Sputterpub's Blog

Robert wasn’t attracted to me either. If it weren’t for the fact that he’d been in a relationship with a woman for twenty years and even married her when she was terminally ill (the poor woman managed to get the sort of rare killer breast cancer that doesn’t show up on a mammogram and does present with pain as a symptom), the folks in our group would have concluded he was gay. In fact, some of them concluded that anyway. Personally, I think the man was asexual (or maybe one of the recently-named demisexuals in our midst). As far as I could tell, Robert just didn’t seek intimacy with another person. He once told me that he’d acquired a video on self-love – I guess he wasn’t without libido – but I never saw an inkling of any lust in him.

Robert was the only person I ever knew who used the word “excrescence” in normal speech and correctly pronounced “desultory.” He was the only peer I ever had who owned a grand piano. He used to play Gershwin for me when I came to his house for dinner. I remember sitting on his angular sofa, my head bent back over the square cushion, lost in the way the tones rang in his living room.

The rest of the room wasn’t spectacular. Robert had beautiful rugs but there were too many and they overlapped like a Bedouin tent. He’d hung a few expensive well-lit paintings on the walls but they were all still-life scenes of flowers and vegetables. The furniture was uncomfortable and the drapes were dark and dull. But that piano gleamed like a magic lamp. Its lines were pure elegance. Its tones were in tune.

Then Robert began to lose his mind. He was six years older than I (I would have said “than me,” but he in his prime would have corrected me), and at first I considered it normal for him to misplace a few nouns in his speech. But when he told me he thought he was losing it, and he mentioned the brain exercises he was doing to try to keep it, and one of those exercises was attempting the Chronicle commuter crossword puzzle (this from a guy who used to do the NY Times puzzle in ink), I started paying attention.

He often had a look of confusion, about normal social interactions. He started to trip a lot when walking, and then it appeared he was having other balance problems. He lost so many common words that he started stammering and often avoided talking. He stopped trying to translate French stories. He exchanged reading for watching movies at home, and almost scared me and his other friends with the number of films he screened (I remember him bragging that he’d watched one hundred eighty-four movies in a month).

One evening he fell down his own basement stairs. It must have taken him an hour to crawl up to the kitchen and work the phone. He had a broken right wrist and he knocked out a bicuspid. In the gap months before the implant his mouth resembled a portion of his own piano keyboard, with that black space between his ivories.

The accident prompted us to get him checked out. That process landed him and his best friend Fred at the Mayo clinic. The diagnosis was acute progressive aphasia. Too ironic. Too awful. The most articulate individual I ever met was losing his ability to speak.

There was more to it. There was clear memory loss and the balance issue. It was only a matter of time before we’d have to intervene and remove him from his house.

We got him to stop driving. Soon he gave up playing music. When he stopped responding to texts and emails, Fred and I decided to visit.

My heart clutched at the first smell. Even from the front door it was obvious that housecleaning and bathing weren’t happening. The sunlight scattered storms of dust motes. And Robert didn’t respond to our voices. Not even when Fred yelled.

As hard as I try to remember Robert smart and healthy, even after five years I can’t get that last sight of him out of my head: crouching like Fred and I wouldn’t see him, face pushed into his bony knees, in plain sight under his grand piano.

I met Meredith when I was thirty-four. Almost mid-span. I wasn’t viewing the number as significant but my mother was, and she and my dad decided to take their first-born on a trip before the thirty-fifth anniversary of their parenthood. We booked two rooms on an Alaska cruise.

My divorce from Jim had been finalized a few months earlier. We were less easy friends but still friendly, and I felt comfortable leaving the kids with him.

My parents had an outside stateroom, with round windows looking out on gray water and blue ice. Mine was an inner single room. It was dark like a sensory deprivation tank when the lights were out, quiet like a grave. I didn’t want to be in that room except to sleep and dress, so immediately after unpacking I took to the deck. On my third revolution I saw Meredith, in a deck chair gazing westward. On my fourth revolution we began to speak. By the sixth time around, pacing in natural unison, we were M & M and infatuated.

We made a corny pair. M was the child of a Jewish mother and a Yiddische character actor, raised in New York hotels and Catskills resorts while I was sampling suburbs. We were the piano player for the cruise and one of the guests.

