Читать книгу Can't Think Straight: - Kiri Blakeley - Страница 16

Day 18 “What’s the longest passion can last?” I ask no one in particular.

“I’ve read lots of studies on this,” Julie declares. “It’s three years.”

“Three years!” everyone exclaims. I’m not sure if we all think three years is too short or too long.

“Wait,” Julie says, “maybe it’s three months. I can’t remember.”

A group of us are on 14th Street at Ipanema, a rundown, glaringly lit little joint. I wish we could go somewhere else, somewhere darker, more intimate, with lighting that won’t reveal every flaw—but my halfhearted attempts to corral everyone are resisted. I have a reason for wanting to look good—Rahil is on his way.

When he does arrive, he’s like a jolt of caffeine to the evening, jubilantly introducing himself (“Rahil here!”) to all and sundry, before turning to me and growling, “You look fantastic.” He doesn’t look so bad himself, with his light green T-shirt a bit too tight. It’s not long before we’re full on in the PDA department and people are beginning to move away from us like we’re contagious.

Rahil begins working one constant theme: going back to his apartment.

“No.”

“All we’ll do is what we’re doing right now.”

“No.”

I hadn’t been out of the game so long that I didn’t know that a girl was still expected to kick up a fuss as a prelude to sex—that is, if she wanted to make it more interesting (for the guy, at least).

“If you’d called earlier in the week, we’d be there now, because that’s what I was going to suggest we do,” I say. “But you didn’t call me until an hour ago. Look. I’m a low-maintenance girl. I’m not asking for dinner or any courting. But I do ask for a plan so at least I know whether to take other offers or not.”

“But … but… you said you didn’t like to make plans!” he sputters.

“For all you know about women, here’s a very rudimentary thing you seem not to know. A woman can change her mind at any time.”

“My mistake. It won’t happen again.”

Julie, Jake, Rahil, and I catch a cab back to Brooklyn. Jake gets in the front seat and keeps looking back with what I imagine is a look of disapproval. Is it directed toward me and the fact that I’m acting so slutty so soon? Or toward Rahil as a kind of warning to tread carefully with me? Or toward Julie, who every once in awhile gives Rahil a drunken, overly friendly embrace?

After dropping them off, Rahil and I head to Loki for one last drink. But we don’t drink. We make a beeline for the back couches, which are deserted, and sit kissing and fondling. I make sure to flash him my pink lace panties, the ones I’d just bought from Victoria’s Secret. Not the kind of thing you bother with in a ten-year relationship.

The apartment refrain is never far from his lips. “We’ll just kiss, nothing more, you can leave at any time. I want you to feel safe….”

Of course we end up back at his apartment.

We’re all over each other on the couch until he picks me up and carries me to the bedroom. I’m acutely aware that this is a calculated move, certainly one he’s practiced many times, but it’s still one of the hottest things anyone has ever done for me. I love the way he comes, noisily and lustily, holding nothing back.

“I’m going to leave early in the morning,” I say. “Don’t be upset if I don’t leave you a note.”

“You don’t have to leave.”

“But I’m going to.”

About 6 A.M. while Rahil sleeps, I’m crawling around on the floor, trying to locate my clothes. My grasping hand touches upon a bunched-up wad that turns out to be a frilly white shirt and a thong—neither of which are mine. Could be the ex-girlfriend’s things, but if so, it seems strange stuff to leave behind. At any rate, I’m amused by it. It’s further evidence that I’d picked the right person to have a purely sexual fling with.

Walking back from his apartment toward 4th Avenue to find a cab, I think of the term “walk of shame.” With my mussed hair and cakey makeup and still wearing last night’s dress-up clothes, it is indeed a walk of shame—giddy shame—as if my bruised sexuality is hanging out there for the world to see, point at, judge, and secretly envy.

I can’t believe this is my life.

* * *

Late that afternoon, I manage to drag myself into the cat shelter, where I’ve volunteered for seven years, cleaning cages and feeding homeless felines. The animals are so simple. Some are scared and need a little coddling. Others are stretched out and happy. I’m just glad to have something to concentrate on besides my own drama and lust. At 6 P.M., Rahil leaves me a message. I’m beyond surprised to hear from him so soon.

“Bottom line, I want to see you,” he says.

At midnight he arrives at People Lounge on the Lower East Side, at my friend Lily’s thirtieth birthday party. I’d been drinking a lot before he got there, hoping that the more I drank, the more I’d find other people interesting. But it doesn’t work. My mind is fixed on Rahil’s arrival and that’s a little scary. I couldn’t begin to rely on one person to make my evening.

I’m excited for him and Sahana to meet. Both are talkative, opinionated, a little crazy, and Indian. After the two of them gab to the point where even I can’t get a word in edgewise, Sahana takes me aside.

