I was grateful that he could.
32
I was naked, shivering, holding my arms across my chest like a V, which was inadequate to the task of hiding my breasts. Sort of silly given that I’d just had sex with him. My clothes were across the room on the radiator. The only light was the glowing isosceles triangle from the closet. Sade crooned in her timeless voice.
I stood there for several minutes watching Brandon, who had already buttoned himself into his matching pajama set. He made hospital corners with the bedsheets and folded the comforter just so after pulling it tight. He didn’t acknowledge me, standing there shivering; he was in another world, a fugue state composed of sheets, blankets, comforters, flat lines, and surfaces with no ripples. My arms shivered against my breasts and goose bumps rose on my belly as my mind tried and failed to return to the moments before Brandon’s vision tunneled to his linens.
Brandon stepped back, hands on his hips, and surveyed the bed. He nodded and mumbled something to himself. He strode to his side of the bed and peeled back the covers gingerly. He shimmied his body down carefully so as to not disturb that hard-won smoothness. With his head on his pillow, he turned to me with a wide, unguarded smile.
“Coming to bed?”
After Renee set up my JDate profile, a series of men who were seeking Jewish partners rejected me upon discovering that “Texas Girl” was actually a shiksa named after the savior of the New Testament. Aaron and Oren seemed offended that my profile had been designed to dupe them, while Daniel, Eric, and Marc were amused at my claims to a kosher diet. Jerry, who must have been sixty-two years old, offered to take me to Manny’s deli and then show me his Jewish sausage. I let my JDate membership lapse and moved on to eharmony.com.
Brandon’s first e-mail charmed me immediately. He asked if I liked to eat breakfast cereal for dinner, which launched a lively debate about the merits of Frosted Flakes versus granola. From his missives, I gathered that he was experienced at dating because he knew how to flirt over e-mail. I also assumed he was well educated, because he knew when to employ a semicolon.
Brandon met my sole criterion for a date: he wasn’t a married man in my therapy group. He had the settled air of a man in his late thirties who now wanted a steady plus-one. On our first date we met for lunch at the East Bank Club, Chicago’s version of a country club that boasted the membership of Oprah and the Obamas. He wore a blue blazer and smiled with kind eyes. He stood an inch taller than I was, and his hair was longer than it was in his profile picture. He looked boyish and approachable, like a Beatle preparing for his first gig on The Ed Sullivan Show. For our second date we saw a play called Love Song at the Steppenwolf, followed by dinner at Boku on Halsted. Brandon was the type of guy who ordered off the specials menu and wore pressed khaki pants on weekend nights. He always paid, always held the door open, always insisted on sharing dessert. His college, the same place he went to medical school, was famous for educating dozens of presidents and Supreme Court justices. When he laughed, he held his hand over his mouth shyly. He’d recently taken up rock climbing to force himself to learn something that didn’t come naturally to him. His hygiene was impeccable—he brushed his teeth before and after we made out, and showered twice a day. He never cursed, didn’t drink, and never lost his cool. I was 90 percent sure he was Republican, but he had yet to demonstrate any misogyny, racism, or classism, so I let myself be wooed by his blue-blooded manners and kind demeanor.
With Brandon, there were no spontaneous jolts of desire that propelled me to the floor of my office in search of orgasmic relief. During our first kiss on my couch after the play at Steppenwolf, I felt pleasant, if not particularly turned on. And that was mostly fine by me. The loss of appetite around the Intern and the illicit charge from my relationship with Reed had left me wrung out. With Brandon, my body was a calm lake on a quiet June morning.
Sometimes, in group, I whispered that I was almost bored.
“Good,” Max said. “The hallmark of a healthy relationship is boredom.”
“It’s true, kiddo,” Grandma Maggie said, beaming her smile my direction. “It’s part of every marriage.”
Dr. Rosen agreed: If I was bored, I was doing something right. But when I listened to other people talk about their early days with their beloveds—Clare or Marnie or Renee—they mentioned not sleeping, not eating, not being able to concentrate. No one described a rippleless lake. Part of me missed the excitement that crashed through me with my previous lovers, even as I recognized that it hadn’t served me. Now, when I pictured my heart, I saw that it was grooved from Reed, gouged a few times by Alex and the Intern, nicked by Jeremy. Of course each group member and Dr. Rosen had left their marks. I tried to imagine attaching to Brandon. Once, at dinner, I stared at his starched white shirt, imagining the surface of his heart. Did his grooves match mine?
And now I’d watched Brandon straighten his
