chaperones. We’re having sandwiches, Jake.”
“Okay, okay. Sandwiches are fine.”
I put a shoulder against the humidity-swollen front door and gave a good shove. It groaned open and I chivalrously allowed Lourdes to enter my palace. She surveyed the surroundings and remained graciously silent. In decorating, I have spared great expense.
Lourdes didn’t blink an eye at the coffee table made of a sailboard propped on concrete blocks. She didn’t fuss at two weeks of newspapers spread across sofa and floor. She ignored a rusty scuba tank, a wetsuit that had dripped itself dry into a potted geranium, now comatose with saltwater poisoning, and she didn’t comment on my architectural skill at building a giant house of cards out of empty cartons of home delivery pizza.
I flicked on the lamp with the translucent rotating Dolphins helmet for a shade. She looked at me in the orange-and-turquoise light and gently touched my forehead with what I took for sisterly concern. “You have any hydrogen peroxide?”
“You gonna nurse me, or you planning to burn this place to the ground?”
“Forget it. Your head is so hard, a few dents and scrapes won’t do any damage.” She put a hand on my shoulder and steered me toward the stairs. “Why don’t you shower? I may tidy up a bit.”
“You sure? I don’t want you to violate some feminist manifesto.”
“Don’t be a jerk. Go!” She ran a hand through my beer-sticky hair, then paused, a puzzled look crossing her face. “Is it my imagination or is that a peanut in your ear?”
I showered and slipped into blue nylon running shorts. The occasion didn’t seem formal, so I skipped the shirt, socks, and shoes. I found her in the kitchen. The living room had been rearranged, dusted, and sorted out. “What I assumed to be garbage, I stacked in the corner by the door,” she said. “The cans and bottles are in separate bags, the newspapers tied in bundles for recycling.”
“Thanks. Those sneakers with the missing tongue and flapping soles were my favorites, but I can live without them. And that’s quarter-inch outhaul line around the papers.”
The coffee cups and cereal bowls that had filled the sink were now in the dishwasher, which had come out of retirement and was happily chugging away. The countertops had been wiped clean, and the floor mopped. And I always thought the kitchen tile was gray.
I gave her a look. “What was that speech about not being the domestic type?”
“You exceeded even my limits of tolerance.”
“I guess the place could use a woman’s touch.”
“Or even a human touch,” she said.
She rooted around in a drawer and came up with a hammer, a screwdriver, some matches, a deck of playing cards, and some plastic gizmos that were once attached to some appliance or another. “Don’t you have any flatware, or do you just use your hands?”
“The flatware,” I informed her, “is with the al fresco utensils.” I opened a drawer filled with paper plates, paper cups, and plastic forks, spoons, and knives.
“Environmentally unsound,” she said.
“I reuse the forks and spoons,” I replied, defending myself against charges of pillaging the earth.
“I can see that.” She was inspecting a fork for toxic scum. After some sudsing and rinsing, she made sandwiches of roast turkey, cream cheese, and strawberry jam on Cuban bread. I watched her slender hands moving quickly. I watched the muscles in the calves of her legs as she moved across the small kitchen. I watched myself watch her and wondered what was going on.
“You know Cubans have a weakness for sweets.” She added an extra dollop of jam to her bread. “This one’s yours.” She slid a plate across the counter to me. It contained a thick sandwich, a garnish of fresh pineapple, and a pile of banana chips. “Beer?” she asked.
“No, thanks. I filled my quota today. Besides, the combination…”
She shrugged, opened the fridge, and found some milk that didn’t predate the Carter Administration. We ate standing up at the counter, looking at each other, contemplating the situation. At least that’s what I was doing. What was going on here? After a moment of silence, I said, “We sure needed the rain, huh?”
She looked at me as if I were a complete fool, which of course I was. There is that peculiar mating dance for the species that doesn’t sing songs or lock antlers to win its mate. We paw the earth and shuffle and smile and chat about everything and nothing and send out little coded signals. I decided to dispense with the meteorological insights. She touched her ebony hair and smoothed it back over an ear. She cocked her head and looked at me from under dark eyelashes. I responded by taking a bite of my sweet turkey sandwich and leaving a glob of cream cheese stuck in the corner of my mouth. When it comes to savoir faire, I come up a little short.
“Let me,” Lourdes said, with a come-hither look. She moved close enough for us to breathe each other’s air, and she scraped up the cream cheese with the ruby red fingernail of a pinky. Then she stuck the fingernail in my mouth. And then the whole finger. When the finger came out, her tongue went in. We stood there, kissing soft and slow, pressed against each other, my hands running from her shoulders to her buttocks. She arched herself into me, running the tips of her nails across my bare back, full lips caressing mine. I cupped my hands under her leather-clad bottom and lifted her off the floor, bringing her to my height. She wrapped her legs around me, and we stood there, motionless except for the grinding of loins.
“The bedroom’s upstairs,” I whispered.
“Here’s fine,” she said.
And it was. I stepped out of my shorts. She wriggled out of her mini and pulled the white silk blouse over her head. Underneath she wore lacy white panties and matching bra. From somewhere she produced a foil-wrapped condom. She opened the foil with her teeth, smoothing the condom on me with steady fingers. She slipped out of the panties and bra with no help from me and was left in her red stiletto high heels. The shoes stayed on as I lifted her again, feeling her moist heat pressed against me. My hands flowed over her, from the shoulders through the smooth valley of her back to the silken skin where her hips flared into that wondrous sweep of womanhood.
“I want you,” she breathed into my ear.
“Whatever the lady wants.”
Our engines hummed along, the fires building. She raised her breasts to my mouth, cradling them in each hand. Her nipples were taut and erect, startling in their darkness against the creaminess of her skin. I lifted her buttocks higher and pressed into her. As she took me into her sweet soft vise, her body stiffened and her eyes widened, nearly fearful. Then she exhaled a slow warm breath, closed her eyes and locked onto me. There was a perfect meshing of gears, temperature rising, cadence matching. When my pace increased, hers matched stride. When my breathing deepened, hers followed. Our tempo built to a crescendo, she dug her nails into my back, wailed some entreaty in Spanish I had never heard, threw her head back, and tightened her grip while spasms shook us both.
“Good Lord,” I said, at last.
“ Ay, Dios mio,” she breathed in my ear.
Later, upstairs in the bed under the paddle fan, her head cradled in the crook of my right arm, she said, “I nearly forgot why I came to see you.”
“It wasn’t to cook-sorry-make sandwiches?”
“No.”
“Or to clean my kitchen?”
“Hardly.”
“Or to fix my clock?”
“That just happened. Yo no planee.”
Uh-huh.
“Want to talk about it?” I asked. Lately, I’ve become sensitive to a woman’s needs. I’m not sure why, but it seems only fair. My rules are simple: I say what I feel, and I never pretend, mislead, or say I love you unless I mean it, so the words have seldom been heard. After an encounter, I try to talk, and not about the recent narrowing of the goalposts in college football. Some years ago, in the dentist’s office, I picked up one of those women’s magazines with a bosomy woman in a low-cut dress on the cover. I took a quiz on my lovemaking skills and made Dean’s List in technical proficiency but flunked the part about postcoital cuddling and conversation. So I read some of the other stuff, too, about connection and communication. Now, I’ve picked up the buzzwords about how men and women misunderstand each other. Men speak the language of power and independence; women speak of
