Actually, once in a while you could get them to kiss.
But then you had to leave. And in your packing and going, in tearing the seams, the hems, the haws, you felt like some bad combination of Odysseus and Penelope. You felt funny in the heart.
“All right,” she said. “What is his name?”
Laird sighed. “Pinky Eliot,” he said, thrusting his arms between his knees. “Somehow in this mangled presentation, I fear I’ve confused you.”
PINKY ELIOT had lost weight, though for sure he still weighed more than the teacher. He was about forty-five, with all his hair still dark. He was not bad-looking, elf-nosed and cat-eyed, though a little soccer ball — ish through the chin and cheeks, which together formed a white sphere with a sudden scar curling grayly around. Also, he had the kind of mustache a college roommate of hers used to say looked like it had crawled up to find a warm spot to die.
They ate dinner at the only Italian restaurant in town. She drank two glasses of wine, the cool heat of it spreading through her like wintergreen. One of these days, she knew, she would have to give up dating. She had practiced declarations in the mirror. “I don’t date. I’m sorry. I just don’t date.”
“I always kind of liked the food here,” said Pinky.
She looked at his round face and felt a little bad for him and a little bad for herself while she was at it, because, truly, the food was not good: flavorless bladders of pasta passing as tortellini; the cutlets mealy and drenched in the kind of tomato sauce that was unwittingly, defeatedly orange. Poor Pinky didn’t know a garlic from a Gumby.
“Yes,” she said, trying to be charming. “But do you think it’s really Italian? It feels as if it got as far as the Canary Islands, then fell into the water.”
“An East Coast snob.” He smiled. His voice was slow with prairie, thick with Great Lakes. “Dressed all in black and hating the Midwest. Are you Jewish?”
She bristled. A Nazi. A hillbilly Nazi gastronomical moron. “No, I’m not Jewish,” she said archly, staring him down, to teach him, to teach him this: “Are you?”
“Yes,” he said. He studied her eyes.
“Oh,” she said.
“Not many of us in this part of the world, so I thought I’d ask.”
“Yes.” She felt an embarrassed sense of loss, as if something that should have been hers but wasn’t had been taken away, legally, by the police. Her gaze dropped to her hands, which had started to move around nervously, independently, like small rodents kept as pets. Wine settled hotly in her cheeks, and when she rushed more to her mouth, the edge of the glass clinked against the tooth in front that was longer than all the others.
Pinky reached across the table and touched her hair. She had had it permed into waves like ramen noodles the week before. “A little ethnic kink is always good to see,” he said. “What are you, Methodist?”
ON THEIR SECOND DATE they went to a movie. It was about creatures from outer space who burrow into earthlings and force them to charge up enormous sums on their credit cards. It was an elaborate urban allegory, full of disease and despair, and Odette wanted to talk about it. “Pretty entertaining movie,” said Pinky slowly. He had fidgeted in his seat through the whole thing and had twice gotten up and gone to the water fountain. “Just going to the bubbler,” he’d whispered.
Now he wanted to go dancing.
“Where is there to go dancing?” said Odette. She was still thinking about the part where the two main characters had traded boom boxes and it had caused them to fall in love. She wanted either Pinky or herself to say something incisive or provocative about directorial vision, or the narrative parameters of cinematic imagery. But it looked as if neither of them was going to.
“There’s a place out past the county beltline about six miles.” They walked out into the parking lot, and he leaned over and kissed her cheek — intimate, premature, a leftover gesture from a recent love affair, no doubt — and she blushed. She was bad at love. There were people in the world who were good at love and people who were bad at it. She was bad. She used to think she was good at love, that it was intimacy she was bad at. But you had to have both. Love without intimacy, she knew, was an unsung tune. It was all in your head. You said, “Listen to this!” but what you found yourself singing was a tangle, a nothing, a heap. It reminded her of a dinner party she had gone to once, where dessert was served on plates printed with French songs. After dinner everyone had had to sing their plate, but hers had still had whipped cream on it, and when it came her turn, she had garbled the notes and words, frantically pushing the whipped cream around with a fork so she could see the next measure. Oh, she was bad, bad like that, at love.
Pinky drove them six miles south of the county beltline to a place called Humphrey Bogart’s. It was rough and wooden, high-beamed, a former hunting lodge. On a makeshift stage at the front, a country-western band was playing “Tequila Sunrise” fifteen years too late, or perhaps too soon. Who could predict? Pinky took her hand and improvised a slow jitterbug to the bass. “What do I do now?” Odette kept calling to Pinky over the music. “What do I do now?”
“This,” said Pinky. He had the former fat person’s careful grace, and his hand at the small of her back felt big and light. His scar seemed to disappear in the dancelight, and his smile drove his mustache up into flattering shadow. Odette had always been thin and tense.
“We don’t dance much in New York,” she said.
“No? What do you do?”
“We, uh, just wait in line at cash machines.”
Pinky leaned into her, took her hand tightly to his shoulder, and rocked. He put his mouth to her ear. “You’ve got a great personality,” he said.
ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON Pinky took her to the Cave of the Many Mounds. “You’ll like this,” he said.
“Wonderful!” she said, getting into his car. There was a kind of local enthusiasm about things, which she was trying to get the hang of. It involved good posture and utterances made in a chirpy singsong. Isn’t the air just snappy? She was wearing sunglasses and an oversize sweater. “I was thinking of asking you what a Cave of Many Mounds was, and then I said, ‘Odette, do you really want to know?’ ” She fished through her pocketbook. “I mean, it sounds like a whorehouse. You don’t happen to have any cigarettes, do you?”
Pinky tapped on her sunglasses. “You’re not going to need these. It’s dark in the cave.” He started the car and pulled out.
“Well, let me know when we get there.” She stared straight ahead. “I take it you don’t have any cigarettes.”
“No,” said Pinky. “You smoke cigarettes?”
“Once in a while.” They drove past two cars in a row with bleeding deer strapped on them like wreaths, like trophies, like women, she thought. “Damn hunters,” she murmured.
“What kind of cigarettes do you smoke? Do you smoke Virginia Slims?” asked Pinky with a grin.
Odette turned and lowered her sunglasses, looked out over them at Pinky’s sun-pale profile. “No, I don’t smoke Virginia Slims.”
“I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet you smoke Virginia Slims.”
“Yeah, I smoke Virginia Slims,” said Odette, shaking her head. Who was this guy?
Ten miles south, there started to be signs for Cave of the Many Mounds. CAVE OF THE MANY MOUNDS 20 MILES. CAVE OF THE MANY MOUNDS 15 MILES. At 5 MILES, Pinky pulled the car over onto the shoulder. There were only trees and in the far distance a barn and a lone cow.
“What are we doing?” asked Odette.
Pinky shifted the car into park but left the engine running. “I want to kiss you now, before we get in the cave and I lose complete control.” He turned toward her, and suddenly his body, jacketed and huge, appeared suspended above her, hovering, as she sank back against the car door. He closed his eyes and kissed her, long and slow, and she left her sunglasses on so she could keep her eyes open and watch, see how his lashes closed on one another like petals, how his scar zoomed quiet and white about his cheek and chin, how his lips pushed sleepily against her own to find a nest in hers and to stay there, moving, as if in words, but then not in words at all, his hands going round her in a soft rustle, up the back of her sweater to herbare waist and spine, and spreading there, blooming large and holding her just briefly until he pulled away, gathered himself back to himself, and quietly shifted the car into drive.