I met her at work. Linda had been a contract employee for about three months when I was hired as creative director. She said I didn’t even look at her when we were introduced. I guess that’s the first time we met. I don’t remember it. The first time I remember was in the elevator. But even then, we didn’t say much. Small talk. Most of our initial contact was via email.
To: Linda
From: K.
Subject: Happy hour
Tonight at Friday’s?
To: K.
From: Linda
Subject: re: Happy hour
I’ll try… 😉
To: Linda
From: K.
Subject: re: re: Happy hour
What if I said I didn’t invite anyone else? :O
To: K.
From: Linda
Subject: re: re: re: Happy hour
Then it wouldn’t be a happy hour…
To: Linda
From: K.
Subject: re: re: re: re: Happy hour
What would it be?
To: K.
From: Linda
Subject: re: re: re: re: re: Happy hour
You tell me…
She had a boyfriend. I knew she had a boyfriend. I asked Shawn about her at our last happy hour.
“What’s her story?” I was staring at her.
“Sorry, man. She’s got a boyfriend.”
She looked up and I didn’t break eye contact. She smiled.
“I can flip her.”
To: Linda
From: K.
Subject: This thing we’re doing
I have to warn you about a few things about me: 1) I can be intense; 2) I can be needy; 3) I can be intensely needy. I have a tendency to push, push, push because I want so badly for you to pull.
The logistics of corporate cubicle life were exacerbated by her height, 5′ 1″, and pretty much kept her out of sight, if not out of mind. The rest of us were visible upon standing, but she didn’t clear the carpet walls and could move with stealth. Her desk was so far removed from the rest of the department that it looked like she was being punished, banished to the Communications Gulag. It did help her sneak in late. Linda was always late. To everything, not just work.
To: Linda
From: K.
Subject: Absolute appreciation
Did I have to go there? I did. But there’s a good reason. You and I connect on such an intellectual level. I absolutely eat your brains. And I think you’re so fucking funny and interesting that I could listen to you speak for days. The mythical, perfect filibuster. That I don’t ever want to get too far off the road map to your being a woman. And a sensual being. And of the body. Corpus. Animus. Spiritus. So, while this particular comment manifested in the profane, and perhaps ridiculous, it was rooted, and I do choose that word deliberately and carefully, in the fertile soil of absolute appreciation.
Text Message (5:19 a.m.): I smell like blood & cum and 2 much wine.
“Okay, I had to call. You win best text of the day.”
“It’s only 5:30 a.m.”
“Trust me. You win.”
She knocked on my door at precisely 2:20 p.m., precisely 20 minutes late. It was Sunday afternoon–Easter–but the day couldn’t be more secular. I’d had almost a bottle of cabernet in anticipation of her arrival, with a steady diet of sushi and sad bastard music to set the mood: longing, lounging, raw.
I opened the door and I could smell her before I saw her, that unique amalgam of Camels, Maybelline, and chardonnay. I found myself sometimes, in our first times together, feeling the short hairs near the back of her head, unconsciously pulling her smell to me, perhaps being harder than I initially intended, because the urgency to have her inside me some way had become so strong. Of course, she would shrug me away. And with the frailest of gestures make light of the heaviness of my movements.
She sat on the couch again as I finished plating her sushi. I poured her and myself a glass of Johannesburg Riesling from Chateau Ste. Michelle and made my way back into the living room.
“Hello, Lovah,” she whispered.“You’re late.” She reeked of weed. Not unusual.
“Oh, but I bring gifts. Had to make a pit stop.” Which meant she had spent the last two hours with Jenny refilling her medicine cabinet full of self-medicating medications.
“I like surprises,” I said, though I was pretty sure what was in store. She put her arm around my waist as we kissed, long and slow, her fingertips tracing up my torso and neck, then stopping, resting on my cheek. We stared in silence.
“Angel.” She broke the spell. I walked back to the kitchen to get the sushi and wine while she retrieved a small baggie of white powder and a jar of dried mushrooms from her purse. “Surprise!”
“I don’t wanna do any coke. It’s a school night. But ‘shrooms seem like a good way to not celebrate Easter.” She chopped a line with her credit card.
“Suit yourself.”
“You wanna eat first? I get the runs just looking at that shit.”
“I’ll be okay. I’m starving.” She rolled up a crisp twenty and snorted the line, chasing it with a shot of Riesling. We clicked glasses and drank. “Cheers.”
