Ellin Pollachek

Author & Photographer

www.ellinpollachek.com

I met Bob during a particularly healthy period in my life. I had just stopped therapy (which is a lot like stopping smoking, you tend to do it a dozen or so times before you really quit), and I was feeling very sane. A fabulous job in an ad agency came my way and within a couple of weeks of working there I caught sight of a guy who totally turned my head. He was about fifteen years older than me, wearing faded jeans and a brown plaid shirt he’d outgrown ten pounds earlier. The only thing that matched on him were his goatee and his moustache. Oh, and his eyes. They were the exact color of his faded jeans.

“Who’s the guy with the goatee?" I asked my boss.

“Bob Goldstein. You like?"

I knew my boss had a crush on me but wouldn’t try anything because he was married. Still, he had his fantasies. I knew that.

“Is he married?" I asked.

“Yeh. Are you interested?"

“Not anymore."

I had had my share of married men. This was the seventies and women with sex drives were discovering that married men were the safest ones to share those drives with. The problem with a married man is that he rarely, if ever, leaves his wife for the women with whom he is fooling around. Not that I wanted to get married, I just wanted them to leave their wives. It was an ego thing.

I put Bob out of my mind as a love interest until one day, walking past his office, I noticed his buns bending in my direction. He was opening a drawer to his filing cabinet and the temptation was more than I could bear. I reached in and pinched him. What I hadn’t anticipated was that, as a moving target, his butt would lift and well, you got it. It wasn’t his butt that I pinched. Instead I ended up with a handful of balls. First he hit his head on the filing cabinet, then dropped to the floor like a bowling pin, turned around and looked up at me in utter shock. I extended my hand and when I finally stopped laughing, I introduced myself. We became good friends.

As it turned out he was getting over a long and abruptly ended affair. Marge, that’s the girlfriend, tired of waiting for him to leave his wife, got married. Poor Bob was abandoned to his wife and two children. The only relief he could find was in a bottle of vodka.

It was after one of these late afternoon drinking binges that he had been riding his Schwinn home from P.J. Clark’s and a bus hit him. He broke his clavical, pelvis, fifth and sixth vertebrae in the accident. Three months later and $37,000 richer, he returned to work with a new head of grey hair.

He was sexier then ever.

By the time he returned, I had gone through three men, all single. There had been two Richards and one Don. The first Richard was an artist. He was into love and peace but complained that he had too much trouble penetrating me. The way he put it was “how could somebody with such wide hips be so small inside?" He also hated the way I cracked my toes and ankles when I awoke in the morning and didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t liberated enough to pay for myself.

The second Richard was also an artist. He owned five cars: a Mercedes, a Rolls, a Jaguar, a Daimler, and a Plymouth. The Plymouth was the only one that worked. The first thing he did every morning was to turn on the television. Cartoons.

Richard liked to brag about the fact that he had an original Renoir and then would add that the only reason he bought it was because the artist’s last name started with an “R." He bought a Raphael print for the same reason. He also stole the letter “R" off of anything that he could and despaired because his best friend’s “old lady" owned two brownstones and I didn’t own any.

Don was the best of the lot. He wasn’t nearly as artistically inclined as the two Richards, but then he was only nineteen. He still had time. He made love gently, never complained about my sometimes impenetrable opening, didn’t seem to be bothered by my ankle-cracking habit, and never watched television. He couldn’t afford a tv. We had a beautiful relationship for about three weeks. Then one day he disappeared along with the filigree earrings I’d bought in Portugal and a watch which had been given to me as an engagement gift.

When Bob returned to work our friendship resumed. We discussed Gide, Maslow, and Peter, Paul and Mary. I had never heard of the first two and he had never heard of Peter, Paul and Mary so we kind of balanced each other out. Despite the pressure he placed on me to go to bed with him, we didn’t make love for another year. It was the first time I had been with a man whom I actually loved before making love.

We were like two children who had found one another in an alien world. He was an artist, a Renaissance man. I was utterly modern. We sort of operated like yin and yang. We were performance artists. One night we went to see Beckett’s "Endgame" in Greenwich Village and decided to pick something up on the way. We ended up serving bagels and lox to half the audience and transformed an otherwise staid intellectual experience into dinner theater.

