Anagrams

2. STRINGS TOO SHORT TO USE

ALTHOUGH I WAS BETWEEN JOBS and afraid I would slip into the cracks and pauses of two different Major Medical policies, I was pleased when they said I had a lump in my breast. I had discovered it on my own, during a home check, had counted to twenty and checked again, and even though Gerard had kept saying, “Where? There? Is that what you mean? It feels muscular,” I brought it in to them.

“Yes,” the nurse-practitioner said. “Yes. There’s a lump in your breast.”

“Yes, there is,” said the surgeon standing beside her like a best man.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you very much.” I sat up and put my clothes back on. The surgeon had pictures of his wife and kids on the wall. The whole family looked like it was in high school, pretty and young. I stared at them and thought, So? I slipped my shoes on, zipped up my fly, tried not to feel somehow like a hooker.

This is why I was pleased: The lump was not simply a focal point for my self-pity; it was also a battery propelling me, strengthening me — my very own appointment with death. It anchored and deepened me like a secret. I started to feel it when I walked, just out from under my armpit — hard, achy evidence that I was truly a knotted saint, a bleeding angel. At last it had been confirmed: My life was really as difficult as I had always suspected. “It’s true. It’s there,” I said to Gerard when I got home.

“Who’s there?” he muttered, preoccupied and absent as a landlord. He was singing the part of Aeneas in a local production of his own rock opera, and he was on his way downtown to shop for sandals “that sort of crawl up the leg.”

“This is not a knock-knock joke, Gerard. The lump. The lump is there. It’s now a certified lump.”

“Oh,” he said slowly, soft and bewildered. “Oh, baby.”

I bought big stretchy bras — one size fits all, catches all, ropes all in and presses all against you. I started to think of myself as more than one organism: a symbiotic system, like a rhino and an oxpecker, or a gorgonzola cheese.

Gerard and I lived across the hall from one another. Together we had the entire top floor of a small red house on Marini Street. We could prop the doors open with bricks and sort of float back and forth between our two apartments, and although most of the time we would agree that we were living together, other times I knew it wasn’t the same. He had moved to Marini Street after I’d been there three years, his way of appeasing my desire to discuss our future. At that point we’d been lovers for nineteen months. The year before he’d unilaterally decided to go on living on the other side of town, in a large “apartment in the forest.” (He called my place “the cottage in the city.”) It was too expensive, but, he said, all wise sparkle, “far enough away to be lovely,” though I never knew what he thought was lovely at that distance — himself or me or the apartment. Perhaps it was the view. Gerard, I was afraid, liked the world best at a distance, as a photograph, as a memory. He liked to kiss me, nuzzle me, when I was scarcely awake and aware — corpse-like with the flu or struck dumb with fatigue. He liked having to chisel at some remove to get to me.

“He’s a sexist pig,” said Eleanor.

“Maybe he’s just a latent necrophiliac,” I said, realizing afterward that probably they were the same thing.

“Lust for dust,” shrugged Eleanor. “Into a cold one after work.”

So we never had the ritual of discussion, decision, and apartment hunting. It was simply that the Indian couple across the hall broke their lease and Gerard suddenly said during the Carson monologue one night, “Hey, maybe I’ll move in there. It might be cheaper than the forest.”

We had separate rents, separate kitchens, separate phone numbers, separate bathrooms with back-to-back toilets. Sometimes he’d knock on the wall and ask through the pipes how I was doing. “Fine, Gerard. Just fine.”

“Great to hear,” he’d say. And then we’d flush our toilets in unison.

“Kinky,” said Eleanor.

“It’s like parallel universes,” I said. “It’s like living in twin beds.”

“It’s like Delmar, Maryland, which is the same town as Delmar, Delaware.”

“It’s like living in twin beds,” I said again.

“It’s like the Borscht Belt,” said Eleanor. “First you try it out in the Catskills before you move it to the big time.”

“It’s living flush up against rejection,” I said.

“It’s so like Gerard,” said Eleanor. “That man lives across the hall from his own fucking heart.”

“He’s a musician,” I said doubtfully. Too often I made these sorts of excuses, like a Rumpelstiltskin of love, stickily spinning straw into gold.

“Please,” cautioned Eleanor, pointing at her stomach. “Please, my B.L.T.”

These are the words they used: aspirate, mammogram, surgery, blockage, wait. They first just wanted to wait and see if it was a temporary blockage of milk ducts.

“Milk Duds?” exclaimed Gerard.

“Ducks!” I shouted. “Milk ducks!”

If the lump didn’t go away in a month, they would talk further, using the other three words. Aspirate sounded breathy and hopeful, I had always had aspirations; and mammogram sounded like a cute little nickname one gave a favorite grandmother. But the other words I didn’t like. “Wait?” I asked, tense as a yellow light. “Wait and see if it goes away? I could have done that all on my own.” The nurse-practitioner smiled. I liked her. She didn’t attribute everything to “stress” or to my “personal life,” a redundancy I was never fond of. “Maybe,” she said. “But maybe not.” Then the doctor handed me an appointment card and a prescription for sedatives.

There was this to be said for the sedatives: They helped you adjust to death better. It was difficult to pick up and move anywhere, let alone from life to death, without the necessary psychic equipment. That was why, I realized, persons in messy, unhappy situations had trouble getting out: Their strength ebbed; they simultaneously aged and regressed; they had no sedatives. They didn’t know who they were, though they suspected they were the browning, on-sale hamburger of the parallel universe. Frightened of their own toes, they needed the bravery of sedatives. Which could make them look generously upon the skinny scrap of their life and deem it good, ensuring a calmer death. It was, after all, easier to leave something you truly, serenely loved than something you really and frantically didn’t quite. A good dying was a matter of the right attitude. A healthy death, like anything — job promotions or looking younger — was simply a matter of “feeling good about yourself.” Which is where the sedatives came in. Sedate as a mint, a woman could place a happy hand on the shoulder of death and rasp out, “Waddya say, buddy, wanna dance?”

