by Ann Packer
I stopped walking, and he stopped, too, and smiled at me.
“I’ll see?” I said. “I’ll see your bedroom?”
He shook his head gravely. “Don’t be offended by the truth, Carrie. That’s an untenable position, don’t you think?”
It was, and it was only a week later that I saw his bedroom, a week later that I stood beside his bed while he unbuttoned the row of tiny buttons down the front of my sweater, methodically, not a touch through the lengthening opening until the whole was undone. But first we walked. Through the teeming East Village; up and down the wide, traffic-clogged avenues; along the grimy, redolent streets of Chinatown. I couldn’t get enough of it, of the crowds, the purposefulness. In Midtown I stared upward and felt awed, filled with vertigo by the clouds rushing between the skyscrapers. The steps into the subway fascinated me, and I asked Kilroy to stop at station after station while I looked down, simultaneously appalled and intrigued by the stench. “Gol-lee,” he said, “we don’t have these in Wisconsin,” but he said it kindly, and I just laughed.
He was a good guide. He pointed out junkies and prostitutes, stockbrokers and undercover cops as if they wore uniforms, as if they held aloft signs only he could see. A good guide but also opinionated: passing restaurants I thought looked interesting, he said, “This is where the hipsters hang out,”
“This is where the media people eat.” Nowhere he’d go, was the implication. We ate in coffee shops, in little dives you’d hardly notice from the outside. He said they were honest.
He lived near McClanahan’s, in a blocky, red-brick apartment building on West 18th Street. His apartment was on the sixth floor, three blank-walled rooms I assumed at first he’d just moved into, there was so little in them. He’d been there for years, though, and there wasn’t a picture in the place, a single knickknack. He had no more furniture than was absolutely necessary, and each piece was spare, purely functional: an unfinished pine bookcase, a futon couch with a plain black cover and no throw pillows, a rectangular wooden table with four folding chairs. There’s a kind of spare you see in magazines that’s studied and elegant, each thing an objet, a strategically placed sculptural vase holding an arrangement of perfect white tulips. Kilroy’s apartment wasn’t like that. It was more as if he were camping there, poised to make a move. When I asked him why the place was so empty, he just laughed.
The bedroom. Box spring on the floor, mattress on the box spring, white sheets on the mattress, white pillows on the sheets. And Kilroy standing in front of me, his fingers just finished with the buttons on my sweater. There’d been a kiss already, or more like four or five, out walking that afternoon, in the elevator, just inside the front door of his apartment. Really one long kiss interrupted by conversation, by the need to keep moving until we were here.
We were here. He kissed me again and then traced a line from my throat to the top of my jeans and back up, to the clasp of my bra. My breasts fell out and he opened his hand to span them, his thumb on one nipple and his little finger on the other, tiny circles and then he stroked down the undercurves.
I tried closing my eyes, but his hands came up to my face, thumbs at my lashes, and I had to look again, had to see that it was he, Kilroy, eyes dark and gray-blue, black-banded, flecked with the color of the sky. His thin lips, the crease at the tip of his nose. His narrow hands and his long fingers, on my shoulders now, pushing the sweater off, the bra straps.
His lips were still cold from outside, late September and windy, like in Madison but also different, a lower, more subversive wind, not your hair but your body, the very center of you. It was touch, touch, slide open, and his tongue on my lower lip, sweeping from side to side.
I had to yank to untuck his shirt, a stiff denim one, one shirttail and then the other, and then the warmth underneath, the hair on his belly and chest, my fingertips plowing through it, raking up and down, around, down into the back of his jeans, tight, all the way down until each hand was full of buttock, my fingers just at the tops of his legs, finding the lines of sweat.
He unbuttoned his own shirt. Tossed it toward the dresser. Held me skin to skin, his hands alive on my back, coming around under my arms, thumbs on my nipples, mouth, mouth, the bed coming up under me, zippers, jeans, and then suddenly the room, the apartment, the world, my face in my hands.
