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Books by DAR
Flipping For It
Excerpts: Pages 161-168
What it is: Thomas wants to want—even if he doesn’t really want to—and there is Vanessa in a slinky silver lame gown who wants to help him want. He takes Vanessa on a date, parking under a sprinkler that is going full blast in front of her building. He is at her door at eight and off they go together, just like a lady and gentleman of yore, no lingering in her apartment, where who knows what expedient events might happen. They both want to be inexpedient. Both in the throes of divorce, they want to take it slow. In the movie theatre they do not touch. They only physical thing that happens is that when the black movie star falls out of the apartment building and the camera follows his quick descent to the tar surface of the parking lot below, Thomas’s lower gut seizes up, but other than this Thomas might as well have no body, which is the way he wants it.
“We’re certainly not wild tonight,” Thomas says, as they sit at an undersized table in a Greek restaurant after the movie.
“So far so good,” Vanessa says. “We get three stars for effort.”
They read the menus unwildly. They barely have room to put their elbows on the undersized table, which serves to remind them of their good manners. Vanessa has very good manners, the kind that are intrinsic to her graceful aura, and abide no one’s rules. They way she cocks her spoon, the forthright delicacy in her wrists and ankles: this was the kind of girl Thomas always fell for, one whose manners were so superior she looked great licking foie gras off her fingertips. A lady. Thomas wishes he could muster the enthusiasm.
“You are beautiful,” Thomas remarks.
“Thank you. So are you,” Vanessa replies.
“Thank you,” Thomas says.
“You are welcome,” Vanessa says.
“I want to say I love your mouth,” Thomas begins.
“Then say it! By all means.”
But Thomas does not say it. “Are you part Irish?” he asks.
“No.”
“Scottish?”
“No.”
“I feel skittish tonight,” Thomas says. “I feel like I should want to make asinine small talk, but I don’t really want to.”
“That’s all right,” Vanessa says.
“I feel like I ought to want to kiss you, but I don’t really want to do that, either.”
“We can just eat,” Vanessa says.
“Um,” Thomas says. He looks without hunger out the windows, where the underside of a turquoise canopy provides the illusion that the sky is still light, that the night is young and may go on forever.
“How old do you feel tonight?” Thomas asks.
“I don’t feel like dancing, if that’s what you mean,” Vanessa says.
That is not what Thomas meant. What Thomas meant was that he feels eighty.
“Do you think we can bring each other comfort?” Thomas asks.
Vanessa looks particularly striking in her silver as she ponders a reply. Thomas keeps staring at her beauty, trying not to imagine her features turning into the mask of hatred she must wear when fighting with her ex-husband, the one she vowed to eternally love six weeks ago. “Go on, eat,” he says, and Vanessa, embarrassed at not answering his question, picks up a fork and digs elegantly into her moussaka.
Thomas looks without hunger about the room as the bouzouki band plays “Help Me, Rhonda.” He divides the coupes present into those who are on the verge of divorce and those who will not be divorced for a while. He sees no couples who will not be divorced sooner or later. Come to think of it, he has seen no nondivorceable couples in weeks.
“I’m an extremely critical young woman,” Vanessa says out of nowhere.
“Don’t worry about it,” Thomas says.
“But what I mean to say is: I like you,” Vanessa says. “I mean, I really do. Or rather, I want to. And that’s a good sign, don’t you think—if we can get over our divorces enough to want to like someone else?”
“Oh, I suppose,” Thomas says.
“Boy-girl stuff, you know? You be boy and I be girl?”
“Sure,” Thomas says.
“Pluck,” Vanessa says hopefully, “that’s what we need. Then maybe we could work up to spunk. Then strength. Real strength. That would be the best of all. Pluck, spunk, strength. But right now I’d settle just for pluck.”
Thomas isn’t really listening. He is looking listlessly at the girls by the bar, single ladies watching for dates, faintly cadaverous-looking as they chitter self-consciously among themselves, hoping a man will notice and approach, smoking a hole right through themselves as their breath goes sour as sour tomatoes. One of them catches Thomas’s eye, and Thomas quickly drops his head.
“Do you ever feel like killing yourself?” Vanessa asks.
“Of course.”
“Out of rate—or out of terror?”
“Despair, darling. Despair.”
“Oh, all of the above,” Vanessa says. She smiles, then touches his hand lightly. “I’m just trying to be perky.”
“Does that come before pluck?” Thomas asks.
But Vanessa will not be put off. She puts down her fork and places her forearm against Thomas’s. “I’m experimenting,” she says with a mischievous look. “I’m testing the electricity.”
“And is there any?”
“Lots.”
So for a while the business succeeds, the date prospers with small talk. The bouzouki band plays Beach Boy tunes as on and on they stay, four hours, five hours, drinking ouzo, breathing each other in and out, all the boy-girl stuff, seduced by the light turquoise canopy into pretending the night will be young forever. Until Thomas inevitably tires of it all.
“I miss you,” Thomas says.
Vanessa’s expression changes. “What do you mean?” she asks.
Thomas shakes his head. He cannot speak. Finally: “I just miss you, that’s all. I keep missing everybody all the time.”
“Oh,” Vanessa says. She touches the top of her gown near a lobster castanet. “That. Yes. I know.”
“I even miss the gerbil you threw away. And I never even saw it.”
Vanessa nods. Her eyes fill with tears. “If I stopped to think of all the things I miss, I’d weep all week.”
“I’ll weep with you,” Thomas says.
“I don’t want to think about it.”
“I can’t help thinking about it.”
They are both beginning to sniffle. But instead of growing soft with sniffles, Thomas grows hard.
“Why are we sitting here?” Thomas says. “I mean, why are we striking up a romance? Do you really have the stomach to do it all over again?”