I grabbed a handful of mushrooms, chewed them into an earthy paste, and cleared my mouth with my wine. She extracted five small buttons from the bag and swallowed them whole with the rest of her glass. “I don’t know how you chew that shit.” We kissed again and I could taste the grapey sweetness as I touched my tongue to hers. “Let me try the sushi,” she said.
It’s ahi from Tamura’s. The back strap is cut into small, deep-red fillets, which I’ve positioned, just so, over hand-rolled balls of rice, dressed with rice-wine vinegar and wasabi.
“Careful,” I warned. She placed the entire piece first into a rivulet of shoyu, then whole into her mouth. Her eyes watered as the green, horseradish-like mustard did its work. A tear made its run down the right side of her face stopping just above the corner of her mouth. She was smiling.
“Mmm,” she hummed with a look that was equal parts culinary and carnal. She was still smiling as we kissed and touched each other, not with the animalistic urgency from earlier in the week–there’s no groping–but with a conspicuous tenderness. She felt to me like love personified, bone and muscle and flesh pulled tight over the angles and curves of her soft, warm body.
The mushrooms were kicking in. They were quick. With my head on her lap as we lay across the couch, I opened my eyes to see her at the center of shapes and colors, her smile so soothing. I was eating Jelly Belly’s and M&M’s left over from stuffing Easter eggs for the kids’ baskets. And as sensual pleasure upon sensual pleasure multiplied–the intense sweetness of the candy, the light touch of her fingers through my hair, the creamy softness of her smooth legs against the nape of my neck, the quiet pleading of Ray LaMontagne singing Empty, and the beautiful kaleidoscope visions of her face–the afternoon meandered into dusk until she announced she had to leave.
“Him?”
“Two more weeks, sweet boy.”
“Him.”
“He’ll be gone forever in two weeks.”
“Then?”
“Then we can be together.” She paused. “Forever.”
“Forever?”
“Forever.”
Forever is a long road.
It had been five days since we slept together for the first time, three since she tried to break up with me. On my 39th birthday. That was Thursday. So long ago. Residual guilt perhaps. We’d met after work every night for two weeks (“I have to work late”) as she painstakingly purged him from her life, her life from his. And there was to be no wiggle room between her two lovers. She broke up with him just after midnight, early Tuesday morning. I was inside of her by eight o’clock that night. We stayed in bed until two the next morning. He called twice–and she answered–as we lay together naked and sweating under the down comforter and slowly spinning fan.
“I’m at Em’s,” she lied.
“I thought you broke up with him?” I whispered.
She covered the phone and mouthed, “I did.”
What she actually told him was never made explicit, but clearly, when he called, he expected her home, in a bed he expected to share. A few months later, after she had moved in with me, I asked her if there was, indeed, any crossover.
“You went back to his house, that night of the conference. We were supposed to meet after you got off work. You cancelled at the last minute. Remember?”
“Yeah. I think he called Jenny that weekend. Ordered party favors. You know?” Jenny provided their, now our, party favors.
“I know.” I hate Jenny so much at that moment. “Did you fuck him?”
“I can’t remember.”
“You can’t remember?”
“No.”
“Mercy fuck?”
“Probably.”
And again, there was that strange vacuum. But not quite a twinge of sexual jealousy. At the time I was upset, for sure, but for a lack of companionship, for being the one not chosen. I had reassured myself then that these things take time. Like a game of pick-up sticks I needed to be patient. I needed steady hands to extricate her from the pile of former lovers and current suitors, to remove her from the situation without disturbing any of the others. Without disturbing her. So, I got drunk and steadied my hands. And waited.
To: Linda
From: K.
Subject: Easter Eggs
I spent the night after you left tripping balls, eating chocolate Easter eggs. Crunching through the candy shell and letting the sweetness slowly dissolve on my tongue. It’s comforting. The sweetness. I use it as a proxy for my longing. The gentle ache you represent. Understanding always that the presumption of any future is a slippery slope. And dangerous to delicacy. The chocolate dissolved before the shell and as I lay on my back with my eyes closed, I thought of you and smiled at the metaphor.
It was in this state of mind that I proposed to her–and she accepted–via email, though her cubicle was only about 30 feet away. We were always more beautiful in the written word, even electronic, than we were in any other context and, to me, it seemed like a good idea at the time.