The implication was that he could not be held responsible for his actions. It was not a comforting message, but still I stayed, not because I felt sorry for him but because I didn't know how to leave. It would have been awkward — or rather,more awkward — and while I definitely thought about it, the mechanics were beyond me. Then, too, I couldn't help believe that I'ddeserved to have my blood tested. I had asked whom his mother loved more, him or his sister. I'd thought I was clever, had prided myself on my ability to drive someone away, and this had been my punishment. The way I saw it, we were even.
When I'd finished with the bedroom, we moved on to the living room, Martin toddling two steps behind me. I gathered some scattered newspapers and magazines into a single pile and had just started dusting the TV when he sank down onto the sofa and activated a porno tape preset in the VCR. It was a military story. A buck private had failed to properly shine his sergeant's boots, and now there would be hell to pay. 'You ever seen this?' Martin asked. I told him I didn't have a VCR, and as he pulled off his shorts, I turned away.
My housecleaning role model was a woman named Lena Payne, who worked for my family in the late 1960s. I used to come home from school and watch with great interest as she tackled the kitchen floor. 'Use a mop,' my mother would say, 'that's what I do,' and Lena would lower her head in pity. She knew what my mother did not: either you want a clean floor or you want to use a mop, but you can't have both. Whether it was ironing or deciding how to punish a child, Lena knew best, and so she became indispensable. Like her, I wanted to control households and make people feel lazy and spoiled without ever coming out and saying so. 'Didn't you have potato chipsyesterday?' she'd ask, frowning at the can as big as a kettledrum my sisters and I parked in front of the TV. Suggesting that potato chips were an overindulged luxury caused them to lose their taste and meant there'd be fewer crumbs to vacuum at the end of the day. She was smart, and very good at her job. I worshipped her.
Standing in Martin's living room, the sweat dripping off my face, I wondered how Lena might have reacted had one of us peeled off our pants and proceeded to masturbate to a movie calledFort Dicks. We didn't have video back then, but if we did, I imagine she'd have said exactly what I had, 'I don't have a VCR.' It would have stoppedme, but this guy was obviously wired differently.
Whack, whack, whack. Whack, whack, whack. Martin's forearm batted against a newspaper lying at his side, and I turned on the vacuum in order to cover the noise. There was no way I was going to acknowledge either him or the TV, and so I kept my head down, reworking the same spot until my shoulder started to ache and I switched arms.Just pretend it isn 't happening, I told myself, but this was unlike ignoring a subway car musician or a crazy stranger seated next to you at a restaurant counter. Like the cough of a sick person, Martin's efforts broadcast germs, a debilitating shame bug that traveled across the room in search of a new host. How terrible it is to be wrong, to go out on a limb and make an advance that isn't reciprocated. I thought of the topless stay-at-home wife, opening the door to the gay UPS driver, of all those articles suggesting you surprise that certain someone by serving dessert in the nude or offering up an unexpected striptease. They never tell you what to do should that someone walk out of the room or look at you with that mix of disgust and pity that ten, twenty, fifty years later will still cause you to burn every time you think about it. I've had some experience in this department, and Martin's depressing, wrongheaded display brought it all flooding back. I thought of the time. . And of the time. .
Whack, whack, whack. Whack, whack, whack.
It had now become the kind of masturbation that's an exercise in determination rather than pleasure. You'd give up but, godammit, you're the kind of person who carries a job through to the end, whether it's making a fool of yourself in front of a stranger or vacuuming somebody's living room.I will finish this, you think.I will finish this. And he did, eventually, climaxing with a bleak, long-winded moan. The paper at his elbow ceased its rattling, the video was turned off, and after pulling up his pants, he scooted into the bedroom. I didn't expect him to come back out and was surprised when he returned moments later with a stack of cash.
'You can stop vacuuming now,' he said.
'But I'm not finished.'
'I think you are,' he said. Then he stepped closer and started handing me money. 'Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty…' He counted softly, and with a different voice than he'd been using for the past two hours. This one was higher and passive, shaded with the kind of relief that follows a prolonged impersonation. 'A hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty…' He counted to two hundred, which was over six times what I normally would have made. 'Is that right?' he asked, and before I could answer, he topped the stack with a thirty-dollar tip.
'Let me ask you something,' I said.
In recounting the rest of the story, it would be the next part that I could never get quite right, in part because it was so implausible but mainly because, between the blood taking and the five blankets, it was just too much. I assumed that Martin had learned about me from theNew York Times, and he had. He'd read the article, written my name on a piece of paper, and looked me up in the phone book. He had also, it seemed, taken down the number of an erotic housecleaning service he'd found in the back of a porno magazine. The names and numbers had gotten confused, and he had phoned thinking that I was the sexpot. Such things happen, I guess, but you'd think that on seeing me, he might have realized his mistake. I've never dealt with an erotic housecleaning service, but something tells me the employees are hired for their looks rather than their vacuuming skills. Something tells me they only surface clean.
I'd wonder for weeks why Martin had put up with me. In his growing impatience, it seemed he would have simply told me what he wanted, but that would have required a different temperament, a straightforwardness that neither of us was capable of. In the phrase book of the indirect, 'FIRE ISLAND' means 'Let us masturbate together,' while 'Who does your mother love more?' translates to 'I prefer to clean the kitchen in private, please.' 'I don't have a VCR' equals 'Your behavior troubles me,' and 'You can always. . you know' means 'I think you should probably take your clothes off now.' 'What do you say we test your blood sugar' — that was just craziness talking.
After I'd collected my bag, Martin saw me to the door. 'We'll have to do this again sometime,' he said, meaning that we would never see each other again.
'That would be nice,' I told him.
He offered his warm, gooey hand, and in a spirit of brotherhood, I accepted it.
The End of the Affair
ON A SUMMER EVENING in Paris, Hugh and I went to seeThe End of the Affair, a Neil Jordan adaptation of the Graham Greene novel. I had trouble keeping my eyes open because I was tired and not completely engaged. Hugh had trouble keeping his eyes open because they were essentially swollen shut: he sobbed from beginning to end, and by the time we left the theater, he was completely dehydrated. I asked if he always cried during comedies, and he accused me of being grossly insensitive, a charge I'm trying to plea-bargain down to simply obnoxious.
Looking back, I should have known better than to accompany Hugh to a love story. Such movies are always a danger, as unlike battling aliens or going undercover to track a serial killer, falling in love is something most adults have actually experienced at some point in their lives. The theme is universal and encourages the viewer to make a number of unhealthy comparisons, ultimately raising the question 'Why can'tour lives be like that?' It's a box best left unopened, and its avoidance explains the continued popularity of vampire epics and martial-arts extravaganzas.
The End of the Affairmade me look like an absolute toad. The movie's voracious couple was played by Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore, who did everything but eat each other. Their love was doomed and clandestine, and even when the bombs were falling, they looked radiant. The picture was fairly highbrow, so I was surprised when the director employed a device most often seen in TV movies of the week: everything's going along just fine and then one of the characters either coughs or sneezes, meaning that within twenty minutes he or she will be dead. It might have been different had Julianne Moore suddenly started bleeding from the eyes, but coughing, in and of itself, is fairly pedestrian. When she did it, Hugh cried. When I did it, he punched me in the shoulder and told me to move. 'I can't wait until she dies,' I whispered. I don't know if it was their good looks or their passion, but something about Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes put me on the defensive.
