results. She also befriended an elderly Egyptian woman from the suk, Fatima, who treated her almost as a daughter.

In the other line, Dana had taken a day trip alone to Sharm el-Sheikh but left her bag on the bus – losing her wallet, passport, visa. Not wanting to call and terrify her parents, she decided to beg for the assistance of strangers, some of whom asked for sexual favors. Judah recognized the silly pornographic logic of this line of imagination, but found himself developing it anyway; since the breakup (even after starting with Lindsey) he had sunk into Internet sex clips, in up to his nostrils, which must have influenced his thinking. Anyhow, he cycled automatically between these two lines, now one and now the other, not fully aware they had totally split.

Kristen was a friend of Lindsey’s, medium height, a bit overweight. Judah had met her only twice, each time at a large party which he was leaving just as she arrived. He didn’t remember a thing of what they said to each other. But he knew that she and Lindsey had a somewhat volatile relationship, which made sense to him knowing Lindsey. He would hear of her in Lindsey-speak: “Kristen is such a perfect balance to my personality”; “I really enjoy being near her, but I never feel I can trust her”; “She is too afraid to be vulnerable and let herself need me.” Judah hardly knew what to say to this, so he would ask shallow questions which poked at a word, such as: “What do you mean by need?”

The Wesleyan campus was unusually dark; somewhere bulbs must have burned out. Judah parked in the half-empty lot where a guard dozed or simply spaced out in a booth. He walked quickly towards the four dorms over the large central lawn. The grass was wet: had it rained? Despite the darkness, three guys were playing football using some kind of rotating quarterback system, shirtless. It was chilly but they were sweating up and didn’t seem to mind. Maybe the cold was the whole point.

Past the athletes Judah walked by the campus bagel store, which had the narrowest seating area you’ve ever seen; the tables (for two only) were set up in a long hallway, or tunnel, which forced anyone going to the back to turn sideways and sidle along, squeezing through while brushing the sitters with either their bellies or asses. Judah and Dana ate there often. In fact, she had eaten her first bagel ever there, a fact which completely floored Judah. “You mean you’ve never had a bagel?!” he prodded. She wrinkled her forehead and leaned in hotly: “What, so now you’ve taken my bagel virginity – are you happy?” He replied that he doubted her Jewishness. And, in truth, he almost did.

Inside her dorm building, called Davidson, a group of male students watched hockey on a big lounge TV. They wore mostly shorts and sweatpants and ate cafeteria food everywhere, making a mess out of a mess. “Ooooo!” A huge, coordinated sigh filled the room, either because a shot had barely missed or someone had suffered a concussion. In any case it roused the security guard and he shouted, in a peculiar mumbled shout, “Hey! Y’got ah-dee?” The guard was bald and in his mid-forties; he looked run down, exhausted, except for his astonishing red lips which he licked every few seconds as a tic. There was no name where it should have been on his nametag, just empty silver. Judah took out his wallet and flashed the guard his student ID. The guard responded by licking his lips, as though that was a kind of stamp on his passport clearing him through. He became annoyed when Judah didn’t comprehend and move on: “A’right, g’on!” he mumble-shouted. Judah took the elevator to the sixth floor.

It was brutally hot out and Sharm el-Sheikh is a resort town, so Dana wore a yellow tank-top and shorts. She just wanted to know when the next bus back to Cairo was, and hoped that she could beg or borrow enough for the fare. She figured her blonde hair would be an asset since that usually earned her favors, but really it was her shoulders, thin and tanned into golden minarets: those bare marvels had the power to reorient the Nile’s flow, not to mention the jumping frogs in every pair of trousers. First, second, or third born – she struck them down just the same. She figured bus change would be rather simple. “A piece of cake,” she thought.

Across the street she spotted a lone guard in a booth who looked pretty bored, propping up his large gun on his forearms while trying to readjust his dirty beige beret. He snapped to attention when he noticed her approaching. She asked, very slowly, “Hi. Do. You. Know. When. The. Next. Bus. To. Cairo. Is?” making a gesture for bus that more closely resembled a fish.

“Bus to Cairo,” he repeated.

“Yes. The next bus.” She stepped inside his booth to get some shade and to reduce the glare, so she could see him better; nonetheless, his black mustache glittered from the midday sun. The booth was really tiny, and the guard fat. He may or may not have understood, or maybe it was a protocol or ingrained habit to ask: “Visa? Show me visa.”

“I lost it. That’s why I need the bus to get back to Cairo. I’m studying at Cairo University, I’m American and I lost my stuff, my documents. I. Lost. It.” Dana was worried, but enjoyed the guard’s plain confusion. It gave her a feeling of control, that he was in a sense more lost than she. He seemed not to understand a word.

Kristen opened the door wearing a long black dress, like she had just been to a formal affair. Maybe she had, but it was strange to Judah regardless. Her dorm was small and opened directly into a drab, dirty kitchenette lit by a fluorescent white bulb. Kristen’s hair was unbelievably frizzy, owing to the rain he had missed.

