Almost - Softcover

Elizabeth Benedict is the author of Almost, which was selected as a New York Times Notable Book, a Washington Post Book World Book of the Year, a Newsweek Best Fiction Book of the Year, and a Best Book of the Year by National Public Radio’s Fresh Air. She is also the author of three other novels, as well as The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers. She lives in New York City.

1
A High Note
I HAVe this boyfriend who comes to visit me -- it"s mostly a sex
thing. Unless I visit him, in which case it"s mostly a babysitting
thing. I"m not sure which turns me on more. You don"t think of
British Jews, if you happen to know any -- and I didn"t until Daniel
Jacobs -- as world-class lovers, but he must be an exception, or it
could be the antidepressants he takes, which not only keep the blues
at bay, but orgasms too. In Daniel"s case, for, oh, forty-five
minutes, give or take a few. My friend Henderson calls him the Bionic
Man.
That"s how I"d have begun this story if I"d sat down to write
it two months ago, instead of now. I"d have put it firmly in the
present tense, the intense present, a time that felt electric to me
and that I know I don"t want to part with yet. Two months ago, the
story would have been all about the sweet madness and the math. And
why not? When the numbers are in this range, you feel some obligation
to history to keep a record. Remember that old Irving Wallace novel
The Seven Minutes, about what goes through this woman"s mind in the
seven minutes of intercourse? Not one reviewer griped, Seven? That"s
it? Not one of them said, Irving, you sure this isn"t autobiography?
Without my telling him, the doorman knows not to buzz me if
packages, even groceries, arrive after he"s seen dashing Daniel come
upstairs. Phone messages on my machine pile up as thickly as pink
While You Were Out slips impaled on an upright skewer. I always turn
off the ringer on the phone and mute the voices on the machine,
incoming and outgoing, so that we"re not distracted. Or bombarded. My
almost-ex sometimes calls, in tears, to say he wants me back, and my
editor, practically in tears, to remind me that my novel based on the
life of Lili Boulanger is budgeted for this year and I am eleven
months late. And my other editor, a guy I call the Eighth Deadly Sin,
who tries to tempt me to ghost another celebrity autobiography. He is
a twenty-seven-year-old manic depressive with his own imprint who
hired me to write the life story of a daytime TV personality, which I
finished in three months and is about to be published without my name
on it, thank God.
As book-writing goes, other people"s autobiographies are
child"s play. You"re handed the central character, the dramatic highs
and lows, the bittersweet, inspirational ending, a deadline that
leaves no room for writer"s block, and money, real money. Enough to
leave my husband, Will O"Rourke, and dog Henry, move back to New
York, and live for a while in this studio-with-alcove furnished
sublet in Greenwich Village with two walk-in closets, galley kitchen,
central air, and a look of Pier One exoticism on the cheap. An
abundance of wicker, batik, cotton throw rugs, and bayberry-scented
candles that I often light when Daniel leaves.
The other people I don"t want disturbing us are my mother,
whose memory is on the fritz, and who sometimes calls to ask how old
I was when my father left, and my best gay friend, Henderson, whose
messages I love, except when they"re broadcast into the boudoir, as
this one was on an overcast afternoon: "Sophy, I trust you"re not
picking up the phone because you and Daniel are having one of those
marathon sessions. Hi, lovebirds. Would you believe I lost the name
of that guy who does interventions again? My birth father was
absolutely blotto last night at Cosě fan tutte, and my wicked
stepmother and I have decided it"s time to send in the Eighty-second
Airborne. I hope this is a quickie, because I really need to talk to
you before the sun goes down."
Since I moved back to the city in March, my life often feels
surreal and overloaded, like an electrical extension cord with too
many attachments, on the verge of blowing a fuse. Henderson claims
I"m suffering from what Jack Kerouac called "the great mad joy you
feel on returning to New York City," though I think it"s the generic
great mad joy of jettisoning a tired old life for a shiny new one.
Some days I"m Gene Kelly doing his waterlogged soft-shoe and singin"
in the rain, happy again. On more difficult days, I"m Dorothy, wide-
eyed at the phantasm of Oz but terrified I"ll never find my way home,
or never have another home to find my way to. Being able to focus
completely on Daniel for several hours at a stretch keeps me from
going off the deep end. Or maybe -- maybe Daniel is the deep end, and
we are a couple of ordinary junkies who don"t even know we have a
problem. You forget, being married, that sex can take up so many
hours of the day.