Also, you could get chores done.

You could get groceries bought.

You could do laundry and fold.

Gerard’s Dido and Aeneas was a rock version of the Purcell opera. I had never seen it. He didn’t want me going to the rehearsals. He said he wanted to present the whole perfect show to me, at the end, like a gift. Sometimes I thought he might be falling in love with Dido, his leading lady, whose real name was Susan Fitzbaum.

“Have fun in Tunis,” I’d say as he disappeared off to rehearsals. I liked to say Tunis. It sounded obscene, like a rarely glimpsed body part.

“Carthage, Benna. Carthage. Nice place to visit.”

“Though you, of course, prefer Italy.”

“For history? For laying down roots? Absolutely. Have you seen my keys?”

“Ha! The day you lay down roots …” But I couldn’t think of how to finish it. “That’ll be the day you lay down roots,” I said.

“Why, my dear, do you think they called it Rome?” He grinned. I handed him his keys. They were under an Opera News I’d been using to thwack flies.

“Thank you for the keys,” he smiled, and then he was off, down the stairs, a post-modern blur of battered leather jacket, sloppily shouldered canvas bag, and pantcuffs misironed into Möbius strips.

· · ·

During rehearsal breaks he would phone. “Where do you want to sleep tonight, your place or mine?”

“Mine,” I said.

Surely he wasn’t in love with Susan Fitzbaum. Surely she wasn’t in love with him.

Eleanor and I around this time founded The Quit-Calling-Me-Shirley School of Comedy. It entailed the two of us meeting downtown for drinks and making despairing pronouncements about life and love which always began, “But surely …” It entailed what Eleanor called, “The Great White Whine”: whiney white people getting together over white wine and whining.

“Our sex life is disappearing,” I would say. “Gerard goes to the bathroom and I call it ‘Shaking Hands with the Unemployed.’ Men hit thirty, I swear, and they want to make love twice a year, like seals.”

“We’ve got three more years of sexual peak,” says Eleanor crossing her eyes and pretending to strangle herself. “When’s the last time you guys made love?” She tried looking nonchalant. I did my best. I sang, “ ‘January, February, June, or July,’ ” but the waitress came over to take our orders and gave us hostile looks. We liked to try to make her feel guilty by leaving large tips.

“I’m feeling pre-menstrual,” said Eleanor. “I was coerced into writing grant proposals all day. I’ve decided that I hate all short people, rich people, government officials, poets, and homosexuals.”

“Don’t forget gypsies,” I said.

“Gypsies!” she shrieked. “I despise gypsies!” She drank chablis in a way that was part glee, part terror. It was always quick. “Can you tell I’m trying to be happy?” she said.

Eleanor was part of a local grant-funded actor-poets group which did dramatic and often beautiful readings of poems written by famous dead people. My favorites were Eleanor’s Romeo soliloquies, though she did a wonderful “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I was a crummy dancer with no discipline and a scorn for all forms of dance-exercise who went from one aerobics job to the next, trying to convince students I loved it. (“Living, acting, occurring in the presence of oxygen!” I would explain with concocted exuberance. At least I didn’t say things like “Tighten the bun to intensify the stretch!” or “Come on, girls, bods up.”) I had just left a job in a health club and had been hired at Fitchville’s Community School of the Arts to teach a class of senior citizens. Geriatric aerobics.

“Don’t you feel that way about dancing?” Eleanor asked. “I mean, I’d love to try to write and read something of mine, but why bother. I finally came to that realization last summer reading Hart Crane in an inner tube in the middle of the lake. Now there’s a poet.”

“There’s a poet who could have used an inner tube. Don’t be so hard on yourself.” Eleanor was smart, over-thirty, overweight, and had never had a serious boyfriend. She was the daughter of a doctor who still sent her money. She took our mutual mediocrity harder than I did. “You shouldn’t let yourself be made so miserable,” I attempted.

“I don’t have those pills,” said Eleanor. “Where do you get those pills?”

“I think what you do do in the community is absolutely joyous. You make people happy.”

“Thank you, Miss Hallmark Hall of Obscurity.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“You know what poetry is about?” said Eleanor. “The impossibility of sexual love. Poets finally don’t even want genitals, their own or anyone else’s. A poet wants metaphors, patterns, some ersatz physics of love. For a poet, to love is to have no lover. And to live”—she raised her wine glass and failed to suppress a smile—“is to have no liver.”

Basically, I realized, I was living in that awful stage of life from the age of twenty-six to thirty-seven known as stupidity. It’s when you don’t know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don’t even have a philosophy about all the things you don’t know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight. Nonetheless you tried things out: “Love is the cultural exchange program of futility and eroticism,” I said. And Eleanor would say, “Oh, how cynical can you get,” meaning not nearly cynical enough. I had made it sound dreadful but somehow fair, like a sleepaway camp. “Being in love with Gerard is like sleeping in the middle of the freeway,” I tried.

“Thatta girl,” said Eleanor. “Much better.”

On the community school’s application form, where it had asked “Are you married?” (this was optional information), I had written an emphatic “No” and next to it, where it asked “To whom?” I’d written “A guy named Gerard.” My class of senior citizens somehow found out about it and once classes got under way, they smiled, shook their heads, and teased me. “A good-humored girl like you,” was the retrograde gist, “and no husband!”

Classes were held at night on the third floor of the arts school, which was a big Victorian house on the edge of downtown. The dance studio was creaky and the mirrors were nightmares, like aluminum foil slapped on walls. I did what I could. “Tuck, lift, flex, repeat. Tuck, lift, flex, now knee-slap lunge.” I had ten women in their sixties and a man named Barney who was seventy-three. “That’s it, Barney,” I would shout. “Pick it up now,” though I didn’t usually mean the tempo: Barney had a hearing aid which kept clacking to the floor mid-routine. After class he would linger and try to chat — apologize for the hearing aid or tell me loud stories about his sister Zenia, who was all of eighty-one and mobile, apparently, as a bug. “So you and your sister, you’re pretty close?” I asked once, putting away the cassettes.