“Hi! Lindsey told me you were coming to give me something. Would you like a drink?” She smiled at him. He had forgotten about the letter, but as soon as she brought it up it began to weigh like lead and poked out of his pocket uncomfortably. Something about its shape or existence caused his thigh to stiffen.

“No thanks,” he said, shaking his head while pulling out the envelope. It had wedged itself into his jeans and didn’t slide out smoothly. “Here, this is for you.”

“Thanks.” She took it but hardly glanced at it, just flipped it over and over in her hands, almost automatically. Judah watched it flip and no longer knew what to say.

“So how are you doing?” was what he hit upon.

            “I’m doing great! I have this really big anthro paper due soon and I’m so behind on the work. Everyone else has been doing all this research for weeks and I barely have a topic! I mean, I think I have a topic but I’m not even close to a thesis, so I need to do a ton of reading before I can even start. Whatever. I always do that, leave things till the very last minute. Everyone makes fun of me for it. A few years ago I signed up to run a marathon and raise a lot of money for breast cancer awareness, but I totally delayed and procrastinated until the last second, obviously…

“Breast!” said the guard abruptly, pointing at her chest. “Show me!” Having never before been asked to flash only one breast, she was amused. With one hand she clasped the right side of her yellow shirt and bra and tugged downward, exposing for the guard’s chocolate eyes her pale luminescent cup; the rest of her skin had tanned well but, God, she hadn’t let her breasts out in a while. It seemed cut from dough. She watched her nipple make furtive, suspicious eye-contact with the guard, as though sizing up him and his uniform; she guessed it was especially wary of his mustache. The man was obviously shocked that his amateur ploy had worked so well and was too taken with disbelief to consider his next move: he froze and stupidly let his gun swing around by its strap. Seizing her moment of dominance, Dana sent one hand to the crotch of his standard issue military pants and took hold of what was formerly his flesh, now a Kalashnikov, pumping mercilessly. The guard bit on his mustache and softly blessed his good luck.

“Basically, in the end I had to go literally the morning of the marathon and knock on the doors of everyone on my block begging them to sponsor me. At 7 AM, and I was wearing my running shorts. It was so embarrassing. This was in Boston, by the way, where I’m from.”

“Oh,” Judah said. “Well, good luck with the paper; I’m sure it will come together fine.” And then, before she could respond, “Mind if I use your bathroom?”

“No problem, right over there.”

Judah came out of the bathroom and found Kristen by the table holding the letter, the envelope lying torn and mangled. She looked at him and said, “I don’t even know what to say. I’m speechless.” This wasn’t quite true because she went on.

“I’ve never, ever said anything like this to her at all. I swear, I really haven’t. And I don’t even feel that way anyway. I have no idea where this came from. Like, what is she talking about? Does she think I’m some psycho bitch trying to steal people’s boyfriends? Ha, I just really don’t get it. It’s so weird, maybe someone said something to her? Do you have any clue where she got this from?”

Judah took this as a kind of invitation and took the paper from her hands. He scanned the letter, composed in Lindsey’s jagged hand with a gushing green fountain pen.

I won’t let Judah come between us. I care about you too much for that. If you want him so badly, if the jealousy absolutely consumes you, then here: I give him to you. Take him for tonight, take him forever: I don’t care. Really. Just come back to me and make things the way they were. That’s the only thing I care about. I need you, love. I really do. My life is a mess and I need your kindness, your truth, your love, your wisdom, your beauty, your

There were at least eight or nine more virtues of Kristen’s which Lindsey desperately needed, but Judah couldn’t finish. He looked at Kristen, first at her face then her chest and thick, plump curved body, and imagined her wearing fitted running shorts beneath her black dress which was long enough to sweep the floor.

            In Fatima’s small, circular kitchen several pitas were about to leave the oven; she was busy preparing the zaatar dip on a plate. Dana and Mary sat on the worn couch in the salon, which was draped with gold embroideries and heavy dark curtains on the walls, sipping Arabic coffee. Soon Fatima entered the salon with the trey of fresh pitas, accompanied by the baker’s aroma. The two girls ate exuberantly. “My God! This is so good, we have to make this! What is your recipe?” Mary exclaimed. And Fatima spoke in bursts of Arabic and began to rub her hands in a large oval in the air, apparently showing how to prepare the dough.

            After a few minutes Dana said to her, in slow English, “We are going to Tahrir Square today. Tahrir. Square. The protests.” Dana pantomimed waving a poster with an invisible slogan. “You know?” It was always difficult to tell when Fatima understood, she would nod whether she did or didn’t. Dana looked at Mary questioningly.

            “Tahrir? No no no,” Fatima said decisively. “No no no. You no go Tahrir.” She was staging a mini protest of her own, and this was her chant. “No no no.”

