Tell her, just tell her, I told myself. She towered over me on Broadway as we crossed in front of traffic, her long legs stretching from a camel skirt, her blonde waves tossing over herturquoise blouse. It’s just Wendy, I told myself; she’ll understand. Tell her you have a crush on her. You’ll both have a good laugh.
Wendy’s long face, like a comedian’s, was made for laughing. Her wide mouth fully extended when she laughed, lighting up the office and relieving the residual sadness in her eyes.At forty-three, she was seventeen years my senior and had suffered a greater number of bad things, so she appreciated laughter. Our friendship had been made through the wisecracks and Xerox art we traded across the desks where we sat close every day. We had had many lunches together, but tonight, Wednesday, August 19, would be our first dinner.
By the time we got to Domenico’s at Sixty-Seventh Street, my shirt was damp from sweat and the late summer sun was low among the skyscrapers. I opened the door for her, felt the gust of air conditioning, ached with longing as her slim hips and pear-shaped backside passed by. She was too tall for me, too old, too married, too rich, too pretty. I was just an Ecuadorian kid from Queens, with coarse black hair, a big nose, and a skinny chest. But a man could dream.
“I thought this day would never end,” Wendy said. “Ned works us both like dogs.”
“You know, I’d like to be worked like a dog,” I said. “Most dogs have very light schedules.”
She let out one of her guffaws, which combined rough release and femininity. “I’ll tell you who has a light schedule, the lobby people.”
This made me guffaw. We had an ongoing joke about the weird reception and security personnel who populated the art deco lobby of our workplace, the Association for Liberal Learning, or ALL.
Wendy had reserved a table for us and the maître d’ led us there under the white tin ceiling, past theatergoers,couples on first dates, and earnest business types. This was 1987 and smoking was still permitted in Manhattan restaurants, so clouds of smoke hung over the tables. Since most of the men wore jackets, I worried that I was underdressed in khaki slacks, a light blue shirt, and my tie from work. As a lowly secretary, I was not required to wear a suit like our boss Ned. And whenever I did wear a suit, at twenty-six it felt wrong, as if I were in drag.
It didn’t matter. I knew Wendy would forgive such things. She thought as I did, giving not a fig for social expectations, caring instead aboutthings like humanity, humor, movies, religion, books. Anyone else might have considered it odd that she, a consultant, was taking a much younger male secretary out to dinner, especially when the secretary was getting married in three days. But it was her way of celebrating my marriage.
We ordered drinks—red wine for her, Scotch on the rocks for me—something I never could do with my fiancée, Margaret, a teetotaler. Wendy pulled out a book she was reading that Ned had recommended, The Closing of the American Mind. It accidentally knocked the candle against the bud vase, making the two pink carnations vibrate but not topple.
“Do you like the book?” I asked.
She made a face. “No. I’m only reading it because he forced me. It’s bad enough he orders me around all day, but he thinks he has a right to shape my mind after hours too.” She looked at me curiously. “Have you quit smoking yet?”
Wendy knew that I had promised Margaret to give up cigarettes, but I had three nights to go. I pulled out a pack of Kents and offered her one. “You’re an angel,” said Wendy. We lit up. What a luxury to smoke with a woman. I told her I was reading Augustine’s The City of God, and she remembered how much she loved his Confessions. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee,” she quoted, exhaling smoke. “That’s the line that gets me. It’s what my generation called heavy. How do you think Augustine got so heavy?”
“Well, he was the Bishop of Hippo.”
She guffawed so loud the people at the next table looked at us with concern. The racket of conversations and clattering dishes around us seemed momentarily to subside, then revived. Wendytouched my arm, a gesturethat always sent me flying. Her own forearm had a fine down that I wanted to touch in return. “This is what Ned will never understand,” she said. “Our deep connection. We’re soulmates.”
I stared into her long-lashed green eyes. “You’re right. We’re soulmates.”