“Close!?” he hooted, and then took out his wallet and showed me a picture of Zenia in Majorca in a yellow bathing suit. He had never married, he said.

The women mothered me. They clustered around me after class and suggested different things I should be doing in order to get a husband. The big one was frosting my hair. “Don’t you think so, Lodeme? Shouldn’t Benna frost her hair?” Lodeme was more or less the ringleader, had the nattiest leotard (lavender and navy stripes), was in great shape, could hold a V-sit for minutes, and strove incessantly for a tough, grizzly wisdom. “First the hair, then the heart,” bellowed Lodeme. “Frost your heart, then you’ll be okay. No one falls in love with a good man. Right, Barn?” Then she’d chuck him on the arm and his hearing aid would fall out. After class I would take a sedative.

There was a period where I kept trying to make anagrams out of words that weren’t anagrams: moonscape and menopause; gutless and guilts; lovesick and evil louse. I would meet Eleanor either for a drink at our Shirley School meetings or for breakfast at Hank’s Grill, and if I got there first, I would scribble the words over and over again on a napkin, trying to make them fit — like a child dividing three into two, not able to make it go.

“Howdy,” I said to Eleanor when she arrived and flopped down. I had lovesick and evil sock scrawled in large letters.

“You’re losing it, Benna. It must be your love life.” Eleanor leaned over and wrote bedroom and boredom; she had always been the smarter one. “Order the tomato juice,” she said. “That’s how you get rid of the smell of skunk.”

· · ·

Gerard was a large, green-eyed man who smelled like baby powder and who was preoccupied with great music. I’d lie there in bed explaining something terrible and personal and he’d interrupt with, “That’s like Brahms. You’re like Brahms.” And I’d say, “What do you mean, I’m old and fat with a beard?” And Gerard would smile and say, “Exactly.” Once, after I’d shared with him the various humiliations of my adolescence, he said, “That’s kind of like Stravinsky.”

And I said, annoyed, “What, he didn’t get his period until the ninth grade? At least it’s consoling to know that everything that’s happened to me has also happened to a famous composer.”

“You don’t really like music, do you?” said Gerard.

Actually, I loved music. Sometimes I think that’s the reason I fell in love with Gerard to begin with. Perhaps it had nothing to do really with the smell of his skin or the huge stretch of his legs or the particular rhythm of his words (a prairie reggae, he called it), but only to do with the fact that he could play any instrument that had strings — piano, banjo, cello — that he composed rock operas and tone poems, that he sang pop and lieder. I was surrounded by music. If I was reading a newspaper, he would listen to Mozart. If I was watching the news, he’d put on Madame Butterfly, saying it amounted to the same thing, Americans romping around in countries they didn’t belong in. I had only to step across the moat of the hallway and I would learn something: Vivaldi was a red-haired priest; Schumann crippled his hand with a hand extender; Brahms never married, that was the biggie, the one Gerard liked best to tell me. “Okay, okay,” I would say. Or sometimes simply, “So?”

Before I met Gerard, everything I knew about classical music I’d gleaned off the sound track record of The Turning Point. Now, however, I could hum Musetta’s Waltz for at least three bars. Now I owned all of Beethoven’s piano concertos. Now I knew that Percy Grainger had been married in the Hollywood Bowl. “But Brahms,” said Gerard, “now Brahms never married.”

It’s not that I wanted to be married. It’s that I wanted a Marriage Equivalent, although I never knew exactly what that was, and often suspected that there was really no such thing. Yet I was convinced there had to be something better than the lonely farce living across town or hall could, with very little time, become.

Which made me feel guilty and bourgeois. So I comforted myself with Gerard’s faults: He was infantile; he always lost his keys; he was from Nebraska, like some horrible talk show host; he had grown up not far from one of the oldest service plazas on I-80; he told jokes that had the words wiener and fart in them; he once referred to sex as “hiding the salami.” He also had a habit of charging after small animals and frightening them. Actually, the first time he did this it was with a bird in the park, and I laughed, thinking it hilarious. Later, I realized it was weird: Gerard was thirty-one and charging after small mammals, sending them leaping into bushes, up trees, over furniture. He would then turn and grin, like a charmed maniac, a Puck with a Master’s degree. He liked also to water down the face and neck fur of cats and dogs, smoothing it back with his palms, like a hairdresser, saying it made them look like Judy Garland. I realized that life was too short for anyone honestly and thoroughly to outgrow anything, but it was clear that some people were making more of an effort than others.

In my early twenties I got annoyed with women who complained that men were shallow and incapable of commitment. “Men, women, they’re all the same,” I said. “Some women are capable of commitment, some are not. Some men are capable of commitment and some are not. It’s not a matter of gender.” Then I met Gerard, and I began to believe that men were shallow and incapable of commitment.

“It’s not that men fear intimacy,” I said to Eleanor. “It’s that they’re hypochondriacs of intimacy: They always think they have it when they don’t. Gerard thinks we’re very close but half the time he’s talking to me like he met me forty-five minutes ago, telling me things about himself I’ve known for years, and asking me questions about myself that he should know the answers to already. Last night he asked me what my middle name was. God, I can’t talk about it.”

Eleanor stared. “What is your middle name?”

I stared back. “Ruth,” I said. “Ruth.” Hers, I knew, was Elizabeth.

Eleanor nodded and looked away. “When I was in Catholic school,” she said, “I loved the story of St. Clare and St. Francis. Francis gets canonized because of his devotion to vague, general ideas like God and Christianity, whereas Clare gets canonized because of her devotion to Francis. You see? It sums it up: Even when a man’s a saint, even when he’s good and devoted, he’s not good and devoted to anyone in particular.” Eleanor lit a Viceroy. “Why are we supposed to be with men, anyway? I feel like I used to know.”