            “Why not?”

            In response Fatima simply pointed at Dana and Mary, both of whom were wearing sleeveless solid colored tops and shorts; it was, after all, hot. Dana didn’t get it, but Mary understood.

            “She’s saying we’re dressed too revealingly,” explained Mary in her shrill Mancunian accent.

            “Oh,” said Dana. This was, in fact, the furthest thing from her mind.

            “I fix, I fix. Wait,” Fatima said and she rushed up in a swoosh of dark robe to her bedroom. In a few seconds she returned with two, full length, actual black hijabs. Mary and Dana gasped at each other in near shock; Dana smiled hugely.

            “Alright then. These are lovely. Thank you very much,” she said. And she grabbed her new, heavy hijab.

Downstairs in the lobby the hockey-watching crowd swelled. It must have doubled or tripled just while he had been speaking to Kristen; the game was close and nearly over, had turned exciting. Everyone stood and a few jumped. They were all boys except for a handful of baffled girlfriends, ignored by their boyfriends. With the intelligent movement of the puck, with the slapping sticks, the boys jeered and cursed, celebrated, pounded high fives to whoever was around. “Yeah!” “Oh, come on! What was that?!” One boy was a flood of indignant, devastating criticism.

Judah didn’t watch hockey much, he found the plays difficult to follow. And you had to wait so long for a goal, he’d get bored. But now he was taken with the spectacle, the dancing on the screen and in the lobby, and stayed to watch. He didn’t recognize anyone else there, and no one seemed to recognize him; he blended into the student mass of activity, tense like bottled pressure. The Bruins were playing somebody: somebody was up a goal.

The puck transfixed Judah, sliding in its blackness across the clean ice sheet without leaving a trail. The players passed it from stick to stick; it had a message, it was a message, which everyone needed to read. But it smartly slid away, rounded the boards, deflected off a knee, squirmed through the narrow opening between two skates. The players looked clumsy, hapless. Judah remembered how he and Dana had been at an engagement party and he poured soda; he took the tongs to fish for ice cubes but kept coming up empty. He swiped seven, eight, more than a dozen times, but nothing – the ice was too slippery, he too maladroit. It was ridiculous. Dana grabbed the tongs from him and got the cubes effortlessly, like they were magnetic or bewitched. She snarled at him and flatly said, “It’s OK babe, you have other talents.”

A sudden, violent cheer broke out in the room, though Judah had missed the action somehow. One section of boys in the center jumped up like aggravated chimpanzees; one of them accidentally flipped an enormous trey of French fries, scattering the fries, painting the surrounding boys red with ketchup dots. Just like that, he jumped up in celebration and was upset before even hitting the ground. Judah left to his car without seeing who won.

            Nobody in the immense crowd of humanity at Tahrir Square seemed to notice the addition of two more women in hijabs. Which is to say, no one suspected. All around them people swayed and pumped fists, wailing, chanting, not in unison but with unified fury. Dana and Mary held hands to make sure they didn’t lose each other. They were trying to find Dirk, who was supposed to be there somewhere. Mary was texting him continually but the directions were vague, the confusion overpowering. A six foot blond German could not only get lost in a crowd like that, he could be consumed by it.

            The people were protesting the continued power of the Military Supreme Council and its chairman, the Field Marshal, who had taken over in the wake of Mubarak’s fall. They demanded that elections be pushed up. They vigorously waved great placards, some with pictures equating the Field Marshal to Mubarak, some equating him to Obama or Netanyahu, some not equating but depicting him in a submissive, puppylike stance towards them – and some of these submissive-stance posters were lewd. An endless supply of slogans raged from an endless number of bullhorns. “GET OUT GET OUT ELECTIONS NOW!” And: “FREEDOM DOES NOT WAIT!” In addition, they were protesting the army’s handling of the previous week’s protest, in which there was considerable violence. The people were practiced at protests, one simply led into the next.

            The army, for its part, set up an enormous barrier or gulf in the center of the square, essentially dividing the crowd into two segments, thereby reducing the people’s overall momentum and enabling easier access for the soldiers to any particular point. But it also channeled the crowd’s rage inward to a definite point. The bisected crowd formed, due to the arc shape of the military barrier, what looked like two enormous, quivering lips.

            Mary said that Dirk texted her that he was on the south side of the square, which was the other lip, or what they thought was the other lip. They couldn’t be sure where they were, exactly. With incredible difficulty and slowness they made their way to the very center, at the edge of the military barrier. Soldiers in full riot gear tangled with protesters, occasionally dragging one or two into a truck for arrest. Dana and Mary had almost no space to breathe, and they sweated wildly under their hijabs. They tried to look for Dirk but were being tossed around by the volatility of the restless mass, all the while holding hands so as not so separate. Lots of protesters were linking arms too, but this was for symbolic purposes, yet it also created a kind of domino effect when one screamer inevitably lost his balance.

