I’m starving.
I’ve had four meetings today, and then had to write a surprise project summary for a grant application. I got an email from a peer-review committee requesting some information about the numbers in the results section of a paper our lab submitted last year. I wasn’t even here then, but since numbers are kind of part of my job, or at least certain kinds of numbers like these, I’ve had to sit down and at least figure out what I’m going to ask everyone for, probably at another meeting.
The thing about science is that there is that whole methods part. And the part about how whatever you do has to be repeatable. Also, money. Which means that if you’re a scientist, you’re also kind of an administrator.
I’m new around here, with the least amount of administrative experience, which paradoxically means I am the one doing most of the administrative work lately. My science wasn’t quite ready to go when I was brought on, but everyone else in the lab is in the middle of projects.
So I am the designated project manager.
Also, my funding could be a little better for what I want to do, and the best way to lock in funding for the middle of my project is to find grant money for it now.
LSU’s lab is actually a great one, very low drama with great people, but after the years of doctoral work doing pure science and a year postdoc with University of Washington doing the same, I miss … well…
I miss science.
I look out of my office door, longingly, at the ESEM, where I can see it through the double-walled glass of the lab, across the hall.
“I miss you, ESEM,” I whisper. “I love you.”
Now I am not looking at my ESEM, I am looking at a coat, buttoned onto a man, who is now standing in my doorway. I look up.
Evan, my occupational therapist who I have sort of kissed, is looking down at me in my chair and giving me the Mona Lisa.
“I love my microscope,” I answer, and I sound entirely unflustered, which, point to me.
He holds out two greasy paper bags. “I have some lunch.”
I try to slide my feet off the desk but my rolling chair scoots back too fast, and then, my ass hits the ground.
Hard.
Point to Evan.
“Holy shit.” He laughs and reaches out his hand. I grab it and he pulls me up while I let my mind go blank, a handy skill for the frequently embarrassed.
“Are occupational therapists supposed to laugh at their clients? It seems kind of cruel.”
“You caught me off guard. I’m a sucker for pratfalls and that was a great one.”
I hold on, tight, to my chair as I sit back down, and then I pull one of the guest chairs next to my desk with my foot. “Sit down. You brought me lunch? Here?”
He sits down, looking around. My office is pretty spartan because I would always rather be in the lab, but I have managed to get my books in here, my journals, a few pictures, and of course my collection of plush microorganisms and iconic cells.
“Yeah, I tried to call earlier, but they said on the phone you were in meetings until three or so and I took a risk that you would be starving. Is that?”
“A sperm plushie? Yes. And here’s its egg. See how much bigger the egg is? And this halo of fuzzy yarn around the egg represents the nutritive goo for the sperm. We think it might also repel undesirable sperm.”
I realize that I am holding the sperm in one hand and the egg in the other and I am, basically, puppeting reproduction for him.
I slowly put the sex toys down.
Point two for Evan.
But he’s grinning and is relaxed in a way that makes it look like he hangs out in my office all the time. “So it’s not like I don’t appreciate the food, whatever it is—”
“Grilled cheese and fries from the Campus Coney.”
I love grilled cheese. I love fries. “Which, that sounds awesome, and I was just thinking that I was starving, but I didn’t know you made house calls? Office calls?”
I am hoping he will explain himself before I give up and ask him if he wants to make out, because while I ask my question he starts shrugging out of his coat and I don’t think he must work today because he’s wearing an old breast-cancer-research 10K T-shirt, and it’s neon pink, which isn’t the problem, the problem is that this T-shirt is too small. And it rides up, away from his hips and then I’m seeing skin, and the only skin I usually see as a single person is my own, especially in the winter, when the whole world is bundled up against casual leering except for noses and cheeks.
It’s this deprivation that accounts for making-out thoughts, for belly-licking thoughts, for pink-T-shirt-removal thoughts.
I’m positive.
“I don’t usually make house calls, no.”
His talking reminds me to look at the face part, not the tiny-bit-nude part. He has a nice face.