M was then thirty-eight, tall, with thick brown hair. Long-faced, sad-eyed, wide-mouthed. His teeth were white as milk. We stayed up most nights for hours after the show, for hours after we closed the upper bar that swelled with passengers requesting old favorites on the piano and then exhaled them to their staterooms happily humming what they sought. We drank gallons of coffee and retired to M’s room, better than mine, where we cuddled like a braid and told each other old bad jokes and gossiped about Henny Youngman.

We had exhaustive, exploring, incomplete sex. Perhaps it was the coffee or the clean strangeness of the Alaskan air, but we spent most of our time adoring each other’s face. I took an obsessive interest in lovely teeth, and then had to learn that a mouth of such beautiful enamel was anchored in disease-ridden gums. It was my first exposure to lurking periodontal disease. M in turn became fascinated with my eyelids.

We stayed up almost all night, but we always separated a few hours before dawn. It wasn’t that we were being discreet, although we weren’t blatant either. It was that M needed a few hours, between playing and sleeping, in which to compose music.

There was a climactic concert on the last night of the cruise. That was the evening the meal ended with a parade of baked Alaskas (really), and the show pulled out all stops. Afterward, M sold cassettes of past piano performances, autographed of course. I didn’t have to pay for mine. But when I asked for an autograph, M looked up at me with surprise and cracked, “And what should I write? ‘Best Wishes’?”

Because of course it made no sense for M to autograph it. Of course we were going to see one another again. Of course.

That was twenty-five years ago. We never even talked again. I think we each got busy with our separate lives. I stopped missing M and started writing lyrics to the music I imagined him composing. Softly imagined piano.

I wasn’t done with pianos or with men. In my mid-forties I met Robert. We were introduced by a mutual friend who was his partner in their small law firm. Our friend was an incurable romantic and hoped we’d fall in love.

That didn’t happen. Robert had a compact body and a way of crossing his arms over his chest and his legs knee-over-knee that seemed too feminine to me. He had the biggest vocabulary I ever encountered, but he also couldn’t resist correcting my grammar, which I found obnoxious. And except for a petulant kind of fussy anger, he didn’t seem to have any passions.

But he was well-read and voiced intelligent opinions. He knew art, wines, fine rugs, and opera, and he liked to teach what I wanted to learn. We were both single and living in the same town, and there were five years when we saw one another regularly, for walks, dinners, shows.

So I was gratified when he asked me to the Winter Ball. And I felt like a bit of a celebrity with him. He knew the band, and I didn’t mind when he interrupted our dancing to help with their equipment. I minded even less when I had to sit a number out while he played the electric piano for them. Immediately after that, when he took me in his arms and we two-stepped around the floor to his friends singing “Yesterday,” I knew most of the other kids were watching us and had one of the peak social moments of my adolescence. He whisper-sang the lyrics and I pretended he meant the words. Finally he murmured “Melody” (which is my name because, my father says, it’s what a pretty girl is like), and I’ll admit my knees got a little weak.

We stayed till the end of the dance. Jim helped the band pack up. We were invited to some sort of party but he gave his friends a noncommittal response. His hand pushed my damp dress against the small of my back as he guided me out the door and toward his maroon Corvair. He drove to the outlook near the prison, parked with the lights-on-water view out my side, and naturally lay his right arm along the back of my bucket seat as he leaned to see the skyline out my window. “Hey,” he said softly, and I felt his breath against my cheek. I turned to him, his lips arrowed in, and I couldn’t help it: I ducked.

He was quite annoyed. He drove me home without any discussion. But we resumed conversation the next week and friendship the week after that, when he called and sought my advice about how to ask Gretchen to the game. We both went to Cal, and we even fooled around a little with opiates and hallucinogenics and genitals, now and then when our significant others were not around. It was a surprise, to me at least, that we got together romantically after all. But it was fun.

We married when I was twenty-one and Jim was twenty-three. I thought we did it because it would hurt our parents too much if we cohabitated, but Jim apparently had more traditional reasons. I thought our deal was to strip off the covers and really know one another and, through knowing one another, know ourselves, but it turned out that Jim made a different deal. I thought we were going to keep exploring and he thought the time had come to tuck ourselves in.

