We thought we were old when we met. I was thirty-nine and he was forty-three—ages that seem young now. I was divorced and Sam was still single. A few friends said that was a red flag, a guy who had never married. But it wasn’t never yet, and he had lived with two women, and we would marry later. We went through the standard exchange of life stories and what I now suspect were dates he carefully planned for variety and originality—performance art in Chicago storefronts, a Japanese dance festival, out of the way art exhibits. I had no way of knowing what sorts of dates were typical. My children were both in college, Mia in her first year at Wesleyan and Jacob, a junior at University of Illinois. I was on my own for the first time in twenty years. Sam was the third man I had dated in the year since the divorce. I felt I had behaved badly with the first two, so I was determined to do better.
Harvey, the first man I dated, was a friend of a friend. He was nearly fifty, which seemed ancient at the time, and a widower. He had a beard that smelled of flavored pipe smoke, which made me not want to kiss him, yet I did. That was my first bad act, kissing a person I didn’t want to kiss. We even made out once, my lips swimming in the fur of his cherry-smelling beard. He was wealthy and witty, had lost his wife to cancer, and took me to expensive restaurants. I would have delivered the line about “just being friends” sooner than I did except I liked telling people I was dating and no one else had asked me yet. The first time he started to unbutton my blouse, I said, “no, I’m not ready.” That was a lie, implying that I would be ready in the future. His next attempt, I felt a little nauseated from the pipe aroma so I simply, wordlessly, pushed him away—my palm shoving his chest—without a word. He exploded (mildly; he was a mild man), saying, “What’s the big deal?! Are your tits made of gold?”
I pictured the girl from Goldfinger. My older foster brother took me to see the movie when I was seven. At the time, pre-cable, it was considered racy, not appropriate for a child. My foster brother rarely took me places alone as a child. I don’t know what prompted that excursion, probably trying to fill time alone with me when he was stuck babysitting, not realizing that it was a movie that our foster mother would find improper. I remember sensing his arms stiffening beside me when the camera scanned the long bikinied body of the golden girl.
Since Harvey’s remark, I have pictured my breasts as golden at the most inopportune times, a gleaming gold lamé, like the girl in Goldfinger, only in my imagination my breasts are stiff and solid, metallic, not malleable like the girl’s in the movie.
I met the second man I dated at a Halloween party that was held in a rambling old house of fading elegance in the Prairie District, an island of mansions just south of the loop that had reached its peak shortly after the Great Chicago Fire. It had been on the decline, albeit with a few upticks, ever since. The aging hosts were considered part of Chicago’s intellectual elite, radical in their day. Their party had been going on for decades and had achieved legendary statue, both for its fame-tinged guests (artists, actors, reporters, advertising folks and local celebrities) and the inventiveness of the costumes. A man wearing armor made completely of bottle caps clinked from room to room. A Vincent Van Gogh with a bloody patch on the side of his head and an ear dangling around his neck set up an easel in the crowded kitchen, and sketched wickedly accurate caricatures of other guests. A woman (supposedly a big shot at Leo Burnett) wore a flawless reproduction of a Heinz Ketchup bottle, her face between the bottle and white cap, stained a scary red, framed by a long red wig. I had never been to the exclusive party before and was invited rather last minute, along with a group of friends at another party, so my costume was an odd mix of what I owned that seemed glittery and costume-like, though not actually representative of anything. My friends and I became separated early on. I stood in front of myriad appetizers spread out on a field-sized dining room table, staring at a platter of hard boiled eggs decorated with olive slices to resemble eyeballs, when Rocky approached me. He was dressed as a Minotaur, wearing a shaggy wig sprouting curly horns, a ring in his nose, and a t-shirt and hairy vest above light brown tights with a swirly tail attached right above his bottom’s crack. The muscles in his butt were so well defined by the thin tights that his behind—along with his twitching tail—almost seemed obscene.