Maybe this was the time to tell her how I felt. But she continued talking. “That’s why he’s trying to split us up.”
I shifted in my chair. “I thought I was imagining that.”
“No.”
The waiter tried to take our dinner order, but we were so busy talking we postponed it in favor of more drinks. While we smoked and drank, Wendy laid out her theory that Ned Rain, the associate director for academic affairs at ALL, had been acting like a jealous man. Even though he, like Wendy, was married, and even though I was getting married, he had behaved the last few months as if we were all single and he and I were vying for Wendy’s affections. He had prevented one of my lunches with Wendy with the pretense that he needed her to work, thenhad taken her to lunch instead. “Sorry, Joe,” he said with a triumphant smile as they walked past. They looked good together—both tall and middle-aged, walking with the same long-legged stride.
Then there was The Untouchables. When that movie premiered in June, with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery fighting Al Capone in Chicago, I privately told Ned it was terrific and Wendy privately told him she hated it. Later when all of us were together, he said, “Joe, Wendy thinks your movie stinks.” Mortified, she tried to defend her position, and I defended mine. It was our first fight. Ned bobbed on his heels with glee.
“Well, what do you think Ned’sup to?” I asked.
“I think he sees the bond we have and he knows he can never have it. I told him I was having dinner with you tonight and he practically hit the roof. He keeps trying to get close to me and I won’t let him.”
I wasn’t sure about that. Wendy often spent long hours in his office, as I had noticed by watching the clock hands crawl. I mentioned this and asked what they talked about all that time. “I have no idea,” she said. “I’m trying to get some work done and he just jabbers on.”
The truth was, I could understand if Wendy was attracted to Ned. Before becoming a Rhodes scholar, Ned had played college basketball, and he was still treelike in stature, despite the bulging middle and the double chin. His hair was gray and patchy, but his eyes were sharp and his manner confident, that of a man accustomed to being the smartest person in every room. “Are you attracted to him at all?” I asked her.
Wendy looked shocked. “Him? Are you kidding? I mean, starting with that I’m married and he’s married—no.” She lit another cigarette. “In fact, I think he’s the devil.”
I laughed. “What’s your evidence?”
She tapped her ear. “Have you ever taken a good look at his ears?”
“No.”
“His ears are pressed back against his head like they were sewn there. They don’t stick out. Take a look next time. He isn’t human.”
I laughed again.
“That’s why he doesn’t like you,” she said. “You’re an angel and he knows it. The devil hates angels.”
We got another round of drinks and I relaxed, knowing now that Ned was not an issue. The white tin ceiling swayed and there seemed to be more than one Wendy in front of me, all beautiful. I would tell her soon, I thought. I just needed the right moment. At this point she was talking about her husband Bruce, whom she called Waldo because, she said, he looked like a Waldo. Her second husband, Bruce Carr was a bald, bespectacled banker who maintained her and his daughter from his first marriage in a swank apartment at Madison and Sixty-Fourth. “He’s a nice guy,” said Mrs. Carr, “but there’s no pulse. When it comes to anything spiritual or intellectual—we just don’t connect. It’s not like you and me.”
Our clouds of smoke mingled. Another round of drinks came. Hours had passed, night had fallen outside the plate-glass windows, and with no dinners we should have been ravenous, but food wasn’t on the list of things that mattered to us. I could put it off no longer. “Wendy, I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“I have a crush on you.”
I waited for the tin ceiling to fall. Wendy’s face lit up with happiness. “Really? You’ve made my day!”
This was not the reaction I had expected. I had expected laughter, as at one of our other jokes. But Wendy didn’t take it as a joke.“You’re not mad?” I asked.
“No. Of course not.”As if to prove it, she stretched out her hands on the white tablecloth and I took them. They were more leathery than mine, with faint spots.
“Well, good,” I said, “because it’s more than a crush. I love you.”
“Really?”
“Yes. You’re beautiful and exciting. I desire you,I want to have you, I want to sleep with you.”
Wendy teared up. “I feel like I’m in a Woody Allen movie.”
The room spun with alcohol. The waiter brought us more drinks. We kept holding hands and Wendy looked into my eyes and asked, “What are we going to do?”
Years later, I know what my answer to her question should have been. I lived alone in a studio apartment on the Lower East Side. It wasn’t much compared to Wendy’s apartment on the Upper East Side or even Margaret’s apartment in Brooklyn, but it had the virtue of being uninhabited by spouses or fiancées. Wendy was drunk and dizzy with the surprise of being loved. Had I been thinking like a man, I would have said, “Let’s go to my place.”
But it didn’t even occur to me. Wendy liked to say I was an angel, and whether I am or not I was thinking like one that night. I believed Wendy when she said we were soulmates. There must be a way for our souls to keep commingling, rejoicing in spiritual union even though our bodies could never unite. She would stay true to Waldo, I would stay true to Margaret, but deep down Wendy and I would belong to each other.Even if we didn’t stay true to our spouses—even if we ended up succumbing to our mutual desire and sleeping together—there was no need to take a step in that direction now. We knew we loved each other; love was enough. There would be time enough for love to tell its own story, unfold like a flower.
I said something like this to Wendy. She stared at me with rapt affection and sadness. “Okay,” she said. “Or maybe we’ll win the lottery and run off to Brazil together.”
The pack of cigarettes was empty. Wendy sent for the check, which was lower than she’d planned since we never actually ate. She pulled one of the pink carnations from the bud vase and handed it to me, and put the other in her purse. “Let’s keep these,” she said. “So we never forget tonight.”
It was midnight. She hailed a cab and we rode crosstown to her Upper East Side apartment. All the way we sat close in the dark back seat, holding hands. “Your hands are cold,” I said.
“Cold hands, warm heart.”
“Cold feet, no sweetheart.”
She laughed, not a guffaw, but a gentle lover’s laugh. The air seemed to have been replaced with her perfume. When we reached her building she kissed me, and I parted my lips only slightly, because I thought it would be only a peck. But she opened her comedian’s mouth fully wide, and I opened mine back. She dug her tongue into my mouth so it pushed against my teeth, rude but welcome. Our mouths seemed to have formed a new animal, warm, wet, nocturnal.We wrapped our arms around each other and her breasts squeezed into me. The whole world was Wendy.
She disengaged from the kiss and opened the taxi door. “Good night, Joe,” she said.
“Good night, Wendy.”
Her long legs walked into the lobby where a doorman waited, and I gave the driver my Lower East Side address. The driver must have seen the kiss, because he looked at me curiously in the rearview mirror. “Uptown girl and a downtown guy, huh?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s it exactly.”
###
As soon as I got home Margaret called. Knowing I had gone to dinner with Wendy and intuiting what that meant, she had been calling for hours, wondering how long one dinner could take. I didn’t tell her what had happened and we talked tensely about other problems, flower arrangements and the organist and whether my best man Tod would wear the right suit, matters in which I had no interest. I was relieved to get her off the phone.
Overnight I reconsidered being an angel. Lying alone, tormented by the heat, I flippedon the damp sheets of my foam mattress, reeling with visions of Wendy naked with me. The dome of the church across the street, shadowy in the window, was my only company, except for the occasional car roaring up Third Street. Wendy loved me! She wanted me! It was madness to think we should confine ourselves to soulmating, not bedmating, out of fidelity to this or that person. Anyway, I wasn’t married yet—I had two nights of freedom left—so the time to have her was now.
The next morning, Thursday, I waved brightly to the receptionist and security guard in the art deco lobby of ALL, shouting, “Isn’t it a beautiful morning?” They looked at me as if I were drunk, but the Scotch had long since passed out of my system. My throat was raw from the cigarettes, my head cloudy from poor sleep, but it wasn’t alcohol that made me drunk. It was love.
