Homeland Elegies(58)
“End of October,” I offered.
“After the twenty-second?” she asked playfully. I nodded, finally sharing the date, and I saw her eyes soften with a thought. She blinked twice now as she looked at me, then blinked again. I noticed her lips barely part, and the tip of her tongue dart in and out between her teeth.
Feeling her hand on my knee, I leaned in for a kiss.
Back in her room at what was then still called the Trump SoHo, we fucked twice that night on a bed that was bigger than my bathroom, then fucked again on the couch as the sun came up over her staggering view of lower Manhattan. I loved how she tasted—sweet and clean, like mountain water—and I ate her out as we waited for the eggs and pancakes we’d ordered from room service. We kissed as we chewed. I confessed that I couldn’t remember ever feeling so knocked out by someone. She smiled coyly and complained about her all-day meetings and a late-afternoon flight back to Houston she couldn’t change.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll come see you this weekend in Texas.”
She looked surprised to hear it. Pleasantly, I thought. “Really?”
“I mean, if it’s okay…”
“Of course it’s okay. I mean, I’d love it. I just—”
“What?”
Her pause lasted long enough for me to register a doubt. “If you change your mind, I want you to know I’ll understand.”
“I won’t change my mind.”
“But if you do, it’s okay. This was great. Really great. And if you walk out of here and realize you got caught up in a moment and didn’t really mean it—”
“I do mean it,” I said forcefully. I was being sincere and wanted her to know it. I didn’t want her to think I was going to disappoint her. But I wasn’t reading her right. She wasn’t actually afraid that I’d lose interest. If anything, she was afraid I wouldn’t.
*
Our night together had been unusual for her, I would discover. I was only the fourth man she’d ever slept with and the only one she’d ever slept with on a first date. Why me? Because, she said, she was completing her Saturn returns. And: with Venus dominating her chart and now in transit through her fifth house, she was entering a period of unusual upheaval and singular encounters. A psychic she consulted at least once a month predicted that, on an upcoming trip, she would meet a “dashing Scorpio” who would “sweep her off her feet.” The personal theme for the period ahead was embodiment; if life was a school, it was time to take the curriculum. She should allow herself to enjoy her time with this man fully, the psychic (named Nancy) said, for though the connection would present as uncommonly strong, it would likely be fleeting. He might fall for you, Nancy said, but don’t worry about breaking his heart—he can take it. Besides, he’s nowhere near ready to settle down…
“Duly noted,” I quipped, not without some irritation, when Asha told me all this that following weekend at a resort built to resemble a Renaissance palazzo in the Central Texas town of—I am not making this up—Florence. Initially, she’d told me she was going to be in Austin, an hour away, on business and wanted us to have time together without any distraction. Once I’d gotten there and settled, and once we were both sore from an afternoon and night of sex, she confessed the real reason for the remote location: she hadn’t wanted us crossing paths with anyone she knew back in her hometown. It was then that she also told me about Nancy, about our predicted encounter, and—mostly crucially—about Blake, who, it turns out, she was still very much seeing.
She’d been with him for the better part of nine years. They’d broken things off for the umpteenth time in the weeks before the trip to New York, where she’d met me, but gotten back together two days before I’d landed in Texas. She knew it wasn’t fair not to have let me know before I left—she said—but she didn’t regret it. She’d wanted to see me again, and now that she had, she was certain she wanted to keep seeing me. She knew it would sound strange and probably more than a little fucked-up. She’d never cheated before in her life, she said, adding in a hushed tone that she would understand completely if all this turned me off.
It didn’t. It gave me a hard-on, actually.
After we had sex again, we talked more about it: she told me Nancy didn’t see things being over with Blake, not even close; they were meant to be together, though it wasn’t clear from their astrological charts they would weather the considerable planetary impediments in their way. “I know I probably sound bat-shit crazy,” Asha said as I nibbled her shoulder, “and maybe I am; I mean, Blake thinks so, and so does pretty much anybody else I ever tell about Nancy, at least when they realize I’m actually making real relationship decisions based on the advice I get from her—but whatever, I’m used to it at this point. I don’t know why people think I haven’t gone through this myself—I mean, really looked at it. I have. I’m a lawyer. And it’s not like I don’t know that Nancy knows how I feel about him. I know she knows. And of course, it’s occurred to me maybe she’s feeding me that line because she knows it’s part of what keeps me coming back at sixty dollars a session. I know all that. But I listen to what resonates and what feels true. And there’s a lot of that in what she says. That’s a fact. It just is. I mean, it’s hard to argue with results like her predicting I’d meet you. Right? I mean, okay—so let’s pull that one apart. Maybe I just needed to be encouraged to step out of my comfort zone. Maybe that’s all Nancy did, open me up to the possibility of meeting someone—which she knows I’m generally not. Maybe she just gave me permission, and that put me at ease, and that’s what led to me doing something I never do. I mean, never. When I hear about my girlfriends’ one-night hookups? They sound like nightmares! So if that’s part of it, I mean, my suggestibility, fine. But it doesn’t account for the part that’s you. Right? A Scorpio? Okay, so sure, there was a one-in-twelve chance of that; so maybe the numbers came out in Nancy’s favor—like they pretty much do all the time. Fine. But what about Venus transiting your fifth house, too? I checked your chart this week. I mean, that’s weird. And it starts to make you feel like you have to do more work to explain it all away than just accepting it for what it is. So whatever. If that’s all it is, some combination of suggestibility and coincidence, so be it. I’d rather live this way than the alternative.”