Good In Bed Part 19

"I'm really looking forward to meeting you," she said.

"I have to go now," I said, and hung up the phone. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, so I wound up doing both at the same time.

"Beyond awful," I said to Samantha on the car phone.

"A freak like you wouldn't believe," I told Andy over lunch.

"Don't judge," Bruce warned me, before I'd even said a word.

"She's... um. She's into sharing. Lots of sharing."

"That's good," he said, doing his squinchy-blinky thing. "You should do more sharing, Cannie."

"Huh? Me?"

"You're very closed with your emotions. You keep everything so tight inside you."

"You know, you're right," I said. "Let's find a total stranger so I can tell how my piano teacher groped me."

"Huh?"

"She was molested," I said. "And she told me all the gory details."

Even Mr. Love Everyone seemed taken aback by this information. "Oh my."

"Yeah. And her mother had breast cancer, and her stepmother convinced her father not to pay her community college loans."

Bruce looked at me skeptically. "She told you all this?"

"What do you think, I drove home and read her diary? Of course she told me!" I paused to poach a few french fries off his plate. We were at the Tick Tock Diner, home of the enormous portion and the surliest waitresses south of New York. I never ordered fries there, but I used all my powers of persuasion to get Bruce to order them, so I could share. "She sounds seriously cracked."

"You probably made her uncomfortable."

"But I didn't say anything! She's never even met me! And she was the one who called me, so how could I make her uncomfortable?"

Bruce shrugged. "It's just the way you are, I guess."

I scowled at him. He reached for my hand. "Don't get mad. It's just that... you have this kind of judgmental thing going on."

"Says who?"

"Well, my friends, I guess."

"What, just because I think they should get jobs?"

"See, there you go. That's judgmental."

"Honey, they're slackers. Accept it. It's the truth."

"They're not slackers, Cannie. They do have jobs, you know."

"Oh, come on. What does Eric Silverberg do for a living?"

Eric, as we both knew, had a full-time temporary job at an Internet startup, where, as best we could both figure, he spent his days trading Springsteen bootleg tapes, meeting girls on one of the three online dating services he subscribed to, and arranging drug buys.

"George has a real job."

"George spends every weekend in a Civil War reenactment brigade. George owns his own musket."

"You're changing the subject," Bruce said. I could tell he was trying to stay angry, but he was starting to smile.

"I know," I said. "It's just that a guy who has his own musket is such an easy punchline."

I stood up, crossed the table, and sat down next to him on his side of the booth, squeezing his thigh and resting my head against his shoulder. "You know the only reason I'm judgmental is because I'm jealous," I said. "I wish I could have that kind of life. No college loans to pay, rent taken care of, nice, stable, married heteros.e.xual parents who'd set me up with their slightly used furniture every time they redecorate and buy me a car for Chanukah..." My voice trailed off. Bruce was staring at me hard. I realized that, in addition to describing most of his friends, I'd just described him, too.

"I'm sorry," I said gently. "It's just that sometimes it feels like everybody's got things easier than I do, and that every time I get close to having things be kind of okay... something like this happens."

"Did you ever think that maybe these things happen to you because you're strong enough to take them?" Bruce asked. He reached down, grabbed my hand, and moved it up on his thigh. Way up. "You're so strong, Cannie," he whispered.

"I just," I said, "I wish..." And then he was kissing me. I could taste ketchup and salt on his lips. Then his tongue was in my mouth. I shut my eyes and let myself forget.

I spent the weekend at Bruce's apartment. It was one of those times where we got it just right: good s.e.x, a nice meal out, lazy afternoons trading sections of the Sunday Times, and then I was on my way home before we started grating on each other. We talked about my mother a little bit, but mostly I got to just lose myself with him. And he gave me his favorite flannel s.h.i.+rt to wear home. It smelled like him, like us: like dope and s.e.x, his skin and my shampoo. It was too tight across my chest- all of his things were- but the sleeves fell to my finger-tips, and I felt enclosed, comforted, as if he was there hugging me tight, holding my hands.

Be brave, I thought back home in my bed. I pulled Bruce's s.h.i.+rt tight around me, tilted my cheek toward Nifkin so he could give me an encouraging lick, and phoned home.

Thankfully, my mother answered. "Cannie!" she said, sounding relieved. "Where have you been? I've been calling and calling..."

"I went to Bruce's," I told her. "We had theater tickets," I lied. Bruce didn't do well in theaters. Short attention span.

"Well," she said. "Well. Um, I want to tell you that I'm sorry for springing things on you like that. I guess I should have... well, I know I should have waited and maybe told you in person..."

"Or at least not at the office," I said.

She laughed. "Right. I'm sorry."

"It's okay."

"So..." I could almost hear her testing half a dozen opening remarks in her head. "Do you have any questions?" she finally asked.

I took a deep breath. "Are you happy?"

"I feel like I'm in high school!" my mother said jubilantly. "I feel... oh, I can't even describe it."

Please, don't try, I thought.

"Tanya's really terrific. You'll see."

"How old is she?" I asked.

