The magician was too big and too good for the club, but I loved watching him work. There were seventy-five or so people scattered around the small tables, but there was room for at least twice that many. I hoped for his sake that his next show was sold out. The performer almost—though not quite—took my mind off the desire the alcohol had unleashed. I felt myself starting to sober up, and I didn’t want to, and so I ordered a glass of wine, and then another one after that. I kept Gavin’s hand in mine as the performer chewed up and swallowed Canadian and American paper money and restored the bills in the different owners’ wallets, and as he put an ice pick through his forearm. I only released Gavin’s fingers when we would applaud, which we did a lot. The guy was good. Inspiring. I knew how he did about two-thirds of his show, and probably could add half of that to my repertoire if I wanted. But it would take a lot of work and a lot of practice.
When we were walking to the parking garage, while Gavin was telling me that he still preferred watching Jasmine perform, I interrupted him. “I don’t want to go home tonight,” I said.
“Well, if you do go home, I’m driving you. There is no way I’m allowing you behind the wheel of a car.”
I had hooked my arm through his, and now I stopped him in his tracks. “No, I wasn’t just wishing or worrying about having had too much wine.” I repeated myself, speaking as clearly as I could: “I don’t want to go home tonight. I want to be with you.”
He gazed down at me for a long moment and then, as I knew he would, he kissed me. He put his hands on the small of my back and pulled me against him there on the street and—his face almost grave, I thought before I closed my eyes—bent down and pressed his lips against mine, and the world around me went quiet. Except for my heart. When I opened my mouth and felt his tongue (a tentative probe at first, but then it was mirroring my own wanton playfulness and need), I heard my heart in my head. An idea came to me: This is why I am here. This was meant to be. This is really why I stayed home in Vermont.
And yet we didn’t make love that night.
I awoke alone in the morning beneath a quilt in his bed. At least I presumed it was his bed. I discovered I was still in my dress. I was still wearing my bra. My underwear.
My head was throbbing and my breath was toxic, even to myself, and I lay with my brow burrowed deep into the pillow, astonished at the disabling spikes of pain that accompanied just rolling my eyeballs. How was that even possible? Carefully I rubbed at my temples and pieced together what had happened after I had climbed into Gavin’s car. Mostly, I realized, I had slept. I had fallen asleep—passed out, if I was going to be precise—and slept all the way home. Here. Not home. Here. I vaguely recalled parking in Burlington and the elevator to his apartment. The paneling on the elevator walls and the bronze plate from another era with the numbers for the floors. I called home, expecting I would just leave a message on the answering machine, but of course my father had picked up. I had lied—badly, I presumed—that I was safely at my friend’s family’s house in Montpelier. Had he said he was just glad I was safe? I thought so, but the whole conversation was fuzzy.
I saw on the clock on the nightstand that it was already noon and felt a deep stab of remorse. Serious guilt. I remembered my vow to smoke less dope, and told myself that white wine and pear mojitos were ill-advised substitutes. In a heartbeat I would have traded the superfund cleanup site that once was my tongue for mere cottonmouth. I took a deep breath to steel myself against the pain that loomed and then sat up in bed. Gingerly, with the care of the oldest woman in the world—in my mind I saw a shriveled but beatific woman eating yogurt in the Caucasus—I swung my legs onto the hardwood floor and looked around. I saw my handbag beside the nightstand and pulled it toward me with my foot because I was afraid to bend over. I reached for my compact and looked at myself in the mirror, assessing the damage. I guessed I had looked worse, but probably not by much. I popped a couple of Altoids into my mouth.