Nice arms, too, honestly. I mean, sure they’re still ridiculously long, he’s nearly a gibbon, but the shoulder part is rounded in this really good sort of way, and he has biceps, of course he does, because that’s just an arm part, but his are kind of strong-looking without looking like all he thinks about are his biceps.
And there’s that part, a part I’ve always loved on guys, that hairless dipping-in place between his biceps and triceps that looks sort of vulnerable but also like a good place to put your mouth.
He has that place, and it is a very nice version of that place if my compulsion to bite it is any indication.
I somehow find my way to his face again though it is almost impossible, the way he is boneless and practically naked in my office chair with his obscene T-shirt and scandalous jeans and titillating Asics running shoes with green paint splattered on them.
I am worried for myself and this crush so obviously sourced from transference and deprivation that has my imagination straddling Evan the occupational therapist and sucking into my greedy mouth the skin resting over the hollow of his throat while his gibbon arms are wrapped all the way around me and I’m running my fingers through his messy hair.
He is almost smiling at me and I worry a little about his freaky mind-reading ability.
“So if you don’t make house calls, I’m kind of back to wondering why you’re here?”
“I’m actually off work for a few days and to be honest, bringing you lunch was a little impulsive.”
Okay. That makes me blush. I have no choice but to ignore my blushing. “I have this effect on people, they eat with me once and then can never eat without me again. Also, they tend to pay for my meals.”
“Noted.”
With that, we just looked at each other in a way that was starting to become a habit, and then I can’t ignore the blushing. I can’t ignore his teeny tiny T-shirt. I can’t ignore his one-sided almost smile or his methylene blue eyes. I can’t ignore his pretty shoulders or his arms. I can’t ignore his big hands, his shoulder-blade-spanning hands, the way the tendons in them lock to every knuckle and speculate on things like capability and dexterity and, of course, the scar over those knuckles on his left hand that I’ve noticed before, and its reminder that he has a life and has been hurt in it.
“Evan?” Why is he so comfortable with these moments between us?
Have I really gotten so depressed that I don’t understand the meaning of these long looks, of how his hand wrapped around the nape of my neck?
Not understanding why a man like this touches and looks at me the way he does seems like a loss approaching the loss of my vision.
I mean this, and vision is my whole world.
“Evan?” I ask again, and I think it sounds different, I think he must know that I am asking him to explain to me where this shift has occurred, what we’ve drifted toward. “I think we should talk, too.” His voice is rough, and he looks down briefly at his hands.
I close my eyes, because okay, yes. What I know about Evan is that he will put his shoulder against the hard conversation. “About my goals for therapy?”
His eyebrows steeple together, and he sighs. Actually sighs, and it sounds frustrated. “No. Is that what you want to talk about? What you think we should talk about?”
I can’t believe it, but suddenly I am overcome with an impulse a little bigger than the one that would have my hands under Evan’s T-shirt.
“Yeah.” I look at him, and I think about all the stuff he tried to get me to do before the exercise in the lobby and how I refused to do it and about those three blocks between me and the corner store and the gross turkey in my fridge and the bus route without transfers.
If I could ever get this guy to kiss me, is the thing, who would he be kissing? I’ve never doubted myself before.
I knew who I was, and everyone else did, too. I looked for the world around me in everything that I saw.
I looked for the world even as a young woman. I looked and I fought for the world one fucking cell at a time, and just when I thought I’d learned everything I wanted to, the whole world would change again.
When I just didn’t know, when no matter how I looked I was left in the dark, it would be Christmas again.
The lights shining and as high up as we could hang them.
I don’t want him to kiss a sad-sack microbiologist who takes one bus and has given up vegetarianism because she’s afraid to go to the good grocery store and sits in the dark at night passing notes with a stranger and needs her mom to talk her asleep.
I want him to kiss Christmas Jenny.
I want him to kiss the Jenny who’s cleared up all the fights and misunderstanding with herself, and will have love, for a whole year.
I want him to kiss the Jenny who has figured out how to collect all this new data on her new life where the equipment’s changed.
I want him to kiss the Jenny who’s remembered that even if everything looks different, it doesn’t mean what she sees isn’t good data.
