And about then I had come, down to a quiet leafy street, a small green house with a great sycamore in front, a neat lawn, a dainty porch, a door behind which stood a month’s worth of erotic fantasies. I took a breath, calmed myself, knocked. Waited for the door to open, smiled when it did, identified myself, stepped inside as the door closed behind me.
When I left that little house in Mount Airy and started driving back to Center City, I was horrified and excited too. On the plus side, I finally knew who the woman was in the photographs, finally had a face with which to grace the perfect body. On the other side, I didn’t like who it turned out to be, not at all, and yet my hormones were splashing, yes they were, and I could feel the arousal in my gut.
“I loved Tommy Greeley, I suppose,” had said Sylvia Steinberg. “At least I thought I did.”
We were sitting across from each other at her kitchen table when she said this. A coffeemaker burbled on the countertop, a small plate of Oreos was set between us. And she was talking about Tommy.
“What happened between you two?” I said.
“Do you know the Yeats line? ‘Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. ’Well, the center couldn’t hold and so it fell apart.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You can only hide from the truth so long.”
“You’re talking about the drugs?”
“I should think that was part of it too. I didn’t know about his business when we first got involved and I never approved when I learned the truth. In fact, I refused to do drugs myself. A few hits and all the fears I was trying not to deal with would just flood over me. But still, I thought we could just get married, move to the suburbs, have kids, everything would be settled. As if I could separate the life I imagined from his rotten business, even if it was the business that would buy the house, the cars, the private schools. Can you spell schizophrenia, Victor? Two separate worlds, which collapsed into each other when that FBI agent started nosing around like a rabbit, sniffing here, sniffing there. But by then, we were already crashing.” She laughed. “Tommy never knew what he was getting into when he made his little suggestion.”
The coffeemaker quieted, Sylvia pushed herself off the table, ambled over to the counter.
She had been a very pretty woman in her youth, you could tell by her lovely face, her dark hair, her smooth soft skin. As she was talking to me, I was examining her closely, trying to see in her the woman of the photographs. It was hard, but I could envision it, yes I could, so long as I imagined that thin lithe body had been swallowed whole by another. If Sylvia was that woman, she weighed about a hundred pounds more than she had twenty years before. I couldn’t help but do the math. Twenty years, one hundred pounds, five pounds per year at 3,500 hundred calories per pound. That would be a mere 50 excess calories a day: three ounces of Coca-Cola, four ounces of beer, or a single Oreo.
“Here we go,” she said, bringing over two mugs and the pot. “How do you take your coffee?”
“Straight.”
“Puts hair on your chest that way, I suppose.”
“I sure could use it.”
She poured, fixed up her mug with milk and sugar, sat down, took a pensive sip.
“You mentioned a suggestion,” I said.
“So I did,” she said, and as she smiled at the remembrance she popped an Oreo into her mouth.
Tommy Greeley, that scamp, that… that scamp. As I drove along the nicely serpentine Lincoln Drive, I couldn’t help but admire his gumption. A suggestion, Sylvia called it, slurring the g’s and overemphasizing the middle syllable just enough to indicate what the suggestion might have entailed. Oh come on. Let’s just try it. Open your horizons. It could be fun. You never know. No, you never do. The logic of it is inescapable, at least to the male of the species. I mean if two breasts to suckle and fondle, to rub your face between are the great obsession of the young, four would be the grand salami of boyhood dreams, right? Four legs to caress, four lips to kiss, two belly buttons to lick clean, two tongues to suck their way across your flesh, four hands to explore, to massage, to tickle and pinch and grab. And the scent of it all, oh my, no thin solo but a veritable symphony. Tommy Greeley, that dog, that scamp.
Of course sometimes things don’t work out quite how you had planned.
“He brought her over,” said Sylvia. “A very pretty girl, quiet, strangely passive, besotted, it seemed, with Tommy. I had seen her before, knew who she was, had always thought her pretty. But this night she sort of glowed. Tommy opened a bottle of wine. We drank and talked and laughed, a sort of forced laughter. There were candles, if I remember, and incense. I felt like I was twelve again. Tommy was very charming, ever the ringleader. And I couldn’t take my eyes off the girl. She was so, so pretty. In the candlelight. We finished up one bottle, were on to the next, and I was feeling it, the alcohol, the tension, the expectation. And then he put his arm around me and kissed me. Right in front of her. A long passionate kiss. And I was embarrassed. I could feel the blood rising through my face, the prickly sensation, which was unusual for me, for I was not the blushing type. Then he took my hand. And we stood. And he led me through the hallway to the bedroom, his arm around my shoulders, like he was ushering me into a whole new world. And I looked back. And she was following, through the dark hall. She was holding a candle and following us, the candlelight dancing across her features, following us like a ghost.”
“And?”
“Well, yes, and. Definitely and.”
She laughed, a rich, good-natured laugh and I couldn’t help but laugh with her.
“I don’t think Tommy enjoyed it as much as he had hoped,” she said. “Oh, he made all the required gestures and sound effects, yes, snorting and neighing, a veritable barnyard of sounds, but eventually there was a touch of petulance to it all. He wasn’t at the center anymore, you see, he was simply one bend on a triangle, and felt maybe like a child who suddenly discovers that everyone in the world isn’t dancing to his tune, that there are other tunes being played.”
“And for you?” I asked.
She didn’t answer right off, but then she didn’t have to. There was a footstep at the entranceway, the scrape of a key, the front door being opened, and then it all became clear as rain.
She had said she didn’t like smoking reefer, that after a few hits all the fears she was trying not to deal with would flood over her. And later, she had hoped her hoped-for marriage to Tommy Greeley would settle things. But some things are not so easily settled, and some fears are not so easily outrun. Especially when the fear is of the truth and the hard uncertain future that its acknowledgment would demand. I could imagine Sylvia Steinberg wrestling with her demon, chaining it tight, stuffing it into a dark corner to keep it quiet, glimpsing its face only in restless dreams or flights of drug-induced paranoia, winning the struggle, winning, until her lover comes up with a suggestion. A suggestion. Oh come on. Let’s just try it. Open your horizons. It could be fun. You never know. And there is alcohol. And there is candlelight. And there is a pretty girl along for the ride. And when the demon finally breaks free, smashing out of its chains with a startling ferocity, it is different than she ever expected. Bright not dark, soft not hard, warm not cold, and its embrace is not one of despair but of acceptance and ease that settles over the soul like a mother’s sweet breath.
The front door opened, the bustle of domesticity, the soft yapping cry of a baby, and then a woman came into the kitchen. She was tall, blond, with a thin, pretty face and a baby held at her hip. She leaned over and gave Sylvia a long kiss on the lips.