Then Came You Read online

  “I don’t know. Since this afternoon, I guess.” He stretched his arms over his head, yawning loudly. In our time together, I’d learned that Marcus seemed incapable of accomplishing a yawn, or a sneeze, or any other involuntary action at a volume less than deafening. It should have driven me crazy, but, somehow, I found it endearing. “We got any Pepcid?”

  I hurried to the medicine cabinet. When I came back Marcus was rubbing at his chest with his knuckles. Fear tightened screws in my own chest. “I’m calling the doctor.”

  “Honey, don’t. It’s nothing.”

  Lightly, I said, “We’re paying for concierge service. Might as well use it.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said again. . but the way he moved, stiff-legged, to the living room, before lying down gingerly on the sofa, told me otherwise.

  It turned out to be a constricted artery — no big deal, the doctor said, but better to deal with it sooner rather than later. Marcus went to Beth Israel that night, and his cardiologist did a cardiac catheterization the next morning. The radioactive dye he injected showed exactly where the artery was pinched. A simple fix, said the doctor, explaining how he’d thread a catheter through Marcus’s chest, inflate a tiny balloon, use a laser to blast away the bits of plaque that remained, then pop in a stent. “Your husband will be good as new!” I held on tight to Marcus’s hand as he lay on the stretcher the next morning, his legs pale beneath the blue-checked hospital gown, his normal smell of cologne diminished by whatever cleanser they’d used on the patch of shaved skin on his chest. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” he said, and kissed my cheek. I tried not to notice that his breath was stale and his cheek felt sandpapery. Do I love him enough? I wondered. If something went wrong, if I ended up caring for him, would I think of him fondly, or would he just be a burden, a sick old man holding me down?

  Up in the hospital cafeteria, in my three-hundred-dollar jeans and a mohair sweater, light and soft, I sipped a cup of watery coffee, imagining, in spite of myself, what would happen if things went badly. I pictured Marcus’s vast fortune as a pie, a pie currently split into four slices, one for each of his children plus a slice for his granddaughter, little Violet, a squat and beady-eyed creature with two crooked teeth, notable only for her ability to produce endless rivers of drool. Unconsciously, I pressed my hand against my midriff. I was over forty and had been on the Pill for more than two decades. Could I have a baby with Marcus? Was it even possible? Maybe it was time to find out.

  I tossed my coffee cup and found myself thinking about my own mother. Her parents had named her Lorraine, but when she was a teenager she’d shortened it to Raine. Raine Stavros, first-generation American. Her parents had emigrated from Skiathos, Greece, and ended up running a diner in Toledo, where they gave birth to a fine-boned, tiny-waisted girl with wide brown eyes, a proud, shapely nose, and wavy dark-brown hair.

  Lorraine might have become captain of the cheerleading squad and queen of the prom before going off to the college education her parents had spent years saving to pay for. Instead, she got pregnant the summer she was seventeen, and rather than having an abortion or giving up the baby, she had me, and named me Samantha. Her high-school boyfriend said he’d marry her, had even given her a ring, but he enlisted in the army three months before I was born. . and this was during Vietnam. Not exactly an endorsement of what he thought life with a wife and a baby might be like.

  Raine — even before I could talk, she’d instructed me to never, ever call her “Mom”—dropped out of high school. Three days after I was born, she drove home from the hospital, dropped me at her parents’ house, and then, full of righteous indignation, pot, and possibly LSD, she’d taken off with her best friend in a secondhand VW Vanagon to see the world, or at least the parts of it the Grateful Dead were touring that summer. She never really came home.

  When I was old enough to understand, my yaya wasted no time in telling me that she was not my mother, a fact I’d already gleaned by comparing her stiff, beauty-parlor-dyed curls and lined face to the ponytails and peppy smiles of my classmates’ moms. “Here’s your mother,” Yaya would say, tapping one fingernail against a picture of a sullen Raine in a dress that looked like it was made out of canvas, with an empire-style waist that gathered beneath her breasts, then fell straight to the floor: a good look, considering that she was four months pregnant when the picture was taken.