Vanessa pulls out a batch of blue silk from her purse and dabs her eyes. Then she sputters a wet sputter, and laughs, and sputters with tears some more.
“Here you are, pretending to be a wholesome, integrated person, when really you’re just coming out of a war with your husband and you couldn’t feel worse about yourself . . .”
“Oh, God,” Vanessa cries. She laughs, and sputters with tears some more.
“And here I am pretending to be warm and civilized and patient, when I know how bruised my insides are, I know that you and I . . .”
“Yes?” Vanessa asks. She hides her face in the blue silk.
“We’d be at each other’s throats sooner or later.”
“Sooner or later,” Vanessa agrees. She laughs with tears behind the silk.
“Somewhere down the line,” Thomas says. “We know that because we’ve both seen it happen.”
“Oh, God, I shouldn’t be listening to you. It’s so true. Go on.”
“There’s just no point!” Thomas says. “We’ve both been through it! I’m a lovable bastard like all men, you’re a sweet bitch like all women; we know each other inside out, right? So what’s the point? Why are we sitting here?”
Thomas swings his gaze with aversion about the room. He looks at the light turquoise underside of the canopy, promising perpetual twilight. But it is not perpetual twilight. It is four o’clock in the morning. Thomas is disgusted with trying to pretend the night is young when he knows they’re both going to have terrific hangovers in just a few hours.
Thomas leads Vanessa out of the Greek restaurant. She holds the blue silk—it is a nightgown! coming undone—in front of her face. He opens the car door for her and she sits inside, refolding the blue nightgown so she can use a dry part to blot her face. Thomas gets in his side and Vanessa adjusts the vanity mirror on her visor to see herself.
“Oh, God, I’m a mess,” she says.
“Don’t worry about it.” Thomas starts the car.
“I’m unfit for human consumption,” Vanessa says, dabbing her eyes with the nightgown and picking off birdseed stuck to her gown. “I should just put myself away for two years.”
“I’m sorry I talked so frankly,” Thomas says.
“No, that’s all right. I’m glad you did. What you said was true.”
“No, I apologize,” Thomas says.
“Please don’t,” Vanessa says. “You’re right. You’re a man. I know exactly how attractive you are—and how despicable. And I’m sure you know the same about me, as a woman. I don’t want to pretend, either. It’s just that if I don’t pretend,” Vanessa says, and here she unfurls the nightgown again and sobs bitterly into it, “suddenly I feel like ‘m eighty years old!”
Thomas drives Vanessa through the deserted streets. The canopy wasn’t lying after all—the sky is light! Light with a new day. Green puffs of trees against the azure dawn sky. And bob-whites chirping from various corners, saying “Bird . . . brain!” Thomas brings the car to the curb outside Vanessa’s building, where the sprinkler for some reason is still going full blast. There is no place to park without getting in it. Thomas puts the car in neutral under the shower, and turns on the windshield wipers. He sits there for a minute, looking at Vanessa’s wrist—all the myriad veining and muscling of life, the intricate surging and buckling of energy that bores him to death.
“And don’t think I didn’t see that look you gave the waiter before, either,” he decides to say.
“What waiter? What look?” Vanessa asks in alarm.
“Oh, never mind,” Thomas says. “I don’t blame you for it. The waiter was a hunk. You’ve got sexual appetites like everyone else. Why not? It’s just that I’m not going into any new relationship with the my eyes closed, that’s all.”
“Of course. No one’s asking you to!”
“I’m not going into any new relationship, at all!” Thomas counters.
“Who cares?” Vanessa cries.
“But I do like you,” Thomas says. “It’s not that I don’t like you.”
“Will you shut up for a while, please?” Vanessa asks.
Thomas shuts up for a while, with the wipers going under the sprinkler. Then he says quietly, “I do like you, Vanessa.”
“I like you, too,” Vanessa answers.
“It’s just—“
“Yes?”
“No more business, please.”
Vanessa looks down at her knees. She glances at Thomas’s knees, then looks back at her own. Shyly she says, “Do you think maybe if we slept together . . .?”
“Would it take the sting out?”
“Do you think?” she asks. “I would crave your hands on me.”
Thomas does not answer.
“Don’t you want?” Vanessa asks, tugging his cuff lightly. “Anything?”
Thomas does not answer.
“You know, for you to be jealous of me and the waiter, it’s kind of sweet, really . . .”
Thomas does not answer.
“I could be jealous about you . . . “ Vanessa smiles, and touches a single birdseed to the tip of her tongue mischievously. “Believe me?”
“I’m not in the believing business,” Thomas says. “I retired.”
“Temporarily.”
Thomas does not answer. He rolls down his window and gets a handful of water as it sprays over the car, and he wets his lips with hit.
Vanessa watches his wet lips.
“Girl wants to make love to boy,” she says, watching his lips. “Does boy want to make love to girl?”
Thomas puts his hand out again and gets some moisture to put on the back of his neck. He rolls up the window and looks at Vanessa without smiling.
“I know there’s tenderness inside you,” she says, breathing lightly. “I know it’s there somewhere, if I could only reach it . . .”
“Don’t worry about it,” Thomas tells her. Unconsciously he revs the car.
“Don’t worry about it?” Vanessa murmurs to herself with a worried little smile.
Thomas has nothing more to say. Already he feels the moisture evaporating from the back of his neck.
Vanessa looks at Thomas with her worried smile. “You’re not just going to send me out in the downpour, are you?”
Thomas has nothing more to say.
“Not that I’m worried about a little water,” Vanessa says.
Thomas waits.
“Not that I’m worried about a little water,” Vanessa repeats—when suddenly her face crashes in on itself and she throws herself across the gearshift to land in Thomas’s arms. “Oh, Thomas, I’m just so shattered inside!” she cries.
“Thank you for the lovely evening,” Thomas says.
