Significant Others Page 5

  “Sit down,” she ordered, seizing his hand. It was large and fleshy, surprisingly strong.

  He obeyed her.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Seventy-one,” he replied.

  “I’ve had lovers that old,” she said. “You’d know that if you’d read my book.”

  Generation Gap

  BRIAN’S NEPHEW TURNED OUT TO BE A LANKY REDHEAD, as soberly and self-consciously devoted to the Wet Look as Brian had once been to the Dry. Jed was an average-looking kid, barely rescued from dorkiness by a rudimentary grasp of current teen fashion. (He affected hightop Reeboks of varying hues and let his shirttails hang out beneath his crew-neck sweaters.)

  For some reason, Brian felt a little sorry for him.

  “So,” he said one night after dinner, “you’re a sophomore next year, huh?”

  Jed nodded, finishing off the last piece of pizza. They were seated at a card table Mrs. Madrigal had hauled up from the basement. Except for a bookshelf and a battered sofa, this was the only furniture in the candlelit room. Here and there, the landlady had compensated for the austerity by cramming jelly jars with yellow roses from her garden.

  “I remember my sophomore year,” Brian offered, trying to draw the kid out. “I screwed around the whole time. The ol’ freshman terror had gone, and the girls started lookin’ good.”

  No response. Zilch.

  He tried again: “Guess things haven’t changed all that much, huh?”

  “I party some,” answered Jed, measuring out his words, “but I have to keep my grades up if I want to be competitive in the job market.”

  Oh, right, thought Brian. Spoken like a true automaton of the state.

  “Cissie and I have worked out a plan.”

  “Cissie’s your girl?”

  The kid nodded. “We wanna get married my first year in law school and start a family and all. But that takes money, so I figure I’d better graduate with at least a three point six or I won’t get into Harvard Law School. The more prestigious firms never hire out of the … you know, minor law schools.”

  Brian repressed an urge to stick his finger down his throat.

  “You gotta plan,” added Jed. “Families cost money.”

  “Right.”

  “Of course, I don’t need to tell you that. Look how long you and Mary Ann had to wait.”

  This observation was not so much malicious as naive, Brian decided. “We didn’t have to wait,” he said quietly. “It’s what we both wanted. We were both in our thirties when we married.”

  “Wow,” said Jed, as if he were digesting an entry from the Guinness Book of World Records.

  Brian took the offensive, intent upon liberating the kid. “I enjoyed my time as a bachelor. It taught me a helluva lot about myself and the world. I think I’m a better husband because of it.”

  “Yeah,” said Jed, “but wasn’t life kind of … empty?”

  “No. Hell, no.” This wasn’t entirely true, but he hated the kid’s priggish tone. “I was an independent man. Sex helped make me that way.”

  Confronted with this hopelessly old-fashioned concept, Jed smiled indulgently.

  “It’s the truth,” said Brian. “Didn’t you feel more … in charge of yourself the first time you got it on with a girl?”

  The kid tugged at the cuff of his sweater. “There weren’t any girls before Cissie.”

  “O.K., then … the first time you got it on with Cissie.”

  Silence.

  Brian studied his nephew’s face, where the awful truth was blooming like acne. “Hell, I’m sorry … I didn’t … I mean, lots of guys …”

  Jed greeted his stammering with another faint smile, more smug than the last. “It’s a matter of choice, Brian.”

  “Oh … well …”

  “We don’t believe in premarital sex. Neither one of us.”

  Premarital sex? He couldn’t recall having heard that term since the early sixties, when it ceased to be a racy topic for high school debate teams. Who was this Cissie bitch, anyway? What gave her the right to pussywhip this innocent kid into a life of marital servitude?

  “Jed … listen, man … maybe it’s none of my business, but I think you’re making a serious mistake. A little experimentation never hurt anybody. You owe that to yourself, kiddo. How can you be sure about Cissie if …”

  “I’m sure, Brian. All right?”

  Brian shook his head. “There’s no way. You’re too young. You haven’t lived enough.”

