The dress cost me $30 and sits on my body like a wooly glove. It is proving a line I once read in one of my style magazines: it’s all in the shoes and the purse. I know I’m being looked at as I walk through my day, if for no other reason than that I feel so good in my skin. The purse cost me $3.50 in store credit but was once worth $100, it’s softened cranberry red faded like a pair of good jeans. It’s the shoes, then, mostly. They were a gift from a man I loved once, and might love again as a friend. I have begun to doubt this second possibility, and this makes it harder to enjoy the shoes, yet here they are making my day.
They’re inches and inches of camel colored calf-belly leather, heeled in wood and wearing slowly in around my feet. I love these boots. They make the dress and reveal the woman in it, and I feel like I deserve everything before me when I have them on. They make me want to write, not for the pull of words on the page but for the paycheck and the admiration and the control over my life. I don’t want anyone to own my schedule; rather, I want to succeed at this and buy a few more pairs of Frye’s.
Then there is the issue of land. I want some. There was a crush recently, a guy who found me on facebook from years and years ago, from before puberty and marriage and divorce, and when he found my runway photos the floodgates of pursuit were opened. I started to take an interest around when he told me about the land. Twenty five acres. He owns twenty five acres of beauty and mulch and fallen cedar needles and he walks around on it with fireman coveralls, chainsaws, other man-type shit. I suspect I wanted to sleep with him largely because of his land. This is how I pictured it.
I’m in a living room covered in tacky old afghans of indeterminate origin and there is a fireplace which is more necessary than it is aesthetic. I’m wearing tiny Hollister shorts which point out two things about me: 1) I am too old to be wearing tiny shorts, and 2) I am totally pulling them off. This pairing of facts strikes me as pleasantly scandalous and I want him to notice both. It’s morning and I’m well-mussed, having arrived too late for sex the night before and yet having nuzzled and burrowed my way through sleep against his body.
He’s been up for hours and I wander out from the bathroom with a sleepy smile. He offers me coffee; I decline and steep urban, bourgeois tea that will soon get me high as a japanese kite. I don Uggs and maybe his extra jacket and I throw my feet up on his deck, sipping jasmine scented, stony, bright caffeine while he hauls things around the yard. Wood has been chopped and I can smell the sap from his gloves. I’m too sleepy yet for the nerves to set in so I just sit, watching and feeling appreciated.
I don’t eat breakfast. He doesn’t let me. I’m three quarters through the tea, halos and sharp lines having formed on my surroundings as I sipped, when he comes and picks me up. There are no particular words at this point, just an intention that settles into his bones as he finishes his work, and then the walking toward me like a very sure thing. He scoops me up and wraps me around his body. I hold onto my tea, my arm braced against his back and the cup held carefully steady while my legs cling all friendly to him.
I hesitate to let go of the tea because it is something to control and manage, but watching this hesitation means nothing to him. It is encoded in girl language he cannot decipher. He lays me on the bed and I see myself from his perspective, disturbingly open and waiting for more of him.
At this point Carter comes to mind. Carter could easily be in the room with us, he’s such a constant factor in my choices. Carter is Toby’s best friend. Carter is part of my family and I suspect would dearly like to have sex with me, were he given the time. He is my best childhood friend’s brother, and also the son of my mother’s ex-lover. While I have loved many men and called them nearly brothers, he is probably the closest thing I have to an actual brother. He barely talks, largely ignores me, and yet obviously wants to be close when he looks me in the face. He is someone who will never say I love you or anything like it, but he seems almost desperately loyal.
The last time I saw Carter he was slunk down over a beer, a late-30’s paunch and some fading acne scars saying more than he would probably have liked them to. His wife had left him, his girlfriend wasn’t having sex with him, and he wasn’t talking about any of this but it was dripping sadly off of him anyway. I wanted to give him mercy head.
I wanted to look him in the sad, sad face and tell him everything was going to be okay, and shhhhh, and look, doesn’t this feel better? This is what you deserve. And then I wanted to remind him what makes the struggles so much fun in the end, why it’s okay that work can be a bitch and your friends are busy with their wives at the end of the day. I wanted to watch the lights come on again and see the mischief and the funny meanness return to his face, and then the kinetic energy of spring cleaning as he threw his girl to the curb and went to climb something monolithic and granite. Go, Carter. I gave you that, and please remember me for it.
I strongly suspect that Toby wishes Carter were here with him. Sex is something Toby can’t give him, and these boys who have loved each other forever need to save one another in whatever way they can. I can see the ghost of Carter in front of the window, watching and hoping for cast-offs or a mingled invitation to join. I don’t want him to, though. Today is for me, and I can’t be bothered with threesomes. A threesome would be for them, I the conduit of bromance and lifelong dedication, a high-five over my awkwardly hoping body another mark of the way they belong to each other. I want them to belong to me.
I want someone, one of them, to fall head over heals and decide that I am staying.
What a curious entry. I found you through "doublesifted". Wonderfully written.
Posted by: Notesfromthecouch.blogspot.com | 12/20/2009 at 06:14 PM