  “Where is she?” I would ask, and Yaya would give one of her sighs and dutifully pull out the atlas, running her finger across the country to land on the location of the Dead’s latest show. I had more questions—Why did she leave me? and When will she come back? chief among them — but my grandmother’s pinched face, her expression somewhere between sad and furious, kept my mouth shut.

  My mother would come home a few times a year and she usually managed to show up around the holidays. She’d appear the day before Thanksgiving or three days after Christmas and, usually, in the week either before or after my birthday, as if she couldn’t quite remember when the actual day had been. I remember sitting at the window, watching her slam a car door shut and bounce up the driveway, still looking like a teenager. There would be presents in her hands, the smell of incense in her clothes, necklaces twinkling against her cleavage, feathered earrings tangling in her hair. There would usually be a man in tow, hanging shyly behind her shoulder, or holding her hand possessively. Sometimes she’d be tan, if she’d been out west or down in Florida. Her hair was long then, dark-brown and shiny, hanging almost to her waist. Once, she’d come with her hair in a hundred narrow braids, with different-colored beads on the end of each one. I sat on her lap and ran my fingers endlessly through those braids, gathering them into bunches, then parting them like curtains.

  I remember that her fingernails were always painted, usually either dark red or silver, and that her front teeth had bumpy little ridges on their bottoms. Once she showed up in cowgirl boots made of red leather, and I wanted those boots more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life. Easter Sunday, when I was six, she showed up at church in a white lace skirt that turned out to be completely see-through in the bright sunshine of the Easter egg roll that was held on the church’s front lawn (my yaya, in a polyester blouse and black skirt, had hustled her wayward daughter back to the station wagon, hissing “You’re not decent!”).

  Raine wore a silver ring on the second toe of her left foot and the Claddagh ring that my father had given her on her right hand. She had a blue unicorn galloping over a rainbow tattooed on her right hip. “Don’t tell Yaya,” she’d said merrily, laughing as she soaped me off in the shower, then gathered me into one of her mother’s stiff, line-dried towels, rubbing my skin until I was pink. It stung, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of complaining. I wanted her hands on me, even if they hurt. I had so little of her — a few snapshots I’d peeled from my grandparents’ photo albums and kept in a shoebox under my bed, a handful of postcards she’d sent from around the country, a feathered roach clip that I’d found behind a couch cushion, and saved without knowing what it was. If I could have gotten that same tattoo, I would have done it. I wanted to be marked as hers; I wanted every moment I had with her to count.

  One Christmas Day when I was nine, Raine had arrived, a little tipsy at eleven o’clock in the morning, with a red-and-white Santa hat askew on her head, her mouth bright with lipstick, flashing an engagement ring with a tiny diamond and introducing me to a shy young man who she said would be my new daddy. My grandmother’s face folded tight as she yanked out the pullout couch, muttering in Greek. The man got the couch (my uncle Ryan’s bedroom had been turned into a study), and Raine slept where she normally did, next to me in my single bed, in the narrow rectangle of a room that had once been hers. The faded pink wallpaper was dotted with red and white balloons; the closet, behind accordion-style plywood doors, still held some of her clothing; and her stuff was still pinned to the walls: a blue ribbon she’d won in a swim meet, a Polaroid of her and her onetime best friend at a pick-your-own-pumpkin patch, Jerry
Garcia’s face, emerging from a tie-dye swirl on a black velvet poster above the bed.

  She pulled me against her, whispering about how we’d move to Los Angeles and have a tree that grew lemons in our backyard. “You’ll love California, Sammie,” she said, telling me about a road that ran along the cliffs looking over the ocean, and a restaurant high on a bluff where you could eat fried shrimp and watch the surfers; the bonfires that dotted the sand at night, and how there was music, always music, everywhere you went. I fought to keep from falling asleep, wanting to stay up all night listening to her, wanting to hear every word.

  When I woke up, she was gone. The sheets were still warm from her body; the pillow still smelled like her hair. I gathered it against me, telling myself that she’d come back and take me away, to the house with the lemon tree in the backyard, to the beach with the surfers and their bonfires. We would eat fried shrimp and salty French fries and listen to music all night long. I didn’t see her again until I was seventeen.