“We need them for their Phillips-head screwdrivers,” I said.

Eleanor raised her eyebrows. “That’s right,” she said, “I keep forgetting you only go out with circumcised men.”

Gerard’s and my courtship had consisted of Sunday chamber music, rock concerts, and driving out into the cornfields surrounding Fitchville to sing “I Loves You, Porgy,” loud and misremembered, up at the sky. Then we’d come back to my apartment, lift off each other’s clothes, and stick our tongues in each other’s ears. In the morning we’d go to a coffee shop. “You’re not Czechoslovakian, I hope,” he would say, always the same joke, and point to the sign on the cash register which said, SORRY, NO CHECKS.

“He’d look great, legless and propped in a cart,” said Eleanor.

Actually Eleanor was pleasant when he was around. Even flirtatious. Sometimes they talked on the phone: He asked her questions about The Aeneid. I liked to see them get along. Later he would say to me in a swoon of originality, “Eleanor would be beautiful if she only lost weight.”

“It’s in the wing of your breast,” said the surgeon.

I hadn’t known breasts had wings, and now I had something waiting in them. “Oh,” I said.

“Let’s assume for now that it’s cystic,” said the surgeon. “Let’s not immediately disfigure the breast.”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s not.”

And then the nurse-practitioner told me that if I had a child it might straighten out my internal machinery a bit. Prevent “Career Women’s Diseases.” Lumps often disappear during pregnancy. “Can I extend my prescription on the sedatives?” I asked. With each menstrual cycle, she went on to explain, the body is like a battered boxer, staggering back from its corner into the ring, and as the years go by, the body does this with increasing difficulty. Its will gets broken. It screws up. A woman’s body is so busy preparing to make babies that every year that goes by without one is another year of rejection that is harder and harder for it to recover from. Soon it could go completely crazy.

I suspected it was talk like this that had gotten women out of the factories and started immediately on the baby boom. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

One problem with teaching aerobics was that I didn’t like Jane Fonda. I felt she was a fickle, camera-wise, overconfident half-heart who had become rich and famous taking commercial advantage of America’s spiritual crises. And she had done it with such self-assurance. “You just want people to be less convinced of themselves,” said Gerard.

“Yes, I do,” I said. “I think a few well-considered and prominently displayed uncertainties are always in order.” And uncertainty and fuzziness were certainly my mirrors then.

Barney adored Jane Fonda. “That woman,” Barney’d say to me after class. “You know, she used to be just one of those sex queens. Now she’s helping America.”

“You mean helping herself to America.” Oddly enough Jane Fonda was one of the few things in the world I did feel certain about, and she made me prone to such uncharacteristically bald pronouncements. I should beware of such baldness, I thought. I should think hedge, think fuzz, like the rest of my life.

“Aw go on,” said Barney, and then he filled me in on the latest regarding Zenia, who was chairing a League of Women Voters committee on child abuse.

I packed up my tape deck, took a sedative at the urinal-like water fountain in the hall, trudged downstairs and home. I went into Gerard’s apartment and spread out on his bed, to wait for him to come home from work. I looked at a black and white print he had on the wall opposite the bed. Close up it was a landscape, a dreamily etched lake, tree, and mountain scene, but from far away it was a ghoulish face, vacant and gouged like a tragedy mask. And from where I was, neither close nor far, I could see both lake and face, one melting into the other and then back again, competing for my perception until finally I just closed my eyes, tight so as to see colors.

Loving Gerard, I realized, was like owning a tomcat, or having a teenaged son. He was out five nights a week and in the day was sleepy and hungry and sprawled, eating a lot of cold cereal and leaving the bowls around. Rehearsals for Dido and Aeneas were growing more frequent, and on other nights he was playing solo jazz gigs in town, mostly at fern bars (one was called The Smokey Fern) with four-armed ceiling fans torpid as winter insects, and ferns that were spidery and crisp. He played guitar on a platform up front, and there was always a group of women at a ringside table who giggled, applauded adoringly, and bought him drinks. When I went out to see him at gigs, I would come in and sit alone at a table way in the back. I felt like a stray groupie, a devoted next-door neighbor. He would come talk to me on his breaks, but he talked to almost everybody who was there. Everyone got equal time, equal access. He was public. He was no longer mine. I felt foolish and phobic. I felt spermicidal. I drank and smoked too much. I started staying home. I would do things like watch science specials and Bible movies on TV: Stacy Keach as Barabbas, Rod Steiger as Pontius Pilate, James Farentino as Simon Peter. My body became increasingly strange to me. I became very aware of its edges as I peered out from it: my shoulders, hands, strands of hair, invading the boundaries of my vision like branches that are made to jut into the camera’s view to decorate and sentimentalize the picture. The sea turtles’ need to lay eggs on land, said the television, makes them vulnerable.

Only once, and very late at night, did I run downstairs and out into the street with my pajamas on, gasping and watering, waiting for something — a car? an angel? — to come rescue or kill me, but there was nothing, only streetlights and a cat.

At The Shirley School we wondered aloud about male hunters and female nesters. “Do you think there’s something after all to this male-as-wanderer stuff?” I asked Eleanor.

She made something of a speech. She said she could buy the social diagram of woman as nestmaker (large, round, see ovum) and man as wanderer, invader, traveler in gangs (see spermatozoa), but that if she were minding the fort, she wanted some guests, a charging, grinning cavalry. Her life was misaligned, she said. The cavalry bypassed her altogether, as if the roadmaps were faulty, and she was forced to holler after them, “Hey, where’s everybody going?” Or a few deserters managed to stroll by, but then mostly just sat on the curb to talk about how difficult it was to save money nowadays. Her D.N.A. was in danger of extinction. What lovers she’d had had always depressed her. She preferred being with friends.

“Sex used to console me,” I said. “It was my anti-coma coma.”