  “I’m not interested in one-night stands,” said Jed.

  “You’re scared,” Brian countered, “and that’s cool. Everybody’s first time is …”

  “Things are different now, Brian. It’s not the way it was with your generation.”

  Or with your mother’s, thought Brian. Sunny had had four lovers and an abortion before she got around to having Jed. How could life have changed so radically in twenty years? “Some things still apply,” he told his nephew, hoping to God it was true.

  Jed rose and dumped the pizza box into a Hefty bag in the corner. “I’ve had a long day, Brian.” It was clearly a signal for the meddling uncle to leave.

  “Yeah,” said Brian. “Right.” He stood up and went to the door. “I’m up at The Summit if you need a tour guide or anything. Mrs. Madrigal says she’ll be glad to answer any questions about the neighborhood.”

  “Forget that,” said Jed. “She’s too weird.”

  Brian didn’t bother to reprimand him. Why waste his breath on this tight-assed little bastard?

  Ten minutes later, back at The Summit, Mary Ann asked him how dinner had been.

  “The pits,” he replied.

  “Well, I hope you were nice to him.”

  He gave her a peevish glance. “I was nice to him. He was the one who wasn’t nice to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I dunno,” he said. “Just rude and uptight.” He saw no point in mentioning the virginity part. Mary Ann, no doubt, would find it “sweet.”

  “He’s young,” she said, stacking her dishes in the dishwasher.

  Her phony generosity annoyed him. “You want me to invite him over?”

  “No,” she replied demurely. “Not if you think he’s … difficult.”

  “Save your platitudes, then. The kid is an asshole.”

  She closed the dishwasher and looked at him. “What is your problem, Brian?”

  A damn good question. He felt headachy still, and his gut had begun to seize up in a peculiar way. Was this weird fatigue a function of the flu? Or merely a function of being forty-two? Was that what made him so resentful of Jed’s unspent youth?

  “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “My head hurts. I’m getting a bug, I think.”

  She frowned, then felt his forehead. “There’s no fever.”

  He shrugged and turned away.

  “I’ll make us some hot chocolate,” she said. “Go put your feet up.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “C’mon,” she said. “Don’t be so grumpy. It’s sugar-free.”

  A soundless TV was their blazing hearth while she rubbed his feet. “Oh,” she said after a long silence, “DeDe called this afternoon. She and D’or want us to come use the pool this Sunday.”

  He grunted noncommittally. He distrusted his wife’s escalating chumminess with the Halcyon-Wilsons, not because they were dykes but because they were rich and social. Mary Ann was simply climbing in this instance, he felt almost certain.

  “I thought it would be nice for Shawna,” she added, giving his little toe a placatory tug. “I know you aren’t crazy about them, but that pool is to die for.”

  “Whatever,” he said.

  “C’mon,” she cooed. “Don’t be like that.”

  “Fine. We’ll go. I might be sick as a dog …”

  “Oh, poor you.” She pressed her thumbs into the arch of his foot. “You’ll feel better by then, and—”

  A ringing phone silenced her.

 
; Brian reached for it. “Yeah?”

  “It’s Jed, Brian.”

  “Oh … yeah.”

  “I just wanted to thank you for bringing the pizza by. And the place and all. You’re a real lifesaver.”

  “Well … sure. No sweat.”

  “You’re a terrific uncle. I see why Mom likes you so much.”

  “Hey … no problem. We’ll do it again, huh?”

  “Sure,” said the kid.

  “Great. Then we’ll—what?—check in with each other tomorrow?”

  “You bet.”

  Brian hung up.

  “Jed?” asked Mary Ann.

  He nodded.

  “He has manners,” she said. “You have to admit.”

  “Yeah,” he said absently, retrieving the towel he had thrown in so hastily. The kid, after all, was his own flesh and blood. He deserved a second chance.

  Maybe all he really needed was a good piece of ass.

  Ladies of the Evening

  THE HALCYON-WILSONS DINED THAT NIGHT AT LE TROU, a tiny French restaurant on Guerrero Street.