I’m a scientist, I don’t know enough, right now, to make a theory.
All those nights I’ve sat alone in my place, afraid of the dark, there was probably all kinds of stuff I could have been seeing and understanding and I didn’t fucking look.
I am not a bad scientist.
I want him to kiss Jenny, who is a motherfucking-awesome microbiologist and is learning to drive again so she can go to museums on the weekends and the farmer’s market and lives her very own life, not the life I think retinitis pigmentosa is telling me I’m supposed to live.
And actually, retinitis pigmentosa never told me anything at all about how it was I was supposed to live.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure it’s told me how I’m supposed to see, either.
I won’t sit in the dark and wait for the whole goddamned world to spin around the sun to bring the light back.
I’ll hang up my own lights and they’ll burn with joy and discovery.
I can learn to see however I want to.
“Yeah,” I say again, “I want to talk about my goals for therapy.” I pull open my desk drawer and grab the voice-recognition-software CD he gave me weeks ago. “Let’s start with this. We’ll eat grilled cheese and french fries and you’ll put this on my computer and show me how to use it.”
I hold out the CD to him, and he takes it, slowly.
“You kissed me,” he says, and he looks right into my eyes and there are places along his cheekbones I watch get almost as pink as his shirt.
“You kissed me.”
“Yes.”
“Right here,” I put my finger on my forehead, at my hairline.
“Right here,” he says, and touches his cheek. “And here,” he says, and drags his finger to that spot just a little east of his mouth.
“I’m just saying.” I take a deep breath. Then another. “Until it’s right here”—and then I put my finger on my mouth, in the middle of my bottom lip, and I watch his eyes sink to that spot—“I’d like you to help me with this stuff. Also, this is your fault for showing me how much therapy could help me.”
Our eyes meet again, and his have gone dark. He’s fixing his eyes, I can tell, so he won’t look at my mouth.
So I look at his, and remember how it felt along my hair, how his hand held me to him.
“Okay?” I whisper. “Please help. I’m ready.”
He squeezes his eyes shut. “Yeah, okay. Of course.” He slides his chair forward, next to mine, and reaches in to insert the CD. His head is alongside mine, his body, like when we were in the lab.
I hear him take a deep breath. “Jenny?”
“Yeah?”
“We still have to talk about this other thing.”
I turn my head, and we’re close enough to end this.
We could really get into the kind of horny, rubbing, hot kiss that happens after you’ve not kissed for way too long.
I could feel his breath on my face, and something about that is painful and unbearable and makes me sore between my legs, but I want to choose myself more than I want to kiss Evan at this moment.
And in this moment, I want to kiss Evan more than I’ve wanted anything in a long time.
But I want myself the most.
I keep my eyes on his, the tension so hot and sweet I have to fist my hands to resist it. “Let’s talk about the other thing when it’s me, really me, that you’re talking to.”
“Okay.” He says this on a breath, hardly speaks at all, but then he turns away and takes my mouse and starts opening the new application.
“Can we eat, too?”
* * *
“Jen-nee R-eye-t iz fuh-rum See-at-tul.”
Jay knee right is fulcrum sea cattle.
“Shit,” Evan says, reaching over me to fiddle with something while I laugh, again, so hard my face is starting to hurt.
“Wait, wait, lemme say something else,” I gasp, and hold my stomach so that I can suppress my giggling.
“Eh-ven iz vuh-ary fer-us-tray-ted.”
A van fairy for us traded.
I burst into helpless laughter again, partly at how Evan puts his fist over his mouth and makes the basset-hound wrinkles and shakes his head. “Oh! Change the computer voice to the British one again, too, and let me try to read from this paper I’m editing.”
“No, no. This isn’t working. I need to get a better version for the kind of stuff you’re going to need it to do—fuck.” He forcefully ejects the CD and leans back in his chair, chucking the CD into the trash.
“Hey, I was playing with that.”
“It’s not going to work for you.” He leans his head back, his throat’s exposed, his T-shirt’s riding up again, and that’s the hotness, but also, this is the first time I’ve ever seen him really frustrated, or kind of angry.