Eleanor shrugged, gulped vermouth. She liked to yell out her car window at couples holding hands on the street. “Cut it out! Just cut it out!”

“How’s Gerard?” she said.

“I don’t think he loves me anymore.” I bit my fist in mock melodrama.

“Give that man a mustache to twirl and a girl to tie down to the railroad tracks. Look, you’re going to be fine. You’re going to end up with Perry.” Perry was a man she’d invented for my future. He was from Harvard, loved children, and believed in Marriage Equivalents. The only problem was that he was an epileptic and had had fits at two consecutive dinner parties. “Me,” said Eleanor, “I’ll probably end up with some guy named Opie who collects Pinocchio memorabilia and says things like ‘Holy-moley-pole.’ He’ll want me to dress up in sailor suits.”

In the senior citizens’ class it was hard to concentrate. One of the women there, Pat, had stained and streaked her legs orange with Q-T or something. Barney kept having trouble with his hearing aid. Lodeme spent a lot of time in the back row taking everyone’s pulse the way I had shown them: two fingers placed on the side of the neck. “Holy Jesus,” she shouted at them. “You must be hibernating!”

This was my fear: that someone would have a stroke in there and die.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s begin with the ‘Dance Madness’ routine. Remember: It’s important not to be afraid of looking like an idiot.” This was my motto in life. I slapped in the cassette and started up with some easy lunges, step-digs, and a slow Charleston.

“Are we healthy yet?” yelled Pat over the music, her legs like sepia sunsets, her face the split-apple face of an owl. “Are we healthy yet?”

“Let me feel your breast again,” said Gerard. “Is this the lump?”

“Yes,” I said. “Be careful.”

“It’s not muscular?” His fingers pressed against the outside wall of my breast.

“No, Gerard. It’s not muscular. It’s floating like fruit in Jell-O. Remember fruited Jell-O? There’s no muscle in Jell-O.” Although of course there was. I’d learned that long ago from a friend in junior high school who’d told me that Jell-O was made from horses’ hooves and various dried bones and muscles. She had also told me that breasts were simply displaced buttocks.

Gerard slipped his hand back out from beneath my bra. He leaned back into the sofa. We were listening to Fauré. “Listen to the strings,” Gerard murmured, and his face went beatific. The world, all matter, I knew, was made up of strings. I had learned this on television. Physicists used to believe that the universe was made up of particles. But recently they had found out they’d been wrong: The world, unsuspectedly, was made up of little tiny strings.

“Yes,” I said. “They’re lovely.”

The women in the class were suggesting that I get my face sanded. I had had acne as a teenager, a rough slice of pizza face, and it had scarred my skin. Gerard had once said he loved my skin, that it didn’t look pitted and old, but that it looked sexy, a tough, craggy sexy.

I sunk into one hip and fluttered my eyelashes at Betty and Pat and Lodeme. “Gee, I thought my face looked sort of scrappy,” I said.

“You look like a caveman,” said Lodeme, her voice half gravel, half gavel. “Get your face sanded.”

In bed I tried to be simple and straightforward. “Gerard, I need to know this: Do you love me?”

“I love being with you,” he said, as if this were even better.

“Oh,” I said. And then he reached for my hand under the covers, lifted his head toward mine, and kissed me, his lips outside then inside, back and forth like polyps. The heel of his hand ran up my side beneath my nightgown, and he moved me, belly up, on top of him. His penis was soft against my buttocks and his arms were clasped tight around my waist. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, offered up to the ceiling like that. So I just lay there and let Gerard figure things out. He lay very still beneath me. I whispered finally: “What are we supposed to be doing, Gerard?”

“You don’t understand me,” he sighed. “You just don’t understand me at all.”

The senior citizens’ class was only eight weeks in duration but by about the sixth week the smallness of the class, and whatever makeshift intimacy had sprung up there, became suddenly oppressive to me. Perhaps I was becoming like Gerard. Suddenly I wanted the big, doughnut-faced anonymity of a large class, where class members did not really have faces and names and problems. In six weeks with Susan, Lodeme, Betty, Valerie, Ellen, Frances, Pat, Marie, Bridget, and Barney, I felt we’d gotten to know each other too well, or rather, brought to the stubborn limits of our knowability, we were now left with the jagged scrape of our differences, our unknowability laid glisteningly bare. I developed a woodlands metaphor—“swirls before pine,” I told Eleanor. Aerobics in front of a forest took much less courage than the other way around, aerobics before a few individuated trees. A forest would leave you alone, but trees could come at you. They witnessed things. When you could see them, they could see you. They could see there were certain things about you. You were not a serious person. You were not a serious dancer. I didn’t want my life to show. At a distance, I was sure, it couldn’t possibly.

Moreover, it was hard being close to these women who, I realized, had exactly what I wanted: grandchildren, stability, a post-menopausal grace, some mysterious, hard-won truce with men. They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

And so the sadnesses started to ricochet around and zap me right in the heart, right in the middle of the Michael Jackson tape. I was, I knew, unconvinced of myself. I wanted to stop. I wanted to fall dead as a leaf. Which I tried to turn into a move for the rest of the class: “One-two and crumple, one-two and crumple.” Once in Modern Dance class in college one sunny September afternoon we had been requested to be leaves tumbling ourselves across the arts quad. I knew how to perform it in a way that prevented embarrassment and indignity: One became a dead leaf, a cement leaf. One lay down on the dying grass of the arts quad and refused to blow and float and tumble. One merely crumpled. One was no fool. One did not listen to the teacher. One did not want to be spotted fluttering around on campus, like the others who were clearly psychotics. One did not like this college. One wanted only to fall in love and get a Marriage Equivalent. One just lay there.

I looked up into the mirror. Behind me Lodeme, Bridget, Pat, Barney, everyone was stiffly though obediently crumpling. I loved them, in a way, but I didn’t want them, their nippled fist-faces, their beauty advice, their voices old, low, and scratchy. I wanted them to recede into some lifeless blur. I didn’t want to hear about Zenia or about how I could use a good pair of hips. I didn’t want to be responsible for their hearts.