  “It means The Hole,” said D’orothea.

  DeDe, who was reapplying lipstick, looked up with exaggerated horror. “Ick. What does?”

  “The name of the restaurant,” said D’orothea. “Stop being misogynistic.”

  “Misogynous,” said DeDe.

  “What?”

  “The word is ‘misogynous,’ while you’re accusing me. But I fail to see how …”

  “You were making a hole joke,” said D’orothea. “You don’t think that’s demeaning?”

  “Look, you brought it up. Besides, you make pussy jokes all the time.”

  D’orothea stabbed sullenly at her bijane aux fraises. “Pussy is friendly. Hole is not.”

  A woman at the next table looked at them and frowned.

  “Tell the world,” muttered DeDe. “Better yet, put it on a sampler. ‘Pussy is friendly. Hole is not.’ ”

  “All right,” said D’or.

  “You’re just mad at me because I don’t wanna go to Wimminwood.”

  “Well … I think that’s indicative of your larger problem.”

  “My larger problem?”

  “Your total resistance to anything you don’t—”

  “I told you,” said DeDe. “I’ve already invited Mary Ann and Brian to brunch.”

  D’or scowled. “That’s just an excuse. The fact is … you’re threatened.”

  “Oh, right,” said DeDe. “By what?”

  “By women-only space.”

  DeDe snorted. “I was in the Junior League, wasn’t I?”

  D’or’s eyes became obsidian. “Don’t make fun of this. I won’t have it. Wimminwood is very important to me.”

  “You’ve never even been there.”

  “I went to the one in Michigan. I know how it feels, O.K.? It’s part of who I am, and it’s … something special I want to share with you.”

  DeDe poked at her dessert. “That’s what you told me when we left for Guyana.”

  Her lover gave her a long, incendiary look. “That was low.”

  Feeling the reprimand, DeDe looked away.

  “You’re becoming your mother,” D’or added darkly. “Is that what you really want?”

  “Talk about low,” said DeDe.

  D’or shrugged. “It’s the truth.”

  “It is not. I’m nothing like her.”

  “Well, you’re not a substance abuser.” The very phrase was pure lesbianese, epitomizing everything DeDe hated about D’or’s reemerging consciousness.

  “C’mon, D’or. Can’t you just call her a drunk and be done with it?”

  This was a bit harsh, DeDe realized. Widowed nine years ago, her mother had struggled valiantly to keep the bottle at bay, never fully capitulating until her remarriage in 1984.

  DeDe’s stepfather had been their next-door neighbor in Hillsborough for as long as DeDe could remember. (That is, his tennis courts bordered on the apple orchard at Halcyon Hill.) Her mother had married him nine months after the death of his first wife and moved into his rambling postwar ranch house.

  That had left the mock-Tudor pile of Halcyon Hill for the sole tenancy of DeDe, D’orothea and the children. Absolutely nobody objected, since her mother and D’or were always at odds, and her mother’s new husband had no intention of living under the same roof with his lesbian stepdaughter and her eight-year-old Eurasian twins.

  By implicit mutual consent, they got tipsy on white wine spritzers at the Baybrick Inn.

  When the floor show began, a sinewy stripper in full police drag made a beeline for their table, bumping and grinding all the way. DeDe giggled uncontrollably as the cop began gesturing lewdly with her nightstick.

  “Did you set this up?” she asked her lover.

  D’or’s eyes were full of mischief. “Moi?”

  “I’ll get you for this. I swear.”

  “She’s waiting. Give her something.”

  The stripper began to hump the back of DeDe’s chair, egged on by the roar of a hundred women.

  “Money, you mean?”

  “Of course money!”

  The cop doffed her helmet and held it out to DeDe, who fumbled frantically in her purse. The crowd was going wild. “D’or … how much?”

  “The twenty.”

  “Isn’t that a little too …?”

  “It’s for AIDS. Give it to her.”

  She placed the bill in the helmet, to the sound of tumultuous applause. To show her gratitude, the cop leaned over and stuck her tongue in DeDe’s ear.

