Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions Read online

  .

  Analysis was about paying attention to little things as though they were important, and then talking about them, even though it was embarrassing. I imagined cleaning Dr. Freundlicht’s bathroom, replacing the tan slime with a new bar of blue Zest, and buying him terry cloth hand towels. That sounded too much like transference, or was it self-abasement? As far as I was concerned they were the same thing. Or else I was turning into my mother, the Bitch-Goddess of Hygiene.

  A sigh escaped me.

  “Hm-m-m?” said Dr. Freundlicht.

  “I’ve got a new nervous tic. Or else it’s an old nervous tic I’ve noticed for the first time.”

  “Describe it,” he said.

  “I take deep breaths and sigh all the time. Sometimes I forget to exhale. It’s depression, right?”

  I was boring to listen to when I talked about depression, which always made me feel more depressed, as well as guilty for boring Dr. Freundlicht, even though he was paid to listen. I was about to apologize for being a guilty boring puddle of melted down tan slime when he said, crisply:

  “You may be experiencing a loss of elasticity in your lungs. It’s an early warning sign of emphysema. If you’re truly concerned you should have a check up.”

  We had a truce, Dr. Freundlicht and I. He put up with my smoking, but took every opportunity to inform me of its hazards to my health, which were the times I felt free to tune him out.

  This time, as though on command, I put out the cigarette.

  Not that I wanted to.

  I felt suddenly split in two, half of me watching, with dread and curiosity, a stranger, who was also me, but who wanted to stop smoking. Where would the surplus nervous energy migrate? I saw myself knitting a long, lumpy muffler while gobbling fistfuls of junk food. Within a month I’d be too fat for standard sizes. In a year I’d be sideshow material.

  I could barely remember what life was like without cigarettes to movie it along. Stretches of boredom bracketed by spurts of anxiety and chasms of loneliness, that’s what it was. A childhood of walking home from the orthodontist in the rain. Frantic hours of piano practice the night before piano lesson as penance for not practicing all week. Staring out of classroom windows. Staring at the clock.

  I fished the crumpled cigarette out of Dr. Freundlicht’s ashtray, ready to light up, but my hands shook too badly for matches. The rest of my life stretched before me as a series of disconnected,

  desperate improvisations.

  “What are you not saying this time?” he said, but he’d seen the whole show.

  He knew what it meant. I didn’t have to tell him.

  .

  The summer of 1981 I lived in the remnants of a group house near National Zoo with Rainbow, an acid casualty who had good office skills and many irritating mannerisms, but housemates my age who tolerated chain-smoking and meat eaters were hard to find. She’d lived in places like Big Bear and Boulder, but moved back east to be near her family and become a grown-up. Her words, not mine. I couldn’t figure out whether she was sincere or just goofing on me in a post-modern ironic way. Out of the blue she’d say stuff like “it’s okay to love your country and be a chick again” or “capitalism is really hip, y’know?” Her wardrobe came from thrift stores, and her big ideas seemed to come off matchbook covers, the kind that said Earn Big Money Now! Learn in Your Spare Time. She was taking a correspondence course in truck driving so she could become an independent entrepreneur.

  .

  “It can’t be healthy for you to live with a retarded person,” Jake told me after he met Rainbow for the first time. “You have to be some kind of a moron to believe you can learn to drive a truck by mail.”

  Sometimes I imagined her presence in my life was in reality a re-education program for Sixties holdovers underwritten by the Heritage Foundation, but somehow I understood her better once I met the rest of her family.

  Rainbow’s family lived in an excessively restored farmhouse outside Leesburg, and were consumed by hobbies. Her father repaired clocks in his garage workshop. There was a congealed boyishness about him, something sinister and gauche. He wore black socks with his Bermuda shorts, and his face was too old for his hair. He made a point of telling me, not that I asked, about being first trombone with the navy band until he lost his embouchure and retired early on disability. Rainbow’s mother was taciturn and fidgety in a way that suggested long midwestern winters. Each kitchen appliance had its own cover, either quilted or crocheted. She showed me her root cellar and what appeared to be a lifetime supply of homemade relishes and preserves. I never got to meet Rainbow’s brother, who was fighting the Battle of Spottsylvania with his Civil War re-enactor group. Later, Rainbow told me the retired trombone story was just cover, and that her father was really a retired spy. CIA. The root cellar was cover too; it was a fallout shelter. Space was reserved for Rainbow, who hoped she could get to it in time.

  “Just make sure you leave early so you miss rush hour,” I’d said, “That traffic jam around the Pentagon is a killer.”

  A sanctimonious expression came over her face, as though she pitied my ignorance but it would be a breach national security to tell me more.

  “It’s no joke, Lauren.”

  “You really want to live in a hole in the ground with your parents and eat pickled relish?”

  “I’m a survivor,” she’d said.

  Not me.

  I wanted to be at ground zero when the big one hit. I wanted to be vaporized.

  .

  The kitchen smelled deliciously of ginger and cinnamon.

  “I’d rather die than not live under a Capitalist System,” said Rainbow by way of a greeting.

  She took a tray of cookies out of the oven. The polka-dot kerchief tied around her curly red hair and her ruffled apron were pure I Love Lucy.

  You twit! I wanted to say. Do you know what your life would be under Godless Communism? Pretty much the same; a shared apartment with a roommate or two in a nice part of Moscow. An office job where you typed letters and answered the phone. A few more amenities than your average Commie working girl, thanks to a Daddy in the KGB.

  “I just quit smoking,” I said. “Four hours and twenty-nine minutes ago.”

  “Oh wow, Lauren. You must be feeling so good about yourself right now.”

  “I feel weird. Like I’m driving on I-95 without brakes. Like I’m driving a strange car with manual transmission. A BMW before they were cool. Everything’s too intense.

  “Have some milk and cookies, and you’ll feel better,” she said. “The ones in the jar are cool enough.”

  The cookies in the jar looked like chocolate chip, but turned out to be oatmeal raisin made with too much ginger. I’ve never liked raisins, but I ate a second one. I reached for another cookie, but thought better of it.

  “Any messages for me?”

  “Jake hasn’t called,” Rainbow said, “Tell me you’re not in love with him. Are you?”

  I’d never used the word, even to myself. Jake was my sentimental education, my destiny. We grew up in adjoining New York suburbs that we despised. We met at a progressive summer camp in Vermont when I was 16. He gave me my first kiss, after which he’d made a play for Wanda Johnson, who was my tent mate, but that didn’t count. What counted was our meeting up in Washington, half a lifetime later and connecting. My first orgasm ever was the time he took me from behind on his living room rug. Karastan, machine made, unlike genuine oriental rugs that were made by exploited labor. We shared Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. Naked brunch: sex, bagels, and lox, fresh bagels and fresh lox because we were both from New York and could taste the difference. Together, we knew all the answers to the Sunday Times crossword puzzle.

  “Yeah, it’s love.”

  “He’s not good enough for you,” said Rainbow.

  She looked like she wanted to say more, but I cut her off.

  “That’s sweet of you, but actually Jake and I are pretty well matched. He’s a little lacking in social graces, bu
t, hey, I’m not the world’s best housekeeper—”

  “Jake made a pass at me the last time he was here,” she said.

  “In the kitchen with the Chinese food?”

  “He sort of snuck up behind me in the kitchen when my hands were full and copped a feel, so I stepped on his feet. If I’d known you guys were serious, I would have said something sooner. He’d tried something like that once before.”

  I wanted to believe she was making this up, but knew better. Rainbow lived in fantasy land but she didn’t tell lies. Soon every cell in my body would shriek betrayal, but for now I wanted something to do with my hands or put in my mouth that was not a cigarette.

  While I brooded, Rainbow cleaned up the kitchen.

  “Men are back, and they’re better than ever!” she announced brightly, after she’d scrubbed her last pot.

  Translation: she was in love again. The last time I noticed, she was dating a stringer for one of the wire services who had a phone in his car but no fixed address. Rainbow called him a reporter, but he was more like a news groupie.

  Before that, it was two guys named Steve.

  “It’s the real thing this time,” she said.

  “Are we talking about Marty?”

  “Don’t be silly, Lauren. No one who lives in a Honda Accord is ready to make a commitment. It’s the real thing this time. Henry’s got a big old house in Arlington with a jacuzzi.”

  “Congratulations on landing landed gentry,” I said.

  Rainbow gave me a pitying look.

  “That’s not what it’s all about. Henry’s a real man, and he knows how to make me feel like a real woman. I’d be a fool to let this one get away, a perfect fool.”

  From the low tremor in her voice, you could tell how thrilled she was with the chance to use that perfect fool line. Rainbow had a hope chest stuffed with bad dialog. Bette Davis in Now Voyager, or did the Great Gatsby say it to Daisy Buchanan? Next, I wrapped my brain around the concept of gender realness unrelated to real estate, but got distracted by thoughts of food.

  Any kind and lots of it.

  Now!

  “Rainbow, what did you put in these cookies besides ginger? Suddenly I’m starving.”

  “That’s because you’ve been without a cigarette for how many hours?”

  “Four and a half,” I said.

  A large, semi-transparent cigarette drifted across my field of vision on the diagonal. I blinked and it moved faster, followed by another. Not exactly a hallucination, more like subliminal advertising.

  ISN’T it time you had a cigarette?

  Isn’t it TIME you had a cigarette?

  Isn’t it time YOU had a cigarette?

  Isn’t it time you had a CIGARETTE?

  Rainbow returned to her favorite subject, Henry, who filled his days with gardening and genealogical research.

  “He doesn’t need a regular job cause he’s got a trust fund,” she said.

  “You mean he doesn’t have a real job? I thought that was what real men were all about. “

  “If you’re independently wealthy you don’t need one,’’ she explained.

  “So where’d you guys meet, or is that classified information?”

  “The Georgetown pool. He asked to borrow my Bain de Soleil.“

  Trust Rainbow to meet true love at Swimming Pool of the Doomed. When I went to the Georgetown pool I met teenagers with bad acne and loud radios, Third World med students with green card problems, and crazy old people who talked to themselves. I suddenly realized Rainbow wasn’t an airhead at all, but a fount of feminine intuition, all that stuff I’d forfeited by going after pay equity. Maybe if I studied her ways I could learn how to be more effective as a girl. Rule one: After thirty always use a moisturizer. Rule two: Never let him know you don’t have a date for Friday night. Rule three involved either sticking elbows in grapefruit halves before a bath, or was it remembering to write your hostess a bread and butter note three days after the visit? I probably owed a bread and butter note to Rainbow’s folks, the spooks.

  My mind was coming unglued.

  A useful rule of conduct in Washington is never do anything you wouldn’t be able to justify in front of a hostile Congressional Oversight Committee, and it occurred to me I was on thin ice.

  “Are there drugs in this cookie?”

  “Don’t worry, it’s just reefer, not acid,” she said with a shrug.

  “So what? This stuff is illegal!”

  “It’s better for you than tobacco,” she said.

  .

  There was a reception for the FAF Board of Directors, that night, and Rainbow invited me to come as her guest. FAF stood for Friends of American Firearms. Rainbow was filling for their regular receptionist, who was out on maternity leave. The FAF threw frequent receptions, which gave Rainbow the chance to wear her collection of thrift store cocktail dresses to work.

  “Maybe you’ll meet someone nice,” she’d said.

  The FAF buffet was lavish, but in odd ways; five kinds of bourbon but no vodka, and the hors d’oeuvres were made from wild animals shot by the membership. I sampled venison meatballs, but passed on the moose Stroganoff. Rainbow introduced me to the FAF president, who looked like Mr. Potato Head and smelled of Brut aftershave. Over the din of drunken small talk I could hear the sounds of gunfire and laughter, and wandered over its source, which turned out to be the FAF rifle range. Tentatively, I picked up a shot gun, but when I noticed a man in a navy blazer aim his camera at me, I put the gun down.

  He came over to me, clearly disappointed. He wore penny loafers, and looked chipmunk cute, like something out of a kit, and turned out to be the official FAF photographer.

  “Say, you didn’t think I was going to take your picture so I could blackmail you just in case I found out you worked for Teddy Kennedy? Most women like to have their pictures taken on the range. I bet you’d be surprised to find out how at how many women members we have. Why we even have a woman on our board of directors. “ He pointed to a laughing gray haired woman with a creased leather face, the only woman besides me in sensible shoes. “She’s some feisty lady.”

  His use of the word feisty was the final turn off. It’s not a real word. The only thing worse was diminutive, a patronizing way of saying short. Feisty, diminutive Lauren Ginsburg shot Jake “the Snake” Meltzer with FAF shotgun, police report. Claims temporary sanity.

  .

  “My name’s George,” the photographer said, holding out his hand. “I’m not such a bad guy when you get to know me.”

  So we talked, or rather I listened.

  George admired Walker Evans and Ansel Adams, but thought his own work would be as emblematic of the eighties as those portraits of Dust Bowl Madonnas were for the Great Depression; George’s work being to photograph the guests at FAF cocktail parties just in case, for instance, some one from Teddy Kennedy’s office wandered across the shooting range.

  His hand rested lightly on my arm. He beat a gentle tattoo with his fingers. I recognized the opening bars of the Twilight Zone theme music.

  The image of Jake groping Rainbow in my kitchen sprung to mind. I felt exceedingly vulnerable, an old-fashioned liberal on nicotine withdrawal, but also voracious. Maybe Rainbow’s way worked better, in which case George was not a really a polished rodent but more like a friendly dog. He seemed eager to please me if he could figure out what it was I wanted. There was something Jake used to do to the back of my neck that made me go loose at the knees. I wondered if George would get the general idea if I tilted my head ever so slightly. As George’s lips grazed the side of my neck, I felt the familiar thrill. I wondered what sign he was, and hoped not Capricorn. Capricorns made lousy lovers, according to Rainbow. Jesus Christ and Richard Nixon were Capricorns. Your typical Capricorn was anal retentive, a real freak for control, as opposed to Virgos, who were anal compulsive, meaning they wash up immediately and don’t like to eat in bed. No one in Washington understood about eating in bed except Jake. Spare ribs, Spring rolls and the Su
nday Times. Jake nibbling on my ear.

  Orca in five letters, prick in six. Ratfink. Schmuck. Meltzer.

  “You have beautiful eyes, George,” I said, having counted at least three of them.

  “My wife thinks I look like A1 Pacino.”

  “You’re married? I’m so sorry. “

  I worked my mouth into a pout of despair. Time to be a cartoon.

  “But let me put it like this,” he said. “We have a little understanding, so long as no one brings home anything contagious, if you catch my drift.”

  He meant herpes. AIDS was barely a rumor, back then.

  “I’m a Libra,” I told him. “We repel social disease.”

  George turned to me. “How would you like to take a nice shower? “ he said.

  Damn, a double Virgo. We hadn’t even left the shooting range.

  “I’m going to look pretty silly with wet hair and streaky mascara.”

  “Oh come now, haven’t you ever made love in a shower?”

  It was silly for him to call what we were about to do “making love”. Probably he thought he was appealing to my feminine sensibilities, but I found the idea offensive that two strangers with nothing in common but horniness could manufacture love out of pure physical sensation.

  “Could we get horizontal,” I asked. “I don’t balance well on slippery surfaces.”

  “Aw, where’s your spirit of adventure?”

  Having sex with a strange man seemed adventurous enough for me. You could slip on a bar of soap, fall down, hit your head, and die in a shower.

  “Do you have something against beds?”

  “I like to push the envelope,” he said.

  It was nine hours and forty-nine minutes since that last cigarette. I was deranged. My lungs felt empty. My lips longed to wrap themselves around something smooth and tubular. I also had a sudden fierce desire to bite down on something. Okay, not bite, just suck real hard.

  This was so infantile. Infinite regress.

  “Maybe you can help me out,” said the stranger who seemed to be occupying my body. “I’m an oral fixate. Would you mind very much giving up the shower for a really good blow job?”