Lie With Me

LIE WITH ME

Michael Ginsberg

2024

I met Susan in October 1976, at a dinner hosted by mutual friends who thought we might make a good couple.

During appetizers, I was interested. By dessert, I was sure. At the end of the evening, I invited Susan for dinner, and she accepted.

A few days later, we were standing side by side in my kitchen, chatting and chopping vegetables for a stir fry.

Halfway through the zucchini, Susan asked if we could hear some music.

“‘Do you have “The Four Seasons?” she asked, as I headed for my albums.

I pulled out “Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ Greatest Hits.” When the drum solo announced “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” Susan clapped her hands and laughed.

Then she hugged me.

Lights went on, lights went out, lights flashed through me – lights were doing whatever lights do when something big happens. At age 24, I knew something big had happened.

It lasted about 10 seconds. Then Susan added, “That was so clever.”

After Susan left, “clever” hung around, so I called my best friend, Joe, told him what had happened and asked if he could figure out “clever.”

“Let’s see,” he said. ”She clearly wanted “Vivaldi, not Valli, so that’s a minus one. But she laughed, so she’s got a sense of humor. That’s plus one. The tie-breaker is whether she thought you played Valli strictly as a joke. You did, right?”

“Who’s Vivaldi?”

“Oh.”

“‘What does ‘oh’ mean?”

“Short for ‘Oh, shit,’” Joe said. “It means you better start expanding your music horizons. Quickly.”

It was too late to find a record store, so I replayed the evening. Susan assumed I knew Vivaldi; I assumed she knew Valli. Both of us were wrong. So, I called it a tie, and the hug was a tiebreaker. But my brain refused to take a break.

What did I know? I knew Susan had grown up in an affluent suburban neighborhood, spoke fluent French, played the flute for a local amateur symphony. When I asked her where she went to college, she said “a school in New Haven” (her words for Yale), and had been accepted for a doctoral program “in Palo Alto, my words for Stanford. Her godfather was a U.S. Senator.

I was a Jewish kid from a lower middle-class family that lived in a crowded 4-room apartment in Brooklyn. I spoke fluent New York and went to a community college before the nearest state university, while still living at home. My Uncle Sol serviced vending machines for the Mafia, as close as I came to having a Godfather.  

Susan loved springtime and dawn. I preferred autumn and dusk, which she judged a sign that I was depressed. I thought it was a sign that I preferred autumn and dusk.

Susan hung out with friends who had gone to school in places like Cambridge (Harvard), Chapel Hill (University of North Carolina) and Durham (Duke). Their remarks often set off my smug alarms, and I’m pretty sure they were pretty sure I was just a phase for Susan.

While looking down on them for looking down at me, I also was trying to rebuild myself. I bought “Viva Vivaldi,” which turned out to sound like “Herb Alpert Does Vito Vivaldi.” I read a couple of books I’d spotted around Susan’s apartment and dropped references into our conversations; and I did everything I could to make her laugh – one talent I didn’t think I had to fake.

I sent Susan clever notes; I rehearsed spontaneous anecdotes; and I came up with clever gifts. My favorite was her 24^th birthday present: a red-and-white checkered bowling shirt, with “Susie” embroidered on the front, and “New York Philharmonicas” sewn across the back.

When Susan unwrapped the shirt it at her party, she seemed puzzled’ her friends traded looks of “amusement,” and I resisted the temptation to lecture them on irony and bad manners.

The hug was starting to wear off in my mind, but Susan said yes, two weeks later to an invitation to go with me to see the 1960s classic film, “American Graffiti.” I showed up at her house with greased hair and a t-shirt, a pack of cigarettes rolled up under one sleeve. No hub, but her laugh indicated to me that she, too, was expanding her social skills.

Back at her apartment after the movie, I surprised her with two tickets to a symphony concert, which I had chosen over Neal Diamond. She surprised me with a captivating performance of “I haven’t gotten over my last boyfriend,” and a finale of “I hope you and I can still be friends. I really like you.”

