“Frederick?”
“What?” His thin voice swelled with greed.
“Would you please fuck me?”
“Oh, all right.” He went for his belt buckle with an alacrity that belied his words.
I sat up quickly. “No,” I said. “Never mind.”
He sat up. We sat there. He blinked several times.
“I guess you want to go,” I said.
He sat on the couch and crossed his legs. “It’s not that I’m not attracted to you,” he said. “I mean, if we had sex, it would probably be really good. But it wouldn’t be right.”
I was acutely aware of my body, as I might be if I had been knocked on the floor in the middle of a dance movement: first my wind came back, then I made sure nothing was broken, then I was filled with tenderness for my body. I remembered the time my dead lover had beat me up. He had said something unkind to me, and though he often said such things, this time I took offense and slapped him in the face. He slapped me harder; I punched him in the stomach. He knocked me down, fell on me, and banged my head on the floor until I was almost unconscious. When it was over, I had the same feeling of returning to my body, with tenacious animal self-love.
Meanwhile, Frederick was still talking. He said he was seeing a lot of women and that he was obsessed with his old girlfriend. He said that he needed “boundaries.” “I’m too guarded to have sex right now,” he said.
I thought of how he had pretended to kiss me and then pulled away. His words did not make sense to me, but many things don’t make sense to me. “You’re probably right,” I said slowly. “We don’t know each other, and it might be a bad experience. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences.”
A look of indulgent emotionality came over his face, as if he were watching a sensitive movie about the special pain of a lonely older woman who’s just been rejected by a younger guy. I felt a little surge of indignation that quickly devolved into pieces of uncertainty and vague goodwill. I was awfully tired. “Can you see what time it is?” I asked.
“It’s five o’clock.”
“Fuck!” I took his jacket from the floor and wrapped it around my shoulders. “The last time I got involved with a guy we didn’t have sex for three weeks, which naturally made me want him desperately. So when we finally did it, it felt like a cataclysm; I went into an emotional frenzy, and he got pulled right into it. Then the sex wore off, and there we were, stuck in all this bogus emotion. It seems like it doesn’t work no matter what you do.”
Mild surprise overtook his look of indulgent sympathy; his face was shadowed by mournful tenderness. It occurred to me that he might feel pain too. We were both silent. Our silence comforted me. I held my hand out to him, and he took it in his.
“I’d like to see you again,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, there’s the old girlfriend and the other women and what have you. It sounds like a mess, and I’m pretty busy, actually. But I’m glad I met you. I think you’re a nice person.”
He almost flinched when I said that. His lips parted and his eyes became bleak and deep. He let go of my hand and stood up. I thought he was going to ask for his jacket, but instead he went to my bookcase and withdrew a book. He looked at the cover and then turned it over. It was my only published book of poetry. I had published it ten years before, won a few awards, and then collapsed. I’d published nothing since.
“Is this you?” he asked.
“Put that back,” I said sharply.
He replaced it and stared at me with a look I couldn’t read.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Sometimes when girls come to my place, they pick up stuff, and I don’t like it. I say, ‘Stop going through my things.’ You just told me to stop going through your things.” He looked at me as if amazed.
I didn’t say anything.
“Maybe I’d like to read your poems.”
“I don’t write poems anymore. That book is really old.”
He got his boots, and as he bent over to put them on he cut a dainty fart. He paused in his bend and made a fussing noise, as if irritated at himself for farting. It was okay with me, though, and I think he realized that. I hoped so. Once, I fell asleep on a train and drooled in front of my fellow passenger; when I woke and glanced at him in embarrassed realization, I saw right away that he had borne with my drool. That subtle acceptance from a total stranger was deeply satisfying to me, and I was pleased to give it to someone else.
He stood up and stumbled over a cat toy. “I’ll miss you,” he said.
“Oh, please.” My words were like quick, shallow water. I handed him his jacket, and he put it on.
“You won’t give me your number?” he asked.
I leaned forward and put my head on his shoulder. Sheathed in his jacket, it felt impersonal and kind. He held me for a moment, and I thought I could feel him experimenting with the sensation of kindness.
“No,” I said.
After he left, I sat for almost an hour, allowing my body to return to aloneness and safety. Then I took a bath and got in bed. It was almost seven o’clock, and the room was filling with daylight. My moist skin made my pajamas damp and warm. There were sounds from the courtyard outside my window; two of my neighbors were out in the garden, talking in low voices. They were talking about the bonnets and dresses they were making to wear at the Indulgence in the Park Easter celebration.
I wondered why I had told Frederick that I thought he was nice. Probably for the same reason that I had sweet dreams about a petty sadist. I tried to think of my dead sex partner, but my memories of him were truncated, and gray with elapsed time. I could only imagine him with flat, terrified eyes, his hands making a gesture that was too cramped and weak to signify anything. I don’t know why I imagined him this way, since I had never seen him make such expressions or gestures. I tried to imagine saying goodbye to him, but it didn’t work. I had a sensation of all my memories growing truncated and gray, stretching out over a lengthening span of years, slowly dissolving into broken pieces of imagery weighted with inexplicable feeling.
I turned onto my side and closed my eyes, as if doing so would finally bring the experience to an end. I would’ve liked to cry, but I couldn’t. From the garden, I heard one of my neighbors describe his bonnet as “robin’s-egg blue.” He must’ve shown it to the other neighbor, because I heard a second voice say, “Oh, it’s so special.” He was being sarcastic, but he also meant it.
Respect
When I woke it was afternoon. Through my open window, the day felt dull and warm. I turned onto my side and remembered Frederick. I remembered his blithe, half-conscious meanness, the nervous toss of his head, the puzzlement in his voice when he had said, “I like you.” Under his silly contempt there had been a little pocket of tenderness, and I had seen it. I imagined that I lay against him, and that he held me. In my imagination, it did not matter that he was thirteen years younger than me. The tenderness was strange and slightly mortifying.
When I went into my living room, I saw the Polaroid that had been taken of Frederick and me lying on the floor, harmlessly reflecting sunlight off its cheap, shiny surface. I picked it up and studied it. The girl who had taken it came into my mind and sparkled for a moment. Frederick posed like a conceited teenager; his face was hard, closed, and very handsome. It looked as if he had struck the pose automatically. Beside him, I was slightly out of focus, and my eyes were woefully large. The picture nonplussed me, but in a curious way it also pleased me. I put it on the kitchen table and looked at it while I drank my coffee.