I tell him about the chair. “Do you think your friend would still want it?” I say. “Now let me think, who was that . . . Charlotte?” “I don’t know if I ever knew her name,” I say. “Yeah, it was Charlotte. I haven’t seen her in a minute,” he says. “I could track her down, but I don’t think she’d want to hear from me. They come and they go, you know.” “Yes,” I say. This is the part I understand perfectly. (But am I a Charlotte? Or an Alonzo? Probably just an Andrea.) “Anyway I can take it off your hands,” he says. “I can probably sell it if it’s in good condition and all.” “It’s just been sitting here,” I say. “Still intact.” “I’ll give you fifty bucks for it,” he says. “Fine,” I say. “Just take it.” He tells me he’s up in the Bronx, but he can get to Brooklyn after eight. I sit and drink the last of the wine until he knocks on my door.
“That’s the chair all right,” he says when he walks into the apartment. He runs his hand across the back of it. “Good as new,” he says. “Some wear and tear,” I admit. He pulls a billfold out of his pocket. The wad of cash is massive. “Honestly, I’d pay you fifty bucks to take it away,” I say. “I don’t ever want to see it again.” I think: What’s happening now? Oh, am I crying? I am. I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “You know what, honey, how about we do a trade instead?” he says.
He asks me to sit in the chair, and I do, gingerly, and then he rubs his hands together and closes his eyes, and then he tells me to close my eyes, and I do that, too. Then he takes his hands, which are warm, nearly hot, and places them on my leg for a while, and then on my arm, and then on my heart, and we talk while he does this, he asks me about my mother and my father and my brother, mostly about my mother, because he’s fond of her, and then we talk about me, how old I am, what I do for a living, what makes me sad, what makes me happy, and I have a hard time answering these last two questions, I can’t even remember the truth half the time, but as we discuss it, I start to feel a ball of heat gathering in my chest, above my breasts, just beneath my clavicle, and I hear Alonzo mutter, “There it is.” Just when I think it can’t get any hotter, the ball in my chest begins to recede, but only ever so slightly; still there is a distinct recession, and Alonzo pulls his hands away from my chest.
“I’m tired,” I say. “I bet you are,” he says. “You got a lot going on in there. I suggest you get it looked at a little more regularly. I’d do it but I don’t come cheap,” he says. “And I can’t be coming from the Bronx all the time. You should find someone local.” We embrace, and then he takes the chair and the ottoman and leaves.
I watch him out the window on the street below. He lifts both pieces handily, as if they are feather light. He never needed Charlotte in the first place, I realize.
The next day I call a therapist. I see her a week later. I have been in therapy ever since. Eight years, I can’t tell you if I’ve healed at all. If the pain Alonzo sensed that day under my skin has shrunk one bit. I like to think the swelling has gone down, and the heat has cooled. I like to think I’m better now. But most days I can’t see through the pain to the truth.
Chloe
We meet at a mutual friend’s barbecue, Baron and I. Our mutual friend’s name is Deb, and she had told me in advance to look out for him. “Newly single,” she had texted. “Like newly newly.” “Fresh out of the womb,” I texted back. “Successful, creative, smart,” she texted. “A catch,” I texted. “In a year he’ll be a catch,” she texted. “Right now he’s a good time.” “Am I not good enough for a catch?” I texted. She didn’t text back for six hours. “Sorry,” she texted. “Work.” There was another pause. “Am I mistaken that you want to have a good time?” she texted. I had wanted to argue so badly but I couldn’t.
Baron and I have an extremely long conversation about potato salad because Deb has made two kinds of potato salad, the creamy kind and the vinegary kind. It’s a dumb, jokey conversation, kind of worthless actually, but he looks at me with obvious interest and desire. I get a little hot in my pants. He has a shaved head, the early male-pattern-baldness shave. He cleans his glasses a lot, and I point this out and he shrugs and says, “I can’t stand fingerprints.” I take his glasses from him, breathe on them, and wipe them on the end of my silky shirt. “Like new,” I say, and hand them back. “You’re helpful,” he says. At some point in the conversation we realize we live ten blocks from each other. “Convenient,” I say and grin.
Deb lives in a garden apartment, and there are children running in and out of the garden and the apartment, and one of them screeches and I shudder. “Children, ugh,” I say. “I have a child,” Baron says. “Just because I don’t like children doesn’t mean I can’t like you,” I say, and I touch his arm, and feel like both a failure and a success at the same time because even though I have already fucked this up, I was probably supposed to anyway.
Two normal people walk away from each other right then and there, but instead he gives me a ride home and parks in front of a fire hydrant on my street and then we make out in the front seat of his car, while I ignore the presence of the child seat in the back. He’s really aggressive, tongue in the mouth, ear, throat, squeezing my breasts hard through my blouse. I’m both mortified and aroused. I put my hand on his dick through his pants and he stops and says, “You’re the first person I’ve been with besides my ex-wife in twelve years.” I say, “Whoa, that’s a lot for a first date,” and he says, “This wasn’t a date,” and I feel suddenly hoarse and damaged. “OK,” I say. “I’m done.” I put my hand on the door, but I give him a few seconds to apologize, which he does. He says, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know if I’m coming or going. I’m having every emotion at once.” He takes my hand and kisses it. “You’re beautiful,” he says. “You’re beautiful and sexy and you should let me take you out and we’ll do this right.”
“Toxic,” says my coworker Nina on Monday morning. “Drop him immediately.”
He texts me on Wednesday and asks if I want to have dinner with him on Friday night. I say I have plans because I’m trying to play hard to get, which has absolutely never worked for me in my entire life. He says he can’t see me on Saturday because he has his daughter that night. I fold instantly. “I’ll move something around,” I say. We pick a restaurant in the neighborhood, but it is a pretense because we both know what is going to happen. We’ve been texting about the things we’re going to do to each other for days. It’s terrible, and it’s all I want.