Story of My Life Read online

  Sure, he whines. Jesus, you’ve got an incredible body.

  I say, but not as incredible as hers.

  Better, he goes.

  I’m like, now I’m really getting pissed.

  What did I do? he goes.

  You’re not being honest, I say. You’re thinking one thing and saying another.

  Not necessarily, he says.

  Yes necessarily, I tell him.

  In my experience this is one big problem with older guys, they start to lose their spontaneity in their thirties, start saying what they think they’re supposed to say instead of what they feel, sort of like hardening of the arteries. Like, we’re all pretty much raving maniacs as kids, but then some of us get all conventional. Not me, that’s why I know I’m going to be a great actress some day, I’m totally in touch with my child.

  Alison, Dean goes, in this older-man kind of tone, let’s just imagine that a guy had just met a girl he really likes. This is strictly hypothetical, right? But let’s say that shortly after he meets her, and before he even knows her very well, somebody asks him, in her presence, who’s prettier, her or, for instance, his former girlfriend. Right? Now, don’t you think he’d be a real pig if he said, in front of this nice new girl, that his old girlfriend made her, his new female friend, look like Lassie?

  I’m like, you think I look like Lassie, huh?

  Dean’s like, Alison! That’s just an example. A deliberately extreme one.

  So your old squeeze is prettier than me, is that it? I say.

  He says, I’m just saying that even if I were lying, which I wasn’t—truth isn’t always an unalloyed virtue.

  I go, a what?

  Unalloyed, he says. That means pure.

  And I’m like, no wonder I don’t know it.

  And he says, there are times when it’s better to spare people’s feelings, keep the social fabric intact.

  And I’m like, the social fabric? What the hell is that? I go, is that like dacron polyester or something?

  I mean really, he believes this shit?

  Actually, it’s more like silk, he says. It’s a delicate thing.

  It’s like nonexistent is what I’m saying, I go. We’re all just pieces of lint if you ask me.

  That’s very clever, Alison, he goes, hauling out the grown-up moan again. Look, he says, I’m just saying there’s a reason for manners. The unvarnished truth isn’t always what we need to hear. Diplomacy is what separates us from the animals.

  I totally disagree, I say. I’ve grown up around liars and cheaters and I don’t think there’s any excuse for not telling the truth. I want to be able to trust you, but if I don’t think you respect the truth, you know, then I’ll just hit the road. You’ve got a nice vocabulary but I’m like, I insist on honesty. You should be able to tell me whatever you’re feeling. If you think Didi has a better body than me you should say so. I can take it.

  Dean says, and what if I do want to sleep with her?

  Then you should, I go. Don’t hold off on my account.

  You don’t mean that, he goes.

  I do too, I say. I hope you don’t want to. But if you do, you should.

  There are some things you feel that you would never act on, Dean says, and there are some things you feel that you’d never want to say. Do you think I should sleep with everyone I’m attracted to? How far does this honesty go?

  If I want to do something, I do it, I say. If I feel something I say it. Otherwise you’re a hypocrite.

  Have you ever wanted to kill someone, Alison? he says.

  A lot of people, I go.

  But you didn’t, right? You can’t act out all your impulses.

  And I’m like, some of them I wish I had.

  Dean lies back down and I can’t even hear him breathing. After a few minutes I begin to feel bad about giving him such a hard time, especially since he was so great about helping Rebecca, so I roll over and curl up in his shoulder, then I kiss his ear and finally he leans over and kisses me on the mouth and one thing leads to another and pretty soon we’re in the same spot we were in the night before. I mean, I am one horny unit, but then the phone rings—for some reason Dean forgot to unplug it or turn on the machine, I don’t know, maybe his friends don’t call at all hours. I would’ve ignored it, but he picks it up and of course it’s Rebecca. I look at the clock and it’s 5:15.

  What are you doing? Rebecca says.

  I’m drinking tea with Princess Di, I go.

  We’re over at Didi’s partying, she goes.

  And I’m like, imagine my surprise.

  She says, I wanted to ask you something but now I can’t remember what it was.

  I can hear Didi screaming something in the background.

  So what’s happening with you? says Rebecca.

  Finally I get rid of Rebecca and apologize to Dean. He says it’s okay and maybe we should get some sleep. What a wacky idea. I tell him he better unplug the phone. Becca will call back in five minutes once she remembers what she wanted to ask me. Probably she’ll want to know the name of some kid who lived next door to us fifteen years ago or something like that. Or else she’ll call up from the police station or the airport or from the apartment of some drug dealer who wants to kill her, like the first time she called tonight about three hours ago—it seems like weeks.

  She’s like, I need to get five hundred dollars quick or I’m going to get sliced up with a knife.

  And I’m like, whoa, is this a joke, or what? Nothing would surprise me coming from Rebecca, but still, this sounds a little radical.

  Alison, she goes, I’m not kidding.

  So I get the address and then Dean and Didi and me hop in a cab. Francesca gives us seventy dollars and Jeannie has forty. Dean gets two hundred out of his cash machine and Didi gets a hundred, which is all she has left, and then we go and wake up our friend Whitney and hit her bank. Feels kind of like old times, scraping up cash to visit Emile—except I’m really scared for Rebecca and I’m thinking about some guy cutting her up while we’re waiting for the damn computer at Chase Manhattan. No mas!

  So we fly up to Morningside Heights and Dean tells the cab driver the faster the trip the bigger the tip and finally we get up to this street of falling-down brownstones and find the right number. Dean says he’s going to go up alone and I say, no way, I’m coming too, and Didi says she doesn’t want to sit outside by herself. Dean’s so cool, I mean, he doesn’t even know Rebecca and he might get killed, I’m real grateful and I say later on I’ll show him just how grateful I can be, but right now I tell him she’s my sister and I’m coming up too. Then we hassle with the taxi driver, who naturally doesn’t want to hang around. In this neighborhood, he says, you get bullets through the windows. Dean gives him some huge tip and asks him to circle the block four or five times and watch for us. Then we go up.

  The front door is open already, busted on the hinges. The front hall is full of beer cans and crack vials. As we walk up the stairs I can hear the vials popping under our feet, snap crackle pop, breaking like little promises. We knock at the third-floor landing. After a while some voice goes yeah and I go, it’s Rebecca’s sister. The guy goes, you got the money? and I say yeah and then the door opens on a chain and these eyes look out, these dark, pinwheel eyes, and the guy goes, who are all these people? So we have this big debate at the door and he says he wants to see the money and I say I want to see Rebecca and finally she comes to the door and says, let them in for Christ’s sake, Mannie.

  So the guy opens the door and lets us in. He’s holding this knife, just kind of pointing it at us in general, but it doesn’t look like he’d really know what to do with it if it came down to that. He looks scared and sheepish. He’s maybe my age, small and skinny, about the size of Prince, with that same ridiculous little mustache, not bad-looking actually.

  Put the stupid knife away, for Christ’s sake, Rebecca says. They’ve brought the money. She’s drinking a beer, wearing a red Danskin top, these X-rated shorts and Reeboks. She looks like
she’s all set for aerobics, her hair up in a ponytail. I don’t know, I expected her to be tied up or something. It’s kind of an anticlimax.

  Dean gives the money to Becca and she gives it to this guy Mannie and he shoves it in his pocket and then folds up the knife. I don’t know why but I feel sorry for him. He looks so scared and lonely on the opposite side of the room from the rest of us.

  We had an agreement, he says. She owed me that money fair and square. She was here last week. I trusted her for the bread.

  You told me I didn’t have to pay.

  That was different, Mannie says.

  Different than what? Rebecca says. You just thought you’d get to fuck me.

  Mannie looks down at the floor. We had an agreement, he whines.

  Becca says, let’s get out of here, and then in the same breath she goes, if you guys have another hundred we can get an eighth for the road. I’ve got one fifty.

  Rebecca is totally in character.

  That’s a good idea, says Didi.

  So I don’t know, it was hard to get the story out of Rebecca. She said she met this guy last week at the China Club and he gave her a quarter ounce and his phone number, so when she goes up there to get some more he demands five hundred dollars. I don’t know what to believe, I really don’t. Little Mannie is apologizing like crazy as we’re leaving. Then he asks Becca to please call him, almost crying. I don’t know what the attraction is—drug dealers, investment bankers, she turns them all into blubbering idiots.

  Did anybody else think he looked kind of like Prince? I go when we’re riding back downtown.

  I thought he looked like Jesus, Rebecca said.

  Of course I sleep through my classes. When I finally open my eyes long enough to focus on anything it’s almost two, and I vaguely remember Dean getting up and leaving for his office. I grab the remote by the bed and flip on All My Children. When I finally get my act together and go home it’s three-thirty.

  I’m about to take a shower because I smell like an all-nighter, then I think I’ll take a bath so I can have a faucet orgasm. After all, I didn’t get any last night. A faucet orgasm is pretty much the same principle as a bidet orgasm except upside-down. When we were growing up we had bidets in all the bathrooms and when I was about ten I accidentally discovered one of the things they were good for. After that I used to spend hours on the damn thing. This dump we rent doesn’t have a bidet so I have to get in the tub and slide up toward the front, running my legs up the wall on either side of the faucet. Turn on the warm water and smile. Actually, you’ve got to get the water temperature just right first or you could really be in for a nasty shock. I’ve made that mistake a few times. This time I get it just right and I come three times before I get around to actually taking a bath.

  After toweling off and dosing up with some baby powder, I flop down on the bed and next thing I know I’m asleep again.

  I love to sleep. My dreams are so good, sometimes when I wake up in the middle of a really good one I go right back to sleep to see if I can get back into it. Once in a while it works. I don’t think most people appreciate dreams enough. They don’t remember or else they try to interpret them, you know, like they aren’t any good unless they have some application in real life. I think you should just take them for what they are. I mean, I love sex dreams but if I believed this psych course I took in college, then all dreams are sex dreams, which is ridiculous. Believe me, I know sex when I dream it, and I’m about the last person in the world to underestimate it, but who represses their sexual desires anymore? Nobody I know. Well, maybe we sometimes resist the urge to jump on top of some guy in the elevator or on the sidewalk. But we probably give him our phone number for later that night.

  Really, though, sex isn’t the only thing in life or in dreams—I can hear some of my friends who are like, unbelievable, Alison admitting sex isn’t everything. I used to be a bit of a slut. But anyway, about dreams, there are dreams about flying and swimming and eating and things that you can’t even describe, which is what’s so great about dreaming. I hate these people who try to make everything fit some scheme. Professors and shrinks. Francesca’s parents really wanted her to go to a shrink just in case there was anything wrong with her, in case they screwed up somehow, so they can feel better about it in advance of even knowing about it and feeling guilty, so she goes twice a week and sometimes when she’s real bored she’ll dish out some really bogus crap about her childhood or her dreams and take the shrink for a horrible ride into fantasyland. Like, gee, I had this dream where my father was smoking a big cigar and stroking my inner thigh, gosh, what do you suppose it means?

  When Jeannie comes home from work and wakes me up I’ve been dreaming this dream where the bunch of us from last night are all sitting around Dean’s apartment playing Truth or Dare. My acting coach is there too. But it turns out that Dean’s apartment is actually on the stage of the Public Theater and there’s this huge audience out there watching us play Truth or Dare. TRUTH OR DARE is spelled out in flashing light bulbs over the stage and my acting coach has a microphone, he’s moderating the whole thing, like a TV game-show host. . . .

  Jeannie’s in a real pissy mood and gets right on the phone to her fiancé, so I watch Wheel of Fortune in the bedroom. When she’s finally finished discussing world literature and nuclear disarmament with Frank she hangs up and calls the deli to order some Diet Coke and a large bag of barbecue potato chips and a pack of Merit Ultra Lights. I stick my head out the door because I want to order a pack of cigarettes myself but she’s already hung up. She picks up a copy of Cosmo and shuffles back and forth through the pages like they’re playing cards that she’s trying to seriously injure in the process. I think she’s mad at me.

  So I go back in the bedroom and call Dean and get his machine. I leave a message that’s cheerier than I feel and then I call Carol, my little sister, but there’s no answer. And then, like an optimist, I call Dad but of course there’s no answer there. I’m such a sucker—every time I dial him I can’t help getting this little tingle of hope. It’s a miracle if I can even find him, but I sort of fantasize that he’ll pick up the phone some day and say, is that you, Alison? I love you, honey, and I’m really sorry about the last fifteen years or so, I don’t know what came over me but I’m better now and I’m so sorry. . . .

  Jeannie picks up the phone in the other room while it’s still ringing and says, oh, excuse me, really bitchy, and then slams it down.

  There’s no answer, anyway. After I hang up Jeannie calls up Alex, my old squeeze, it doesn’t take long to figure this out because she keeps repeating his name and laughing real loud so I’ll know who it is and what a great time she’s having talking to my old boyfriend.

  A few minutes after she hangs up Jeannie finally comes in and sits down on the bed, viciously crunching away on her potato chips. I hate to see her expending so much energy on getting me to notice that she’s not a happy unit, so I say to her, are you mad at me? I remember as I say it that Dean asked me that same question about twelve hours ago.

  Who, me? she says, with a big fake look of horror. Mad at you? Why should I be mad at you? Just because you accused me in public of wanting to sleep with your boyfriend, is that any reason for me to be mad at you?

  I bet Jeannie’s been rehearsing those lines all day.

  Well, don’t you? I say.

  No, I don’t. For one thing I don’t find him irresistible, no offense, and for another thing he’s your boyfriend and some of us are loyal to our friends.

  Well, I’m sorry, I say, I guess I was wrong. And I feel kind of guilty when she says loyal to our friends because I have been awfully hard on her lately, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I love Jeannie.

  And Jeannie goes what? The infallible Alison? Wrong? Impossible. God, I hate George Michael, she says, watching his video on MTV.

  I could say, well, that’s what remotes are for, babe, but instead I say, I don’t trust men whose last names sound like first names.

 
; Jeannie says, I don’t trust men, period.

  Well, at least it’s not just me she’s mad at. I ask her if there’s trouble with Frank and she launches into this thing about how Frank suddenly told her he can’t come up for the weekend, which was the plan because supposedly the other tennis pro suddenly came down with a sick grandmother and he has to cover all weekend. I’m like, sick grandmother? give me a break. Or maybe the dog ate his homework, right? And not only can’t he come up but he’ll also be too busy to see her, she really wouldn’t have a good time down there blah blah blah and Jeannie, not real surprisingly, isn’t sure she believes him. She thinks something’s rotten on the island of Hilton Head.

  So I do my bit. Come on, I tell her, he’s probably telling the truth, she should trust him, she’s going to marry the guy and trust is the basis of marriage and she can always wake up really early Saturday morning and call him if she thinks he might be slipping around, see if he’s actually home and if he sounds guilty. Or if she really wants to do a serious bedcheck she could fly down unannounced.

  She says that’s a great idea, it cheers her up, she decides to go for it and surprise dear old Frankie. She hugs me and I hug her back. She calls up the airline and reserves for an 8:00 A.M. flight.

  You going to be able to wake up for that one? I say.

  I may just stay awake, she says. God, this is great, I should be able to get to his apartment by ten, which is plenty of time.

  She’s dying to catch Frank in the act. It’s nice to see her smiling again, but what a smile, all teeth and gums, like a piranha. She calls the limo service and books a car to pick her up Saturday morning.

  Alison, she goes, you’re a genius.

  All this boyfriend stuff makes me think of Dean. I call him and get the machine again. This time I leave a really neutral message asking him to call me when he gets in, very demure and ladylike. That’s me.

  Jeannie and I talk for a while about what dickheads men are and then we watch some dumb TV movie, as if there’s any other kind, I couldn’t begin to tell you what it’s all about because my concentration is shot, I’m thinking about Dean, wondering where he is. It’s after nine so he’s probably at dinner somewhere. I remember he said he likes Indochine so I call up there but they say he’s not there. I try to remember the name of his old girlfriend. I could just call and hang up if he answered. . . .