They were both lawyers. Alexis worked for a large firm at an average of sixty-five hours a week. It was drudgery, but very well remunerated. Every time I visited their lovely, high-ceilinged apartment I saw the evidence of reckless online-shopping benders piled in cardboard columns in the doorway. The money to buy the stuff without the time to even unwrap it. Sidney’s job was more rewarding but paid half as much with nearly as many hours. The last thing they wanted to do during their precious Saturday-night dinners or Sunday brunches was to talk about their problems. So, like the two only children they were, they retreated from the discussions, with the silent understanding between them that when things “calmed down,” they might see a therapist.
Two burly men came into the diner. One of them leered at Sidney and me, sitting on the same side of the booth. Did he think we were a couple? I met his eyes and held them until he turned and sat on a counter stool, his pants pulling down and his shirt pulling up to reveal a hairy plumber’s crack.
“What is it?” Sidney asked, sensing that my attention was elsewhere. I shook my head, and she continued: “So at work there was a big case that came up for us, a lawsuit about wrongful termination, and I was given some support staff to help me. It was summer so I had this law student from NYU, and, well, she was very, um—”
She paused and drank her milkshake.
“Beautiful, very tall and, um, fun to be around and passionate and smart, and we were working very long hours—”
She trailed off.
“And somehow Alexis found out,” I finished for her.
“She had a summer Friday and was bringing dinner by for me as a surprise. There was nobody else in the office and we were—” She hesitated, and I held up my hand to let her know that she didn’t need to elaborate on any further details. She rubbed her eyes roughly, as if to wipe off the memory. “So we talked through it, and I said I would end it, and then our team won the case and went out for drinks and it happened again, and I was trying to be good so I told her, and she said, three strikes, you know, and then one night—this woman, you see, I couldn’t, it was like a spell, she was so beautiful and so tall and so—”
“Young?”
“No. No, she was my age. Before she went to law school she was an actress. A real one, commercials and Broadway. I don’t know. Being with her was like shooting something into my veins. I tried to resist, and then one night it was two in the morning and she texted me that she was at a bar outside our apartment and I just—left. Just hoped Alexis wouldn’t notice I was gone. But of course she did notice I was gone, she’s—I don’t know what I was thinking—I don’t think Alexis has slept through the night since middle school. So I ruined it. She’ll never take me back now.”
She rested her head in her palms again and sobbed. Our plates arrived and I moved back to my seat. I felt cold. Sid shoveled food into her face, hardly chewing, choking down her milkshake between bites.
“Now you’re judging me.”
“I like Alexis.”
“You of all people should not be judging me.”
“I might argue I am exactly the person who should be judging you. I’m your mother.”
“Look at what you and Dad did.”
“We had an understanding.”
“You had an understanding about him power raping women?”
She was loud, with an ugly, stretched look on her face. The man with the butt crack and his buddy looked over toward us with amused expressions. I was reminded of Dante’s Inferno, when Virgil rebukes Dante for watching two souls argue with each other, telling him it is wrong to ogle two beings who are embroiled in their own suffering. I told her to quiet down. She looked at me like she wished me dead, though when she next spoke, her voice was lowered.
“How could you not be sympathetic to me?”
“Of course I’m sympathetic to you.”
“I messed up. She should give me another chance.”
“She might.”
“We were going to go all the way.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You know, all the way. A kid, a house. A life.”
“But it seems like you didn’t want that.”
“I just wanted time.”
“It seems to me like you wanted to act in some way—to sabotage it. Because you weren’t ready.”
“Never mind.”
She slammed her cup onto the table and got up as if to leave. I asked her where she expected to go. She sat back down and asked me not to psychoanalyze her, that she needed a listener. I apologized, blamed my upbringing, and sat quietly until I saw her posture soften.
“Are you taking the week off work?” I asked her tentatively.
“No, that’s another thing.” After all her adolescent histrionics, her face took on the fatigue of a grown-up person, and I finally could imagine her sitting at a desk and being trusted with a task.
“You got fired?”
“No, I didn’t get fired,” she snapped. “But Charlie—”
“The other woman?” I clarified.
“She got a job there. I mean, of course she did, she’s brilliant. I asked to take leave. I think I have to find something else. It’s going to be too complicated, and Alexis will never take me back if she’s working there.”
“You love your job.”
“I can get another job I love. I think. If I don’t expect to get paid well for it.”
“This woman ruined your life.”
“It’s not her fault. Or it is, I don’t know. But it’s not like I can prevent her from getting hired. My ass would get sued every way but straight.” Every way but straight—one of John’s phrases. Sid laughed. She loved the old Texan/Midwestern expressions John and I traded. She used them to contrast with the rest of her overeducated liberalese. In high school she was fascinated when she learned that Bob Dylan lyrics were cited by judges to elaborate on obscure laws in court filings. The folksiness blended with the officiousness delighted her. More than doing good, and to my great pride, she was a do-gooder, far more than her father or I were or would ever be, she loved the language and jargon of the law. She loved the way phrases could become solid, and then could have their solidity stripped from them, all by interpretation, all by language, language, and more language. Fighting with words, she would call it when she participated in Lincoln-Douglas debates in high school. She was so awkward then, so homely and horse-ish, with bad makeup, poorly fitting clothes, and a sawing, toneless laugh. But when she stepped onto the debate stage her tongue was loose and her mind was quick and precise. She could find and dissect holes in the arguments of her competitors nearly instantaneously. It was when I saw her there at that podium that I knew, despite everything, despite all my weakness and guilt, that she had something in her she could use to take care of herself.
I, of course, was thrilled when she told me she was dating a woman. What a relief, I thought, to free oneself from the heterosexual prison. Straightness: the predictable container in which all possible outcomes seemed already etched into stone—happiness, unhappiness, complacency, strife—a life in which we were all operating inside of a story already told, even as we sought to live an authentic existence. Even as we tried to say to ourselves that it wasn’t who we mated with but the quality of the thoughts in our brain that made us radical, we knew that the patterns of our life were the patterns of our parents, were the patterns of all the dim, sorrel-chomping sheep living unexamined existences in all the homes all over this thoughtless, anti-intellectual country. We knew that the stuff of our lives was the stuff of normalcy, and how normalcy and its trappings and expectations were always there. There would always be couple friends who were a bit more square than you, who you would have to play some hetero game with. There would always be family who would ask the women to do the dishes while the men played chess. How fortunate for her, I thought, to be able to evade all that. She told us she was queer, attracted to men still, and that she would appreciate if we didn’t label her one way or another. She was Sid. Fine, fine, fine. As long as whatever she chose, she wouldn’t have to take on the identity of the anxious woman who got dinner on the table while the men sat on the porch. As long as she didn’t have to act the part of the schoolmarm to a good-natured rascal of a partner who did whatever he liked and was loved more because of it. And if she did choose to cook or clean or worry, at least she could maybe do all those things for a woman who understood, not a man who, by virtue of being born with a thing between his legs, had absorbed from an early age that it was all right to sit back and enjoy being served.