Any Place I Hang My Hat (33 page)

Even if I said, My search for my mother is none of your damn business, and hung up on him, there was no way I was going to have a day without thinking John and practically getting the vapors, so I made the decision to talk. Briefly, courteously, determined not to drag it out. Besides looking pathetic, it would also be futile. What the hell: I wasn’t going to make my last note a sour one.

“Well, to cut the long story about my research mercifully short,” I told him, “I came up with the address of where my mother had lived in Brooklyn.”

“You know you’re talking to a pro here. Don’t cut it short. I want to hear all about the research. In as much detail as you remember. How about dinner one night?”

I didn’t go through any of that Oh, this must be a dream, but his words sounded awfully light for a request that ought to have sounded important. “Dinner?” All those books about how men and women react differently in similar circumstances: I could not believe his heart wasn’t beating like the kettledrums in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I’m going to be direct, John.”

“How unlike you.”

“What does dinner mean, and don’t give me appetizer, entrée, and dessert.”

“It means that I was glad when I heard your message. I’d like to hear what you found out. And to offer to do anything I can to help.”

“You offered that before. Is it still the same friendly offer, emphasis on the word friendly?”

He hesitated for a couple of seconds, and I knew that the answer wasn’t going to be what I wanted to hear. “As friends,” he said.

“All right,” I breathed. “I need a minute to think about what I want to say.”

“Now that doesn’t sound like you at all,” he said. “Where is the Amy Lincoln of the instant comeback?”

I knew he was trying to avoid having the conversation get heavy, but it was my turn to talk. I didn’t want to toss the repartee back and forth like a game of Hot Potato—moving fast, not thinking, trying only not to get burned. I didn’t have the inclination and I didn’t have the energy. It may have been only a couple of minutes after six a.m., but I felt I’d already lived an all-nighter. Just being on the phone with him wiped me out, to say nothing of hearing him say As friends.

“Are you up for ruthless honesty?” I asked.

“Do I have a choice?”

“Sure. You can choose to hang up.” He didn’t, so I gave it to him as straight as I could. “It’s like this, John. The breakup was awful for me, maybe even the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

“I don’t know what to say to that, Amy. You’ve had some rough times in your life.”

“My mother taking off, my father going to prison, maybe even taking the rap for her—all that was objectively traumatic, guaranteed to make any semirational person feel like shit. But you were on the other side of the universe from all that. You’re funny, kind, intelligent, interesting, all sorts of things. You don’t like sour notes. And you’re a hot guy.”

“Thank you.”

“I guess that’s a compliment, but I mean it as an explanation. I loved you. I lost you.” I pulled up the covers to form a hood over my head. I didn’t know why. I’d always talked to John in bed, under the covers, but I’d left my head outside. Maybe I was trying to shelter myself from the realization that there would be no future under-the-covers business with him. If I got it going with Steve or with some other guy, I’d have to carry on our conversations from a different venue.

“Do you think I was in the relationship just for laughs?” he demanded.

“I know you weren’t. And I know there were plenty of times I let you down or hurt you. Being so close-mouthed, which I guess was a way of saying, I can’t trust you with this information. Leaving you so soon after nine-eleven. I was afraid you’d get tired of me or need your space, and I couldn’t bear to hear it. Instead I ran—without regard for what you wanted. I’m sorry for all those times. I’m sorry if I hurt you. I’m sorry I wasn’t a big enough person to trust you.”

“Don’t take it all on yourself. I should have spoken up. I shouldn’t have dumped all of that on you the last time we were together, after my cousin’s wedding. It wasn’t fair.” I could hear in the flatness of his voice that he was seriously upset with the conversation and trying to maintain self-control. When he’d called, he probably saw himself as being a nice guy, possibly an interested friend, and he was getting more than he’d bargained for.

“John, I can’t be your friend. Friendship would only extend the pain.”

“You’re still not over it?”

“I’m not sure.” I was tempted to add, Don’t worry, it’s no big deal … but realized it would sound sarcastic, or even bitter. “Well, probably not over it yet. Look, if I were in your shoes I’d want to know what happened with the Great Mother Search. And I think you should know. So when I get some distance from all this, from you, from whatever happens or doesn’t happen with my mother, I’ll write you and tell you about it. At length. But here’s the deal. You can’t acknowledge the letter in any way. I don’t want to spend a week or month or however long thinking about what’s on my voice mail or what’s in my mailbox. I have to know it’s a one-sided correspondence, and I’m the one side. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Good.”

