Valerie was thirty-six. Michael couldn’t actually provide for her, but she didn’t need him to do that. She loved that he’d gone to the grocery store and roamed the aisles of abundant, slightly tatty and unripe fruit so that he could bring her bags of it. His impulse seemed both generous and slightly inept, which she found sweeter than generosity straight.
Michael himself was a little surprised by his beneficent urges, surprised and pleased by their novelty. It occurred to him that it had something to do with her physicality, although he didn’t know quite what. Valerie was pretty, but she was not beautiful. Her arms and neck were fine-boned and elegant, while her hips and legs were curvy, fatty, almost crudely female. She embraced him confidently, but her fingers sought his more delicate places—the base of his head, the knobs of his spine—with a tactile urgency that was needy and uncertain. After their first time together, on the floor of her living room, she’d put on her underpants and stood over him, posing with her hands on her hips, chin lifted, one hip tilted bossily—but she held her legs close together, and her one bent inturned knee had the tremulous look of a cowed animal. “Woman of the year,” he’d said, and he’d meant it.
It was only their second time together when she suggested that they “role-play.” “You know,” she said. “Act out fantasies.”
“Fantasies?” The idea was a little embarrassing, yet it also intrigued him; under the cheesy assurance of it, he felt her vulnerability, hidden and palpitant. Besides, the fantasies were fun. She would be a slutty teenager who’s secretly hoping for love, and he would be the smug prick who exploits her. He would be the coarse little gym teacher trying to persuade the svelte English teacher to let him go down on her after the PTA cocktail party. She would be a rude girl with no panties flaunting herself before an anxious student in the library. Feverishly, they’d nose around in each situational nuance before giving in to dumb physicality. Then she’d make them a dinner of meat and salad and a pot of grains, and they’d eat it with their feet on the table.
When he left her apartment, Michael felt as if the entire world loved him. He walked down the street, experiencing everything—scraps of trash, traffic, trotting pets, complex, lumbering pedestrians—as a kind of visual embrace. Once, immediately after leaving her, he went into a bookstore and sat down on a little stepladder to peruse a book, and he was assailed with a carnal memory so pungent that he opened his mouth and dropped a wrinkled wad of gray chewing gum on the page. He stared at it, embarrassed and excited by his foolishness. Then he closed the book on the wad.
For the first week she wouldn’t let him spend the night with her, because that was too intimate for her. But he would get in bed with her and hold her, cupping her head against his chest and stroking the invisible little hairs at the base of her spine. “My girlfriend,” he would say. “My girlfriend.” His chest was big and solid, but under her ear, his heart beat with naked, helpless enthusiasm.
When he held her that way, she felt so happy that it disturbed her. After he left, it would take her hours to fall asleep, and then when she woke up she would feel another onrush of agitated happiness, which was a lot like panic. She wished she could grab the happiness and mash it into a ball and hoard it and gloat over it, but she couldn’t. It just ran around all over the place, disrupting everything.
Valerie made a fair living illustrating book jackets, which meant she worked at home, which meant she was pretty susceptible to disruptions anyway. When Michael appeared she had just started a jacket for a novel by a well-known hack, which required that she draw prowling leopards. It should’ve been an easy job, but she could not bring her sensory apparatus to bear on the leopards. She would draw for minutes and then spend nearly an hour pacing around, listening to overblown love music or obnoxious sex music. Her thoughts were fragmented. Her feelings buzzed and swarmed. She remembered sitting on the edge of the couch, him kneeling on the floor, her underpants dangling from the tip of her high-heeled foot. Finally, the gym teacher had gotten the English teacher to come across! Aggression surged between them in bursts, but he’d paused to bend and press his cheek against her thigh.
The kitchen table became littered with partial leopards.
“It’s like I’m so happy I can’t feel it,” she said to her friend Tanya. “It’s just sex, really; I mean, he’s too young for us to actually get involved. But the enthusiasm of him—I mean, he’s just right there.”
“How can he be right there if you’re not really involved?”
“We are involved, in a profound, sexually spiritual way. But we’re not going to be boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“But you like it when he calls you his girlfriend.”
“I do.” Valerie paused, thinking how she could best explain this apparent contradiction. “It’s like another version of the slutty-teenager fantasy. It’s real, but only in the erotic realm. I mean, we have feelings for each other, but they can’t be permanent.”
Michael was a bartender, but he also played bass guitar in a band. The band was a ramshackle affair, perpetuated by the dour perseverance of the lead singer and animated by the disproportionate loudness of the sound system. They were usually just a warm-up act in a good-natured dive, but Valerie was enchanted to think of Michael onstage with his guitar, one hip slung out insouciantly. “I think all twenty-four-year-old boys should play in bands,” she said.
It was a condescending thing to say, but he didn’t mind. He sensed that the luxury of such minor arrogance was new to her, and that she was trying it out, with a certain brittle excitement, just to see what it felt like. He would imagine her watching him from the audience as he turned away from them all, in private communion with his guitar, aloof and mysterious and secretly delighted in his role of admired object.
During the second weekend of their affair, the band went up to Seattle to play. Valerie thought she’d spend the weekend retrieving her equilibrium, but just hours after he left, she discovered one of his sweaty T-shirts balled up at the bottom of her bed and found she had to listen to loud music while she paced around with the shirt pressed to her cheek.
That evening he called her from the pay phone of a gas station while the rest of the band peed and raided the candy machine.
“I had to tell you this,” he said. “When we were driving through Oregon we went past this cornfield, and I was just staring at it and I saw this little white cat walking between the rows. It so much made me think of you. The way it walked was so intrepid and fine.”
He heard a quick intake of breath, followed by a soft, tremulous silence. He closed his eyes and took a long, ecstatic drink of grape pop.
Later that night, a beautiful girl threw herself at him. He was standing at the bar after the band’s last set, wiping his face with a wet cocktail napkin, when she emerged from the ambient murk. She had long black hair and a fancy little strut that suggested uncomplicated, competent sex. They made out against the wall, and she nonchalantly pressed her pubic bone against him. He was going to suggest that they go to her place, but realized, in the midst of speculating about what she might have in the way of food, that to do so would only increase his longing for Valerie. The girl stuck her hand inside his shirt and circled the rim of his navel with one cold finger. “I can’t do this,” he said. “I’m in love with this girl in San Francisco.” The irritated hoyden slunk off, and he slid to the floor, free to wallow in the thrilling abjection of his love.
The next day he called Valerie and told her what had happened.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said mildly. “That girl was probably really hurt.”