My Old Man Read online

  The meat released, I raised the fork to my mouth. As I bit in I felt nauseous, certain I was going to die or pass out as punishment for violating the Torah. But I kept chewing and the nausea passed, and…nothing happened. I didn’t throw up or faint. I didn’t even feel guilty. I took another bite, waiting again, and because I was not struck down I felt defiant. The meat was salty and rich and I felt like an idiot for not eating it all these years.

  “So Hank,” I said, chewing slowly, “how’d you get so perceptive about human nature?”

  “I’ve always been that way. When I was a kid in Jackson Heights I got beat up every day because I would look at a thug and he would see that I could see him. It would scare the crap outta him. Though I didn’t say it aloud he knew what I was thinking was Why are you afraid? or How come you think you’re ugly? As a result I was a magnet for bullies. The constant blows are what made me decide to pursue the life a the mind and not the body.”

  “I could give you a lot of constant blows,” I said.

  He chuckled. I felt woozy and elated and leered at him, buzzed. It was one of those looks that feel sexy in your own head but if you could see it on a videotape you would howl in pained shame. I took my napkin off my lap, leaned forward, placed it on top of his hand, and squeezed his fingers.

  “Are you a Hasid?” he said. “You can’t touch me?”

  “I’m Reform.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “Swathing you.”

  “Why?” he said slyly. “Am I injured?”

  “No,” I said, “but even a healthy man can use a good nurse.”

  His mouth spread wide in deference to the line. He reached forward with his free hand and grabbed my upper arm. His grasp was firm but not violent, like a period at the end of a sentence, and as he held me he looked at me with mysterious intensity, as though communicating some telepathic message. We stayed like this for a few seconds and then, just as abruptly as he’d reached, he placed both hands in his lap, scooted his chair back, and said, “What do you want for dessert?”

  We ordered two slices of Key lime pie. As he was licking the back of his fork he said, “You wanna get a drink somewhere?”

  “There’s a dive bar down by the expressway,” I said. “It’s called Montero. They have a pool table and it only costs seventy-five cents.” I had gone there with David a few times, but opted not to mention that. You have to make every guy think he’s the first to see the places you like, even if he’s the twelfth.

  “I like the sound a that place,” Powell said.

  “It used to be a sailor bar in the fifties. They would come and drink, get into a fight, go out on the street and maul each other, then come back in and have another beer. The owner told me about it. Pepe. I asked him once if anyone had been killed there and he said, ‘The person didn’t actually die inside the bar. He died in the hospital.’ ”

  “I really like the sound a that place,” Powell said, and raised his hand for the check.

  WHEN we got outside we went to Pacific, turned, and headed up Court Street. As we were crossing Atlantic, I spotted my mom coming toward us, carrying a bunch of shopping bags.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Nothing.” Before I had time to hide she saw us, waved, and shouted, “Rachel!”

  Feeling like a complete idiot for running from my own mother like she was an ex-boyfriend, I waited for her to come to our side. “Hi Mom,” I said, as her eyes veered to Powell with confusion.

  My mother is a conservative liberal, which means that she supports the library and votes Working Family but gets deeply disturbed if she gets a waitress at a restaurant who’s pregnant or has visible brastraps. Before she could ask who he was, he said, “Hello, I’m Hank,” and reached for her hand.

  She transferred one of her grocery bags to the other side and raised her hand to meet his paw. “I’m Sue,” she said. “Rachel’s mom.”

  “I was certain you were her sister,” he said.

  “That won’t work on me,” she said. “But I love it anyway.” No one said anything for a while, we all just smiled awkwardly, and then my mom asked how he knew me.

  “She came to see a play I wrote. The History of the Pencil.”

  “Oh,” she said, playing it completely cool. You can’t say you’ve seen a play when you’ve only seen the first half. It’s setting yourself up for disaster.

  “Hank’s a screenwriter,” I said deliberately. I turned to Powell. “The only one of your movies she’s seen is Flash Flood.”

