Instant Love (23 page)

“It would just make me feel better,” I say. I suck on my lips. “I’m all alone in here.”

He reaches in the bag, pulls out a can of beer, cracks open the top.

“Yeah, OK, I’ll take a look,” he says.

ONCE AFTER
a big party where they made a dent in their front door, I left a note that said, “You are loud. You are the loudest people in the world. Why do you need to be so loud? Don’t you know that other people don’t like noise? Please shut up shut up shut up.” Everything was underlined. Every single word.

IN THE KITCHEN
I am teetering. The presence of someone else has suddenly amplified my drunkenness. I cling tightly to the counter, as if it is a life raft in the pit of a swirling ocean, only nothing is moving around me, not technically anyway. He looks at the cabinet under the sink, pulls everything out from inside, the dishwashing detergent (which stands, unfortunately, erect), an unopened pack of sponges, a bucket full of cleaning supplies, a container of old fabric softener I keep meaning to throw away but never do. He stacks these items behind him and then notices me and my grip on the counter. He asks me if I’m OK.

“It’s the chardonnay,” I say.

He shoves his head underneath the sink, really shoves it in there, and I stare at his ass because I feel that I should, but really, I don’t even care what it looks like. He could have a huge backside, or no ass at all and I would still sleep with him at this point. He is there, and I am ready. I loosen my robe enough to expose the top half of my breasts. I slip a round, soft leg out from the silky fabric. Peekaboo.

His ass is small, as it turns out, like two saucers in a pair of jeans, and I bet it is rock hard.

He pulls his head out from under the sink. “Well, there’s no rat,” he says. “At least not any that I can see.” He squats on the floor, takes a sip of his beer, squints at me. He bounces a bit on his calves. He nods at me. “There is no rat. Right?”

“Right. There is no rat.”

“OK, so you wanted something else?”

“Right.” This I didn’t know how to do. Online, everything was already taken care of, fully explained by a system of clearly labeled and color-coded boxes. It was just a question of confirming the agreement. I stretch my leg out further, pull my hands up to my breasts and stroke the sides of them.

He looks momentarily terrified, and then relaxes. “Oh, I thought maybe you wanted to buy some weed. Because for that I’d have to go back to the apartment.” He stands up and puts his hand on his crotch, starts rubbing it. “You want this though, that’s what you want.” He is hard in moments.

“Yes,” I say. My voice is low and has edges to it. “I want that.”

“You want to smoke some weed first? I could—”

“No,” I say. “Let’s go in the living room. On the couch.”

“No, we’re going to do it right here.” He pushes me up against the wall, unties my robe, and heads straight for my breasts, takes huge tastes of them, bites them and licks them, as if he has been hungry all night. I just stand there, hands against the wall, letting him fondle and eat my skin alive. I am almost immediately ready for him to get inside me, but I sense that he needs to do this first.

“You smell good,” he says. He licks and kisses down my stomach, gets on his knees and starts to bite my thighs, and then lick in between my legs. An involuntary noise rises from my throat and I emit it, it hangs in the air in front of my face, and then I release another.

“Fuck,” I say. I put my hands in his hair.

He sticks a finger in me, and then another. “Yeah, you’re ready,” he says. He stands, slips off his grungy tennis shoes with one hand, keeping the other on my right breast, pinching the nipple. He is looking at me the entire time. He drops his hand to his pants, unzips, unbuttons, pulls them down over his hips and ass. “You still ready? Check to see.” I stick a finger inside, and it is wet.

“I’m ready,” I say.

And then it feels like it is over in an instant, if only because I wish it could have lasted forever. I am dizzy the minute he starts pumping inside of me. I wrap a leg around him and then my arms around him, and he mutters in my ear between thrusts about how he knows I always watch him, that he has watched me, too, that he has thought about my twat—
twat,
he actually says that—and what it would be like to fuck me in the elevator.

“Throw down your bags. Bend you over. Make you scream. Every floor. All the way to the top. Back down again. Fucking you.”

I feel light like a child and I sink into him.

“You really thought that?”

“Sure,” he says, and I don’t believe him but it doesn’t matter. I just let him rampage on for a few minutes. I am almost sleeping. And then it’s over; he pulls out, jerks himself off for a minute, dribbles down his leg. I watch this, through a warm golden haze that has clouded my eyes and face. I feel hot, almost feverish.

“I need to sit down,” I say. I pull on my robe, tie it tight around me, and then go to the living room. He pulls on his pants, grabs his can of beer, and follows me, rubbing the moisture off his hands onto his pant legs. I stretch out on the couch and he lays down next to me and puts a hand on my breast and massages it with his fingers, around the nipple, and underneath, where it’s at its softest.

“God, you smell good,” he says.

I thank him. He kisses me.

“You want me to hang out for a while? I don’t have anything to do. I was supposed to bring the beer to those guys”—he motions his head toward my front door—“but fuck ’em. I can take a night off.”

I didn’t respond. I let my nerve endings unfurl from their tensed state. Calm down, children.

“I like your place,” he says.

“Thanks,” I say.

His hand picks up steam on my breast. “It’s so clean.” He moves his hand down my stomach, and I reach mine out and hold it there, intertwine my fingers with his. I am too tired to start anything else, but I cannot seem to say no just yet. “It’s a real hole where I’m at,” he says. “You could probably guess that, though.”

“I could, yes.”

He kisses me on the neck.

“Man, I’m getting hard again,” he says. “I could get used to this.”