For before we married, Jim was a continual grin at me with his sensuous mouth. His eyes and his teeth sparkled as he bicycled, unicycled, flew, hiked, camped, drove, built, fixed, disassembled. He played the piano, the organ, the concertina, harmonica. He built a clavichord and refurbished a harpsichord. He discovered Scott Joplin and learned to play syncopated rhythm. He could construct anything I could draw.

But after our wedding, he was diverted from adventure and keyboards, to home repair and computers. He stopped innovating and he smiled less. He grew hemorrhoids. He began to have frequent nightmares about losing all his teeth.

I had never lost my fear of dentists. I brushed twice a day and I flossed every night. I understood the horror of Jim’s nightmares. What I couldn’t understand was his propensity to skip nighttime brushing. He’d let himself nod out on our bed while watching TV. Finally I’d push at him to get out of his clothes. Brushing his teeth was clearly out of the question. He’d slink under the covers like a ten-year-old boy getting away with something. That’s how it seemed to me. Then he’d have the toothless nightmare and expect comfort from me.

It got to where he just wasn’t sexy any more. He wasn’t making music and he wasn’t adventuring. He never felt well. He never felt good. Our sex became less frequent and more pallid. He wanted to work on the relationship, and I wanted him to work on him. Not “work” exactly: I wanted Jim to figure out what would make him happy. He said the only thing he wanted was for me to be happier. He only wanted me to look around and see that what we had was as good as it got. I didn’t get that. Still don’t.

My other boy cousins were so into sex by then that they were tiresome. Most of them were around sixteen and having enough wet dreams that their libidos were a new topic between their mothers. I knew this because, being female, I was supposed to associate with my aunts and mother in the kitchen, where I could not help but hear. Kitchen time was one of the many expectations I rebelled against, but even so I spent some with the women, more than the boys did anyway. Once I was warned not to answer a chorus of cousinly summons; my mother intercepted me on the way into the house and told me to stay with her, because she’d overheard several of my cousins conspiring to get me in the bathroom and strip me. Boys are curious, she explained, and they will be boys.

My mother told my aunts and they corralled my cousins somehow. But Mark wasn’t part of the conspiracy. Mark and I were special. In fact, he came around right after that event, smiled with his even white teeth, hugged me in his strong arms, and took me back to his place, where we talked and he played piano till the others fetched us for dinner.

Then it got complicated. Mark started really mooning around, partly about me, and his brother Philip teased him nonstop. Mark tried to talk to me about it the next time we visited, and I must not have regarded him seriously enough. I guess I made light of the family jokes about us. He said we might as well do it, for all the fuss. I assumed he was joking. I said well sure we could have intercourse, just as long as I didn’t have to do anything with my mouth. I don’t think he understood that I was going along with a joke. He played some more on the piano, but half an hour later, when I left to go to the bathroom, he followed me.

I went to the toilet beneath the stairs, the one with no window, and at first I didn’t know what hit me when the lights went out and my back met the wall. Then Mark was against me, strong thighs and hard chest, and his mouth dipped down to press mine.

His teeth clacked against my teeth and mashed my upper lip. I opened my jaw to pull away and his tongue filled my mouth. I grunted. I gagged. I pushed him away.

We were never as close after that.

In fact, I became a little phobic about kissing. First-kissing, anyway. Maybe I’m too connected to my own mouth, but it seemed to me that French kissing was just about the most intimate act possible. And a first kiss, a kiss that almost certainly would either begin with the male pressing too forcefully or develop, orchestrally, into an insinuation, such an act was simply too loaded for my comfort. I was all for it in anticipation but when the moment came I tended to avoid. Sometimes I even ducked.

Looking back on it, I may have married Jim because he was the only one to persevere after such a duck.

My parents and brothers and I moved again, this time from extreme Southern California to the San Francisco Bay Area. My brothers were then eleven, and they always had each other; they slipped into the new environment like tadpoles into a pond. But I was sixteen. I had to leave all my pals and start over in a four-year, stratified high school. Even as an eccentric I was not going to have much of a social life. I gravitated to the few other new kids in the fast-track classes. Jim was one of them. We became friends. We talked a lot, walked a bit, worked even on the homecoming float. I’ll admit I found him attractive. His hair was too thin and his ears were a little prominent, but he had good teeth and a strong body. He was on the diving team, because he was too big for gymnastics and they hadn’t yet gone to fiberglass poles for vaulting. He swam daily. His body was tan with glints of blonde hair. But he only wanted to talk to me about politics, astronomy, and girls who didn’t look at all like me.

gravicembalo col piano e forte

I am piano. I am a harp supine, encased in echo, felt, hammered.

I am piano but I sound loud. Say me soft: piano. piano. pianissimo. Still it sounds louder than forte.

I am the golf game of musical instruments: easy to play and impossible to master. I am the empress of orchestra.

I am stringed, percussive, wooden. I am the range of human sound, in cabinet.

At first it was no instrument to me. I never saw anyone play the grand piano in my aunt’s cold living room, in White Plains, New York. The room wasn’t really any colder than the rest of her Tudor house; it just wasn’t used, so it seemed cold to my five year-old self. It was the dark mysterious left turn from her front door. Everyone usually went right, through the dining room and den and breakfast room and kitchen, sometimes all the way to the back yard, where the playhouse was. Or maybe straight upstairs to the bedrooms, either the big one where my aunt and uncle watched The Tonight Show in bed, or one of my cousins’ rooms, with the two-doored bath that connected them. No one ever turned left into the fancy living room. Except me.

I hid in there. I crawled under the big black piano and crouched quietly when they looked for me. My uncle was a dentist, and he wanted to pull my front teeth, which were getting loose, and he said I could swallow them in my sleep, which frightened my mother so she said he could take them. But I never said he could take them. I hid under the piano, and loved it for sheltering me even before I learned what it could do.

Uncle Iz took my teeth anyway.

Years passed. Long years. Formative years. The next time I noticed a piano I was thirteen. Sure there had been others around, for Mr. Stone to pounce at or Madam Ortane to push on during my intermittent ballet classes, or planted like a tree in the corner of the stage in every school auditorium, but those were like armoires at the edges of my life: seldom noted, picturesque.

My family had ballooned from three to six and we had relocated to the West Coast. I no longer stayed with Aunt Esther and Uncle Iz and the cousins from my mother’s side; now we visited extended kin my mother called “The LA Contingent.” That was her term for my father’s four sisters and offspring.

There was an embarrassment of boys in that family. Not only had I and my parents been bombarded by my triplet brothers, but my father’s fecund sisters had only produced two girls. To counter the presence of my eleven boy cousins, I had no one except Camille and Judy.

It was almost corny, how precisely we three divided the feminine family honors of our generation. Camille, the oldest and dimmest, grew blonde hair and big tits; she took on the role of dumb tramp. Judy was a little younger than I and the baby in her family after five boys; she too was blonde, but it curled! She fell right into the role of cherub, and developed very smoothly into a dutiful (bitter) daughter.

My hair was brown, and straight until it frizzed with adolescence. I was neither voluptuous nor sweet. I tended to challenge rules and if I had to spend time with cousins I usually preferred the boys. And they preferred me.

Mark especially. Seven of the eleven were three years older than I. Mark was my favorite of that cohort.

Unlike the others, unlike even his older (born-to-be-a-cop) brother, Mark was smart. He was thoughtful, and interested in philosophy, ecology, and genetics. He was the only one of my cousins who didn’t own a gun. He supported my opposition to sport hunting. Together we admired our creative outputs.

For we were sensitive. I wrote protest poetry and he played the piano. With his encouragement, I even submitted, to real magazines that sent polite rejections, lyrics like “We’re all people, all human beings,/Black, yellow, white, red: all of one mold…”

Mark walked with me and talked with me, and it didn’t hurt that he looked like a lifeguard. He was tall and fit. He swam every day and his fair skin was tanned to a fine-pored gold. He was the only boy cousin with blonde hair, and it curled light against his forearms and thighs. He kept it short, so it was thick and springy around his face. He had a small nose and a wide mouth, and his smile revealed perfect white teeth.

