Fiona and Jane(63)

The second week in January, I reinstalled the dating apps. I matched right away with Naima: thirty-four, a cinematographer. We chatted a bit then made a first date for happy hour downtown on a Thursday night. Naima was cute in her pictures, but in person she was striking, a real knockout. She wore a dark denim jumpsuit with a triangle cutout under her breasts, silver bangles on both wrists, and a pair of platform espadrilles with red ribbons tied around her ankles. Her hair was cut into a short Afro and dyed a reddish-brown tone, a style that revealed the elegant slope at the nape of her neck. When she came in for a hug, I caught the scent of jasmine on her throat. I felt underdressed in my black tee, ripped jeans, and black Converse high-tops, but something in the way she held my gaze, her dark brown eyes radiating warm energy, gave me a boost of confidence.

It was one of those dates that didn’t feel like a date at all, none of the stilted getting-to-know-you questions that forced you to perform some gilded version of yourself; with Naima, I immediately felt as if I were catching up with an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long while, someone both familiar and new. A feature she’d worked on as DP had screened in competition at Sundance last year, and the two indie music videos she’d directed had both gone viral. We discovered we knew many of the same people, other writers and producers and directors hustling to make it to the next level in the industry, like we were.

I confessed that I felt like I was running out of time, staring down the big four-oh.

“Stop it,” she said. “Each of us is on our own journey,” which might’ve sounded corny coming from anyone else in the world. Then she asked if I believed in reincarnation; I said I wasn’t sure. “Let me see your hands.” I showed her, and she traced a finger across my palms, left to right. A soft tingle passed through my wrists, traveled up my arms, like bells singing. “You’ve been here before,” she said. “You know death, intimately.” She tilted her head toward her shoulder and looked at me for a long moment. Her gaze seemed to penetrate me. I held my breath. Then she smiled and said, “Can you tell I’m bullshitting? I can’t read palms.” I laughed, relieved—and maybe just a little bit disappointed.

We ordered a bottle of prosecco and finished it sitting there at the bar, then walked down Spring Street to a lounge with low leather sofas and dim purple lights, a three-piece band setting up in the corner. We watched them opening up their cases, hooking up cords to amps. I put my hand on the small of her back. She turned to me, and I leaned toward her mouth. I felt her stiffen. She blinked and then looked down at her feet. I kept my hand on her back and asked her what was wrong.

“I’m not used to—” she started to say. “It’s not you—there was this guy sitting at the bar. Gave us a weird look when we walked in—”

“Can I kiss you?” I leaned close to her ear, my voice a whisper. “I’d like to kiss you,” I said. “Fuck him,” I added. “I know the bartender here.”

We kissed. I felt her back relax under my hand. We pulled apart when the band kicked in, a bluegrass number with the banjo strumming, a harmonica solo near the end. It was too loud to talk now. I watched Naima in profile, her head bobbing along to the jumping bass line.

She came home with me that night—luckily I’d tidied up before our date. After another glass of wine, she began to undress slowly, drawing out the performance, as if presenting herself to me. Our energy together felt urgent but unhurried. Next to her curves I felt boyish, narrow hips and too-big feet. It wasn’t a bad thing, though. It was sexy. We made love like teasing, nudging each other toward the precipice then pulling back, flying over the edge then starting over, again and again. She was a confident lover, a woman who enjoyed her body. She rode the pleasure of our sex in waves, and I felt myself caught in her wake.

“You’re a troublemaker,” she said, after.

“Me?” I said. “What did I do?”

“Exactly what a troublemaker would say.”

“I like you,” I said. “Miss Naima.”

She smiled. We kissed again. I felt her shiver under my hands.



* * *



? ? ?

At Julian’s new job, the bank’s HR department paired him up with a company mentor, another former Marine. They had a program, Julian explained one night on the phone; an affinity group within the practice to ease the transition from military life into corporate America: professional-development workshops, speakers on mental health, yoga and meditation classes.

“He was fat,” Julian said about his assigned mentor, his voice laced with disgust. “Huge beer gut that hung over his pants.”

“He’s a regular person now. A civilian,” I said. “So he ate a few burgers. He’s allowed.”

“You can’t go around introducing yourself as a Marine Corps vet, looking like that. It’s embarrassing,” he said. “He probably had a lame staff job. No way any one of my guys would’ve ever let themselves go like that.”

I thought of Julian’s brown skin, the muscles that felt like fine carved stone beneath my hands. He was proud of his body, a confidence that revealed itself in how he moved, in bed and out of it. I wondered how long he’d stay like that, now that he was a civilian nobody like everyone else.

He kept in touch—mostly through texts; sometimes with phone calls, when he couldn’t fall asleep. Julian drank every night of the week, downing a whole bottle of red by himself at home, or else rounds of bourbon on the company tab at some team-building happy hour. He’d call me drunk, his voice suddenly boyish, full of smiles, rinsed of the nervous energy that otherwise clung to him. Were we becoming friends? No straight guy I’d ever slept with acted like this. Maybe he didn’t know this wasn’t normal behavior, that you were supposed to just ghost.