  “My greatest fear is that when I die, that’ll be the flick I’m remembered for,” he said. I could tell this wasn’t the first time he’d used the line.

  “Then I guess I’ll have to catch up on the others,” she said, as I winced. “Well, I’d better get home before this ice cream gets cold. Nice to meet you, Hank.”

  I started walking as quickly as I could in the other direction as Powell skipped to catch up with me. “Ya mother’s lovely,” he said.

  “You should have just gone on ahead,” I said.

  “Never! It’s not often you meet a girl’s mother on the first date.”

  “You don’t understand! You give my parents an inch and they take a mile. Now she’s going to tell my dad she saw me with an older man and they’re going to ask me a million questions about you.”

  “You don’t have to answer,” he said.

  “I know,” I said, “but I wish I could have a little privacy sometimes.”

  “If you want more privacy,” Powell said, as we turned and headed toward the water, “it’s obvious what you gotta do.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Move.”

  THE bar was a sad scene. Six sixtysomething Hispanic men were listening to Sinatra, with wounded eyes, drinking from shot glasses. As we walked in they eyed us with calm hostility. A hipster and a cradle robber; they had no respect for either.

  “This is a dark place,” said Powell, without lowering his voice. “It’s like the Puerto Rican lonely hearts club here.”

  We ordered two Budweisers and went into the back room through an old ornate black wrought-iron gate. The pool table was in the center of the room and all over the walls were sailor paraphernalia—oars, lifesavers, paintings of seascapes, and huge framed photos of Latin social clubs from the fifties. A sign by the pool table said, “This is our OOL. Notice there is no P in it. Please keep it that way,” and I wondered whether something had happened to make them feel the sign was necessary.

  Powell put some quarters in the table. The balls tumbled out with a satisfying series of thwacks. “Are you gonna break?” I said, as he racked up.

  “No, you.” I had to kick Powell’s ass. All the women in his movies were good at pool and I wanted to remind him of one of his protagonists.

  I looked over at the rack. The order was crazy. “You don’t do it like that,” I said, coming around to his side of the table. “Haven’t you ever heard of a New York rack?”

  “What’s that?”

  I stuck out my chest and said, “You’re looking at one.”

  “I liked that,” he said. “That was good.”

  “In a New York rack you gotta put the yellow up front,” I said. “That’s ’cause it’s the easiest to see. Then you alternate around the perimeter, stripe, solid, and so on.”

  “That’s not how we used to play when I was a kid,” he said. “All that matters is the eight in the middle. Everything else should be arbitrary.”

  “Well, this makes things more fair and trust me, when I whup your ass you’re going to be grateful we started out even.”

  He sighed and fixed the balls, as I watched over his shoulder. “You happy now?” he said. I nodded. He lifted the triangle off but didn’t do the flip. It was a thrill to be on a date with a guy mature enough to refrain from the triangle flip.

  I put the cue an inch behind the dot, placed all my weight in the center of my body like I was taking a shit, b
ecause that’s how you get power, and measured up eight times. “You look good,” he said.

  “Don’t distract me,” I said. I measured up another eight times and hit the sucker as hard as I could.

  The balls separated OK but nothing sank. “You’re all bark and no bite,” said Powell.

  “What are you talking? I’m very bite. It’s just hard for women to break.”

  “Oh, so now ya pleading poverty? How quickly they turn.” He sank a stripe, and then another.

  “You’re all right,” I said. “How long have you been playing pool?”

  “Let’s see, since I was seventeen.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You’ve been playing pool longer than I’ve been alive.”

  “That’s right,” he said, and missed his next shot.

  “You’re totally over the hill,” I said as I lined up. “You’re old enough to be my old man.”

  “I know I am,” he said. “But you know what?” He came over to where I was standing and put his mouth by my ear. “I’m not your old man. And that’s all that matters.”

  I giggled and sunk the three. “You’re definitely in good shape for a geezer,” I said. “You have excellent hair.”

