Refresher
ROGER, A SIXTYISH GYM TEACHER WITH AN IRON GRAY CREW CUT, smiled at his fellow miscreants as he smeared cream cheese on a rubbery bagel.
“Hey,” he said, sounding suspiciously cheerful for someone attending an abstinence refresher course at eight o’clock on Saturday morning. “It’s just like The Breakfast Club, except they actually provide breakfast.”
Ruth didn’t know for a fact that Roger was a gym teacher, but it seemed like a safe bet, given that he was wearing those high-waisted polyester shorts favored by coaches of a certain age and a T-shirt that read PROPERTY OF WEST HIGHLAND EAGLES.
C. J., the mannish lesbian standing next to Ruth, gave an appreciative snort. (Ruth didn’t know for a fact that C. J. was a lesbian, but she had yet to meet a straight woman who thought it was a good idea to dress like the lead singer in Sha Na Na.)
“Yeah,” C. J. said, eyeing the meager spread of coffee, juice, and supermarket baked goods that had been laid out for them. “You get treated real nice here. Just stay away from the Kool-Aid.”
There were four of them in all—Roger, C. J., Ruth, and Trisha, an earnest young woman who’d brought along her own supply of herbal tea bags—standing around a folding table in the regional headquarters of Wise Choices for Teens in downtown Lakeview, an hour’s drive from Stonewood Heights. The other tenants in the brick office building included a dentist, a test-prep service, and a company called Home Surveillance Solutions.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Roger told C. J. “I drank the Kool-Aid and it had no effect on me whatsoever. I just happen to firmly believe that sex is bad and my penis is an instrument of the Devil.” He paused, looking momentarily puzzled. “No, wait, it’s my wife who thinks that.”
“Well, she’s at least half-right,” C. J. quipped, tearing open a packet of Sweet ’N Low.
Trisha sipped her Wellness Tea and studied the poster pinned to the wall above the copy machine. It showed a horrified college boy backing out of a dorm room, trying to escape the clutches of a seductively dressed, otherwise lovely coed who had “HIV+” stamped on her forehead in bold black letters. If Only It Were This Easy, declared the headline at the top of the poster. A smaller caption at the bottom read, Abstinence: Because You Never Really Know.
“This place gives me the creeps,” she muttered.
“What did you do?” C. J. asked her.
Trisha turned away from the poster. She was a short, plump woman with straight dark hair and a pretty mouth. If not for her serious-intellectual eyeglasses, she could have easily been mistaken for a college student herself.
“I admitted to my students that I masturbate,” she said, sounding mortified and defiant at the same time. “It wasn’t like it was part of the lesson plan or anything. We were just talking in a general way, and I said that most people probably did at one time or another in their lives, and that it was nothing to be ashamed about. And then this boy asked me point-blank if I had ever done it myself.”
“Oops,” said Roger.
“I know.” Trisha’s face flushed pink with astonishing rapidity. “I should’ve just told him it was none of his business, but it seemed cowardly to evade the question. I mean, I tell them all the time that I want my classroom to be a safe place where people can talk openly about every aspect of sexuality and ask any question they want.”
“And look where it got you,” C. J. said. “What about you, Ruth?”
“My story’s not so interesting,” Ruth told her. “I just lost my head and suggested that there might be some problems with our handouts from the Jerry Falwell Institute of Disinformation.”
“Hear, hear,” said Roger.
“I’m a repeat offender,” C. J. volunteered. “They made me come last spring for the same reason I’m here now. Because I don’t care what the goddam curriculum says, abstinence until marriage can’t possibly apply to gay and lesbian people until we’re allowed to get married. Sentencing someone to life without sex is a cruel and unusual punishment.”
“Tell that to my wife,” said Roger.
“Ba-dum-bum,” said C. J. “And I thought Rodney Dangerfield was dead.”
“What about you?” Trish asked Roger. She seemed to have relaxed a bit now that her secret was out. “What’s your sin?”
Roger shook his head.
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
“That’s not fair,” C. J. told him. “We all fessed up.”
“Whatever,” Roger said. “If you really want to know, I showed my kids a Playboy centerfold. Miss April, 1973.”
“Why’d you do that?” Ruth asked, genuinely curious.
“It was stupid,” he said. “I was just trying to make a point about fake tits.”
C. J. looked bewildered. “What’s that got to do with the curriculum?”
Roger cupped his hands beneath his pectorals and gently lifted up.
“I just like ’em natural,” he said.
Ruth and Trisha exchanged queasy glances.
“It’s something I feel strongly about,” Roger explained. “Don’t even get me started.”
JOANN MARLOW was her usual perky, overdressed self, as if she couldn’t imagine a better way to kick off the weekend than to throw on a tailored silk blouse, a tasteful string of pearls, and three coats of makeup before heading over to the office to knock some sense into a bunch of reprobate Sex Education teachers.