It’s a little sweet, if you ignore that he’s indulging in man pain on my behalf, and I’m just fine.
“So we’ll try another version. Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that.”
“But this is your Rome.” He says this to the ceiling.
“Okay.”
“So it needs to get built faster.”
He rubs one of his hands in circles over his heart, and it bunches up his T-shirt even more and, God help me, I see his belly button.
Seeing someone’s belly button is like being next door to seeing them naked. I don’t know why. It just is. “So do you run?”
He leans up to look at me. “I do. Why do you ask?”
“Your shirt?” The pink shirt that will feature in all of my brand-new fantasies.
He looks down as if to remind himself that he’s half-undressed in my office. “Oh yeah. This run was a couple of years ago.”
“Did you run it for someone?” My friend Neil ran a lot of prostate-cancer races for his dad, and I always liked to watch the races and see the names of people the runners loved and were running for.
“My mom.”
I just wait because the way he said that makes my gut sink.
“It was the last race she watched me run. She had recently made the decision to discontinue treatment. I was so angry about that, I wanted her to keep fighting, she was still so young, and I knew it had been awful, but I just couldn’t hear her. I had this really fucked-up fight with her about it, punched the wall, and I’d never punched a wall.” He rubs his left hand absently and I think his scar.
It’s one of those kissable scars, then. One of those you want to kiss and make it better even after everything’s all healed up.
“I ran the race to try to convince her to start up treatment again. I thought that seeing all the runners, runners she’d met over the years, the family members and the survivors, would remind her to fight. She cheered, just like usual. She mingled at the big party afterward, even though I knew she was tired. Sometime at the end of that race I figured out that she wasn’t getting inspired to fight, she was saying good-bye to the fight. To her friends. To the others who had fought alongside her.”
“To you?”
“Yeah, to me. To the part of me that needed her to stay with me forever just because she was my mom and that’s what she’s supposed to do. Even if she couldn’t fight for herself anymore, she was supposed to fight for me.”
I lean over and grab his hand. The wall-punching one. I count the little white dots where the suture knots were. “Eleven stitches.”
“Thirteen, actually.”
“I guess the wall won.”
He breathes out something like a laugh. “I guess so.”
I put my face against his hand, and he lets me, lets me hold his hand up, his scarred knuckles against my lips. Then I kiss his knuckles, and he makes a fist into my palm where I am holding his hand, so I kiss the scar again.
I look at him, watching me, and put my finger on his knuckles. “Right here, twice.”
“Jenny …” he starts.
“Is that why you keep trying with me?” I interrupt, my heart beating around in a knotted tangle of feelings. “Because you want me to fight?”
He looks at me for what seems like a really long time. “Yes. I want you to fight. Maybe I want you to fight, some, for me. So I can see that I can inspire someone to. Especially someone as great as you are. I know we’re not talking about this, but we have to talk about it, even if we don’t talk about it, how I feel means I have to do the right thing and let you fight with someone else.” He lets me take that in, take in how hard this is for him, too.
He keeps his gaze steady. “I thought you were great, first. Also, great is pretty much an understatement, and some of the things I think about you are pretty shallow.”
“Shallow?”
“Yeah, the package that all the great parts are wrapped up in, shallow.”
“Oh.”
He smiles and rubs his hand over his face. “It’s been confusing, what I want for you. Figuring out what you might want for yourself. Wanting—”
“We’re not talking about that yet.”
“Wanting?”
“Yes. We should table almost everything that starts with I want.”
“Because?”
“Because I find that I really do want to fight. But not for you, for me. For Jay Knee Right. I’d rather do that with you, but I get if that’s not possible. I just want to do this, finally.”
He stands up and holds his hand out. “Come here.”
He pulls me against his body and I’m not sure what to do, at first, because he’s so warm and solid and my cheeks are against that rounded part of his shoulder and through the thin T-shirt I can smell him, minty and softly soapy with this perfect sort of overwarm skin smell, and his long arms are all the way around me.