  “I do have nice hair,” he said, running his fingers through it. “I’m lucky. But I’ve had two ulcers and a herniated disk. So it all evens out.”

  I sunk four straight balls but then one went in that I wasn’t going for. “Your turn,” I said.

  “Whaddaya mean? You got the six in.”

  “I didn’t call it. If I didn’t call it I don’t deserve another shot.”

  “That’s not how I play,” he pronounced. “In my game, you sink you get another turn, regardless of intention. I prefer to leave as much to chance as possible.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it makes life more interesting!”

  As I chalked up he strode up to me and put his hand on the back of my neck. “C’mere,” he said, and turned me toward him. He held my hair, and tongued me firmly like he already owned my mouth. As we kissed he took the cue out of my hand and leaned it against the wall. It toppled to the floor with a loud clatter. I opened my eyes and bent to retrieve it but he yanked me up and said, “Never mind that.”

  He lunged for my mouth again. He wasn’t a biter but he seized me like a man. I felt like a shiny new puppy. I wanted him to lift me into the air by the nape. He pulled my body close and made a high-pitched moaning noise. The pitch of the moan, though high, was savage, a “Huh huh huh” first cousin to his “Heh heh heh” laugh.

  With each pull I felt smaller and like more of a victim and Powell grew more menacing and big. He knew what he wanted and didn’t need or care to ask my permission. He made me feel like a woman and I was too used to feeling like a man. I didn’t know how much was his age and how much his hubris but I loved his outsized-ness, his running the show. With guys my age I felt like a movie director, exhausted by the ingénues who wanted to please. It wasn’t their sensitivity I minded so much as their willingness to kowtow.

  “I didn’t expect this to happen,” I said softly.

  “Of course you did.”

  “I really wasn’t sure,” I said. “I wanted it to but I wasn’t sure.”

  “Couldn’t you tell in the restaurant when I grabbed you by the arm? It was a moment, an articulation. I was trying to tell you you’d been seen.”

  “You couldn’t have just said it?”

  “Getcha bag.” My lips felt raw, like someone had just walked on my face.

  “Where we going?” I said.

  “Don’t ask silly questions.”

  WHEN we stumbled out of the bar the streets were empty. It reminded me of the scene in Leon and Ruth where Julia Roberts and Don Cheadle are walking together in Jackson Heights the night before he’s leaving for Vietnam and Julia turns to him and says, “I can’t think of you going away, Leon. Without you I’m like an ant somebody stepped on but didn’t kill, toddling around, half broken and afraid.”

  I looked at Powell and felt the instinct to quote but decided it was best not to overemphasize my fandom on my way to the boudoir. When we got to Baltic Street he went halfway down the block, looked around, confused, and said, “Where the hell is my street?”

  “Which one do you live on again?”

  “Strong.”

  “It begins at Kane,” I said. “We gotta loop around. Don’t you know your own neighborhood?”

  “To you it’s a neighborhood,” he said. “To me it’s a subway stop.”

  We did an about-face and as we made our way down the block we passed a middle-aged woman walking a dog. She was wearing a short-sleeved tight tee and had the thin tan arms of a woman who tries too hard to stay in shape. She took him in, and then me, and scowled.

  “Did you see that?” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “She gave me a dirty look. What did I do to her?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? She thinks you’re taking me off her market.”

  “Am I?” I said.

  “We’re not even at my door,” he said, “and already you’re moving in.”

  His block was a beautiful two-block street that stretched from Kane down to DeGraw. All the brownstones were pristine and well kept. It was one of the most bourgeois-ideal streets in Cobble Hill.

  His apartment was a regal floor-through, one flight up. We entered in the kitchen and the rest of the apartment was laid out to the right—a huge dining area in the front, a spacious living room in the middle, then a pair of closed French doors with purple curtains. Powell beelined through the doors, saying something about “using the facility.” The apartment was more feminine than I would have imagined from his movies, and more classily decorated, chic antique. Evidently what he’d saved from moving across the river he’d spent on interior design.