I dropped my head and slowly walked out the door; I had no “Walk like a Man” exit routine in my repertoire.

I called my friend Joe, hoping for sympathy. Instead, he suggested counseling, to figure out why I was trying so hard when it was clearly a bad match.

“Mark, you’re making this into a ‘60s song, a bad ‘60s song. You know, rich girl, poor boy, living on the other side of the tracks. He thinks she’s dumped him because he’s not good enough for her, but then . . .”

“Stop it, Joe,” I cut him off. “What if she changes her mind, and it works out?” I asked Joe.

“I’ll suggest counseling for her,” he said.

“What did you see in her, anyway?” he continued. “She’s nothing like you.”

“Exactly,” I answered. Joe laughed. I was serious, but I didn’t tell Joe.

After a few months of waiting for the phone to ring, I decided to try friendship and invited Susan to join Joe and me for a movie. She said yes, and added that she was glad I called.

Maybe she really did want to be friends. I still wanted to raise our two children together and grow old with her – as friends, of course.

The movie threesome went fine, and Susan said we should do it again sometime. Joe agreed, and after Susan left, he said he now understood what I had found so appealing about her.

“Well thank you,” I said. “So I’m not so crazy.”

He laughed. “I never said that. I still think you’re a lousy couple.

“So, would you mind if I asked her out?”

Joe laughed again. I didn’t. But I finally gave up thinking I had a future with someone who (1) hadn’t gotten over someone else, (2) hadn’t gotten into me, (3) hung out with elitist jerks, and (4), was packing to leave for graduate school.

So, I beat her out of town to pursue something I had long been thinking about: becoming a newspaper reporter. I enrolled in journalism school at the University of Missouri. Boy, did I show her!

Crossing southern Illinois, I had a revelation. (What else is there to do in southern Illinois?): I realized I had been acting in a Grade B movie, and not a particularly good one. Joe was right. I was playing out a tired social class story: Young man from the other side of the tracks. (In this case, the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge) meets an Uptown Woman. (Sorry, Billy Joel.)

Maybe it was dumb luck, or maybe I really had finally made a good decision by enrolling in journalism school. From the first day, I practically lived at the Missourian newspaper, a general circulation daily published by the journalism program. My writing was quickly finding its way to Page 1 and I was finding my way to self-esteem and rarely even thinking about Susan.

Then came “The Call.” If this were a TV show, it would have broken for a commercial, the moment after I picked up the phone and heard, “Hi, it’s Susan.”

When I caught my breath, Susan told me she was driving her younger brother to college at Washington University in St. Louis in two weeks and wanted to visit me for a couple of days. I think I said yes. When I hung up, I enjoyed the best 30 seconds of my life.

Then I unraveled. “I can’t do it,” I thought. “I’ll never pass this audition.” Pure terror.

I slapped myself around and made up my mind to win the tryout. I composed a list: what to wear, what to do, where to go, what to say, where to eat, how to eat, how much to tip.

Ignoring Columbia’s sweltering summer, I chose a reporter ensemble for Susan’s arrival: blue corduroy jeans and a long-sleeve white shirt – wrinkled, sleeves rolled up. That critical decision out of the way, I turned to my entrance.

Yes, my entrance. I knew I’d look weak if I were waiting for Susan at my apartment, so I decided to leave a key and a note, explaining that I’d been called back to the newsroom to finish a big story. It didn’t matter that I was off that day.

I stumbled through the next two weeks. Susan was due on a Friday at 4, so I headed for the newsroom at 3 and waited for her call. When it came, I loosely covered the receiver and yelled across the newsroom, “I’m leaving. Call if the mayor gets back to me.” Ignoring the puzzled stares,

I retreated to the men’s room to brush my teeth, reinforce my deodorant and practice breathing.

When I pulled up, Susan was sipping a beer on the porch and reading the newspaper. She kissed me on the cheek and thanked me for leaving the paper opened to one of my articles. (I had thought about highlighting it, but even I had some limits – and no highlighters.)

