—You look like you’re going to cry.
—The bartender said, Well, hello, missy, and Big Sky smiled. His friend left after a hello and a few last sips. I’m always impressed that men know when to leave.
—Do you think they discussed it beforehand?
—I don’t think so, no.
—God, this is sexy.
—Then we were alone. We looked at each other for several seconds. I saw him look at my legs and relished the feeling of power. And then he said, I thought of you all weekend.
—God bless him.
—He’d been at his family’s home in the Catskills. In the basement he’d slipped a movie in the player, one he’d told me to watch, and he thought of me. He was building a fire, he said, and he thought of me. He was chopping down firewood and he thought of me. And you, he said, are such a BITCH. And he jabbed me lightly in the chest, right between my breasts, but politely. Because I didn’t email him back right away.
—What a cocksucker!
—And there I was, I said, thinking of the long weekend I’d spent, the tap-tap-taps into my phone. How I’d done thirty walking lunges back and forth across my apartment floor, thinking that by the thirtieth one, he’d have responded to me. He reached for a greasy jar of bar cherries and said, I should be giving you one of these at a time. Instead here I am, passing you the whole goddamn jar at once.
—Was he drunk?
—Yes, but not like an asshole.
She said she understood exactly what I meant and what type of man he was. I went inside and brought out two more beers. I would have to replenish the register later. It was an hour of work I’d be paying back to the place, but I didn’t care. When I returned, she was leaning back in her chair. Her pose—shut but sun-searching eyes, long golden neck—belonged on a yacht.
—Thank you, she said, taking the beer. Please, get back to the story. Bated breath over here.
—We kissed, I said, right there in the bar he went to all the time. The bartender was down at the other end. I leaned in to him, put my hands on his thighs lightly. He left a hundred-dollar bill on a forty-dollar check. I hated myself for being impressed. We walked outside and he threw me up against a brick wall and I swung my legs around his waist and we kissed some more. On the way back to my place, a car honked as we crossed Broadway. We laughed at the car as it flew by, knowing whoever was in it was less excited to be alive. We were holding hands and I felt high. I thought, I’ll always remember how beautiful a moment this is. I will always be grateful for this.
—And are you?
I smiled and shook my head. I wanted to cry, remembering.
—He sounds like a fucker. I love fuckers, too. Tell me the rest. I need another cigarette.
—In my apartment we went down on each other. We were all over each other. We kissed like animals. We knocked into my stupid liquor shelf and it wobbled and in particular I noticed the Rémy Martin on the shelf. It had belonged to my parents and I never touched it or let anyone else touch it. But in the near future, I would let him drink it. We didn’t fuck, he only went down on me, and I faked an orgasm because I was in love. Afterward, we were practicing a few yoga positions together, downward dog into crow jumping back into chaturanga, when his cell phone rang. His breathing was heavy but he clipped it somehow: Hey, honey. Yeah, no, don’t sweat it. I’m gonna bring home a pizza. Yeah, coming right now. Okay, love you. He smiled as though nothing had happened. It wasn’t that he was cruel but that he was tipsy and the moment didn’t call for being strange or for acknowledgment. I followed his lead. We laughed some more about some things and he said, Well. And I said, Bye. And he said, Easy, girl. I’m going.
—The wife, Alice said, like it was a vital video game character we’d forgotten to include in our game of capture the banker.
—What about her? I asked, trying to be neutral, wondering whether she was on the wives’ side or the other side.
—She’s at home, throwing out dead coffee filters from the morning. She’s too exhausted to cook and she doesn’t think for a moment her husband is in a crow pose at some slut’s apartment.
—You’re judging me, I said.
—Of course I’m not. Morality is uninteresting. I’m intrigued by the idiocy of trust. I’ll never trust a man I love. In fact, if I trust him, it will mean I don’t love him enough. And a man should never trust me. Please, go on. I’m rapt. I keep interrupting because I’m rapt as fuck.
—Ten minutes later my heart was still beating hard and my rug was still a quarter up the wall and an email came through from his name. Sweet dreams.
—Fucker! They all should die.
—I was so happy. Because he’d left his Mets cap on my couch and his headphones. I went to bed without a pill and left my shades open and looked out at the moon. I was so happy.
—It’s strange to think that there is some nice boy somewhere who wants to read us Pushkin and play records and not even fuck for a month.
She drank the rest of her beer down and threw her cigarette in the can. She rose and I counted her inches. She must have been five feet eight. Her mother was tall. Mine was not.
—I come in here a few times a week for lunch after class, she said. Will you be here tomorrow? I’d love to hear the rest.
I tried to seem flippant when I said that I was there every day. I watched her get into her car. It was a light green Prius. It felt so good to talk to her. I saw her arm out the window with a cigarette as she pulled onto the boulevard. The purple bougainvillea along the fences was washed blond by the sunlight. Happiness had come easily to her. She was a person who never had to make a haunting choice. Everything was laid out for her. She only fucked men with perceptibly clean dicks.
One of the best things about childhood is the lack of choices. Your parents make choices for you that you must inhabit. Even better is your lack of awareness. You have no conception of all the wrong choices that might have maimed you. Take the road to the left and you won’t get run over by the car that will kill you if you take the road to the right.
The last time I was ignorant to the notion of choice was in the Poconos. It was 1989 and I was nearly eleven. I remember every single day before the day my life ended. I remember all the hot dogs and every sunset. We had a red cedar A-frame on an undeveloped lot. The Saw Creek Estates. The word estate. These ugly little summer and ski homes, linoleum and wall-to-wall oatmeal carpeting.
We never hung around the house anyway. We went to the Fernwood, the local hotel, to meet up with friends of my parents. There was a roller rink attached to the inn. My crisp, electrified memories of roller-skating make me want to kill myself. The sharp cuts on the rink floor. The smells of the pizza and the wood. I was so impressed by the teenage girls who worked there. Their rainbow socks and crimped hair. What they did after the rink closed.
For dinner we’d go to a steakhouse called the Big A. There was a huge iron bull over the door, and THE BIG A in red neon blinked like a beacon. That was where I grew my love for American taverns. Shoestring fries. Men drinking beer from thick mugs. Waitresses with bumpy faces. We never waited for a table yet the place was always packed.
Occasionally we went to a white-tablecloth place called Villa Volpe, which was cavernous like a catering hall. Waiters in bowties and more than five fish entrées on the menu. My parents took me now and then because I liked the idea of fancy things. I think about it all the time. How the fancy place of my youth could seem cheap to me now. Broke as I am.