  “You looked utterly stricken,” D’or told her later as they sped home to Hillsborough in their big Buick station wagon. “I wish I had a picture of it.”

  DeDe laughed along with her. “Thank God you don’t.”

  When the city lights were gone and the highway became a dark ribbon through the hills, they both fell silent for the final stretch, with DeDe stealing occasional glances at the volatile, loving woman behind the wheel.

  “D’or?” she said at last.

  “Yeah?”

  “Could we take the children?”

  “Where?”

  “Wimminwood.”

  D’or turned and smiled at her sleepily. “Sure.”

  “Well … maybe you’re right, then. Maybe it would do us some good.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. I mean … I’m willing to give it a shot.”

  D’or reached over and squeezed her leg. “I figured that stripper would do the trick.”

  Their baby-sitter was a leggy freshman from Foothill Community College. When they got home, she was watching Love Letters on the VCR. Since they’d acquired the movie for the sole purpose of ogling the naked body of Jamie Lee Curtis, DeDe had the uneasy sensation their privacy had been violated.

  The sitter, however, seemed totally oblivious of the smoldering eroticism on the screen. “This is so lame,” she said without getting up.

  D’or grinned wickedly at DeDe, who said: “Well, you two can settle up. I’ll go look in on the children.”

  The kids were dead to the world, sprawled like rag dolls across their respective beds. Their almond-eyed faces seemed smoother and rounder than ever, gleaming like ivory in the bright summer moonlight.

  A little healthy exercise in the woods would be good for them, she told herself. There would be other children at Wimminwood, playmates with similar home environments. What better reinforcement could she find for them?

  She adjusted Edgar’s blanket, then leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. His eyes popped open instantly.

  “You weren’t asleep,” she whispered.

  “Did you have a good time?” he asked.

  “Yes, darling.” She sat on the edge of the bed and brushed the hair off his forehead. “How ‘bout you?”

  “That sitter is a retard,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “She likes David Lee Roth.”

  “You didn’t give her a har
d time, did you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Go to sleep, then. In the morning I’ll tell you about a great trip we’re gonna take to the Russian River.”

  “D’or told me already,” he said.

  “She did? When?”

  “Long time ago.”

  She wasn’t surprised. It was typical of D’or to marshal the forces before mounting the attack.

  “I can’t go,” Edgar added, “cuz I’m a boy.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “D’or.”

  “Well, she must have been joking, darling.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You misunderstood her, then. We’re all going. We would never go anywhere without you.” She pulled the blanket up under his chin. “Go to sleep now. Before we wake up Anna.”

  She descended the staircase to the foyer, her face burning with anger. She could hear the sitter’s car spewing gravel in the driveway as she cornered D’or in the kitchen. “Did you tell Edgar he couldn’t go to Wimminwood with us?”

  D’or opened the refrigerator and took out a half-gallon carton of milk. “No. Of course not.”

  “He says you did.”

  “Well, I didn’t, dammit. I told him just the opposite, in fact. I said we should all go this year, because he’s not ten yet.” D’or set a saucepan on the stove and poured milk into it.

  “And?” prodded DeDe.

  “And … little boys don’t get to go when they’re ten. It’s the rule, DeDe. I wanted to be up front about it. Children can understand rules.”

  “This is what I hate, you know. This is exactly what I hate.”

  “Oh, c’mon.”

  “This doctrinaire bullshit, this … this …”

  “You want some cocoa?”

  “You hurt Edgar’s feelings, D’or. A little boy doesn’t understand what’s so threatening about his penis.”

  “I’ll talk to him—all right?”

  “When?”

  D’or opened the cabinet, removed a can of cocoa and handed it to DeDe. “Fix us some and bring it to the bedroom. I’ll be there in a little while.”

  DeDe was still fuming when D’or finally joined her in bed. “Is he O.K.?” she asked.

  “Just fine,” said D’or.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him they made that rule about little boys because ten-year-old boys were almost men, and men were all rapists at heart.”