Jimmy responded with a long, uncharacteristic silence. He stared ahead and frowned. Then he said, “He’s married.”
“You think so?”
“What else could it be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or maybe he’s in the witness protection program. Or he just got out of prison! Is he wearing one of those ankle bracelets?”
I groaned.
“Do you know his last name? We could Google him right now.”
“No. I didn’t, like, ask to see his ID.”
“Rach, what if he’s a sex offender?”
“He’s not a sex offender.”
“How do you know?”
“Anyway, I heard that most sex offenders aren’t pedophiles or anything. They’re people who, like, had sex in a movie theater once, or had sex with a seventeen-year-old when they were eighteen.”
“Now you’re trying to justify dating a sex offender?”
I stood up, folded my arms. “You’re being mean. I’m gonna go back inside.”
He looked up at me, narrowed his eyes. “You really like this guy,” he said.
I looked away. “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know yet.”
“You do! You really do!” He gave a cackling laugh and made a spidery, anticipatory gesture with his fingers. “Maybe he’ll melt your cold, cold heart.”
“You know I don’t like it when you say that.”
“I know. I’m sorry, hon.”
I sat down. “You just make me sound so…defective.”
“Nobody said you’re defective. Remember what Samira said that time? You’re like a princess in a glass case. You’re a little hard to get to. You just have…a different threshold. It’s not a bad thing. I mean, would you rather be like me?”
He had a good point—I would not have traded places with him—but I still felt it: a familiar hopelessness, like a hollow itching in my gut. Luckily, at that moment our Thai food arrived, and that distracted us both.
“Anyway,” I said, after a few mouthfuls, “how’s Kit?”
Kit was a man Jimmy had met on Grindr a couple of months before. This was so typical of Jimmy: at the beginning of the summer he had announced that he was done with relationships, that he was Codependent No More, that he was initiating a season of casual assignations untainted by emotion. “I’m calling it SOS,” he said. “Summer of Sex.” But the second time he met up with a random guy it was Kit, and their date ended up lasting for fifty-six hours. By the time it was over, Jimmy had spent two nights at Kit’s property upstate, had FaceTimed with Kit’s elderly mother, had spent several hours holding Kit while he sobbed and resolved to finally end his ailing marriage to a modern dancer named Byron who was currently outside Santa Fe in what sounded like a fancy rehab for porn addicts. And this was all before they even had their first butt sex. Anyhow, Jimmy had recently moved into Kit’s place, and Kit had immediately discarded all of Jimmy’s clothes in secret and bought him all new clothes, for a “fresh start.” When Jimmy suggested that maybe this was a teensy bit of an insane thing to do, Kit threatened to kill himself, but Jimmy could tell he hadn’t meant it. He was a veteran of people threatening to kill themselves over him and so he had become an expert; he could spot the counterfeit threats like those bow-tied guys on Antiques Roadshow can spot a counterfeit Revolutionary War footstool or whatever.
He shrugged. “It’s basically the same,” he said. “I guess I’m working up the courage to admit how bad it’s gotten. I mean, in hindsight it seems so stupid to have moved in.” He sighed. “I just thought I was in love. For real this time.”
“You were in love,” I said. “Being in love wasn’t the problem.”
“What was the problem, then?”
“Everything else.”
He laughed.
“Seriously, though. Just leave. I’ll help you. Because what’s next? He already destroyed your clothes. What if he does something to Kierkegaard?”
Jimmy went pale. Kierkegaard was his cat. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said.
“Has Franklin found someone else for your old room yet?”
“Yeah, but they can probably kick him out. They don’t like him anyway. He keeps making these smoothies and not putting the blender lid on properly, so these little shit-green flecks get all over the kitchen. You know how Franklin is about the kitchen.”
“Ugh.”
“And he’s a teacher. Teachers are the worst.”
“Ask them tomorrow, okay? I’ll help you move back. And you can stay with me if you need to.”
He elbowed me. “Then where are you gonna fuck your new married sex-offender boyfriend?”
“Shut up.”
A window above us opened, and Samira’s head emerged. Quickly, we tried to hunch over our takeout trays to obscure her view of them.
“There you are!” she cried. “The tagine is almost ready!”
“We’ll be up in a minute!” yelled Jimmy. Samira went back inside. We sighed, relieved, and leaned back.
He turned to me. “What do you think the Samira version of a tagine will look like?”
“Who knows? I guess we’ll find out.”
For a moment, neither of us said anything, but I knew what we were both thinking about: the time Samira had tried to take our whole group of friends on a “secret bike path” through Staten Island that she claimed to have discovered. We’d ended up in some kind of forest that was grown over with nettles and poison ivy and turned out to be some rich person’s private property, and one of the rich person’s staff people had seen us and called the police. The police officers glanced at our scratched-up, poison-ivy-inflamed legs and weary expressions and took pity on us and gave us a ride back to the ferry in their van. The whole way back to Brooklyn, Samira had talked indignantly about how they definitely, definitely would have arrested us if we had all been people of color and not just her and Marcus, who were black, and Flor, who was Filipina. This was probably true but also, in that moment, felt like an annoyingly selective interpretation of our encounter with law enforcement, of her role in bringing it about. Still, this was what we loved about Samira: her determination to insist on her version of the world. We wanted to believe in secret magical bike paths, and improvised Moroccan feasts, and justice: in general, in a world that was more responsive to our imagined visions of it. Yet we hedged our bets. We showed up to her visions with full stomachs, expecting nothing.