I sat at my desk and did some desultory typing, expecting a light day since Ned was out of town on business. It was my last day in the office before I took time off to get married and go on my honeymoon, though I was just about ready to ditch all that for Wendy. She came in late, after ten. I beamed at her as she walked by, but she avoided eye contact. I was too deliriously happy to pick up this cue.
Shortly afterward, she called me into Ned’s office, where she was taking advantage of the boss’s absence to work by herself. When I closed the door behind me in Ned’s narrow, book-lined office, I felt sure we were about to make out, maybe even have sex on his desk. But her demeanor didn’t look promising. She sat upright and stiff behind the desk, her hands tightly gripping Ned’s leather armrests. A scarf around her neck hid its long beauty. Thick hairspray sealed her hair into place so the blonde waves wouldn’t toss loosely the way they had last night.
“We have to get a few things straight,” she said in a hard voice. There was no comedian’s smile on her face, which for the first time looked old.
“Okay,” I said, sitting down across the big adult desk from her.
“I’m married and you’re getting married, and that’s that,” she said in a flat dictatorial voice. “There isn’t going to be anything more between us.”
I was stunned. The only thing that mattered in the world to me was the thing between us. I wasn’t sure what this thing was—whether or not it would result in sex—but my whole future had come to depend on it. “Darling, you don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I know exactly what I’m saying. And don’t call me darling.”
I searched her face for contrapuntal longing, a hint that she wanted me more than she let on. But her face was murky, backlit by Ned’s bright window with its view of the tall buildings on Columbus Avenue. “I love you,” I said.
“You can’t.”
I leaned forward. “You love me.”
“I never said that.”
“You said maybe we’d run off to Brazil together.”
She waved her hand. “Joe, you’re very young and someday you have to grow up.” Her eyes were green adamant. “Welcome to someday.”
I sat back in my chair. “You kissed me. Did you not mean that?”
“You’re embarrassing me.”
“You said we’re soulmates.”
“We have a certain rapport.”
“And that carnation—you gave me one and you kept one. What was that supposed to mean?”
She looked irritated. “I’m forty-three years old. I’m always opening books and having flowers fall out of them. They’re all crushed and dried up. They all meant something when I put them in the books, and now I can’t even remember what it was. This one’ll be like that.”
“But why does it have to be like that? You don’t love your husband.”
“I never said that.”
“But do you?”
She glared at me. “That’s none of your business. This whole argument is pointless. I’m telling you we’re not having an affair and that’s final. Actually, I don’t even think this is about me at all. I think it’s about you and Margaret. You seem to be having trouble making up your mind to get married. You can’t have it both ways, Joe.”
If she had punched me, she could not have hurt me more. The idea that my passion for Wendy wasn’t real—that this, the most important thing in the world to me, was a figment of a much more trivial problem, whether I should get married—wounded me like an arrow to the heart. I stood up shaking. “That’s it then,” I said.
“That’s it.”
The air held no trace of her perfume. Maybe she wasn’t wearing any. The contrast between last night at Domenico’s with its excited, drunken avowals and today’s frigid exchange almost brought me to tears. I stepped out of Ned’s office and went back to work. She slipped out for the day early while my back was turned.
###
For my bachelor party that night, my male friends took me on a boat ride that launched from the South Street Seaport. In a crowded restaurant on the main deck, with a bad rock band playing and the wind over the Hudson River whipping by, they feted me with drinks and steakand joked about how I still had time to back out of marriage. They didn’t know I was seriously considering doing just that. Wendy was right. I hadn’t made up my mind to get married. I had proposed, I had chipped in for the hall, but always I wondered if there was someone better than Margaret, someone I was waiting to meet. When I became friends with Wendy, the cloud of possible someones had collapsed into her.
I told none of this to my friends. They didn’t know about Wendy; what I felt for her had seemed too high and pure to divulge to idiots like them. After the boat ride they took me to a strip club in Lower Manhattan, where we watched topless women gyrate around a pole. The sight of their bare breasts made me pity them and the sleazy patrons gaping at them in the gloom. The idea that the relations between men and women could be reduced to this—flashing skin, heat in the groin—made a mockery of the soulmating I had felt with Wendy.