We walked to a quiet Italian restaurant, with Susan looping her arm through mine and leaning her head against my shoulder. I would have been content to die at that moment, but I had no such luck. We did get through dinner without my spilling anything, and, after tipping generously, I showed Susan around town.

Returning home, I fretted (and perspired heavily) over the next big challenge: our first night of sleeping together. I’d even practiced lying in bed and reaching for my nightstand drawer, to make sure I could find a condom in the dark. I could, and we did.

When I awoke the next morning, the spot next to me was vacant. Tracking kitchen sounds, I found Susan making coffee. “Good morning,” she said, her back to me; when she turned, her face said something else.

At that moment, standing in the kitchen, I knew Susan had already answered whatever questions she had about me and us, and the answers were “no.”

I wanted to call “do-over,” but her eyes told me she had checked out. My face must have convinced her to keep it to herself, so we entered into an unspoken conspiracy of silence.

I dreaded the next two days, but I didn’t have the courage to pull the plug. So, pretending nothing had changed, we proceeded with our plan to camp overnight in the Ozarks. It quickly took on the features of a forced march, with awkward silences and clumsy conversations. Susan gradually slipped into automatic pilot, tuning out as I cursed the steamy Missouri heat, snapped at our server in a roadside restaurant, and tore up a map that directed us to a Dairy Queen instead of the state park. I was falling apart; I was sure she was counting hours until she left.

We finally found the park, and a campsite – which, in keeping with the weekend theme, turned out all wrong. The only open tent site tilted at a 45-degree angle. The picnic table was anchored 10 feet from a dumpster overflowing with garbage and mosquitoes. And our campground neighbors were a bunch of metal-heads, with a Confederate flag planted and hints of “Deliverance.”

We pitched our tent, hauled water from the pump, wiped away sweat, and hit the trails. Our map promised a “breathtaking” waterfall; two miles in, we found an IV drip of water crawling over a giant rock, spray painted with “Realty sucks.” Had I packed a can of paint (or a highlighter), I would have corrected the spelling or replied “Your right” to the existential realtor. Instead, Susan and I silently marched back to the campground, where we discovered that our neighbors apparently considered Metallica best appreciated at 200 decibels.

I now understood why Jed Clampett fled the Ozarks and the south lost the Civil War.

I tried to fill the silence and the time with mindless chatter and rehearsed jokes. Susan laughed – a little too loud and a few seconds too late. Then, pointing to the tilted tent, I joked about “the gravity of the situation.” Susan responded with the worst possible move: She hugged me.

I screamed to myself in pain. She asked what was wrong, but I could answer only with an “I can’t talk right now” wave of my hand, I staggered away and found a trail leading out of the campground. I also found my voice.

“Shit,” I yelled. Then I picked up a rock and threw it at a tree. I missed.

Then I cried.

I don’t know how long I cried or how far I walked, but – drained of energy and emotion – I stumbled back to our campsite. “Let’s go to bed,” Susan said.

If anyone had asked what was least likely to happen in the tent that night, I would have quickly answered, “We made love.”

We made love. Considering the dynamics, “making believe” is a better description. I don’t remember starting or finishing, but I awoke the next morning, entangled with Susan and frozen in place, afraid to stir her or do anything to take us back to where we’d been the day before. When she woke up, however, her eyes were clearly packed for home. I wondered what final exam I had failed.

We broke down the camp, loaded our car, and headed back to Columbia in silence. I drove and Susan slept, or at least kept her eyes closed. I catalogued everything I hated about her, from her elitist friends to her snobbish taste in music to her annoying laugh. But I succeeded only in reminding myself that I still wanted her more than anyone or anything I had ever wanted.

When we reached my apartment, we transferred her belongings to her car.

“Snack?” I asked. Susan said she was meeting her brother in St. Louis for dinner.

“Lie with me awhile?” My desperation immediately embarrassed me.

Susan shook her head, gently kissed me on the cheek and turned toward her car. Promising myself I wouldn’t look back, I climbed the steps to my apartment, opened the screen door, and looked back. She didn’t.