And his hand on my face, his eyes on my eyes, asking: Are you OK?
I was. I pulled the sheet aside, the we’re doing this of it, sweeping the thing out of the way. And I closed my eyes and felt him hard against my leg, the satiny softness of it, against my thigh, pushing to get in, and then it was this, yes: familiar and strange, old and new, me and not me.
CHAPTER 16
It was all I wanted to do. Morning and night, at dusk when he’d just gotten home from work, early on a weekend afternoon. I came up behind him and circled his waist with my arms, then slid my hands down the front of his pants. He was at the sink washing dishes when I did this, or he was on his couch and I went straight for his crotch, kneading the front of his jeans until he was so swollen I had to press myself against him, right then.
He kissed me on my lower back, on the sweaty creases under my breasts, in a line from my shin to my inner thigh. “What are you thinking?” I’d whisper half into sleep, and his index finger would stroke so slowly down my belly that I’d be wet when it got to me, wet and ready for him.
His mouth there. His tongue reading me like Braille, like he didn’t want to miss a word. Mike—well, he’d been reluctant. On my birthday, maybe after we’d fought. For a special occasion, a contribution to an annual fund—there’s money in the bank. But not because he wanted to.
Kilroy wanted to. The first time I tensed up, guarded, thinking Don’t, wanting to say he didn’t have to, but one hand stroked my thigh reassuringly while his tongue lazed along, and I let go of the clenched muscles and turned inward, and something that was half scream and half moan came together and started toward my vocal cords, but so slowly the wait itself was worth a scream, a long, rising scream barely heard from over a distant horizon, and then louder, and louder.
It was fierce between us sometimes, his stubbly face abrading mine, times when I just wanted him to fuck me. Other times it would go on so long I’d start to hyperventilate, this tingling on my cheeks, my forearms. What are we doing? I’d want to know. Who are you, what is this? He’d respond by pushing my head downward, my tongue swiping his furry chest until my face was at his erection and I didn’t know what to do because I wanted to rub him against my ears and over my eyelids, and I wanted to burrow deeper into his smell, and I wanted him forcing my mouth open wider than it could go—and I wanted it all at once.
Outside his apartment we hardly touched. No holding hands on the street, no legs coming together under restaurant tables. If we were meeting at McClanahan’s we met without a kiss, so that it all stayed in the air between us, ignitable but not ignited.
The world was different because of this. The sky was a blue I’d never seen before, hard and cold, with edges that could cut. Smells emanating from restaurants attached themselves to individual ingredients with startling specificity: melted butter, grilling lamb, cumin in tomatoes, cilantro, frying salmon. From the jukebox at McClanahan’s I heard the line of a guitar lift itself from the surface of a song and then settle down again. I wondered if this was what the beginning of crazy felt like. And then Kilroy would say something bland and vaguely cynical, and it would reel me back in to where I was steady again.
We were at McClanahan’s a lot, drinking beers at a table near the back, or sitting at the bar when the place wasn’t so crowded, Kilroy saying, “That guy needs an appointment at a methadone clinic yesterday,” or “Watch, now she’s going to tilt her head sideways so her diamond earring will show”—and she, whoever she was, would do just that.
“You’re an observer, aren’t you?” I said one evening. “You should be a journalist. Go around with a little tape recorder you’d talk into. Then you could write these reports abo
ut, you know, life in the city.”
It was noisy, so we were leaning forward to talk. Sitting at the back of the bar near the pool table, curved glasses of pale beer on the table between us. Kilroy ran a finger down the side of his, leaving a trailmark in the condensation. He shook his head, but with a smile. “See, there it is right there.”
“What?”
“The pernicious little idea that who you are should determine something as trivial as what you do for a living.”
“As trivial?”
He shook his head again. “Life’s not like that. It’s not that malleable. It’s not that neat.” He lifted his beer and took a long drink, then wiped the cuff of his sweatshirt across his mouth. “With that theory you’d have to be one of those career graduate students, going from Ph.D. to Ph.D.”