“This is depressing,” I finally told my best man Tod, who had organized the party. “Let’s go.”
Tod looked upset. A friend from high school, he was a skinny guy whose face in sadness always looked comical, like that of Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy. He had noticed all night that I seemed down and had worried it was due to bad bachelor party planning. “There are other clubs we could go to,” he said. “Or we could catch a movie. Have you seen The Untouchables?”
I winced with pain. “I just want to go to bed.”
Another friend, the Moose, had a better idea. A tall man with a long mustache, he had been the class clown in high school and was now a cop in Nassau County. He put his muscled arm on my shoulder and pointed to the girl dancing on stage, who wore nothing but a G-string. “You like her, Joe?” he said.
“I don’t have anything against her.”
“She’s yours. I’ll set you up with her as soon as she finishes her number.”
I stared up at him. “Are you suggesting I sleep with her?”
He grinned. “Attaboy.”
“You’re a cop!”
“Yeah, but only on Long Island. I don’t have jurisdiction in the city.”
“I’m getting married in two days.”
He winked. “Now’s your chance.”
I shook my head and started toward the door. Tod and the others followed. The Moose shook his head. “Sucker,” he said.
###
The wedding rehearsal next night was the first time I’d seen Margaret since my dinner with Wendy. As she entered the almost empty Brooklyn church in a long black dress, I scrutinized her carefully, trying to find anything of Wendy in her. Margaret was neither tall nor blonde; she was short, with short red hair and glasses, a little older than I but much closer in age than Wendy. Margaret was Catholic and literary like me, and we had good times, but I had never felt she was my soulmate.
We took our places at the altar with the groomsmen and bridesmaids and the little Italian priest. As we pretended to say our vows, I kept thinking, Tell her, just tell her. Tell Margaret you can’t marry her because you’re in love with another woman. But that made no sense. The other woman had rejected me. I couldn’t have Wendy. So why give up Margaret too? And everyone was expecting us to marry—the priest, our families, our friends. We’d hired a florist, organist, photographer, swing band. We’d taken ballroom dance classes and pre-Cana religion classes. We’d paid for the reception and the honeymoon. If we didn’t get married, somebody should. Maybe I could talk the Moose into taking my place.
But getting married for its own sake also made no sense. So what if everyone expected us to marry? Better a few minutes of disappointing everyone than a lifetime of misery. And marriage would make us miserable. However I felt about Margaret, it was clear I longed for something more. Wendy could never have gotten to me if I didn’t. Even though Wendy had rejected me, my heart still lay wide open, and Margaret could never close it. The American mind might close, but not me. It was just a matter of time before another woman beckoned me away.
The rehearsal dinner that night was my third restaurant dinner in three nights—first Domenico’s, then the boat, now this Moroccan restaurant on Atlantic Avenue. The room was filled with family and friends. The need to circulate kept me away from Margaret most of the night, but toward the end we sat together at a table alone, apart from the rest, surrounded by scraps of other people’s couscous and tagine.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Sorry about what?”
“Wendy.”
I stared at her. I hadn’t told her anything about Wendy except that we’d had dinner. “How do you mean?” I asked.
“She must have turned you down,” said Margaret. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
Margaret, I realized, had perceived the whole thing. She had seen my passion for Wendy, seen how it peaked on Wednesday night, seen that the next two days had been spent in gloom and rumination. I looked at her kind round face, her sympathetic eyes. I had never met anyone who could see my heart so clearly and nevertheless acceptme. “That’s just about what happened,” I said.
“We don’t have to get married,” said Margaret.
“Do you still want to?”
She considered for a moment. “If you do.”
I took her hands across the white tablecloth. “I’m ready too,” I said.
