You Love Me(You #3)(78)

You don’t miss a beat. “I love you, Joe.”

The L-words drag us down. Heavy as the music, the music that makes it okay for us to be wordless and I can’t tell if that’s your heart or my heart and I know you love me and I know I love you but it didn’t need to be said. The kittens know we’re finished and they’re making the room theirs again. You laugh and blow a kiss to your favorite and you roll into me and your eyelids hit mine. Your nose too. You’re so close that I can’t see, that I can see. You aren’t getting Closer anymore. You are closest.

“Joe.”

“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry. We can forget I said it. We can… we can not say it.”

You wrap me up in your branches and you say there is no need to be sorry and you kiss my hair, you kiss my head, and you say you wish you could reach inside my body and kiss my liver and my kidneys, and I squeeze your ass—you are my own little Hannibal Lecter and you laugh—you are sick—and I laugh—Okay, Hannibal—and you tell me you wanted Hannibal and Clarice to get together and I tell you I did too and you sigh. “I wish I could understand why Nomi can’t let go of Klebold.”

“Do you remember when it started?”

You sigh. “Maybe it’s because I used to joke that Hannibal Lecter is my book boyfriend, which is evidence for my Worst Mother Ever award… In the middle of the night I get fired up… I’m gonna drag her to a therapist, gonna full-on intervene. But in the morning, I don’t have that urgency… I should probably do something but I just want it to go away on its own.”

“It will,” I say. “Don’t forget that she’s yours. You made her…” Same way I made my son. “And you’re right to trust the day. Nights make everything worse.”

You tell me I’d be a good dad and I am a good dad and you laugh. “Wait… is this song on repeat?”

You love me so much you didn’t notice the music until now and I tell you I’m weird and you tell me I’m passionate.

The song ends and it begins again, and the audience cheers and it sounds like a hundred candles lit in the dark and the solo twang of the instrument leads to more cheers and the people in the audience sing along and we sing along too, in our own way, with our bodies, our bodies that we already know by heart.





29





We are three and a half weeks into our show: The Office: NC-17. XXX. I am on my hands and knees and I am wiping down the Red Bed and you are ten feet away, clothed. Tights on. Professional. But that’s not how you were last night!

Oh, Mary Kay, I read about this kind of sex and I thought I had had this kind of sex but I was wrong. Your Murakami is my favorite place on the planet. Your buns have given way to ponytails—you had to do something to express the new love in your life—and we are a secret for now and there is nothing more fun in this world than a really good, juicy fucking secret.

I walk outside to go to Starbucks and Oliver is on my tail. A buzzkill. A housefly.

“FYI,” he says. “It’s illegal to fornicate in a public library.”

I don’t kiss and tell and I don’t fuck and tell but Oliver is no dummy. We all know when our friends are getting laid. “So call the cops, Oliver. Or arrest me. Can you do that? Or is that just some Police Academy bullshit?”

He stops walking. “She has a husband.”

“And he slept with her best friend.” Oliver is an Angeleno so this doesn’t land the way it should. “He slept with her for ten-plus years.”

“Yikes,” he says. “And the kid? Does the kid know?”

“About the affair? Hell no. Oliver, it’s fine. They’ve had problems for years. The kid’s on her way to college…” It’s really hitting me, Mary Kay. Spring has sprung—it’s drizzling but the rain has purpose, flowers are blooming, and we really are on our way.

“If he loses his shit and kills you…”

“He’s not that type of guy. And the woman he had the affair with… well, you’ve seen her. Sort of.”

Once in a while I like to remind Oliver that he knows where a woman is buried and it’s like those cartoons where you can see his blood pressure rising and then he coughs. He shifts. He tries to be the boss of me. “You say this, but I listened to this Sacriphil stuff, my friend, and there’s a lotta violence in there.”

“Exactly, he’s a musician. He has drug issues. He beats himself up, not anyone else.”

Oliver yawns. “All right,” he says. “I sent you some Eames chairs.”

“How many fucking chairs can you fit in that place?”

He’s placated and I carry on to Starbucks and I buy his stupid chairs and I buy myself a Frappufuckingccino because it’s all finally happening. Your rat has moved into your junk room, where he sleeps on a futon—he doesn’t even get a mattress but then he did fuck your best friend—and we have to take baby steps because of the Meerkat but soon you and the rat will be like Billy Joel’s Brenda and Eddie: divorced!

You really are getting a divorce as a matter of course and it begins with an indoor separation, behind closed doors so that Nomi can get used to the idea of you two moving apart. You’re feeling good about it because Nomi is doing better—She says she saw it coming and I guess in a way she’s lucky because with my parents, I was floored—and I’m so happy for you and the Meerkat, for us.