Sunday, he called. To ask me to dinner. The next night, I prepared myself for my first dinner date in possibly ever. With shaking hands, I applied a new gold eyeshadow named something like Nights on the Beaches of Botswana. We met up at this pretty cheap place near my apartment where we drank a big bottle of Pinot Noir and talked more about his animating. He had a lot of amusing, post-apocalyptic ideas, and I said, "We should work on a cartoon together." This is when I realized I really wanted him. When I think of the great love stories I know, it's never the passions and the distances traveled that move me, not the self-destructive muses not Scott and Zelda, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. It's the couples who worked together on something, who expressed their love through projects and shared passions. Richard and Mary Leaky. Kathleen Brennan and Tom Waits. In high school, my boyfriend made a comic book, and we were happiest when sitting on the floor of his parents' factory, cutting and pasting, stapling, Xeroxing, creating poorly stapled little booklets. (I was also pretty happy when I was shirtless on my parents' sofa, with his inexperienced fingers hovering at the button of my cargo pants.) So "maybe we could make a cartoon together" meant "I have, for whatever reason, faith in my fondness for you." "That would be fun," he said. "Let's do it." "It'll be about a gang of troglodyte children, of course," I said as we paid the check, and headed out, hand in hand, up Avenue A. "Absolutely. They'll have superpowers, but really limited ones. Like, one will be able to move Ikea furniture with his mind." "Can there be one ill-tempered girl who can read the future of flowering plants?" "How could there not?" He squeezed my hand. "It's strange. I really like you." "Well . . . two dates. Kind of a New York record." "Yeah, it's bullshit here. I've seen it fuck with people. So I don't do it." He was being frustratingly vague, but I didn't push it. "I just do it. The fun, the sex, without risking much."
I wanted him to kiss me when I came over after working late, my face held in both of his hands. I wanted him to offer to make me tea, and I'd say, "Okay, but let me wash out the cups, it's a mess here." I wanted Jack to sit with me on the floor where I'd been sobbing because I couldn't pay the bills, and I wanted him to tell me that maybe I should see a therapist. I wanted us to end up fucking on the cold hardwood floor with the most minimal amounts of clothing removed. I wanted it to be that confusing, horrible freak-out sex, and I wanted it to put me in a good mood even though I knew I'd have to take the morning-after pill. I wanted him to sleep next to me as I drifted in and out of consciousness, floating on the Percocet I needed for the cramps the pill gave me, which were unique and excruciating and sometimes made me wonder if just jamming a wire hanger into my cervix wouldn't be better. I wanted to buy him a set of paints for Christmas. I wanted to finish my text messages with "xoxo." I wanted to go down on him in the guest bedroom of his cousin's house in Cincinnati. I wanted a picture of us together, with him wearing his "I only date crack whores" T-shirt. This was a sort of love too, no? Not the ancient and infinitely tender, solemn love we talk about, but this — inserting someone into the tiny tableaux of your life and thinking they looked right there. Back in reality, Jack and I made made out in a dark Tompkins Square Park for a while. I was sitting on his lap, which was nice. I'm five-eight in bare feet, and a comfortable lap is rarer than it should be. Again, I told him he could crash. Again, he said he wanted to take things slowly. Again, I didn't understand. Is there something about fucking too early that dooms you, or is it just the tattered vestiges of custom lurking in our minds and bothering us? "Slowly" is time wasted, no? I asked Jack what bar he'd go to first if he'd been in prison for ten years. "You think about drinking a lot," he chuckled. Oh fuck. This take-it-slow stuff, this discouragement of alcoholism — it wasn't a thing, was it? He wasn't Christian, was he? I wondered if it was wise to care about him, or if it was really best to keep sleeping with pretty rocker boys. But I was determined: we were going to have sex. The next night, we had plans, and I didn't fuck around getting ready. I wore cute green underwear with lace. I put on The Shirt. On the rack, The Shirt looks very Little House on the Prairie: puffed shoulders, flared sleeves, bias cut, hook closures up the front, a dense pattern of red and pink flowers. But once it was on, my breasts, normally an unremarkable B, were suddenly translucent and amazing and moved when I breathed. Honestly, I can't stop looking at them. The Shirt is not fair. And I didn't want fair. I wanted to speed things up, figure out what was going on. Once ready, I took a cab uptown. I didn't want people on the subway to think I was odd for staring at my own tits. When I got there, he'd ordered a Maker's for me already. Aw. "You look nice," he said, neither awkward nor slimy in his tone. I had the feeling he understood the game I was playing with The Shirt. It was humbling. Soon we were on our third round, I was on his lap, and it started to rain. "Oh, shit!" I said. "It's such a bitch to get back downtown in this weather!" Actually, it's not. You're on the train or in a cab. You're not hacking through the brush with the rain making the quicksand more dangerous. "Do you want to stay over?" he asked, sounding genuinely concerned, like it might really be a problem for me to get back downtown. "Is that all right?" Despite all my planning, I wanted to make sure he really wanted me there. "Would I ask if it weren't?"
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