I'm Not Sam

That got a laugh. But I thought that this Samantha Martin person was pretty smart stuff too.

And I was already thinking about her own skin,

It had been a year and a half since Linda had e-mailed me from New York saying — apologetically but baldly — that she’d fallen out of love with me. She didn’t know why.

Was there another man? No. Something I did or said? No. It just happened. She’d been meaning to tell me for a while now but hadn’t gotten up the courage. I was twenty-four years old and we’d been lovers for four of those years. I was still completely crazy over her. Those seven stages of grief they talk about? I went through all seven at once I think, rattling from one to the other like a game of bumper-pool gone berserk. At the end of it, I more or less vowed that love and even sex could wait. Until I was thirty, maybe.

But then here was Sam’s skin. The complexion of her face, her bare arms in the sleeveless blouse, her long graceful neck.

It’s always been one of her loveliest features. Arguably her best. Winter-pale or summer-tan, it’s always seemed to smolder with some warm inner glow, an even interior lighting. There are tiny dances of freckles across her shoulders, hands and forearms. And one beautiful dark mole just to the left of the small of her back.

I didn’t get to see the mole that day. But from my desk in the second row of our classroom the rest was pretty clear to me. That she was smart and she was lovely. Neither fact was lost on anybody in the classroom. Especially the guys.

So while I listened carefully to what she had to say about parting epidermis, dermis and hypodermis, about scalpels, about where and how to cut in order to get at all that good stuff inside, I was doing some fantasizing too. About what it would be like to touch her.

I hadn’t done that in a long time. Touch a woman.

And when her lecture and the Q&A were over I did.

It’s always amazed me to hear beautiful women — actresses or models — say that they hardly ever get asked out, that most men are intimidated by them, tongue-tied by their beauty. Me, I just don’t get it. That’s never been my problem. Maybe it’s this artist’s eye of mine that just can’t help being drawn to beauty, to want to be in its presence as much as humanly possible. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a pretty secure family.

Maybe I just don’t know any better. Fools do rush in.

But as the class filed out Sam was talking with our teacher, Mrs. Senner. She stood with her back to me, and that gave me all the excuse I needed. I touched her lightly just beneath the shoulder and said excuse me? and the smooth warm softness of her skin and firmness within hurtled straight to my brain like a flaming trail of gasoline.

She turned and smiled.

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “But I’ve got a couple of questions. Could I maybe buy you two ladies a cup of coffee?”

I was being disingenuous in the extreme. I knew perfectly well that Mrs. Senner always raced home after class to fix supper for her husband, who was just getting off his shift at Tartan Industries. We all did.

She introduced us, said I was one of her better students, and then gracefully declined.

But Sam accepted.

I don’t remember much of what we talked about over coffee first and then two glasses of wine each, and the walk back to our respective cars, except that she seemed as interested in the business of making graphic novels as I was in what went on in the autopsy room. More importantly, the current was there. The connection loud and clear.

Later, after our third date and first night in bed, she would tell me that my hand below her shoulder that evening had startled her, gone through her like a shot. She called herself a workaholic and said that after an affair gone south with an older married man it had been a very long time between drinks for her too and that my touch felt to her like a wake-up call from a long dry dreamless sleep.

It was and still is the loveliest thing anyone has ever said to me.

And now I watch her sleep.

I won’t cry. Not yet.

I wake up like somebody’s hit me with a cattle prod.

I wake up horrified.

Zoey’s climbed through an open window which should have a screen in it but doesn’t and she’s out on the ledge of a tenth-floor apartment, looking fascinated by what she sees below and then frightened and finally bewildered and as I’m crossing the room to get to her, carefully, afraid to startle her she tries to turn on the narrow ledge when she should just be backing up the way she came and falls out of sight into space.

I’m instantly awake, stunned, my arms outstretched in front of me, reaching hopelessly for my cat. Inside the dream and right here in my bedroom I’ve been shouting, both worlds melded into one. Now they break apart. Zoey stares at me from the foot of the bed.

She gets up and meanders over. I scratch her neck and chin and she tilts her head back and closes her eyes, content. When I stop she steps onto my lap and nuzzles my chin. Breakfast time.

“In a minute, baby. Got to piss.” I step into my jeans. Tuck in my tee shirt. Habit. It slightly amazes me that I still have habits.

On the way to the bathroom I can hear the TV. Cartoon voices. Lily’s already awake.

The guy I see in the mirror disturbs me so I don’t dwell on him. I just finish my business and get out of there.

In the living room Lily’s kneeling in front of the TV set, watching a commercial for Sid the Science Kid.

She’s also naked to the waist.

There’s that mole.

She hears me behind her and turns and smiles.

“’Morning, Patrick.”

Even after all these years it is wholly impossible not to take in her breasts.

Sam’s breasts are small. You can cup one in each hand and not get much overflow. They’re quite pale. So pale that in a few places you can see the dim blue traces of vein beneath the flesh, traces of vulnerability I always thought. Her areolae are a very light brown, almost perfectly round and about an inch wide. Her nipples are pink and a quarter-inch long at all times, permanently erect.

And her nipples have a direct phone line to her cunt. I’ve made her come dozens and dozens of times without ever going below her waist.

If she notices me looking at them she doesn’t show it.

“Something wrong?” she says.

“Where’s your pajama top, Lily?”

“On the bed. It got hot.”

“Why don’t you go get it for me, okay?”

“I’m still hot!”

“Girls are not supposed to run around with their tops off, Lily.”

“Who says?”

“I say. Trust me.”

She sighs again. I’m getting used to that sigh. But she gets off her knees and stomps past me toward the bedroom and as she goes by she brushes my bare left arm with her right breast.

I could practically swear she’s done this on purpose.

Like she’s flouting her body, flirting with me.

But that’s impossible. How can she know how this makes me feel? If this were Sam she’d damn well know of course. Sam’s very self-aware. But Lily?

The answer is, she can’t. She hasn’t got a clue. Kneeling there in front of the TV she was the picture of innocence. Brushing against me’s just the sullen, pouty thing any kid might do who isn’t getting her way.

Forget about it, I tell myself.

Sure.