            At various points along the central barrier, now and again, a group of protesters was able to overwhelm the soldiers and cross to the other side. There was no real purpose in doing this, but they all cheered it as a critical victory. At these points the two monstrous lips actually kissed, briefly.

            The two girls were being shoved around by no one in particular, falling forward then falling backward, always falling over their hijabs. The angry in their tens of thousands had come out that day, and they swayed and rocked their anger as though nursing a baby. Nothing stood still. The two great lips shook and compressed, at times kissing and at times retreating. The girls, indeed the whole crowd, were compelled forward then backward, in then out, as if by the force of a huge, repetitive suction cup. Suction, desuction.

            And then, by sheer luck, Dana spotted Dirk’s blond hair elevated above the crowd on the southern lip near the barrier. Or at least what she thought was Dirk’s blond hair. They tried to shout but everyone else was doing that already, and better. And besides, there was no way to get across except at one of the kissing points, and that was madness.

            Judah drove towards his apartment trying to block the letter from his mind, failing to do so. He hadn’t called or texted Lindsey and didn’t think he would, in fact, unless he could think of something especially magnificent to say to her. He doubted it, and preferred to simply excise her from his life like a tumor – which, apparently, was fine with her as well. The one problem, though, is that Dana would soon come back from Egypt and he would still be single. He’d wanted to avoid that scenario, but there didn’t seem any way out now. Barring divine action.

            Mindlessly, he turned the corner onto Main St. and drove past the two college bars. He glanced at the front looking for people he knew – maybe Mike and Brandon were out. But there, there was Mr. Schreiber! It was him, right down to the wavy nose! Except he looked bareheaded – but you couldn’t say for sure just passing by in the dark. And Judah thought, “What the hell?”

            Then he recalled that heroic figure, that sexual juggernaut who no woman denied, no pair of legs shut out, which he had always imagined Mr. Schreiber to be. “Ha!” he thought. “So there he is!” The image of Mr. Schreiber buying a drink for a college girl amused him, but was also sickening and sad. He was divorced so there was pain at play here, and loneliness. He had heard how divorced men in every city haunt the streets looking for sex, like zoo animals let out of their cages and lost. Was this now Mr. Schreiber, up late outside a college bar? Why else be here, and now?

            Judah looked at the clock on his dashboard. A quarter to one. And so he had a strange, straight-forward thought: was Mr. Schreiber just waiting up to eat dairy? It was, after all, not yet six hours, so he was still meat. The more Judah thought the less he could rule out the possibly that, in fact, here he was, wandering the streets simply waiting to stop being meat. And anyway, Mr. Schreiber didn’t have a train to catch.

            Judah kept driving as he felt the rising urge to say, not knowing why or to whom, precisely, “I need your help.”

You're Listening To

            It was one of those cramped rooms, those rooms that make you wonder, probably the leftover of a lobby cut in half. To Lewis’ right sat a petite Asian woman fingering through a magazine, with her oblivious daughter crouched on the floor playing with her mom’s shoelaces. Across from him was an elderly yet very handsome man wearing a sweater and a beige fedora, on whose lap sat a bagel on a plastic plate, but he didn’t touch it. He sat stiffly like he had been in the army some decades ago and wanted Lewis, the Asian woman, and especially the little girl to know it, and would even salute should that prove necessary. The waiting room was shaped like a small V and opened into a wall with a glass barrier, behind which were two blonde women at their desks. The room was so tiny it had the aura of an elevator, just like the one Lewis had rode up, except there was no movement; in the waiting room nothing is moving and it seems senseless. It is just a matter of the doctor being for a long while not ready to see you and then suddenly ready to see you. For those unfortunate sick people, this process resembles their disease: vexing, uncommunicative, invisible and, whether healing or getting worse, always taking its sweet time.

            Over sixteen minutes later – Lewis kept time because he was trained to do so – a woman with an enormous chart-board walked into the room from the hallway and announced, “Lewis Davidson?” He walked toward her with a smile yet as he passed the old soldier, who had been waiting there longer, he felt the man’s hot enmity on his back; the gentleman even let go a soft harmless curse which, Lewis imagined, had once been a roaring death-knell to a Jap in an overwhelmed bunker, but had faded with time. He followed the rather tall blonde woman into the empty sterilized exam room. She announced, “Dr. Reonalds will be here in a minute. You can get undressed.” As she shut the door Lewis lifted his striped button-down shirt out of his pants, then undid the upper buttons in an automatic way with his thumbs, meanwhile extracting that minimalist sinful pleasure one feels in pushing a button through its tiny slit.

