Good in Bed

Of course it wasn’t God, just Ellyn Weiss, the small, strange, androgynous-looking Village Vanguard contributing writer who’d sat down behind me and decided to say, “I know where you’re going” instead of “hello.” But in my mind, I thought that if I ever got to hear the voice of God, it would sound exactly like that: small and still and sure.

Once you’ve heard the voice of God, it changes things. That day, when the preeminent gun rights activist waggled his fingertips against the side of my right breast as he made his lurching way back to his office, I accidentally on purpose dropped 1987 on his foot. “So sorry,” I said, sweet as pie, when he turned the color of a dirty sheet and stumbled away, never to lay a finger on me again. And when Kiki told me, “I’ve been thinking about women and men, and how they’re different,” and asked whether I could start pulling pages, I told her a bald-faced lie. “My advisor says I won’t get credit for this if all you’ve got me doing is photocopying,” I told her. “If you can’t use me, I’m sure the copy editors can.” That very afternoon I slipped Kiki’s ski

Now, seven years later, I sat cross-legged on a picnic table, my face turned up to the pale November sunshine and my bike parked beside me, waiting to hear that voice again. Waiting for God to take notice as I sat in the center of Pe

I stretched out my legs, lifted my arms over my head, breathing in through my nose, out through my mouth, the way Samantha’s yoga instructor boyfriend said would rid my bloodstream of impurities and increase clear thoughts. If it had happened the way I figured – if I’d gotten pregnant the last time Bruce and I were together – then I was eight weeks along. How big was it, I wondered? The size of a finger-tip, a pencil eraser, a tadpole?

I’d decided that I’d give God another ten minutes, when I heard something.

“Ca

Ugh. That most definitely was not the voice of the divine. I felt the table tilt as Tanya hoisted herself on top of it, but I kept my eyes closed, hoping that maybe, for once, if I ignored her she’d go away.

“Is something wrong?”

Silly me. I was forever forgetting that Tanya was a participant in a clutch of self-help groups: one for families of alcoholics, another for sexual-abuse survivors, a third called Codependent No More!, with an exclamation point as part of its name. Leaving well enough alone wasn’t even a possibility. Tanya was all about intervention.

“It might help if you talk about it,” she rumbled, lighting a cigarette.

“Mm,” I said. Even with my eyes shut I could feel her watching me.

“You got fired,” she suddenly a

My eyes flew open in spite of myself. “What?”

Tanya looked inordinately pleased with herself. “I figured it out, didn’t I? Hah! Your mother owes me ten bucks.”

I lay on my back, waving her smoke away from me, feeling a growing a

“Was it Bruce? Did something else happen?”

“Tanya, I really don’t feel like discussing it right now.”

“Bruce, huh?” Tanya said mournfully. “Shit.”

I sat up again. “Why does that bother you?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, your mother figured it was something with Bruce, so if she’s right, I’ve got to pay her.”

Great, I thought. My poor life reduced to a series of ten-dollar bets. Easy tears sprang to my eyes. It seemed these days I was crying about everything, starting with my situation and continuing relentlessly to human-interest stories that ran in the Examiner’s Lifestyle section and Campbell ’s soup commercials.

“I guess you saw that last article he wrote, huh?” said Tanya.

I’d seen it. “Love, Again,” it was called, in the December issue, which had hit stands just in time to ruin my Thanksgiving. “I know I should be focusing on E. by herself,” he’d written.

I know that it’s wrong to compare. But there’s no way to avoid it. After The First, it seems that the next woman is, necessarily, The Second. At least in the begi

“Rebound,” my friends tell me, nodding their heads like ancient rabbis instead of twenty-nine-year-old full-time temps and graduate students. “She’s your rebound girl.” But what’s wrong with rebound, I wonder? If there was a first and it didn’t work out, then there has to be a second, a next. Eventually, you have to move on.

If first love was like exploring a new continent, I think that second love is like moving to a new neighborhood. You already know there will be streets and houses. Now you have the pleasure of learning what the houses look like inside, how the streets feel beneath your feet. You know the rules, the basic vocabulary: phone calls, Valentine’s Day chocolates, how to comfort a woman when she tells you what’s gone wrong in her day, in her life. Now you can fine-tune. You find her nickname, how she likes her hand held, the sweet spot just beneath the curve of her jaw…

And that was as far as I’d made it before ru

“It must be tough,” mused Tanya.

“It’s ridiculous,” I snapped. And really, the whole situation was pretty ridiculous. After three years of resisting his pleas, his offers, his desperate importunings, and biweekly proclamations that I was the only woman he’d ever want, we were apart, I was pregnant, and he’d found somebody else, and I would, most likely, never see him again. (Never was another word I’d hear in my head a lot, as in: You’ll never wake up next to him again, or, You’ll never talk to him on the telephone.)

“So what are you going to do?” she asked.

“That’s the big question,” I said, and hopped off the table and onto my bike, heading back home. Except it didn’t feel like home any-more and, thanks to Tanya’s invasion, I wasn’t sure it ever would again.

The less you know about your parents’ sex lives, the better. Sure, you figure, they had to have done it at least once, to get you, and then maybe a few more times, if you had brothers and sisters, but that was procreation; that was duty, and the thought of them using their various openings and attachments for fun, for pleasure – in short, in the ma

Unfortunately, thanks to Tanya’s self-help training, and my mother’s being rendered senseless by love, I got the whole story.

It started when my brother, Josh, came home from college and was rummaging in my mother’s bathroom for the toenail clippers, when he came across a small stack of Hallmark greeting cards – the kind with abstract watercolors of birds and trees on the front, and florid calligraphy’d sentiments inside. “Thinking of you,” read the front of one, and inside, beneath the rhymed Hallmark couplet, someone had written, “A