Jimmy laid a hand on my leg. “I’m sorry I made fun of your new guy,” he said. “I’m sure he’s not a sex offender.”
“I know.”
“Look, if you really like him, don’t hold back. I know I’m a bad example, in terms of consequences, but letting yourself free-fall like that? It’s the best feeling in the world. I want you to have it.”
It always took me aback, how Jimmy could suddenly become sincere like this, out of nowhere. I supposed it was how he seduced people: he teased and poked and got your hackles up, and then, just when you least expected it, he ripped open the door to his gooey boyish heart. I was used to it, but still, in that moment, I felt genuinely touched.
“Thanks, J,” I said, leaning my head against his shoulder.
He frowned and sniffed the air. “Do you smell that? Is that smoke?”
I lifted my head from Jimmy’s shoulder just as a piercing alarm rang through the air. This was the part of the evening when the friction between reality and Samira’s vision of it became so abrasive that something actually caught fire. In this case, it was her entire kitchen. Luckily, some quick-thinking person had immediately grabbed the fire extinguisher and quenched the flames, but coughing people began streaming out of the front door, clutching each other and looking back up at her third-floor window as though at the experience they had just witnessed and escaped. Already they were telling each other about it, as if it had happened a long time ago; already Samira was holding out the singed tips of her long curly hair and announcing her plan to shave it all off to commemorate the experience. Her kitchen m
ishap had been not a careless mistake but a crucial node in the universe’s vast plan for her continuous renewal, a baptism by fire.
Jimmy gave me a smug look and raised an eyebrow; I reciprocated. We generally expected little from other humans besides absurdity. As a result, we were rarely disappointed.
But now, privately, I felt a stab of melancholy: my smoke-free lungs, my full belly, seemed to speak to the kind of defensive wisdom that had always excluded me from the tenderizing blows of experience.
I closed my eyes and thought of the golden man, of his hot hands and crackling eyes, of our date the next day. I would approach it the way Samira would, the way Jimmy-in-love would: inviting risk, entering the dark forest, running back into the burning building in search of my own heart.
* * *
Our library is one of only a handful of branches open on Sunday, aside from the big central one, and while I probably should resent this, it’s actually a relief; I never know what to do with a Sunday otherwise. There’s never anything to do, besides brunch: you make conversation for a couple of hours while eating an overpriced omelet you could have made yourself, and then, bloated and drunk from mimosas, you end up sleeping away the afternoon. I much preferred it this way, working busily for a few afternoon hours and then taking a long walk home (my bus did not run on Sundays), feeling the tired tingle in my feet, then curling up with a cup of tea and a pleasure book.
This Sunday, though, it was not the book I looked forward to.
All night and morning, I had thought of the golden man and resisted the impulse to touch myself. This kind of desire was rare and I did not want to squander it. Now I moved around the library in a silent delirium of longing, my outsides taut and awake, my insides tender and molten. I stamped and reshelved books, marveling at how well I could fool everyone: they thought I was a librarian, but I was really a lady volcano.
On my long walk home, I touched everything I could. My desire had expanded outward, to include the whole world. I ran my fingers along chain-link fences, feeling the airy skips between the wires; I laid my palms against the sun-warmed metal skin of the streetlamps. I felt the roughness of tree bark and the pliant tongues of the leaves. I was a body covered in skin, and everything invited my touch.
I’d told Thomas I would cook for him at my apartment, but I am not a very good cook and in my nervousness and sexual agitation I managed to ruin everything except the kale. But when he showed up at my door, his electrical eyes crackling, he was carrying a big fat cherry pie bursting with soft cherry parts, emitting a warm yeasty smell. It was so sensual it was almost pornographic. We both blushed and grew embarrassed when he held the pie between us.
We went up to my roof as the sun set, and ate the kale dripping with garlic and the pie oozing with cherry juice and drank a crisp, sexy white wine. He said that it was the best meal he’d ever had, and I believed him because I agreed.
“Do you cook much?” I asked, licking cherry juice off my fingers.
“Nah,” he said. “I mean, I can. But I don’t really need to eat that much. Sometimes I just kind of…forget.”
“What do you mean, you forget? Don’t you get hungry?”
“No,” he said. “I sort of graze. I don’t need much food.”
“But what about your fast circulation? Doesn’t that give you, like, a high-octane metabolism?”
He shook his head. “It’s not like that. I told you, my body’s weird.” He paused and frowned, as if he was trying to decide whether to elaborate or not. Instead, he leaned in and kissed me.
The kiss felt just how I had imagined it: a warm welcome shock. I closed my eyes and kissed him back, but then he pulled away and gave me a long, serious look.
“I’m going to be very honest with you right now,” he said. “As honest as I can be. Is that okay?”
“Of course,” I said.
