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mallorys_cameraAnd-d-d-d-d-d Chapter 2 is done.
I have no idea if it's any good, but it's certainly been fun writing it. And a bit of a lifesaver, too, because instead of feeling sorry for myself because I'm living in fuckin' Wallkill where I know absolutely no one & could go for weeks without having a single in-person conversation with anyone but store checkers, I can pretend I'm at an exclusive writer's retreat where everything has been arranged to give me perfect solitude for my art!
Anyway, Chapter 1 is here.
And here is Chapter 2:
-------------------------
Part 1: Grazia
Chapter 2
I was born and raised in New York City.
New York City is like no place else on the planet, and when you grow up there, some unquantifiable but enormous part of your brain is assigned to cracking the City's various codexes. The map of the subway, of course, but also the conversations on the subway, voices chattering away in a thousand different dialects that some magical gift of urban telepathy allows you to make sense of. The discombobulated dance step you have to learn so you can weave in and out of the crowd coming at you whenever you walk down a city street. The litter of unexplainable objects on every city street, like fall-out from some highly selective Rapture: passports, wallets, Hermes scarves, Apple watches, Argentinian pesos. The sirens, horns, screaming voices, pulsating bass notes, which you must learn to love like a lullaby.
Once, I saw a woman walking a pigeon on a leash; it was an ordinary pigeon, and it was an ordinary woman.
Before my divorce, when I still lived in Brooklyn's Sunset Park, my idea of a perfect day had been to wander aimlessly till I could catch confluences of buildings, streets, plantings in four dimensions. Why was this here? What had been here before? What will be here 10, 50, 100 years hence? Will there be vestiges of that this still when human civilization vanishes and sentient cockroaches need a Rosetta stone?
I thrilled at the ghost signs on building walls: Pomeroy Trusses, Elastic Stockings, Abdominal Belts, Artificial Legs; Omega Oil for Still Joints, for Sore Muscles. I loved it when vaudeville palaces were repurposed into vast, drafty second-hand clothing emporiums. My heart soared at the sight of a McDonald's, eschewing the plastic box with its corporate gold arches, huddled instead inside the carapace of an ancient Schraffts restaurant.
You only found such gems in the City's poorest neighborhoods. In neighborhoods with high property values, it didn't pay to give the past a chance to reinvent itself. It was cheaper to tear the buildings down, erect something new in their place.
As a New Yorker, these are the things your brain has been customized to register. If you go some place else, your brain will simply not be able to work.
That makes moving very difficult.
###
Still, after my divorce, I moved away from Sunset Park.
My husband had left me for another woman. He'd studied for a time at an exclusive, expensive culinary academy upstate, and Anthony Bourdain was his personal savior.
The other woman was not like me at all, my husband assured me. "You're so brilliant, so beautiful. So exhausting.”
We were lying naked, smoking, in what had once been the marital bed. He'd smoked in secret the whole time we were married, but I never had. Now, I figured I needed a really bad habit like smoking, so I wouldn't develop an even worse habit like shooting heroin or picking up strange men on the subway.
“So, do you think you’re going to end up doing to the new girlfriend what you did to me?" I asked. "I mean the psychopathic lying and all?”
“No,” my ex-husband said.
“Why not?”
“Well. I’m just so incredibly comfortable with her. I’m not afraid to tell her when I’m scared. If a dish isn't coming along right, if I’m nervous about the state of the world, we talk. Plus, I mean—well. If she sees one of the buttons on my shirt is loose, she'll take that shirt out of the laundry basket and sew the button back on. Nobody’s ever done that for me before.”
Right, I thought. I didn’t sew your fucking buttons on your shirt. I just supported your sorry ass for five years while you got fired from restaurant after restaurant.
"So you're going to tell her you just fucked your ex-wife two times while you were out combing Korean fruit markets for heirloom tomatoes?"
"Well. No. But that isn't lying. That's just withholding information. Plus I did buy some heirloom tomatoes! They're right there in that little brown bag on the dresser. See?"
Asshole.
I got up from the bed, walked over to the dresser, threw the little brown bag on the floor, and began stomping on it.
"Grazia! What the fuck are you doing? Those tomatoes cost me eight bucks!"
My misery was a kind of map engraved upon my heart, charting a winding road into his interior.
Time to throw away that map.
Time to throw away the cigarettes.
Time to move.
###
I picked the Hudson Valley as my new home.
It was close enough to the City so that I could still get some use out of my museum memberships.
Also, the Hudson Valley was quaint and unbelievably scenic. Suburban developments sprawled side-by-side with orchards and verdant rolling farmland where mooed and farted real cows. There were rivers and creeks, too, teeming with fish and patrolled by exotic birds, the likes of which would never be seen in the Big Apple outside a very shabby basement exhibit in the Museum of Natural History's basement. (Maybe I'd just forget to renew my museum memberships.)
The Hudson Valley was a simpler place. More genuine. Eventually, I would live way out in the country, I decided. I would learn to love it. But for now, what I was most comfortable with was concrete.
Kingston was a city of only some 20,000, but it had a few square blocks of urban sprawl.
I was fortunate: I was an ER nurse, my occupation was transferable. People had heart attacks everywhere! People fall down flights of stairs everywhere. People got drunk and crashed their Ram 2500s into Acura Integras. Even in the boondocks, people still stick weird things up their butts.
In New York City, ER staff, from docs to janitors, were an elite crew, brilliant, driven front-line workers whose lingua franca was sarcasm. It was easy to make friends.
Their Kingston counterparts matched them in competence, but not—alas!—in edginess. The only two male nurses, both Filipino, preferred reading Tagalog newspapers to talking, so only three topics were ever really discussed in the female-dominated Wiltwyck Hospital's ER breakroom: children, mileage, and reality TV.
You had to keep up a certain amount of mindless chitchat in the Wiltwyck Hospital's ER breakroom because otherwise the other nurses would start suspecting you of stealing narcotics. Childless by choice, I had nothing to contribute to the first topic. And I couldn't complain about my Prius—it got 50 miles a gallon. So, I started watching The Real Housewives.
I was shocked by how absorbing I found The Real Housewives. Kyle and Erica and Larsa and Lisa quickly became the constants in my life till I began to wonder if I felt about the Housewives the same way medieval folks felt about the saints and God—that they were fixed stars around which, though far below, my inconsequential life revolved.
I was very lonely, in other words.
And also—not horny exactly, but I wondered how long I could stay off the bicycle and still remember how to ride.
So, I signed up with an online dating service.
