The door to Bill’s house had a rectangle of opaque glass, and the light that came through was gold. I touched my hair, pressed my lipstick lips together. After three weeks and four dates, I was at his house. Finally a not-out-in-public date.
I rang the doorbell. Inside, the shadow of Bill moved toward me. The door opened and there he was. Curls, shoulders, slim hips, long legs, him.
“You’re here,” he said. He pulled the door wide.
“I’m here.” Our fourth date, and I’d be completely alone with him in a we-can-do-anything kind of way.
I stepped up the step into his house, my heels tap tap on the entry floor. He hugged me. Three dates so far and nothing more than a hug. I wanted more. I wanted to put my lips to his ear, to whisper: Please, move your hands lower. Lower still. Yes. There. Pull me to you.
He stepped back. The lamplights in the front room were set low; two tall plants in wicker baskets columned either side of the sofa. One was a palm, and the other looked like something from a jungle, with wide curving leaves and rough textured bark.
The rust-orange brushed-velvet sofa had many pillows. I wanted to stop there, fall on it with bare skin, pull the length of his body on mine. Whisper: Please, could we finally be together this way? It’s coming on a month of knowing you and I won’t really know you until I know you with my clothes off.
He led me through the living room, into the bright-light kitchen. More plants at the windowsill, heart-shaped leaves in dark green and light green trailed the length of it. A wok on the cooktop, chopped vegetables and shelled prawns on a cutting board. The kitchen was open to a family room with a wood stove, a TV, two more tall plants, a sectional sofa in a nubby beige. We could start here. Let’s skip your nice dinner and go for the dessert of skin on skin.
He turned the burner on under the wok. “I’m making stir-fry,” he said. “I know you like prawns.” He remembered.
We chatted about my day, his day. I walked around the family room. Touched the arm of the nubby sofa. He had a wood stove. He had a stereo. He had end tables. He had a wok. I looked out the window and myself reflected in the dark. I was slim, my dark hair perm-curly, chin length. My nose that my first boyfriend said was too big. I didn’t know if I was pretty enough. Maybe all Bill wanted was a friend.
“Your house is really nice,” I said. His grown-up house. His grown-up life. I wanted to be grown-up with him. But first: Let’s be like teenagers, let’s jump in the sack, let’s get it done.
“Thanks,” he said. “But I can’t take all the credit for it. My ex-wife did a lot of it.”
I took a quick breath in. I’d had a talk with myself to remember that this is what he did. He spoke of her as someone who had been in his life.
“She has good taste,” I said.
He’d said he was done with her. But still. Why was this house so complete? Why did he get to keep it all? Would she come back for more? Were they really done?
“She left you with most of it?” I couldn’t help myself.
“She moved to a small apartment and got some new furniture. She took a lot of the nice things.” He said it without blame or complaint.
“Well, it looks great anyway,” I said.
“She agonized over it, to make it this way. Each thing. She cared too much about having it be perfect.”
I would be different. I didn’t need everything perfect. Forgetting the memory of my ex-husband’s worried eyes when he found me on my hands and knees scrubbing invisible grime from the corners of the bathroom in the townhouse we moved to after the rape. Dust and dirt, dirt and dust, dark in corners. Like fingerprint powder. The crime scene that followed us from one apartment to the next, to the next. When Sam had found me there with a toothbrush and bucket of hot soapy water, he said “What are you doing?” Like it was a crime to want perfection. “Cleaning,” I said. “It’s dirty, I’m cleaning.”
Bill stirred onion and garlic in hot oil. He added the carrots. Steam rose around him.
“I had a Christmas cactus once.” I pointed at the one in the window, blooming pink blooms. “But I watered it too much.” I could show him all the ways I could be perfectly imperfect.
“Yes, I guess they don’t like much water,” Bill said. He put in the zucchini, the mushrooms. He stirred the stir-fry.
I still had an African violet from my grandmother. It sometimes bloomed dark purple blooms. African violets like damp soil.
“You must have a green thumb,” I said.
I still had a plant from a start given to me by the mother of a boy I’d dated in high school. Long spear leaves, with creamy stripes running through a green so dark it was almost black. Mother-in-law’s tongue, she’d called it when she handed me the starts, the ends wrapped in damp paper towel, her smile sweet like an inside joke.
“No,” Bill said, “I’m not sure what I’m doing at all. I’m lucky they’re alive. My ex couldn’t fit them in her apartment.”
On one shelf was a terra-cotta figure, about a foot tall, a man hunched over carrying a kind of basket on his back. I went to it.
“I found that in Mexico,” Bill said. “She didn’t like it.” He didn’t sound bitter, maybe a little sad. “But I bought it anyway. I put it out after she moved.”
I touched the rough sand skin of the terra-cotta man, cool under my fingers. Could he see I loved it too, this man with the burden on his back?
Bill picked up the bowl of prawns and tipped them into the wok. More steam, the low hiss and murmur of vegetables mixing with heat and the prawns turned from pale pink to pale white and the heat reached me. Put that spoon down, turn the burner off, let’s eat later.
He turned down the heat, spooned the food to the waiting plates, and I followed him into the dining room. We sat knees-touching close.
Dinner was delicious. My favorite kind of food, like he already knew, vegetables and rice and prawns. I hardly ate five bites. My appetite was taken by the wanting whispers of my body.
“I rented a movie,” he said. “Short Circuit. A friend recommended it.”
I’d heard of that movie. Something about a robot and maybe for kids. It didn’t matter. We would sit on that big nubby sofa in the room with the TV.
Bill put the tape in the VCR. He sat next to me, his leg along my leg, his shoulder touching my shoulder.
The movie started. I slipped my pumps off, tucked my legs under me, and leaned closer. He put his arm around me. He smelled of heat and musk cologne. He pulled me closer. I liked it there.
Fifteen minutes in, he said, “This is kind of a kids’ movie, isn’t it?” Maybe his friend was having a joke on him.
“Yes, I guess it is.” My face was close to his and his was close to mine. This became a kiss that became something else, like fluid and ease. He stretched out and pulled me to him. In that fluid move the two of us were the length of each other. I moved on top of him. He ran his hands down my back, my waist, to lower and he pulled me closer. I pressed into him. He put his hand under my skirt, moved it up my thigh. Up to the top of my stocking. Bare skin, strap of garter belt, panties. What I wanted to share with him.
“Wow,” he said.
All thought went away, and this was all we said for a long time. Bit by bit we left our clothes behind. We went, slow and urgent, from here (the couch) to there (his bed).
After the familiar relief and pleasure, the unthinking-only-feeling discovery of someone new, we looked once more at each other.
Bill said it again. “Wow.”
And I smiled and said, “Yeah. Wow.”
The relief of this part finally being done. The worry of how familiar it felt, the glittery firstness of it. What I hoped wouldn’t go away when I knew him more, when he knew me more.
I’d been here before. But this was the longest I’d ever gone from knowing someone to sleeping with him.
He laughed, “I can’t believe that happened.”
“You can’t?” Because it did and why wouldn’t it and what was unbelievable about it? “What do you mean?”
He pulled me close. His hands were warm, gliding over my back. I felt like silk.
“Oh, I had this plan,” he said. “It’s kind of silly when I think about it.” He smoothed his hand, down my arm, my thigh. “I wanted to wait and be friends first. Before. You know. This.”
Did I hear disappointment in the space between the words? He hadn’t seemed disappointed when he was inside me, kissing me, moving with me.
“Really?” I said. I propped myself up on my elbow, pulled the sheet up over my nakedness. I was cold. I looked around the room. I’d never done this with a friend. Why would I want to miss out on this part? The fast and new. The unknown. The surprise of me showing him how bold, how easy, how free I could be. This place where we didn’t have to speak, just do what our bodies wanted.
The bed had no headboard; the comforter, now thrown to the foot of the bed, was faded. She had cleared all the beauty from this room.
“I have this feeling,” he said. “About you. We could have something really special. I thought if I waited, if we went really slow, if I really got to know you as a friend. Like six months or something, I’d be doing something different. Break a pattern. And we’d have something really intimate, being friends first.”
How would we have gone from friends to this? I tried to imagine it and felt only a dull feeling in me. As far as I knew, it only worked this way. When the friend part happens, this breathless part changes. To something too familiar.
It didn’t occur to me that this idea of friends first could have worked too, could have been the something different that would mean I didn’t fuck this up. I didn’t trust friendship yet. I only trusted what my body could do.
I stretched alongside him, moved my hand down, touched him. This man scared me. He wanted to know me. “You should have told me,” I said.
He moved to the rhythm of my hand. “I was crazy to think I could wait.” He pulled me to him like our bodies could melt together. “I’m glad we didn’t.”
He wasn’t disappointed. But in his holding, his touch, in his house, this bare bedroom, it was possible I scared him too. The possibility of what could happen if we weren’t careful.
He ran his hands down my back. “You are beautiful,” he said. It was the first time he’d said anything like this. Over the years he would tell me this when he touched me.
With Bill, beauty is a felt thing. One of a thousand ways we would find we were different. Him tactile, me visual. Him thinking we could wait, me not. Him wanting intimacy, me thinking that’s what this was, us here in bed, too guarded to have ever known anything else, to speak what was inside of me, to even know it myself.
In the morning, when I left early to go home and get ready for work, Bill held me in a long hug; his hands went down my back, low, and pulled me to him. We made plans to see each other that night.
“I’m glad we didn’t wait,” he said.
I pressed myself into him. This language I could speak so easily.
On my way out, I went past the sculpture of the man bent forward by the burden on his back. Jorge, we would start calling him. He would always be in our home.
I went out through that front room, those tall plants in their wicker baskets. For the first years after I moved into Bill’s house, I would try to keep these tall plants alive because I thought they were his too, not just hers. The leaves of the palm yellowed, they curled and dropped; the jungle plant sent out a single glorious bloom, and I thought I’d made a miracle until Mom told me some plants bloom when they are stressed. A few months later the trunk of the jungle plant, with its rough bark, thinned and melted. All of his ex-wife’s plants died. Even the Christmas cactus.
When one died, I bought another to replace it, thinking Bill wanted tall tropical plants in his home. Until finally I stopped. I said, “You know, these plants are a lot of work. And I don’t know how to keep them alive.” He said, “I don’t care, they aren’t my thing. I thought you wanted them.”
My mother-in-law’s tongue lived. The African violet lived, and I divided it once and again. I bought two hardy lipstick plants, and Mom gave me a start of her hoya plant that blooms once in a while, small waxy flowers each with a single drop of nectar, like a teardrop. These plants don’t mind being root-bound, they like less attention, not more, and I have kept them alive.