“He’s unlovable, but funable,” she says.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means you’re safe. He’s fun. But you’re never going to fall in love with him. He’s unlovable. Don’t tell him I told you that.”

Back at his apartment, Rahil carries me to the bed again. I love to look at his expression when I kiss him, the way he leans into me and purses his lips slightly, sometimes licking them, waiting for the next kiss, full of desire. It’s only after getting kisses like this that you realize that something had been missing from your other kisses.

When we’re done, we wrap our legs around each other, and he tucks his head into the crook of my neck, gives two heaving snores, and falls asleep. The desire for sexless affection is so strong in humans, even in those where the relationship is based purely on sex. Aaron had always been such a delicious snuggler, though in the past couple of years, it had been pretty much one sided, up to me to snuggle. But about a week before I left for Los Angeles in March, to attend the Oscar parties, I’d felt him curling around me from behind. “You spooned me last night, baby,” I’d said the next day, pleasantly surprised. “I did,” he’d smiled. Maybe he’d known then it would be the last time.

In the morning, Rahil makes me Indian tea. He never seems in a hurry for me to leave, though we both know it’s going to happen. It’s difficult to keep the conversation at the superficial level. At some point you run out of light banter and things creep toward the “get to know you” talk. It creeps very slowly, but still it creeps.

I fight it. The less I know, the more I can cloak him in my own fantasy. If I find out he voted for Bush, or hates cats, or once spent time in prison for child molestation, the less likely I’m going to want his fingers up my vagina.

I lie with my head on his naked lap, and at some point I realize he’s rubbing his penis while talking to me.

“Good lord, what are you doing?” I laugh.

“What?” he asks, innocently.

“You don’t do that on the subway, do you?”

“Certainly not. I’m only perverted when someone wants me to be.”

I had gone from Aaron, someone so repressed he hardly liked anything touched, to a guy so sensual he couldn’t keep his hands off me or himself. I wondered why I couldn’t find someone in the middle, but maybe this was what I needed now, as maybe Aaron was what I needed then.

I still have dreams about Aaron: short, nonsensical, gut-wrenchingly sad dreams about my best friend leaving me. After one, I awake with a jolt and realize I need to see him more. Cutting him out of my existence is not working. I don’t know how people who lose their life partner after fifty years, who are older and may not have the big city distractions I do, survive. I guess they slowly die of a broken heart.

That night, Rahil calls to make plans for Friday. The “plan” is to go to his apartment … period. Something about the call makes me feel so generous that when I speak to Aaron, I tell him that when he comes over to get the rest of his things, he can bring boxes. I’ll give him some bowls, plates, glasses, towels.

“But I keep all the good stuff,” I say.

That night in my dream, Aaron is animated and emotionally expressive like I’d never seen him—and it’s because he’s free to be himself. I feel so horrible about that, as if he’d been forced to be someone else for ten years.

Then we get into an argument. “Well, you like men,” he says, explaining his own attraction.

“Yes, Aaron,” I hiss. “But I’m a girl!”

Good God, I’m becoming a red stater in my dreams.

I remembered the night Aaron and I had met at Boat. I’d asked him to help me understand how I might spot this kind of thing in future relationships.

“When the sex goes bad …” he’d sighed, trailing off.

How that had galled me! I’d spent years trying to convince Aaron the sex wasn’t quite right, and he’d always played it off like it was fine. Eventually, I’d come to accept that it was better to have a lukewarm sex life and a great relationship than the reverse.

It’s not that you don’t see the warning signs, or ignore them. It’s that after ten years you learn not to freak out about them. You’ve gone through so much crap together and are still together that a gradual widening of interests or dwindling of a physical connection doesn’t set off the alarm bells that they might only six months into it. After a man comforts you through the World Trade Center collapsing before your eyes, through the deaths of relatives, and through hundreds of more minor crises in between, you don’t expect him to suddenly take a U-turn out of the relationship—and into the arms of a big hairy man.

The next afternoon, I go to my hair salon to pick up a diffuser that my stylist, Katie, had ordered for me. Aaron uses the same place, the hairdressers all know him. They are dumbfounded by my news.

“Are you going to get therapy?” Katie asks, wide eyed.

“Everyone keeps asking me that. I’m not much of a therapy person.”

“I’m just saying, you might want to consider it,” she warns. She tells me about a male friend of hers who was with a woman for ten years, got married, and a year into the marriage found out his wife was having an affair with a woman.

“Please don’t tell me the past eleven years have been a lie,” Katie’s friend had begged his wife.

“I can’t tell you that,” she’d answered, less than diplomatically.

Subsequently, Katie continues, the man got into a car accident. “And he died!”

“Because he didn’t get therapy?”

“Because his head wasn’t in the right place. He wasn’t concentrating.”

“Well,” I say, “I don’t drive.”