We got back up on our tiptoes. “Good! Good! Punch the air, three-four. Punch the air.” In the mirror we looked as if we had melted — puddles that shimmered and shimmied.

Afterward, Barney came up and told me more about Zenia. I tried to be minimally attentive, packing up the cassettes, waving good night to the other women who were leaving. Barney’s voice seemed to have a new sort of gobble and snort. “I saw a program on child abuse,” he was saying, “and now I realize I was an abused child myself, though I didn’t know it.” I looked at him and he smiled and shook his head. I didn’t want to hear this. Christ, I thought. “My sister Zenia was fourteen and I was six and she climbed into bed with me once and we didn’t know no better. But technically that’s abuse, that. And funny thing is is that I …” He wanted badly to be telling someone this. He followed me around the studio as I switched off lights and locked windows. “I never would have watched that show but for the committee she’s heading. She’s my sister, I’ve got to love her, but—”

“No you don’t,” I snapped at the old man. The world was a carnival of fiends and Zenia was right in there with everyone else. “Good night, Barney,” I said, locking the studio door and leaving him standing at the top of the stairs. “Good night,” he mumbled, not moving. I did a fast bounce down the three flights, the cassettes rattling in my bag, out into the cool drink of the night. If only this were some other city, I would go exploring in it! If only this were someplace, if there were someplace, new in the world.

In a single week four things happened: Barney stopped coming to class; Gerard announced he was thinking of spending a year in Europe on a special fellowship (“Sounds like a good opportunity,” I said, trying to keep my voice out of his way, like a mother); I got a letter from a friend asking me if I wanted to come to New York and work in a health club that she and her husband were partners in; I did a home-kit pregnancy test, which came out positive. I tried to recall when last Gerard and I had even made love. I double-checked the kit. I re-read the instructions. I waited, hopelessly, as I had in the ninth grade, for my period to come like a magic trick.

“New York, eh?” said Eleanor.

“I’d be teaching yuppies,” I complained. Despite our various ways of resembling yuppies (Eleanor was a wine snob, and I owned too many pairs of sneakers), we hated yuppies. We hated the word yuppie, though we used it. Eleanor would walk down the street looking at people she passed and deciding whether or not they qualified for this ignominy. “Yup, yup, nope,” she would say out loud, as in a game of Duck, Duck, Goose. Yuppies, we knew, were greedy, shallow, and small. They made their own pasta. They would rather play racquetball than read Middlemarch. “Go home and read Middlemarch,” Eleanor once shouted at a pastel jogger, who glanced sideways to see Eleanor and me zipping by in Eleanor’s car. We renamed the seven dwarves: Artsy, Fartsy, Cranky, Sleazy, Beasty, Dud, and Yuppie.

“Well,” said Eleanor, “if you’re in New York, it’s either yuppies or mimes. That’s all New York’s got. Yuppies or mimes.”

I loved Dido and Aeneas. It had electric guitars, electric pianos, Aeneas in leather and Dido in blue sequins, sexily metallic as a disco queen. The whole thing resembled MTV, replete with loud guitar solos. Aeneas shouldered his guitar and riffed and whined after Dido throughout the whole show: “Don’t you see why I have to go to Europe? / I must ignore the sentiment you stir up.” Actually it was awful. But nonetheless I sniffled at her suicide, and when she sang at Aeneas, “Just go then! Go if you must! / My heart will surely turn to dust,” and Aeneas indeed left, I sat in my seat, thinking, “You ass, Aeneas, you don’t have to be so literal.” Eleanor, sitting next to me, nudged me and whispered, “Shirley’s gonna turn her heart to dust.”

“I doubt it will be Shirley,” I said.

Gerard, as Aeneas and director, got a standing ovation and a long-stemmed rose. In my mind I gave Dido a handful of tiger lilies, a bouquet of floral gargoyles.

Afterward, Eleanor had to go home and nurse a headache, so I went backstage and shook hands with Susan Fitzbaum. She was out of her sparkles and crown. She was wearing a plaid skirt and loafers. She had a large head. “So nice to meet you,” she said in a low, tired voice.

I kissed Gerard. He seemed anxious to go. “I need a beer,” he said. “The cast party’s not until midnight. Let’s go and come back.”

In the car he said, “So what did you really think?” and I told him the show was terrific, but he didn’t necessarily have to leave someone just because they told him to, and he smiled and said, “Thanks,” and kissed my temple and then I told him I was pregnant and what did he think we should do.

We sat for a long time in a nearby bar with our fingers drawing grids and diagonals in the frost of the beer glasses. “I’m going back to the cast party,” Gerard eventually said. “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.” He got up and put down cash for half the check.

“No, I’ll go,” I said. “If you want me to.”

“It’s not that I want you to or don’t want you to. It’s up to you.”

“Well, it would be nice if you wanted me to. I mean, I don’t want to go if you don’t want me to.”

“It’s up to you,” he said. His eyes were knobby, like knuckles.

“I get the feeling you don’t want me to go.”

“It’s up to you! Look, if you think you’ll have things to say at a party full of music-types, fine. I mean, I’m a musician, and sometimes even I have trouble.”

“You don’t want me to go. Okay, I won’t go.”

“Benna, it’s not that. Come along if you—”

“Never mind,” I said. “Never mind, Gerard.” I drove him to the cast party and then drove home, where I got into my pajamas and in my own apartment listened to the sound track from The Turning Point, an album, I realized, I had always loved.

There was one main reason I didn’t tell Eleanor I was pregnant, although once, when we both had gone into the ladies’ room together, a not unusual occurrence of synchronized plumbing which allowed chit-chat between the stalls, I almost told her anyway. I attempted it. I stared at the crotch of my underwear and said, “You know, I think I’m pregnant.” There was no response, so when I was finished, I stepped out, washed my hands slowly, and then just said to the feet in Eleanor’s stall, “Welp, see you out in the real world.” I looked in the mirror; the glare and precision of it startled me. I had that old look: that look where you look — old. When I got back to our table, Eleanor was already sitting there lighting one of my Winstons. “You took a long time,” she said.

“Oh, my god,” I laughed. “I just confessed my entire life story to someone in black boots.”

“I would never wear black boots,” said Eleanor.

Which was some residual thing, she said, having to do with Catholic school. Which was why I never finally told her about the pregnancy: She still had weird, unresolved strings to Catholicism. She was sentimental about it. She once told me about a frugal, lapsed Catholic aunt of hers who, when she died, left two large, mysterious boxes in her attic, one full of various marital and contraceptive devices, and one labeled “Strings Too Short to Use,” which was a huge collection of small pieces of string, multicolored and inexplicable, matted together in large coils and nests. That, I realized, was both Eleanor’s and her aunt’s relationship to Catholicism: ties too short to bind and therefore stowed away in a huge and secret box. But Eleanor clearly liked to lug her box around, display her ties like a traveling waresperson.

“You can’t really be a fallen Protestant,” she said. “How can there be any guilt?”

“There can be guilt,” I said. “It’s my piety, I can cry if I want to.”

“But being a fallen Catholic — that’s skydiving! Being a fallen Protestant — that’s like mugging an old lady, so easy why bother.”

“Yeah, but think how awful you’d feel after you’d mugged an old lady.”

Eleanor shrugged. She liked lapsed Catholics; I think the only reason she managed to like Gerard at all was that they both had been Catholics. Sometimes when Gerard got on the phone to ask her things about Virgil, they would end up talking about Dante and then about nuns they’d known in Catholic school. They’d both attended parochial schools called The Assumption School, where, they said, they had learned to assume many things. More than once I sat at Gerard’s kitchen table and listened while he talked on the phone with Eleanor, uproarious and slap-happy, exchanging priest stories. I had never known a priest. But it was curious and lovely to see Gerard so taken up by his own childhood, so communed via anecdotes with Eleanor, so pleased with his own escape into an adulthood that allowed him these survivor’s jokes, that I would sit there, floating and transfixed as a moon, laughing along with him, with them, even though I didn’t really know what the two of them were talking about.

“I’ve made an appointment,” I said to Gerard.

We were in my apartment. He thought he might have left his keys there.

“Christ, Benna,” he said. “You stare at me with those cow eyes of yours — what am I supposed to say? I’ve got to go off to a gig in a half hour and you say, ‘I’ve made an appointment.’ It’s like what you did the night of the cast party: cow eyes and then ‘I think I’m pregnant.’ ”

“I just thought you’d want to know.” I kept thinking of that horrible saying mothers tell you about getting the milk and buying the cow.

“You make me feel like I’m in a tiny store and all I want to do is relax, look, and enjoy, but because I’m the only potential customer there, you keep coming over and pressuring me.”

“I don’t pressure you,” I said. I have a lump in my breast, I wanted to say but didn’t. Maybe I will die.

“Yes, you do. You’re like one of those ladies that just keeps coming over to say, ‘Can I help you?’ ”

I stared at his square chin, his impossibly handsome unshaven chin and then I looked off at the Mary Cassatt print on the wall, mother bathing child, why did I own such a thing, and it was at that moment I really truly understood that he was in love with Susan Fitzbaum.

Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.

Gerard kept repeating himself. “You’re like one of those ladies that just keeps coming up to you—‘Can I help you, this is nice, let me know’—over and over and over. You won’t leave me the hell alone.”

I thought about this. Finally I said very quietly, “But you’re in the store, Gerard. If you don’t like it, get out of the goddamn store.”

Gerard picked up a magazine and hurled it across the room; then, without looking further for his keys, he left early for his gig at The Smokey Fern.

I was not large enough for Gerard. I was small, lumpy, anchored with worry, imploded. He didn’t want me, he wanted Macy’s; like Aeneas or Ulysses, he wanted the anonymity and freedom to wander purchaseless from island to island. I could not be enough of the world for him. A woman could never be enough of the world, I thought, though that was what a man desired of her, though she flap her arms frantically trying.

Eleanor had said she was staying home to watch The Sound of Music, so I stayed in and read the abortion chapter in my women’s health book. On TV I watched a nature documentary. It was on animal species who, due to a change in the landscape, begin to produce unviable eggs, or are chased into the hills.

I wandered into Gerard’s apartment and fetched back some of my stuff that had ended up there: shoes, dishes, magazines, silverware. It was like some principle of physics: Things flowed naturally back and forth between the two apartments until the maximum level of chaos was reached. I had his can opener, but he had my ice-cube trays. It was as if our possessions were embarked upon some osmotic, conjugal exchange, a giant french kiss of personal effects, which had somehow left us behind.

On Monday I met Eleanor for breakfast at Hank’s. I wanted to discuss hopeful things: the job in New York, how she might feel about coming with me. Perhaps she could start up a reading group there. I would promise not to die of Globner’s Disease.

“We should stop smoking cigarettes. Do you wanna stop smoking cigarettes?” said Eleanor as soon as I sat down.

Despite my degenerating health, I enjoyed them too much. They were sororal. “But they’re so cysterly,” I said, and stuck out a breast. No idiocy was too undignified for me. I might as well have sat in a corner and applied Winstons directly to my lymph nodes, laughing and telling terrible jokes.

Eleanor’s mouth formed a small, tough segment of a smile. “I have something to tell you, Benna.”

Something to do with cysterly; I said, “What?”

“Benna, I asked Gerard to go to bed with me.”

I was still smiling, inappropriately, and my breast was still stuck out a bit. “So, when was this?” I said. I pulled back my breast, realigned my torso. Something between us had suddenly gone pale and gray, like a small piece of meat one dislodges hours late from between the teeth. I lit up a cigarette.