“Good morning!” she said, once they’d all taken their places around the big table in the conference room. “It’s nice to see you all!”
JoAnn flashed a brilliant smile at her captive audience and didn’t seem the least bit put out when it wasn’t returned. She took a sip of coffee from a to-go cup—Starbucks, Ruth noted, not the cheap stuff they brewed for the inmates—and drummed her polished fingernails on the tabletop.
“Before we start, just let me say that I’m well aware of the fact that these special Saturday reinforcement sessions aren’t very popular. Some of the teachers who’ve been invited here in the past have been pretty vocal about that on their evaluation sheets. Some have said they felt they were being punished. Others have used words like ‘indoctrination’ and ‘total waste of time.’ Maybe some of you share these sentiments. If that’s the case, all I can tell you is, get over it.”
JoAnn rolled her chair away from the table and stood up. She wasn’t particularly tall, but there was something elegant and powerful in the way she carried herself, a quality of absolute confidence that Ruth couldn’t help envying, even though it was completely foreign to her and deeply off-putting.
“The first thing you need to remind yourselves,” JoAnn continued, “is that you’re here for a simple reason. You did something wrong. Maybe it was an honest mistake, maybe it wasn’t. I can’t look into your hearts, and I don’t know that I’d want to if I could. At the very least, I think it’s safe to say that everyone here this morning is having a little trouble adjusting to a new way of thinking. And I want to help you fix that.”
She strode over to the whiteboard and wrote the words “GREAT OPPORTUNITY” in squeaky red marker.
“So instead of feeling sorry for yourselves and resentful of me,” she said, “I think you’d all be better served by adjusting your attitudes right now, before we start. As hard as it might be for some of you to believe, this is a great opportunity for all of us to reconnect with our shared goal, which is to teach the Wise Choices curriculum to our students as enthusiastically and effectively as possible.”
“Yez, boss,” Roger muttered under his breath. “I sho is enthusiastic.”
C. J. covered her mouth with one hand in an unsuccessful attempt to stifle her amusement. Ruth and Trisha stared at the table.
“Go ahead and laugh,” JoAnn said. “But I guarantee your local school board doesn’t see abstinence as a laughing matter. That’s why they’ve adopted our curriculum, and that’s why they expect you to present it to your students in good faith, without additions, caveats, or sarcastic commentary. And if you can’t do that, you should think about resigning or requesting some form of reassignment before you end up facing more serious disciplinary action.”
JoAnn turned back to the board, wrote the word “PARTNERS” in very large letters, and underlined it three times.
“All I’m asking this morning is for you to make a small leap of faith. Just this once, and just as a kind of experiment, could we try to think of ourselves as partners instead of adversaries? If we approach this morning’s activities in the right spirit, then maybe we can make the first small step on the road to establishing a relationship of trust and mutual cooperation. Because the fact is, whether we like it or not, we’re in this together.”
None of the teachers nodded, but none of them protested, either, and that seemed to be good enough for JoAnn.
“Great,” she said. “What I’d like to do is start with some autobiographical writing.”
RUTH STARED at her exam book and tried yet again to focus her thoughts. So far the only words she’d written were a restatement of the assignment JoAnn had given them before stepping out of the room: “A Sexual Encounter I Regret.” By now, enough time had passed that this simple phrase had become the center of an elaborate solar system of doodled objects—stars and crescent moons and sinuous vines, a palm tree and a pair of sexy lips, the Eiffel Tower and a fish wearing sunglasses, the planet Saturn with a large tulip sprouting from its surface.
Writing had never come easily to Ruth in the best of circumstances, and this morning’s circumstances didn’t even qualify as half-decent. She was tired from a night of fitful sleep, cranky about missing Maggie’s soccer game, and deeply suspicious of JoAnn’s motives in choosing this particular subject—she’d said she was “looking for common ground” with the teachers, but Ruth was pretty sure she was just trolling for more horror stories to inflict on impressionable adolescents. It didn’t help that all three of her colleagues were scribbling away like honor students, C. J. and Trisha unburdening themselves with grim diligence, Roger looking oddly exhilarated, chuckling and shaking his head fondly at the sights on memory lane. On top of everything else, Ruth suddenly realized that she was extremely hungry, a condition she deduced from the fact that she was drawing an excessively detailed picture of a donut with sprinkles on it, floating like the sun above the Eiffel Tower and shooting quivery rays of deliciousness into the sky.
It wasn’t that she was stumped for something to write about. Like anyone else her age, Ruth had committed her share of youthful and not-so-youthful indiscretions. There were a couple of tipsy one-nighters in college she would have taken back if she could, as well as an ill-considered fling with a married, much older grad-school professor that had fizzled after a lackluster session on his office couch. And she certainly regretted her weekend in the Poconos with Ray Mattingly—not because it had gone badly, but because it had gone so well, and because she’d humiliated herself by weeping inconsolably when he broke the news that he was moving.
