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10:30 p.m.
I still hadn’t heard from Allison. I found that I hadn’t really slept since she’d left. The bed had lost its refuge status. I watched TV late into the night. You know the score—the really bad infomercial-type late-night stuff. And then the Italian channel puts on its porn-disguised-as-melodrama material. You feel contempt for the whole sorry mess, but, at the same time, you don’t turn it off and go to bed. It’s crazy, really. All you have to do is to press one little button on the remote, but you don’t. When you do finally go to bed, you’re horny as hell from all those jiggling bums and breasts. In the morning you feel like a fool.
With Allison gone, it was just me and my left hand. Well, my right, really. And, as any man will tell you, wanking off might bring you to orgasm, but there’s no orgasm like the ones you have with the woman you love.
I vacillated between pretending to myself that Allison wasn’t gone for anything more than a visit at a friend’s place, and obsessively visualizing poor Allison stuck in some shabby sex motel, eating brown beans cooked over a hot plate, or giving birth to our child alone in a small-town hospital somewhere, crying with pain, fear, sadness, or dying in the bush somewhere at the hands of a brutal sex killer. That kind of thinking was like torture.
There was no response to my messages on her cell phone. She had done one thing for me, though. She’d recorded a new message before the tone on her voice mail:
“I am alive and well. Please leave me a message. Don’t be alarmed if I don’t return your call. It just means that I don’t want to speak to you.”
Typical Allison. Even when she was shutting me out of her life, she still went out of her way to alleviate my worst fears. That’s my girl.