A quickie in Daniel"s book is half an hour, and never mind
foreplay, never mind the nerves on the back of my neck, the world of
whispering and slowness. Daniel"s cut-to-the-chase is an acquired
taste, I know, but now that I"ve got it, I"m not sure I want to go
back to the evolved, sensitive-guy approach. When I told my best
woman friend, Annabelle, that on my birthday Daniel and I were at it
for forty-three minutes -- according to the digital clock on my
microwave, which I can see in certain positions from the bed across
the room -- Annabelle said, "That"s a very good birthday present,
Sophy." Afterward he gave me another present, a framed gelatin print
of a photo of my beautiful, sad-eyed Lili Boulanger he had an art
dealer colleague in Paris track down, wrapped in wrinkled Pocahontas
gift paper. Then we staggered to his house at the end of Waverly
Street, stopping at Balducci"s and Carvel to pick up dinner for his
four Vietnamese orphans, Tran, Van, Vicki, and Cam, two boys and two
girls.
Of course they"re not really orphans, because Daniel is their
legal father, but so far they have lost two mothers apiece, the
Vietnamese women who bore them and Daniel"s wife, Blair, who is, as
it says on all those old tombstones, Not Dead Only Sleeping, in a
nursing home on the North Fork of Long Island, with a spot-on view of
a meadow, a salt marsh, and the daily sunrise, none of which she is
ever likely to lay eyes on again.
Daniel explained all of this to me over coffee, days after I
had moved back to the city and we met at the gay-lesbian-all-welcome
AA meeting in the gay-lesbian-all-welcome neighborhood where we live.
But by all welcome, they don"t only mean boring straight people like
Daniel and me; they mean cross-dressers, transsexuals, and a
surprising number of people who haven"t made up their minds. He and I
ended up there separately and by accident, thinking it was
nondenominational, but we stayed because, story for story, it"s the
best theater in New York, a darkly inspirational, Frank Capra-in-drag
movie that could be called It"s a Wonderful Life One Day at a Time.
It"s also a place where a man telling his life story can say, "During
that period, which went on for five years, I was so busy drinking --
I mean, honey, I was taking Ecstasy as a mood stabilizer -- that I
forgot to meet men and have sex, which brings us to Fire Island," and
seventy-five people will howl with sympathetic laughter.
Daniel and I innocently sat next to each other, and he
invited me out after for coffee at Dean & DeLuca on Eleventh Street.
I was still thinking about the speaker at the meeting whose name was
Robert S., and who wore a platinum pageboy wig and a chartreuse DKNY
miniskirt and said to us, "Girls" -- though I was the only one in the
room -- "I am waiting for God to work her magic," and I suppose I was
waiting myself. That"s what made me ask Daniel, at the start of our
first date -- as I began to take inventory of all the ways he
appeared different from my gray-haired, salty-looking husband --
where he stood on God.
"Off to the side," he answered, "quite a way. But here I am,
knee-deep in drunks who talk about the Almighty as if he lives next
door. It"s a lot for an Englishman to sign up for. We have a long
tradition of drinking ourselves to death quietly and all alone. Then
again, this wasn"t my idea." Daniel had the look of a youthful Tom
Wolfe, long-limbed, clean-shaven, wearing a suit I didn"t know then
was an Armani; and there was not a strand of gray in his fine brown
hair. He might have been my age, mid-forties, or a few years younger.
"Whose idea was it?"
"My physician advised me three years ago that I"d die in
short order if I didn"t quit. And what about you? Where do you stand
on God?"
I said that for the first ten years I went to meetings, I had
a difficult time overcoming my godless Unitarian upbringing, but in
the last six months, I found myself leaning in another direction,
dispensing with some of my skepticism. I wasn"t a practicing
Unitarian any longer, I told him; I considered myself lapsed. Trying
that out for the first time, the "lapsed." Daniel laughed out loud.
But I wanted to play it for laughs; I was flirting like crazy. I
hadn"t slept with anyone but my husband for the ten years of our
marriage, plus the two years before, and I wasn"t leaving anything to
chance.
"And what"s at the core of a lapsed Unitarian"s belief
system?" he asked.
"Nothing to speak of, so there"s room for reconsideration,
but not much motivation for it. What about you?"
"I"m Jewish," he said, "but in the English style, sort of
half a Jew, as if it were only one of your parents, and you"re not
certain whether to take it or leave it."
"What"s the other half, in your case?"
