Dana Spiotta - Innocents and Others

“But I have to go soon,” she said.

“No, Nico,” Jack said.

Jelly wanted to hang up while he was still wanting her, long before he had had his fill. But Jack was hard to resist. She liked the way he called her Nico. The way he asked things of her so openly.

“No? Why not?” she said, her voice slightly creaking from her sore throat.

“Because your voice sounds so sultry today, and I need to listen to it,” he said. His naked want worked on her. It skirted toward the sexual, but she never let it go there. She was reserved about overt sexuality, and the men she talked to got that somehow. Some women were butterflies in your hands. You didn’t say crude things to them. You breathed gently and you didn’t make any sudden moves.

However, it was also true that a few men she had called in the past didn’t get her at all. They didn’t understand her despite her guidance, her clear vision for them, her parameters. They weren’t interested in her, not truly.

“You are making me so hard,” said one unworthy contact apropos of nothing she had said. She hung up immediately and never called him again. This despite her elegant and subtle approach, her knowledge and the fact that she knew someone in his circle. Jack was polite, he cursed and he hacked his cigarette cough, but he was gentle. A gentleman.

“Maybe I don’t have to go yet,” she said. “Are you feeling sad? You sound a little sad.”

“Maybe a little.”

“It isn’t just about your work?”

“I don’t know. It’s a nice Sunday sad, some old-fashioned melancholy. Sometimes I sit around and just feel sad about things. Is that odd? I am odd, you know I am. It isn’t just loneliness. I miss certain people, feel sad about certain people, which is different, I think.”

“Who?”

“I miss my Uncle Tom. He died a few years back, but I thought of him today. He was a funny guy. He didn’t really understand me or what I do, but that didn’t matter. We were family and he always liked me and made me feel that. Up until he died, he used to give me money every time I saw him. Even though he was a retired insurance salesman and I was making a lot of money, a successful guy, an adult with a kid, when he would see me at a family dinner or whatever, as he said good night, he would press a hundred dollars into my hand and say, ‘a little gas money,’ and wink. I would try to refuse, but it was his way to say he was looking out for me. An Italian thing, I guess. I miss that little jolt of family.” Jack coughed. “I should have, I don’t know, asked his advice or something instead of just talking to my cousins.

“And I miss my dog Mizzie. She was a mutt, with these droopy hound eyes and long velvet ears. I got her in my twenties and had her through my first divorce and second marriage. I never walked her as much as she liked, I rushed her or let the housekeeper do it. I grew impatient with her, and today I wish she were here so I could take her for a long walk.”

“Oh, you are being very hard on yourself,” she said.

“Not just that.” She heard him light a cigarette and exhale. “Not just that. I miss my daughter and my mother. I mean, my daughter is still around, but—” Jack said. He laughed.

“What’s funny?” she asked.

“I don’t know. My spiel of regrets.”

Jelly fingered her tender throat and listened to Jack smoke.

“It’s difficult,” she said. “So difficult.”

“Do you miss anyone, Nico?” he said. “Maybe you are too young—”

“No, I do,” Jelly said, talking before Jack finished, which is something she tried never to do.

“Yeah? Who?”

“My father died when I was sixteen,” Jelly said. “He never lived with us, so I didn’t see him too often. Once a week or so he would take me out. Usually we saw a movie and then went to a diner and had hamburgers. It was hard because he died suddenly of a heart attack, and I kept thinking about the last time I had seen him. I was in a bad mood, and I didn’t want to go out to dinner with him. I wanted to be with my friends. So I went, but I sulked. I didn’t want to see a movie and I barely ate my dinner. I remember peeling the label off the Coke bottle and that he kept asking awkward questions about my life. I found everything he said irritating and boring. Anyway, after he died, I felt bad about that dinner. I remember sitting on my bed and realizing I could actually count the number of times I had spent with my father. One night a week plus a full week in the summer. Times my age, or at least my remembered years, so let’s say twelve. That’s all we had, and yet I couldn’t be bothered to even look at him the last time I saw him.” This was a true story that she had never told anyone before. Part of her thought, Stop. What are you doing? She pushed that thought away. Jack would love her, she knew it.

“Oh no,” Jack said. “I’m sorry. But you were a kid, he knew you loved him under the sulk. My daughter did this — all kids do this. I promise you he understood that.”

“Yes,” Jelly said. The word squeezed through her tight throat. She could feel patches of heat on her cheeks and her eyes started to sting.

“I mean, my daughter — I haven’t seen her in months,” he said. He made a loud exhale sound, half sigh, half noise. “We had a stupid thing a few months ago. We — I mean I — should be able to do better, but every day I don’t.” Jelly said nothing, just waited for what he would say or sound next. A sniff. “It’s okay,” he said, but it was still heavy in his voice. “It is good sometimes to feel this way, even if it fucks me up a little,” he said. Jelly could hear that his voice had what gets called a catch: a failure of breath mid-word, and it undid her. Jelly’s own throat caught.

“I know,” she said softly, and she heard the unmistakable sounds of a person weeping, a man unused to it, and she let him get it all out. She could hear his breath, his sniffs, the little human sounds of feeling. “I know.” She did know. The longing to love and be loved in a very deep way, not the usual way.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, Jack. You’re okay with me.”

“Yeah, yeah. I am okay with you. I am.”

* * *

She felt so close to Jack that she did something she had never done before. She stopped calling other men, her other phone dates. She gave Jack her number and let him call her whenever he felt like it. They began to talk every day. It was quickly escalating, and she tried not to worry about it or think of where it would lead. She tried, in her own soft, quiet way, to maintain a little reserve and slow things down. But it was hard because, well, she was in love with Jack. She felt connected to him in ways that made her feel happy all the hours of her day.

He trusted her and she trusted him, and when she hung up the phone she felt so loved. But then all at once her life — her real life, her harsh, real life — was all around her. She looked down at her hand holding the phone, at her legs in her robe, at her notebook full of notes about her phone conversations. She squinted up at her apartment, and imagined how she looked to anyone else. She tried to tell herself it might be okay, but the gap was so big. It made her gasp.

Sex was the easy part of being with Oz. They decided she would move in right away, just weeks after they started to date each other. The first few months were a daze of body longing and heat. Most afternoons Jelly would have to work her shift at the call center. In between making sales calls, she fell into reveries about sex from that morning or last night. She had never experienced anything like this before, having only one previous lover her last year of college, yet she understood that this intensity was too obsessive and unsustainable. She had some sense that later it would be important to remember feeling this way, so she went over everything they did from the very first night, getting the specifics exactly right and in order. Her reveries were arousing, but they were driven by purpose too. She kept track as if every orgasm were part of a story and she had to follow them in order. But that wasn’t true: it was more like circling in and away, swings, than it was like a story. As time went by she collected favorite moments or sequences (Oz with his mouth by her ear, whispering to her as he came, then a cut to Oz slowly pulling her clothes off, then a moment when Oz reached under her skirt at dinner and put a gentle finger inside her as she spoke). Always Jelly wanted that heat to rise from her body, would rush herself to find the heat. Jelly made another sales call, then gave herself a moment to sit and dream. Daydreams, an indulgent combination of memory and fantasy, dreams that did your bidding. Jelly’s vivid and detailed daydreams were almost as good as real life, like an edited, highlighted version of real life in which she saw herself in a soft, flattering glow. When she finally got home from work in those early months, she would practically run to find Oz and his body. She would put her hands and face against his chest. She would inhale, and the way he smelled made her tremble with want.