You Think It, I'll Say It(20)
Mark, who at forty-three is just under two years older than I am, got married when he was twenty-six, the summer after he’d finished medical school. Libby had been his college girlfriend and worked in private school admissions until their first child was born, and she resumed that role when their second started kindergarten. That Mark’s a pediatric cardiologist mostly offsets—to me, if not to everyone—how he’s also kind of an asshole. Meanwhile, I consider myself morally neutral. I practice bankruptcy, restructuring, and creditors’ rights law, and, yes, I routinely represent clients widely agreed to be the bad guys, but I also do pro bono work, including teaching a quarterly “financial literacy” class at a nonprofit. So: a wash.
Even as I resist the idea that my singleness requires more explanation than Mark’s seventeen-year marriage, there was an explanation I offered to my girlfriends and happen to believe, disappointing as it is in both its succinctness and its banality. My parents had a bad divorce; the almost two additional years that Mark spent experiencing their marriage before it soured were, it seems, crucial in allowing him to later suspend disbelief about the institution. Or you could just chalk it up to our being different people.
It’s slightly less clear to me that I never wanted children than it is that I never wanted to marry, but I mostly didn’t, and in any case, Finn and Noah charm me on Sunday evenings without leaving me regretful when I depart from their house.
Mark and I are passing the baseball fields of Washington University when I say, “Seriously, though—I’m sure Libby hasn’t given up on you.” Mark says nothing, and I ask, “So was Parigi any good?”
“It was okay.” When I glance at him, Mark smirks. “The food was a little rich.”
* * *
—
I like how slow and powerful this piece is, I write. It amazes me how much emotion Chopin could fit into something that’s only four and a half minutes. (You probably already know people called this “Sadness.”) Is it weird that Chopin and the Pixies remind me of each other? It’s how they both move so quickly and effectively from loud to quiet.
The link I attach is to étude op. 10, no. 3.
* * *
—
I text Bonnie at six, while I’m still at the office: Feel like company tonight?
Her response arrives less than a minute later: Sorry I have Sophia
Bonnie and I met seven months ago, through a dating app, though dating is of course a euphemism. She lives twenty-five minutes south of me, is the manager of a housewares store—it’s part of a national chain, and hers is at a mall—and is divorced, with a nine-year-old daughter I’ve never met. We see each other every ten days or so, and though we went out for drinks a few times in the beginning, our encounters now occur exclusively inside my apartment or her condo and start at around 8:30 P.M., with a glass of wine and a discussion of current events; we share few other frames of reference. After sex, she stays over, which I don’t mind, but I never stay at her condo. I usually fall asleep, then wake at midnight or one and drive home.
Bonnie is pretty enough—she’s thirty-eight, with obviously dyed long black hair—and the curviest woman I’ve been involved with. She must outweigh me by thirty pounds, and I’m reminded, when she’s straddling me, of the middle school girls who entered puberty before the boys did. The truth is that I consider her a kind of preventive medicine. If I could make my libido disappear, I would, and as I age, this might well happen; certainly it’s decreased already. But it hasn’t yet gone away, and I’ve found in the past that I can go without sex for three or four months, and then one day I wake up in despair. Presumably, there are biological explanations, and my abrupt desperation has as much to do with touch as sex, meaning maybe I could stave it off with massages, of the more or less sordid varieties. I’m considering trying this after Bonnie tires of me, which I imagine will happen when she decides she wants a real relationship, a stepfather for her daughter. I will lament such a development and do nothing to stop it. No worries, I text back.
At six forty-five, I leave the office, drive to Clayton, park outside my apartment building, and walk to a restaurant where, once or twice a week, I have dinner at the bar. The bartender, who is French and whose name is Thérèse, is the woman I currently am most attracted to; if she and Bonnie were standing side by side, Bonnie might not appear pretty enough after all. And if I were younger and knew less about myself, I’d pursue Thérèse. Even now, though I’m fifteen years older than she is, I have a feeling she’d accept if I asked her out. She’s unfailingly warm and has remarked more than once on how unusual it is that I pronounce her name correctly. Despite the two accent marks that appear on her name tag, apparently most St. Louisans pronounce it not only with a long second e, but also with a nonexistent a on the end.
I take a seat on a stool and Thérèse smiles and says, “William.” Ironically, she mispronounces my name—she says Weel-yum—and I find it very endearing.
I ask for a whiskey and soda, which Thérèse deposits in front of me with two skinny black straws and a curl of lemon rind. For dinner, I order green salad with wild salmon, and she says, in a teasing voice, “Always so healthy.”
“Not always,” I say, though I do avoid bread and sugar. It’s when I’m eating with others, most frequently with Mark’s family, that I relent, more as a matter of politeness than indulgence.