“I’ll eat one if you do,” he said. We both laughed—tittered really—but didn’t eat any of the eggs. Instead, we started talking, then wandered into a living room or parlor—his forearm and my upper arm brushing—and danced with a half dozen others to oldies like the Monster Mash, twisting lower and lower until our churning knees were only inches from the tattered oriental carpet. We did ironic imitations of the Swim and the Jerk until we became breathless, and our laughter turned genuine. Later, we talked art and politics and our jobs as we drifted from room to room. He was a food photographer and I was in public relations, so there was a bit of crossover in our careers and acquaintances, at least with the food companies I represented. We drifted to the wide front porch. On the top step, he pushed his tail away and we sat side-by-side. It was a warm night and a lot of people were outside. Harmonica music and the smell of pot wafted about. But we were in our own bubble.
A couple dressed as mimes in striped shirts with powder-white faces—the man carrying a sleeping toddler—skirted around us.
“Night, Rocky,” said the woman. “Can’t believe it’s almost one. We’ve got to get this one home.”
Rocky saluted them, and then whispered to me under his breath, “Lucky for us we don’t have kids.”
That’s when I should have said, “I do,” and told him about Mia and Jacob away at college. I was both surprised at not having mentioned them in all our hours of conversation and enjoying feeling unencumbered, so I didn’t. Why couldn’t I be fancy-free for a night? When the sky turned pink and he asked me for my phone number, it seemed crazy to say, “And oh, by the way, I actually do have two children who are almost adults.”
We went on three dates. Each time, I felt guiltier, as if I had killed Mia and Jacob or orphaned them. I preferred the orphan scenario; at least as orphans they had each other and I had been punished for my sin of omission. By our second date, I had stopped being able to concentrate on our conversations, focusing, instead, on trying to find a way to casually break the news of my offspring. Rocky lived in the Pilsen neighborhood and I lived on the north side. Chicago is a big city but not that big. And our professions did overlap. I didn’t want him to find out on his own.
On our last date, sitting across from each other at a Thai restaurant, he told me that I looked like a young Katherine Ross, a generous comparison I thought. He was extremely handsome with a large head and lustrous black curls. He almost could have been a Minotaur without a costume. His mother was of Mexican descent and his father, Italian. The only actors I could think of to compare with him seemed like stereotypes of his heritage, so I remained silent.
We exchanged ages. He was thirty-two.
“You look too young to be thirty-nine!” he said with a big smile. “Show me your license!”
I showed him.
“No one would guess from looking at you,” he said.
I thought of saying “or that I have two grown kids.” Instead I talked about my trip to the Grand Canyon the summer before as if I had traveled there by myself.
“I’m glad you’re older and you didn’t lie about your age. For once, I’m with a woman who doesn’t play head games,” he said. “After my last relationship, I’ve been pretty starved for maturity and honesty.”
If that wasn’t a perfect opportunity, there never would be one. So I told him about my children.
***
I met Sam six weeks later. After what happened with Rocky, I knew to tell Sam about my kids within the first ten minutes of our introduction.
“How old?” he asked.
“They’re both in college.”
”That’s a relief! I was scared you were going to say they’re little kids. I’m not into kids.”
I found his remark a bit presumptive and arrogant but I was so relieved that I hadn’t killed off my children again that I let it go.
Sam was a dentist (still is, though retirement looms), a profession that had previously seemed nerdy to me if I thought about it at all. Or worse, the occupation of a person who couldn’t get into medical school, so had to settle. With Sam, I began to see things differently. The way he described dentistry made it sound artistic—matching colors and sizes of little gems, working in tiny spaces. He talked of teeth the way his great grandparents probably discussed diamonds when they were in Antwerp and later his grandparents in the states. Sam’s father had broken the tradition and become a physician, and it turned out that Sam had gone to med school, though chose to drop out in his third year.
“I shadowed two docs in my father’s practice and just didn’t find it that interesting, so little variety. Just writing prescriptions and looking down people’s throats or up their asses,” he said. “I asked my dentist if I could shadow him for a day. He agreed and it was fascinating—so many different problems to solve. My parents weren’t too happy about my decision since my dad planned to pass on his practice but they wanted me to be happy, and they understood—it wasn’t like my dad wanted to be a diamond broker and take over his dad’s shop.”
