I don’t know what I expected. But I didn’t expect that. I was savoring every second with him and he was merely passing the time before he could be in the mountain air with his family. We fucked on one of the striped deck loungers under the silvery Manhattan starlight. He didn’t wear a condom; he always pulled out and came across my chest. That was our thing.
Even though I wanted to stay over I knew that I couldn’t so I took a cab home just after midnight. It was my choice to be hurt in these ways.
Talking to Alice about Big Sky made my feelings for him both more painful and more manageable. I had only told her the first part of Vic, what you might call the honeymoon period, though I cringe to think of it in those terms. She was giving me exactly what I had always wanted. She was making me feel seen and heard.
—Are there any herbs you absolutely hate? she said to me when we were before a table of them. Tall fronds of dill and glistening bunches of cilantro and parsley and basil, arranged like tiny trees inside of mason jars.
—In general?
—These are things we should get over with now. Otherwise you become close and then one day you discover the other person doesn’t like dill. And you’re forced to hate them forever.
—Dill is a deal breaker?
—No. Cilantro. I can’t stand people who don’t like cilantro. They’re closed-minded.
—I could do without oregano, I said.
—Everyone can do without oregano. That’s fine.
—There isn’t any herb I hate. I think chives and chervil are beautiful.
She turned to me and smiled. I’d gotten the answer right.
—Do you cook? she asked.
I nodded. I worried that she was more skilled in classic techniques, like poaching fish. She was likely a neater chopper; I could never take the time to dice an onion into comely cubes.
—Is it too soon, Alice said, for us to cook together?
—Maybe, I said. We both laughed. There is no better invitation in the world than women laughing. The boys in the bright Ray-Bans stopped in their tracks and unabashedly stared at us. There were four and not one was better-looking than another. None of their eyes were kind. I wondered how many women between them they’d gotten pregnant. Sometimes I can’t get down a city block without seeing the quiet abortions in the air above everyone’s head.
They were frozen in that airless atmosphere of men waiting to aggress. The way they stared—lips parted in a lively leer, gleaming eyes—often forced the woman to say something first, often out of fear.
I was wondering if Alice noticed them, or if she was even more used to being hit on than I, when suddenly she spoke.
—Do you recognize us from somewhere?
The apparent leader—the tallest, wearing a highlighter-pink sleeveless tank with highlighter-yellow Ray-Bans—pushed the glasses up on his sandy head.
—We were wondering if you girls might know where the vegetarian masala dosas are?
—Masala dosas are traditionally vegetarian, so you don’t need to qualify, said Alice.
—Actually, some have meat, the captain said, smiling.
—Actually, some have meat, Alice mimicked, her lips pursed.
As a group, they looked wounded. It was funny how men could look that way. For years they could violently finger and push just the tip in, all the while saying, Just the tip, just for a second, not like a question but like a mantra. They could thoughtlessly fuck you from behind, their hips on hydraulics. They could be tired, sick, sad, rageful over having the flu, yet their hips would be completely fine, moving back and forth like a car part. Men were dependable fuckers. But suddenly they could look sad like that. After all, they were only trying to make conversation.
—The Indian culture is more meatless than any other, Alice said, but you boys look like you could use some. Meat.
She said the word meat very softly. But not sensually. I watched the rape in them shrivel up.
—Maybe it’s not too soon, I said, staring at the boys, to cook together.
* * *
ALICE’S HOUSE, CLOSE TO THE Venice canals, was nothing like what I expected. I expected to be jealous. Teak and windows, clean lines. Not rich but well planned. Single flowers in old Italian lotion bottles.
I’d followed her in my car, and when we pulled up, I had that sinking feeling I get when something is the opposite of beautiful. I used to feel that with my parents when we’d pull up to hotels they’d booked, or the first time I saw the Poconos house.
Alice’s house was not clean and holistic. It was an exhausted bordello. From the outside it was a tiny cape with blue aluminum siding. There was a shabby porch with two stained armchairs and an old steel planter. The area beneath the porch was covered with broken white lattice. There was a strip of dead grass between the edge of the porch and the start of the sidewalk. From the outside it looked the home of a couple who’d met in college, settled into this spot after a bender, and never left.
The front door opened directly onto a depressing kitchen. Yellowed wallpaper. Cheap white cabinets with pine trim. Beige linoleum floor peeling up at the corners. Coil stove. A dirty white Mr. Coffee. Then there were the inexplicable touches. Dried lavender hanging from the ceiling, Jem dolls and Barbie dolls with dyed blue and pink hair posing from the tops of the cabinets.
Alice, unembarrassed, gave me the grand tour. The living room had a black leather couch and a nineteen-inch Magnavox sitting on a stack of books. Many Persian rugs that looked expensive, some of them beginning on the floor and finishing a few feet up the wall. Ruby and emerald settees, pink and mahogany pillows on the floor, lanterns filled with battery-operated candles. It was both operatic and small, overstuffed and empty.
The bedroom made the least sense. A patchwork quilt. Glossy black cabinets. Lots of unwatered plants, the smell of myrrh. Posters of heavy-metal bands with curled-up edges. A framed picture of a naked man, his crotch obscured by a python. A pink neon sign over the bed, in wild font, said, LOVE ME. I could only think of the stains of many sex acts.
Alice waited for me to turn around after seeing the bedroom. Her arms were folded and she was smiling.
—What do you think? she said.
—It’s kind of insane.
—It’s a reminder not to get comfortable.
—It’s like this on purpose?
—It’s like this because it’s like this. Some of it is laissez-faire sloppiness, laziness, what have you. Mostly it’s cheap, whatever I had on hand, garage sale things. Some of it’s from an escort’s place on the boardwalk. She gave me her pillows.
Because my expression didn’t change, she squinted and cocked her head until I looked directly into her eyes.
—Don’t forget, she said, I’m younger than you.
* * *
IN NO TIME, THE UGLY home transformed before my eyes, the way the ugly homes of beautiful women are wont to do. Alice cranked open the window in the kitchen and the California breeze blew in. She set a bushel of basil in a vase filled with water, and a bunch of cilantro went into an empty creamer carton. She took out all the fruit and vegetables we’d bought, arranging them in bowls and tall carafes until the kitchen came alive. Dusty orange watermelon radish, prim pearl onions, grassy spring onions, vine tomatoes, and limes. Sandy spinach, mustard greens, and arugula. Green papaya and avocado, and the banana blossom looking like a panicked bird in its own white bowl. She placed the hunk of ruby tuna we’d bought from the fishmonger on a white cutting board and then rubbed the bluefish with salt and oil and left it in its brown waxed paper. She washed her hands with Mrs. Meyer’s lemon soap and played calypso from her laptop.