And then, of course, there was Frank. They’d had some good times early in the marriage—a nice honeymoon in Tortola, lazy Saturday mornings in their first apartment on Hillcrest—and brought two beautiful children into the world, but from where she sat now, it was hard to feel anything but sorry about that whole misguided era of her life. They’d stayed married for at least four years after they both knew it was over, and during that time, they continued to sleep together out of some pathetic combination of need, habit, and wishful thinking. If she counted all that, then she had no choice but to admit that she regretted most of the sex she’d ever had, and thinking that way made her even more depressed than she’d been when she woke up in the morning, with last night’s date still fresh in her memory.
SHE HAD set out from her house on Friday night with two condoms in her purse and a totally open mind. She wasn’t exactly planning on sleeping with Paul Caruso, but she certainly wasn’t ruling out the possibility in advance, or looking for reasons to say no. At her age, in the midst of a two-year dry spell, there wasn’t a whole lot to be gained from playing hard to get, or from asking more from the world than the world was prepared to offer. Because most of the time, as Ruth well knew, it wasn’t offering anything at all.
And besides, she and Paul were already lovers. It didn’t matter that it had happened more than half a lifetime ago, so far back in the past that she couldn’t even picture him clearly anymore. Once you’d broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not. She felt this even with Frank sometimes, an undercurrent between their bodies that didn’t seem to care about—or even acknowledge—the fact that they were divorced, or that she thanked God on a daily basis that she no longer had to wake up next to him in the morning, no longer had to see him brushing his teeth in his underwear, staring soulfully into the bathroom mirror.
She and Paul had arranged to meet at Ferraro’s, a homey Italian place in Bridgeton that Randall and Gregory had recommended. Ruth braced herself as she entered for that moment of unpleasant surprise she remembered so well from her twentieth reunion—the gasp of disbelief she had to swallow over and over again as she looked down at the name tag and back up at the face—but the shock she felt upon seeing Paul was a different thing entirely.
If it took her a few seconds to recognize him, it wasn’t because time had done its usual number on him—quite the contrary. He looked good, way better than she’d let herself imagine in her most optimistic fantasy. He’d cut his hair, of course—no man his age wore it long and parted in the middle anymore—but that wasn’t what threw her off, nor was it his expensive suit, or the fact that he had acquired one of those deep, even tans that didn’t look like it came from spending a lot of time in the sun.
Sometimes, in magazine ads for weight-loss products, you can see a continuity between the obese person who used to wear those gigantic blue jeans and the skinny grinning individual who displays the gargantuan empty pants to an admiring world. Other times, though, the transformation is so complete that you’re tempted to wonder if Before and After are even the same person.
That’s the way it was with Paul. Ruth had come here to meet the grown-up fat kid of her memories—the sweet vulnerable teenager with a can of Pringles in one hand and a trumpet in the other, the boy who’d taught her that you didn’t have to fit the world’s definition of “perfect” to be loved—and she wasn’t quite sure what to make of the studly businessman sipping a glass of red wine at the bar, exuding an air of masculine self-possession she would have found very attractive if this were a blind date, if he’d been anyone else in the world.
Suddenly aware of her scrutiny, Paul spun on his stool and met her gaze, his face breaking into a broad smile that didn’t betray a hint of the ambivalence she was directing at him. If he noticed this discrepancy, though, he didn’t let on as he slid off his seat and began moving toward her, opening his arms as he approached, gathering her against his disconcertingly flat body, squeezing her tight and letting out the kind of soft groan you’re allowed to make when you’re hugging someone who’s heard you make sounds like that before.
“Ruth,” he said. “Wow.”
He let go of her and took a step back, smiling at her with a kind of awestruck disbelief as his eyes roamed up and down her body.
“Holy shit,” he said. “Guess you’re not my little neighbor anymore.”
C. J. VOLUNTEERED to be the first reader.
“Ever since I’ve been aware of myself as a sexual being,” she began, “I’ve known that I am a lover of women.”
“Me, too,” Roger chuckled, but C. J. silenced him with an imperious glare and resumed her narrative.
“When I was a teenager, this knowledge frightened me, implying as it did a lonely outcast life, lived on the fringes of quote unquote normal society. Growing up in small-town, Red State America in the 1970s, I was as yet unaware that there were vibrant communities of women just like me—supportive, loving, beautiful, strong dykes of every race, creed, and color—and even if I had, I’m not sure that I would have had the courage to imagine myself living among them.
“All I really did in high school was muddle through, biding my time until I could sneak off to college and figure out who I was without my parents, siblings, neighbors, and everyone else I knew looking over my shoulder, ready to mock and ostracize me for any deviation from the so-called norm. Scoff if you must, but even today, in this supposedly enlightened country, there are places where it isn’t safe to be a gay teen—not just physically, but mentally, spiritually—”
JoAnn tapped the table. “We get your point, C. J. Could we just skip ahead to the part where you’re actually responding to the assignment?”