After Sam and I graduated from quirky and trendy dates to traditional ones (movies and ethnic restaurants), we also moved from life stories to our secret transgressions, focusing on romantic relationships. I told him about my behavior with Harvey, how ashamed I was to have kissed him and led him on. Sam dismissed it with a snort. “Nothing,” he said. (At the time, my revelation felt like a confession, though looking back, I wonder if I told it, in part, because the anecdote also made me appear more desirable.) I wanted to tell Sam about how I had lied to Rocky yet that felt too fresh, too intimate and too revealing. I winced at the memory of Rocky’s face, his dark eyebrows rising and coming together as if in prayer when he asked, “What kind of woman denies she has children?”
Well, my own mother for one. She married her fourth husband in Vegas without even mentioning us. We were living with my grandmother then, and later when my mother didn’t return to claim us—for the ten months her marriage lasted—in foster homes. I wonder if she ever did mention our existence. I didn’t tell Sam about any of that. My mother was long dead, no use hunting for pity or making myself appear pathetic. And he came to understand that my childhood was not a time I liked to talk about.
Sam told me of a woman named Natalie whom he had been involved with for nearly two years. He said that after they broke up he couldn’t get her out of his mind. He didn’t use the word stalked (maybe no one used it yet—that could have started with Fatal Attraction), though it was the most fitting term for his subsequent behavior. Just to hear her voice, he would call her and hang up (this was when everyone still had landlines) multiple times a week for months. He drove past her house, twenty minutes north of the city in Evanston. More than once, he sat out front, his car idling, in the hope that’s he would glimpse her walk past a lighted window, ready to peel away if she should spot him.
Sam’s affair with Natalie had been passionate. He said that it was the kind of sexual magnetism so powerful that a few times while driving they had to pull over to have sex. Once, right on Lake Shore Drive! I knew I wouldn’t tell any of my friends about his confession as it would surely be seen as a giant red flag. A stalker! I didn’t view it that way. Obsessive and tortured, yes, but he was not stalking with the intent to terrorize or cause harm. I found myself falling in love with him and didn’t want to hear any warnings. Besides, I was ashamed that I found myself tremendously jealous of her.
Natalie was married and for a reason Sam couldn’t fully explain, he had pretended to her that he was married as well.
“Maybe so we would be equal in the relationship.”
We were lying in Sam’s double bed when he told me the story. It was almost three pm on a Saturday. We had woken up around ten but stayed in bed talking and occasionally having sex. “If I couldn’t call her at home, why should she be able to call me? I was never in love with her and didn’t expect things to go on as long as they did. As sexual as the whole thing was, I didn’t want to see her that often. I wasn’t obsessed when we were in the affair, only afterwards.”
I thought about how it might be the perfect time to tell of my lie of omission with Rocky. I found myself too embarrassed. Plus, to be completely honest, I knew there was very little chance of Sam meeting Rocky; they were in such different lines of work. And in the unlikely event they did meet and Rocky did spill the beans, I pictured myself telling Sam, We only went on a few dates, I don’t know why he freaked out when he learned I had kids.
Yes, there would never again be such a perfect opportunity, but I had been down that perfect-opportunity road once. I closed my eyes at the memory of Rocky silently pushing himself away from the table in the Thai place, leaving me to finish the meal on my own, staring at the golden goddess—holding two types of hot sauce in her lap—in the center of the table, and to pay the check.
“She went crazy when I told her I wasn’t married,” said Sam. “She stopped speaking to me, wouldn’t return my calls—we had a signal, two rings and a hang-up.”
“Why did you tell her?” I asked. I scooted against the wall so that my legs went up it as my instructor often had us do in yoga, my heels and ankles pressed against the plaster, giving my calves a good stretch. My legs were slender to begin with and I really liked the way they looked with all the skin and what little flab I had in those days sinking toward my hips
“Natalie had started talking about us getting divorces. But she was worried about how it would affect me financially—I had just started my practice and my fictional wife didn’t work. I didn’t want to marry Natalie but I thought that after almost two years, the lies, and the damage I had caused her marriage, I owed her. So I decided to come clean and tell her that as soon as she was free, I would be there for her without the cost of a divorce because I wasn’t really married.”
His sense of honor touched me.
I spun around and brought my legs back to his bed. I felt sorry for him—his twisted chivalry and the obvious pain he was feeling about what he had done.