We kissed, not deeply and roughly as Wendy and I had kissed,but with a fond familiarity that promised more.
###
The next morning, Saturday, August 22, 1987, I, Joseph Wraca, took Margaret Plennerto be my wife in Our Lady Star of the Sea Church in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Margaret didn’t think white was a good color for her, plus it implied a virginity she lacked, so she wore a periwinkle off-the-shoulder gown. I wore a gray suit that fit so well it was the first suit that didn’t make me feel in drag. Saying my vows to her, beginning with “I promise to be true to you,” was the most joyful moment of my life, because it combined intellectual clarity with emotional wholeness. After the dark night of my temptation toward Wendy, I emerged into the daylight of matrimony.
I had invited Wendy and her husband to the wedding, and to show there were no hard feelings, I hadn’t rescinded the invitation. Her husband sent his regrets, but Wendy showed up, as did Ned, who had also accepted my invitation without bringing his spouse. Wendy looked beautiful in a white polka-dot dress with cap sleeves, her blonde hair waving loose again in the late summer sun as she stood in the receiving line outside the church. In tears, she bent down and hugged me and kissed my cheek. Her arms were downy; her perfume filled my nostrils. “God bless you,” she said. “You’re an angel.”
I looked at her with the happy resignation that comes with making the right choice. “So I’ve been told,” I said.
She squeezed Margaret. “Take good care of him.”
“I’ll do what I can,” said Margaret.
At the reception in the Oak Room of the Grand Prospect Hall, Wendy and Ned sat at a table with other friends from ALL, while Margaret and I reigned from our weddingdais. The swing band began playing and Margaret and I applied our fox-trot lessons to the first dance, “I’ve Got You under My Skin.” Soon the dance floor filled with cheerful couples. I was having a fine time with Margaret until I noticed Wendy and Ned.
They danced more closely than any other couple on the dance floor, including the bride and groom. Whether the songs were slow or fast, Wendy and Ned pressed into each other as if trying to merge, arms entwined, cheek-to-cheek, whispering things no one else could hear. They were gorgeous together, Wendy tall and blonde in polka-dots, Ned taller and sharp-eyed in a stone summer suit. They hung over each other in the manner unique to people who are sleeping together and still excited about it.Ned caught me looking and flashed me that same triumphant smile he had displayed when he took Wendy to lunch. Without his having to say a word, the smile said, “Sorry, Joe.” And I realized that since my dinner with Wendy he had taken her to bed.
I released myself from Margaret’s arms, muttering “I need a drink,” and hurried to the bar for a Scotch on the rocks. I bummed a cigarette from the bartender and lit up, breaking amarital vow before my wedding day was even over. Now I understood: Wendy hadn’t rejected me for her husband’s sake, but for Ned’s. She had wanted an affair all along, but with Ned, not me. The reason she took me to dinner was to make Ned jealous. I was very young; she had been right about that. I was so young I thought in adultery the only thing you had to worry about was the spouses. I didn’t realize the real danger was other adulterers.
I returned to Margaret and danced angrily, trying not to watch Wendy and Ned, unable to keep my eyes from them. All the whole, clean, intellectual joy I had experienced during my vows was gone. I was in so much painthat breathing hurt.
Margaret and I left the reception early. A limousine drove us back to her apartment to change into travel clothes for our trip to New Orleans. I searched the bags for our plane tickets, though I was still not sure I was going on my honeymoon. Thinking I had stuffed the tickets in my book, I opened The City of God. The pink carnation from that night at Domenico’s fluttered out. It was beginning to flatten and dry, just as Wendy had predicted.
Walking in, Margaret saw the flutter. “What’s that?” she asked.
I picked up the carnation, swung back my arm to throw it in the garbage. But I couldn’t. I loved Wendy more than I could say. No matter how I tried to close my heart, it remained wide open. I slipped the flower back between the pages. “Bookmark,” I said.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
I couldn’t speak. But I found the tickets and opened the door for her.