I laughed. “What’s that supposed to mean, I’m a nerd?”
“I was referring to your inquisitiveness.”
My face warmed, and I looked away. The night before, I’d gotten going with questions. We were in bed, entwined after sex, and I’d asked about his last girlfriend: who, how long, what happened. And he became—well, not huffy, but cool. Or not even cool so much as absent. It was like he suddenly wasn’t there. We were lying so close I could feel his heartbeat, but he himself slipped away. The monosyllabic answers he gave were deflections, offered up by someone else, Kilroy 2, a stand-in.
Now, in McClanahan’s, I felt his eyes on me. I was looking to the side. I watched a guy in a blue-and-white striped dress shirt moving around the pool table. He gathered the balls from a low shelf and began arranging them in a plastic triangle. Something about him …
“Hey,” Kilroy said. “I’m not complaining.”
I turned back and stared into his face, his eyes tight on mine. He was, of course, but maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe not knowing didn’t matter. I said, “Not too grumpily, anyway.”
He smiled and lifted his beer again to drink. After a moment he turned and watched the pool table. The guy had lifted off the triangle and was getting ready to break. His opponent stood off to the side, his cue standing upright next to him. He wore a dress shirt, too, but he was smaller, closer to Kilroy’s size, while the first guy …
He had Mike’s shoulders, that was it. The exact span of them, their girth in a dress shirt. He looked nothing like Mike—older, balding, with a long, olive-complected face—but the shoulders … My God, my God. I was dizzy suddenly, queasy with remorse.
Kilroy coughed. “I think tonight’s the night.”
I turned back and found him studying me curiously, eyes narrowed, head tipped slightly to the side. He knew something had happened.
“I don’t know what I’ve been thinking, waiting so long,” he went on. Then he smiled. “Well, maybe it’s that I haven’t been thinking.”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“Your first pool lesson, of course.” He extended his left hand out in front of him with his forefinger curled, drew his right hand close to his side, and mimed a shot. “What do you say—you up for it? Not to put any pressure on you or anything.”
I shrugged. I felt torn, half in the moment and half back in the anguish of seeing Mike’s shoulders in another man’s shirt. Mike’s old shoulders. It was wrong to be having a conversation at this moment, yet the fact that I was here, in this bar, in this city with another man—how much more wrong was that?
Kilroy raised his eyebrows. “Well? Want to give it a try?”
“I guess.”
He sat still for another moment, looking at me, then he stood up, fished some change from his pocket, and went over to the table. With the men watching, he set two quarters on the edge of the pool table, then another two right next to them.
“What was that all about?”
He eased back into his chair. “I’ll play the winner and then you’ll challenge me.”
“I’ll challenge you?”
“Pool has its protocol, just like everything else.”
“What if you don’t win?”
He grinned. “I’ll win. Those guys have hardly played at all since college, when they used to goof around on the table in the rec room of their frat house.”
I laughed. “Now you’re making assumptions. Maybe they didn’t go to college, let alone belong to frats.”
“Right,” he said with a snort. “They’re dressed like that for their jobs selling hotdogs at Nathan’s.” He shook his head. “They graduated from college within the last five years and now they work on Wall Street or I’m—” He broke into a grin. “Or I do.”
“The least likely thing in the world?”
“Pretty close.”
We turned sideways in our chairs and watched the men play. The smaller one bent over and sized up a shot, the solid red ball just in front of a corner pocket. An old Propane Cupid song came on the jukebox, and I waited for the part I liked: Riding a Greyhound to L.A., passed your picture on a billboard. You’re not—ready. You’re not—ready for me. What was I distressed about? Mike, yes, but more: over the pool table a bright pendant lamp shone on the deep green felt, and I dreaded standing in its light.
“Hey, not to worry,” Kilroy said.
