My boyfriend liked bleeps and bloops and pings and spaces. I felt coarse, paying attention to the lyrics. His music transcended the body.
He sent me a quote he liked by Camus:
“Charm is getting the answer 'yes' without having asked a question.”
I’d never had that kind of charm. I asked a lot of questions.
I wanted more yeses.
So I replied to the ending of things, a year early.
Friend
He had a friend named Charles who rarely talked about girls, and whose face reminded me of someone else, a friend of a friend from college, a guy who once told me how much he liked Bridget Fonda. “She smart, she’s pretty, she’s fit,” he’d said.
I asked Jeremy if he thought Charles was gay. He shrugged. He said Charles liked Tina Fey.
I asked Jeremy who he liked when he was younger. He thought for a little while.
“I liked Bridget Fonda,” he said.
I’d never expected the half-story to find its conclusion, a dormant punch line, unresolved.
Coolness
Jeremy was a cool guy.
Glacial, perhaps, in temperature, temperament and emotional speed.
Like a glacier in every metaphorical way.
Light
Three times I should have known to let go:
I asked him for a cigarette and he handed it to me. I asked him for a light and he slid the lighter across the table.
I asked him for a cigarette and held it in my hand. The female bartender lit it. I said, “The bartender lit my cigarette.” He said, “Cool.”
We both had cigarettes in our mouths. He lit his first.
Nipple
It started to ache once the cold air hit, the remnant of a piercing, invisible, unfelt for seven years. A flaring and contracting pulse, up-and-down, seasick. Not unfamiliar.
An itch inside a shoe.
I imagined myself an old woman, who would know by a twinge in her nipple that it was about to rain.
Meteor Shower
Tonight was payday, jackpot, but slow and ephemeral, flares and lasting tails. Delicate trails. The earth spun, passing through a field of debris that ignited on contact. The sky was alive.
We didn’t use the picnic blanket.
Jeremy kept his hand in his pocket.
My nipple made slow, chronic fists.
Feet
I woke up early and walked through the living room, pet Jeremy’s cat.
Charles was sleeping in his boots, feet off the edge of the couch, weighted. He held some tension in his eyebrows.
I unlaced a boot, loosening the tongue. Slid it off. He flinched without waking.
I undid the second. He yanked his foot back and awoke with a “huh.”
“Sorry, sorry,” I whispered, and went back to bed.
Next Day
“You took off his boots?” Jeremy asked from bed, while I laced mine up.
“He was sleeping in them.”
“If someone took off my shoes while I was sleeping,” he said, looking at the ceiling.
Later I asked him why he didn’t touch me on the roof. We broke up.
I walked in a daze to the subway, carrying the blanket in a paper shopping bag.
Table
The few hours on the phone provided heated, much-needed psychotherapy for Jeremy.
Once our talks cooled we met for drinks now and then, telling each other about our lives and the people we used to know, as if through a glass partition.
Three Years Later
I still saw Jeremy sometimes, but never Charles.
Then I ran into them at a club.
Charles hugged me and I hugged him back. “You look great,” he said.
I smiled.
“When was the last time I saw you?”
“The meteor shower.”
“That’s right … and you took off my boots.”
A deep release,
a warm, liquid feeling in my heart.
An avalanche had buried his boots years ago.
“Oh,” I said. “Jeremy thought I was weird for doing that.”
“It was the sweetest thing anyone ever did for me.”
