The thing about married men is they are never available when you need them.
When my father was still alive, in November, I met Lucas for the first time. From the start, it felt deeper than it had with other men, and deeper than sex. The day that my Sri Lanka article was published, he’d texted me to say he liked it. Then I noticed a strange comment on the Apogee website. One thing you quickly learn as a journalist, especially a female journalist, is not to read the comments on your articles. Rarely is it productive to see the bottom feeders of the internet issue their provocations.
I’d written an article that day about Senate Democrats struggling to renew the Violence Against Women Act, which funded domestic-violence prevention and support programs. Conservatives were largely opposed. I’d gotten a tip that a group of Republican senators were working on a ridiculous amendment to the bill, designed to create a stranglehold over progress so the legislation would stall; apparently they were taking meetings with men’s rights activists. I was a tiny bit proud of the connection I’d made, a link that no one else seemed to be writing about. Jane didn’t usually put me on political stories, so I felt I’d been tested and done well. Maybe that was why I broke my own rule and scrolled down to see the comments: Liar, whore, Satan-lover, you deserve to be raped, I shud rape ur fat ass. Toward the bottom there was something different: Appreciate the multifaceted reporting on this critical bill. This reporter called out people who deserve to be called out. Well done. It was posted by someone identified as ColomboFan. The back of my neck shivered. It was him!
It was a Wednesday evening, and I was supposed to play poker with a bunch of male science reporters at the National Press Club. Someone had added me to a Facebook group for science and environmental journalists, and the poker night gave me an opportunity to network without having to make small talk. Flying high from what I assumed was a comment from Lucas, I played a few hands, drank two beers. I was seated next to one guy from the New York Times science section, in town for a conference, and another from Biology magazine, both of whom eyed me with the kind of generic interest most young heterosexual men evinced when there was only one woman in the room. That was the case with the handful of men I’d dated in college; all of them wanted a girlfriend, none of them wanted me.
Still, I checked out the dude from Biology. He had a membership to the National Press Club, an institution that was as shambolic and venerable as journalism itself. He would pay the members-only price for the chicken club sandwich. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Lucas Ataide, comparing the sparks I’d felt between us on the phone with what was currently in front of me: a pile of American flag–colored poker chips and a reporter whose idea of a fun evening was getting one more flush than Reuters.
After a few hours, I called it quits, leaving the male reporters to their long night of saying the things they really wanted to say but couldn’t when a woman was around. Outside, I unlocked my bike from the heavy metal grate surrounding the Press Club’s sculpted green bushes. During the day, two million people swarmed to D.C. from the suburbs, filling the Metro seats and sliding their cars along the Beltway for seven and a half hours of tepid governance. But at night downtown felt like mine alone. I’d always loved staying up late—the night and its dreaminess suited me. All the stately marble buildings nearby—the White House, the Wilson Building, the Department of Commerce—were lit up in gold spotlights, showing off for an audience of no one. It was one kind of distinctly American boasting. Show, not substance.
I mangled a bobby pin into my hair and put on my bike helmet. Riding at night through empty streets was magical, cajoling me to boldness. I felt a thrum between my legs, thinking of ColomboFan. I’d spent some time googling him, looking at his professional photos, his close-lipped, slightly mischievous expression. I had googled every combination of “Lucas Ataide” and “wife” and “girlfriend,” I could think of. “Boyfriend.” There was nothing. His Twitter account was purely work related—links to papers he’d written, articles he wanted to share. Still, I’d scrolled through hundreds of tweets, looking for selfies or mentions of family, but there weren’t even any artful pictures of shadows or coffee mugs or windswept fields. Who didn’t post personal things to social media? I already felt this was sexy, superior. I glided north to K Street, turning at McPherson Square, where Occupy tents were huddled. Mal and Adrian had been going to protests all fall. Mal said that Occupy brought collective rage into the streets.
It was quickly becoming clear to me that in D.C. there was the mostly white professional class who moved to the city from elsewhere, shopped at Whole Foods, and sent their kids to private school, on their way up and out to the suburbs, and then there were the Black families who were longtime residents, deeply connected to the history of the city, often in poorer neighborhoods where children were enrolled in some of the worst schools in the nation. Segregation between the two populations was near complete. Young people like my housemates and me, transplants from elsewhere, who’d come to D.C. for the jobs and opportunities, were riding an elevator into that professional class. Mal said this was why we had an obligation to step up, to protest and to organize. I had been meaning to go with her to Occupy, but I’d just started at Apogee, and my hours were overwhelming. Plus, if I was being honest, I felt uncool compared to the protesters—their perfectly ripped black jeans, bold eyeliner, sticklike bodies, cardboard signs. I was already too establishment for them, I thought, drawing a paycheck from a journalist start-up, lusting after a man who worked at a think tank. Mal would have scoffed at this and found some way to make me feel included. But feeling like an outsider, I was realizing, was my specialty.
