Philipa kept talking but I stopped listening. By now her body was folded in the chair like an origami stork, her elbows, forearms, calves, and thighs going every which-a-way. She didn’t even finish her last sentence; it just trailed off. I think the subject had changed in her head while her mouth had continued on the old topic, not realizing it was out of supplies. She asked me how old I was.
“Thirty-three,” I said. “I thought you were late twenties,” she said. I explained, “I never go out in the sun.” She said, “Must be hard to avoid.” I thought, Oh goody, repartee. But Philipa quieted. It seemed-oddly-that she had become distracted by my presence, the very person she was talking to. Her eyes, previously darting and straying, fell on me and held. She adjusted her body in the sofa and turned her knees squarely toward me, foreshortening her thighs, which disappeared into the shadows of her skirt. This made me uncomfortable and at the same time gave me a hint of an erection.
“When’s your birthday?” she asked.
“January twenty-third.”
“You’re an Aquarius,” she said.
“I guess. What’s yours?” I asked.
“Scorpio.”
“I mean your birth date.”
“November fifteenth.”
I said, “What year?”
She said, “Nineteen seventy-four.”
“A Friday,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, not recognizing my sleight of hand. “Do you date anyone?”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “I’m dating a realtor.”
“Are you exclusive?”
“No,” I said. “But she wants me to be.”
Then she paused. Cocked her head like Tiger. “Wait a minute. How did you know it was a Friday?” she finally asked.
How do I explain to her what I can’t explain to myself? “It’s something I can do,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I don’t know, I can just do it.”
“What’s April 8, 1978?”
“It’s a Saturday,” I said.
“Jeez, that’s freaky. You’re right; it’s my brother’s birthday; he was born on Saturday. What’s January 6, 1280?”
“Tuesday,” I said.
“Are you lying?” she asked.
“No.”
“What do you do for a living, and do you have any wine?”
“No wine,” I said, answering one question and skirting the other.
“So you want some wine? I’ve got some upstairs,” she said. Open, I’ll bet, too, I thought. “Okay,” I said, knowing I wasn’t going to have any. Philipa excused herself and ran up to her apartment with a “be right back.” I stayed in my chair, scratching around the outline of its paisley pattern with my fingernail. Soon she was back with a bottle of red wine. “Fuck,” she said. “All I had was Merlot.”
Philipa poured herself a tankard full and slewed around toward me, saying, “So what did you say you do?”
I wanted to seem as if I were currently employed, so I had to change a few tenses. Mostly “was” to “am.”
“I encode corporate messages. Important messages are too easily hacked if sent by computer. So they were looking for low-tech guys to come up with handwritten systems. I developed a system based on the word ‘floccinaucinihilipilification.’ ” I had lost Philipa. Proof of how boring the truth is. She had bottomed-up the tankard, and I know what wine does. Right now I was probably looking to her like Pierce Brosnan. She stood up and walked toward me, putting both hands on my chair and leaning in. I kept talking about codes. She brushed my cheek with her lips.
I knew what I was to Philipa. A moment. And she was attached to Brian, in spite of the recent storm clouds. And I was attached to Elizabeth even though she didn’t know my name. And I knew that if Philipa and I were to seize this moment, the hallway would be forever changed. Every footstep would mean something else. Would she avoid me? Should I avoid her? What would happen if she met Elizabeth? Would Elizabeth know? Women are mind readers in the worst way. But on the other hand, I knew that if I dabbled with Philipa that night, I could be entering the pantheon of historical and notable affairs. There is a grand tradition involving the clandestine. The more I thought about it, the less this seemed like a drunken one-off and more like the stuff of novels. And this perhaps would be my only opportunity to engage in it.
By now, Philipa’s eyelashes were brushing my cheek and her breath was on my mouth. With both hands, I clutched the arms of my chair as if I were on a thrill ride. I pooched out my lower lip, and that was all the seduction she needed. She took my hand and led me into my own bedroom. I’m sure that Philipa was lured on by my best asset, which is my Sure-cuts hairdo. I’m lanky like a baseball pitcher, and the Sure-cut people know how to give me the floppy forehead at a nominal price. So without bragging, I’m letting you know that I can be physically appealing. Plus I’m clean. Clean like I’ve just been car-washed and then scrubbed with a scouring pad and then wrapped in palm fronds infused with ginger. My excellent personal hygiene, in combination with the floppy casual forehead, once resulted in a provocative note being sent to me from my former mailwoman. Philipa never saw females going in and out, so she knew I wasn’t a lothario, and I had come to suspect that she regarded me as a standby if she ever needed to get even with Brian the wide receiver.
I never have interfered with a relationship, out of respect for the guy as much as for myself, but Brian is a dope and Philipa is a sylph and I am a man, even if that description of myself is qualified by my failure to be able to cross the street at the curb.
The bedroom was a little too bright for Philipa. She wanted to lower the lights, so I turned out three sixty-watt bulbs but had to go to the kitchen to turn on a one-hundred-watt bulb and a fifty-watt bulb and two fifteens, in order to maintain equity. It is very hard to get thirty-watt bulbs, so when I find them I hoard them.
She still didn’t like the ambience. The overhead lights disturbed her. I turned them off and compensated by turning on the overheads in the living room. But the light spilling into the bedroom was just too much; she wanted it dim and sexy. She went over and closed the door. Oh no, the door can’t be closed; not without elaborate preparations. Because if the door is closed, the light in the bedroom is cut off from the light in the living room. Rather than having one grand sum of 1125 watts, there would be two discrete calculations that would break the continuity. I explained this to Philipa, even though I had to go through it several times. To her credit, she didn’t run, she just got tired, and a little too drunk to move. Our erotic moment had fallen flat, so I walked her to the door. I hadn’t succeeded with Philipa, but at least I could still look Elizabeth straight in the eye.
After Philipa left, I lay in the center of the bed with the blanket neatly tucked around me; how Philipa and I would have mussed it! Inserted so neatly between the bed and the sheets, I thought how much I must look like a pocket pencil. My body was so present. I was aware of my toes, my arms, my weight on the bed. There was just me in a void, wrapped in the low hum of existence. The night of Philipa had led me to a quiet, aesthetic stillness. You might think it odd to call a moment of utter motionlessness life, but it was life without interaction, and I felt joy roll over me in a silent wave.
As long as I remained in bed, my relationship to Elizabeth was flawless. I was able to provide for her, to tease out a smile from her, and to keep her supplied with Versace stretch pants. But I knew that during the day, in life, I could not even cross the street to her without a complicated alignment of permitting circumstances. The truth was-and in my sensory deprivation I was unable to ignore it-I didn’t have much to offer Elizabeth. Or for that matter, Philipa (if that were to happen) or Zandy (if she were to ever look at me).