“You are the first woman I’ve gone out with in a while,” he said. “Like I said, something bad happened to me a couple months back. I don’t want to scare you or anything, but this is the first time I’ve really connected with anybody since then. I still have to leave soon. That’s not going to change.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I still can’t tell you why.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So if you don’t want to get into this, I completely understand.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But right now I’m really here. And I want to be here really badly. I don’t want to be anywhere else or think about anything else. I just want to eat pie with you and talk to you and look at your face and touch you everywhere and get your red lipstick all over me.”
I considered this for a moment. I let his words sink in. I’d never held any fairy-tale notions of love; I never expected anything to last forever. I had read too many literary novels for that; I understood the nature of the daydream. I just demanded that, like a good literary novel, love be absorbing, and full of texture, and, well, novel. I demanded that it demand something of me.
“Well,” I said, “here we are.”
He took this as the permission it was, leaned over, and kissed me again—this time deeper, more intentionally, like the sealing of something.
Then we went down to my bedroom and lay on the bed and he touched me slowly, through my clothes. I’ve always liked this best, the over-the-clothes part. It recalls the illicit feeling of the very first touches I ever experienced, from the nervous hands of older boys, in the backs of school buses and movie theaters and planetariums. I let them cup my tiny breasts in their palms like newborn chicks, but did not grant access to skin. These were the same hands that had touched greasy dollar bills and urinal flush levers all day. But through my clothes I sensed the massive thwarted thrust of their desires and felt both powerful and helpless in the face of such forces, like a person on top of a tall mountain looking up at the stars. Even now I always try to prolong the slow beginning moments, to conjure that lost discovery-channel feeling. But the guys almost never get it. Their desires move faster than their hands, jumping around in front of them like rodeo clowns, and they get distracted and their hands follow, slapping and clutching at my body as if it might get away.
This man touched me slowly. He seemed confident I would not get away, and his confidence held me in place. He covered my breasts with his palms, warming me through my bra and thin cotton T-shirt. He moved one hand down between my legs and whispered, “I can feel how wet you are.” But when he tried to slide a hand into my underwear, I pulled it away, nearly burning myself on his hot wrist.
“Hold on a minute,” I said.
I got up and went to the bathroom. My face in the mirror looked like an Impressionist’s idea of a face. In the grayish-gold evening light, the edges seemed to blur and fade. I brushed my hair and reapplied my lipstick, then stared at myself until I came back into focus. Then I went to the kitchen and filled two glasses with water, pausing on my way back to look out the kitchen window. The world looked the same as always, like a photograph of itself. It was doing a very good impression of not having changed.
I brought the water back to my room, gave him a glass, and we each took a sip. Then we sat on the bed and looked at each other. Neither of us said anything. I felt his firecracker eyes playing over my skin. Some kind of respiration was happening. The room pulsed like a lung.
“You’re so dense,” he said, finally. “You’re so real.”
“‘Dense’? ‘Real’? Is that your idea of a compliment?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s the nicest compliment there is.” He set his water down on the bedside table, then reached out and touched my right breast, very very lightly. He leaned in close to my ear. “You belong so well in the world,” he whispered. “Fucking you would be like fucking the world.”
Then we stood up and removed our clothes, individually and slowly, with a sense of ceremony and purpose. I felt like a virgin bride undressing for her wedding night, or a matador undressing for the sake of donning her ceremonial matador clothes, w
ith all the lacings and flourishes. I was aware of my body as a kind of garment. Or perhaps the awareness was the garment. Either way, I stepped into myself. I was aware of how my skin covered me, how it fit so well over my bones and flesh.
We looked at each other. He had my favorite kind of male body: lean and wiry, no extra bulk. His penis was straight and graceful. His skin faintly glowed. “I like it,” I said.
“I like yours too,” he said. “Holy crap, do I like it.”
Then he took a step toward me, closing the distance between us, and embraced me. When he touched me I gave out a little cry: his skin had grown much hotter, and while it wasn’t exactly scalding, it was enough to startle me.
He stepped back. “Sorry,” he said. “Did I hurt you?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I was just surprised. Try again, slower.”
He reached out for me again, this time moving oh so slowly through the air, so that even before his skin made contact with mine, I could feel its heat. This gave me the strange sensation that his body extended beyond his skin, and that mine did too: I could feel my beyond-body pulsing into the space between us, touching his beyond-body, greeting it; by the time the skin of his hand actually touched the skin of my shoulder, the touch had already existed, was only building upon itself.
In this way we continued, touching other parts of our bodies with other parts of our bodies, but always slowly, the beyond-touch preceding the actual touch. We did this for hours. While he did not penetrate me, because that seemed like too huge a step to take, I still can’t think of any other name for what we did besides “sex.” It went on and on with neither of us coming; he couldn’t move fast without heating up his body too much, so it was a long slow taffy pull, interspersed with talking and kissing, rather than the wordless, grunting, goal-oriented frenzy I had been conditioned to expect. We fell asleep eventually, around three in the morning, intertwined like children who pass out carelessly, wherever they find their bodies flung midplay. I don’t remember falling asleep but I do remember the feeling I had, a soft orange hum of well-being.
The Regrets Page 7