All of this faded as I pedaled, crafting the perfect text message to Lucas Ataide in my mind. I was riding through the hub of D.C.’s elite, a street packed with office buildings, take-out salad places crammed into every storefront. On K and 17th, I stopped beneath a concrete building with tinted black windows. I knew from my internet stalking that the Council on Asiatic and Pacific Interests, CAPI, was on the fourth floor. I got off my bike and agitated my phone, scrolling until I found his text. Not bad for an article about Kuala Lumpur, he’d written four days before. I’d texted a brief thank-you, hoping the conversation would continue. It hadn’t, but then today there was the post from ColomboFan. Now I typed another message. Why not, I told myself. He could always ignore it, delete the message, refuse to see the subtext. Coming home from poker at the national press club and passing CAPI made me wonder if you’re still there, correctly identifying Asian capitals
I wouldn’t get a response. Still, I felt relieved. At least now I’d done something; I’d know if the flirtation I sensed on the phone was real. I stood for a moment on the sidewalk, watching a water bug crawl up from between the bricks. D.C. was like that. You were always one step away from a cockroach. I glanced down at my phone and felt a rush of shock as three blinking dots appeared in the text chain—Lucas was typing a response. I watched the dots disappear and then reappear. Then disappear again. I realized I was holding my breath.
My phone bleated.
I actually AM still at work. Poker, huh?
Do you want to take a walk? I wrote back, in a blaze of excitement. It had been real. It was real. As I took off my bike helmet, I examined the steak restaurant across the street, the green awning with white letters announcing to D.C. think-tank types that this was where they could come after work, loosen their ties over oysters and tenderloin. Was this where Lucas Ataide relaxed? I hoped not. He seemed too sophisticated to frequent such an obvious and bland place. In a car window I glanced at my reflection, ran my fingers through my hair. I looked flushed from exertion and a little orange in the streetlight. I almost turned sideways but decided against it, since turning sideways in mirrors, no matter how often I did it, had never resulted in my stomach looking flat. What if Lucas found me fat or unattractive? What if I saw dissatisfaction in his eyes when he looked at me for the first time? It was like my mother always said: “If you’d just lose some weight, you could enjoy your young body.” What she meant was that if I lost weight, men could enjoy my young body. I never questioned why she would think about someone else’s ability to sexualize me.
Revolving doors swooshed somewhere over my left shoulder. I turned around slowly, but there was no way to seem nonchalant—it was nine o’clock on a Tuesday night and I had texted Lucas from outside his office building.
“Oh, hey.” I laughed nervously. “I guess you exist outside the phone.”
He laughed too. “How are you?”
We shook hands over my handlebars. He had academic hands—warm and soft. He wore a slim gold band on his ring finger. I tried not to stare. The combination of arousal and disappointment writhed in me.
“To be clear, it’s for the glory, not the money,” I said.
He seemed slightly startled.
“Poker,” I said.
He laughed again. His deep-set brown eyes looked kind, quizzical, calmly assessing. So far, I thought his assessment was positive. He did not seem put off by my forwardness. He did not seem disappointed by the fact that I was the kind of person in the department-store dressing room who always required the saleswoman to find her a bigger size. Though he hadn’t checked me out either—his eyes hadn’t left my face.
We kept my bike between us as we walked. The ticking of the spokes forced a rhythm to our steps. He was born in São Paulo, he told me, but had grown up all over because his father was a diplomat. Lucas had come to the States for college. Harvard. Then a PhD program. Also Harvard. Then an MBA. He said where, but I immediately forgot, trying to keep all the facts in my mind, bright little orbs in the Lucas solar system. He’d been in D.C. for nine years.
I did the math in my head.
“I’m thirty-nine,” he said. “And you?” I kept my head down, not wanting to meet his eye. Would I be too young for him?
“I’m twelve,” I said.
“You look great for a twelve-year-old.”