When we visited him in LA, he played piano for all at night and for me in the afternoon. We swam in the morning, and then I watched his clean square fingers on the black and white keys. He aspired to compose then, but he played drills of Chopin. He made me notice how the piano works.

When he visited us in San Diego, he talked to my father at night and my brothers in the morning, but I usually had him for long walks every afternoon and longer talks after my parents went to bed. We spent so much time together that my parents and my aunt began to worry. We were at that age, after all. There were nervous jokes about first-cousin marriages, which I found silly and which seemed to offend Mark.

I guess, generally, I didn’t follow Mom’s advice. I’m much more likely to follow my daughter’s. She’s now at the parenting age, and I won’t be surprised if she starts in on the experience soon.

My mother is alive and well, and she comes by here at least once a week for tea. She still has disparaging eyes. Just last month she told me she thinks my hair is thinning, and she suggested I wear it longer and bleach it a little, to hide that.

I must admit it got to me. I asked my daughter for her opinion. Now, I should remember that she has occasionally shaved all or parts of her head, following her idea of fashion. I should bear in mind that I’ve usually disagreed with her choices in attire, although never enough to make it an issue unless to tell her she was sending an inadvertent message to my peers. But even with all of that, I’ve got to admit I was stunned and overwhelmed and gratified beyond words when she told me my hair is fine: I’m the most beautiful woman she knows.

“Come on,” I said then.

“No. Really.” She looked at me, and she said the words slowly and distinctly. “Mom. Listen. Someone asked me just last week: who’s the most beautiful woman I know. And I said you. Really.”

So now I look in the mirror and I don’t know what to trust. I see an aging face, ripply around the chin, reminding me of what I never liked in my aunt’s face and my mother’s. And I also notice an attractive presence. My image is like one of those little cards that changes its picture as it catches the light at different angles. I’ve discovered that I can’t trust my eyes when it comes to witnessing my own visage. I’ve decided to stop trying to see my face, to let those photons wash through me until I begin to fill with a pattern. And the view in front is starting to refract as much as it reflects. It begins to include the view in back.

[She was a beautiful infant, unwanted but loved. Her poor weary mother had five babies in six years, followed by four abortions, and then her, an exotic Chinadoll of a child: raven-haired, porcelain-complected, almond-eyed, round. She looked like no one else in her yiddische Brooklyn family.

Her mother was then an elderly thirty-five. She taught her to be busy, and to fear pregnancy. Her father was just starting to make money; he was seldom around except on the Sabbath, when he tended to indulge his pretty daughter.

Her siblings, four brothers and a sister, protected and parented her in their joint and several ways. The brothers were variously sheltering and zealous. Her sister was the closest to her in love and in age, but she was homely and jealous, and only taught her to distrust women.

She had many aunts and uncles, and a score of cousins. The family was orthodox, so the men didn’t touch women except their wives and daughters, and very young relatives, like her. Two of her uncles exposed themselves to her before she was six. She always did think penises were ugly.]

I outgrew the climbing a few years later, but I didn’t outgrow the tennis courts. They continued to be a popular place for kids to gather. It was there I discovered that Betty was half-blind.

Betty was our beagle. I had to lobby for years to get a pet better than the tropical fish Dad was always nursing through ichthy-whatever (I learned that tropical fish are sick all the time with something or other, and I used to wonder what made the tropics so great, if those blue lagoons were filled with sick fish). I was almost thirteen when Mom finally relented and let me have a dog.

She was a beautiful purebred puppy, with velvety long ears and lots of white on her, and she matured into a lovely animal. But she seemed a bit stupid at times. One Saturday I walked her to the high school, off-leash, and when I left the tennis court she lagged inside. I called her to me and she dashed straight into the fence. I knew then she wasn’t stupid; she just couldn’t see.

My family moved to Northern California when I was fifteen, and I had to give Betty away. That made no sense to me then or now, but my parents required it. I didn’t have another pet until I set up a household of my own.

And there was Mom, with disagreeable advice.

I was twenty-five then. Into my first house, and pregnant with my daughter. I adopted a retriever.

