Instead I usually sit in the chair by the window, feet up on the sill. I stare out at the building next to mine, the half dozen trees on the street below, spurting forth from the concrete, the fire hydrant, the double-parked cars, the deli on the corner, the one where the counter guy thinks I’m cute, but not fuckable. He told me this one night: “You look too wholesome,” he said, “those chubby cheeks,” and I thought, Brother, are you wrong. You don’t know anything about me and my leather couch.
There are framed something or others on my wall. Pictures of pictures. Flowers, sunsets. A step above a dentist’s office, a step below a therapist’s office. I know I’m weak. I bought them because I thought I was supposed to. My true love is my book collection, that’s why I rented this place. Built-in bookshelves, floor to ceiling, head to toe, stacked with everything I ever bought and never sold: biology textbooks from college and graduate school that I can’t seem to sell or give away, so I hold on to them as a reminder that I am smart; collections of entire science-fiction series; books with faraway gnomes and fairies—it’s weird, I know, but my sophomore-year roommate got me hooked on the stuff fifteen years ago, and I haven’t been able to stop. I like going to those faraway lands; I like it when there are new words to learn, new cultures to understand, all vaguely like my own, at least metaphorically, but somehow different, more freakish, outlandish, whimsical yet dark. I reread some of these books at least once a year, take myself to that place again.
My books fill me. Just not enough.
AT LAST, a flash of fresh hope on the screen, a new message for me from a man on the Lower East Side who looks just like all the boys before him, young and wiry, sideburns like strips of bacon, long and unshapely, an inch of buzzed hair around his head, pulling back on his forehead in echo of a grandfather or a great-uncle, and two earrings in the upper right-hand corner of his ear. Two entirely gay earrings. But I know they’re not supposed to be gay because, look right there, there on his profile, it says, “Straight,” right above “Play.” And I read his e-mail, which gently suggests that the red, red lips of my profile picture would look even better around the tip of his cock.
It’s on. I am so troubled. And it is on.
I LIKE FINDING a new boy each time, I admit this. Uncovering a new treasure. And in the minutes between my sending him my address and his hopping in a cab and heading to my apartment, I am anxious and excited, as if I am waiting to hear about important, potentially good news. Not that I get a lot of good news these days. I don’t get bad news, either. I am just treading water. Occasionally, on nights like tonight, I create my own news.
While I wait, I bite my nails, so raw and ragged, and then I realize I’ve been sweating for the last hour, chardonnay seeping out of my pores, and I’ve been ignoring it out of laziness. But now it’s time to pretty myself for my latest suitor. In the bathroom I drop my robe to the floor, stumble into the shower, catching my foot on the curtain (I am drunker than I originally thought), and crank on the water.
Even though I shaved yesterday, I start shaving my legs all over again and under my arms, and while we’re at it, why not hike up that bikini line? I soap myself all over, every pore, every crevice, scrub my face with a fancy grapefruit scrub my sister got me last year for Christmas, which I never use (She is always getting me things I don’t need, spending her husband’s money on products. God, so many products. She’ll try anything once, or make you try it anyway) except when I feel like I’m supposed to, like on nights like this. I want everything to be glowing and pink, create a remarkable image for the man between my legs that night, so that he’ll remember the experience fondly when he’s jerking off a week later before he has dinner with his ex-girlfriend from college. Look how far he’s come. He can get laid anytime he wants. With a pretty, pink, slightly older weird woman from the Upper West Side.
I also do this in hopes of some sort of karmic retribution, that he, too, is standing in a shower, perhaps a dingy stall in a shitty studio apartment, making himself nice and clean for me.
HIS LAST E-MAIL said, “Leaving now,” an hour ago. He was supposed to take a cab. Maybe he took a subway. Maybe that’s why he’s late. He should have been here in a half hour at the most in a cab. There’s no traffic this late. He would have come up Broadway. Maybe the West Side Highway.
I pour another glass of wine, the last in the bottle. Maybe it is the chardonnay. Maybe it has nothing to do with my father or my failed relationships or the isolation of urban life. Maybe it is just the chardonnay.