John sighed. Not one of those weary man sighs, but the sigh of a kid who doesn’t have a clue about what to say next. Finally he said: “I was still hoping that maybe you’d change your mind and come up for the Seder.”

“Is this some really subtle way of trying to get back with me that I’m not getting?”

“No,” he said softly.

“Okay. Then let me tell you about me and holidays. When I started at Ivey, I spent Passover with the rabbi and his family who lived three towns away or with one of the girls whose families actually practiced Judaism, as opposed to just being Jews. And for all the American holidays and Christmas and Easter, I was with Tatty, either in New York or their other two houses or with other friends. The same thing at college and J-school. I always found someplace to go.

“But no matter where I went, I was always so envious. Even when it was a dysfunctional or twisted or some-kind-of-awful family—like Tatty’s, with her father so drunk he took a nap at the table with his check on his roast goose—I was jealous and resentful that I wasn’t part of it. Even if I was a regular, I was still a guest. I had no unconditional right to be there. All of which is a way of saying that aside from loving you, I loved your family. I appreciate the invitation and your persistence. If I went, I would be envious. And I bet I’d even be angry, because this was something I wanted and couldn’t have.”

“You never acted angry or envious,” John said.

“One of my talents is knowing how to get asked back. It’s only when you’re part of a family that you have the luxury of behaving badly. So many times in the last—I don’t know—five or six years I tried to get my father to come for some holiday, any holiday, Saint Swithin’s Day for all I care. But he was always with some woman or other who couldn’t know he had a twenty-something daughter. And Aunt Linda and Uncle Sparky go to his family for all the holidays and they’re nice people, but there’s no chemistry, even though they’re Italian. I asked Linda and Sparky to come over once for a Seder, but Aunt Linda called at the last minute and went cough-cough, I have a bad chest cold so I wound up with four quarts of matzo ball soup and pounds of roast chicken and five people from the Weinberg Home for the Aged because I’d volunteered and they all turned out to be ex-communists who were still having doctrinal fights with each other.”

“You had all of them in your apartment?” John asked.

“Yes. The food was in the kitchen and when I cleared, I put the dirty dishes in the bathtub so it wouldn’t look messy.”

“You never told me that.”

I was so tempted to go into the story about how one of the men stood up and started shaking his knife at a tiny cotton ball of a woman, a Trotskyite. I was getting so comfortable with the normality of the conversation that I pushed the blanket off the top of my head. Except this was what I’d told him I didn’t want to do. “John, I find myself falling into the friendship trap.”

“Can I ask you, Amy, what’s so terrible about that?”

“Because it’s over.”

“You know, you’re the one who called me that time, asking if we could reconnect.” Although John occasionally blew up, most of the time, like now, his anger was low-key. “You’re the one—”

“I know. Let me explain. I was having a really bad night. I’d just broken three ribs and I was in pain and probably scared. Whatever.”

“Why didn’t you tell me, for God’s sake?”

“What would you have done? Come over and been very kind and taken me to the emergency room. And then what? You and I are history. I took myself to the emergency room.” I was so tempted to say, And I met a cute doctor who really came on to me. Instead I said, “John, I wish you nothing but happiness. If I accused you unjustly about that woman at the Mahler concert, then I’m sorry. And now it’s time to say goodbye.”

“Did you ever see yourself being married to me?”

“I didn’t allow myself a marriage fantasy too often, but when I did … Yes.” Then naturally I asked: “Did you see yourself being married to me?”

“Yes. I guess so. But then whenever I took a step toward you, you took a step back—”

“Goodbye, John,” I said, and very gently hung up the phone.

