wrong with rebound, I wonder? If there was a first and it didn’t work out, then there has to be a second, a next. Eventually, you have to move on.
If first love was like exploring a new continent, I think that second love is like moving to a new neighborhood. You already know there will be streets and houses. Now you have the pleasure of learning what the houses look like inside, how the streets feel beneath your feet. You know the rules, the basic vocabulary: phone calls, Valentine’s Day chocolates, how to comfort a woman when she tells you what’s gone wrong in her day, in her life. Now you can fine-tune. You find her nickname, how she likes her hand held, the sweet spot just beneath the curve of her jaw…
And that was as far as I’d made it before running to the toilet for my second hurl of the day. Just the idea of Bruce kissing someone else on the sweet spot just beneath the curve of her jaw – even the thought of him noticing such a thing – was enough to send my already queasy stomach into revolt. He doesn’t love me anymore. I had to keep reminding myself of that, and every time I thought those words, it was like hearing them for the first time, in all-capital italic letters, being boomed out by the guy who did voice- overs for movie previews: HE DOESN’T LOVE ME ANYMORE.
“It must be tough,” mused Tanya.
“It’s ridiculous,” I snapped. And really, the whole situation was pretty ridiculous. After three years of resisting his pleas, his offers, his desperate importunings, and biweekly proclamations that I was the only woman he’d ever want, we were apart, I was pregnant, and he’d found somebody else, and I would, most likely, never see him again. (Never was another word I’d hear in my head a lot, as in: You’ll never wake up next to him again, or, You’ll never talk to him on the telephone.)
“So what are you going to do?” she asked.
“That’s the big question,” I said, and hopped off the table and onto my bike, heading back home. Except it didn’t feel like home any-more and, thanks to Tanya’s invasion, I wasn’t sure it ever would again.
The less you know about your parents’ sex lives, the better. Sure, you figure, they had to have done it at least once, to get you, and then maybe a few more times, if you had brothers and sisters, but that was procreation; that was duty, and the thought of them using their various openings and attachments for fun, for pleasure – in short, in the manner you, their child, would like to be using yours – was nothing short of sick-making. Particularly if they were having the kind of trendy, cutting-edge love life that was all the rage in the late 1990s. You don’t need to know about your parents having sex, and you especially don’t need to know about them having hipper sex than you are.
Unfortunately, thanks to Tanya’s self-help training, and my mother’s being rendered senseless by love, I got the whole story.
It started when my brother, Josh, came home from college and was rummaging in my mother’s bathroom for the toenail clippers, when he came across a small stack of Hallmark greeting cards – the kind with abstract watercolors of birds and trees on the front, and florid calligraphy’d sentiments inside. “Thinking of you,” read the front of one, and inside, beneath the rhymed Hallmark couplet, someone had written, “Annie, after three months, the fire still burns strong.” No signature.
“I think they’re from this woman,” said Josh.
“What woman?” I asked.
“The one who’s living here,” said Josh. “Mom says she’s her swim coach.”
A live-in swim coach? This was the first I’d heard of it.
“It’s probably nothing,” I told Josh.
“It’s probably nothing,” Bruce told me, when I’d talked to him that night.
And that was how I started my conversation with my mother when she called at work two days later: “This is probably nothing, but…”
“Yes?” asked my mother.
“Is there, um, someone else… living there?”
“My swim coach,” she said.
“You know, the Olympics were last year,” I said, playing along.
“Tanya’s a friend of mine from the Jewish Community Center. She’s between apartments, and she’s staying in Josh’s room for a few days.”
This sounded slightly suspect. My mother didn’t have friends who lived in apartments, let alone who slept over because they were between them. Her friends all lived in the houses their ex-husbands had left, just like she did. But I let it go until the next time I called home and an unfamiliar voice answered the telephone.
“H’lo?” the strange voice growled. It was, at first, impossible to tell whether I was talking to a woman or a man. But whoever it was sounded as if they’d just gotten out of bed, even though it was almost eight o’clock on a Friday night.
“I’m sorry,” I said politely, “I think I have the wrong number.” “Is this Cannie?” demanded the voice.
“Yes. Who’s this, please?”
“Tanya,” she said proudly. “I’m a friend of your mother’s.” “Oh,” I said. “Oh. Hi.” “Your mother’s told me a lot about you.” “Well, that’s… that’s good,” I said. My mind was churning. Who was this person, and what was she doing answering our telephone?
“But she’s not here right now,” Tanya continued. “She’s playing bridge. With her bridge group.” “Right.” “Do you want me to have her call you?” “No,” I said, “no, that’s okay.” That was Friday. I didn’t speak to my mother again until she called on Monday afternoon at work.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” I asked her, expecting her to say some variation of “No.” Instead, she took a deep breath.
“Well, you know, Tanya… my friend? She’s… well. We’re in love and we’re living together.”
What can I say? Subtlety and discretion run in the family.
“I’ve got to go,” I said, and hung up the phone.
I spent the whole rest of the afternoon staring blankly into space, which, believe me, did nothing to add to the quality of my article about the MTV Video Music Awards. At home, there were three messages on my machine: one from my mother (“Cannie, call me, we need to discuss this”); one from Lucy (“Mom said I have to call you and she didn’t say why”); and one from Josh (“I TOLD you so!”).
I ignored all of them, instead rounding up Samantha for an emergency dessert and strategy session. We went to the bar around the corner, where I ordered a shot of tequila and a slab of chocolate cake with raspberry sauce. Thus fortified, I told her what my mother had told me.
“Wow,” murmured Samantha.
“Good God!” said Bruce, when I told him later that night. But it wasn’t long before his initial shock turned into… well, call it shocked amusement. With a heavy helping of condescension. By the time he arrived at my door he was in full-blown good liberal mode. “You should be glad she’s found someone to love,” he lectured.
“I am,” I said slowly. “I mean, I guess I am. It’s just that…”
“Glad,” Bruce repeated. He could get a little insufferable when it came to toeing the P.C. party line, and to mouthing the beliefs that were practically mandatory among graduate students in the northeast in the nineties. Most of the time I let him get away with it. But this time I wasn’t going to let him make me feel like a bigot, or like I was less open-minded and accepting than he was. This time it was personal.
“How many gay friends do you have?” I asked, knowing what the answer was.
“None, but…”
“None that you know of,” I said, and paused while he let that sink in.