“I’m sorry,” C. J. said, in a voice oozing with insincere apology. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”
“Not at all,” JoAnn replied. “I’d just appreciate it if you picked up the pace. I’d like to give everyone else a chance.”
“Fine.” C. J. flipped forward a couple of pages, squinting to find her place. “Okay … here it is … So what’s a confused young dyke to do when a boy asks her to the prom? All I can tell you is that I found it very difficult to say no. I had four close girlfriends at the time, and they all had dates. Plus, they were all going to Lori Welker’s lake house after the prom, and I didn’t want to miss out. It was our senior year, and they were my whole life, those girls. You can probably imagine how happy my mother was. Her butch little girl, dressing up like a princess on the big night. She put makeup on me and stuffed me into a frilly dress. I felt sick about it, sick and dishonest, but there I was.
“My date was a boy named Donnie, and he wasn’t so bad. He didn’t care about me one way or the other, he just wanted to be part of the fun. One thing we had in common, we both liked our Southern Comfort, and we both liked to dance when we were drunk. So the prom itself was actually a pretty cool experience.
“The after-party was when things got weird. We hung out as a group for a while, but then the couples started to drift off, one by one, looking for private places. And finally, it was just me and Donnie, and we were trashed.”
C. J. paused to gather her courage.
“You ask me why I let him have sex with me, and I guess I could hide behind that as an excuse, say I was just too drunk to resist, and maybe there’s a little truth in that, but only a little. I think deep down I was just praying that I would like it, that Donnie would do what the prom and the rest of my life hadn’t—turn me into a good little straight girl like everyone else.
“I guess you want to know what it was like for me. It was disgusting, and painful, and humiliating. Sobering, too. If there was one last shred of doubt in my mind that I was queer, Donnie Bolger’s penis knocked it right out of me on prom night.”
C. J. smiled sadly, running her fingers through her slicked-back hair.
“As everyone here has probably guessed, I’m not a big fan of abstinence. I believe that we human beings have been put on this earth to love and worship one another to the best of our abilities and inclinations, regardless of our sexual orientation or marital status. But I will say this—for as long as I live, I’ll think back to that awful night in 1979 and wish to God I had abstained. Thank you.”
PAUL SEEMED a little more familiar to her once they sat down and began to talk. Even as a child he’d spoken slowly and with unusual precision, as if he’d gone to broadcasting school, and the sound of his voice made her feel a little more certain that the boy she’d spent those wild afternoons with a quarter of a century ago was still hiding out somewhere inside the body of this handsome stranger.
“You look great,” he said, once they’d gotten through the obligatory small talk about traffic and the perils of MapQuest. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
“Everyone tells me that,” she replied. “I guess it’s the upside to having gray hair and wrinkles when you’re a teenager.”
Paul grinned. There was some loose skin around his collar that was the only physical trace she could find of his former self.
“Touché,” he said. “You were always funny. I remember that.”
Ruth was surprised by this—humor didn’t often get included in the inventory of her virtues—but let it pass unchallenged.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Sure.”
There were a hundred ways to phrase the question, some kinder than others. Ruth chose the direct route.
“What happened? You’re a completely different person.”
Paul shrugged. “I got tired of being fat. I decided to make some changes.”
“When?”
“Ten years ago. After Missy and I got divorced.”
Ruth nodded sympathetically, trying not to reveal any pleasure or excessive interest in this revelation.
“I didn’t know you two had gotten married.”
“I knew it was a disaster when I was walking down the aisle. But it was like I had to do it, like it was in the script.”
“Been there,” she said.
“We have two kids,” he said. “So that kinda complicated things.”
Ruth resisted the urge to tell him about her own situation and what a hard road it was for a single mom. They’d have time for that later.
“So did you start going to the gym or something?”
“Exercise was part of it. But mainly I just had to learn to discipline my eating. Do you remember how much food there was in my house?”
“It seemed like a lot,” Ruth conceded.
“All we ever did was eat. The whole family. I asked my mom about it a few years ago, and she pretended not to know what I was talking about. I mean, we had two spare refrigerators in the basement, and both of them were always full.”
“But you got married,” she pointed out. “You weren’t living in your parents’ house anymore.”
“Overeating was a habit, and Missy aided and abetted it. But when my marriage finally ended, I just kinda woke up and realized I’d been given a second chance, and could live my life the way I wanted to. I lost 120 pounds in two years, and I’ve kept it off.”
Paul ran his hand slowly down the front of his shirt, as if he were trying to iron out the wrinkles.
“It’s actually not that hard,” he said. “Because I really like who I am now. I go to the gym sometimes, and I see this dude in the mirror, and I’m like, Hey, who’s that good-looking guy? I wish I could be like him. And then I realize it’s me.”
