Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

Jesus Christ. That’s not funny. How the hell do you feel?

I don’t know. I’m not awake yet.

Take it easy on yourself. They say it can be like starting the grieving process all over again.

I don’t think so. It needed to happen. Even Wendy said so.

What do you mean?

Oh, I say, lightly, she used to visit me. We had conversations. Up until a few weeks ago, actually. And shit, she scolded me about not wanting to date. It was a major topic of discussion, believe me. You surprised?

Kelly, she says, remember? I spent the last decade in San Francisco . You’d have to work a lot harder than that to surprise me. Half my friends out there have astrologers. More than have health insurance.

Can I ask you an awkward question?

Is there any other kind, at this point?

You were thinking about someone else. So was I. So who was your someone else? Who was my body double?

Oh, she says, at first I was thinking about you. Remember that time we tried to have sex, back in ninth grade? God, I was terrified . I was thinking about how glad I am to be thirty-seven and not fifteen.

Seriously?

Come on, it’s different for women. Do I really have to explain this, Kelly? I wasn’t treating you like some blow-up doll. I was synched with you. Yeah, okay, I thought a little about this guy Brian. My last fling, before I moved back. What about you, though?

Someone I just met.

A possibility?

Definitely not a possibility.

Well, you’re allowed to feel guilty, she says. Like it or not, you’re still recovering. You’re still in the process. You can’t just decide that all of a sudden you’re free of it all.

But if I didn’t know I’d had these feelings—

Oh, come on, don’t be ridiculous. You knew . She was just in the general class of women I’d fuck if I got the chance , and now she’s moved up the ranks to women I wish I could fuck right now.

She’s the wife of a colleague.

And?

And, I say, and, I think that, on principle, she’d rather jump off a bridge than sleep with a white man.

Man, Rina says, that is hot . A holy vow. It’s like lusting after a nun. No wonder you’re all skeevy about it. Go take a shower. Towels are on the chair. Go home and go to sleep. In the morning it’ll all feel like a vague and pleasant dream.

We should get together again. Just to hang out, I mean. Let me buy you dinner sometime?

And then more kabuki sex? She reaches over and runs her fingers through my hair. I don’t know, Kelly. Maybe this should just be like one of those little winter-break hookups in college.

I don’t want to wait another fifteen years to see you again.

You won’t be in Baltimore long, she says. That’s my prediction. In the end it was never much more than a way station for you, was it?

I don’t like to think of it that way.

Look, it’s too late to be sentimental, isn’t it? Of course you feel bad. We all feel bad. I mean, why did we leave, any of us, in the first place? Because of the crime. Because of the unsolvable social problems .

Which is just another way of saying—

That we don’t want to look at so many poor people.

So many poor black people.

Yes. It hurts, doesn’t it? In high school, you can feel optimistic about it. It’s a project . But then after the project’s over, and they’re still poor, and it’s the end of the Nineties, the greatest postwar expansion, blah, blah, blah, Sandtown-Winchester, economic development zones, and they’re still poor, what do you do then?

You move to fucking Boulder.

Boulder, Portland, Santa Monica, Burlington, Park Slope. And look at me: I can’t wait. As soon as I can, I’m going back. Don’t get me wrong: I’m still putting my shoulder to the wheel. I was McKinsey’s charitable-projects girl for two years. Twenty hours a week at the Oakland Partnership. But at least then I got to help poor black people and still live in paradise.

Rina, I say, how did we get this way?

What way?

The way you say, it hurts to say it, but it actually doesn’t. The world is full of people apologizing for saying unconscionable things they actually mean.

Well, she says, I’d rather be cynical than self-deceiving, the way most Boomers are. I’d rather be mean and accurate. Like the line from the Liz Phair song. You know? Obnoxious, funny, true, and mean ?

I want to be your blowjob queen.

She throws a towel at me.

You had a thing with Martin, too, didn’t you? I ask, trying to be casual, as if I’ve just remembered it. Jesus, I forgot about that.

A thing ?

Well, didn’t you?

We hooked up once. One night. Sophomore year. So?

That was all?

Yes, that was all, she says. Now tell me: why are you so interested in Martin, all of a sudden?

You remember that song by the Pageboys, “Of All the Lost Ones”?

Of course. I loved that song. You were the most lost of all the lost ones. So?

So — okay. Forgive me for being schlocky, but that was him. He was always the most lost. And now, still, he’s the most lost. The weakest link.

The weakest living link.

Yes. Right. It bugs me. It’s always bugged me. How hard do you have to work, in 2012, to be utterly untraceable? So, you know, I’m just trying to jog my memory. I mean, he was slippery. It’s hard to recall just what he was like.

He was a normal high school boy, Rina says, as I remember it. In that way. In that he was too eager. Sticking his tongue down my throat like he was trying to get my tonsils out. Grabbing me between the legs, groping around for the right button to push. You really want this kind of detail? It doesn’t, like, turn you on , does it? Because that would be weird.

Trust me. I’m utterly unmoved.

I was really into him, she says, always was, and frankly I also always assumed he might be gay. In that he didn’t have much time for any of us. And he was cute, in his own gangly way, and in a band and all. And the bass is a very phallic instrument. He just didn’t try . Didn’t wear deodorant. Didn’t try to get rid of his acne. Kind of an enigma, really. But so that one night I guess someone had dragged him to the party at Ayala’s house, and we were both drinking gin and Sprite, and somehow we wound up together in her dad’s garage. You remember what it was like? That old Morgan he was always rebuilding, and the couches? So that was where it happened. Once I gave him the signal he was all attention, put it that way. Really wanted to have sex. Really, really . He might have been a virgin, for all I know. But we didn’t have a condom or anything. So in the end he went down on me, and then I gave him head, and that was more or less it. We wound up sleeping all night back there. That enough for you?

That’s plenty. Thanks.

Part of his mind was always elsewhere, she says. But in that sense he was just like Alan. Only the elsewhere was different.

What does that mean?

Well, she says, scratching herself between the eyebrows again, think about it. For Alan the elsewhere was death. We can say that for sure. But Martin wasn’t one of those suicidal emo boys. He just wanted to be, I don’t know, elsewhere . Far away. On some other planet.

Or to be somebody different.

Yeah, she says. Oh, wait! Fuck. I completely forgot. I did see him again, once. Just for a moment. God, that was years later, wasn’t it? Nineteen ninety-nine. It must have been 1999, because that’s the year Mom was diagnosed. I spent a month here, going around to nursing homes and things.

And?

Well, it was downtown, on Charles Street. Near that bookstore with the café, what was it called? The one across from the Walters. Anyway, it was definitely him. But he looked like a different person altogether. He was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase.