A Time to Scatter Stones Read online

  “And you came home.”

  “Not right away. First I went down to the basement to let Henry know everything was settled, and he wouldn’t be seeing any more of your brother.”

  “Her faux brother,” Elaine said. “Didn’t Henry see you schlepping Paulsen down the stairs?”

  “I think he made a point of staying in his apartment. He was relieved to have it all over with, and happy to lend me the key rather than go upstairs with me.”

  “You went back upstairs?”

  “To straighten up, and to retrieve what I’d brought with me. Oh, that reminds me.”

  I went to the other room and returned with the backpack. I had dropped a like-new kitchen mallet in one trashcan and a worn-once ski mask in another, so there was only one item in the backpack, and I took it out and handed it to her.

  “My alligator bag,” she said.

  “I didn’t know what else you might need or want,” I said, “and when I started looking around, it felt like an invasion of privacy.”

  “You might have found panties,” Elaine said. “Can I see? Oh, it’s a beauty. You wouldn’t want to leave this behind.”

  “I thought I would never want to look at it again,” she said, and clutched the handbag to her chest. “Because he touched it.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Elaine said. “He had his hands all over your pussy, too, and you’re not gonna get rid of that, are you? This is a gorgeous bag. You hang on to it.”

  THE PASTA WAS THE sort that looks like little bedsprings. Fusilli, I think it’s called. It was topped with Paul Newman’s marinara, which Elaine had pepped up a little with Dave’s Insanity hot sauce. She’d thrown together a salad, too.

  “My default setting,” she said. “Pasta and a salad. It’s a good thing everybody likes it, because it’s the only thing I ever seem to cook.”

  No one complained. Hunger’s the best sauce, even better than Paul’s and Dave’s, and we all brought good appetites to the table.

  Afterward we had our tea in the living room. Ellen talked about her apartment, and tried to figure out if she wanted to return to it. “Just in case he’s crazier than we think,” she said, “maybe I shouldn’t be too easy to find.”

  “On the other hand,” Elaine pointed out, “it’s rent-stabilized, isn’t it?”

  “For the next eight months. Then the built-in increase takes it over the edge, and the landlord can ask full market value for it.”

  ‘Then the hell with it,” Elaine said. “You can live anywhere.”

  “I can, can’t I? I like where I am now, on the Upper West Side. I’ll stay there for the full period of the sublet, and by then I might be able to find something in the neighborhood. Or Brooklyn, which seems to be where everybody is moving these days.”

  “Except for the ones moving to Harlem, or the South Bronx.”

  “I really could go anywhere, couldn’t I? Figuring out where I want to live is the least of it. What I really have to figure out is who I want to be.”

  “No rush on that one,” Elaine said.

  “No. That woman this evening, the one who’s going back to school? I could do that.”

  “I wouldn’t make her a role model just yet.” They both laughed, and to me Elaine said, “She told us how she blew her professor to get her grade changed.”

  “But it wasn’t really prostitution,” Ellen said, “because she didn’t take any money for it.”

  “And besides she really deserved an A.”

  “Plus he was sweet, and she might have done him anyway.”

  “SPEAKING OF MONEY,” Ellen said, “you spent a lot of it. I want to pay you back.”

  I told her not to worry about it.

  “But that’s not right,” she said. “A hundred dollars to the cab driver, and I don’t know how many hundreds you gave my super. Plus the mallet and the mask and the backpack, and why should you be out of pocket for all that?”

  “I’m not out of pocket,” I told her. “Quite the reverse. I came out ahead.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Our friend had more in his wallet than ID and credit cards. He had over eighteen hundred dollars, most of it in hundreds and fifties.”

  “And you took it.”

  “Just the large bills.”

  “Good for you,” Elaine said. “What do we need with chump change?”

  SHE REFILLED OUR TEACUPS, and then the two of them got to talking about other things various Tarts had said. In AA this would have been considered breaking a person’s anonymity, but Tarts didn’t have AA’s formal traditions, and anyway I didn’t know the people they were talking about.

  “I don’t know why men want to see two women together,” Ellen said. “Would you get off on watching two guys?”

  Elaine said she wouldn’t, but she’d read that a fair number of straight women enjoyed watching gay male porn. But she couldn’t believe it was anywhere near the proportion of men who were turned on by lesbians.

  “No, I’m sure it’s not.” To me she said, “Is it a turn-on for you? Two women?”

  “It doesn’t make me want to run out of the room,” I said.

  “A lot of clients wanted it,” Elaine said. “What they wanted was a date with me and a friend of mine, but they always wanted us to fool around a little before they joined in.”

  “Did you like dates like that?”

  “They were okay,” she said. “I never felt romantic about a girl, but I didn’t mind the sex part.”

  “That’s what I was thinking of, when it’s romantic. What that one woman said.”

  The woman in question, I learned, was a lesbian. Her girlfriend was also in the game, so when a client wanted a threesome that was who she recruited, and they put on a show and did each other, and then they both did the guy.

  “Like you do,” Ellen said.

  “And it ruined her relationship,” Elaine said. “Once they’d turned their lovemaking into a performance, it wasn’t fulfilling anymore. It made them self-conscious, as if someone was watching them.”

  “With his dick in his hand,” Ellen said. “They broke up not long after that. And the ironic thing is that the main reason she picked her girlfriend for the date was because she thought it would be cheating if she brought in another girl.”

  I’d wished I could be a fly on the wall at a Tarts meeting, and this was even better.

  Elaine told how her regular partner on threesie dates had been her best friend in the game. “And if anything we were closer friends afterward.”

  “Because you’d shared the experience.”

  “Not just that. She was cute and funny and very sweet, and I’d had thoughts about her. Not fantasized exactly, but, you know, wondering what it would be like.”

  “To be in bed with her.”

  “Uh-huh. And it was nice. Matt probably knows who it was.”

  I said I could probably guess. “Connie Cooperman?”

  “Yes, and all of a sudden I’m so sad I could cry.” To Ellen she said, “She met a real nice guy and got married and moved out to—was it Indiana?”

  “Ohio,” I said.

  “And then someone went out there and murdered her and her whole family. I don’t want to think about it.”

  ELLEN SAID, “YOU SAID something earlier. In a Jewish accent.”

  Elaine didn’t remember, but I did. “The woman who borrowed the pot,” I said.

  “Oh, right. So there are these two dames, and one accuses the other of borrowing a pot from her and never returning it. And the second woman denies everything. “In the first place, I never borrowed from you a pot. In the second place, it was an old pot. And in the third place, I gave it back to you in better condition than you gave it to me. It’s not really much of a joke. It’s better as a reference than a joke.”

  “The way you used it.”

  “Right.”

  One thing it did, it got the spotlight off Connie Cooperman.

  ELLEN ASKED IF A client of Elaine’s ever wanted t
o bring her home to his wife. Never, Elaine said. She’d heard enough stories along those lines, but nobody ever invited her to that sort of party.

  Ellen said, “Really? I would get that a lot. And, you know, it was a different experience every time. Once it was obviously all his idea, and his wife hadn’t had any experience with women and didn’t particularly want to. She was just helping him fulfill his fantasy.”

  “Accommodating of her.”

  “Another time the wife had a lot more experience with girls than I did, and knew just what she wanted to do. And another time . . .”

  The energy in the room had changed. All this sexually-charged talk, I thought. It could hardly fail to raise everybody’s temperature.

  But it was more than that.

  Ellen shifted in her chair, crossed her legs. She said, “There was this one couple.”

  “Oh?”

  “He was a nice guy. A lot older than me, like really a lot. And I’d had two or three dates with him, and he said he knew his wife would like me, and how would it be if the three of us went out for dinner?”

  Elaine: “Like a date? I mean a date date?”

  “Kind of. Still, it was pretty clear how the date was supposed to end. I put on a good dress and met them at a really nice restaurant. I mean, not some ridiculous place with a $200 tasting menu, but a decent French restaurant. I couldn’t tell you what I ordered, but I remember it was good, and so was the wine.”

  She paused, thinking back, and not about the food or the wine.

  She said, “I don’t know why, but I expected his wife to be closer to my age than his. I was wrong about that, she couldn’t have been more than a few years younger than him. But she was still pretty, and she’d kept her figure.”

  “An attractive woman of a certain age.”

  “And very sweet, and completely at ease. The food was excellent, and the conversation was about everything in the world but what we were there for. He was a Yankees fan and she was a Mets fan, and they said they were living proof that a mixed marriage could work out. There was a Tom Stoppard play on Broadway, and they’d seen it and so had I, and we talked about that. We never ran out of things to talk about. It was a great conversation and a terrific meal, and afterward we sipped our espresso, and nobody wanted an after-dinner drink.

  “And she said, ‘Ellen, we like you very much. Would you like to come back to our apartment?’ ”

  “I guess you went.”

  “You think? Their apartment was just a block or two from the restaurant, and it was a beautiful night, and we walked there. Not too fast and not too slow, because we really wanted to get there but the anticipation was too exciting to hurry through it. Do you know what I mean?”

  I knew what she meant.

  “It was like electricity in the air, that kind of energy. They lived in a full-service building, of course, with a doorman and an elevator operator. They were on the twelfth floor, and he unlocked the door and locked it again when we were inside, and she took me in her arms and told me how sweet and pretty I was. Then she kissed me, and I got all caught up in the kiss, and then she let me go and he took her place, kissed me on the mouth and then on the side of my throat, right at the pulse point. He had his arms around me, and then she was touching me, too.

  “I never said their names, did I?”

  “No.”

  “Gordon and Barbara. Their apartment was gorgeous. Antique furniture from different periods. Art on the walls. He pointed out a couple of paintings, told me things about the artists, but I couldn’t take it in.

  “There was soft indirect lighting in the bedroom. The bed was queen-size, and it had been turned down. He took off his jacket and hung it over a chair, and she turned so that I could help her with the zipper of her dress. And when we’d all taken off all our clothes, she looked me up and down, and her face just filled up with delight, and I honest to God felt like the most beautiful woman in the world.