“Sometimes it’s hard to get out of a lie,” I said and put my head on his chest. He had a broad chest with just the right amount of soft curly hair. He stroked my hair and, in penance for not telling about Rocky, I confessed to a few isolated times I had treated my husband unfairly. My list of martial offenses was surprisingly sparse; probably, I had buried my worst sins so deeply that even I couldn’t unearth them.
“Did you buy these sheets?” I asked, looking at the daisy field spread across his mattress, not at all masculine.
“They were cheap but with a good thread count. I didn’t know anything about thread count or sheets until Natalie told me how bad mine were. Mostly polyester.”
During most of Sam’s childhood, his family had struggled financially while his father built his practice. Sam was frugal but liked quality. He started his dental practice seven years before I met him, the ground floor of a large two-flat he bought just west of Ashland before the area became gentrified. He lived on the top floor.
Natalie was a dental equipment rep who invited him out to lunch after a sales call. On the walk back to his office, she took his hand. He was completely surprised—he had noticed her wedding ring—but responded by inviting her up to his apartment. He told her it was a place he kept when he had to work late. He said that he and his wife lived in the suburbs.
“What did Natalie look like?” I asked.
“She was pretty, petite.” He paused and squinted as if trying to bring her image into focus. “She had straight strawberry blonde hair—about shoulder length—and freckles all over. Not really my type. I prefer dark hair, curly or wavy like yours” he said, wrapping a band of my hair around his hand. “But I wasn’t seeing anyone at the time. I never expected to hear from her again—and certainly never would have predicted how passionate we would become, how long we would be together or how I would feel when we broke up.”
He turned toward me. He had lovely full lips—pillowy, soft, though not moist—and large white teeth, like Chicklets—nice advertising for a dentist, though he wasn’t the least bit vain about them. His eyes were large with heavy lids. He cupped a hand on my right breast. To my displeasure, I immediately pictured a golden idol’s breasts, metallic and hard; I winced.
Sam and I had Chinese takeout the night of his confession, a picnic in the field of his flower-printed sheets, planted by Natalie. Over the years we have graduated to a queen mattress, but never a king. We want to be able to find each other at night. That night was when jealousy began. I found myself intensely disliking Natalie: the passion she had shared with Sam, the fact that she had rejected his attempt at making things right, and even her part in the soft sheets fitted on his mattress. And I was jealous of Sam for being able to unburden himself of his sin.
***
Sam and I were married in the basement of city hall two years after we met, with Mia and Jacob, two of my friends, one of his friends, his head dental assistant, and his mother crowded into the judge’s chambers. We were the oldest couple in basement of city hall that day. A lot of the other brides were pregnant and more than a few of the other new spouses seemed to be providing American citizenship for their partners.
The longer I was with Sam, the more the memories of my first marriage faded. They seemed of another life, two premature adults set on beginning their careers and raising children. For me it provided the normalcy I didn’t have growing up. We had had regular meals every night, entertained other couples on Saturdays, and took two week vacations yearly. I could remember the scope of it, yet few individual moments stood out. It was a blur of what was expected of responsible couples at the time. When I did see Don after Sam and I were married, he seemed almost a stranger, a distant colleague with whom I had exchanged shifts for staying up with kids who had the flu or driving them to sporting events.
Sam and I explored new things. We played hide and seek (I can remember trembling in my hiding spot under the stairs in his dental office, afraid that he would find me and afraid that he wouldn’t). We traveled to places that Don and I would never have considered. Don and I went to Cancun on our tenth Anniversary and I pretended to enjoy it; Sam and I visited small villages in Mexico. And for many years, we took turns reading to each other at night. He read mostly history. I read fiction and poetry; like most of the “creatives” at the agency, I had literary aspirations.
I saw Harvey—the gold tits, guy—occasionally over the years. He married again, a woman younger than me, and even fathered a baby—at over fifty! Sam and I talked briefly about having a child but I already had two, was over forty by the time we married, and his disinterest in “rug-rats” appeared sincere, though it almost broke my heart whenever I saw how tender he was with his young patients.