JOHN WOULDN’T CALL again, I was positive of that. But just in case, I threw on my running clothes and sneakers and rushed outside. Another gorgeous day, not that I could see it from my apartment. To celebrate, I began to run as soon as I hit the park, daring any rib to slice through a lung and stop me. Once I didn’t drop dead, I did my obligatory nature check. Okay, the daffodils had done their bit for New York, and now their heads drooped from shriveled necks. They’d been supplanted by tulips and those giant pink and purple pom-pom flowers that grew on bushes. That was pretty much it for me and botany. As for zoology, I saw a cardinal, pigeons, and too many dogs wearing bandannas.

As I veered onto a bridle path, I must have shifted into runner’s high. For me, it was never exhilaration, but the ultimate dumb-down, a blank mind, free of productive musings such as Is John calling at this precise minute? He wouldn’t believe I’d get out of the house so fast. Now he’s thinking I’m deliberately not answering. Is he about to slam down the phone swearing never to call me again? If he remembers our relationship at all, will it be as two wretched years in an otherwise lovely life?

As I cooled down back in the apartment, I realized my torso hadn’t accordioned, which meant my ribs were still intact. I ate breakfast, one of those practices that will, one day, be the subject of a column in the Science section of the Times, where someone will report on a study that runners who eat while still breathing hard and sweating into their pineapple cottage cheese survive, on the average, ten fewer years than runners who have a modicum of self-control.

Minutes later, I was washing the conditioner out of my hair while musing that since John had been so clear about being just friends, he was probably on his way to a big-time commitment to La Belleza or someone else. With that, I thought I heard the phone ring. I willed myself to believe it was one of those phantom calls that occur when one is emotionally in extremis and also in the shower. Trying to distract myself, I thought about Steve Raskin. Sharp-witted, nice, plus that solid building-trades body that carried itself as if it knew its way around.

This did nothing to stir me up about Steve. It did get me to ruminating about John. Two years, and I’d never tired of him. Part of it was his look, the gold skin, the brown hair potentially perfect but usually mussed up from his running his fingers through it all day as he read or worked in the editing room. And his smile was lovely, though too broad for Manhattan: the well-adjusted smile of a happy suburban childhood. His body was fine, with thighs like rocks. But it was his chest and arms that got me, solid—Come on, I’d say to him, like a girl with her first boyfriend. Let me feel your muscle.

John was always warm. We could come back from an hour-long romp in new snow, undress each other, and he’d put his arms around me. The temperature of him, and his unflinching ability to wrap himself around me and heat me, no matter how cold I was, made me feel not just secure, but treasured.

Of course it was more than his temperature, his personal normal of 99.6. It was his ardor. John was one of the rare, highly sexed guys who didn’t bring his mother along into bed. No Do what? Are you kidding? Blech! No dash to the bathroom a second and a half after ejaculation. In other words, he had no no-no’s. Neither was there Look what I’m doing, Mommy! naughty-boy shit. No tedious attempts at Kama Sutra positions 147 to 152—It’s the left leg that goes around my neck. No request for a threesome with a Rottweiler.

Sometimes he’d say a few words. You’re beautiful. Or something raunchy that got me higher and hotter. But he was, blissfully, not a blabbermouth. I didn’t have to deal with lines that sounded as if they’d been culled from a multiple choice list: I want to kiss-suck-lick-bite your tits-clit-tongue-ear. True, no I love you. On the other hand, his cock was his cock and I didn’t have to call it Joey.

The second I got out of the shower I checked the phone and discovered the phantom phone call had been an actual one. I punched in my code, 1920, the year the constitutional amendment guaranteeing women’s suffrage became law. Although the message was a letdown, i.e., not from John begging me to go back with him, it at least had some interesting potential. “Hi, Amy. This is Freddy Carrasco. If you get a chance, give me a call. I’m home. I’ll leave this message on your voice mail at work also.”

Quickly, I pulled on panties so I wouldn’t feel self-conscious and dialed Freddy’s number. “Hi. Amy Lincoln.”

“How mad at me are you?” He sounded bright and snappy, just like at the press conference.

“Give me a hint, Freddy. What am I supposed to be mad about?”

“You didn’t get the scoop.”

“I told you right from the beginning, In Depth wouldn’t run a story like this.”

“Well, just in case, I wanted to apologize about, you know, leaving you out of the loop. I know I owe you big-time. I mean, when the only reporter who’d speak to me was a guy from one of those Martians Eat Baby newspapers, you went out on a limb for me.”