“Let’s get this straight,” Perry says, pacifying the audience. “You’d kill her and then divorce her.” The audience laughs. Perry is on my side. He is here to give my grief away.
“Let’s get this straight,” Perry says again to focus the audience as he takes his seat next to mine on the stage. “You sleep with married men because this way you have the same amount to lose. It’s an exchange of risk and loss, if you will.”
“That’s right, Perry,” I say. “It’s a reciprocal relationship.”
Then Perry does something he’s never done before. He touches me. He puts his hand on my shoulder, letting his fingers slip past where my dress covers my skin. His hand brushes Tina’s jugular, burning with its foreign heat her skin so unfamiliar with touch.
He doesn’t stop there. He kisses me on the cheek. As it’s happening, I miss the moment already — the soft lips of it, the breath-minty breath of it on my face — already configuring itself in my dream landscape. He kisses me in slow motion and then, bang, back to normal speed, and he’s saying what he usually says.
“Thank you for sharing with us, Tina,” as if he’s never met Rita. This fresh agony snaps me momentarily out of the constant hum of grieving. Then, when Perry gets into his car to drive home after the show, waving good-bye as if it was just another day at work, the hum returns.
My cat ran away when I was seven, and there was a shallow dip of grief. It dipped in and touched my little soul. When my mother died, that grief went through me like a bullet, leaving a clean hole, taking parts of me with it. Then there is this new grief that falls somewhere in between a runaway cat and a dead mother, the minty blue wind of a man who kisses you the way no one has kissed you before, sucking the life out of you with his lips. This is the way it is with Perry.
As I get into my car, I look in the mirror and realize I’ve forgotten to take off the curly red wig. I toss it onto the passenger seat, reminding myself that I never intended to do this forever. I’m just never sure when sadness will brush past me like some rude stranger.
Years ago, when I still lived with my parents, my mother and I witnessed a car accident. A boy walked away from one of the crumpled cars without a scratch, then the blood came up in staggered waves from his mouth. A police officer who arrived at the scene told us the boy had swallowed part of a windshield. My mother said he would have been better off had he swallowed the whole smooth rectangle of the windshield rather than the tiny splintered shards. That’s how I feel about dressing up as these big griefs, pain so unimaginable that it swallows in one gulp the death of my mother, my runaway cat, the touch of Perry’s fingers on my neck and nothing more.
I pull into a gas station on the way home, and the attendant studies my face as I tell him to fill it up. On rare occasions, people recognize me from Do Unto Others. “Sally, as a fellow woman, I know just what it’s like to lose all your teeth at such a young age,” a woman once said loudly through loose dentures, down the length of a crowded aisle in a grocery store.
There was one show where I played a woman who was addicted to sadness. A woman in the audience began to talk about her estranged sister, and suddenly an adolescent boy next to her screamed out the name of his best friend who’d moved all the way across the country. When the older man in the back row brought up the fact that his real parents gave him up for adoption, Perry said, “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s get back to the subject at hand. The topic of today’s show is ‘addiction to sadness.’” He paused and looked out into the audience. For the first time in the show’s history, he didn’t say anything. The sadness was everywhere, floating in midair above us all, cloudy beyond recognition.
So when the gas station attendant bends down next to my window and says, as if there is a secret between us, “Look, I know it sounds like a cheap line, but I’m serious — haven’t I seen you before? Your face is so familiar — do you work at the Stop and Shop?” I shake my head no. “I can’t put my finger on it, but I know I’ve seen you,” he says, handing me my change. “I’m sure you did,” I say reassuringly, and all of us feel the stroke of a smooth, warm hand of comfort.
GENEALOGY
WHEN the phone rang in the middle of the night, Bernard answered it even though he wasn’t in his own apartment or even in his own city. It made him feel needed for once.
“What?” he said into the receiver, eyes still closed. He was emerging from the deep fog of postcoital sleep. The woman lying next to him, moist and naked, said something about getting the fucking dog off the bed though there was no dog, then rolled over, pulling the tangle of covers with her.
The person on the other end of the line said nothing. “What?” Bernard asked again, starting to feel a familiar panic — the sensation was one of small birds flying in his chest. For him, middle-of-the-night phone calls meant death (his ex-wife’s) or anguish (his daughter’s). “Is everything okay?” he said. The tiny frantic wings beat against the cage of his heart.
“Who are you?” a nervous male voice asked.
“Come on,” Bernard said. What a question. “Can’t you do better than that? Isn’t there anything else you’d like to know?” For the past several weeks since taking a leave of absence from the university, Bernard had lived his life like this: he drove rental cars up and down the East Coast, spending nights with women who found his kind of drifting irresistible or else they found him just pathetic enough (finally, a man who needed directions). In the tourist area of rest stops, women asked him if he was lost (And how! he always thought). Once, as he wandered through a roadside plastic dinosaur park on Route 1 in Massachusetts, a woman — a paleontologist who took study breaks there — appeared seemingly out of nowhere and asked him if he wanted a tour.
The woman lying next to him had said she smelled his sadness. “What does sadness smell like?” he’d asked. “Maple syrup,” she said. He reminded her that he’d been eating pancakes when they first met. “No, you smelled like syrup,” she insisted. It was his scent that drew her to him as he sat alone in the twenty-four-hour Greek coffee shop underneath her apartment on a grim strip of discount tire stores, electonic stores advertising beepers for sale, nail salons, and across the street, the psychiatric hospital the color of dried blood.
“That fucking dog,” the woman said and flipped over, pulling a pillow over her face.
“Look,” the nervous voice suddenly burst forth. “I call this number occasionally to get off. Are you happy now? I pick up the phone and dial randomly, and every once in a while I get lucky. This is one of my lucky numbers, pal.”
“Maybe you dialed the wrong number?” Bernard asked.
“It’s no wrong number,” the nervous voice said defiantly. “I’ve got it on speed dial.”
In the hotels where Bernard stayed, when he wasn’t staying with one of these women (they were never looking to take him on permanently — the fact that he was a wanderer was part of his lonely charm), he was treated with the respect due a man in his late fifties with all the nutty professor trappings — shabby tweed coat, unkempt hair and graying beard, the way he smelled of musty, cramped offices piled high with old, decaying books (except when he was having pancakes with maple syrup).
Bella looked out from under her pillow — she was a beauty not everyone could appreciate, with eyes so close together it made people a little cross-eyed to look at her and a crooked Roman nose. “Is that Ralph? Ralph, fuck off, you fuck.” She took the phone from Bernard and threw it down, then put her hand over Bernard’s, let it linger in a way that made him think of earlier, her soft pubic hair a darker red than her hair, against his face. He reached over to touch her, and she reached just beyond him to pull a condom from the box on the bedside table, handing it to him as she closed her eyes and turned her back to him.