Early in the summer, this guy drops you a line. When you first got to Iowa, he had flown into town and the two of you spent a weekend in bed together and it was a nice culmination of a few years of light internet flirtation. It turns out he’s in town for a conference for work, and he asks if you want to get dinner. You agree, even though you don’t really want to see him. You even agree to pick him up from his hotel—his request—although you don’t want to do that, either.
Even as you’re driving to his hotel, you’re thinking about how you’re just doing what he’s asking you, the same way you’d respond to the woman in the Dream House, even though he’s just this random guy. You think about that as you pull up under the awning, as you drive him to the restaurant. He is talking to you. Even as you’re responding to him, even as you’re ordering and making small talk, you’re marveling at the fact that his maleness—the generic fact of it—has as much pull as a carefully curated, long-term abusive relationship. It’s as if one scientist spent decades developing a downward-facing propulsion system to get an apple to descend to the ground and another one just used gravity. Same result, entirely different levels of effort.
You refuse to get a drink, pick at your meal. He insists on paying. You drive him back to the hotel. You pull in front of the entrance, and he smiles at you.
“Why don’t you park so we can say good-bye?” he asks.
You pull into the parking space around the corner.
“Why don’t you walk me inside?” he says. “There’s a gorgeous koi pond in the lobby.”
He’s not wrong. The soaring atrium is breathtaking. It’s nicer than any hotel you’ve ever stayed in. You bend over a bridge and look down at the koi, their muscular bodies the color of warning. You think about how much easier it would be to just sleep with him. He isn’t the worst guy in the world. The effort of resisting is exhausting.
“I should go,” you say. “I have a thing at eight.”
He makes a clucking sound in his throat, smiles.
“Why don’t you come on up?” he says.
“I have to go,” you say.
He walks you back to your car, and as you fish your keys out of your purse, he kisses you. He keeps kissing you; he grabs your arms, pushes his tongue in your mouth. Your body goes rigid. You don’t fight, but you don’t respond. You briefly float outside your body and see yourself, the almost comedy of your mismatched libidos. When he pulls away, he does not seem to notice that you can feel nothing at all. He gives you a key card, tells you his room number, in case you change your mind.
On the drive home you pull over near a parking garage and stumble out onto a patch of grass. You drop down into child’s pose and take deep, shuddering breaths as the car’s emergency signal ticks next to you. The grass catches the copper light: on and off and on again.