“Saturday night.” Eleanor’s face looked arranged in anxiety, the same face she used when reading Romeo’s speech to the County Paris he’s just killed: O, give me thy hand / One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book. She looked pink and beseeching, though essentially she looked the same, as people do despite the fact they have begun to turn into monsters and are about to tell you something that should require horns or fangs or vaulted eyebrows but never apparently does.

“I thought you said you were staying in to watch The Sound of Music,” I said in the same voice I always used when blowing cigarette smoke out my nostrils.

“I, uh, ended up not doing that. I went to see Gerard play instead. He said you’d had a fight, Benna.”

And suddenly I knew this was only a half-truth. Suddenly I knew there’d been more than this. That there always had been.

“Benna, I thought at first we were kidding,” she continued. She kept saying my name. “I sat down next to him and said, ‘Hey, let’s ruin a beautiful friendship—’ ”

“You hated each other,” I insisted.

“—and he said, ‘Sure why not?’ and Benna, I’m convinced he thought at first he was kidding …”

Kidding? That was what my Mary Cassatt print was a picture of. A woman with kids.

“Benna, I’m sure it’s not …”

Eleanor’s skin was smooth and poreless. Her hair was frosted golden like some expensive, marbley wood. I wanted her to stop saying my name.

“But you didn’t actually sleep together, did you?” I asked, though it sounded pathetic, like a tiny Hans Christian Andersen character.

Eleanor stared at me. Her eyes started to fill with water. She felt sorry for me. She felt sorry for herself. I could feel my heart wither like a hand. I could feel the lump in my breast rise into my throat, from where perhaps it had fallen to begin with.

“Oh, Benna, he’s such a shit.” They did hate each other. That was why she was telling me this: We all hated each other. “I’m so sorry, Benna. He’s such a shit. I knew he would never tell you.”

She was fat. She didn’t know anything about music. She was a child. She still received money from her parents in Doc Country. No animal is as problematic in captivity as the elephant, I thought meanly, like an aerobics teacher who watches too much PBS. Every year around the world at least one zookeeper is killed.

Something in Eleanor now began crumbling and biting. “How long do you think I could have been a sounding board for the two of you, Benna?”

This was horrible. This was the sort of thing you read about in magazine advice columns. O, give my thy hand / One writ with me in sour Ms. Fortune’s book.

“… I deserved a love affair, and instead I was spending all of my time being envious of you. And you never noticed me. You never even noticed I’d lost weight.” She knew nothing about music. She knew none of the pieces from The Turning Point.

“Don’t you see, sisterhood has to be redefined,” she was saying. “There are too few men in the world. It’s a heterosexual depression out there!”

What I finally managed to say, looking at the Heimlich Maneuver poster, was, “So, is this what’s called sociobiology?” She smiled weakly, hopefully, and I started to laugh, and then we were both laughing, teary-eyed, our faces falling into our arms on the table, and that’s when I took the ketchup bottle and cracked it over her head. And then I got up and wobbled out, my soul numb as a crossed leg, and Hank yelled something at me in Greek and rushed out from behind the counter over to Eleanor who was sobbing loudly and would probably need stitches.

For nine days Gerard and I didn’t speak to each other. Through the walls I could hear him entering and exiting his apartment, and presumably he could hear me, but we didn’t speak. On the very first day I had refused to answer his knock.

I went out at night to all the really bad movies in Fitchville and just sat there. Sometimes I brought a book and a flashlight.

I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.

From across the hall I could hear Gerard’s phone ring, and I would listen and wait for him to pick it up and speak into it. The words were always muffled. Sometimes I could hear him laugh, as if he were quite ready to be happy again. A few times when he stayed out all night, his phone rang until three in the morning.

I stopped taking sedatives. The days were all false, warm-gray. Monoxide days. Dirty bathmat. Shoe sole. When I went downtown the stores all bled together like wet magazines. There was a noise in the air that changed with the wind and that could have been music, or roaring, or the voices of children. People were looking up into the trees for something, and I looked up as well and saw what it was: Not far from Marini Street thousands of dark birds had landed, descended from their neat, purposeful geometry into the mess of the neighborhood, scattered their troubled squawking throughout trees and on rooftops, looking the rainbowy, shadowy black of an oil spill. There were scientists, I knew, who did studies of such events, who claimed to discern patterns in such chaos. But this required distance and a study that took no account of any single particle in the mess. Particles were of no value. Up close was of no particular use.

From four blocks away I could see that the flock had a kind of group-life, a recognizable intelligence; no doubt in its random flutters there were patterns, but alone any one of those black birds would not have known what was up. Alone, as people live, they would crash their heads against walls.

I walked slowly, away from Marini Street, and understood this small shred: Between large and small, between near and far, there was no wisdom or truce to be had. To be near was to be blind; to be one among so many was to own no shape or say.

“There must be things that can save us!” I wanted to shout. “But they are just not here.”

I got an abortion. Later I suffered from a brief heterosexual depression and had trouble teaching my class: I would inadvertently skip the number three when counting and would instead call out, “Front-two-four-five, Side-two-four-five.” Actually that happened only once, but later, when I was living in New York, it seemed to make a funny story. (“Benna,” said Gerard, the day I left. “Baby, I’m really sorry.”)

Because of the pregnancy, the lump in my breast disappeared, retracted and absorbed, never to sprout again. “A night-blooming-not-so-serious,” I said to the nurse-practitioner. She smiled. When she felt my breast, I wanted her to ask me out to dinner. There was a week in my life when she was the only person I really liked.

But I believed in starting over. There was finally, I knew, only rupture and hurt and falling short between all persons, but, Shirley, the best revenge was to turn your life into a small gathering of miracles.

If I could not be anchored and profound, I would try, at least, to be kind.

And so before I left, I phoned Barney and took him out for a drink. “You’re a sweet girl,” he said, loud as a sportscaster. “I’ve always thought that.”