“THANK YOU, C. J.,” JoAnn said. “That was a very interesting piece. I think you put your finger on a couple of really important issues that some of us might want to address in the classroom. One is the link between alcohol abuse and self-destructive sexual behavior, and the other is prom-night peer pressure. A couple of schools I know have gone so far as to set up sobriety checkpoints at their proms, complete with Breathalyzers and police officers, and I think your essay goes a long way in showing why that might not be such a bad idea.”
“That wasn’t my point at all,” C. J. protested. “What I object to is the mandatory heterosexuality at the prom, all those smug straight people rubbing it in everyone else’s face. That’s what led to my self-destructive behavior.”
“One thing the rest of you might want to consider,” JoAnn continued, as if C. J. hadn’t spoken, “is encouraging parents in your communities to sponsor chaperoned after-parties in their homes. If you go to our website, you’ll find a list of recommended group activities that’ll help keep the kids out of trouble and restore some of the lost innocence back to prom night.”
“Nude Twister,” muttered Roger.
JoAnn stared at him in disbelief.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Old enough not to give a crap,” he replied.
“Ugh.” Jo Ann grimaced, as if she’d just swallowed something unpleasant. “I can’t believe they let you teach children.”
“Not only that,” Roger told her. “They gave me tenure.”
“I feel sorry for your students,” JoAnn said. She looked like she was about to say something more, but decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. “Let’s just move on. Trisha, would you like to go next?”
With obvious trepidation, Trisha glanced down at her composition.
“It’s kind of embarrassing,” she said.
“That’s all right,” JoAnn said. “We’re not here to judge you. We just want to hear what you have to say.”
“I’m really ashamed of myself,” Trisha murmured.
“Excellent,” JoAnn said. “Why don’t you tell us about it.”
EVER SINCE kindergarten, Trisha had been best friends with a girl named Eve, and right from the start, Trisha had been the dominant figure in the duo. She was the smart one, the athletic one, and later, the pretty one. Eve was the admirer; it was her job to stand loyally by Trisha’s side, marveling at her friend’s many gifts and talents, and broadcasting them to the wider world.
The interesting thing about this dynamic was that it somehow survived long after it had any basis in reality. Midway through high school, soon after the fog of puberty had lifted, it became painfully clear to Trisha that her sidekick was actually prettier, smarter, and more athletic than she was. Oddly, Eve seemed unaware that the ground beneath their relationship had shifted. She continued to defer to Trisha and sing her praises as if nothing had changed, as if they were still second graders hanging upside down on the monkey bars.
Trisha treasured the friendship as they grew into adulthood, but she was also troubled by it. She kept waiting for the long-overdue day of reckoning, when Eve finally saw her for the weak, underachieving loser she really was and began to treat her accordingly. But it never came, not even after Eve got admitted to a better college and had a string of boyfriends way cooler and kinder and better-looking than any of the jerks Trisha went out with.
Two years ago, Eve got engaged to Thad, a handsome investment banker with a passion for rock climbing, a sport, it turned out, for which she had an uncanny knack. Every weekend, they’d head off to the mountains to test themselves against a new rock face, each more challenging than the last. Trisha was mired in grad school at the time, miserably single, and the thought of Eve’s happiness filled her with bitter envy. It sometimes seemed to her that they’d traded lives, that Eve had somehow ended up with rewards that rightfully belonged to Trisha.
A few months before their wedding, Thad and Eve invited a bunch of their friends to Thad’s uncle’s summer house in the Shawangunk Mountains of Upstate New York. All weekend long, Trisha watched the happy couple interact with an emotion so strong it could only be called hatred. Thad was gorgeous—lean and muscular with close-cropped blond hair and an air of quiet intelligence—and he couldn’t take his eyes off Eve, who seemed to have acquired a new summer wardrobe—skirts and sundresses and halter tops—every item of which fit perfectly, and called attention to the loveliness of her limbs, the grace of her smallest gestures.
All the guests left on Sunday afternoon except Trisha, who was getting a ride home from her hosts on Monday morning (her car, a crappy Dodge Neon, needed a new transmission that she couldn’t afford). They’d rented Vertigo, but Eve pled exhaustion around nine o’clock, saying she couldn’t keep her eyes open another minute. When Thad offered to join her, she insisted that he and Trisha go ahead and watch without her.
“I don’t want to spoil your guys’ night,” she said.
They cued up the movie shortly after Eve went upstairs. Trisha made herself comfortable on the couch while Thad took a seat on the floor. Vertigo was one of Trisha’s favorite films, but she could barely follow the action, so distracted was she by Thad’s magnetic physical presence, the soft fuzz of his hair, the taut muscles of his legs stretched out in front of him, his shins nicked and bruised and battered by the rocks, the little grunts of surprise he made as the story unfolded.
