Pt. 1:
Immediately After Turning Down an Offer of Marriage
(Note to readers: Part 1 is more story, part 2 is where most, but not all of the action is. But part 2 is a lot more erotic if you've read part 1 first)
I got home late on Friday because the traffic into Somerville from Burlington, where I work, is always awful on Fridays. But I was tired and had no plans other than chilling by myself with a beer and a pizza and watching something stupid (preferably with car chases and explosions) on Netflix. And I expected to have the place to myself because my roommate, Jenny usually spent weekends at her boyfriend's ridiculously expensive apartment over in Boston.
Jenn and I have been roommates for about a year and a half -- ever since I moved down from New Hampshire for my first real job after college - doing web design for a biotech start-up in the belt of computer and bio companies along Route 95. (The less said about the two previous years of gig jobs and Uber driving while living at home the better.) I'd taken over my half of the lease on our two-bedroom in a three-decker just off Porter Square from some woman who was moving to Seattle; and Jenn and I had done okay as roommates. We'd socialize sometimes, eat dinner together occasionally, watch movies or just nerd out nights on You Tube. Because she had a boyfriend when I first moved in and ever since, we never got into any awkward boy/girl thing. We were just buds. And she was as close to a platonic girl/friend as I guess I'd ever had.
The boyfriend was something else. Jenn, who was about four years older than me -- so, just on the crest of turning thirty, was a lawyer. She worked at a Legal Aid office over in Jamaica Plain, trading money for a chance to do something decent in the world. The boyfriend -- Anthony (be sure not to call him Tony) -- worked at Bain Capital in Boston, earning ridiculous money just for moving other people's money around. And maybe I'm just a biased, Occupy Wall Street Vote for Bernie-type Millennial asshole, but I don't like arch-capitalists, young Republicans or people who make fun of guys who wear man buns (which I don't, but I mean, ease up on people, y'know?) And Anthony, whom Jenn had been dating since college up in Maine, fit all three categories. The guy was a dick. And, more damning, I kinda though he was stringing Jenn along while she was getting progressively more anxious about, I guess, the usual stuff that you have to worry about when you're female and about to turn thirty.
Which is all a way of saying I was surprised when I got home at almost 8:30, carrying my determinedly celibate 12" eggplant pizza, to find Jenn there, sitting on the couch, wearing shorts and a t-shirt (definitely not-going-out clothes) with three dead soldiers from the Bud Light Infantry on the coffee table in front of her, watching impeachment porn on MSNBC. And, by all indications, just finished but not quite done crying. Now, Jenn's a moderately pretty woman, shortish, kinda curvy, full lipped, and dark eyed and olive-skinned , her Mediterranean gene pool most clearly expressed in her complexion. She's kind of like a nowhere-near-as-movie-star-beautiful version of Michael Corleone's first wife in the Godfather movie, the one who gets blown up.
But I don't care what people look like in the movies. Nobody ever looks pretty when they're crying. Just sad.
"Hey, stranger," I said as I walked in. I put the pizza down precariously on the narrow table by the door that we used for mail. "What's up?"
She looked at me and the faucets started again. Two lines of water running down from her eyes over her already glistening cheeks.
"Oh, Tommy," Jenn said. "Oh, shit."
"You wanna translate that into something I could understand?" I asked and came over to sit next, but apart from her, on the couch. We'd never been much for hugs. And just as well. I've always found, you get a woman's boobs crushed up against your body, it kinda interferes with the whole buddy thing.
She looked at me like she was weighing something in her mind, like how much to let me in to whatever was going on inside her.
I waited for her to decide.
"It's Anthony," she said finally. I watched as two more tears made their appearance and began their slow glide downward. "He asked me to marry him."
"Well, shit, that's good news, isn't it?"
She went through that same weighing process as if each revelation to me had to be evaluated on its own merits. I waited.
Finally: "I said no."
And I said, "Shit."
And then I asked why.
*
Okay, back up. Let me talk about Jenny and me for a minute. And sex. I just said that we were only buds and that we didn't have any awkward boy/girl thing going on. And that was true. But girls -- let me just put this out here -- girls, women can be - well, stupid is too strong a word, but naïve -- definitely naïve about men who they think are (and who maybe genuinely are) their friends. I mean, guys are guys. We're programmed to procreate. So, even if there's nothing going on between a girl and a guy and even if circumstances and maybe even inclination dictates that probably nothing much ever will, we still don't turn off. And I've never met a woman who fully gets that.
So: picture. A Sunday morning, me sitting at the kitchen table reading the Globe Sports, Jenn in the shower in our shared hallway bathroom after a run along the Charles. My name bellowed from the bathroom. I go to the door. Ask, what?