So I put my arms around him, and I let my fingertips drag a little over his ribs, and his hands settle just above my waist, both hands flat against my spine, until he hooks his fingers into the edge of my bra strap, and I wouldn’t think that would be something that made my nipples get hard and tingle but it is, because maybe he can hug me, but he can’t do that, not really, he can’t get his fingers under my bra strap in a restless way like all he’s thinking about is how to take it off.
He’s not supposed to want that, but he does want that.
He wants me.
Oh, and I want him. I also want one more chance to start over, just enough, that I understand how it is that I want him, so that I know that I want him because he laughs at pratfalls and loved his mom and was into my microscopes and brings me grilled cheese and not because I haven’t taken a minute to stop and look around me at the world.
I want me.
“Okay,” I whisper into his collarbone, and try not to follow my whisper with a kiss, but that is impossible. I put my finger against the spot I helplessly kiss. “Right here.”
I feel his breath at my temple before I feel his lingering kiss there, then his lips move against the spot. “Right here.”
I feel his voice vibrate against my chest from his, and I let myself squeeze one more time before I step away, but before I do he squeezes back, even harder.
“So, thanks for lunch.”
“Anytime.” He skates his hand over my arm to the wrist, and then grips my hand, just briefly and lets go.
He turns to look at the pictures on my desk, me and mom in front of the pig at the Seattle Public Market, a few hiking with friends, one of me in my old lab, and one I printed off from C’s feed of the matchbook cars—I have the little car he told me to find parked next to the frame.
He picks C’s picture up, and the car.
“Isn’t that cool? I have this friend, sort of a pen pal really, who takes these pictures, like this.” I turn the frame in his hand to look, too, and then I look at Evan. He’s staring at me, in full basset wrinkle.
“This is your friend?” His voice is quiet, and he seems a little weird, like he’s thinking of ten things at once and I’ve interrupted him.
“Yeah. You okay?”
He looks down at the car in his hand and gives it back to me along with the photo.
“Jenny?”
“What is it?” He’s looking at me, but sort of like he’s expecting me to say something. Then he looks away and hugs himself, rubbing his forearms like he’s suddenly chilled. “Hey, are you okay?”
“I think so, I just … I don’t know.” He looks at me, then grabs the cap of my shoulder, squeezes it like he’s about to say something, like I’m about to say something.
“Evan?”
“I’m good.” He looks down at his feet, with his almost smile. “Hey, do you need a ride? We could talk a little more?”
I kind of blink at that. Not the offer, that’s just Evan, but the weirdness and the shift and then an offer for a ride like the entire temperature of the room hasn’t changed. “No, but thanks, I should finish up here.”
“Great. Okay.” Then he starts to leave, grabbing his coat, but then stops and steps toward me again, leans over and kisses me in the middle of my forehead.
“See you,” he says, softly.
And then he’s out the door, shrugging into his coat.
* * *
Something about seeing Evan in my space, touching him in my space, almost talking about this inevitable inevitableness between us makes me yearn for even more connection.
I’m meeting C.
I’m committing to OT so that I can understand what it is I want from it and what it is I think I will need.
Jenny Wright is the kind of woman who needs friends.
I wander into Bob’s office, where he has two monitors set up with spreadsheets of data on both.
“Hey.”
He turns around in his chair and smiles. He’s a good guy, Bob, and has done the most to orient me to the lab and hold my hand through all the nonbench work. He’s wearing scrubs, which means he’s been in his lab today, and his brand-new deep pink Mohawk is all messed up from running his hands through it.
“Hey, Jenny. What’s up?”
“I just wondered if you had dinner plans? Maybe we could ask Melissa and anyone else hanging around, too?”
He grins and rubs his hands together. “Finally.”
“I know. I’ve been kind of antisocial.”
“Yeah, but that’s cool, you’ve had a lot to deal with.”
“So, yeah? Dinner?”
He holds up a finger and turns around to call Melissa and after wrapping up at the lab I’m deep in a trencher of dinnertime pancakes at The Windmill getting grilled by Melissa.
