A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

“Are you you?” I ask.

“It is I,” she says.

“Sorry I’m late,” I say, sitting down.

“Not a problem,” she says.

I look at her more closely. If I were being honest, I’d say she looks entirely unfamiliar, which prompts me to think that it’s all a setup, that some guy will pop out from behind the grill and announce himself as “Stoned Pauley from peepingtoms. com.” Maybe it’s my obsession with media, with a camera crew, with the idea that everything has to be documented in order to be real. Whatever it is, it’s making me nervous. She seems to intuit my concern.

“I changed my hair,” she says.

“It looks nice,” I say, with no commitment.

“I play with my hair a lot,” she says. “It’s a way of being expressive — you may recall the pink?”

I blush but am relieved.

“What happened to your eye?” she asks.

“Gardening accident.”

“It looks like you’ve been crying,” she says.

“Sweating, not crying. The salt water may have aggravated it.”

“So — how are you?” she asks, struggling to make conversation.

“Weird,” I say. “And you?”

“Were you always weird, or is it only now a thing?”

“I was in court for my brother this morning — he’s in a bit of trouble and, oddly enough, today the charges were dropped.”

“That’s fantastic,” she says, raising her water glass. “Cheers.”

“He’s guilty,” I say, indignantly. “I was ripped off. I was counting on justice being served.”

“You mentioned that you’d had a stroke?” she says, changing the subject. “How did it affect you?”

“What makes you ask? Is my face falling? That’s what it did, it slipped and fell while I was watching in the bathroom mirror.”

“No reason, just trying to find out more about you.”

I nod.

The waiter brings some olives and bread and tells us about the specials and offers us “a moment to think.”

I tell her about Nate and Field Day weekend.

“Aren’t kids great?” she says, beaming. “But, look,” she says, leaning forward and forgetting that Nate is not my child, “this isn’t about our kids, this is about us. I’ve been there,” she says, “the soccer mom, standing out in the warm afternoon rain with the coach whose corporate-lawyer wife just got breast cancer and he’s so sad and lonely and wants a little action on the side. ‘Could you just touch it, right now, right here, under my poncho? It would feel so good to have someone touch it. Come on, I’ve got it out, feel, it wants to do a little dance for you.’”

The way she tells it is both terrifying and a turn-on.

The waiter comes back. “Come to any conclusions?”

“No,” I say, “we haven’t had a chance to think.”

“Should we share something?” she asks.

“Whatever you desire,” I say, and she seems pleased with that.

She looks up at the waiter. “The meatball pizza with no onions, and a large salad.” The waiter nods and then leaves.

“So — what happened with you? You mentioned you’d come unraveled.”

“I went off my medication. I’d been on it so long I couldn’t remember why I was taking it. They gave it to me for postpartum blues sixteen years ago and I stayed on it, but recently I thought it made no sense. I’m happy, I said to myself, I have all the stuff I’m supposed to have, I can do whatever I want. So I stopped taking the medication, I weaned myself off, and everything seemed good.”

“And?”

“And then, a few months later, a girl I knew since nursery school dropped dead, and something shifted. Slowly, it all got away from me.”

“How did it start?”

“Flirting,” she says. “I would go online and send flirty little e-mails. And then I had some phone calls — very innocent, but fun. And then someone dared me to meet him in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot — said he’d be wearing a jelly doughnut — and, well, I took him up on it.” She takes a sip of her drink. “I really don’t know you very well,” she says.

“Why sex instead of shopping, for example?”

“Are you calling me a slut?” Her voice gets sharp.

I lean forward. “I’m trying to understand what it means to you and why you wanted to see me today.”

The waiter puts the salad between us.

She throws her head back and shakes out her hair. It’s the kind of move that looked good when Farrah Fawcett did it, but here it looks odd, like a health hazard. She sheds coarse blond threads into the salad.

“Ugghh,” she says, plucking them out. “They say not to dye your hair more often than once every six weeks, but I can’t wait that long — when I need a change I need it now.” She’s blinking and seems to have a lash in her eye, which is reminding me that she wore glasses when I met her for lunch at her house — she had glasses on, glasses on a string around her neck, glasses that hung down in front of her like odd breast-magnifiers tapping against her chest again and again, as if to remind her of something, as I had her from the back.

“Do you wear glasses?” I ask.

“Yes, but I broke them. I’m flying blind,” she says, putting a bite of hairy salad in her mouth.

She slowly extracts the long thread and calls the waiter over. “There’s hair in the salad,” she says.

“How unusual,” he says in a deadpan tone. “Would you like another?”

“We’ll wait for the pizza,” I say.

“Enough about me,” she says. “Let’s talk about you. So you’re teaching?”

“Yes,” I say, and nothing more.

“Well, I was thinking about you and couldn’t remember if it was Larry Flynt, Nixon, or, for some reason, that guy George Wallace; he sticks in my head because wasn’t he shot?”

“Wallace and Flynt were both shot; Wallace in 1972 while campaigning for president in Laurel, Maryland, by a guy called Arthur Bremer — whose diary prompted the film Taxi Driver, which prompted John Hinckley to aim for Ronald Reagan. Larry Flynt was shot in 1978 in Georgia by a sniper while he was on trial for obscenity. These days he rolls around in a gold-plated wheelchair.”

“I love that you know all that,” she says.

“I’m a historian,” I say. “It’s actually more layered than that. People wondered, was Bremer working for someone? Whose side was he on? Did Nixon succeed in planting McGovern campaign materials in Bremer’s apartment — if so, was it propaganda or cover-up?” I pause and look at Cheryl. I find myself wondering: how many men did she have “lunch” with during her period of insanity, and does her husband know?

“He doesn’t know,” she says, as though reading my mind. “In theory, in the rules of ‘recovery’ I should tell him. But while I may have gone nuts, I’m not crazy — he knows I lost my mind, the details aren’t relevant.”

The pizza lands, hot, gooey, truly exceptional. I burn the roof of my mouth on the first bite and manage to peel it off with the third — after that I taste nothing except my own flesh.

“And what about Julie Eisenhower — are you close?” I ask, still peeling cheese off my palate.

“She’s very nice, but I wouldn’t say we’re close. I wouldn’t even know her except that we’re distantly related. Me, I’m not at all political, I’m more social, a people person. But I guess you found that out.”

“Has anything like this happened to you before?”

“Anything like what?”

“Any of this.”

“I had depression in college; no one knew about it. I stayed in bed for a month and then I got up.”

“Did you miss classes?”

“No, I got up for classes and meals, and then I went back to bed.”

“So you weren’t really paralyzed by the depression?”