  In the hospital, with my husband in surgery, with a ring worth more than my grandparents’ house on my finger, I stared out the window and thought about slicing up that pie: Trey and Tommy, Bettina and the baby. What would be left for me? Then I pictured Marcus waking up, how I’d lean over him, backlit by the sun, looking like an angel as I whispered in his ear, Honey, I want us to have a baby. I was ready now. I’d be a wonderful mother, not like Raine. If I made promises, I would keep them.

  “Miss?”

  An older woman in a Yankees T-shirt had tapped my shoulder. When I turned, she smiled, showing teeth that could have been improved with a few visits to a dentist. I recognized her from the waiting room where we’d sat that morning, me next to Marcus and her beside her husband, who was, from the sound of it, having his hip replaced. “I just want to tell you,” she said, hands clasped at her waist, “that it’s lovely, the way you’re taking care of your father.”

  JULES

  Have you ever. . you know?” Kimmie ducked her head shyly. It was ten o’clock on a hot August Saturday night in New York City, eighty degrees and still humid in spite of the darkness, but the window air-conditioning unit chugging away kept Kimmie’s place deliciously cool. We’d gone to a screening of Blade Runner all the way downtown at the Angelika, and now we were sitting on the futon that took up most of the space in her grad-student-housing apartment, a studio on 110th Street and Riverside with a doll-size kitchen, a refrigerator the size of an orange crate, and a single window that afforded her a delightful view of the brick of the apartment building three feet away. It was a vast improvement over my place, in a no-name neighborhood in midtown, a fifth-floor walk-up that I shared with two other girls, where the single bedroom had been chopped into three prison-cell rectangles by particleboard walls that didn’t make it all the way to the ceiling.

  Every morning I took the subway down to Wall Street, to my job as a junior analyst at Steinman Cox, the investment and securities firm, which had recruited me with a six-figure salary and the promise of rapid advancement. One hundred thousand dollars a year had sounded like untold riches, but the money didn’t go as far as I’d hoped, not when I was dealing with New York City rent, paying off my loans, and trying to send a little something to each of my parents every month. The egg money had already gone to pay for rehab. . and “junior analyst” turned out to be finance-speak for “slave.” I worked for an analyst named Rajit, a dark-haired guy with deep-set eyes and bristling eyebrows who came to work every day in a suit and tie, with a gold chain-link bracelet on his wrist and an eye-watering amount of cologne clouding the air around him. Rajit advised clients on investments in the Eastern markets. Every day I’d spend endless hours “building a book,” putting together research about the tin trade in Taipei, or automobile manufacturing in Hong Kong. Once a month I’d be traveling with my team for client presentations, not to the glamorous destinations featured on the firm’s website but, usually, to the Midwest.

  Kimmie’s place was tiny, but it was all hers, and she’d filled it with colorful touches. There were brightly colored prints, Kandinsky and Frankenthaler, thumbtacked to the walls, an aloe plant in a dark-blue glazed pot on the windowsill, a jade elephant that she’d bought on our recent trip to Chinatown centered on the coffee table.

  “Have I ever what?” I asked her. “Had sex?” I’d let Kimmie talk me into a glass of cold white wine. After the week I’d put in at Steinman Cox, a few sips were enough to get me feeling loose-limbed and a little loopy.

  “No, no. Have you ever orgasmed?”

  “Orgasmed?” I giggled. Kimmie looked at me sharply.

  “Am I saying it wrong?”

  “No. Well, I guess most people say ‘had an orgasm.’ And yes, I have. I figured out how to do that by myself when I was thirteen.” Kimmie looked impressed. I shrugged modestly. “We didn’t have cable TV.” I didn’t mention that I’d never had an orgasm during intercourse with any of the three guys I’d been with. I’d never been relaxed enough, and, honestly, I’d always felt a little revolted at the sight of each of them with their clothes off, with their strange, drippy protuberances and unexpected clumps of hair.

  “Can you show me?”

  “Can I…” I looked at her. She was staring at me seriously.

  “I can’t figure out how. It’s very frustrating.” She pointed at her computer, set up underneath the window on the smallest desk IKEA sold. “I went on YouTube to watch, but it didn’t work. I get close, I think. . but then…” She pursed her lips and blew a small, disappointed raspberry. “Nothing.”

