Michael Chabon

We half-dressed and sat on separate sides of the windowsill, legs entwined, watching the street for the appearance of the pizza man.

“I’ve been walking a lot, Art,” she said, running a finger down my shin. “Very long walks, since—since our problems. Sometimes it helps me figure things out. Sometimes I just go and go without a single thought in my head.”

“Alone?” I said. It was difficult to imagine Phlox setting out for a long excursion, or for anything at all, all by herself.

“Yes, alone. I’ve gotten much better at being alone lately.”

“It’s only been ten days, Phlox. You keep making it sound like I’ve been off sailing around the Horn.”

“Well, I’m not good at being alone. It was a long ten days.”

She looked away, pretending to watch two hopping robins down on the little lawn, though at first I didn’t see that she was just pretending. At first I saw only her profile, that outline I knew so well, and the dim light falling past it to her ear, the mass of familiar shadows and glints, the darkness along the side of her straight nose, the tiny lights in the hairs of her upper lip, and it pleased me, as it always did, her profile, so that I was impelled now to look more closely, to toss my gaze quickly across it as across a painting reproduced in an artbook, to try to see the whole and its parts at the same time, to bear in mind the regular profile but remark the Egyptian effect of her slightly pointed chin, the fine join of earlobe and jaw, the bone beneath her eye, and as I looked, it was no longer a profile, for profiles, really, don’t exist; it was Phlox’s face; and I had loved it. And then, suddenly, I saw motion, the tightening of her lower lip, the flaring of her nostril, the tears that dwindled down her cheek, and I saw that she pretended to look down at the birds in the grass.

When we went to bed that night it was loud and fast again, again she took control, and I found myself, inevitably perhaps, crouching on my elbows and knees—that way; I twisted and buried my face. She said, then, in an odd, clear voice which cut through everything, that she wished she could fuck me, that there must be a way, and something very primitive deep inside me awoke with a start. I rolled over, panting, but came to a definite halt. Phlox began to sob, and I wondered, unclenching my fists, if she was crying because the thing she’d wished for had frightened her, or because she could not have it, or if it was because she knew, now, that she could have it, because somehow I had been changed.

“I didn’t mean it,” she said, tumbling over onto the bed.

“All right,” I said. I knelt beside her, ran my fingers through her faded hair. I said things that I forgot as soon as I said them. In ten minutes we were going at it again, and although I’d wanted it to be more gentle this time, had wanted to embrace, to linger, in no time at all it was exactly like wrestling; we bit and exclaimed, and I found myself twisting her into the pose I’d held just a little while before. I stared all the way down her glistening back to the tangle of her distant head.

“Can I?” I said.

“Do you want to?”

“Can I?”

“Yes,” she said. “You’d better. Now.”

I went to her cluttered vanity and scooped out a dollop of cold petroleum jelly, prepared everything Arthur had trained me so well to prepare, but immediately on entering that pinched, plain orifice of so little character, I lost heart, because I simply could not understand what I was about to do; it was neither backward nor forward, or else it was both at the same time, but it was too confusing for me to desire it anymore, and I said, “It’s all a mistake.”

“It is not,” she said. “Go, ah! go. Slow, baby.” When we were through, and we’d collapsed, she said that it had hurt and it had felt all right, that it was frightening as sex could be, and I said that I knew it. We stopped talking. I felt her grow heavy, heard the slow gathering of her breath. I slipped out of bed and went to find my clothes. Dressing furtively in the darkness, pulling on each sock, I felt very happy, for one instant, as though I were rising at three in the morning for a fishing trip, and there were sandwiches and apples to be packed away. I decided not to leave a note.