Aftermath of Dreaming(102)

Before I even realize what I am doing, I pull out my cell phone, following my instinct to call Reggie, then I remember the weirdness we are in and that he’s out of town, so I hang up. I could call the police. Should probably, but I don’t feel like it. I can always do it later, say I was in shock. Frankly, I want to catch the movie and just not think about it.

Driving home in my truck from the movie—which was distracting, but not completely—through the descending darkness of the late afternoon, I think about that guy walking up to me on the sidewalk and hauling one off. And so casually. Easily. As if I had been walking there for the express purpose of letting him take care of his need to express anger. Fuck him. I suddenly am reminded of Reggie blowing up at me in his car on the way home from Santa Barbara. The way his anger came out so completely and unexpectedly. Not that I didn’t know he doesn’t like hearing about Andrew, but for Christ’s sake, yelling at me? What is it with these guys? I realize that I don’t want some masked hero coming down from the sky to save me. I want the person who’s always there no matter what. Me.

And suddenly I decide to learn how to box. Not that kick-to-get-fit version, I’m talking traditional, in the ring, Ali-is-still-God boxing. So that I’ll never be at the mercy of someone like that again. Someone’s hands altering my body, hurting me. I wonder what the emotional equivalent to boxing is. But maybe doing it physically will give that to me. The minute I get inside my apartment, I pull out the Yellow Pages and begin calling gyms.





28




To be totally honest, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I realized deep down what age I truly am. Not that all this time I’ve been in some annually recurring version of Alzheimer’s—I am aware what year this is and how that relates to my birth—but a few years ago I discovered quite accidentally that in bed I still thought of myself as seventeen.

Not consciously. I wasn’t removing my clothes thinking years were being shed at the same time. Other than a vague, off to the side, sort of still-in-my-Catholic-school-uniform feeling, I had no idea I thought of myself as still seventeen until one night right in the middle of having sex, the man I was with said, “Woman.” Just “Woman,” as if that was expressive enough. Growing up in the South, I was used to being called “sweetie” and “sugar pie,” or at least “honey” here in L.A., and, okay, this man was a Yankee, but other than wondering if his last girlfriend was Betty Friedan, it took me a good minute to figure out that he was talking to me. That I was the “Woman.” I think I even looked around, worried it was one of those “Surprise! Ménage à trois!” moments—which actually did happen to me once, making me forever doorbellphobic during sex.

Anyway, what I wanted to do was stop what I was doing, climb off him, and say, “Oh, my God, do you know how old I am?” But I did not because he did, in fact, know how old I am, I mean, was then. He was forty-two and well aware of our respective ages. I guess it was just me who wasn’t.

But I’ve never been very clear about all this. When I started seeing widow-man in Pass Christian, I would forget how much older he was than me. Not that he didn’t know the real difference in our ages. He did. And I did when prom night came around and I tried to picture how he would look on the dance floor with his wide chest that definitely did not come from high school football practice. He had one of those adult male bodies that just worked for him. I remember one day he decided to go for a five-mile run, just decided and went. He was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, but he came back, had had a great run, that was it. I will never forget looking at him and wanting that. To be able to just tell my body to perform some physical feat and have it simply comply.

I was still trying to figure out how mine worked. I had only recently started getting my period when I met him, then I immediately went on the pill to stop it. Well, not to stop it, but to stop its effect. Once I could get pregnant, and was doing what you do to get pregnant, I would avoid getting pregnant by making my body think it was pregnant. Which is how I was told the pill works. Like having some constant ghost baby inside my womb, which honest to God, I never even knew I had. I thought only Mary had a womb for Jesus, but clearly I did, too. Just one with nothing in it. Even though my body thought there was, constantly experiencing a false physical reality as if it were true. Like me and my age, I guess. Anyway.

It’s my birthday today. On a Monday this year, which is a horrid little day to have a birthday, though it is starting out okay. I went shopping at Barneys, which I rarely do, mostly because I rarely do, so I figured it’d feel special, like Easter Sunday mass after a year of not going. I found some pretty pastel sweaters that I loved, picked out two, then agonized over getting a third with the salesclerk who I immediately liked because she had a name that was unpronounceable when you see it and unspellable when you hear it. I left with only two, but made a silent vow to go back more often—a kind of Lent in reverse—instead of giving up going to Barneys, I decided to give up not going to Barneys.

What I wish I had given up was the massage I am getting now. It is at a natural hot springs spa in Korea Town that I’ve been to quite a bit, because for some reason I keep forgetting that I don’t like it here. The idea of it is so nice—warm water, all naked, hands kneading my body—but the reality is being in a cold echoey room, forced to wear a rubber cap like some cranium version of “socks in the shower,” and a rubdown that consists more of slapping and shoving than anything else.