My first three dates were with a guy named Irwin.
"But call me Stash," he urged.
###
There's an unspoken rule on OK Stupid: On the third date, you have sex.
On my third date with Stash, I went up to his apartment. It was a very nice apartment. He lived across the river in Beacon.
He asked if I'd like to partake in some consciousness-raising substances. "Sure," I said.
He had a fireplace, and we watched the fire. I set myself to extracting biographical details: Stash was an immigration lawyer. Born in New Jersey. Stumbled into immigration law quite by accident. Had been married, but figured out she was only a Starter Wife. Now, he was 36, and it was time to get serious.
He leaned over flirtatiously. "May I speak Italian to you, Grazia?"
"No, you may not," I said.
That's because my Italian is (a) not very good and (b) a Calabrese-cum-Sicilian dialect they don't teach on Duolingo. But I certainly wasn't going to tell him that!
So, instead, I steered him to recounting his various misadventures on the online dating site. He'd dated something like 30 women in three years. The longest "relationship" had lasted six weeks.
Turned out the Starter Wife had been the one who fled. After two years, she disappeared one day, only to resurface a few weeks later in Australia.
After sitting in a room with him for two hours, I only wished that I could disappear and resurface in Australia.
"Why do you think all your relationships have been so short?" I asked.
"They haven't been short," he said. "What makes you think they're short?"
"Well. I mean. Two years. Six weeks."
"Women don't want a good guy," he said. "Women want bad boys.
Huh?
"Women want bad boys," he repeated with some relish. "They don't know a good thing when it's looking them in the face."
"Well, I don't think women want bad boys," I said.
"They do," he said.
I sighed. "Stash. Trust me. Women over 30 don't want bad boys. Bad boys are all obsessed that their hairlines are receding, and that motivates them to go out and get really ugly tattoos. Plus, they whine a lot."
"Women want bad boys," he repeated doggedly.
"And that's why they don't want you?"
"I'm a good guy."
"You are a good guy, Stash!" I said heartily. "But maybe it's not quite that binary. Maybe women want goodness plus other qualities too."
He glared at me. It was rather unpleasant being the poster child for all the mistreatment Stash had suffered at feminine hands throughout his life, and if I hadn't had my consciousness altered, if it hadn't been raining, if it hadn't been such a helluva long drive back to Kingston, I would have left.
Practical creature that I am, though, I stayed. Oddly enough, the physical part was okay. I managed to summon the temple prostitute.
###
Neal was Guy # 2 from the online dating site.
We arranged to rendezvous at a café in the Rondout District. I was 10 minutes early; he was 15 minutes late.
It was only early September, but the café was already tarted up for Halloween. Polyethylene spiderwebs, a smattering of pumpkins, a bale of hay where sat two plastic skeletons gossiping over empty cups labeled PUMPKIN LATTE. Two hipsters storyboarded the coming apocalypse in loud voices; two new moms dissected their latest Mommy and Me adventures, while rocking their respective mewlings in expensive strollers. Nobody looked interesting enough to eavesdrop on, so I killed time frowning at the small marina outside the café's windows. It was early September; fallen leaves littered the pavement, but the trees still held on to their green.
The café's ceiling was that ersatz patched tin meant to give the impression of antiquity, but it seemed to me that the building was, in fact, 19th century; its existence and the existence of a small group of almost identical buildings suggested this corner had once been a thriving commercial hub of some sort.
Why so close to this dinky harbor?
This question whetted my interest in a way I was 99% sure the OKStupid date wouldn't.
###
When I looked away from the harbor, a giant was striding toward me. His head was shaved, and he sported a walrus mustache—still, not unattractive if you could shake the resemblance to Mr. Clean. He was dressed in a crumpled suit, but his shirt had no tie. "Hi, I'm Neal. Sorry, I'm late, but that judge was angling for his own reality television show. God! This is an awful place—"
"You're an attorney?"
"I am! But not one who makes the big bucks. I'm a public defender. Wanna cancel the date?" His smile was broad and engaging.
"Maybe," I said.
We stared at each other for a couple of seconds.
"That was a joke," I explained.
"I kind of got that," he said. "I didn't think I knew you well enough to laugh." He paused a second. "That was a better joke."
He hadn't sat down. "The inside of this place isn't the way I pictured it when I suggested meeting you here. Halloween decorations in early September? Get off my lawn. Wanna go some place else?"
"Wanna walk around?" I asked. "I'm kind of interested in the architecture around here."
His eyes lit up. "Yes! This is where the Delaware and Hudson Canal used to empty into Rondout Creek. It was a very big deal back in 1840. Canal barges carried all that anthracite coal from all those mines in Pennsylvania, and right here, on this very spot, it was loaded into coastal schooners and sent down the Hudson to Manhattan. This café and the buildings around it? They're the cottages D&H set up to house the dock foreman. The workers themselves would have lived in wooden houses—" He broke off. "I'm boring you, aren't I?"
"No, no, no, no, no!" I said. "I live for stuff like this."
###
The café was on West Strand Street. West Strand Street was lined with brave little shops, all bursting with Halloween decorations, all empty. Neal clucked disapprovingly. "When will they realize? Zombies and mummies are the same monster. They just come from different socioeconomic backgrounds."
We made an abrupt turn, and then suddenly, we were facing a narrow, murky strip of water.
"All that's left of the old canal," Neal said softly.
It was a raw day, not cold exactly, but when the wind blew, you knew winter was coming and there wasn't a thing you could do about it.
Another abrupt turn, and we were walking in a residential district that had seen better days. "The Rondout District," Neal told me.
The Rondout District made me just as deliriously happy as the derelict landscapes of Sunset Park, though it was a different kind of post-industrial topography. Failed attempts at upward mobility were the apocalypse behind the cracked facades and boarded-up windows of the Italianate row houses, now gone to slum, that had been built to house the newly rich 150 years ago.
"Wow! Look at this sidewalk!" I marveled to Neal. Uneven and cracked, it was a distinctive grey, like slate.
Neal laughed. "If we really hit it off, I'll take you to the old bluestone pit where this was quarried."
We turned again and came across half a block of vacant lots scattered with bricks and trash. Another turn, and another, and we were on an avenue that once, no doubt, had been the in spot for Kingston parvenues. A limestone building, bearing the inscription "State Bank of New York," now housed a nail salon, a discount phone store, and a Dominican restaurant with a hand-written Closed sign flapping by one taped corner on its door.
"The Ozymandias Factor!" chortled Neal. "Don't you just love it?"
I did.