  “She came over to me, and put a hand on me. No one had said a word since we entered the bedroom, but now she spoke. ‘Let’s do everything,’ she said.”

  “IT WAS KIND OF magical,” she said. “Very highly charged sexually, but there was something else going on, too, something primal. I felt as though I was healing something from my childhood, some trauma I didn’t even know was there. I remember there was one moment, I was lying on my back and they were on either side of me, not touching but close enough that I could feel the warmth of their bodies. And I felt safe. It was like I’d never in my life felt completely safe, and now I did.”

  Elaine asked her if she’d stayed the whole night.

  “Most of it. I didn’t fall asleep, nobody slept, and there was a point where it felt like it was time to leave, and nobody tried to talk me out of it. I got dressed and Gordon handed me an envelope and offered to take me downstairs and put me in a cab, but he’d have had to get dressed and I knew the doorman could get me a cab.

  “I went home and went to bed, and I must have fallen asleep within minutes. And when I woke up I felt this strange combination of happy and sad, and it took me a while to realize that the sad part was because I knew I would never see them again.”

  “But you did,” Elaine said.

  “How did you know? What happened was they sent flowers, not that day but the day after. Just their names on the card, Gordon and Barbara. No message.”

  “The flowers were the message,” Elaine said.

  “Yes, but I wasn’t sure what it meant. ‘We had a wonderful time and we never want to see you again.’ I wanted to pick up the phone and thank them for the flowers, but I didn’t know what was appropriate, or what they might want. There’d been a thousand dollars in the envelope. A thousand dollars plus a good dinner, plus flowers.”

  I said, “Well, you paid for your own cab.”

  “Plus I tipped the doorman, and the kid who brought the flowers, if we’re keeping score. Anyway, I didn’t make that phone call. And a couple of days later, when I’d stopped wondering if I’d hear from them and accepted that I wouldn’t, the phone rang and it was Gordon.

  “I told him the flowers were lovely, and how sweet it was to send them. And he said something about the importance of finding a really good florist, which was certainly a subject I’d never thought about, and then he asked if I’d be able to see them Saturday evening.

  “I didn’t need to think. I said I’d love it, but there was one condition. I didn’t want to take any money for it. He said not to be silly, and I said I wasn’t being silly, and I made it clear that I was serious. And we arranged a time for me to come over.

  “And I got there a few minutes early, so I made myself look in a store window for a while and then go to their building. He answered the door wearing a sport jacket but no tie, and she was in lounging pajamas, which was a very good look for her. Kisses right away, and then a little petting on the living room couch, and then we got up and headed for the bedroom. And just before we crossed the threshold I said, “I have one request, but if it’s too weird just say so and we’ll forget I ever said it. But would it be all right if I called you Mommy and Daddy?”

  THEY WERE FINE WITH it, she told us. It added something, not that anything needed to be added, and not that she could define what the extra element was. She saw them three more times at intervals of about a month, and after the last time she left knowing they wouldn’t be calling her again.

  She looked off into the middle distance, at a memory or a notion. Then she looked at each of us in turn, and said, “It’s true, in case you’re wondering. Everything I said is exactly what happened.”

  I started to say something, but she held up a hand and stopped me.

  “Exactly what happened and how it happened,” she said. “But here’s what you should know. I’d have told you that story even if I’d had to make up every word of it.”

  Nobody dropped a pin. I would have heard it.

  “I’ve never seen your bedroom,” she said. “Is your bed big enough for three?” Sh
e smiled. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You know you want to do it.”

  WHEN I OPENED MY eyes, it was because the morning sun was streaming through the window. It generally does that, except on overcast days, but I rarely notice because I always sleep on the far side of the bed. So it was disorienting, and it took me a moment to realize that our normal sleep routine had been altered, and how and why.

  I turned, and saw Elaine on the other side of the bed, sleeping on her side, facing away from me. I was relieved and disappointed, in approximately equal parts, that it was just the two of us. I closed my eyes, turned away from the daylight, and would have gone back to sleep if my bladder had let me. I got up and went to the bathroom, and when I got back in bed Elaine was awake.

  I said, “Did that happen?”

  “Either that or we both had the same vivid dream. You know how it’s always a mixed blessing to live out a fantasy in real life? I mean you’re glad you did, and it’s exciting, but it’s never quite as good as it was when all you were doing was imagining it.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “That’s where I was going,” she said. “Just a few days ago we imagined the whole thing, and we had a good time—”

  “More than a good time.”

  “—and what we just did was better. I don’t want to talk it to death, but it’s got to be right up there on my list of peak experiences.”

  “Probably not all that far from the top.”

  “Not far, no. Did you see it coming? Because I didn’t.”

  “Once she started telling the story about the older couple—”

  “The much older couple.”

  “Oh, ever so much older.

  “Gordon and Barbara. Gordie and Barb?”

  “Gordo and Babs,” I suggested. “By the time they were in the restaurant, I had a feeling where she was going.”

  “Oh, sure. By then.”

  “But even then,” I said, “I wasn’t close to certain.”

  “Because we’d fantasized about it.”