            There was no mirror in the room but the bottom of the exam table, which could have been less horribly named a couch or a bed or even a divan, was reflective. Lewis had a face that was “too pretty for radio,” as Donny, his not-too-bad-looking-himself colleague, had once told him; because, actually, Lewis was a radio-newscaster for the medium sized station PMWR, delivering the news a couple dozen times a day with slight modifications, a few sentences or clauses more or less, for every successive rendition. He continued to undress. He caressed his dotted red abrasions, the small irritated markings on his sensitive wrist-skin, and up to his forearms and elbows, like how a man’s beard scruff blemishes the child’s cheeks given to him by his mother; and, inevitably, the man will develop the habit of fingering his scruff, in the way divers are drawn to a good wreck, the same way Lewis fondled his semi-mutilated wrists. Besides, there was nothing else for him to do. He did this while mulling over a decently worded description of his disease. Because of course he would be asked.

            Lewis was in this office, among the thousands of doctors’ offices in the city, since he and “Dr. Reonalds” – that is, Jeff – had been roommates in college for three semesters. It had probably been almost two years since they saw each other (there was, for sure, Brittany’s catastrophic wedding) and yet nothing changed, it was obvious that nothing could change; as far as they were concerned, the other one was still and always in college with them. Even at that last meeting, which was admittedly drunken, they had seen each other with their outdated eyes and classified it that way, just as a mother will find a stray photo of her son or daughter at around age five and rush to catalogue it in the album at the right spot with the other photos of age five, as if it had never been separated, because that’s where it belonged; so each time Lewis and Jeff met after college, which is now at thirteen years ago, it was filed as a college memory and no progress was possible. It didn’t help, in this particular instance, that Lewis was now clad dorm-true in his underpants. 

            Jeff walked in and called out in his too-loud chuckling voice, “Lewis! Hey, how are you doing?” He was short and appeared even shorter than he actually was, since his white doctor’s coat extended very far down, threatening the floor, and his stethoscope hung past his torso to the half-zipped fly’s beginning. What used to happen was that Jeff woke up early every morning and would interrogate Lewis, or Lewis’ blanketed AM corpse, what shirt should he wear, this one or that, look, this one right? Ok, and which pants? Lewis would respond with his inhuman throat-rattle picking an outfit at random, and somehow Jeff assigned to this process a ritual significance; he was certain he dressed sharper for it. Without a doubt, Lewis mused, his wife must now be the morning clothing oracle. Such rituals tend to perpetuate themselves.     

            “Hey, Jeff, nice to see you.” Lewis smiled generously, forgetting for a moment the room’s chill, as well as the unpleasant sad imprint his aged body was making on Jeff, who had seen him naked and in his prime. “Funny to be in your office. So you’re a real doctor, after all, huh?”

            “You better hope I am, or else why would I even dream of poking my fingers in your butt?” Jeff said in a mock terseness which was somewhat alarming, though it didn’t hurt the joke. In usual settings Jeff was a jovial and rowdy man. He advertised his own reckless streak and had a way of making his voice jump like a cricket whenever his sentence reached a string of meaningless profanities. And yet, Lewis always puzzled, he was an extraordinary studier who took his classes to heart, and his ambition eventually brought him through the arduousness of med school. There was a tricky coexistence in him. In everything he was forceful and winning but often, like most of us perhaps, he was moved by intangible chance notions that had a way of sticking.

            “So what’s wrong?” Jeff asked, transitioning into a more or less professional posture and squinting slightly. He motioned for Lewis to sit on the exam table, which he did with a boyish exuberance. Lewis put his hands on his knees and slouched on the table so his belly changed form and became very expressive, acquiring several layers of meaning.

            “Well,” Lewis began, looking down at the series of cartoonish cherry-bump hives across his hands’ and arms’ undersides, which apparently itched badly since the evidence of his scratching was right there in a few dozen miniature scabs, “I have a pretty bad rash. See?” and he presented his open palms like an accused man protesting his innocence of a crime, petty or brutal, in this case brutal because of the dried blood.

            “Oh my,” remarked Jeff, and he took Lewis’ hands to inspect and feel the hives for himself. “When did this start appearing?”

            “A little less than a week ago.”

            “Hm, look at that.” He was still playing with Lewis’ forearms feeling out the logic of the bumps. One doubts whether he was stroking in an amateurish curious way, as happens when a friend buys a new sweater and orders you, “Feel this,” or whether there was actually some type of decipherable rash code, like braille. In either case the stroking went on. It was palm against wrist except for the thin anti-flesh coolant of Jeff’s wedding band, whose icy movement Lewis could track on his skin. “Do you have any known allergies?”

            “Uh, I’m a bit allergic to kiwi and melon, but I didn’t have any recently. I’m positive.” Lewis looked up at Jeff, who was somewhat absorbed in the texture of the rash, and saw that he was biting on his lower lip. That used to be his worried cue, or preface, of an approaching midterm, or a date – he bit on himself so severely (the structure of his teeth was literally indented into the lip, it was that bad) that Lewis wondered what kind of female dinner companion, exactly, wanted to kiss him goodnight; she would have to make out less with lips than with an orthodontal mold. But Jeff’s dating life was mostly impenetrable to him anyway, on still more technical grounds.

