“Work underwear,” I tried to joke.
He looked up at me. “You’re so gorgeous, Jackie.”
He kissed my stomach, tickling but in that good way, pulling at my insides, arousing all the equipment I’d been neglecting in my long self-imposed chastity. It wasn’t until he pulled off his jacket and shirt to reveal the clean muscles of his chest that I felt overcome. He did look slimmer than in his films, but the curves of his muscles were beautiful, maybe a bit of flab around the love handles, but still sculpted and lovely. I ran my hands over his chest and stomach. I kissed the hair on his abs.
I avoided looking at his groin, pushing away the thoughts of all the women he’d likely been with, whatever background afflictions he might carry. He didn’t offer to use a condom, and though this seemed incredible (Think of the potential for paternity suits, darling!), I didn’t ask him to. I hadn’t been on birth control since Jefferey. All of this seemed far away.
The pleasure was climbing back onto an abdicated throne—not an orgasm but that kind of aching skin-tight throb that felt triumphant and divine. He kept asking me what he could do for me, but I only urged him on. I knew I’d never be comfortable enough to orgasm, not with this being the first time.
And only time. Over his shoulder I could see the city’s stars. The only time.
When people began to ask when Jefferey and I would get engaged, I’d shrug and say, “There’s no rush.” Yet their curiosity was dwarfed by mine. The longer it went on, the more it upset me—as I feel it would have upset anyone. We lived together. We spent holidays with each other’s families. We were both comfortable in our jobs. Yet he never so much as put a toe in the water on the subject, leaving me to broach it in the most oblique ways, talking hypothetically about buying a condo or a house. I began entertaining the awful notion of getting forgetful about my birth control.
It was a slow-rolling panic, a premonition of getting hurt, that made me finally use the very distant possibility of a job opening at my company’s New York office as a way to talk about the future. An insidious white lie, but I had to know.
The conversation lasted from Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. There were all the typical platitudes—“I’m just not ready,” “We’re still young,” “I’m not sure I even want marriage or children.” Argued around and around for hours. It made no sense to me and still doesn’t. Why be together for three years then? Why move in for those last two if he didn’t think that was where it was going? It made me hate him so intensely, how he could lead me on that long. Of course, he didn’t see it that way, but it was hard for me to draw any other conclusion: I’d spent three years with a man who always had one foot out the door, who’d conned me into falling in love with him even as he kept it secret in the back of his mind that he did not think of our future the same way. I wanted to curl into myself until the world vanished.
He stayed another month until the lease was up. A month of so many protracted hours-long weeping sessions, so much goodbye sex, so many terrible things said and then immediately retracted. He could still make me laugh even in the midst of the most painful thing I’d ever known, and I’d think, This person is ruining my life. And when he left, he left. We had some contact at first, two Starbucks meetups, emails exchanged, a few phone calls. The last time we spoke only because I drank too much with Linda. I woke him up and cried into the phone about how much I missed him. “You already know I feel the same way,” he said. But this didn’t change the bottom line. In the morning I deleted his number. What followed, everyone knows: a grief like death, only the person who haunts you is still of the world. Before him, I had no idea how fury and longing are barely any different at all.
He pulled out of me, and I felt what he’d left, slick, running between my thighs, pooling around my anus. I’d go to the pharmacy the next day for the morning after pill. My heart thundered, and my left breast throbbed where he’d pinched it in the heat of the moment. He turned onto his side and took my face in his palm. I kept my eyes on the hard line of his jaw.
“You all right?” he asked.
I nodded.
We stayed like that for a while, talking sporadically, but mostly I lay with my head on his chest, plucking at the hairs on his stomach while he stroked my back. The patterns of his fingers reminded me of Jefferey. Maybe all men just learn how to do that.
Finally, I pulled away from him. “I’m going to go,” I said.
He looked confused. “Why? Stay. We’ll get breakfast in the morning.”
I didn’t know how to explain it to him. How I didn’t think I could bear to wake up beside him and eat overpriced room service.
“I’m a light sleeper,” I said. “And I have a million things to do tomorrow.”
“I don’t want you to feel—” he began. “I don’t want you to think I’m—”
I shook my head, pulling on that plain pair of cotton underwear. “It’s nothing like that. You’ve been really sweet. I had a great time.”
I was dressing quickly, checking myself in the mirror. It occurred to me that when I walked out, the concierge would probably think I was a call girl.
“Did I say something?” he asked, looking genuinely dismayed.
“Not at all. Really.” I paused, fumbling with the buttons of my blouse. I grabbed my bag, and there was The Road sitting right on top. “I just think we should leave it here. That’s all.”
I managed to get through the door with only a few more protests and one long kiss goodbye.
I hurtled out of the elevator, through the lobby, and out into the brisk night. I moved like a wind coming off the lake, slowing for nothing. Then I stood at a corner of State and Wacker, just north of the hotel and there wasn’t a single car in sight. It felt like a premonition, these empty streets, how hollow the city would feel if it was abandoned. The air felt cool on my skin, which was still as hot and sticky as candy in the mouth, and I could feel the pent-up desire soaking into my underwear. Already I wanted nothing more than to go back into that hotel, knock on his door, and again grip the muscles of his chest. I finally spotted a cab, and as I slid into the seat I couldn’t tell if I was joyful or sad, empty or fulfilled, coursing with a new energy, a renewed love of life’s possibilities, or simply mourning all the people and places I hadn’t even realized I’d left behind.
T
HE
L
ION AND THE
F
IELD
2015
You decide to leave home for good after you win the lottery, a Shell station scratch-off that abruptly puts three hundred dollars in your pocket. You’re fresh off one last blowout fight with your mom. You’ll have to go back eventually, if for no other reason than to get your stuff, the box of minor valuables beneath your bed.
You’re sick of Trotwood, sick of Dayton. It’s time for a change anyway. You collect your winnings, the cashier laying twenty after twenty in your palm, and go pick up Claire Ann from the Jiffy Lube where she works. It’s a sauna-hot evening, and you drive with the windows down because your AC’s wrecked. You don’t bother to call in to your job, and you don’t answer when your boss puts in call after call, the buzzing phone annoying your thigh.
You deliver for Domino’s, $4.50 an hour plus tips, and spend most of your time with Claire Ann, driving to the park so you can fuck without your mom interrupting. You have dreams—not as in hopes and aspirations, which you figure at age twenty are not yet your concern, but bad dreams. One in particular that won’t stop.