Kissing Sharon hello at the café, I felt static as my lips brushed across her cheek, as if Alena and Sharon were coming into contact through me. Sharon ordered mint tea and I ordered what I thought was a simple drip coffee that turned out to be an exorbitantly priced single-origin Chemex affair. At the tiny table beside the window looking onto Houston, we split a large slice of chocolate bread. “It’s Valrhona,” Sharon said, which meant nothing to me; Sharon had a chocolatier’s vocabulary — almost everything she ate, it seemed, involved chocolate. “Are you sleeping together yet?”
When we left the café and wandered south I could feel the trains moving underground. I could feel, at least imagined that I felt, Sharon’s pulse in her biceps, slightly faster than my own, as we walked — as we almost always walked — arm in arm. I looked up at an illuminated billboard on which nothing appeared but a violet wash, probably because a new advertisement was going up, and asked Sharon, who is color-blind, what she saw. Overhead the stars occluded by light pollution were presences like words projected through time and I was aware that water surrounded the city, and that the water moved; I was aware of the delicacy of the bridges and tunnels spanning it, and of the traffic through those arteries, as though some cortical reorganization now allowed me to take the infrastructure personally, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body. Sharon saw grays and blues, and as we crossed Delancey she described a movie she wanted to make about color-blind synesthetes who report that numbers are tinged with hues they otherwise can’t perceive.
Soon we arrived at the packed gallery, where we’d planned to meet Jon, but he’d texted to say his cold had worsened. We made our way to the white wine on a table in the near corner. I saw Alena talking to two tall and handsome people across the space and I raised a hand awkwardly. She looked at me steadily while speaking to them but did not return my wave; I couldn’t decide if her shadowed eyes were expressing perfect indifference or smoldering intensity, her signature form of ambiguity. I tried to turn from Alena’s gaze to talk with Sharon as if I’d barely noticed the former’s expression, but I spilled some of the wine as I lifted it to my lips. I glanced back at Alena, who was smiling slightly.
It was impossible, as at most openings, to look at the art; indeed, the opening as a form, insofar as I understood it, was a ritual destruction of the conditions of viewing for the artifacts it was meant to celebrate. Sharon and I tried to circulate a little, and, while the afterglow was slowly diminishing, I still experienced softly colliding with so many bodies as a pleasure, not an irritation; it was as if the crowd were a single, sensate organism. I said hello to a few people I knew from art magazines for which I’d written, but soon I could tell Sharon wanted to leave, and we began to swim our way to Alena, to congratulate her and move on to a drink.
Alena and Sharon kissed hello, but Alena and I didn’t touch. I explained, trying to feign cool, that Sharon and I were going to catch up somewhere quiet, but that she should text me when things were winding down and I’d come back to help clean up. She said thanks, but she doubted she’d need help; her tone implied my offer presumed a greater degree of intimacy than our exchange of fluids warranted.
I was alarmed by the thoroughness of what I experienced as Alena’s dissimulation, felt almost gaslighted, as if our encounter on the apartment floor had never happened. Here I was, still flush from our coition, my senses and the city vibrating at one frequency, wanting nothing so much as to possess and be possessed by her again, while she looked at me with a detachment so total I felt as if I were the jealous ex she’d wanted to avoid, a bourgeois prude incapable of conceiving of the erotic outside the lexicon of property. Maybe she’d separated from me only so she could reencounter me coolly, asserting her capacity to establish insuperable distances no matter our physical proximity. On the one hand, I felt a jealous anger rising within me, a desire for her to desire me, the only kind of desire, Alex had once told me during a fight, I was able to sustain. On the other hand, I frankly admired how she appeared capable of taking or leaving me, of taking and leaving me simultaneously, found it exciting, inspiring even, as if the energy we had generated were now free to circulate more generally, charging everything a little — bodies, streetlights, mixed media.
We walked west to a bar Sharon liked. It was lit in the speakeasy fashion, dark wood and a tooled tin ceiling, no music. “Jon says she knows Krav Maga. Remember to agree on a safe-word.” It was quiet enough to hear the bartender shaking an artisanal cocktail.
“Why do you assume I’m the submissive?” The drinks involved gin and grapefruit and were served in Collins glasses.
“Because you’re a pussy.” Sharon desired to be vulgar with an earnestness that defeated vulgarity.
“I’m the one having casual sex in a stranger’s apartment with a mysterious woman who probably doesn’t care about me. You’re married.” I had officiated their wedding, first ordaining myself online.
“She cares about you, she just doesn’t attach.”
“When a male octopus ‘attacks’ in the attempt to mate, it uses its suckers to grapple with its target and insert the hectocotylus.”
“If Alena ever reproduces, it’s going to be through fission.”
“The breath-play thing,” I said with the help of my second cocktail, “makes me nervous.”
“What if you stopped worrying about protecting women from their desires?”
Now we were walking down Delancey, a gas I hoped was only steam rising from the street vent. “Maybe it’s how she grapples with and overcomes a fear of death.”
“Maybe it’s how she grapples with the threat of voicelessness.”
A passing ambulance threw red lights against us. “Or takes pleasure in making you confront the pleasure you take in those threats.”
“The flood of oxygen upon release.” We descended underground.
“A match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed,” I quoted, but it was lost in the noise of the approaching train.
“Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”
“We helped edit a film on bonobos for the BBC; they’re our closest relative and have no concept of sexual exclusivity.”
“They say monogamy is an effect of agriculture. Paternity only started to matter with the transmission of property.”
“Get tested for HIV today,” said the poster on the D.
“But they do eat the young of other primate species.”
“So why did you get married if you don’t want kids?” We emerged onto the Manhattan Bridge; almost everyone checked e-mail, texts.
“You left without saying goodbye,” Alex’s said.
“Shine bright like a diamond,” Rihanna sang through the earbuds of the girl beside me, whose fingernails were painted with stars.