            “You didn’t eat anything strange, did you?” Jeff finally released his arm and leaned back in his doctor chair, which was basically a rolling stool.

            “No, I don’t think so. But–” here Lewis tried not to hesitate – “the night before I took home a guy from a bar, and…literally by the next afternoon I had this crazy rash, so I’m a bit concerned it could be some kind of infection.” Jeff swiveled closer on his short stool.

            “Well um, it doesn’t look like an STI. But why the hell didn’t you use protection? You’re still screwing around like that? I can’t believe it, for God’s–”

            “I don’t know. It was stupid, yes, I’m aware, but he’s married so I guess figured he can’t have too serious a–”

            “Jesus, Lewis.”

            “Okay, I know. I learned my lesson.”

            “Listen, I can give you the name of a clinic to get bloodwork and a swab, and I think you should get tested anyway, but I still believe this is something you ate or were exposed to somehow. It doesn’t really look like the symptoms of an STI. Give it a few more days, it’ll probably go away.”

            “Thanks.”

            “And you have to stop screwing around like that. I’m serious – it’s dangerous.”

            “I know. Don’t worry,” Lewis said with hidden confidence. He thought of that man, the toxic man, slightly mustached and totally bald. As old as he was (definitely over 50) he had an extraordinary wellspring of vigor. The veins on his head were almost literally popping. This man, who when asked had given his name as Theodore, his occupation as in finance, and his body as in devotional sacrifice – could he have infected him? Lewis debated. He certainly had not appeared to be in any manner at all physically defective.   

            Lewis sat on the exam table for a few minutes as Jeff was jotting down information on a paper affixed to a clip-board. Lewis thought to ask, perhaps in vengeance for the humiliating revelations and scolding just past, and while still wearing only his underpants, “Hey, by the way – how is Lauren doing?”

            “She’s good. Same old,” Jeff replied. Then, after a pause in which the pen stopped moving but his posture remained as if writing, he said, “Listen – she’s cheating on me, you know.” 

Of course Lewis knew (see: Brittany’s wedding). The fact of Lauren’s liaisons or affairs or protracted and overlapping episodes of sexual freelancing (combined with total disinterest in Jeff’s overtures) was so well established it was almost documented. There were legends. Her career beddings were, they said, literally calculable on a bell curve of normal distribution in which the majority of accomplices were virile males between ages 28 and 51, but including two standard deviations in both directions. Just the muscle memory in her thighs could probably raise a marching army in one night, if need be. Of these foot-soldiers and cavalrymen it was estimated that Jeff knew of a third, but what an impressive and damning third! All of that by way of rumor, so in actuality she may have had only 3 or 4 lovers spread out over ten years; though by the same token there may be a whole other as-yet-undiscovered militia. So the question “How is Laruen doing?” implied an oblique but radiant counterpart, like the sun warming the backside of a cloud, which carried the more vulgar sense of doing. Basically it was a cruel thing to ask. And here Jeff once again bit his lip.

            “But you know what,” he added, “that’s just who she is.”     

            “What do you mean that’s who she is? So you’re okay with it? Jeff!” He inserted a garish blast of air through his nostrils which signified a kind of rage or pity so immediate and unrefined it actually evaporated itself before coming into existence. Lewis’ expressions often had difficulty in coming to be.  

            “Well–”

            “Obviously it’s hurting you. I can see that clearly enough.” His voice now assumed its chiseled resonance and beat which would be familiar to the radio listeners of nearly all Maryland.

            “It’s not about whether it hurts me, it’s not about that. The thing is – we want to have another child and, you know, I just have to be sure.”

            “But, why do you put up with it?” mystified Lewis asked.

            “I can’t change any of that. That’s really just who she is. But I have to be sure that our child is mine, you know – mine and hers. That’s what actually matters, in the end of the day. That my genes get passed on. Because really,” Jeff now looked him in the eyes, “our genes are the only vestige of permanence to emerge from love’s bosom.” This last phrase having obviously been prepared in advance, perhaps even actually recited out loud in a shower or in traffic, Jeff could not suppress a look of pleasure at executing it masterfully, though the appropriate look would have been either meekness or devastation or blend of. Lewis for his part was not that impressed, and instead regarded his friend with a stunned face, as if wondering, “Where is his head?”

            Jeff had married for love, so he married badly. She was physically persuasive. Her brows on top of grey or green eyes were, like the rest of her, feats of grammatical symbolism: shoulder blades being quotation marks, navel inlaid on the abdominal sheet, crisp apostrophe, her twin intrepid hemispheres below the collarbone, parentheses, teasing commas. A fine rhetorical body. When her sun-heated skin was even thinking of sweating it was basically an argument for something, hardly mattering what, and Jeff was swayable. She wasn’t bookish or what could be called sharp, but she enjoyed her conversations. So did everyone else. To his great disadvantage Jeff loved her. Perhaps the characterization being formed is one of a vainglorious soul-sucker demon whore, and that must be corrected: Lauren was actually a virtuous person, in her way. Not virtuous in the biblical fashion, as in toward the destitute or hungry or barren women, and respecting her husband least of all, but she was extraordinarily giving of herself. Just mostly to other men. Encased within all the mess of her trysts was the profound righteous will to heal, to replenish and revivify the spirit of a desperate beaten-down man, a man necessarily tortured because he is a man, and grant him entry over and over to a piece of actual paradise. She didn’t have to verbalize or even semi-cognize those noble motives; her body was plenty articulate.

            Jeff was determined, having what is called drive, and so his love was driven and powerful. But the wandering lusts of his wife became a charged obstacle, like a rivulet dammed for hydroelectric purposes. The energy needed transfer. So naturally he had no choice but to reorient his heart to a chromosomal nano-love. With no room for souls or bodies, his resourceful affections took hold of the pure genetic material and ran from there. It became a chemical thing. Involving helixes. They would have a child who, composite of parents, would by all true measures constitute their literally undying love. What else could he do? Happily, this notion was corroborated – even trumpeted – by the most up-to-date branches and specializations of evolutionary biology. Hence Jeff’s need to “be sure” about the fatherhood of his next child. Hence his remark about love’s bosom. Hence his anguish.

When Lewis had already gotten dressed and said goodbye to Jeff and held in his hand a piece of paper with the address and phone number of a clinic near his work, he walked back out to the cramped waiting room shaped like a V. Incredibly the elderly maledicting soldier was still sitting in the same seat, legs crossed at the knee, though his bagel had disappeared and was survived by a slew of crumbs spread over the sweater. He was alert. Lewis walked by him in the most self-conscious manner, though luckily he seemed to have forgotten him altogether. New people had entered the room to wait, of course, and the old man was now entirely focused on this second or perhaps third wave of waiters. He apparently liked doing that.  

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It was one of those bars, those bars that make you wonder, Do all of these people actually exist elsewhere? The group could not have been more random. It wasn’t such a big place, and because of the hard-thumping music it felt smaller and fuller than it probably was. But the effect was one of being almost compelled into the arms of the three or four men near you, pretending to dance. Because of the partial darkness and the refusal of anyone to stay still I couldn’t even see what they looked like. I could guess at their ages by their clothing but the margin of error is enormous; in places like that, boys still with a pubescent afterglow gyrate alongside silvery great-uncles on the brink of senility. You may not believe this but it wasn’t until I was actually kissing Theodore, an inch into his mustache, that I realized he had about fifteen years on me. The marker was the scent and elasticity of his skin. Someone else was exploring my thigh but I didn’t bother to follow the hand.

At the beginning of each of my segments I recite a lead-in with this formula: “Good morning/afternoon/evening! It’s [time o’clock] and you’re listening to PMWR Maryland’s News Headquarters, I’m Lewis Davidson and This Is Happening Now [usually an ‘actuality’ here].” Donny, who I almost always see wearing his black jaw-hugging microphone headset, operates all the recorded sound bite material, and I follow his cues. He is only 25 and yet skilled and brilliant, the type who was called by everyone in school a “genius.” Somehow he remains disarming beyond belief. Perhaps I am infatuated with him because he is everything I am not: radically handsome (thin, yes, but his face repays anyone lucky enough to look), youthful, extremely devoted, almost painfully sincere, and straight. I know it is paradoxical, maybe, that opposites should attract me, since that rule does seem repudiated by my one-sided, wholesale, eager general preference. Nonetheless I am attracted to him. He is also very serious about work. As far as I can tell he has no social life, and I’m quite certain no girlfriend. Yes, I’m aware there is no chance. Nonetheless I always hope to see him in one of the bars, which, yes, I select sometimes by their nearness to his home, sometimes the furthest one from there.  

Theodore woke up before me this morning and was already fully dressed. I believe the actual sound that nudged me awake was his pants zipping up. I remembered who he was and why he was in my apartment, but this is the point when the etiquette is ambiguous. Was there any need for breakfast? Phone numbers? You had to work off of the echo of nighttime, try to retrospectively interpret a cadre of whispers and spasms and grunts, and see if there was anything substantial to them. Something to justify more. In his case I thought there was; I still had the fire in my morning belly for a few light amorous maneuvers. But we were mock lovers, really. Even we couldn’t take ourselves seriously. His bald head was so lustrous it seemed like a parody of something, like it was ready to issue forth a light-bulb as a cartoon gesture of inspiration. And technically our business had concluded; I noticed he had even cleaned the mess off the floor.  