  There were about twenty paintings on the walls, all 1950s-style pinups of women in various states of undress. Each painting featured ass in a prominent and unapologetic way—in one a woman was bent over, standing, peering out between her legs; in another a librarian type was bending to retrieve a book from the floor.

  There were no records, videos, CDs, or papers to be seen, and no clutter. I had always imagined he wrote in a separate office but on one wall of the living room was a black simple desk with an old Macintosh computer on it, and a plain wooden nonergonomic chair. I noticed his mouse was smudged with fingerprints, which made me less intimidated. Even superstars had trouble keeping their mice clean. He had three floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, which contained the complete diaries of Casanova, some Kafka, some Céline, the Klaus Kinski autobiography, and Moby-Dick. He also had three full shelves of Scratchiti, The Stoop Sitter, and Powell: Six Screenplays. I heard him coming so I scurried back to the couch and sat down. “How ya doin’,” he said, as he came in, yawning.

  “Pretty good,” I said.

  He turned on a lamp. The light was warm, the kind I can never seem to accomplish in my own apartment, highbrow and soft. I don’t even have a dimmer. He loped around the couch, opened his armoire (there was a stereo inside), and pressed a few buttons. A few seconds later this sad, familiar-sounding folk came on.

  “What is this?” I said, as he sat next to me.

  “Marc Cohn,” he said.

  “You listen to Marc Cohn?”

  “What can I say? His music speaks to me.”

  “I just never expected someone as tough as you—”

  “Marc Cohn has been through a lot of pain at the hands of evil women,” he said, “as have I. You could tell he was about to lose his wife on this album. Every song speaks ‘troubled marriage’ but what makes it so moving is that he didn’t know it at the time. His subconscious did before he did. After this one came out she left him and he went to pieces. The next one is considered the breakup album but I prefer this one because he was anticipating his own demise. I find anticipation of demise far more interesting than demise itself.”

  He blinked at me twice, pushed me down o
nto my stomach, and got on top. As Marc Cohn crooned in the background he slid my underwear down and put a couple fingers inside. The undies were white and cotton and on the front they said “Brooklyn Rocks.” I was glad to be lying on my belly.

  “You’re so wet,” he said.

  “That’s because of you,” I said. Guys love it when you say that.

  “I can’t believe how ready you are,” he said. “Oh Rachel, my sweet little hoo-ah.”

  Was Al Pacino in the room? I flipped my head around to look at him. “What’s a hoo-ah?”

  “You know, a hooker.”

  “A whore?”

  “That’s what I said: a hoo-ah.” I was lying on a couch getting dry-humped by my idol but I couldn’t help laughing.

  “What?” he said. “That’s how we grew up saying it. I lost my accent in the rest of my speech but that word still comes out Queens. Are you laughing at me, you little hoo-ah?”

  “Yes I am,” I said.

  He put his face by my ear, his mouth right into the hole and purred, “The laughing part is over now, Rachel. You are going to do as I say.”

  He pushed my bra up without unhooking it and kneaded my breasts perfunctorily before sliding his hands down to my ass. He sighed loudly and openly and for once I felt good that I had something down there to grab. “Hank,” I said, over my shoulder. “Are you an ass man, a pussy man, a tit man, or a leg man?”

  He turned his head to the side a second and said, “Ass, with pussy rising.”

  There was some movement and it seemed like he was fingering me, a bunch of fingers all pushed together. Then he moved it in deeper and I realized it wasn’t a hand. I jerked my body away and turned over to face him.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “What do you think?”

  “You’re supposed to ask before you put it in.”

  “I wasn’t aware that was necessary.”

  “Don’t you have a condom?”

  He looked at me like I’d asked the dumbest question in the book, and said, “Pfff.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t use condoms. I believe men should take women the way they were meant to be taken. The natural way. Flesh to flesh and skin to skin. That’s the whole point of making love. I believe people should feel that every time they have sex they could die from it.” I stared at him dumbly, thinking of this safe sex pamphlet I read in high school that had comebacks for all the anticondom lines.