Ian looked at me carefully. “The way I feel,” he announced, “is that I like Lacie, and I like you. I like both of you.”
“Okay. Congratulations. But that’s not what I asked.”
Steaming plates of greasy noodles arrived. Ian stabbed a big flat fat one and said, “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” I was annoyed, and my annoyance felt good, because it meant we were in relation, two semantic steps from in a relationship. “I was just pointing out that you chose a place where Lacie would never go and her friends would never go.”
“That”—he stabbed another noodle—“sounds like a question to me.”
We ate in silence. I was still so awed by his beauty—I mean, it was absurd, him out to dinner with me—but something about it made me want to outfox him. “Do you get off on this?” I asked.
“Off on what?”
“Cute,” I told him, and that did it: a little smile curled around his lips. I felt as victorious as all the times I’d wrested laughs from him.
“So,” I tried again. “You and Lacie have an open relationship.”
He looked at me, bemused. “Is that what she said?”
“I’m surmising. I’m an optimist.”
“Here is the way I feel.” He seemed to be into announcements, as if he had processed everything, figured everything out. “It’s not like things are open or closed between us, it’s not like we’ve talked or not talked about it. It’s like—she doesn’t seem to operate by those kinds of categories. So I’m not going to either.”
I nodded rapidly. “That makes total sense.”
“I just feel like, if I brought it up, she might look at me like, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I laughed. “Yeah, totally.”
He put his hand on my arm. Oh, the heat. I like Lacie, and I like you. What bullshit. What a delicious steaming hunk of bullshit; how easy everything would be, though, if it were true. How simple. Maybe, for him, it was. Maybe, for me, it could be.
When the bill came, he said what he had said before: “Want to go home?”
* * *
—
As we were walking down the slope, a light rain began to fall. It misted the cones of orange streetlight and collected along Ian’s hair in tiny sparkling droplets. In the windows of duplexes, there were rooms of yellow and blue light, a woman pacing with a phone at her ear, a man setting down a brown paper bag of groceries. Ian was talking, either about Nietzsche or about his childhood superheroes; I couldn’t tell which. I liked him draining himself of words, draining himself into me.
He lived at the bottom of the slope, right before it crested upward again. Gowanus: the point of the V, where brownstone Brooklyn sours into industrialization before becoming bourgeois again. Now that I wasn’t thick with whiskey I could really look at where he lived: the stoop’s painted red steps and black railing, the building’s long carpeted hall, which smelled faintly of vegetable soup, and the cool gray cleanness of his one-bedroom.
Quick as a lynx he slipped off his shoes and plugged in a strand of white Christmas lights. The tangerine kitchen fell into dappled relief. I stood by the door.
“There’s bourbon in the hutch.” He had his back to me, rinsing out glasses in the sink. “If you want some.”
Carefully I shrugged off my coat and hung it on a hook beside his Carhartt. I unlaced my shoes. Everything in the apartment was deliberate, and it made me deliberate, too, as if I were being filmed.
As I was unhooking the pantry’s latch he came up behind me and pressed against me, his arm around me, his hand cupping my breast. As his other hand slid down my jeans, he nuzzled my neck. I arched against him. “Come on, get the whiskey,” he muttered. “Get it,” and when I leaned forward, he plunged his fingers deep into me.
I was pinned. Impaled like a butterfly. Study me, I thought. Push me. Pink gauze fell over my mind and strange soft pants came from my mouth. He drew my blouse over my head and I lifted up my arms like a child. My breasts, freed from their bra, were one-eyed fish, pink and dumb. He unzipped my jeans. I reached out and undid his belt, and he yanked down my underwear.
Then he had me by the neck, bending me forward. Then he was gliding into me. My head was nearly in the hutch. There was no condom, we were definitely not using a condom, but what the fuck, who did he fuck anyway? Lacie? I’d take that risk.
Fuck me with the same cock, I thought. Just try to knock me up. Just try. If these ancient eggs get whammed off a one-night stand, I’ll dress up as the goddess of fertility with corn sheaves next Halloween.
“We should use,” he said, “a condom,” and then he scooped me up, carried me to the bed, and poured me out so he could stuff his cock into my mouth. It was that kind of night. He fed his fingers into my mouth. He fed his asshole into my mouth. I tongued it like I was getting a grade. It tasted peppery and dry. Later I sat on his face, and his fingers dug into my hips as he worked me over with his soft, marvelous tongue, his genius tongue, and I moaned until I caught sight of myself moaning in the mirror on his closet door, my tiny belly swelling out, my cheeks flushed. I looked beautiful. His fingers dug deep into the flesh of my hips, and his face was lost between my thighs. “Do you see yourself?” he hissed from somewhere deep in my cunt. “Do you see what I’m doing to you?”
Later, when we were fucking again—with a condom—we stared deep into each other, and he looked so old to me. His eyes were deep and sunken, with fine lines around them, and his face kept wavering between human and idol. A stone god. I sensed the evil in him.
When it was over I curled up with my head on his shoulder. I wanted to tell him that I had felt his spirit, that I knew it was not entirely benevolent, but I couldn’t find the words. Finally I said, “You’re very masculine.”
“Yeah.” He sounded neither flattered nor surprised. “I’ve got a lot of dude energy.”
I thought of him walking across his canvas or standing in the doorway of the kitchen in the Barn. Watching me. Watching me from the shore.
“I tend to be drawn to really feminine women,” he added. “I don’t know what it’s about exactly.” He was talking up to the darkness above his head.
“What does that mean, ‘feminine’?” I said. “What’s feminine?”
“You know.”
But I didn’t. Was feminine pliant, was it docile, was it passive? I was sure he meant something good, but everything I remembered from Hinduism and yoga sounded lame. “Do you think I’m feminine?” I asked.