It had been an overcast day, but as we were walking, the sun broke out, and the oil spatter on the canal's surface became a captive rainbow. Life stretched into one of those moments so close to the future you can touch it, except then, when you're there in that future, you remember how good it was to be in the past.
I began to skip. Without a word, Neal began to skip next to me. We skipped faster and faster. We were having a race. And then, holding hands and laughing, we collapsed on a bench in front of a massive wedge-shaped building on a small plaza.
"Old hotel?" I suggested.
"Old opera house," Neal said.
"Opera house that's only two stories high?" I scoffed.
"I suspect there was a fire," Neal said.
An hour. That's all it had taken us to develop our own secret shorthand. Soon we'd be finishing each other's sentences. He seemed to be enjoying himself, but when I thought about it harder, I realized he was enjoying me enjoying myself. Clearly, we were soulmates!
A woman veered around the shabby bandstand, huddling into her sweater.
"Now, she's a supinator!" Neal said.
"A what?"
Neal smiled. "See, how she's rotating her ankle and coming down on the side of her foot?"
I didn't.
A youngish man carrying a briefcase strode briskly across the plaza.
"And he's developing problems with his hips. See how he's waddling ever so slightly? Classic myopathic gait."
"What is this?" I asked.
Neal laughed. "My old man was a podiatrist. He trained me to notice the way people walk. Not consciously. But it was something he talked about all the time, so I just naturally picked it up from him."
"I get it," I said. "The first thing I always notice about people is their veins. Like, how hard would it be to start an IV on them?" I stood up and began to twirl in front of Neal. Surely, he would be enchanted by my grace and spontaneity. "So what am I?"
He eyed me dispassionately. "Pronator, definitely. Are your feet flat?"
Crack went the perfect moment.
"I'm gonna take some pix!" I announced and ran off to the wedge-shaped building with my phone, leaving Neal on the bench with his funny walk festival.
Up close, the wedge-shaped building was entirely uninteresting. It had reinvented itself, apparently, as some kind of Middle Eastern restaurant. The restaurant was closed.
I sneaked a glance at Neal. He wasn't watching me.
I walked back to the bench, pretending enrapturement at the fabulous photographs I hadn't taken.
"Can I see?" he asked me politely, and that made me so nervous I punched the wrong icon.
Neal's eyebrows shot up. "Wait! What? You have 28,000 photos on this phone?"
I flipped the phone face down. "I need them!"
"For what? You working for the Federal Art Project? In case you hadn't heard, it's not 1935 anymore."
"No," I said. I didn't have to be embarrassed. I wouldn't be embarrassed. "I keep an online diary. And I post a lot of photographs."
"An online blog?"
"It's not a blog. It's a diary."
"What's the difference?"
"A blog is a place where you're promoting your opinions. A diary is a place where you write about your life—only if you're doing it online, you're doing it as a kind of high-wire act because other people read it. I have about a hundred readers!"
"An audience!" Neal said. "Do they pay to read you?"
"Well, no. But that's not the reason I'm writing it."
"So, what is the reason you're writing it?"
I didn't actually have an answer to that one, so I just smiled enigmatically.
"You're not interested in opinions?" he pressed.
"I'm interested in stories," I said.
"Hmmmm. Should I tell you mine?"
"Sure."
From the way he folded his hands on his lap and cocked his head slightly to the left, I was sure I was listening to a set piece, one he'd recited twenty times before, possibly using the exact same words. "Well, I no longer practice monogamy."
"Uh huh. And what does that mean?"
"I'm polyamorous."
"You mean, if this is Tuesday, you must be Sarah!" I said.
Neal looked wounded. "I see Sarah on Wednesdays! No, that was a joke. I don't actually have a lover named Sarah. What? You think this is too much information?"
I shrugged. Practiced looking noncommittal.
"Well, you must admit this is a transactional venue. We met on a dating site! It may lead to something, it may not. So the conversation has to be process-oriented. I just want to make sure from the start that there's no ambiguity."
Was there any way to tell this big, smiling, friendly, yet strangely indifferent stranger that I personally liked ambiguity? That it was the shapeshifting potential of new acquaintance that drew me in, the possibility that I might be the person with whom someone could forget the old scripts? That real communication takes place in the interstices where it's not what's said, but how it's said?
Probably not.
So, we started talking about sex.
Eventually, we went back to his apartment. Neal brought out baguettes and prosciutto and a nice runny Camembert. It was just a terrific apartment, a converted industrial space with a large piano and tons of books and interesting art on the walls, and wires on to which he'd trained multiple tendrils of an ivy plant, which had obviously been growing for years and years and years. Amazing view outside his front window, too, of an old brick lighthouse that appeared to be floating on its own reflection in the middle of the Hudson.
"This is an incredible place," I blurted out.
"You want it?" Neal asked. "I could put in a good word with the landlord. I'm moving. Flavia, my primary, bought a place in the Catskills. Ten acres. I can have a garden there. Bit of a commute, but you know, I won't have to watch people walking." His smile was wry.
"You know, I do think you're attractive," I said. "So we probably will have sex at some point. Thing is I want to be the one who decides when. I'll be the one who makes the moves."
"I see," he said.
And then he began telling me about his superpower: Neal could make women come just by looking at them and telling them to come.
I had no reason to doubt him. He was very charismatic. But I really didn't want to be programmed to orgasm like Pavlov's dog, so the whole I-make-women-come-while-I-masturbate-to-orgasm-myself thing squicked me out. It was kind of like: I want you to lose control, but I'm not gonna lose control. The dom thing, in other words.
I'd actually had sex with a dom once before I was married, though not in a BDSM context. I think I was supposed to lose myself in the sheer rush of sensation, and to some extent I did, but still, I kept count: He made me come 11 times. He pleasured me exactly as though he was winding a clock with a kind of clinical degree of interest that made the experience, despite the physical pleasure, rather… degrading, I suppose would be the word. I guess that was the point. He was a dom, after all.
When I left Neal's apartment, I felt a real pang of regret. There were so many good things about him. But I never wanted to see him again.
And I only wanted to think about him again for the length of time it would take me to write up the date for LiveJournal.
###
Despite what I'd told Neal, my online diary was actually a very tiny tide pool of edges of the vast, deep Internet.
Still, my satirical write-up of our date netted enough replies to make me quite pleased with myself.
Dr. Fraud would peg this guy as a garden variety narcissist, wrote one commentator.
This guy's quotes have a strained, industrial quality, wrote another.
And another: Why not just play with our respective sextoys when we're alone and get together for lunch occasionally to discuss current events?
