“I thought the sex was really good. I mean, don’t you think it’s hot?”
I knew he thought it was hot.
“It’s just”—he was speaking slowly—“it brings up something I don’t like in myself. I know this part of myself. I don’t feel the need to explore it anymore.”
Okay, so, a few times during sex, I’d cried. Just a bit. It didn’t freak me out. It had happened to me before, a hot welling when the wires of sex and emotion got crossed. Not a big deal, but the last time Ian had caught me. He’d been working his fingers into my asshole, working and working them, and I knew he wanted to fuck me there, and I felt trapped, caught, and suddenly there they were: hot shuddery tears shaking from me. He stopped right away. “Oh, honey, honey, what is it?” he had cooed, curling up beside me. “What’s going on?”
“You’re scared,” I suggested now.
“Maybe.” He sounded amiable.
“So don’t be scared!”
“Look.” He chewed the end of his straw. “I think it’s clear that we’re not good for each other.”
“No. I wouldn’t say that’s clear at all.”
“No? You wouldn’t say this thing about Lacie makes it clear? We bring out something bad in each other. We should just stop.”
“Maybe.” I was thinking hard, scrambling. It didn’t matter what came out of my mouth, it didn’t have to be true, it just had to be convincing enough that he would keep fucking me. “Maybe, maybe we’re just like, interested in different kinds of kink. Like, I like the performance of losing control, this sort of overtly playacting, like, Oh my God, what a big cock you have!, and I think you actually like this more liminal stuff, where I’m actually ambivalent about the stuff you’re doing to me—”
Two pink blooms appeared on his cheeks. He studied the floor as he blew out his cheeks. “Yeah, uh. This conversation is actually really turning me on.”
I went hot. Just him saying it: I got hot. But wasn’t this game exactly the game he thought we should stop? “It’s just like, maybe if I sort out my feelings about us having the kind of sex we’re having, I won’t be so ambivalent, and then you wouldn’t feel so weird about it,” I concluded.
He pushed back from the table. He had flushed a darker pink. “I actually can’t talk about it. It really turns me on.”
Out on the sidewalk we kissed like crazy. Relief made me giddy. He couldn’t keep his hands off me. So no one was more surprised than me when Monday came and he did not call. Then Tuesday. Then Wednesday. I sent him one text, and he answered a day later, briefly. That was when I understood. We were done.
There’s the thing when you fall in public, and you get up real fast, smiling, thinking it matters more to preserve your dignity than to figure out whether you’re hurt. There’s the thing where someone says I still want to be your friend, and you say yes, as if you even care about the friendship of a guy who no longer wants to fuck you. And then there’s the thing when you wake up at five thirty in the morning with your heart thumping gone, gone, gone and you think, Actually this is fantastic, when the supermarket opens I’ll be first in line. I’ve been meaning to make some stock, and we could use some more garlic anyway.
But first, because you are an obedient child, you sit at your desk with a cup of coffee trying to write about a thinly fictionalized boy, but quickly you discover that your brain has been colonized by a real boy, and you think, It’s a relief, really and But you wanted this too and Obviously he cares about you, this doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about you but you don’t care that he cares about you, you care about him saying, You’re so wet, saying, Oh my God, your pussy feels amazing, and then you’re—what? Turned on and sad? Furious and heartbroken and wet? It’s a mess. It’s time to go to the food store.
Two hours later, Lacie stood in the doorway to the kitchen wearing nothing but her underwear and one of my T-shirts, which naturally looked amazing on her. Clearly baffled to be smelling carrots and onions a half hour before breakfast, she nonetheless tried to play it cool.
“You’re making stock,” she observed.
“Yeah, I don’t know, I woke up early, I can’t get any writing done, I figured why not?”
She took in the bubbling pot, the green plastic bag. “You went to the Co-op.”
“Yeah, there was no line. I should always go early in the morning.”
She cocked her head—that classic Lacie move—trying to decide what all this meant, but in the end all she said was, “That’s awesome. Maybe I’ll make risotto tonight.”
* * *
—
For days it went like this. I woke up, heart pounding, splintery with grief, bright with the knowledge that he was gone. Anything remotely like sitting at my desk was impossible, but the thing is, when you wake up at six A.M. and you can’t write and you don’t have to tutor until four P.M., there are a lot of hours to slaughter.
So I taught myself to bake bread. I took over feeding the sourdough starter. I scrubbed the woodwork, because God knows the last time that had happened, and replaced the lightbulb that had burnt out in the coat closet. Once the light was fixed I could see how much dust had accumulated down among our winter boots and summer sandals, so I took out all the shoes and the shoe rack, and then I matched up all the fallen gloves with their husbands, and dusted, and then I thought, I might as well mop, and really the closet looked so much brighter than it had before, and I was sure Lacie would be overjoyed with the bright yellow silk scarf that I had discovered crumpled in the back on the floor, especially since I had soaked it in warm water to remove the dirt, but she only took it between her fingers as if it were a letter from a foreign, possibly hostile country and said, “You’re not pregnant, are you? It seems like some nesting instinct in you has gone berserk.”
I laughed as if this were the funniest thing she had ever said, and she did her head cock as if pretending to consider for the first time whether I was “sexually active,” and then she said, “Well, I think you’re working too hard, but it is really nice to have all that stuff taken care of,” and I saw that Lacie was not as indifferent as I had thought to who was doing which household chores.
So I kept on cleaning. I stepped up my relationship with the toilet-bowl cleaner and started shopping for household goods. The oven door had squeaked since I moved in; with a can of WD-40 I silenced it. The shoe rack had a loose screw; I tightened it. Nothing I did was that complicated or technical—certainly it all seemed worlds easier than the magic Lacie regularly conjured from the kitchen—but I felt a little butch with that blue spray can, or sticking a Phillips head in my back pocket. I was the man of the house, fixing things up, if the man of the house could also be a lovesick little girl.