            And then I remembered that he was married, which I had discovered already at night by the pallid centimeter-wide curve around his left ring finger, which implied the curve of a wife. It also implied that his hand was often exposed to the sun; perhaps he dangled it out the window while he drove, as I have seen men with mustaches do disproportionately. I watched him delicately button his shirt. I asked, “What would your wife say if she ever found out about this?”

            He reacted very badly, or at least irrationally. It was as if my question set off a chemical response inside him which altered him physically; his breathing halted, his powerful chest contracted; the veins on his head rose up; and I could swear his head’s luster multiplied its wattage. He plunged his hand into his pants pocket, but since the pants were very tight and his movement violent he couldn’t get out whatever he was trying to get out. Like recoiling from an electric current, he extended his torso and shook his leg, nearly hopping, revealing once again the vigorous fifty-year dynamo he had lately proven himself to be. This afforded me a few seconds to watch and unfreeze, but also to think that perhaps he was pulling out a gun. Instead he finally liberated his phone which he flipped open and began to dial, saying, “Hm, that’s an interesting question,” and continuing to dial, “let’s call her and find out, heh?” He stared at me with moist, hostile eyes. Holding the phone to his large ear, he declared, “It’s ringing.”

            It was true; I could hear the feint ring. I was still sitting in bed with only the blanket covering me. I had been gripping it so stiffly that I felt the discomfort of sweat droplets there, as well as coldness due to uncirculated blood. My insides cringed as if my own wife were on the phone, and when I heard the muffled feminine voice say “Hi” I wanted to yell, Hi honey, it’s me. Everything’s fine. Go back to bed, I’ll be home soon! because I knew that my wife, whoever she is, would be devastated and wouldn’t recover, or else why would she have married me? But I didn’t scream; I was too scared. He said, “Hi,” and then peeled the phone off his cheek and whispered “Here” as he tossed the phone at me like a football. I have always been shit at sports. Since elementary school I’ve been teased and embarrassed whenever I got (usually by accident) near a ball, and I worried that this fact would expose the façade of my masculinity. This time was no exception; because I was in complete shock and because I can’t catch anyway, my helpless hands missed the phone and it bounced off my bare chest where my heart had just ceased beating. “Why don’t you tell her what’s going on here, heh?” he said sharply, like an inquisitor extracting a confession; he knew what sort of torture this was. But I could see that he was also almost in tears. Not knowing what to do, I picked up the phone, I think just to see if she was still on the line. But then I had it in my hands.

It was a very clever conceit, but I can’t say I totally planned it. In part it was just the lines I was so used to saying that they existed, as they say, on the tip of my tongue. It was basically thoughtless. I just put the phone’s mic to my mouth and said, “Good morning! It’s 7:30 and you’re listening to PMWR Maryland’s News Headquarters, I’m Lewis Davidson and This Is Happening Now!” She must have assumed her husband was playing some kind of joke with her, pressing the phone to the radio (which isn’t totally false: I am the radio) – which was believable because he really did seem like a joker, as just then I remembered how playful and frankly funny he was in bed; he developed a subtle comedic rapport with my body, how he would pinch my skin here and smile, pinch my skin there and smile, which was insanely sensual and hilarious. Actually, it was partially that very kidding which put me at ease enough (so I thought) to ask him the question about his wife in the first place – which, I gather, is the discrepancy between sex and marriage, because he found the first funny and the second apparently not at all.

            But before I hung up I added something. I said what I have thought about a lot, and rehearsed alone: “My heart beats for you, Donny.” How much I’ve wanted to say that on air! If those words could be broadcast and transmitted as radiowaves, in my honest voice, then they could maybe make an impact. At least they would be permanent, and they would be huge. They’d literally permeate the bodies of every man on the planet, across cultures, receptive and hospitable, and inside everything else too, and then stretch out into infinite space without stopping. That would be real. My words or waves becoming – via my lips, via the radio tower – an incontestable fact, and gently, imperceptibly, boldly winding through and around everyone – this is what I found myself wanting, knowing still that it would not make Donny less straight. (And yet, really, why doesn’t he have a girlfriend?) That simple phrase, which I had practiced quite a bit, I said it to Mrs. Theodore. Out loud, on the phone, this morning. And then I hung up.       

            I tossed the phone back to Theodore – he caught it, obviously – and he put on his jacket and left, slamming the door, cursing me. I haven’t really recovered from the episode; I took the day off. And this afternoon I noticed little red dots on my wrists, a whole bunch of them which itch like hell. They seem like hives, so I wonder if it has to do with Theodore or with my nerves. But, actually, a stranger thought comes to mind: maybe it’s because of what I said? I said it in Mrs. Theodore’s ear, but those waves were transmitted via cellular towers. My sentence is loose, spreading, a fact, maybe (likely) infectious. Is it possible to be allergic to your own love? And hence the rash? For the rash, at least, I should see my old roommate Jeff, who is a doctor. I’ll make an appointment.