I scrolled down two pages of replies. But, wait—what was this last comment? It was from someone who was not on my officially approved list of commentators, so visible only to me:
So I'm the "narcissist" "Dom" etc. y'all are talking about. Grazia spends 4 hours hanging out with me, and thinks she's got it all figured out. Fine with me, except it might be nice to be kept in the loop one-on-one. I'm not going to "answer" what has been said/surmised about me. I don't enjoy being the object of ill-informed (not necessarily wrong) projections about who I am, but since short of the Vulcan mind-meld, projection is all we have, I'll have to live with it.
I hadn't given Neal the URL for my diary. How the hell had he found it?
I was still wondering when the phone rang.
It was Neal. "Do you want to talk about this?"
Well, no. Not really. I would have much preferred Neal to remain an amusing character on the page. But I felt I owed it to him, so I agreed to meet him.
And at that meeting, we hammered out a Treaty of Friendship.
###
Thereafter, we got together every two weeks or so. Mostly, he called me. But sometimes when the time elapsed since we'd last seen each other verged on three weeks or four, I'd call him. Mostly, when he didn't call me, it was because he'd been away on trips. Skiing vacations to Colorado or the Swiss Alps with his primary Flavia. Sojourns to California to hang out with his special friend Daria. Solo hiking expeditions along the Appalachian Trail.
We explored the towns of the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley together.
Middletown had developed as a distribution hub and processing center for farm products, reaching its mercantile heights between the late 19th century and the beginning of World War II, when the Erie Railroad's downtown yard bustled with freight cars, and the big industries were tanneries and condensed milk.
Walden had been the center of U.S. pocket knife production.
Rosendale had produced the cement that built New York City's bridges, aqueducts, and Fifth Avenue emporiums.
Staatsburg had been the center of the flourishing ice-harvesting industry.
Rhinebeck had grown violets. Violets used to be the world's most popular flower, and there'd been so many violet greenhouses in Rhinebeck, it was nicknamed "Crystal City."
All those industries had once existed, had thrived, but all of them were gone now. The entire Hudson Valley was a kind of geographic ghost that didn't realize it was dead, drifting on the miasma of a manufacturing past. I'd go somewhere with Neal, I'd look around, and I'd wonder: Why is this here? These buildings, these roads, this railroad depot. Why HERE? Why not fifty miles down the river?
There was never really any answer. Except the obvious one, which was more of a reproof than an answer: Nothing survives.
The Ozymandias Factor.
###
Sometimes I drove up to Neal's new digs in the Catskills. You could tell it had once been a settlement of some sort because the small scattering of houses was right where two backcountry roads crisscrossed. But there had never been a post office, so the scattering of houses never got to be on a map.
It did have a name, though: "Riggsville," Neal told me. "Flavia looked it up."
I didn't mind listening to Neal talk about Flavia. She sounded like an interesting person. She was very interested in environmental conservancy, had bought the cottage, its ten acres, and the hundred acres up the mountain behind it to save it from some land developer. And she'd graduated from Pratt with an architecture degree—
"Oh, really?" I said. "What kind of architecture does she do?"
"Oh, she doesn't do any type of architecture," Neal said. "She doesn't work. She doesn't have to. Flavia is very rich. I mean, she does design her own houses. She's got one in Greenwich Village, and one on Long Island, and one on the Jersey Shore. Does designing your own houses count?"
"Why not?" I asked expansively.
Often when I visited, Neal would cook me dinner. He was a good cook, specializing in Southeast Asian cuisines.
Sometimes, Neal would play the piano for me. Was he a good pianist? He claimed not to be. But I found watching his face and the movements of his hands on the keys as he played an amazing experience. He didn't perform the music so much as he channeled it. The play of expressions across his face was so intimate and unguarded at those moments that it moved me almost to tears.
Always, we would talk.
"I suppose terrorism is sort of like Vietnam was during the 70s," I said. "The defining matrix in which we all live."
"More like McCarthyism," he answered. "But, yes. The defining matrix."
"But you don't protest it."
"Oh, I do my part combating the evil forces of the criminal justice system," Neal said. "But the police state is inevitable. I mean, I know you like the Second Amendment—"
"I've never owned a gun in my life. I think it's highly unlikely I'll ever shoot a gun. But I look at places like North Korea and I think, Yes. The citizenry needs access to guns—"
Neal laughed. "Grazia," he said. "Have you seen the guns SWAT teams and the military use? Do you believe for one second that any gun you or anyone you know could get his hands on would stand up to that kind of firepower? Trust me, Grazia. When Da Man comes knocking on your door, you're toast. I'll come visit you at Guantanamo. If I can get a security clearance."
One time when I came to visit him, he'd just been out in his garden, and he'd pulled a muscle in his shoulder. "It's nothing," he told me, but he was wincing with pain.
"You know, in nursing school, they teach us many fabulous things," I said. "Like how to give the perfect back massage. It's an ancient technique, handed down from Asclepius and written on scrolls preserved in Rosacrucian temples right next to the aliens' exoskeletons—"
"Fine," said Neal. "You can give me a back rub."
"I'll have to check your insurance first," I said.
"Let me just duck into the shower."
Ten minutes later, I went upstairs to his bedroom.
I had never been in his bedroom before, and I had never seen him naked.
His bedroom was a completely utilitarian space. King-sized bed with blue duvet and no headboard. Enormous desk with a laptop monitor and two giant monitors, covered with papers. Cardboard boxes on the floor. Many windows, no curtains.
He was lying half under a sheet.
He was a big man, and his back was massively muscled. Since he shaved his head, I couldn't tell where his neck ended and his skull began. I balanced on my knees, very careful not to rest my weight on him. I could feel his scapula with the heels of my hands, but my fingertips couldn't find his intercostals through the sheath of muscle. His skin was very smooth, almost glossy. I could smell the faint scent of the soap he had used.
This Neal was totally unfamiliar to me.
I wondered what he would do if, all of a sudden, I started tracing his spine with kisses instead of fingers. I wondered if that was something I wanted to do. Honestly? It didn't say No to me, but it didn't say Yes to me, either. It didn't even say: This will change your relationship.
If we started having sex, I knew that it would only be one more thing to add to the list of things we did together. Urban exploration, talking, eating, talking, getting high, talking, fucking, sucking, fingering, talking: The essence of the relationship would remain the same.
Neal stretched and gently dislodged me. "Much better," he said. "You tell the Sisters of Mercy, they trained you well."