"Thirty-six," said my fifty-six-year-old mother.

"A younger woman," I observed. My mother giggled. You have no idea how disturbing that was. My mother has never been the giggling type.

"She does seem to have a little problem with... boundaries," I ventured.

My mother's voice got very serious. "What do you mean?"

"Well, she called me Friday morning... I guess you weren't there"

A quick intake of breath. "What did she say?"

"It might take me less time to cover what she didn't say."

"Oh, G.o.d. Oh, Cannie."

"I mean, I'm sorry she was, you know, molested..."

"Oh, Cannie, she didn't!" But underneath the shocked, horrified tone, my mother sounded... almost proud. As if underneath the anger, she was indulging a favored child in the child's favorite prank.

"Yup," I said grimly. "I got the whole saga, from the piano teacher who tickled her ivories..."

"... Cannie!"

"... and the wicked stepmother, to the obsessive-compulsive co-dependent ex-girlfriend."

"Ack," said my mother. "Jeez."

"She might want to consider some therapy," I said.

"She goes. Believe me, she goes. She's been going for years."

"And she still hasn't figured out that you don't go blurting your whole life story to a complete stranger the first time you speak to them?"

My mother sighed. "I guess not," she said.

I waited. I waited for an apology, an explanation, something that could make sense of this. Nothing came. After a moment of awkward silence, my mother changed the subject, and I went along, hoping this was a phase, a fling, a bad dream, even. No such luck. Tanya had arrived for good.

What does a lesbian bring on a second date? goes the joke. A U-Haul. What does a gay guy bring on a second date? What second date?

An old joke, true, but there's a certain amount of truth to it. After they started dating, Tanya did in fact move out of the bas.e.m.e.nt of her codependent obsessive-compulsive ex-girlfriend's condominium and into an apartment of her own.

But for all intents and purposes, she'd moved in on the second date. I realized this when I came home six weeks after what my siblings and I were referring to as Mom's Outage, and saw the writing on the wall.

Well, the poster on the wall. "Inspiration," it read, above a picture of a cresting wave, "is believing we can all pull together."

"Mom?" I called, dropping my bags on the floor. Nifkin, meanwhile, was whining and cringing by my legs in a most un-Nifkin-like manner.

"In here, honey," yelled my mother.

Honey? I wondered, and walked into the family room with Nifkin cowering behind me. This time, the new poster was of frolicking dolphins. "Teamwork," it said. And beneath the dolphin poster were my mother and a woman who could only be Tanya, in matching purple sweatsuits.

"Hey!" said Tanya.

"Hey," my mother repeated.

A large tangerine-colored cat leapt off of the windowsill, stalked insolently up to Nifkin, and stretched out a paw, claws extended. Nifkin gave a shrill yip and fled.

"Gertrude! Bad cat!" called Tanya. The cat ignored her and curled up in a patch of sunlight in the center of the room.

"Nifkin!" I called. From upstairs I heard a faint whine of protest- Nifkin-speak for no way, no day.

"Do we have employees that we're trying to motivate?" I asked, pointing at the teamwork dolphins.

"Huh?" said Tanya.

"What?" said my mother.

"The posters," I said. "We've got the exact same ones in the printing plant at work. Right next to the "27 Days Injury Free" sign. They're, like, motivational artwork."

Tanya shrugged. I'd been expecting a standard-issue gym teacher, with sinewy calves and ropy biceps and a no-nonsense haircut. Evidently I'd been expecting wrong. Tanya was a tiny boiled pea of a woman, barely five feet tall, with an aureole of frizzy reddish hair and skin tanned the color and consistency of old leather. No chest or hips to speak of. She looked like a little kid, right down to the scabby knees and the Band-Aid wrapped around one finger. "I just like dolphins," she said shyly.

"Uh-huh," I said. "I see."

And those were just the most obvious of the changes. There was a collection of dolphin figurines above the fireplace where the family pictures had been. Plastic magazine racks were bolted to the walls, giving our family room the look of a doctor's office- the better to display Tanya's copies of Rehabilitation magazine. And when I went to drop my bags in my room, the door wouldn't open.

"Mom!" I called, "there's something wrong up here!"

I heard a whispered consultation going on in the kitchen: my mother's voice calm and soothing, Tanya's ba.s.s grumble rising toward hysteria. Every once in a while I could make out words. "Therapist" and "privacy" seemed to comprise a dominant theme. Finally my mother walked up the stairs, looking troubled.

"Um, actually, I was going to talk to you about this."

"About what? The door being stuck?"

"Well, the door's locked, actually."

I just stared.

"Tanya's kind of been... keeping some of her things in there."

"Tanya," I pointed out, "has an apartment. Can't she keep her things there?"

My mother shrugged. "Well, it's a very small apartment. An effi-ciency, really. And it just kind of made sense... maybe you can sleep in Josh's room tonight."

At this point I was getting impatient. "Ma, it's my room. I'd like to sleep in my room. What's the big deal?"

"Well, Cannie, you don't... you don't live here anymore."