PACKING PAJAMAS FOR A SLEEPOVER,
PAST COLLEGE, BUT BEFORE CONCLUSIONS
I am lying on a bare mattress in a bare room, a rented apartment to a house in the low-rent, but hip, district. The room is strung with Christmas lights and a cat sleeps at my feet. She’s in the bathroom, a thin wall away, peeing. Years and lovers before recall bubble baths of lilac, cool porcelain to elbows, mirrors and steam. But now it is only sheets and my own bare shins and a cat. She said:
Hey, take off your pants, stay a while. So I did.
She brushes her teeth and spits. I inspect her fridge. It rattles, shakes, and then just hums. She’s put up postcards with magnets. Typical, and beautifully so. Her college friend has written about a boyfriend who picked her up at the airport, wearing a wig, and driving a motorcycle; she took a cab because, of course, she had her luggage. Said postcard friend—
never again. Somehow it is just enough to bring a nod. And I mutter to myself, yes, exactly, as if all breakups at a certain year, not too long passed, involve airports and motorcycles and taxis and wigs.
It is the year 2000. Everyone believes in beginnings and endings in equal measure. A million college spring break kids to Mardi Gras, seeking double dog dares and beads for flashing, knowing—expecting, even hoping, to have it caught on an internet webcast. Reality TV pushes verite confessions, yet even night-vision bedroom cameras dull, wavery green light, shapes moving across rooms and back. The radio call-in show takes dedications and answer listeners’ questions about premature ejaculation, bondage and sadomasochism, batteries not included. Someone that night gets voted off an island.
She walks naked from the bathroom, past the kitchen, says without turning,
You coming or what?We meet this way again, another night, these sheets, a warm arc of shoulder, smooth spine, churning hips. I would say we are baptized in sweat, but that’s silly. I say it to myself, just the same. She straddles me and I push in. Light spills, red, from the grocerystore sign across the alley, as it spins, rolls across her chest. I try to keep the image, but it comes back always as the clay cup she made in an art class her freshman year, fired it herself, now keeps seven condoms there.
One for every day of the week, I asked.
Silly silly you, she said. Which is not exactly denial.
The cat has not moved, not even as she slides away, sweaty now and sticky. Pipes ping and the radiator gurgles. Somewhere taxis return from airports. In other rooms, lovers cradle lovers. She says to the ceiling:
Europe by rail is grand, this flat is like the Left Bank, and we have our art pads, our charcoal. She says,
My last boyfriend…and trails off. She doesn’t care to tell, and I don’t ask for more. I listen to her cat’s breathing.
I’m tucked in the crook of her shoulder, kissing the nape of her neck and down her arms, where she lets her hair sprout and it smells of us. Everything is delicate just enough. But I cannot tell you like Euripides, cannot refine this moment, this stray hour between one day and the next, college and career, love lost and the hope again. It is only a bare mattress in a bare room, where we collide and fall apart, all in equal measure.