At some point, Thad shifted position so that his back rested against the bottom of the couch, his right shoulder just a few tantalizing inches away from her right foot. It was so easy to extend her leg, she barely realized she was doing it until she felt her big toe brush against his T-shirt. He moved away from the touch in a reflex of politeness, but then settled back into it, exerting a slight counterpressure so she’d know it wasn’t an accident.
They sat like that for a long time. Trisha’s heart was racing; it took all the concentration she could muster to slow down her raggedy breathing, to keep herself from panting. Finally, she worked up the courage to move her foot even closer, until her instep was pressing against the top of his arm. She moved it back and forth against the soft cotton, an awkward but tender caress. He turned slowly, smiling over his shoulder. She smiled back.
Thad’s expression grew solemn. With an odd courtliness, he cupped his hand under her calf, lifted her heel off the couch, and planted a tender kiss on the sole of her foot. She giggled in surprise, then let out a soft moan of encouragement as his lips proceeded to her ankle. He paused there, glancing uncertainly toward the ceiling. Trisha followed his gaze, thinking of her lucky friend, asleep and clueless upstairs.
“Keep going,” she whispered, and he did as he was told.
PAUL BARELY touched his gnocchi, but he seemed very enthusiastic about the wine.
“I’m really glad you posted that message,” he said. “I don’t think I’d have the guts to do something like that.”
“I don’t know what got into me,” Ruth confessed. “I couldn’t sleep one night, and for some reason I started thinking about you and me, and what happened back then….”
“That was a crazy time,” he said. “I had that broken leg and things were all messed up between me and Missy. You were a real bright spot. You saved that whole spring for me.”
Paul poured more wine for both of them, finishing off the bottle. Ruth was already feeling a nice warm glow from her first two glasses, a mingled sense of nostalgia and anticipation. I was a bright spot, she thought.
“You still play the trumpet?” she asked.
Paul made a sad face.
“Haven’t touched it since sophomore year of college. I thought I would major in music, but I ended up switching to computer science. Best decision I ever made.”
“You were a good musician. I liked listening to you practice.”
“Maybe I’ll take it up again sometime,” he said without conviction. “What about you? You said you were a teacher, right?”
“High school,” she said. “Sex Education.”
“Yeah, right.” He seemed to find this amusing. “That’s a good one.”
“I’m serious,” she told him.
He couldn’t quite manage to wipe the smirk off his face.
“Scout’s honor?”
“Why’s that so funny?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It just seems kind of weird, considering, you know, what you were like as a teenager.”
“What do you mean?” Ruth said, feeling slightly miffed. “I was a perfectly normal teenager.”
“You seemed kinda wild.”
“I wasn’t wild. Not even close.”
“I mean, you were just a sophomore, right? You know, when we—”
“That was a one-shot deal,” she told him. “You were the first and only guy I had sex with in high school. I didn’t have another boyfriend until college.”
“Really? You were a virgin?”
“You did,” he said. “I just didn’t believe you.”
JOANN STARED at Trisha with a look that teetered between pity and contempt.
“Eeew,” she said. “I can’t believe you had sex with your best friend’s fiancé. While she was in the house.”
“It was just that once,” Trisha explained in self-defense. “It never happened again.”
“Personally,” Roger interjected, “I can’t believe he kissed your foot. That’s what’s really gross.”
“It was clean,” Trisha informed him. “I’m pretty careful about that.”
“The foot’s a powerful erogenous zone,” C. J. declared. “Anyone who denies that is missing out on one of life’s great pleasures.”
“Right,” said Roger. “And I know some African tribesmen who say the same thing about sautéed monkey brains.”
“Who knows?” said C. J. “They might be delicious. You never know until you try.”
“Point taken,” Roger said. “Whatever floats your boat.”
JoAnn ignored this sidebar, still staring doggedly at Trisha.
“Did you tell Eve what you’d done?” she inquired.
“I meant to,” Trisha confessed. “But it was so close to the wedding, and I was Maid of Honor. It just seemed awkward.”
“I hope you’re kidding me,” JoAnn said. “I hope you didn’t stand up at the altar next to the woman you betrayed.”
“There wasn’t an altar,” Trisha told her. “The ceremony was in a French restaurant.”
“You were the Maid of Dishonor,” Roger said with a chuckle, giving Trisha a friendly pat on the shoulder.
“That was my punishment,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “To know that I’d been a terrible friend.”
“What about Thad?” Ruth asked. “Did you ever talk to him about it?”
“Just that night,” Trisha replied. “We made a pact to forget what we’d done, to pretend it never happened. And that’s pretty much what we did, except that every now and then, when I’m over their house and Eve leaves the room, he’ll give me this weird little smile. Sometimes he winks. It’s horrible.”
“I think you should tell her,” C. J. said. “You’ve got to clear the air. She shouldn’t stay married to a creep like that. Let her get out now, before they have kids and everything gets complicated.”
Trisha winced. “It’s too late. Eve’s pregnant. She asked me to be the godmother.”
