“But separate showers, no nudity.”
“No, very chaste,” she said.
“What was he doing when you got out of the shower?”
“He was peering inside a Venetian paperweight.”
“Classic. He’d obviously heard your shower turn off, and then he’d stood there, holding the paperweight to his face for ten minutes, so that you would be sure to discover him in that casual pose, appreciating your trinket.”
“Quite possible. Anyhow, he sat in the kitchen and we talked rather formally while I made a spiral kind of pasta and microwaved a packet of creamed chipped beef — this is a great dish, incidentally, Stouffer’s creamed chipped beef over any kind of pasta noodles — I have it about once a week. Lawrence made an elaborate pretense of being impressed by this super easy recipe, and when I poured the spirals from the drainer into a bowl he came over to where I was standing and he said, ‘I have to see this.’ I was going to simply slice the packet of creamed chipped open and dump it over the spirals, which is what I normally do, but I was feeling sneaky, I’d just had a shower, and you know about me and showers, but I hadn’t dithered, despite the major striptease fantasy I’d had at the circus, because obviously I couldn’t, since a man was in my apartment, so I was feeling devious, and so I got out some olive oil and poured a little of it on the spirals, and he — he was definitely not in the know about cooking, and I’m certainly not much of a cook myself — but he said, ‘So that’s how you keep them from sticking and clumping.’ I stirred them up, and they made an embarrassingly luscious sexy sound, and I just decided, fuck it, I’ve dressed this person, I’m feeding this person, I’m going to seduce this person, right now, today, so I said, I said, ‘How very strange,’ I said, ‘I just remembered something I haven’t thought of in years. I just remembered this kid in my junior high — you remind me of him in some ways — I just remembered his commenting that a certain girl must have used olive oil to put on her jeans.’ Well, I saw Lawrence’s little eyeballs roll at this. He said something obvious about extra virgin cold pressed and he snuffied out a nervous laugh and I thought, yes, I am in charge here, I am going to see this person’s penis get hard, and even though I have a smoldering yeast problem and so can’t really have full-fledged sex I am going to have my way with this person somehow. It was probably that Venezuelan ball-twirling screamer that put me in that mood, now that I think back. I mean, I felt powerful and shrewd and effortlessly in control and everything else I usually don’t feel. I cut open the packet of creamed chipped and I said, musingly, ‘My grandmother was very careful about money — she always used to say that she was as tight as the bark on a tree. And I used to think about what that really would feel like, whether bark does feel tight to the inner wood of the tree. I used to put on my jeans and take them off, thinking about that.’ Lawrence said, ‘Really!’ I said, ‘Yeah, although actually I didn’t like my jeans to be at all tight, even then. I liked them loose. The appeal was the rough fabric, and the rough stitching, very barklike, the appeal was of being in this sort of complete male embrace, but then when you took them off, being all smooth and curved.’ Lawrence nodded seriously. So I said, making the leap, I said, ‘And when I started getting my legs waxed, which is quite an expensive little procedure, I also thought of that phrase, as tight as the bark on a tree, when Leona, my waxer, began putting the little warm wax strips on my legs and letting them solidify for an instant and ripping them off.’ I said, ‘In fact, I just had my legs waxed yesterday.’ Lawrence said, ‘Is that right?’ and I said, ‘Yes, it’s amazing how much freer you feel after your legs are waxed — it’s almost as if you’ve become physically more limber — you want to leap around, and make high kicks, cavort.’ I waited for that to sink in and then I said, ‘Leona’s a tiny Ukrainian woman, and she makes this growly sound as she rips the strips of muslin and wax off, rrr, and when she’s done both my legs and there’s no more hurting, she rubs lotion into them, and it’s a surprisingly sensual experience.’ Lawrence was silent for a second and then he said, ‘I’m inexperienced with depilatory techniques. I’ve never known anyone who had her legs waxed.’ I said, ‘Let’s have dinner.’ ”
“What a tactician!”
“Not really. Anyhow, we had dinner, which was pretty tame. Lawrence had many virtues, he had a kind of bony broad-shoulderedness, and a deliberate way of blinking and looking at you when you spoke, and he was quite smart — he was a patent lawyer.”
“Ah. Patent infringement?”
“Yes indeed. But he had no conversational skills at all. He was putty in my hands. No, I’m actually making myself seem more completely sure of my powers than I felt — but still, I was pretty much in control. I started asking him how electrical things worked — you know, like what shortwave radio was, and how cordless telephones worked, and why it is that at drive-ins now you can hear the movie on the FM radio in your car. And he was full of interesting information, once you jump-started him that way. But the thing was, I kept a faint racy undertone going in the conversation. For instance, I’d say, ‘What do you think those ham-radio bulls really talked about? Do you think some of them were secretly gay, and they left their wives asleep and crept down to their finished basements in the middle of the night to have long conversations with friends in New Zealand or wherever?’ He said, ‘I suppose it’s a possibility.’ And about the drive-ins I said things like, ‘It must be much more comfortable and private in drive-ins now, because you can close the window completely, you don’t have that metal thing hanging there with the tinny sound, covered with yellow chipped paint, like a chaperone, you’re not attached to anything around you, it’s much more like being in a car on the expressway.’ He said he didn’t know exactly how drive-ins supplied the FM sound, because he hadn’t been to a drive-in since he was eight years old, but he said that technically speaking it was an easy problem to solve, for instance there was a thing advertised in the back of Popular Science that picks up any sound in the room and broadcasts it to FM radios within several hundred yards, it’s called a Bionic Mike Transmitter. I said, ‘Ooo, a Bionic Mike Transmitter!’ He said, ‘Oh sure, it’s this device that you can leave in this room, for instance, and it will broadcast any sound in the room to any nearby FM radio, if it’s correctly tuned.’ He said, ‘Of course it’s advertised with a big warning about how it’s not meant for illegal surveillance. But probably that’s what it’s used for.’ I said, ‘You mean that whatever I did, whatever intimate private activity I engaged in, would be heard by the people swooshing by in the cars on the expressway?’ He said, ‘If they were tuned correctly, yes.’ I said, ‘Hmmm.’ You see, my living room is on the second floor, about three hundred feet from a raised part of the expressway.”