The monitor on the coffee table crackled. It was mine, his already wrinkled face collapsing in on itself, his breath coming in little gasps, his arms wriggling. I stood.
“I’ll go, too.” It was Dominique, rising from her chair. “Élise is such a light sleeper, she’ll be up in a second if she isn’t already.”
* * *
—
Sandra’s spare room was dim, the shades drawn against the glow of the sun now beginning to set outside, a night-light plugged into the socket by the door. I picked my son up and he quieted. Élise was in fact awake though not complaining, blinking up at Dominique through thick, dark lashes. For a few moments we were silent, me pacing beneath the window, jiggling my arms up and down, Dominique sitting cross-legged on the ground. She’d taken a bottle from her bag and was nudging the nipple into Élise’s mouth.
“Mine,” Dominique said, “told me I should feel lucky.” She was whispering. Above her voice, the sound of Élise suckling. “He was older than yours, unmarried. Divorced I think, no kids. But in other ways it was similar. First job out of college, my boss, sex in the office, that sort of thing.” Dominique was turned away from me but I saw her shoulders move up and down in a shrug. “He said I should feel lucky. He said no one else would want me. I know I look—now”—Dominique’s shoulders moved again—“but I got braces late and my skin was bad and I had glasses and freshman year I gained all this weight, plus it took me ages to figure out what to do with my hair. My senior year of high school I shaved most of it off thinking that would solve the problem, which it did. It also made me look”—I could hear the smile in her voice—“like an egg with a bit of hair on top.” Élise was done feeding and Dominique put the bottle down. “He asked me if I was a virgin. He said, I bet you’re a virgin. And I wasn’t, not technically, but I might as well have been.” Élise’s head was resting on Dominique’s shoulder now and Dominique was standing. She turned to face me. “Was yours ugly?” My son’s eyes were drooping shut.
“Not particularly. I mean, he wasn’t handsome, either. A little pudgy, thinning hair. Standard-issue middle-aged white guy.”
“Mine was hideous,” Dominique said. “I mean truly repulsive. Short and squat and bowlegged. Pockmarked and bald and he didn’t take care of himself, his teeth were yellow and his breath was terrible and there was always dirt under his fingernails. Also hairy, fantastically hairy. That’s what made me think of it, the fact that yours had hairy hands.” She smiled. “And he was telling me”—the smile became a grimace—“later I understood that his ugliness gave him power. Or anyway it made him mean, and if you’re a man, a white man, being mean, usually you get what you want.” She paused. “But I think also he could see the ugliness in women, I mean, how ugly they believed themselves to be. It was some kind of superpower he had. Because by then I’d lost the weight, I wasn’t breaking out, the braces were off, I’d figured out contacts—but it was like he could see me at fifteen and sixteen and seventeen and eighteen. He could see, in my head, he could see that was still what I thought I looked like.”
We were both pacing now, jiggling our arms, moving in opposite directions, passing each other under the window.
“Did you believe him?”
“About what?
“About being lucky.”
“You know,” Dominique said, “I think I did. And more than that, I think I was relieved. To know that someone who found me so unattractive—he was always telling me how badly I dressed, how my breasts were too small, how I needed to lose more weight—still wanted to—” Dominique paused. Élise was asleep again and Dominique settled her into her carrier. She stood up and faced me and cupped her hands around my son’s small ears. “Still wanted,” she said, “to fuck me.” She smiled. “To be fair, my clothes were terrible. But I think I thought that made him special. And that that made me lucky. Lucky to have found this guy who was nice enough to overlook all the things that were wrong with me. Which, I mean, now I get it. This ugly guy, fifty years old. Of course he was into my twenty-three-year-old pussy. Back then though—” Dominique shook her head. “I was amazed. I swear I was amazed.”
Dominique dropped her hands. My son had fallen asleep. Dominique stepped outside and I closed the door softly behind her, kneeled to settle my son in his car seat.
* * *
—
“Home Depot.”