“Yuck,” JoAnn said. “I can’t listen to this. Who wants to go next?”
“Me,” Roger said. “Unless Ruth wants to.”
“That’s okay,” Ruth told him. “I can wait.”
“Fine,” JoAnn said, with an audible lack of enthusiasm. “Let’s hear from Roger.”
Roger looked around the table, smiling at each member of his audience, making a preliminary claim on their goodwill. After clearing his throat and cracking his knuckles, he picked up the composition book and began to read.
“Anyone who has given any thought to the matter will understand that the difference between fifteen and sixteen is hard to pinpoint with the naked eye. I have known fourteen-year-olds who look like they’re twenty, and seventeen-year-olds who could pass for twelve. Yet for the legal system, the distinction between fifteen and sixteen is crucial and enormous, and woe to the man who finds himself on the wrong side of that line. I accept this—many laws, such as speed limits, rely on arbitrary numbers, and we all do our best to obey them. But who’s really to blame when a teenager claims to be an age she isn’t? The deceiver or the deceived? Roberta was a camp coun—”
“You know what?” JoAnn said, raising her voice above Roger’s. “Why don’t you just stop there?”
Roger looked up from the page, puzzled and clearly annoyed.
“But I just started,” he said.
“That’s all right,” JoAnn told him. “I think we’ve all had enough of you for today.” She turned to Ruth. “Let’s just hear from our final reader, and then we’ll take the multiple-choice quiz.”
“Do I really have to do this?” Ruth asked.
“Everyone else went,” JoAnn reminded her.
“Not me,” Roger said. “I was censored.”
“That wasn’t censorship,” JoAnn informed him. “That was self-defense.”
“I’m just not comfortable with this,” Ruth explained.
“It can’t be any worse than what I said,” Trisha told her.
“No one’s judging anyone,” C. J. said. “We’re just sharing our experiences.”
“I felt like people were judging me,” Trisha said. “I sensed a lot of disapproval in the room.”
“What did you expect?” JoAnn asked her. “A pat on the back?”
“I respect everyone else for volunteering,” Ruth said. “But I’d really like to take a pass.”
“Do what you have to,” JoAnn told her. “But I think you should be aware of the fact that I’m evaluating you on participation, not just attendance. If you don’t participate, you’ll just have to come back next month.”
“That’s not fair,” Ruth said.
“Just read the damn thing already,” Roger told her. “You could’ve been finished by now.”
THEY’D AGREED to share the tiramisu, but Paul didn’t even bother to pick up his spoon.
“This is really good,” she told him. “You should at least try some.”
“That’s okay. I’m stuffed.”
“Stuffed? You barely touched your dinner.”
“Something happened to my metabolism when I lost the weight. I’m just not hungry anymore. I think it’s actually more of a psychological than a physical thing.”
Ruth wondered if he had some kind of eating disorder but decided to keep it to herself.
“So how come you haven’t gotten remarried?” she asked. “You’ve been divorced for a long time.”
“I don’t know.” He picked up his wineglass, realized it was empty, then put it back down. “Maybe I’m just having too much fun being single. I travel a lot for work, and I meet a lot of women. I’d hate to have to hide out in my hotel room all night, or feel guilty about flirting with some pretty sales rep at a bar.”
“Just flirting? Or is that a euphemism?”
“I go with the flow,” he explained, with just a trace of smugness. “If something’s meant to happen it will. If not, that’s cool, too.”
Ruth hadn’t spent time in hotel bars, and didn’t know a whole lot about the sexual habits of business travelers, but it was easy to imagine Paul doing well in that setting. He was a fit, handsome, soft-spoken man with a nice tan and an inspiring story to tell, a cut above the aging frat boys who’d be his main competition.
“But what about when you’re home?” she said. “Don’t you get lonely?”
He seemed surprised by the question.
“Not really. I work long hours. I go to the gym. I see my kids on the weekend. Most of the time I’m so busy I don’t even think about it.”
“I have days like that,” she said. “But sometimes I get depressed. Usually at night, when I’m alone in bed. It’s like, why are all these other people able to find love, and I’m not? Is there something wrong with me?”
“Don’t bring love into it,” he said, smiling as though he were making a little joke. “That just confuses the issue.”
Ruth wasn’t sure what he meant, but she smiled back at him anyway. He glanced at their waitress, who was taking orders at a nearby table.
“More wine? Or should I get the check?”
“Whatever,” she said. “I’m ready when you are.”
She felt his leg brush against hers under the table.
“I’m ready now,” he told her.
“I’VE MADE a few mistakes in my life,” Ruth began. “Some of them have involved sex, and at least a couple have been pretty big.”
She’d experienced a sudden breakthrough near the end of the writing session, and had composed her entire statement in a five-minute burst of inspiration. At the time, she’d felt as though she were articulating something true and important, but now that she was speaking them out loud, her words seemed vaguely embarrassing to her. They even looked childish on the page, no more substantial than the doodled universe floating above them.