Then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "You and I, we have moved into the sibling zone."
I have no idea if it's any good, but it's certainly been fun writing it. And a bit of a lifesaver, too, because instead of feeling sorry for myself because I'm living in fuckin' Wallkill where I know absolutely no one & could go for weeks without having a single in-person conversation with anyone but store checkers, I can pretend I'm at an exclusive writer's retreat where everything has been arranged to give me perfect solitude for my art!
Anyway, Chapter 1 is here.
And here is Chapter 2:
-------------------------
Part 1: Grazia
Chapter 2
I was born and raised in New York City.
New York City is like no place else on the planet, and when you grow up there, some unquantifiable but enormous part of your brain is assigned to cracking the City's various codexes. The map of the subway, of course, but also the conversations on the subway, voices chattering away in a thousand different dialects that some magical gift of urban telepathy allows you to make sense of. The discombobulated dance step you have to learn so you can weave in and out of the crowd coming at you whenever you walk down a city street. The litter of unexplainable objects on every city street, like fall-out from some highly selective Rapture: passports, wallets, Hermes scarves, Apple watches, Argentinian pesos. The sirens, horns, screaming voices, pulsating bass notes, which you must learn to love like a lullaby.
Once, I saw a woman walking a pigeon on a leash; it was an ordinary pigeon, and it was an ordinary woman.
Before my divorce, when I still lived in Brooklyn's Sunset Park, my idea of a perfect day had been to wander aimlessly till I could catch confluences of buildings, streets, plantings in four dimensions. Why was this here? What had been here before? What will be here 10, 50, 100 years hence? Will there be vestiges of that this still when human civilization vanishes and sentient cockroaches need a Rosetta stone?
I thrilled at the ghost signs on building walls: Pomeroy Trusses, Elastic Stockings, Abdominal Belts, Artificial Legs; Omega Oil for Still Joints, for Sore Muscles. I loved it when vaudeville palaces were repurposed into vast, drafty second-hand clothing emporiums. My heart soared at the sight of a McDonald's, eschewing the plastic box with its corporate gold arches, huddled instead inside the carapace of an ancient Schraffts restaurant.
You only found such gems in the City's poorest neighborhoods. In neighborhoods with high property values, it didn't pay to give the past a chance to reinvent itself. It was cheaper to tear the buildings down, erect something new in their place.
As a New Yorker, these are the things your brain has been customized to register. If you go some place else, your brain will simply not be able to work.
That makes moving very difficult.
###
Still, after my divorce, I moved away from Sunset Park.
My husband had left me for another woman. He'd studied for a time at an exclusive, expensive culinary academy upstate, and Anthony Bourdain was his personal savior.
The other woman was not like me at all, my husband assured me. "You're so brilliant, so beautiful. So exhausting.”
We were lying naked, smoking, in what had once been the marital bed. He'd smoked in secret the whole time we were married, but I never had. Now, I figured I needed a really bad habit like smoking, so I wouldn't develop an even worse habit like shooting heroin or picking up strange men on the subway.
“So, do you think you’re going to end up doing to the new girlfriend what you did to me?" I asked. "I mean the psychopathic lying and all?”
“No,” my ex-husband said.
“Why not?”
“Well. I’m just so incredibly comfortable with her. I’m not afraid to tell her when I’m scared. If a dish isn't coming along right, if I’m nervous about the state of the world, we talk. Plus, I mean—well. If she sees one of the buttons on my shirt is loose, she'll take that shirt out of the laundry basket and sew the button back on. Nobody’s ever done that for me before.”
Right, I thought. I didn’t sew your fucking buttons on your shirt. I just supported your sorry ass for five years while you got fired from restaurant after restaurant.
"So you're going to tell her you just fucked your ex-wife two times while you were out combing Korean fruit markets for heirloom tomatoes?"
"Well. No. But that isn't lying. That's just withholding information. Plus I did buy some heirloom tomatoes! They're right there in that little brown bag on the dresser. See?"
Asshole.
I got up from the bed, walked over to the dresser, threw the little brown bag on the floor, and began stomping on it.
"Grazia! What the fuck are you doing? Those tomatoes cost me eight bucks!"
My misery was a kind of map engraved upon my heart, charting a winding road into his interior.
Time to throw away that map.
Time to throw away the cigarettes.
Time to move.
###
I picked the Hudson Valley as my new home.
It was close enough to the City so that I could still get some use out of my museum memberships.
Also, the Hudson Valley was quaint and unbelievably scenic. Suburban developments sprawled side-by-side with orchards and verdant rolling farmland where mooed and farted real cows. There were rivers and creeks, too, teeming with fish and patrolled by exotic birds, the likes of which would never be seen in the Big Apple outside a very shabby basement exhibit in the Museum of Natural History's basement. (Maybe I'd just forget to renew my museum memberships.)
The Hudson Valley was a simpler place. More genuine. Eventually, I would live way out in the country, I decided. I would learn to love it. But for now, what I was most comfortable with was concrete.
Kingston was a city of only some 20,000, but it had a few square blocks of urban sprawl.
I was fortunate: I was an ER nurse, my occupation was transferable. People had heart attacks everywhere! People fall down flights of stairs everywhere. People got drunk and crashed their Ram 2500s into Acura Integras. Even in the boondocks, people still stick weird things up their butts.
In New York City, ER staff, from docs to janitors, were an elite crew, brilliant, driven front-line workers whose lingua franca was sarcasm. It was easy to make friends.
Their Kingston counterparts matched them in competence, but not—alas!—in edginess. The only two male nurses, both Filipino, preferred reading Tagalog newspapers to talking, so only three topics were ever really discussed in the female-dominated Wiltwyck Hospital's ER breakroom: children, mileage, and reality TV.
You had to keep up a certain amount of mindless chitchat in the Wiltwyck Hospital's ER breakroom because otherwise the other nurses would start suspecting you of stealing narcotics. Childless by choice, I had nothing to contribute to the first topic. And I couldn't complain about my Prius—it got 50 miles a gallon. So, I started watching The Real Housewives.
I was shocked by how absorbing I found The Real Housewives. Kyle and Erica and Larsa and Lisa quickly became the constants in my life till I began to wonder if I felt about the Housewives the same way medieval folks felt about the saints and God—that they were fixed stars around which, though far below, my inconsequential life revolved.
I was very lonely, in other words.
And also—not horny exactly, but I wondered how long I could stay off the bicycle and still remember how to ride.
So, I signed up with an online dating service.
My first three dates were with a guy named Irwin.