"Pure capitalist. I come from a long line of merchants. Fur
and microchips. My great-grandfather was furrier to the czar. My
father was the last furrier in London to move away from the East End
when the Bangladeshis moved in. He went to Golders Green in 1962 and
sold dead animals until the PETA people threw a can of fuchsia paint
on my mother"s full-length sable, which coincided roughly with the
discovery of the microchip. He and my older brothers are computer
consultants to the Queen. They have the lucrative gift of being able
to endure long hours of bowing and scraping. I"m the youngest of four
sons and, some say, the family rebel. Instead of software, I peddle
paintings."
In AA, of course, you are not supposed to tell anyone your
last name, but Daniel blithely told me his. I knew it from going to
galleries during all the years I lived in New York and reading art
reviews in the Times during all the years I didn"t.
A cappuccino or two later, we were swapping infertility
stories like girlfriends, by way of explaining how he ended up with
four imports and I ended up with no offspring at all, except this
gryphon-like dog Henry, whom I had left with my husband until I got
settled. I didn"t tell Daniel that night that Henry had been Will"s
present to me when I quit trying to get pregnant. "I still carry
around a picture of him, ugly as he is."
"Your husband?" Daniel said, visibly startled.
"The dog."
And I didn"t tell Daniel about the immense sadness that had
made me stop trying to have a baby. It was our first date, after all,
and I wanted him to think my past was safely behind me, buried like
nuclear waste, in airtight containers, even though I"d walked out on
it only a handful of days earlier. Instead, I entertained Daniel with
stories of my test-tube encounters with Green-Blue, the code name for
the nuclear physicist at the California genius sperm bank I had
wanted to be the father of my child, after it became clear that
Will"s sperm motility wasn"t what it had been when he"d fathered my
two grown, soon-to-be-ex stepdaughters.
"Green-Blue is six-one, IQ of one fifty-six, and the father,
as of two years ago, of thirty-one children of lesbian mothers and
straight single women scattered across the fault lines of Southern
California. They Fed Exed me the stuff in tanks of liquid nitrogen.
But I ovulate funny. It was like waiting for three cherries to come
up on a slot machine. And my husband was convinced that the only
sperm donor in the joint was the skaggy-looking guy who ran the
business and called me at seven in the morning -- mind you, that"s
four A.M. in California -- to say, "Sophy, I have to know, is your
temperature going up or down?""
Daniel told me that he and Blair had done the temperature
business, test tubes, and Pergonal injections. She had even made an
appointment with a faith healer named Falling Rain Drop, who insisted
they participate in a fertility dance in Washington Square Park every
day at dawn for a week. Daniel refused.
The years of trying piled up, and Blair, pushing forty-three,
grew impatient and fearful. In one fell swoop, they adopted three
siblings, two boys and a girl, ages approximately six, four, and two,
who had been living in an orphanage in Hoa Binh for six months, and a
fourth child, Vicki, whose sad face in a photograph Blair could not
resist. They nearly emptied out the orphanage and filled every room
in the narrow, turn-of-the-century brownstone Blair had inherited
from her stockbroker father.
Adopting all those children, you could say she was Mia Farrow
minus Woody, and now, poor lamb, poor Blair, she is Sunny von Bulow
minus the millions. Not that they are destitute; Daniel"s two art
galleries are doing record business, despite his long afternoon
absences. He was a willing partner in the international quest for
children, and he is a devoted father, though he is often sleep-
deprived and frequently flummoxed, as when his five-year-old said to
him, "If you don"t buy me a Beanie Baby, I"ll say the F word all the
time, starting right now."
He wants me to think and seems to believe himself -- and it
may be the truth -- that his essential nature is now subsumed by the
condition of being overwhelmed. "I used to have a personality," he
will say, "and a life I rather liked. Now I run an orphanage on a
street where I am the only heterosexual man for ten blocks in every
blinking direction."
On the other hand, I"m not sure what that personality was,
the one he claims to have had. He can predict whether a client will
prefer a Miró etching to an obscure Delvaux oil painting, and he is
consulted by museums and foreign governments to detect forgeries, but
in matters of his heart, nuance is a rare commodity. When I asked him
how his marriage had changed over the years, all he said was, "Once
the children arrived, we quit having sex on Saturday afternoons."

My friends are divided over the nature and severity of Daniel"s
affliction. Those who have spent time in England insist that his
passport is his destiny, and his answer to my question about his
marriage passes in that population for soul-searching. Other friends
ascribe his limitations to gender. "He sounds just like a man,"
Annabelle said, "but worse." It may be most accurate on any continent
to say that he is wh...