I had arrived with my tote bag slipping off my shoulder into the crook of my elbow, my feet not catching up to me yet; my breath not yet caught.
I laugh when you open the door and everything topples. When you look at me I’m not sure you think I’m even pretty, which I can’t help but take note of as I tell you that I love the walls of your stairwell, which are a green that looks much harsher on the way out but right then seemed perfect.
I weigh the probability that anything will ever happen as we walk nervously around your apartment. I pick things up and ask you about them and we share things and dismiss each other and I put my hands in the back pocket of my jeans hoping you don’t look at me and wondering how I will finally leave and if I will ever, ever kiss you. I stare at your bookshelf like a painting at the Met, my head appropriately cocked. You come over and make me nervous and I can’t concentrate on the titles and authors anymore I just stare straight ahead and read the same words again and again. We had both probably anticipated this moment, the evaluation of the bookshelf, an act so familiar by now it becomes a joke but one that cannot be skipped because even as a joke it hasn’t lost its value.
“Do you like Roth or do you hate him for being a misogynist?” you ask as if you’d been waiting to. I think of being home from college for the summer, up in my old room, with a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint and laughing to myself and running downstairs to read bits of it out loud to my mother. But then I worry if that’s not the right answer and I pull my hands out of my pockets and pick up a book and shrug and tell you I don’t look into it that far, just enjoy it, which feels irresponsible and like a huge lie considering the way things were unfolding. But I have said it aloud and so I can’t take it back, only mumble about something else very quickly. You step forward next to me and make a reference to your transparent sentimentalism with Ian McEwan and god knows what and I groan to make you laugh and we do and you are cute again but I don’t know what to do and you lead me into your bedroom to look at more books and we laugh about that, too, but you still worry me, I still wonder how I will leave, what we will say to get there. I want to lie on your bed and face the wall and be near you, anyone.
But not doing that feels like a good choice for both of us. It seems like the right thing, like a decision we will individually look back on and congratulate ourselves about— you with your therapist, maybe; me with my girl friends— I’ll tell the story and feel very mature and new. Maybe things will work out and you’ll think, Oh yes, everything changed when I didn’t kiss that girl that night in my apartment. And I’ll say the same thing but wonder if it was really good decision making or simply fear or simply that you didn’t like me, that you thought I was silly and young and couldn’t look you in the eye.
“Do you drink bourbon?” you had asked me. I had been looking at it on top of your fridge while I talked to you and regretted that no, I did not. I wondered what a braver girl would have said; would have done by now.
“No, do you?” I said.
You smiled and lit up a little and gestured up towards the near-empty bottle and stood up and walked around and said you were starting to think this was a bad idea.
I walked around after you and pointed at two yellow chairs that sat against the wall, facing your piano. I said I liked them and you said they were from France and the 60s and so we sat down in them, as if we were waiting for the dental hygienist to come out and call one of our names.
I felt ugly and we talked about life and I asked you stupid questions while I looked at your cd rack; considered making fun of you for it because what else could I do now? The chairs were metal and vinyl, the kind you would find in an office break room in France in the 60s and we were separated by the bathroom door, and when things went well we both leaned our heads back on the respective sides of the door jam, facing each other a little. I asked you if you were scared, if you were ever afraid or paralyzed; that your greatest enemy must be yourself. You said that yes, sometimes there was fear, and I loved you for saying that. I would like to sit with a man and repeat back and forth to each other how afraid we are and how okay that is. I’m afraid. Don’t be, but so am I. Or something more closely resembling that I have yet to discover. It was then that I really wished I felt pretty around you, when I looked at the light blonde stubble under your lips. I leaned my head against the door jam, tired. My Keds were pigeon-toed and barely reaching the floor and I felt very young and wondered if maybe we would ever kiss each other some time in the future, since now it seemed we wouldn’t be making any mistakes this time.
I crawled around on your seeming Platonic ideal of a rug and thumbed through books under your chair, leaned on you for a minute and then made a joke about it; sat at your feet and made a joke about that and then laid on my stomach and stared up at your piano, searching for something to bring up, which ended up working out quite well because I asked you what the lights were for and you told me that that little green one in the middle lit up when you had to water it. “You water your piano,” I repeated back. We both laughed and I rolled around on the carpet and there we were, unfolding these narrative details to each other like a game of show and tell, here is something I think you’ll appreciate.
Everything is requisite and self-aware and careful and everything is done with the sense that we could ruin each other. That maybe we already know all of that and we are both very tired and are trying to be better and unsure of what is left?
I listen to the song you told me you thought I’d like a lot now. I do some worrying for you, some thinking about you. And I still have no idea.