"But call me Stash," he urged.
###
There's an unspoken rule on OK Stupid: On the third date, you have sex.
On my third date with Stash, I went up to his apartment. It was a very nice apartment. He lived across the river in Beacon.
He asked if I'd like to partake in some consciousness-raising substances. "Sure," I said.
He had a fireplace, and we watched the fire. I set myself to extracting biographical details: Stash was an immigration lawyer. Born in New Jersey. Stumbled into immigration law quite by accident. Had been married, but figured out she was only a Starter Wife. Now, he was 36, and it was time to get serious.
He leaned over flirtatiously. "May I speak Italian to you, Grazia?"
"No, you may not," I said.
That's because my Italian is (a) not very good and (b) a Calabrese-cum-Sicilian dialect they don't teach on Duolingo. But I certainly wasn't going to tell him that!
So, instead, I steered him to recounting his various misadventures on the online dating site. He'd dated something like 30 women in three years. The longest "relationship" had lasted six weeks.
Turned out the Starter Wife had been the one who fled. After two years, she disappeared one day, only to resurface a few weeks later in Australia.
After sitting in a room with him for two hours, I only wished that I could disappear and resurface in Australia.
"Why do you think all your relationships have been so short?" I asked.
"They haven't been short," he said. "What makes you think they're short?"
"Well. I mean. Two years. Six weeks."
"Women don't want a good guy," he said. "Women want bad boys.
Huh?
"Women want bad boys," he repeated with some relish. "They don't know a good thing when it's looking them in the face."
"Well, I don't think women want bad boys," I said.
"They do," he said.
I sighed. "Stash. Trust me. Women over 30 don't want bad boys. Bad boys are all obsessed that their hairlines are receding, and that motivates them to go out and get really ugly tattoos. Plus, they whine a lot."
"Women want bad boys," he repeated doggedly.
"And that's why they don't want you?"
"I'm a good guy."
"You are a good guy, Stash!" I said heartily. "But maybe it's not quite that binary. Maybe women want goodness plus other qualities too."
He glared at me. It was rather unpleasant being the poster child for all the mistreatment Stash had suffered at feminine hands throughout his life, and if I hadn't had my consciousness altered, if it hadn't been raining, if it hadn't been such a helluva long drive back to Kingston, I would have left.
Practical creature that I am, though, I stayed. Oddly enough, the physical part was okay. I managed to summon the temple prostitute.
###
Neal was Guy # 2 from the online dating site.
We arranged to rendezvous at a café in the Rondout District. I was 10 minutes early; he was 15 minutes late.
It was only early September, but the café was already tarted up for Halloween. Polyethylene spiderwebs, a smattering of pumpkins, a bale of hay where sat two plastic skeletons gossiping over empty cups labeled PUMPKIN LATTE. Two hipsters storyboarded the coming apocalypse in loud voices; two new moms dissected their latest Mommy and Me adventures, while rocking their respective mewlings in expensive strollers. Nobody looked interesting enough to eavesdrop on, so I killed time frowning at the small marina outside the café's windows. It was early September; fallen leaves littered the pavement, but the trees still held on to their green.
The café's ceiling was that ersatz patched tin meant to give the impression of antiquity, but it seemed to me that the building was, in fact, 19th century; its existence and the existence of a small group of almost identical buildings suggested this corner had once been a thriving commercial hub of some sort.
Why so close to this dinky harbor?
This question whetted my interest in a way I was 99% sure the OKStupid date wouldn't.
###
When I looked away from the harbor, a giant was striding toward me. His head was shaved, and he sported a walrus mustache—still, not unattractive if you could shake the resemblance to Mr. Clean. He was dressed in a crumpled suit, but his shirt had no tie. "Hi, I'm Neal. Sorry, I'm late, but that judge was angling for his own reality television show. God! This is an awful place—"
"You're an attorney?"
"I am! But not one who makes the big bucks. I'm a public defender. Wanna cancel the date?" His smile was broad and engaging.
"Maybe," I said.
We stared at each other for a couple of seconds.
"That was a joke," I explained.
"I kind of got that," he said. "I didn't think I knew you well enough to laugh." He paused a second. "That was a better joke."
He hadn't sat down. "The inside of this place isn't the way I pictured it when I suggested meeting you here. Halloween decorations in early September? Get off my lawn. Wanna go some place else?"
"Wanna walk around?" I asked. "I'm kind of interested in the architecture around here."
His eyes lit up. "Yes! This is where the Delaware and Hudson Canal used to empty into Rondout Creek. It was a very big deal back in 1840. Canal barges carried all that anthracite coal from all those mines in Pennsylvania, and right here, on this very spot, it was loaded into coastal schooners and sent down the Hudson to Manhattan. This café and the buildings around it? They're the cottages D&H set up to house the dock foreman. The workers themselves would have lived in wooden houses—" He broke off. "I'm boring you, aren't I?"
"No, no, no, no, no!" I said. "I live for stuff like this."
###
The café was on West Strand Street. West Strand Street was lined with brave little shops, all bursting with Halloween decorations, all empty. Neal clucked disapprovingly. "When will they realize? Zombies and mummies are the same monster. They just come from different socioeconomic backgrounds."
We made an abrupt turn, and then suddenly, we were facing a narrow, murky strip of water.
"All that's left of the old canal," Neal said softly.
It was a raw day, not cold exactly, but when the wind blew, you knew winter was coming and there wasn't a thing you could do about it.
Another abrupt turn, and we were walking in a residential district that had seen better days. "The Rondout District," Neal told me.
The Rondout District made me just as deliriously happy as the derelict landscapes of Sunset Park, though it was a different kind of post-industrial topography. Failed attempts at upward mobility were the apocalypse behind the cracked facades and boarded-up windows of the Italianate row houses, now gone to slum, that had been built to house the newly rich 150 years ago.
"Wow! Look at this sidewalk!" I marveled to Neal. Uneven and cracked, it was a distinctive grey, like slate.
Neal laughed. "If we really hit it off, I'll take you to the old bluestone pit where this was quarried."
We turned again and came across half a block of vacant lots scattered with bricks and trash. Another turn, and another, and we were on an avenue that once, no doubt, had been the in spot for Kingston parvenues. A limestone building, bearing the inscription "State Bank of New York," now housed a nail salon, a discount phone store, and a Dominican restaurant with a hand-written Closed sign flapping by one taped corner on its door.
"The Ozymandias Factor!" chortled Neal. "Don't you just love it?"
I did.
