Not much to this one. Good times and feelings again, maybe, but he suddenly thinks of something else. Whenever he had trouble getting or keeping an erection when they made love or one that was full, he’d say “We should probably forget it for now” or “take a rain check, as you like to say,” and she’d say “Maybe I can do something,” or “Let me see what I can do” or “if I can help,” and what she did — it took no more than a minute once they got settled — always worked. That’s all there is to it? “Thanks,” he said a few times, and once: “I’d do the same for you with your erectile tissue, but you never said you needed it,” and she said “I don’t like it done as much as you, and it never seemed crucial.” He finds he’s holding his penis, jiggles it a little, nothing happens and he lets go. Does he think he’ll ever make love with another woman? With Gwen it was more than every other day, two hundred to two hundred fifty times a year for around twenty-seven years. Never even kissed another woman romantically in that time and she said same for her with a man. “I’ve had fantasies,” and she said “So have I, but what of them?” “Masturbated maybe twenty times since I’ve known you,” he said, “and most of them when we were split up that first year or I was out of town doing a reading and you were home,” and she said “I don’t think I’ve done it once since we met, not even when we were split up, and I didn’t have another man then.” But the memory he started. It was with her parents. Had to do with food. Whenever he and she and the kids drove to their New York apartment from Baltimore or came back to it after their long stay in Maine, her parents would come by that night around seven, even if it was raining hard or there was a light snow, with food from Zabar’s. Always shrimp salad, which he didn’t eat because he’d got stomach poisoning three times from shrimp, but Maureen and Gwen and her parents loved. And Nova, kippered salmon or smoked sable (they seemed to alternate), creamed pickled herring, two gefilte fish balls with a small container each of white and beet horseradish, potato knish and half of a rotisseried chicken, which he had to warm up in the oven — hated that in the summer because of the heat it generated — because her parents had bought all this that morning to avoid the store’s crowds and nobody liked the chicken or knish cold. “Chicken’s too much,” he used to say, “and we already have potato salad so don’t need the knish,” and her father would say “Freeze what we don’t eat and take it back with you to Baltimore.” Cole slaw, potato salad, bagels, a sliced Jewish rye, a whole apple strudel or chocolate babka, which he’d freeze most of — by then they were all full — and throw out the next time they came to New York. As he said, they were all glad to see one another and had a good time. Around nine, her parents would say they should go — her mother had a patient coming early tomorrow morning, her father had several tax extensions to look over tonight, the “children,” as they called them, have to get to sleep soon, “and both of you must be tired from the long drive in.” He’d call the private car service that brought them there — it was an easy number to remember because it ended with 6-6-6-6,” get nervous they wouldn’t make it downstairs in time — the dispatcher always said “Two to three minutes; the driver’s just a few blocks away”—and go with them to the car, hold an umbrella over them one at a time if it was raining or their arms at the elbow if it was snowing and kiss them both on the cheek and help them into the car. Just before he shut the door, her mother would say to him “I kiss you, my darling.” One time, after the car had left, Rosalind, who’d come downstairs with them, said “Why’d Nona say that about kissing? She did kiss you, and he said “She meant it another way. That I’m a good son-in-law.” Once, when he got back to the apartment, Gwen said “You’re very nice to my parents,” and he said “Because I love them, but that’s not the only reason why.”