Sam and I had what would be considered a good life by any standards. Time moved more like an accordion than the treadmill it had been with Don. How do you sum up so many years? Sam’s practice grew. He was always quick to do the latest in dentistry. He had funny sunglasses for his patients so that they didn’t have to look at the light fixtures, offered many flavors of dental floss, sugarless lollipops for the children, and for any procedures over two hours he showed movies on the ceiling of his surgery room, which he had constructed on the second floor of his two-flat once we purchased a house. He worked weekends in a lab to develop a more sensitive teeth whitener—less likely to permanently damage teeth—and made a small fortune. When Mia had her first baby, he was at the hospital with me. We had not parented together yet we did grandparent together, an occupation that required less time and drudgery.
I tried to tell him everything but sometimes it was difficult for me to move a thought from my mind to my lips. I always confessed the embarrassing things—like when I peed while standing in line at Home Depot, too much coffee and a new diuretic, the way pee ran down my leg and formed a small puddle that I simply walked away from; the less tangible things—the emotionally shameful moments—felt harder to say. I tried to convince myself that my reluctance had as much to do with modesty as shame, self-revelations being egotistical. How much could a person reveal and still hold onto self? I told myself these things, but knew I was lying.
Although I rarely went to Sam’s conferences with him, I did when, in his late fifties, he was invited to give the keynote at a huge meeting in Boston. I sat in the back row of what must have a dozen lines of metallic folding chairs and marveled at Sam’s confidence and the way all the young dentists looked at him attentively. In the dental world, he was a star.
His talk was the grand finale before the open bar.
“Do we have to go?” I asked.
“Just for a few minutes so I can thank the organizers, say hello to a few people.”
In the hotel ballroom, there was a stage with a small band—the kind that plays at Holiday Inns and weddings—and a postage-stamp sized dance floor that flickered in glowing blue from a disco ball. Most of the dentists were lined up at the appetizer table with tiny paper plates or standing three deep around the bar. No one was on the dance floor. A sad affair. Sam and I made our way toward the bar, stopping every few feet to hear a colleague congratulate him.
My right arm was linked in his left when a short woman, squat really, approached.
“Sam Levy! So wonderful to see you! I don’t usually come to these things but when I saw you were on the program, I couldn’t resist.”
Sam stared at her blankly. Her reddish-gray hair was shaped more or less in a bowl cut, straight bangs in the middle of her brow. Her double chin hung in a soft hammock. Despite her stoutness, the woman wasn’t really unattractive—just unnoticeable, the way so many of us become when we age. The pull of gravity and the fading of brightness.
“I’m sorry,” said Sam with a kind smile. “But could you remind me how I know you?”
“It’s Natalie!” she blurted with a wide grin.
Sam’s face paled as he realized who stood before him; my heart fell like an elevator cord had been severed. We both froze as she nattered on.
“I got out of sales right after I knew you, went on to head the division. I’m divorced now,” She tilted her head and produced a coy smile. “But I guess you could have predicted that. I’ve thought of getting in touch…”
With the slant of her head, her eyes caught the light in a way that allowed me to imagine how they must have sparkled twenty-five years ago.
After a moment, we were—thankfully—interrupted by two dental students. I stood with a smile plastered on my face, not absorbing a word they said, recalling the jealousy I had once felt toward Natalie. When the students departed, we turned toward the bar; from the corner of my eye, I noticed a flicker on the dance floor. I glanced over to see Natalie—by herself—in the middle of the blue light, languidly swaying to the beat of “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Her arms waved sensually over her head, as she strutted slowly from one end of the empty patch of dance floor to the other. Her raised arms pulled her sequined top over her belly, exposing a drooping bulge of white flesh above her pants. Her eyes were closed and her head gently rolled. Did she think herself Salomé, performing the dance of the Seven Veils? Was she envisioning Sam as King Herod? I noticed other people watching, silence growing. A few smirks from the dental students we had just spoken with. Did Natalie believe herself alluring? Did she think she could provoke Sam’s obsession once again? I reminded myself that as far as we knew she never knew about the “stalking,” only his lie about the fictional wife. Still, she must have remembered their passion. I wondered, did she not know how she appeared now?