“I get that a lot. No, I’m twenty-four.”
He didn’t react. “So, you’re new to the city? What are your impressions?” He seemed genuinely curious.
I thought for a moment. “Do you remember in college, when it was cool to get good grades without trying? The less you appeared to be working, the better? In D.C., it’s cool to brag about how late you stayed at the office. Moving here, I got whiplash from the difference in social posturing.”
“In that case, I’ve achieved cool status. Finally, after all these years of trying,” Lucas said. “I had fashion sneakers in high school and everything.”
“Calling them fashion sneakers clearly means you were a dork.” It felt natural, teasing him.
“Ouch. At the ripe age of twelve, you’ve turned into a mean girl.”
I liked amusing him. He laughed easily. I went into my newly developed taxonomy of ID badges. D.C. was the kind of town where interns wore their badges on the outside of their jackets on the Metro, I told him. The more senior you were, the more your badge migrated beneath layers, until finally you were so powerful that other people carried it for you. He seemed to like that, so I did a little riff on how at parties in D.C. everyone was always like, “Hey, have you read the new CBO study on federal highway spending?” and then when they got a little bit drunk, they were like, “Hey, have you read the new CBO study on federal highway spending?”
Why was I trying so hard? In the back of my mind was his ring. My father had had many women and wives. What was I doing taking a late-night walk with a married man? But he didn’t seem to want to go anywhere, and I was electrified by him, by his interest in me.
We walked on the path around the Washington Monument, which rose in a smudge above the stately flagpoles. We looped past the Korean War Veterans Memorial, where spotlights were shining up on giant soldiers, frozen in their slickers in the tall grass. Visitors were cordoned off with low wires because the larger-than-life men could not be touched.
“I’m actually glad to live here,” I said. Our eyes met and lingered on each other until he looked away. It was true that I was proud of the life I’d started to make, getting on my bicycle in the morning, dismounting lightly at a glowing little start-up, then returning home to my ad hoc salon of housemates, whose drive and purpose and hopefulness about the world, I hoped, might spur me on too.
“It’s a good city,” he said. “I feel very lucky. I have my dream job.”
“When did you know it was your dream to be an economist?”
“My family lived in Sri Lanka when I was young,” Lucas said. “I had a babysitter, Abishani, whom I really loved. She was like an older sister. After we moved to Belgium when I was eleven, my parents hired someone to take care of me after school, a college student. I don’t think she was around long. I don’t even remember her name. At the end of her first week, I saw my mother count out her wages onto our dining table, and I realized it was five times what she had paid Abishani to do the same job. I was a little math nerd, so I did the calculation between Belgian francs and rupees. My mother explained that now we lived in Europe, where people earned more. I was incensed. It was unfair and arbitrary. Growing up between worlds the way I did, I saw how the accident of your birthplace determined whether you lived a good life or an impoverished one. Whether you were stable or on the edge. Whether you had access to healthcare or not. It was a natural leap for me, to study economic development in college and then to make a career out of studying poverty and how to lift people out of it.”
I was quiet for a moment, taking it in. I liked that his thoughts were about the world, not just about himself or D.C. I liked that he had been moved by injustice and that he’d cared about an important woman in his life. “Did you stay in touch with Abishani?”
“For a while. We lost touch a few years after we moved to Belgium.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “I don’t usually talk about her. It feels good.”
I saw him look around, as though taking in our surroundings for the first time. We were headed toward the tidal basin on a path flanked by cherry trees. It felt right, for the present moment, to bring us out of the emotions of the past.
We reached the river. I leaned my bike against a tree and we sat down on a bench, with several feet between us. Whatever was happening, I didn’t want it to end. I was pretty sure I was grinning like an idiot. All I wanted was to keep talking to him, to know him, to see what would happen. I felt as though the river could overflow, the Lincoln Memorial could crumble to the ground, the Pentagon could burst into flames—none of it would matter, as long as we continued this conversation. This was what love songs were about, I realized. This blindness, this feeling of tripping into another realm. I hadn’t understood it before.
He looked like he was trying to articulate something but was struggling to get it out. We sat for a few moments in silence. Across the wide darkness, the Potomac River rolled over, sending barges and fish and grit southeast into the Chesapeake Bay.