"Just come in for a sec."
"Come in?"
"Yeah, come in."
So I come in. The room's all steamed up and Jen's head and bare shoulders are poking out from behind the shower curtain.
"I'm sorry, Tommy. Lissen, I forgot my shea butter."
"Your what?"
"Shea butter. It's good for your skin. I bought some at the co-op yesterday but I left it. It's in a bag in my room. On the bed. I'm covered with soap here. Could'ja get it for me?"
"Shea butter," I tell her. "Sure."
And go out, come back in. The curtain, I (automatically) notice, has shifted while she waited so a discreet bit of skin at the top of her breasts is now visible. Amused, I ask her, "You want me take it out of the package?"
"Yeah, please."
I don't exactly glance at her, and, with dry hands, crack open the plastic and cardboard packaging and hand the tube over to her. She takes it with her other hand, an awkward little maneuver that involves turning sideways to maintain modesty and nevertheless results in a brief flash of belly and underboob. Then she has her shea butter, her left hand pulls back behind the curtain, she tells me thank you, you're a lifesaver. And dismissed, I leave as she ducks back inside. I go back to the sports page, both amused and feeling just a little bit lecherous over the thought of Jenn, naked behind that thin plastic curtain; and, when I hear the water turn off, by the additional thought of her, standing in bathtub applying her shea butter all over her bare self.
Or again, I don't know how many times, Jenn just out of bed, having coffee in our kitchen, wearing one of these diaphanous girly nightgowns that she favors: standing, warmed by summer sunlight from the large window over our sink. Gloriously oblivious to how the backlighting presents her legs in silhouette, as well as the jointure between them. Me doing my polite damnedest not to look and -- male to the core -- not being entirely successful. And not having a clue about how to say to her, "Hey, Jenn, you might want to be careful there, I can kinda see a silhouette of your vagina" without seeming like a complete perv.
And am I a complete perv for just noticing? Or for being just a little turned on by our close encounter in the bathroom? The funny thing is that I think Jenn would definitely think so. There's where the naïveté comes in. But to me it's all just one of those boy/girl things that never makes it all the way to awkward. It's just there.
*
Which is all kind of a prelude to what happens next.
*
Jenn sizing me up again. This one's the longest, as if whatever she's gonna say has more portent that the fact she had just turned Anthony down.
And when it comes out, it's only a single word.
"Sex," she says.
"Sex?"
"Yeah, sex, Tommy, sex." She looks at the ceiling, away from me, and says, "Jesus Christ, I'm only telling you this 'cos I'm already drunk."
"On three beers?"
"Yeah, on three beers. Look at me, Tommy. I'm little. I'm a lightweight."
"Okay," I say. And then, feeling as if I'm peeling back the plastic curtain just a little, I say, "So tell me."
One deep breath, but less hesitation now. (The curtain ain't open, but now it ain't exactly closed either.)
"He's polite, Tommy. He's just so goddamn polite."
"He's polite during sex? What, does he say thank you?" I almost laugh, manage not to.
"No. But...yeah, I mean, not just polite. Gentle. Passive. Not aggressive."
"He's not aggressive enough in bed?" Pretty much all I can do right now is repeat what she's saying. This is way new territory for us.
"No, look. I dunno. Maybe it's the other stuff and I'm just focused on this because it's like easier, y'know. I mean, I don't like what he does for a living and I wonder if that'll make us long-term incompatible, and I swear to god, I don't know how much he meant it when he asked me and how much is just that I've wanted it and he's, like, being passive about this too, just going along for the ride. But I've been waiting for like two years, like ever since you and I met, for him to ask me. And then he does, we're sitting in this fancy restaurant over in Boston where dinner's gonna cost like my week's salary, and he pulls out this box and there's the ring inside and the fucking diamond, and I don't even want a fucking diamond, I wanna get married to somebody who makes me happy and I want to have kids with him, but all I can think as I look at it, as I look at him, is,
I'm gonna spend the rest of my life with this guy and he's never, never gonna fuck me the way I want to be fucked.
And, oh god, I can't believe I just said that to you, but I mean, that's what I thought and am I, like, the most shallow person on earth, it's just fucking for chrissake, but I can't stop thinking that and it's like screaming in my ears, and all of a sudden, I just say, "No," and then get up and run out of the restaurant. And leave him sitting there with his goddamn ring.
"I mean, god, Tommy, what the fuck is wrong with me?"
Without thinking, I reach across the couch to her, take her hands in mine (we never have been much for hugs) and look right into her dark, tear-reddened eyes.
"Maybe nothing," I tell her. "Maybe nothing at all."