“Home Depot?” Fran looked at Sandra.
“You said”—and now Sandra was looking at me—“you wanted to know how we got here. When it happened. The moment when the wine and the kid and the no partner, when those things became inevitable. Well.” Sandra sipped her white wine. “The short answer is I went to Home Depot.” Raised eyebrows, raised glasses, eyes moving, and a look that flashed, or was it my imagination, between Dominique and me. “My husband,” Sandra continued, “my husband at the time”—another sip of wine—“wanted to build me a desk. It was a present. A thoughtful present.” Fran put her phone back in her purse, the gesture indicative of respect if not interest. “I’d been talking for years,” Sandra said, “about going back to school. Not full-time. Just taking a few night classes. I wanted to learn how to draft.” Rueful smile. The wine glass was on the table now and she twisted its stem. “I knew it was too late to become an architect. You need a graduate degree, and even after the degree, you have to apprentice. It’s not called an apprenticeship, not anymore, but that’s the word for it. Long hours, total deference. The word junior in front of your title. And I was already forty, forty-one, I wasn’t going to spend three years working fifty-hour weeks for a man a decade younger. Not if my business cards also read junior.” Another sip of wine. “Not that I would necessarily have had business cards. Anyway”—clearing-away hand motion—“I’m stalling. Sorry.” She smiled. “Sorry, I’m nervous. I’m not used to talking about—” She shook her head, cleared her throat. “Anyway. I wanted to learn how to draft. But to draft you need tools, protractor, ruler, sharp pencils, you need, obviously, you need skills, and on top of all that you need also a large horizontal surface. I could buy the tools. I could learn the skills. And my husband said he would take care of the surface. He said he would build me a desk.” She was twisting the stem of the glass again, stalling again. “He was a kind man. Is a kind man. Kind and thoughtful and he wanted to make me happy. That’s why he sent me to Home Depot. He wanted me to pick out the wood and the stain. He offered to go with me, but I said I would go alone. It felt more”—she shrugged—“like a surprise that way. I imagined folding up the piece of paper on which I’d written my desires and giving this piece of paper to my husband. I imagined forgetting what it was I’d written down. I imagined, some months later, getting exactly what I wanted, how it might, if I were lucky, feel like accident, like serendipity, rather than design. Rather than my design, I mean. How it might feel like his design.” More shrugging. “He was good at giving gifts. Is good. I mean, I imagine. We’ve stopped exchanging gifts for”—hand motion—“obvious reasons.” Sandra’s lips looked like they had wrapped themselves around an especially sour slice of lemon. I think she was trying to smile. “Can I,” she said, “get anyone more wine?” “Please,” I said. I did not need more wine but I sensed Sandra’s anxiety, remembered her trip to the kitchen during my story, forgave her the insult, hastily drained my glass, warmth flooding my body, the warmth partly self-satisfaction. “I’d love some more white.” Sandra rose and went to fetch another bottle and I looked at Dominique and yes, there was, in her eyes, a kind of interest, a spark of complicity. Awareness of what I had done for Sandra and gratitude and sympathy. I was tipsy, yes, but also I was grace itself. There is, below the surface of every conversation in which intimacies are shared, an erotic current. Sometimes this current is so hot it all but boils and other times it’s barely lukewarm, hardly noticeable, but always the current is present, if only you plunge your hands just an inch or two farther down in the water. This is regardless of the gender of the people involved, of their sexual orientations. This is the natural outcome of disclosure, for to disclose is to reveal, to bring out into the open what was previously hidden. And that unwrapping, that denuding, is always, inevitably sensual. Nothing binds two people like sharing a secret. One of the secrets I imagined Dominique and I sharing: our dislike of Fran. Call it hatred. Outsized emotions are easiest to summon when the stakes are low. When Sandra returned, Dominique and I both accepted more wine. Fran shook her head. I thought the word uncharitable. Though it also made sense: she’d barely touched her wine, which, fair, she was small enough a thimble would do for a shot glass.