“It would be all too easy to pick one of these errors and tell you what I should have done differently, and how much better my life would be if I’d been mature and responsible enough not to have made it. But I’m not sure I believe that. I think it would be more accurate to say that we are our mistakes, or at least that they’re an essential part of our identities. When we disavow our mistakes, aren’t we also disavowing ourselves, saying that we wish we were someone else?
“I’m halfway through my life, and as far as I can tell, the real lesson of the past isn’t that I made some mistakes, it’s that I didn’t make nearly enough of them. I doubt I’ll be lying on my deathbed in forty or fifty years, congratulating myself on the fact that I never had sex in an airplane with a handsome Italian businessman, or patting myself on the back for all those years of involuntary celibacy I endured after my divorce. If recent experience is any guide, I’ll probably be lying in that hospital bed with my body full of tubes, sneaking glances at the handsome young doctor, wishing that I hadn’t been such a coward. Wishing I’d taken more risks, made more mistakes, and accumulated more regrets. Just wishing I’d lived when I had the chance.”
* * *
THEY WENT back to Paul’s hotel room and began to kiss, experimentally at first, and then with more conviction. After a while, he slid his hand down her back and onto her skirt.
“You always had a nice ass,” he told her.
“It’s not what it used to be,” she warned him.
“Feels okay to me,” he said, punctuating this assessment with a gentle squeeze. “If you take your clothes off, I’ll be happy to perform a more thorough examination.”
If there was anything in the world Ruth wanted less at that moment than a thorough examination of her ass, she wasn’t sure what it might be.
“I’ll take your word for it,” she told him.
He kissed his way down her neck to the opening of her blouse and began undoing the buttons, revealing her lacy black bra.
“Mmm,” he said. “Look at that.”
She placed her hand on top of his.
“Not yet. I’m feeling a little shy.”
Paul didn’t argue. He stepped away from her, looking directly into her eyes, and unthreaded his tie.
“It’s okay. I’ll go first.”
With the teasing patience of a stripper, he unbuttoned his shirt. His chest was bronzed and nearly hairless, his belly startlingly flat. He checked for her reaction.
“You look good,” she told him.
“It’s amazing.” He gazed affectionately down the length of his torso. “I can see my feet.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off his socks and shoes. Then he undid his pants.
“Don’t be surprised if it looks a little bigger than it used to,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice. “It’s not actually bigger, but the proportions in that area are different now. I think what it was, my belly actually used to make it look smaller than it really is.”
“Makes sense,” she said.
Wearing only boxers, he lay down on the bed and smiled up at her, hands cupped behind his head.
“Why don’t you take your clothes off and join me?”
“In a minute,” she said. “I’m not quite ready yet.”
Paul slid his hand inside the waistband of his shorts and began stroking himself.
“You’re a sexy woman,” he said. “It really turns me on to have you watching me.”
“I’m glad,” she replied.
He wriggled out of his boxers and tossed them on the floor near her feet.
“Your turn,” he said.
Ruth wasn’t sure what was holding her back. In theory, this was what she’d come here for. But for some reason she couldn’t move.
“Something wrong?” he asked. “Am I freaking you out?”
“It’s not you,” she assured him. “I just haven’t been with anyone for a long time.”
He nodded thoughtfully and sat up.
“We don’t have to fuck,” he said. “You could just go down on me if you want. You were always great at that.”
“I was fifteen,” she told him. “I didn’t have a clue.”
“Coulda fooled me,” he said, scooching back to the edge of the mattress. “I thought you were amazing.”
Ruth hesitated for a moment before kneeling at his feet. It felt like the least she could do.
“Sweetheart,” he whispered.
The night had been interesting. It had been a pleasure to reconnect with Paul after all these years, to find him physically transformed and happier than ever. She was touched by how fondly he remembered their time together, and flattered by the fact that he still wanted her.
“Oh, Ruthie,” he said, running his fingers through her hair. “I’ve been waiting for this.”
Paul’s penis was hard, just a few inches from her mouth, and it did seem bigger than she remembered. It was a very inconvenient time for her to be thinking about Tim Mason, and the way he’d looked at her earlier in the evening, after she twirled around for him on the sidewalk in front of her house. The twilight had been fading, and there was some distance between them, but his face seemed oddly vivid as he studied her, full of pain and longing.
Do I look okay?
Her question had seemed innocent enough at the time—part curiosity, part harmless flirtation—but it had been a physical shock to receive the answer, to register the full unspoken force of his approval, a jolt to her system from which she still hadn’t recovered. She would’ve given a lot to still be standing with Tim on that dark quiet street, instead of kneeling here on the coarse hotel carpet, thinking how unhappy Paul was going to be in a second or two, when she stood up and told him that she’d made a mistake and needed to go home.