It had been an overcast day, but as we were walking, the sun broke out, and the oil spatter on the canal's surface became a captive rainbow. Life stretched into one of those moments so close to the future you can touch it, except then, when you're there in that future, you remember how good it was to be in the past.
I began to skip. Without a word, Neal began to skip next to me. We skipped faster and faster. We were having a race. And then, holding hands and laughing, we collapsed on a bench in front of a massive wedge-shaped building on a small plaza.
"Old hotel?" I suggested.
"Old opera house," Neal said.
"Opera house that's only two stories high?" I scoffed.
"I suspect there was a fire," Neal said.
An hour. That's all it had taken us to develop our own secret shorthand. Soon we'd be finishing each other's sentences. He seemed to be enjoying himself, but when I thought about it harder, I realized he was enjoying me enjoying myself. Clearly, we were soulmates!
A woman veered around the shabby bandstand, huddling into her sweater.
"Now, she's a supinator!" Neal said.
"A what?"
Neal smiled. "See, how she's rotating her ankle and coming down on the side of her foot?"
I didn't.
A youngish man carrying a briefcase strode briskly across the plaza.
"And he's developing problems with his hips. See how he's waddling ever so slightly? Classic myopathic gait."
"What is this?" I asked.
Neal laughed. "My old man was a podiatrist. He trained me to notice the way people walk. Not consciously. But it was something he talked about all the time, so I just naturally picked it up from him."
"I get it," I said. "The first thing I always notice about people is their veins. Like, how hard would it be to start an IV on them?" I stood up and began to twirl in front of Neal. Surely, he would be enchanted by my grace and spontaneity. "So what am I?"
He eyed me dispassionately. "Pronator, definitely. Are your feet flat?"
Crack went the perfect moment.
"I'm gonna take some pix!" I announced and ran off to the wedge-shaped building with my phone, leaving Neal on the bench with his funny walk festival.
Up close, the wedge-shaped building was entirely uninteresting. It had reinvented itself, apparently, as some kind of Middle Eastern restaurant. The restaurant was closed.
I sneaked a glance at Neal. He wasn't watching me.
I walked back to the bench, pretending enrapturement at the fabulous photographs I hadn't taken.
"Can I see?" he asked me politely, and that made me so nervous I punched the wrong icon.
Neal's eyebrows shot up. "Wait! What? You have 28,000 photos on this phone?"
I flipped the phone face down. "I need them!"
"For what? You working for the Federal Art Project? In case you hadn't heard, it's not 1935 anymore."
"No," I said. I didn't have to be embarrassed. I wouldn't be embarrassed. "I keep an online diary. And I post a lot of photographs."
"An online blog?"
"It's not a blog. It's a diary."
"What's the difference?"
"A blog is a place where you're promoting your opinions. A diary is a place where you write about your life—only if you're doing it online, you're doing it as a kind of high-wire act because other people read it. I have about a hundred readers!"
"An audience!" Neal said. "Do they pay to read you?"
"Well, no. But that's not the reason I'm writing it."
"So, what is the reason you're writing it?"
I didn't actually have an answer to that one, so I just smiled enigmatically.
"You're not interested in opinions?" he pressed.
"I'm interested in stories," I said.
"Hmmmm. Should I tell you mine?"
"Sure."
From the way he folded his hands on his lap and cocked his head slightly to the left, I was sure I was listening to a set piece, one he'd recited twenty times before, possibly using the exact same words. "Well, I no longer practice monogamy."
"Uh huh. And what does that mean?"
"I'm polyamorous."
"You mean, if this is Tuesday, you must be Sarah!" I said.
Neal looked wounded. "I see Sarah on Wednesdays! No, that was a joke. I don't actually have a lover named Sarah. What? You think this is too much information?"
I shrugged. Practiced looking noncommittal.
"Well, you must admit this is a transactional venue. We met on a dating site! It may lead to something, it may not. So the conversation has to be process-oriented. I just want to make sure from the start that there's no ambiguity."
Was there any way to tell this big, smiling, friendly, yet strangely indifferent stranger that I personally liked ambiguity? That it was the shapeshifting potential of new acquaintance that drew me in, the possibility that I might be the person with whom someone could forget the old scripts? That real communication takes place in the interstices where it's not what's said, but how it's said?
Probably not.
So, we started talking about sex.
Eventually, we went back to his apartment. Neal brought out baguettes and prosciutto and a nice runny Camembert. It was just a terrific apartment, a converted industrial space with a large piano and tons of books and interesting art on the walls, and wires on to which he'd trained multiple tendrils of an ivy plant, which had obviously been growing for years and years and years. Amazing view outside his front window, too, of an old brick lighthouse that appeared to be floating on its own reflection in the middle of the Hudson.
"This is an incredible place," I blurted out.
"You want it?" Neal asked. "I could put in a good word with the landlord. I'm moving. Flavia, my primary, bought a place in the Catskills. Ten acres. I can have a garden there. Bit of a commute, but you know, I won't have to watch people walking." His smile was wry.
"You know, I do think you're attractive," I said. "So we probably will have sex at some point. Thing is I want to be the one who decides when. I'll be the one who makes the moves."
"I see," he said.
And then he began telling me about his superpower: Neal could make women come just by looking at them and telling them to come.
I had no reason to doubt him. He was very charismatic. But I really didn't want to be programmed to orgasm like Pavlov's dog, so the whole I-make-women-come-while-I-masturbate-to-orgasm-myself thing squicked me out. It was kind of like: I want you to lose control, but I'm not gonna lose control. The dom thing, in other words.
I'd actually had sex with a dom once before I was married, though not in a BDSM context. I think I was supposed to lose myself in the sheer rush of sensation, and to some extent I did, but still, I kept count: He made me come 11 times. He pleasured me exactly as though he was winding a clock with a kind of clinical degree of interest that made the experience, despite the physical pleasure, rather… degrading, I suppose would be the word. I guess that was the point. He was a dom, after all.
When I left Neal's apartment, I felt a real pang of regret. There were so many good things about him. But I never wanted to see him again.
And I only wanted to think about him again for the length of time it would take me to write up the date for LiveJournal.
###
Despite what I'd told Neal, my online diary was actually a very tiny tide pool of edges of the vast, deep Internet.
Still, my satirical write-up of our date netted enough replies to make me quite pleased with myself.
Dr. Fraud would peg this guy as a garden variety narcissist, wrote one commentator.
This guy's quotes have a strained, industrial quality, wrote another.
And another: Why not just play with our respective sextoys when we're alone and get together for lunch occasionally to discuss current events?