I am flattered, I can’t help it. I had turned him on twice. Maybe this is no fluke.

“You know I could come over again sometime. Spend the night. I could make you dinner. We could do this some more.” He squeezes my hand.

“Maybe.”

“Because honestly, I’d much rather crash in a place like this than with those guys. They’re just a bunch of slobs. It’s gross.”

He shifts his arm up, and happily puts it around me. I picture a stack of garbage bags outside my front door, facing their twins across the hall.

We lie there for a while, our breaths catching in our throats, and listen to the distinct noises of the night turn into the roar of the day: an individual car hurtling through yellow lights, unchallenged; dogs greeting each other on their morning walks before their owners prepare for work; and the sound of a lone bus running the regular route, its breaks moaning for oil and tenderness at the stop below my window. Suddenly there is sunlight through the window, not a lot, because it’s winter and nature is sparing with her love these months. Finally the streets grow anxious and full, the rest of traffic mixing with the sound of doors opening and closing, footsteps made by overpriced high heels and running shoes and scuffed dress shoes; everyone is shifting and moving at once, and the blend of the sounds and the piercing pure light through my window signal that while what happened between me and my neighbor was different from the usual, it is now over. I cannot go back, so now I must move on. I didn’t know how this would happen, this progression, this growth, what form it would take, or how much work I would have to do to get there, but at the very least, I knew I was going to have to find a new apartment.

“So maybe I could stay here for a while,” he says.

I look at him, try to picture him here in the morning and the evening, with the sunrise and the sunset, every single day. I can see someone, but it’s not him, it’s not his face. I see Alan’s smile, and I see the legs of a man I invited to my house once, strong and lean, and I see a man with my father’s mind, and I see a man who works two floors down from me at work who makes me laugh all the time in the elevator, and I see someone with my sister’s generosity who can give until he bleeds—I like that sometimes, the bleeding—and I see the satisfied faces who look at me for that instant as they groan like I’m the woman they love. I see bits and pieces, parts, fractions, hundreds of people comprising the one perfect man, and I know suddenly that he’s out there, even if this one, he’s not the one.

     1.     

IT IS
morning now, and Sarah Lee sits and waits for the bus.

     2.     

SARAH LEE
falls in love every time she takes the subway, so she’s started taking the bus instead. The L train from Williamsburg to the East Village is
killing
her, with all these cute young boys, with their lovely young skin and doe eyes and mussed-up hair, mussed up just so and their vintage-store winter coats, some military style, stiff and serious-looking, some more textured and glamorous, as if they should be walking the streets of London circa 1932; and all kinds of crazy kicks on their feet, expensive tennis shoes of vibrant colors, sturdy walking boots, and lately, cowboy boots with heels, but those are worn by the gay boys, so she just admires their feet and ignores the rest. And they are all reading books, worn paperbacks mainly, she imagines they’ve borrowed from roommates or girlfriends, or listening to their iPods on shuffle. Some of them are checking out the girls—their glamour-puss counterparts, equally casually yet strictly attired—looking at their asses or their hair or their new shoes, wondering what those shoes would look like wedged between bed and wall of their crappy, crumbly apartment, their naked bodies splayed out in some uncomfortable, pornographic position. They are wondering what it would be like to fuck them, Sarah Lee firmly believes. And while she doesn’t want that, want them to only want to fuck her, she wishes, still, that they might glance at her. But they don’t. They look anywhere but at her, in the old winter coat she bought at the ninety-nine-cents-a-pound Salvation Army outlet in Seattle, fading pink wool with childlike bejeweled buttons she sewed on herself, not as tough as it used to be, sometimes coats just die, she needs to admit that to herself one of these days; and even if they looked beyond the coat she knows she is too old and not cool enough for them, and sometimes she still speaks with a stutter when she meets new people (though it is much better now) so that even if they could see something in her, once she opened her mouth they might move on to the next person, pretend like she didn’t exist, until suddenly, she simply didn’t. And there is nothing worse than not existing.

So she takes the bus into the city instead, the B39 across the bridge, from the Southside of Williamsburg to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She likes to think of her bus stops not by streets but by proper names, as if she were traveling from one kingdom to another, or at the very least, from one town to the next, so that she feels like she’s really going somewhere very important, and not just across the bridge to work. On the bus, she is pretty again, a pretty thirty-two-year-old woman with nice waves of brown hair that go past her shoulders and cover her oversized ears (she has finally learned to cover them), and a full, healthy face, shiny like a silver dollar, with a smattering of freckles on her cheeks that make her look a little bit younger than she is, though not much. Enough to confuse the guy checking IDs at the door sometimes. She likes to think. She likes to believe.

The people who live in her neighborhood, she wouldn’t consider them her neighbors. They, too, ignore her, won’t meet her eyes as she walks down the block. She had tried greeting people the first month after she moved to the Williamsburg sublet, cheerful morning hellos that used to work sometimes in Queens, and in Oakland, and in Eugene, and in Portland before that, and in Seattle, too. No one wants to say hello to her, except maybe the deli guys who call her “Sweetheart” and “Mami,” and serve her first when there’s a long line, or the car-service drivers idling on the side streets who call out to her as she’s walking. Sometimes she forces the Hassidic women working at the grocery store to interact with her, just so she can hear the sound of her own voice, asking them how they’re doing, telling them to have a nice day. Are they timid or do they dislike her? She can’t tell by their quiet responses, but she’ll take them anyway.