Mom wanted me to have a monitored alarm system. I told her the dog was a better solution to that kind of security issue. She insisted that I fence in the front yard. I refused. The yard was small and right on a pedestrian thoroughfare. It wasn’t like we needed it to be private; we did all our relaxing in the relatively large (and fenced) backyard. As far as I was concerned, a wall fence just invited graffiti. And I was put off by those run-of-the-lumber-mill pieces of paintable picket fence. Until we could afford a beautiful low stone wall or something, I declined to accept her recommendation.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t helpful. After my daughter was born Mom was often with us, cooking and freezing meals and making me rest. It’s more that she had an overly strong urge for physical safety. As if a fence or an alarm were going to do it.

All in all I would have done better without her help. She got overly upset about any kind of diaper rash, and when my daughter was about a year old and discovered how much she liked rolling on her stuffed sheep in her playpen, pushing her plump little pudenda against the sturdy stuffed animal and grunt-moaning a little, Mom seemed to freak out and tried to get me to “make her stop that.”

My mother had a fat pussy. Not plump-fat but bland-fat, like a mound of bread dough. It was broad, sparsely furred, surrounded by girth. I didn’t see it often – not even she did that – but I can almost sketch the view from four years old: that pad of pale flesh that appeared briefly above me between her stand from the toilet and the hoist of her big white underpants. It didn’t look at all like mine, and I don’t think she liked it. I never saw her touch it, but more than once she warned me not to touch my own. She even advised me not to take so long peeing.

She had weak fingernails and ugly feet, and legs that widened from thick ankles to dimpled knees to pocky thighs. Like inverted piano stools, she used to say.

Ugly this. Fat that. Yet the world found my mother pretty, and she knew it. She was the beauty in her family of origin, the flirt in high school, the mistress of my father’s romantic heart. Whenever a camera was aimed at her she pulled her glasses off and held them behind her back, in her left hand. She positioned her legs so that her feet made a T, front foot pointed forward and back foot almost perpendicular to it. She tried to teach me to pose that way, too.

She was always energetic and helpful. Even now she finds it impossible to repress her suggestions. Why, I probably wasn’t older than seven when she started teaching me how to hide my flaws. I don’t remember having any then, but Mom was a big believer in genes over environment; her cautions were about familiar problems I was likely to develop. I learned how to minimize the width of my nose before it was even apparent that I had inherited my father’s. I understood that a T-strap would slim the look of my foot before my feet grew. I was taught how to pick clothes that wouldn’t “cut me in half” long before I ever widened.

I’m not sure I would have known I had flaws if she hadn’t told me. Her incessant suggestions weren’t good for my self-confidence, but fortunately I had a few charms against her. It turned out I had qualities aside from my body, that I could esteem. And because my mother was the baby of her original family, and I was the first of mine, I swapped some roles with her. In many circumstances I parented her, and disregarded her foolishness.

Like when she told me not to climb fences. I must have been ten, and we lived in Southern California, south of San Diego, half a block from what would be my high school. The subdivision was wild and free, grass and dichondra conquering tumbleweed and prickly pear, a new school amid a new housing tract, just cut into the adobe-hard terrain. When the rare rains came, the street gutters coursed with tan water from the corrugations of the school grounds. When the Santana winds blew from the east, half of the school’s outdoor lockers sifted sand into their ventilation slats.

There were chain link fences everywhere. Short ones around the parking areas, six-footers at the school perimeter, and two-story woven walls for the tennis courts. We were drawn to those walls. Even though they would take us nowhere, the tall chain link fences just begged to be scaled.

Mom really didn’t want me to do that. It was okay with her if I climbed trees, and I don’t remember her objecting to normal-sized fences, but she drew the line at the double fences around the tennis courts. When pressed, she got flustered and blurted that I could injure myself at the top; tall fences and horseback riding carried some risk that I would not be an acceptable bride.

I’d seen the film at school. I knew the rudiments of reproductive anatomy. What she said made no sense. I could just as easily injure myself, that way, on a low chain link fence. Or the right kind of tree branch. And I’d already decided I didn’t want to be a virgin on my wedding night.

Of course I climbed the fence. There was a little thrill and danger in its height. All of us neighbor kids met that challenge.