  My tongue felt heavy, and my cheeks were burning. “You went on YouTube?”

  “You can learn lots of things on YouTube,” Kimmie said, unperturbed. “The Times had a story about makeup tutorials.”

  “Well, okay, eyeliner, that’s one thing. But masturbation. .” I shuddered, imagining what horrors Kimmie’s computer had disgorged when she’d typed her keywords into Google.

  “If you’d show me, then I’d know how.” Her eyes were shining. “I read on a sex-positive blog that women need to take responsibility for their own orgasms.”

  “That’s true,” I said, gulping the rest of my wine. “Hey, Kimmie, you’re not looking at sex-positive blogs at school, are you?”

  She looked at me disdainfully. “I’m not stupid!”

  “No,” I said. I was getting the giggles again. “Just orgasm-challenged.”

  She got stiffly to her feet. “Never mind.”

  I felt bad. “No, no, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  “So you’ll show me?”

  I picked up my glass again. In college, I knew people who’d done, or at least claimed to have done, all manner of wild sex-things. Same-sex experimentation, particularly among the members of certain eating clubs, was practically a graduation requirement. The two girls down the hall from me junior year had let it be known that they were in a polyamorous relationship with a guy who lived in the vegetarian co-op and wore skirts to his visual-arts seminars. And, I liked Kimmie. She was the best friend I’d had in a long, long time. . and going through life, or even just the rest of her twenties, not knowing how to have an orgasm was a significant handicap. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

  “Excellent!” She waved me off the futon, which she quickly shifted from its upright to its reclining position, then turned down the lamp and lit a vanilla-scented candle, which she set on the coffee table, next to the jade elephant.

  “Romantic,” I said, starting to giggle again. Kimmie ignored me.

  “Where should I sit? Right here?” She lowered herself and sat cross-legged on the edge of the futon, fully dressed except for her shoes. All she needed was a pen and a notebook and she could have been attending a lecture.

  “Wherever you want.” I thought for a minute, then lay on my back on the futon, squeezed my eyes shut, and pulled my jeans and my panties off over my hips. If I’d been by myself, I would have just unzipped my jeans and slid my hand down the front.
. but Kimmie wouldn’t be able to see anything that way. I lifted my head, squinting through the half light.

  “Can you see okay?” I felt strangely out of breath, giggly and awkward and surprisingly aroused. The whole thing was so weird, by far the strangest sexual situation I’d ever been in, a world away from my grapplings with Dan Finnerty.

  Kimmie nodded. I took a deep breath, stretching out my legs, positioning my hands the way I normally did, the left one pressed against my belly (for some reason, I liked the feeling of pressure there), the fingers of my right hand resting against my cleft. I took a quick peek and saw Kimmie sitting back on her heels, watching intently as I started stroking myself with my index finger. I closed my eyes, wanting to squirm away from her scrutiny, wishing I’d shaved. “It’s kind of like this,” I said. “But I don’t know how helpful this is. Probably it’s different for everyone.”

  I opened my eyes, enough to see her make an impatient gesture—keep going. I turned my head to the side, concentrating on the sensation, trying to ignore the strangeness of doing this with someone watching. Kimmie was so close that I could feel her breath on my belly. For a minute, I thought that nothing would happen, but it had been a little while, and maybe I was hornier than I thought, or maybe it was the wine, but I was already wet, the muscles in my belly and inner thighs fluttering in the anticipation of release. I wriggled around, getting comfortable, and arranged my fingers the way I normally did, my index finger tapping, lightly and rapidly, then nibbling more firmly against my clitoris. I couldn’t keep from sighing, and Kimmie sighed, too, in approval, I thought, a little cooing noise.

  “Ooh,” she whispered. The futon shifted as she leaned closer. I could feel her breath on my belly, her long hair trailing against my thigh, and suddenly this went from being an academic exercise to the most exciting thing I’d ever done. I felt like a porn star, or the way I imagined porn stars must feel, desirable, sexy, controlling their audience even as they lost control themselves. I spread my legs slightly, strumming my finger faster. My voice was strangled as I said, “Watch. . I’m close. .” My back arched. My toes curled. I felt Kimmie’s breath against my face, then her lips against mine, and her tongue slipped into my mouth as I came.