![]() Richard said, “Isn’t she sweet?” I hated that he said that. I kissed her on the forehead, like she was some child, and everyone laughed. She was still in her business suit, with the jacket. When I spun the bottle, it landed on a beautiful blond woman. I looked around the room, at the twenty-five or so people, to see if there was anyone I would hope it would land on. I knew what the bottle in the middle of the room was for. For all his talk, I had never seen him with a woman before. ![]() All his furniture had been cleared, piled on one side of the room. There was a green glass bottle in the middle of the room. There wasn’t any food, and it began later in the evening. This party was different from the others. You want someone who has imagination, who is excited. Sometimes good-looking people don’t do anything in bed. Anyway, looks don’t have anything to do with it. It’s sometimes just athletic to do it.” Richard was not a beauty but he acted like one. What’s more clear than that? There are always others who want to. If someone tells me no, I don’t get worked up about it. He was always talking about all the sex he’d had. ![]() As far as I was concerned, I hadn’t had sex for such a long time that I could consider myself a virgin. Thirty years is a lifetime for some people. I hadn’t been with anyone but my husband. I could tell he had no use for anyone who didn’t have sex. He asked me if I’d had sex with anyone lately. I asked him, “Do you think maybe you’re in love with her?” He said no, to be in love, you should have sex with that person, and he didn’t want that with her. He always wanted to know what she was doing. When she didn’t answer his emails or phone calls, he would google her. They had, for seven years, been a couple, but then they weren’t anymore. He said he wasn’t in love with her, that they were best friends. She lived in New York now but came back once in a while to visit. The first was his roommate, whom he didn’t talk to anymore, the one he told us about on the bike tour. Richard liked to talk about the women he had slept with. I didn’t know what it was and put it back. I reached inside him and took out a small brown thing the size of a pencil eraser. The anatomy man had little plastic bits inside. A few plastic chairs, a couch he had dragged back from someone’s front lawn, a table, and a little anatomy man. Doesn’t mean they really know what it is.” They think they should say it because it’s what you say. A few minutes passed between us, and he said, “People say that they are in love all the time, but they’re not. I got the feeling that what I wanted to say to him was about the quality of closeness, not what he was talking about. “Maybe,” I said, “you haven’t had much time to know a range of people.” It happened, and when it’s happened, there is no need to think too hard about it. We had all known it, but it was something that happened a long time ago, not something we sat around thinking about. Then I thought of my friends and my own experience. I thought of Rose, who always said she was in love whenever she met a new guy and then would wait by the phone all day, crying. I had gotten a package of his in my mail. It’s a construct,” Richard told me one day when I went over to his apartment. When I walked by that building, that corner, his stories were there, the way he told them. Where they ate in the city and skipped out on a bill, the places they kissed. On the bike tour, he told us about a woman he’d loved once, his roommate. He told us stories, personal ones, about his time living here. I sat on the bar in front of the seat and he pedaled. I did not have a bike, so he let me ride with him. He even had a party where people brought over their bikes, and we took a tour of the city with him. Other times it was middle-aged people crawling through some tent maze built out of cardboard boxes. Sometimes there were just kids, little ones, over there, with Christmas lights all over the floor. His apartment was an open door, people coming in and out at all hours. At first, it was just the housewarming, and then it was other things. Richard had parties at his place every Saturday.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |