I do what he says, even though I have given up on the prospect of sex, because it turns out maybe he is the only friend I have. So I eat half a chocolate cake and arrive at the club in cutoffs and sneakers, so ready to fuck that when someone brushes up against me on the train I make a scary, involuntary noise. Eric emerges from the club through a wall of smoke and pulls me inside with his large, clammy hand, and all around me are the campy trappings of 1975. He leads me to the center of the pit by the tips of my fingers and the air is thick with mist and sweat and plumes of artificial fog, the strobe and smoke machine’s combined effort churning out these puffy, orange convex knives and I sneeze into my elbow and make eye contact with a dog who is sitting in the corner chewing someone’s silk slipper, which bums me out, as it always does when animals look to be in places they don’t want to be. A parade of synthetic fabrics move in unison under the liquid clip of light like a school of silver herring as some bunting near the stage that says Fever! pulls away from the ceiling and it occurs to me that this is one of those places in the business of reproducing a decade for a night because the bulletin by the door indicates that in a few weeks it will be the nineties. But for now a workable hologram of Chaka Khan overtakes Gloria Gaynor and her bouncy curls and Chaka is cooing in her famed shredded panties, squatting and saluting at the end of the stage, flexing her brown thighs and smirking into the crowd, though the music that is actually playing is KC and the Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way,” which makes it feel a little spectral, which is how nights like these always feel once the strobes lift for a moment and you see the beer and glitter on the floor, the reanimation of what is dead repackaged and called nostalgia and all that earnest time travel tempered with irony because as I look around almost everyone is dancing but with the sort of shrugging participation that conveys this whole thing as joke, like, how lame, like, I dig this, but not too much. But the beauty of disco is the too much, is the horn section and the cheese, and so Eric and I convene in the bathroom over a spoon and someone is in the stall next to us with bare feet weeping and we go out into the middle and Eric is a very coordinated white man but given to fall back on the cabbage patch and the diddy bop, which is fine, and then we’re in his car with the AC all the way up, on a reasonable clip through the Holland Tunnel, and he’s handing me his phone and asking me to decline a call from his wife, which makes me feel terrible, not out of any fealty to Rebecca but because this night appears to have generated from some greater marital drama, though of course I relish denying the call, just as I relish the wave of cicadas rippling the air as we pull up to his house, which does indeed have a mailbox with a flag and Walker on the side in a jaunty yellow font, and up the stairs and inside his bedroom all the pictures are facedown, which is a level of premeditation that gives me pause, but that ultimately eases me out of my clothes because to do all this he would have to know I would say yes, he would have to believe himself capable of finessing the initial yes into the terminal yes in such perfect order that I would even go to Jersey and the idea that he understands this, his total control of the situation, is what does me in. There is no foreplay. I am still in my socks trying to discern from the wallpaper a conclusion about the marriage that results in this, this man peeling off his Disco Sucks shirt and pulling me into his lap and apologizing about the delay because it has been thirteen years with the same woman, he says, thirteen years, and all the rules have changed, and so I try to help him out of his pants but his shoes are still on, shoes with laces that we both consider for a moment before we opt out and get his pants down only as far as they need to go, his face dark and urgent, his body taut and smattered with coarse, curly hair. Slowly, he eases me down onto his grand, slightly left-leaning cock, and for a moment I do rethink my atheism, for a moment I consider the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope, and so I fuck him desperately with the force of this epiphany and Eric is talkative and filthy but there is some derangement about his face, this pink contortion that introduces the whites of his eyes in a way that makes me afraid he might say something we cannot recover from just yet, so I cover his mouth and say shut up, shut the fuck up, which is more aggressive than I would normally be at this point but it gets the job done and in general if you need a pick-me-up I welcome you to make a white man your bitch though I feel panicked all of a sudden to have not used a condom and I’m looking around the room and there is a bathroom attached, and in the bathroom are what look to be extra towels and that makes me so emotional that he pauses and in one instant a concerned host rises out of his violent sexual mania, slowing the proceedings into the dangerous territory of eye contact and lips and tongue where mistakes get made and you forget that everything eventually dies, so it is not my fault that during this juncture I call him daddy and it is definitely not my fault that this gets him off so swiftly that he says he loves me and we are collapsing back in satiation and horror, not speaking until he gets me a car home and says take care of yourself like, please go, and as the car is pulling away he is standing there on the porch in a floral silk robe that is clearly his wife’s, looking like he has not so much had an orgasm as experienced an arduous exorcism, and a cat is sitting at his feet, utterly bemused by the white clapboard and verdant lawn, which makes me hate this cat as the city rises around me in a bouquet of dust, industrial soot, and overripe squash, insisting upon its own enormity like some big-dick postmodernist fiction and still beautiful despite its knowledge of itself, even as the last merciless days of July leave large swaths of the city wilted and blank.
And then for a week Eric doesn’t answer my texts, or my emails, or my calls, and I am maintaining my smile in the middle of my open office plan, leafing through this new book we’re putting out on the virtues of sharing. And now I know where he lives so ten days after having fucked him in the bed he shares with his wife I go right up to the door and find it unlocked, and no one is home, so I walk around the house and pick up these cold lemons on the counter and roll them around in my hands, and I open the fridge and take a drink of milk and carry the carton up to the bedroom where a door opens to a closet with a collection of women’s clothes and I gather the silk and wool and cashmere in my hands and then there is a voice, and I turn and standing in the doorway of the attached bathroom in yellow rubber gloves and a T-shirt that says Yale is his wife.
3
I got the abortion in my junior year of high school. There was a brief moment when I considered the pregnancy, when I tried to halve a grain of sand and accommodate its ambition to yield a pair of lungs. At the time, I worked retail at a dying mall. Eighteen hours a week smoothing chinos and shadowing aggressive Quebecois customers who came to upstate New York to exploit our low-priced bids to stay in business. There were only four stores open in the mall. A CVS that kept the animal crackers next to the douches, a Deb with five-dollar packs of high-waisted panties, a gun shop, and my store, a scrappy little boutique for the professional woman. I was a miserable sales associate, prone to confessional spirals during my attempts to move the store loyalty card, but an asset as long as I did enough work to afford the veteran associates more time to socialize. During lunchtime, I manned the store alone, and the two other associates suspended their concerns about my awkwardness with customers to go have lunch at Boston Market. That I was not invited to these lunches felt more like a kindness than a slight. They were good to me, inclined to bring back some creamed spinach and runny macaroni, which I ate by a defunct Key Bank whose ATMs were filled with honeycomb. During this time, I couldn’t tell if I liked being alone, or if I only endured it because I knew I had no choice.