For the next five years Bob lived two lives. One with me and one with them. Since he was probably one of the finest commercial illustrators in the country, he was always busy and worked well into the night. What he did was leave the office at about six, stay with me until around midnight, and then return to the office. He knew all of my friends, and my friends all knew him. It was as if we were married except he didn’t support me.

Yet with all of that I fell out of lust with him. I don’t know why or how it happened but it did. And he, utterly sensitive to my responses to him, knew it before I did. He suggested we call it quits.

We may have stopped making love but not being in love. He continued to read all of my writing, critiqued my photos, and kept me abreast of his kids’ development. Sex never came up again until about a decade later, shortly after he had his first heart attack. The truth is that Bob made light of the attack. He was fifty-five years old and in what seemed like perfect health. He had just finished building a house with his own hands. Literally. He wasn’t overweight. He rode a bike. But he was fifty-five, six years older than his father was when he died of a heart attack.

A year later when he had another heart attack the doctors decided to give him an angiogram to determine how much damage had been done. I wanted to visit him in the hospital but he wouldn’t let me. He told me his wife would immediately know who I was. I had to wait for him to call me with the results. He said he’d call Friday around noon.

It is my clean leotards, or rather my lack of them, which dictates laundry day. When the drawer which holds them goes bare, I trudge down to the corner, my pocket full of quarters, to use the public laundromat. Actually, I used to look forward to it. I got to spend two hours with people I would have otherwise thought lived only in Ken Kesey or John Irving novels.

There was Rita, the lady who brought in fried chicken and hung over it, legs spread wide apart (hers, not the chicken’s), wearing no panties, staring into the window of the clothes dryer as she ripped apart a thigh or a breast. This is at eight o’clock in the morning, mind you. Or the young Oriental wannabe punk who hires himself out to do other people’s laundry but has the need to tell me, or anyone else who will listen, that he went to Harvard but doesn’t want to be part of the system. Or the lady who had one half of her face eaten away by cancer but still has the need to gossip about the person who just walked out of the laundromat. And no one ever smiled. At first I thought it was because they were unfriendly and then realized they had no teeth.

This particular week, laundry day came on Friday. I had just walked in the door and was getting ready to dump my sack full of leotards, towels, and sheets on top of my bed in preparation for folding them when the phone rang. I picked it up before my answering machine did.

A man’s voice asked if I was me.

“It is."

“It doesn’t sound like you," the man said.

“How would you like me to sound?" I said in my sexiest, come-hither voice.

“Ah, now that sounds like you."

I laughed. He paused.

“Now that you know who I am, who are you?"

When he told me his name, I froze. I remembered him well. We had worked together in the agency in which I met Bob. He was one of the men in the agency who, despite the fact that he was married, had a number of girlfriends. He like them young--real young--and buxom. I could have been one of those girls, but I was in love with Bob.

This man knew that. He remembered that time fifteen years earlier when it had all began. In fact, I had run into him one year ago and when he heard that Bob and I were still close, he wasn’t at all surprised. Which is why I froze. There was no reason for him to call me. Except one.

“I have bad news for you," he said and waited for my response. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t about to make it any easier for him.

“He died," he said. But I already knew that. I knew that from the moment he told me his name. “His heart."

“Thank you," I said, using every bit of restraint I had to remain friendly and polite. “Thanks for calling," I said, hanging up. I don’t like sharing my tears. My body was one thing, but my feelings were another.

Eventually I returned to the laundry. I folded the bath towels first. I folded them as I always had, the short way first and then the long way. That way they make up a neat pile of large squares. The hand and kitchen towels were folded just the opposite, first the long way and then the short. They formed two small piles of rectangles. I always fold the sheets any old way, and so I save them for last. And then my leotards. I folded those just like my mother taught me, holding the legs together so that they were even; then, starting at the narrow end by the toes, rolling them up until they reach the waistband. Then I turned them inside out and rolled them into little balls.

Then I put everything away. Except for the feelings.

I was never able to do the laundry after that. Now I just drop it off at the laundromat and pay the people who work there to do it.