I thought about turning back. But I looked good and a part of me knew I needed this, that you can’t turn away from feelings like this even if they’re wrong. I called my aunt, who told me to go inside. That, for God’s sake, it was the most beautiful day.
So I did. And right away I saw him. Spring Lounge had these old picture windows with fly wings in the seams, and the Easter-time sun was shining on his face. All the anxiety left me at once. He looked imaginary, wearing the same fishing vest and a pair of cargo pants. I would come to know and love it as his uniform. He’d ordered us two beers and held a corner table.
—I hope you don’t mind, he said, I took the liberty of ordering you a Stella.
I said hello and thanked him and said I had to run to the bathroom, where I looked in the mirror and screamed at my reflection. John Fogerty drowned me out. I was in love.
We had a couple of beers and everyone in there was less excited than we were. We glowed together. I was proud of a lot of things about myself. The way I always knew how to make a dish taste better with salt or turmeric or Parmesan or lemon zest or cardamom. How I could make another person feel comfortable or feel smaller. How I was rarely drunk or out of my own control. I was even proud of my pain. It made me enigmatic and aware. But I had never felt better about myself than I did in that moment, with the sunlight coming through those filthy pretty windows, sitting next to that man.
—This secret accountant of yours sounds like he will be unbelievably helpful. I’ve gotten myself into a number of untenable situations.
—Listen, he said, leaning his chest across the table. Truth is, I’m not just trying to help you. Look, I was excited to come here. Looked forward to it all damn week.
I blushed and then we did what people in illicit situations do. We pretended something untoward hadn’t been said but enjoyed all around ourselves the warmth of it.
I tried several times to pay for a beer of his. As a thank-you, I said. But he kept saying, No, that’s not how it works. Gentlemen pay.
—I’m a certain type of woman.
—Okay, buy me a drink somewhere else, certain type of woman. This place is getting beat.
We walked to Tom & Jerry’s, a bar that had the same bearded bartender for years. On the walk he smoked a one-hitter. He smoked good pot. I thought it was sexy. We walked by a church in SoHo and he told me about its engravings. He knew the histories of places. He knew good bars. He was of an indeterminate wealth, somewhere in between a two-bedroom in Chelsea and a classic six on the Upper West Side. I said something funny and he laughed and then he stopped us on a block of Manhattan that I would, in the desolate future, walk over and over, trying to reconstruct the essence of that first night. I would stand in the very spot he’d stopped us.
—This is so weird. Seriously. It’s like the best first date I’ve ever had. Only I’m married.
I was so happy. I was too happy. I should have played it cool. I’d have given anything to go back and play it cool. At Tom & Jerry’s we sat side by side at the bar. We drank gin and tonics. He complimented my hair and my intelligence. Our thighs were touching, my jeans against his loose khakis. I felt the heat of his leg through the material. I had never wanted someone more.
—I have never wanted someone more, he said. I have a wife and a baby at home. I have to get out of here.
He paid and we left and outside it had started to rain, turning the streets darker. That little stretch of Elizabeth Street would become hallowed. Within months it would feel like the love of my life was buried under the cigarette packs and the fallen magnolia blossoms. He hailed a cab. One flew past.
—We didn’t want that one anyway, he said, laughing.
A second came and stopped and Big Sky opened the door for me. As I was getting in, he took hold of my shoulder.
—Hey, he said. Jesus.
His face looked like a wolf’s. He had a long nose and clever blue eyes. He didn’t look like a liar. His self-centeredness was sexy.
—May I kiss you on the mouth? he said.
The cabdriver’s impatience was palpable but nobody else mattered.
—Yes.
He came forward. My heart was a rock knocking in my chest. The kiss was openmouthed but tongueless and lasted no longer than three seconds. It was more sex, that kiss, than any sex I had ever had. Maybe it wasn’t love, but I don’t know what to call how I felt inside that moment.
Do you see how it’s a cycle? I was standing there with the lead singer of a seventies folk band. I was attracted to this faded man because he looked like Big Sky, because I craved men who had big happy lives of which I would never be a part. The experience of Big Sky gored me. In a way, Big Sky was responsible for Vic’s death. One man like that can be responsible for every big and small thing in a woman’s life. A woman he isn’t married to whom he doesn’t think very much about at all. But it’s not the man’s fault. The man is nothing. It’s what you think you are missing inside of yourself. I promise that you are missing nothing.
* * *
I DIDN’T KNOW IF I could bear to see Alice again. I like to think I was lying in wait, sharpening a knife, but really I was only postponing the last thing I had left to fear.
I considered writing her a letter.
Dear Alice,
I have had a lifetime of suffering. From what I know, you have not. I have something to tell you, and you have something to tell me. I am all alone. I thought about killing myself but I wanted to meet you first. I am depraved. I hope you like me.
On the way home from the café I passed River walking with a dog. They were on the crest of the lookout just before Comanche. The sun and the greens framed them.
The dog was a mutt, gray and brown with a beard like a schnauzer and robust as a shepherd. River came to my open window and said, This is Kurt.
He told me Kurt was a stray he’d found on the stairs hike at Murphy Ranch Trail. Men and their dogs. They will bring them everywhere and never forsake them. Unlike their women, children. Dogs want nothing of a man except all the things a man wants to give.
He had no leash for the dog, yet the animal waited pleasantly beside him while we spoke. There’s something admirable about a man who can keep a stray dog at his heels. It made me want to have sex with him.
Every single thing I did was to make that young man want to fuck me. Who are these people who have platonic conversations? They are adults.
I rubbed my chin against my shoulder, exposing half of my neck. I couldn’t tell if that had turned him on, so I did twenty more things. Envying another woman made me ugly with need.
I had to leave first—you must always be the first to go—so I said goodbye and drove away like a person who drives unsafely. I passed the house with the aluminum gate all the way around. Palm trees rose from behind the metal and bougainvillea strangled itself against it. You couldn’t see anything in the distance. Much of the Canyon was that way. Behind a wall of trees and fencing there might be a glorious house with good cars in the driveway, horses in the distance, and crops; or there might be a commune like ours, sandy adobe structures, the occult. That house, Lenny had told me, was the site of a former swinger’s haven called Sandstone. Communal bathrooms and sleeping areas, hot tubs, naked women rinsing their legs in natural springs. You would go for a daytime interview, and if you were deemed suitable, you could come back that night for a trial evening. If you were trim and attractive, you might be invited to become a member. Lenny talked about it like he’d only heard tales and never visited. But he spoke in great detail of tan women with cornrows jumping on cowhide trampolines as the sun fell behind the red mountains.