Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

But what then could he say? I have two sort-of girlfriends? My boss, whom I work for and who is older than I am and whom I have never kissed or said anything even slightly romantic to, but love very much, then also a spook who has disappeared, gone undercover, a jock gal who likes the outdoors (like you) and with whom I have had some cosmic outdoor sex (like we used to have), but who is now off-radar and incommunicado, I have no idea where? Whom I’m scared for and am desperate to see?

Oh, and along with that I’m also still freaked out by my instant attraction to an MIT star who thinks I am a professional cheater, and yes I still find you all too attractive, and remember all too well the passionate sex we used to have when we were together, and wish you weren’t so angry at me, and indeed can see and feel right now that you’re maybe finally giving up on that, and aren’t as angry as you were in Atlanta….

He too had had a couple of margaritas in the restaurant.

“Well? Come on, Frank! Tell me.”

“Well, it isn’t really anything quite like that.”

“Like what ! What do you mean ?”

“I’ve been busy.”

She laughed. “You mean you’re too busy to call them back afterward? That’s what too busy means to me.”

“Hey.”

She crowed her laugh and Yann and Leo looked over their shoulders to see what was going on. “It’s all right,” Marta called, “Frank is just telling me how he neglects his girlfriend!”

“Am not,” Frank explained to them. Yann and Leo saw this was not their conversation and turned back to their own.

“I bet you do though,” she went on, chortling. “You did me.”

“I did not.”

“You did too.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

Frank shrugged. Here they were again.

“You wouldn’t even go dancing with me.”

“But I don’t know how to dance,” he said. “And we still went anyway, all the time.” Except when you wanted to go by yourself to meet new guys and maybe disappear with them for the night.

“Yeah right. So come on, who is it? And why are you so busy anyway? What do you do besides work?”

“I run, I climb, I play frisbee golf, I go for walks—”

“Go for walks ?”

“—snowshoeing, tracking animals—”

“Tracking animals ?” Now she had gotten to the snorting phase of her laughter.

“Yes. We follow the animals that escaped from the National Zoo, and do feral rescue and the like. It’s interesting.”

She snorted again. She was thinking like the Californian she was: there were no such things as animals .

“I go ice-skating, I’m going to start kayaking again when the river thaws. I stay busy, believe me.”

“When the river thaws . But big deal, so what! You’re never too busy for company .”

“I guess.”

“So. Okay.”

She saw that he wasn’t going to say anything to her about it. She elbowed him again, and let it pass. She caught them up to the others.

The sun was almost down now, and the ocean had taken on the rich glassy sheen that it often did at that hour, the waves greenly translucent.

“Have you been out surfing yet?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure. What about you?”

“Not on this trip.”

They came back to their restaurant, went through to the parking lot, stood in a knot to say good-byes.

“Yann and I are going to go dancing,” Marta said to Frank. “Do you want to come along?”

“Too busy,” Frank said promptly, and grinned as she cried out and punched him on the arm.

“Oh come on, you’re out here visiting! You don’t have any work at all.”

“Okay,” he said. Dancing, after all, was on his paleolithic list of Things To Do. “What is it, some kind of rave again? Do I have to blast my mind with ecstasy to get with the beat?”

“ Rave. That isn’t even a word anymore. It’s just a band at the Belly-Up.”

“A rave band,” Yann confirmed.

Frank nodded. “Of course.” That was Marta’s thing.

“Come on,” Marta said. “It only means you’ll know how to do it. No swing or tango. Just bop up and down and groove. You could use it, if you’re so busy out there.”

“Okay,” he said.

Leo had already driven off. He was outside Marta’s sphere of influence.

So he followed Yann and Marta up the Coast Highway to Solana Beach, and turned inland to the Belly-Up, a big old Quonset hut by the train tracks that had hosted concerts and dances and raves for many years now.

This night’s bill appeared to Frank to be catering to the gay and lesbian crowd, or maybe that was just what the Belly-Up audience always looked like these days. Although the band was a mostly butch all-girl acid reggae kind of thing, with perhaps a score of people on the little stage, and a few hundred bopping on the dance floor. So he could join Yann and Marta both on the dance floor, and start dancing (that curious moment when the rules of movement changed, when one began to dance) and then it was bop rave bop rave bop, in the heavy beat and the flashing lights, easy to lose one’s mind in, which was always good, dionysiac release into shamanic transcendence, except when it involved losing his sense of all that had gone on between him and Marta (Yann was somewhere nearby) and also his sense of just how dangerous it would be to regard her only as a sexy woman dancing with him, seemingly oblivious to him but always right there and deep in the rhythm, and occasionally giving him a light bang with hip or shoulder. (In the old days these bumps would have come from pubic bone as well.) He had always loved the way she moved. But they had a history together, he struggled to remember. A really bad history. And he was already overcommitted and overentangled in this realm, it would be crazy and worse to have anything more to do with Marta in that way. He had gotten her back to San Diego as a way to make up for taking their money out of their house without telling her, and that was that—they were even! No more entanglements needed or wanted!

Although he did want her. Damn those softball players anyway.

“Here eat this,” she shouted in his ear, and showed him a pill between her forefinger and thumb. Ecstasy, no doubt, as in the old days.

“No!”

“Yes!”

The paleolithics had gotten stupendously stoned, he recalled, in the midst of their dionysiac raves. Some of their petroglyphs made this perfectly clear, depicting people flying out of their own heads as birds and rockets. He remembered the feeling of peace and well-being this particular drug used to give him when he danced on it; and let her shove the pill in between his teeth. Nipped her fingers as she did. Leap before you look.

He danced with his back to her, and felt her butt bumping his as he looked at the other dancers. Quite a radical scene for good old San Diego, which Frank still thought of as a sun-and-sports monoculture, a vanilla Beach Boys throwback of a place, hopelessly out of it in cultural terms. Maybe one had to stay out in the water all the time for that to be true anymore. Although in fact the surf culture was also crazed. Certainly it was true that in the Belly-Up of the beast, in the cacophonous sweaty strobed space of the rave, there were plenty of alternative lifestyles being enacted right before his very eyes. Most provocatively in fact. Some very serious kissing and other acts, dance as simulated standing sex, heck actual standing sex if you were at all loose with the definition. A very bad context in which to keep only pure thoughts about his bouncing surfer-scientist ex, who always had been a party gal, and who was now looking like someone who did not remember very well the bad parts of their past together. That was not what dancing was about.