Sex was never the problem. It was, in fact, the only possible real thing in her life. The way it took the rule of two and made a mess of it, destroying and exhausting. There was nothing that couldn’t be brought to sex or found in it, and it made all the conversation dumb. But this was not a world where sex was understood. In all her life she could not imagine, no matter what, not wanting sex, would always hope for its transformations, its undoing alchemies. It was finally her only answer to her family, the only thing the world had to match the loss of her family, the loss of innocence, the only compensation for having to grow up and grow old. The only thing not given in her family was sex, so it made a perverse kind of sense that families were born of sex. The cold reality of sex, the way it made you bodied and exposed to someone not you, my God, the revelingin the body, the hushed words that flew, the desperate feelings. And yes, even in the most rote situation of it, even in its awkward moments when you thought banally — too long, lower, almost — even, or especially, then, the ordinary things of bodies. Her wounds exposed, and then she is embraced, or embraces, and she looks at him (it could be any one of them) and they are human and male and flawed, so fragile, but so different, such a strangeness to behold. And this was the pleasure she knew, the secret heart of all people, to be loved like this, perpetually strange, the bravery in it, the complications.
She sat at the bar at the Gentleman’s Club and waited for Lorene to close up. Mina thought maybe the thing to do was to have children. Maybe that’s the thing to make sex stick. If that could make the bodily need of difference and strangeness become the undying connection of the ultimate familiar thing — a body born of you — a family.
“Can I get you something?” Ray asked.
“Liquid Oblivion. With ice.”
He started in with the club soda.
“Ray, a real one. Whatever cheap pour.”
He didn’t even look up and poured her a glass of caramel-brown liquid.
“In movies in the forties, when you ordered a drink in a bar, the bartender would place a shot glass in front of you and then put the bottle next to it, letting the orderer pour the drink himself. It’s almost a testament to seriousness. A certainty that one will not be enough. Leave the bottle. Pretend I’m John Garfield. That’s right. Thank you.”
Mina downed the drink, took the bottle and poured another.
Lorene wore gray silk trousers and a cashmere sweater, also pearl gray. She watched Mina.
“Sit down. It’s rude to make a lady drink alone.”
Lorene sat next to her on a bar stool. Ray placed a glass in front of her and Mina poured her a drink.
“I hadn’t noticed any ladies drinking,” she said. Mina smiled.
“You’re cute, doll,” Mina said, nodding at the glass.
Lorene drank it in one shot. They sat quietly for a while.
“All right, you’re upset.”
Mina nodded. “Your razor-accurate perception again in evidence. How do you do it, Lorene?”
“So you’re angry at me?”
“What about sex. I mean, you apparently never have it, don’t need it, do you?”
“You are having enough sex for both of us.”
“It’s the only thing I like. I like sex. I love sex.”
“You know, it’s impossible to have sex with everyone. You have to limit it or it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a triage kind of thing — you have a limited capacity and have to be selective in where it is applied.”
They sat quietly as the restaurant closed down around them. Mina looked at Lorene in the semidark. She put her hand on Lorene’s wrist. Lorene held her hand as they sat.
Mina shook her head. Lorene drank another shot. So did Mina.
“You don’t even know the half of it.”
“Well, I know more than you think. It’s not all that difficult to figure out.”
“It’s funny, Lorene, that men are called callous for wanting to sleep with different women.”
“You’ve been thinking about that.”
“Yes, I have. They are called inconstant and callow. Theyfear depth. But what is it that makes men long for different women, if not desire for a different soul, if not attention to the ways each woman is different from all the others. In truth, I love the longing of men, the dire way they want all women, and I’ve felt it myself. I could fall for anyone, find all their calamitous, ridden selves deathly appealing at the right moment.”
“In the right light.”
“It’s not necessarily something I want to be cured of— desire.”
Lorene got up from her bar stool. She started to shut off the lights and pulled out her keys to lock up.
“All right, then there’s no problem. So why are you sitting here in the dark?”
Mina leaned back against the bar, regarding her crossed legs. Lorene leaned over the bar and replaced the bottle.
“There are so many alternate fictions at work in my life right now.”
“Lies, I believe, is the common name.”
“Right, then, secrets, lies, fictions. Logistics. It’s all about the mess of explanations and not the mess of bodies and souls. Lorene, I’m going in for the big car wreck, I’m heading—”
“Right. Well, and it would be the best thing to—”
“Right, run away—”
“Exit before it all collapses—”
“But.”
“Look, maybe that’s the intention all along. Maybe the desire is to mess it up until you have to leave, because that’s really what you want all along.” Lorene leaned toward her over the bar. “I decided the other day as I sat home, unable to leave the house, that I would go. So we’ll go, we’ll go together.”
Mina shook off Lorene’s suggestion of a lift home. She wanted a late-night, dangerous walk, a two-in-the-morning solitary walk home. Or maybe she wanted to pretend she was John Garfield for a little while longer.
David was asleep when she got there. She wanted to slip into bed next to him and rouse him slowly with kisses and caresses. But it would just be a fight about lateness and another round of edging toward explanations. Which was a shame, because she wouldn’t mind holding him close right then, she was still certain that would make things better. Because tomorrow she would be leaving.
Her father had said to her once, I’m addicted to desire. That was before. Back when he had everything.
She constantly eavesdropped on him, or was inadvertent witness to a thousand of his indiscretions. Did he think she had no ears, no eyes? But she lurked, from lap to lap sleepily after dinner, playing with reading glasses in breast pockets and teaspoons on lemon twists and napkin rings. She experimented with drops of wine on sugar cubes. If she stayed quiet, often he let her stay for hours, head resting on the shoulders of a dozen eager “uncles” and “aunts.” Many hands wanted to hold her, and she heard the murmur of adult voices as the sweetness of drifting in and out of wakefulness in candlelight surrounded her. It was always a special occasion, and he was not one to protect children. It was only later in her sulk of fourteen-year-old languor that explanations were offered. “Sara is my special friend, be nice to her,” he would say, and she would shrug, unsmiling. He handed her his wallet. “Go get yourself something.” She carried it with two hands in front of her. She wandered to a corner to look inside. Bills and bills. She bought so many things. She thought he’d ask, but he didn’t. He just putthe wallet in his pocket without even looking at the money left. Her mother bought in bulk and at thrift stores. She would say, Let’s go to the bargain matinee. Mina took to pulling bills from his wallet whenever she could. Early in the morning, she slid stocking-footed into his sleep room and pulled a twenty or a ten. He never said a word, never a word.