The notches of Lucas’s spine are perfectly proportioned, a bone xylophone. She imagines playing the instrument with a padded mallet. His back features a fading tan. She fingers the line where his butt goes white. He doesn’t stir. Wendy’s the big spoon, breasts to shoulder blades, nose in his neck hair. Wendy holds her hand in front of his mouth until her palm is wet from condensation.
Wendy saw Lucas’s bathroom last night, but she was drunk. Only now can she truly admire the spotless space, tile so shiny and disinfected. He has one of those showerheads that looks like a large, circular lamp. No products but a bar of soap and a bottle of generic shampoo. A neatly organized shaving kit rests on top of the toilet. She does her legs and armpits. The water pressure is strong. Dead skin down the drain.
(The Parentheses)
(Sunset over D’Agostino’s. Crosstown wind off the Hudson. Michael thinks he can still smell ash. Exiting shoppers cut like tailbacks toward the end zone of the subway entrance. Celery stalks blossom from the tops of brown bags. Soup season is here. Michael stares at what may or may not be Wendy’s window. The way the sun hits the window makes it difficult to tell if lights are on in the apartment. Michael gives the horn another honk.
Wendy strides from the building in burgundy heels that match her hair. She says sorry she’s late, though she’s not. Her mother always insisted on making men wait. It’s one of the few shards of wisdom that Wendy remembers. This is why Wendy, a naturally punctual person, still follows it.
Michael’s truck smells like Slim Jims. His breath smells like cigarettes. He sweats and taps the wheel, accelerating rapidly out of green lights and braking hard into red ones. Wendy fastens and refastens her seatbelt. Their first date was nearly two months ago, and this thing that happened since makes it feel like even more time has passed. Michael turns onto Ninety-Sixth Street. The radio is off. He debates playing his demo. On the one hand, it’s tacky. On the other, Wendy, who majors in English, might pick up on his allusions and use of enjambment.
“You have any music?” Wendy asks, and before he can stop himself he’s inserted the tape. Web MD comes in over the car’s tinny speakers:
I got love for the doctors
And medicine men
Who pen scrips and pen rhymes
From the tips of blunt pens
Who roll blunts out of dimes
Like Proust’s madeleines
“Check it,” says Michael. “That’s me.”
The restaurant is a small Portuguese place that will soon be out of business. Rents rise in the wake of the attacks despite predictions of mass exodus. On date number one, Wendy had mentioned a summer she spent in Lisbon with her father.
The restaurant’s walls are covered in woven tapestries depicting battles and sex acts. Stringed instruments that look like mandolins but aren’t, exactly, hang between the tapestries. The waitresses wear bandannas and gauzy print skirts and black boots and dangling earrings and beaded necklaces. Entrees are in the twelve-to-fourteen-dollar range, which is all Michael can afford, but he’s hoping the warmth of the waitstaff, and the authenticity of the decor, and the deep pork odor coming from the kitchen, and the fact that he remembered about Lisbon, will give Wendy the impression that he chose this restaurant for its Old World ambience and not because he’s on a budget.
“Nice place,” says Wendy.
He reads her flat affect as that too-cool-for-anything attitude prevalent among upperclassman whose initial enthusiasms for the city have hardened into stone-faced opacity. Wendy, however, was being sincere, though the restaurant doesn’t remind her of Lisbon so much as a childhood summer—one of the last with her mother—spent at a seaside rental in Little Compton, Rhode Island. She recalls the rocky coastline and the vein-green shade of her mother’s forearms; lunches at the local pub, eating steamers and burnt linguiça. At night Wendy would write in her journal, attempting to re-create, in prose, the town’s clammy odor and sea-salt air. To get the experience on paper was a way of freezing time. It was also the beginning of a new identity: Wendy, aspiring author. Only recently, under the tutelage of an eager nonfiction writing prof, has she come to understand that recapturing the past means reliving its traumas. She interviewed for an internship at an ad agency last week.
Their waitress arrives, a voluptuous woman of indeterminate age in a low-cut blouse and candy-apple lipstick. Her name is Bernice, and there’s something overtly sexual in her demeanor: the way she poses with hands on hips, elbows cocked, bracelets piled at her wrist. Bernice asks if they’d like anything to start, bread and olives, perhaps, or the house special jamón croquettes?
Michael hesitates. He was hoping to be quick with dinner so they can get to part two, a quiet cruise around the neighborhood, listening to slow jams and not spending money. He brought his dad’s truck down from the Berkshires to help Ricky move, and he figures he might as well milk the novelty.
Wendy senses her date’s discomfort. She knows he’s on financial aid and that he’s embarrassed about it. She tells the waitress they’re ready to order their entrees.
Wendy will have a salad. She actually wants shell steak with herb-roasted potatoes, but she won’t order it in front of a guy. This is not something learned from her mother, but from Rachel Kirshenbaum, her semi-anorexic roommate and so-called best friend. Wendy’s not meant to finish her entree either, but rather to take five or six rabbit bites, then cover her salad with a napkin.
Rachel and Wendy are an unlikely duo. They were paired freshman year, and have stuck together because neither is good at making friends. Wendy because she’s shy, and Rachel because her Long Island accent is grating. Rachel wears her eating disorder like a Tiffany’s tiara, bragging about skipping dinner, and constantly quoting the Kate Moss maxim that nothing tastes as good as skinny
