—Romantic.
—I’m saying it out loud, now, so you are my witness. What I thought was sweet, what I looked upon later as a gesture of, I don’t know, kindness, affection, love? was how he got up to get one of my paper towels and wiped his semen from between my breasts.
—Fucking hell.
—Then I spilled a beer in anxiety on my rug and I got so paranoid about the smell of beer lingering that I sprayed it with carpet cleaner right away.
—In front of him?
I nodded.
—What a marvelous complexity, though! So you didn’t come at all?
—No.
—He just jerked himself off and you cleaned up some beer.
—Jesus, I said. You’re making me see the rot on a moment I thought was golden.
—That’s the point! Now, is coming important to you, as important as it should be?
—No, I don’t think so, I said, realizing I’d never explored the question.
—That’s funny. It’s all I care about.
—Really?
—It’s all I think about the whole time. And when I have one, I’m like, Goodbye! So people need to get there with me. Or they will be having corpse sex.
She tilted her head to one side and stuck her tongue out and I laughed.
—I’m too busy thinking, I said.
—About?
—How I look. How he’s feeling.
—So you fake orgasms?
I nodded.
—To what end?
—I don’t know.
—You want to please him, to let him know he has pleased you?
—I suppose.
—I find that men have a better time when they think they are terrible in bed. It inspires them to read magazines and find a new nub to tweak. They come back and back until they feel they’ve figured it out.
I was upset that she was more sexually conversant than me. She was younger and better at fucking. She would have eaten Big Sky alive. I shuddered to imagine them together.
—Are you cold? she asked, rubbing the tops of my arms with her palms.
—Not a lot, I said, trying to hide how loved I felt.
—Please, she said, continue, I’m sorry.
—I’m starting to feel silly.
—No, we need to get to where this is going. So you didn’t come and he did and he watched you clean the rug and pretended it wasn’t weird.
—Yeah, and it was tax season and he asked whether I’d received all my forms yet. Then he just stopped and looked at me and said, Who are you? His eyes, I have to explain his eyes. He was like a wolf. Fuck and I loved him. And I didn’t know what he meant. I said, What? And he said, Like, who do you hang out with? And Jesus, I thought he meant—I thought he was trying to inhale me, the way I wanted to inhale him, you know? I thought he was trying to get to know me.
—Oh, you poor thing.
—And I began to name friends of mine, like first names. Like an idiot. Because I didn’t understand what he really meant. Which was: What circle are you in? Will my wife find out? Do you hang out with weird bouncers from New Jersey, because you just acted like a girl who does. Then he gave me tax advice and I thought how lucky his wife was—her name was fucking Parker—I thought how lucky she was to have this beautiful, smart, sexy man who does her taxes, who makes a lot of money. Who fishes and hunts. I felt so empty and shitty and stupid. I put on a pair of sweatpants. He left with his gear.
—But that wasn’t the end.
—No, but every time was the end.
I felt like I was going to cry. I didn’t want her to see. I looked ugly when I cried.
—Perhaps we need an interlude. I think you should tell me about Vic.
—You’re right, I said, because Vic is part of the actual end. But I’m tired of my fucking voice.
—I’m not, she said, taking my hand.
I didn’t think another woman had ever taken my hand in that way. We sat there on the cooling sand and I began to tell her about Vic. I told her about Scotland, our naked bodies on the bed. She didn’t look at me like I was disgusting, and for the first time, I didn’t feel that I was.
15
WHEN I GOT BACK TO the house that evening I felt alive. All my life I’d avoided women. They complicated my time. I’d learned how to do everything alone, how to use men for what I needed, and whenever another woman was around, there would invariably be jealousy, or I was bound to act differently, to be less sexual and exacting.
But with Alice it was the opposite. I felt the need to turn myself up more. She made me feel the way that Gosia had—valid.
Vic had questioned Gosia’s role in my life once, when he was feeling me slip away. He knew I told Gosia everything. He asked whether I was sure she was the best influence on me. I slapped him across the face. His stubbly cheek jiggled and he apologized right away.
The truth is, who knows, she might have been a bad influence. She taught me that men will use you unless you use them first, that sometimes men must be punished because women are in important pain from the moment they are born until the moment they die. But you could also say that my mother taught me that, and you could of course say that it was my beloved father who fucked the whole thing up. Gosia did the most for me and did the least to hurt me of anyone in my life.
I remember vividly the first night she brought me to a bar. I was fifteen. She didn’t drink much, a glass of Grüner here and there. I ordered a Bloody Mary. The bartender, a kind-looking man in his fifties,
