“And I miss my dog Mizzie. She was a mutt, with these droopy hound eyes and long velvet ears. I got her in my twenties and had her through my first divorce and second marriage. I never walked her as much as she liked, I rushed her or let the housekeeper do it. I grew impatient with her, and today I wish she were here so I could take her for a long walk.”
“Oh, you are being very hard on yourself,” she said.
“Not just that.” She heard him light a cigarette and exhale. “Not just that. I miss my daughter and my mother. I mean, my daughter is still around, but—” Jack said. He laughed.
“What’s funny?” she asked.
“I don’t know. My spiel of regrets.”
Jelly fingered her tender throat and listened to Jack smoke.
“It’s difficult,” she said. “So difficult.”
“Do you miss anyone, Nico?” he said. “Maybe you are too young—”
“No, I do,” Jelly said, talking before Jack finished, which is something she tried never to do.
“Yeah? Who?”
“My father died when I was sixteen,” Jelly said. “He never lived with us, so I didn’t see him too often. Once a week or so he would take me out. Usually we saw a movie and then went to a diner and had hamburgers. It was hard because he died suddenly of a heart attack, and I kept thinking about the last time I had seen him. I was in a bad mood, and I didn’t want to go out to dinner with him. I wanted to be with my friends. So I went, but I sulked. I didn’t want to see a movie and I barely ate my dinner. I remember peeling the label off the Coke bottle and that he kept asking awkward questions about my life. I found everything he said irritating and boring. Anyway, after he died, I felt bad about that dinner. I remember sitting on my bed and realizing I could actually count the number of times I had spent with my father. One night a week plus a full week in the summer. Times my age, or at least my remembered years, so let’s say twelve. That’s all we had, and yet I couldn’t be bothered to even look at him the last time I saw him.” This was a true story that she had never told anyone before. Part of her thought, Stop. What are you doing? She pushed that thought away. Jack would love her, she knew it.
“Oh no,” Jack said. “I’m sorry. But you were a kid, he knew you loved him under the sulk. My daughter did this — all kids do this. I promise you he understood that.”
“Yes,” Jelly said. The word squeezed through her tight throat. She could feel patches of heat on her cheeks and her eyes started to sting.
“I mean, my daughter — I haven’t seen her in months,” he said. He made a loud exhale sound, half sigh, half noise. “We had a stupid thing a few months ago. We — I mean I — should be able to do better, but every day I don’t.” Jelly said nothing, just waited for what he would say or sound next. A sniff. “It’s okay,” he said, but it was still heavy in his voice. “It is good sometimes to feel this way, even if it fucks me up a little,” he said. Jelly could hear that his voice had what gets called a catch: a failure of breath mid-word, and it undid her. Jelly’s own throat caught.
“I know,” she said softly, and she heard the unmistakable sounds of a person weeping, a man unused to it, and she let him get it all out. She could hear his breath, his sniffs, the little human sounds of feeling. “I know.” She did know. The longing to love and be loved in a very deep way, not the usual way.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, Jack. You’re okay with me.”
“Yeah, yeah. I am okay with you. I am.”
* * *
She felt so close to Jack that she did something she had never done before. She stopped calling other men, her other phone dates. She gave Jack her number and let him call her whenever he felt like it. They began to talk every day. It was quickly escalating, and she tried not to worry about it or think of where it would lead. She tried, in her own soft, quiet way, to maintain a little reserve and slow things down. But it was hard because, well, she was in love with Jack. She felt connected to him in ways that made her feel happy all the hours of her day.
He trusted her and she trusted him, and when she hung up the phone she felt so loved. But then all at once her life — her real life, her harsh, real life — was all around her. She looked down at her hand holding the phone, at her legs in her robe, at her notebook full of notes about her phone conversations. She squinted up at her apartment, and imagined how she looked to anyone else. She tried to tell herself it might be okay, but the gap was so big. It made her gasp.
JELLY AND OZ
Sex was the easy part of being with Oz. They decided she would move in right away, just weeks after they started to date each other. The first few months were a daze of body longing and heat. Most afternoons Jelly would have to work her shift at the call center. In between making sales calls, she fell into reveries about sex from that morning or last night. She had never experienced anything like this before, having only one previous lover her last year of college, yet she understood that this intensity was too obsessive and unsustainable. She had some sense that later it would be important to remember feeling this way, so she went over everything they did from the very first night, getting the specifics exactly right and in order. Her reveries were arousing, but they were driven by purpose too. She kept track as if every orgasm were part of a story and she had to follow them in order. But that wasn’t true: it was more like circling in and away, swings, than it was like a story. As time went by she collected favorite moments or sequences (Oz with his mouth by her ear, whispering to her as he came, then a cut to Oz slowly pulling her clothes off, then a moment when Oz reached under her skirt at dinner and put a gentle finger inside her as she spoke). Always Jelly wanted that heat to rise from her body, would rush herself to find the heat. Jelly made another sales call, then gave herself a moment to sit and dream. Daydreams, an indulgent combination of memory and fantasy, dreams that did your bidding. Jelly’s vivid and detailed daydreams were almost as good as real life, like an edited, highlighted version of real life in which she saw herself in a soft, flattering glow. When she finally got home from work in those early months, she would practically run to find Oz and his body. She would put her hands and face against his chest. She would inhale, and the way he smelled made her tremble with want.
Jelly especially liked when she lay on her stomach and he got on top of her, covering her completely. She could feel the weight of his big body slowly pressing down, and it made her feel contained and safe. It was a lot but it wasn’t too much; Oz was surprisingly graceful in bed. Jelly didn’t like being on top. She had no rhythm, no coordination. She banged her shin on Oz’s platform bed, she tripped against the coffee table. There was a recklessness in her limbs. She always had a bruise on her legs or arms. She could see it, barely, but everything looked bruised to her bad eyes. Oz could not see the bruises, but he could feel her flinch. Her awkwardness hardly mattered after a while. The very first time they slept together (which Jelly would remember over and over for its certain payoff in heat), Oz told her that she needed to settle down. They had already tried a number of positions. She was so aroused she nearly flinched at his touch, but he moved slowly. His patience just made her want him even more. Oz put his big hand over hers and pressed it between her legs. Her head was on his chest; she waited. His hand covered hers but didn’t move. He said, “Show me. Make yourself come.”