“So who was the guy?” She spears a sausage link and points it at me, her dark hair a crazy fluff around her face, as usual.
“Evan?”
Bob and Melissa and the doctoral student, Lisa, all look at one another and grin.
“Um. He’s my occupational therapist?”
Melissa laughs. “Really? I’m actually supposed to call one, to help with ergonomics at the lab after my bike wreck. Can I call yours?”
“I’m sure you could, he works on campus at the medical center, and he’s really good, I think, if you I want, I could—”
“I’m kidding, Jenny. You know, because he’s hot.”
“Yeah?” I say, my neck burning. “I—”
“Oh, you’ve totally noticed,” this from Lisa.
I look at Bob. He looks at me, says, “I’m here for the Ohio-cured bacon.”
“He’s my OT. We have a professional relationship.”
Lisa pulls her cat’s-eye glasses down to the end of her nose and looks at me over them, like she’s a schoolmarm. “So fire him. There must be a kajillion OTs at the health-science campus.”
“I probably just have a crush because, you know. Whatchacallit.”
“Transference,” Bob supplies.
“Yeah, that.”
“Which, if he’s bringing you lunch, it’s also countertransference.” He digs into more bacon while Melissa and Lisa glare at him and I feel a little sick and too full of maple syrup.
“Dude,” Lisa says, “it’s probably not transference, there’s a whole bunch of criteria for that. Like, have you been really resistant to your exercises and things you’ve been learning in therapy?”
I feel a little queasier. “Yeah, kind of.”
Melissa interrupts, “But it’s not as if you’ve been going really deep into emotional stuff, either.”
I look at them, helpless.
Lisa sighs. “Well. Life is complicated. Also, Freud was a dick. Or dickless, I can’t remember.”
“Was the transference thing Freud’s? Or was it Jung’s? Or that Otto guy, maybe.” Bob wipes his mouth.
I close my eyes. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not a good idea. He really is professional, and this stuff hadn’t come to the surface until recently, and he keeps trying to talk about it. He came today, out of his office, to tell me I’m probably going to have to work with someone else.”
“What’d you say?” Melissa asks.
“It’s possible I said no?”
Melissa smiles, her funny dimple by her eye engaging. “You should probably figure out what you want, which, if I were in your shoes, would be really difficult, so I don’t blame you. I think, though, someone can be both a person who helps you, understands how to help you with their expertise, and someone who is simply a person you like, even really like, are even attracted to. It says something good about him that he would be honest with you about that and want to terminate the professional relationship no matter what happens, and honestly, you should probably listen to him.”
Oh. Yeah. Put that way, Melissa is right. I feel a little queasy again, for not being fair to Evan and that he obviously needed to feel okay with everything. I wonder if this was why he seemed so weird when he left today. “I’ll talk to him. I promise.”
“And you know,” this from Bob, who had pushed his plate away, “this kind of thing? It should happen more often. You were brought in not just because you’re a good scientist but because the lab thought you’d be a good fit. So, you know, start fitting.”
“Right,” I say. Because he is. I’d forgotten how right other people can be.
When I get home, I call my mom even though I actually want to call Evan and make things right. I tell her, right off, that I’m feeling better because maybe I am going to finally get somewhere in therapy. In everything.
“Were you not getting anywhere?” she asks.
“Not really,” I admit to her, and it feels so good to admit something to her, and it makes me realize that here is another thing I have lost, my easy honesty with my mother, my best friend, really, in all these months of trying to protect her. “I’ve been making it hard on myself, actually.”
“How hard?”
“The hardest. You know how I’ve always turned in all my homework, and signed up for all the class projects, and was the line leader?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I’ve been doing the opposite of that.”
“Tell me why, right now, I shouldn’t get on a plane.”
Then I say, “Because of Evan,” but then I talk mostly about me. About my breakthrough. I talk about how what I should get for Christmas is a small car with big side mirrors and indoor timers for all my lamps and a really good microphone for my computer.
I tell her about Bob and Lisa and Melissa.
“I’m going to do this, Mom,” is what I say. “It’s like a research question, just for me. I’m good at research. I’m a scientist. I’m going to use my scientist powers on this problem, and I’m going to work out if it even really is a problem, and I’m going to let people help me.”
“Is Evan single?” she asks, but I can tell she is laughing, too.
I’ll probably get some huge care package in the mail this week.
Then, I find myself thinking about C again, and how last night, the best part about it was that we had started to be friends.
After all the parts where he thought of me, taking himself in hand.
After I thought of him, putting my hand between my legs.
It made me wonder, though, who I was thinking of? I was thinking of C, but who was C in my brain?
Fingers? Words?
Had I gotten so isolated that I could make love to an idea?
More than pictures of close-up things and games where we pretended to be someone else or verses of pornography, I liked the C that worried about me getting out of the house to see an Andy Warhol exhibit.
Who wanted to meet and eat mashed potatoes.
So I logged on and went to his blog and opened the message box.
You’re certain you want to meet? Is the first thing he asks.
Yes. I’ve turned over this new leaf, this new snowflake, I guess. Where I say YES all the time.
It takes a long time, but he finally answers,
I’m a little surprised to see you here, it’s later, and I thought maybe we were … taking a break? Until we met. Not that we have to, I just wasn’t certain.
I think about that. Maybe he’s feeling the same kind of sea change I am. That we need to be friends, start there, after we’d gone so far as strangers and words.
What’s more, Evan. There’s a sea change there, too.
It won’t be easy to meet C, I don’t think, because we have all these disconnected pieces of deep intimacy between us, but no normal introduction, no basic friendliness. I look at my blinking cursor, then I open my hard drive.
I choose a corny picture my mom took of me when I moved into this place, a kind of “kid on the first day of school” picture.
I’m wearing cargo shorts with hiking sandals and have on a black tank top and my hair is in two braids like a little kid—it was so hot that day. Coming from Seattle, Mom and I had been unprepared for the heat and it took us forever to bring my stuff in from the little trailer we’d rented.
I look sweaty and kind of red-faced, and normally I’d be a little shy about a picture where I’m wearing shorts and have cleavage and upper arms on display, but I’m standing in front of a stoop he knows and has walked up and down a million times, so that’s the one I upload into the message box.
I take a huge breath when I hit SEND.
So really meet me, or be introduced. Jenny Wright. Postdoc in microbiology, in the Blasdel Lab. I’ll be there, at Potato Mountain. Christmas Eve’s Eve.
I hold my breath.
You’re beautiful. So beautiful. I don’t even feel like I have the right to say that because you don’t even know who I really am, but I can’t help it. I think you’re so beautiful.
I don’t know why I expected that, but I do. I’m not surprised he thinks that I’m beautiful, it doesn’t scare me that this sort of stranger believes that I am and would tell me.
Even if all those times we typed things to each other in the dark he might have been thinking of some other image, I still don’t doubt that this man believes I am lovely.
I am. I look at my picture. I look happy in it.
If he would show me who he is, I think I would think he was beautiful, too.
Will you?
Three pictures load, not in the message screen, but on his blog.
The colors are warm; look warm to touch. I think, at first, it is because I am looking at sand dunes, then I realize it is the hollow between a man’s clavicle and his neck and the next is a smooth curve of muscle—a shoulder maybe. The last has another curve of skin, and the edge of a black-ink tattoo that looks like a fancy lowercase f.
Bits and pieces.
I’m not sure what to say. The pictures are gorgeous, erotic even, but I feel let down. I look at the pretty dips and shadows of his pictures, then the overexposed, raw composition of mine.
He’s curated himself, and the perspective is too close-up to see anything.
In my picture, it’s just me, tall and smiling and kind of naked.
Those aren’t pictures of you. Those are just pictures.
Then I shut the lid of my laptop.
Tears burn in angry drips from my eyes—in the middle of my new resolution to say yes, here was somebody, something, that was a no.
I lost him, or he lost me.
I was ready to tell him he was beautiful, and he didn’t give me anything to look at.
I don’t have any patience for anyone who would keep me in the dark.
Not even myself.