“This reminds me of a Louise Glück poem I love,” I said carefully. “ ‘Go ahead: say what you’re thinking. The garden is not the real world.’ ”
“Louise Glück is one of my favorites,” he said. “I read her in college when I first got to the States.” When he looked at me, his eyes were blazing with confusion and desire. I saw the struggle in them. “I—” he said. He looked away from my eyes, at my mouth. “I’m married.”
“I know. You wear a ring.”
“You didn’t know that when you asked me to take a walk,” he said, excusing me.
“Yes,” I said. “But you did.”
“I’ve been married for nine years.”
I realized that his telling me he was married was an admission that something was happening for him too, that this wasn’t just a walk. I didn’t know what to say, now that he’d laid bare the power difference between us. He was older. Sophisticated, worldly. Off-limits. All the life he had lived and the things he knew! He probably had The New York Times delivered and not just on Sundays. He’d be the perfect date at a dinner party—stimulating, thoughtful, easy to talk to. He was nothing like the boys I’d dated in high school and college, who approached sex and dating the way they approached a flight of beer: a sampler, theirs for the sipping, with little flirtation, almost no foreplay. With Lucas, listening and talking was a joyful discovery. It was in harmony with the desire, the wanting.
“I should go,” Lucas said. He glanced in both directions. I followed his eyes. There was no one, not even a lone jogger chugging beside the river.
He looked like he couldn’t remember how to seduce a woman. His nerdiness, the way he glanced at me and quickly away, as though he was embarrassed for me to see how much he wanted me, drew me to him even more.
We sat facing forward, toward the dark water, on opposite sides of the hard bench. I counted ten long breaths, waiting for him to get up. Then another ten. My throat tensed with hope. Still, he didn’t move. I understood then that he didn’t want to go and that I had to be the one to act, to initiate.
In a swift move that surprised even me, I got up from the bench and straddled him. I cupped his face in my hands and kissed him hard. For a moment his lips were still, as if he was in shock and clinging to the idea that this was a platonic walk. Then his head tipped back and his lips parted. I held his face in my hands, smelling his cologne, fingering the dampness of sweat at his hairline. I didn’t know where I’d gotten this nerve. “Oh God,” he said.
He lifted my dress and brushed a hand against my stomach, and I felt his touch jolt through me. I sucked my belly in, overcome with self-consciousness.
“Am I too heavy?” I asked, shifting my weight to my knees.
“Of course not.” His voice was breathless.
But I felt myself cooling, thinking about him touching the roll of flab on my stomach. This was a question I asked almost automatically with anyone new. There would come a point, usually right before my clothes came off, when I asked to be reassured. It was a sad question, a shameful one, a question that skinned me bare, but I couldn’t help myself. Based on how the men answered, I would put them in categories: shallow, tolerant, or turned on. I brushed the thought away.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, fingering my hair.
So this is what it felt like to desire and to feel truly desired: It was the thrill without the fear. I pulled his face toward me and kissed him again. When I drew back to look at him, it was as though I was looking at myself: His eyes were greedy and passionate and scared shitless.
I felt his hardness through his pants and reached down and grasped his belt, undoing it, and unzipped his pants so that we were separated only by our underwear. Then I rocked back and forth on top of him, moving my pelvis bit by bit, slightly more each time, looking into his eyes, which were so close I could feel his long lashes against my cheek. I had to go slowly so that I wouldn’t finish. But then I thought of him inside me, on top of me in bed—in our bed, tangled in soft sheets, the rain going against the window—and I tugged his lower lip between my teeth. “I’m going to come,” I said softly. He moaned and shifted under me until I felt his cock pulse through his underwear and then I came hard, listening to the sounds he made. He collapsed forward against my chest and began kissing me frantically, my lips, my nose, my cheeks, my neck, my hair. “I didn’t even know that was possible,” he whispered. I didn’t know which part of it he was referring to.
Soon, he gave me his hand and I braced myself against him, climbing carefully to my feet. I went over to my bike, making each motion slow and careful, aware that his eyes were on me. I heard the creak of his zipper, the click of his belt. When I turned around, he looked like he was trying to formulate something else to say, but anything he said would diminish what we had just done together. “Good night,” I said, wanting to prolong the dream.
“Get home safe,” he said. He sounded dazed. I cycled home, dizzy with joy.
That was seven months ago. Since then, there had been many late-night walks on empty streets. Stolen afternoons in hotel rooms. Then my father’s death, my stupid text, showing up at Lucas’s office, asking him for a night together. Wanting more, and more, and more.