I scrolled down two pages of replies. But, wait—what was this last comment? It was from someone who was not on my officially approved list of commentators, so visible only to me:
So I'm the "narcissist" "Dom" etc. y'all are talking about. Grazia spends 4 hours hanging out with me, and thinks she's got it all figured out. Fine with me, except it might be nice to be kept in the loop one-on-one. I'm not going to "answer" what has been said/surmised about me. I don't enjoy being the object of ill-informed (not necessarily wrong) projections about who I am, but since short of the Vulcan mind-meld, projection is all we have, I'll have to live with it.
I hadn't given Neal the URL for my diary. How the hell had he found it?
I was still wondering when the phone rang.
It was Neal. "Do you want to talk about this?"
Well, no. Not really. I would have much preferred Neal to remain an amusing character on the page. But I felt I owed it to him, so I agreed to meet him.
And at that meeting, we hammered out a Treaty of Friendship.
###
Thereafter, we got together every two weeks or so. Mostly, he called me. But sometimes when the time elapsed since we'd last seen each other verged on three weeks or four, I'd call him. Mostly, when he didn't call me, it was because he'd been away on trips. Skiing vacations to Colorado or the Swiss Alps with his primary Flavia. Sojourns to California to hang out with his special friend Daria. Solo hiking expeditions along the Appalachian Trail.
We explored the towns of the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley together.
Middletown had developed as a distribution hub and processing center for farm products, reaching its mercantile heights between the late 19th century and the beginning of World War II, when the Erie Railroad's downtown yard bustled with freight cars, and the big industries were tanneries and condensed milk.
Walden had been the center of U.S. pocket knife production.
Rosendale had produced the cement that built New York City's bridges, aqueducts, and Fifth Avenue emporiums.
Staatsburg had been the center of the flourishing ice-harvesting industry.
Rhinebeck had grown violets. Violets used to be the world's most popular flower, and there'd been so many violet greenhouses in Rhinebeck, it was nicknamed "Crystal City."
All those industries had once existed, had thrived, but all of them were gone now. The entire Hudson Valley was a kind of geographic ghost that didn't realize it was dead, drifting on the miasma of a manufacturing past. I'd go somewhere with Neal, I'd look around, and I'd wonder: Why is this here? These buildings, these roads, this railroad depot. Why HERE? Why not fifty miles down the river?
There was never really any answer. Except the obvious one, which was more of a reproof than an answer: Nothing survives.
The Ozymandias Factor.
###
Sometimes I drove up to Neal's new digs in the Catskills. You could tell it had once been a settlement of some sort because the small scattering of houses was right where two backcountry roads crisscrossed. But there had never been a post office, so the scattering of houses never got to be on a map.
It did have a name, though: "Riggsville," Neal told me. "Flavia looked it up."
I didn't mind listening to Neal talk about Flavia. She sounded like an interesting person. She was very interested in environmental conservancy, had bought the cottage, its ten acres, and the hundred acres up the mountain behind it to save it from some land developer. And she'd graduated from Pratt with an architecture degree—
"Oh, really?" I said. "What kind of architecture does she do?"
"Oh, she doesn't do any type of architecture," Neal said. "She doesn't work. She doesn't have to. Flavia is very rich. I mean, she does design her own houses. She's got one in Greenwich Village, and one on Long Island, and one on the Jersey Shore. Does designing your own houses count?"
"Why not?" I asked expansively.
Often when I visited, Neal would cook me dinner. He was a good cook, specializing in Southeast Asian cuisines.
Sometimes, Neal would play the piano for me. Was he a good pianist? He claimed not to be. But I found watching his face and the movements of his hands on the keys as he played an amazing experience. He didn't perform the music so much as he channeled it. The play of expressions across his face was so intimate and unguarded at those moments that it moved me almost to tears.
Always, we would talk.
"I suppose terrorism is sort of like Vietnam was during the 70s," I said. "The defining matrix in which we all live."
"More like McCarthyism," he answered. "But, yes. The defining matrix."
"But you don't protest it."
"Oh, I do my part combating the evil forces of the criminal justice system," Neal said. "But the police state is inevitable. I mean, I know you like the Second Amendment—"
"I've never owned a gun in my life. I think it's highly unlikely I'll ever shoot a gun. But I look at places like North Korea and I think, Yes. The citizenry needs access to guns—"
Neal laughed. "Grazia," he said. "Have you seen the guns SWAT teams and the military use? Do you believe for one second that any gun you or anyone you know could get his hands on would stand up to that kind of firepower? Trust me, Grazia. When Da Man comes knocking on your door, you're toast. I'll come visit you at Guantanamo. If I can get a security clearance."
One time when I came to visit him, he'd just been out in his garden, and he'd pulled a muscle in his shoulder. "It's nothing," he told me, but he was wincing with pain.
"You know, in nursing school, they teach us many fabulous things," I said. "Like how to give the perfect back massage. It's an ancient technique, handed down from Asclepius and written on scrolls preserved in Rosacrucian temples right next to the aliens' exoskeletons—"
"Fine," said Neal. "You can give me a back rub."
"I'll have to check your insurance first," I said.
"Let me just duck into the shower."
Ten minutes later, I went upstairs to his bedroom.
I had never been in his bedroom before, and I had never seen him naked.
His bedroom was a completely utilitarian space. King-sized bed with blue duvet and no headboard. Enormous desk with a laptop monitor and two giant monitors, covered with papers. Cardboard boxes on the floor. Many windows, no curtains.
He was lying half under a sheet.
He was a big man, and his back was massively muscled. Since he shaved his head, I couldn't tell where his neck ended and his skull began. I balanced on my knees, very careful not to rest my weight on him. I could feel his scapula with the heels of my hands, but my fingertips couldn't find his intercostals through the sheath of muscle. His skin was very smooth, almost glossy. I could smell the faint scent of the soap he had used.
This Neal was totally unfamiliar to me.
I wondered what he would do if, all of a sudden, I started tracing his spine with kisses instead of fingers. I wondered if that was something I wanted to do. Honestly? It didn't say No to me, but it didn't say Yes to me, either. It didn't even say: This will change your relationship.
If we started having sex, I knew that it would only be one more thing to add to the list of things we did together. Urban exploration, talking, eating, talking, getting high, talking, fucking, sucking, fingering, talking: The essence of the relationship would remain the same.
Neal stretched and gently dislodged me. "Much better," he said. "You tell the Sisters of Mercy, they trained you well."
Then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "You and I, we have moved into the sibling zone."