The whole room fell silent, mesmerized by her bizarre performance. My long-held jealousy evaporated. No one talked; the only sound in the large crowded room was the band—an occasional screech from the old amplifier. Natalie’s head continued to sway. I could see her lips moving to the lyrics:
All my bags are packed
I’m ready to go
I’m standin’ here outside your door
I thought of some of the things I had kept secret—my quiet sins—and my fascination switched to horror and then to compassion. I let go of Sam’s arm and strode to the dance floor to sway beside her. She opened an eye for a second—perhaps thinking I was trying to steal the show—then closed it again. She was too lost in her head to be bothered. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and sang along. I tried to make my movements seem silly without mocking her. After an excruciating few minutes, another woman joined us, then a couple more women trickled onto the floor, all imitating what I had tried to establish as an ironically sensual dance. I released my breath. The song ended and the band switched to “Proud Mary,” persuading more people onto the floor to do the fast dances of their own youth, or their parents’ youth. Even Sam—an awkward dancer who usually had to be yanked onto the floor at weddings and bar mitzvahs—joined me. He smiled, a closed-lips acknowledgement of my rescue of Natalie, and then twirled around. I thought of the silly abandon with which Rocky and I had danced to the Monster Mash all those years ago in that rambling mansion. Then a thought of the possibility of my and Natalie’s roles being reversed fleeted across my consciousness—me alone at a conference, Rocky and his wife on the sidelines watching me make a spectacle of myself.
I never saw Rocky again (though I suppose never isn’t over yet) and seldom thought of him except when I would see an especially nice photo of a dessert topped with whipped cream, knowing—as he had informed me—that the whipped cream was probably shaving cream so it would not melt under the intense photographic lights.
At the end of that Halloween party as Rocky and I went our separate ways, he had asked, “What are you anyways?”
“Huh?” I had responded, flushed with embarrassment, certain that I had been found out in some way.
“Your costume? What is it? What are you supposed to be?”
After “Proud Mary,” Sam and I slipped out of the reception and walked to a small Italian restaurant where the concierge had made reservations for us. We had to walk down a few steps into the cozy dining room, packed with gilded mirrors, twisting plastic vines, gold statues and twinkling lights. After Sam ordered wine, he reached his hand across the table and cupped mine. He felt proud of me, I knew, because of my rescue of Natalie. I felt like a fraud.
“You know,” I said. “After my divorce I lied to one of the first men I dated. I didn’t tell him I had children.”
“Where is that coming from?” Sam asked. His lips were still full and finely shaped. I had always loved his hooded eyes. He did not yet need glasses except for reading and his lashes had always been longer than mine.
“I was just feeling bad about it.” I wanted to set free all my lies and omissions. They felt sealed deep inside. I knew the incident with Rocky was more connected to who I was when I met Sam, then who
I was now, but I needed to be free myself.
“Everything seemed so important then. What we said or did seemed to become part of our DNA.”
“It doesn’t matter. You were young and newly divorced, finding your way.”
Though I was glad he said it, his absolution did not seem enough. He also needed to recognize the enormity of both what I felt I had done and the fact that I had not told him when he confessed his obsession regarding Natalie that afternoon in his double bed. But my precise explanation would not come. Nor did the fact that Rocky and I actually dated a few more times than I have admitted. And perhaps I led Harvey on a bit more than I’ve stated.
“I did not feel young.”
It suddenly occurred to me that although I know Sam better than I’ve ever known anyone, there is probably more we don’t know about the other than we do know. In what dark crevices do we hide these memories from both ourselves and others? What are you anyways?
Despite it all, I had been trying to save Natalie from humiliation when I stepped onto the dance floor. No ulterior motive. Maybe that was atonement enough for my sins of omission.
The waiter poured a sample of the wine into Sam’s goblet and stood back. Sam swirled and sipped. I glanced at a gilded cherub—each curly lock and tiny toe coated in gold—on a pedestal behind the waiter, and remembered the rumor I had heard many years ago about the girl from Goldfinger; it was said that she had died from the gold paint spray blocking all her pores, preventing her skin from breathing and letting the toxins escape. Sam nodded earnest approval to the waiter, and I was struck by how I now—that I had shed just a small swatch of my lies—understood what it felt like to be trapped inside one’s own skin.
This story appears in the collection Cravings, by Garnett Kilbern Cohen, and was originally published in december magazine, where it received Honorable Mention in the 2022 Curt Johnson Prose Awards.