I turned, and he was watching me with the same curious, narrow-eyed look.
“Are you worried?”
I lifted a shoulder.
“You’re going to do very well.”
“You seem awfully sure.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re one of those fetching small-town girls who’s full of surprises.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Is that what you think of me?”
“As if I’d tell you.”
“Now you have to.”
He raised his eyebrows briefly and then looked away, his nose in profile coming to a sharp point. My mouth was dry, and I took a sip of beer. I glanced over at the pool table: the men were almost done, just two balls left.
“It’s a city,” I said. “Of over a hundred thousand people.”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, you’re still a fetching small-town girl. That milky-skin thing you’ve got going confirms it.” He grinned. “Oh, and lean forward a sec, there’s a little straw in your hair.” He reached across the table and pretended to pluck something from behind my ear, and the edge of his hand brushed the side of my face, suddenly electric.
The men were done. We looked at each other for a long moment, and then Kilroy got up and went over. I watched as he slid his first two quarters into a little metal drawer on the pool table, pushed it in, then fished the balls into the plastic triangle. He spoke to the tall guy, but it was too noisy for me to hear. It was a noisy, noisy bar in the middle of Manhattan. I was sitting at a table watching my lover play pool.
The game passed quickly, Kilroy moving around knocking ball after ball into pocket after pocket. When they were done he offered the guy his hand, and they shook.
I set my beer down and stood up. Why was I pretending to be interested in playing pool when I’d passed up hundreds of opportunities at home? Actually, I was interested. I was more than interested—I wanted to shoot one ball home after another, I wanted to astonish him.
“Are you going to get a cue?” he said.
“Yes.”
I went over to the wall and looked at the cues hanging there, finally choosing one at random. Its heft was unfamiliar: all awkward, unbalanced length, the wide end so much heavier than the narrow. I found a cube of chalk and rubbed it against the tip, then turned back to the table.
“OK,” he said, “I’ll break, then we’ll ignore the rules and you can just try shooting for a while.”
He made his way to the far end of the table, drew his cue back, and sent the white ball racing toward the triangle of colored balls, which broke apart with a satisfying knockknockknock. The green one slid into a corner pocket, and he looked up and smiled at me. “Go for it.”
The yellow stripe was halfway betw
een the white ball and one of the side pockets. I bent over the table. I liked the idea of the little guide Kilroy had made with his forefinger, to slide his cue through. I curled mine and got the cue situated, then practiced drawing it back a few times, aware of Kilroy’s eyes on me. At last I took a breath and fired, so off the mark that the white ball twisted back and stopped closer to me than it had started.
“Shit.”
He came around the table and stood next to me. “You have an idea what it’s supposed to look like, but you’re not quite looking at it. Here, let’s try something.”
He moved the yellow stripe out of the way, then stationed the white ball so it had a free path to the far end of the table. “Just work on hitting it, forget about making it hit another ball. Think of the cue as an extension of your arm.”
I moved closer to the table and leaned over. I lined the stick up and did the drawing-it-back thing again, but this time I focused on the ball. I poked it with what I was sure was insufficient force, and it rolled away from me and knocked smartly against the opposite edge.
We repeated this several times, and then he started setting up shots for me: angleless shots that should have been easy but weren’t.
I was about to shoot when a guy with a goatee came over and set a pair of quarters on the table.
I looked up at Kilroy. “Uh-oh. What’s the protocol now?”
He turned to the guy. “You have someone you want to play with?”
The guy shrugged. “Yeah. Whatever.”
Kilroy tilted his head toward me. “I’m giving my lady a lesson right now. Give us a little more messing-around time and then the table’s all yours.”
“OK.”
The guy walked away, and Kilroy turned to face me. “Go ahead,” he said, but my heart was pounding.
“You called me your lady.”
A smile lifted the corners of his mouth, and I felt my mouth twist into a smile, a question, I wasn’t sure. Say something, I thought at him. Say something.
