Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

He asked about my journalism, and I retailed a few stories about the more colorful characters, and the excesses of the political fund-raising I covered. It was easy to impress people from outside that world with the extremity of it, trading on the insiderism my reporting was meant to pierce.

The chitchat got us through our entrées, and I resigned myself to the idea that this would be it, another little shot of false hope, a perfectly decent date, followed by a dwindling e-mail thread. Then, out of nowhere, as we were sharing a piece of almond cake, with the date all but over, he said he liked the way I talked.

“The way you use words,” he said, “I like it.”

Thrown off, once again, by his guilelessness, I didn’t know how to respond.

His eyes were green. I rarely noticed the color of people’s eyes, and found it implausible when it came as one of the first descriptors of a person in an article, as if from yards away people picked up the color of two dots in the head. But our faces were only about two feet apart, and he was looking at me with unnerving directness, and I saw that his eyes were definitely dark green.

“Did I say something wrong?” he asked.

“No.”

He put down his fork and rested his elbows on the table. “I know it’s too early to ask this,” he said, “but do you have a boyfriend?”

Just like that the nattering in my head ceased. “Not at the moment,” I said, monitoring his expression, wondering if my nonchalance had hid well enough the full answer: that I had never really had one, not for more than a few months.

“What about you?” I asked.

“Not at the moment,” he repeated after me, smiling, as if maybe he had seen through me but didn’t care.

The last thing I wanted to do was lurch onto the subject of past relationships. So I don’t know why I said, “There’s been someone, though?”

“We were in grad school together,” he said.

What I detested most about my jealousy for other people’s pasts was how it yoked me to Michael. In the solitary years since Bethany, he’d edged toward bitterness. I was determined not to let myself do that. Still, I couldn’t help but picture Seth and his boyfriend drinking with friends in student apartments, sitting on the floor at parties holding hands, knowing without thinking about it that later they would be naked together in their bedroom, the flow of sex between them running into their work as well, which they would have shared, too. For Seth it was a memory now, and all the more glamorous for being just that — an assumption, like wealth to the heir.

“But that was a while ago,” he said. “What about you?”

“It’s been a while, too,” I said.

He smiled again, broadly this time, as if we were already coconspirators, as if my response were a seduction, not a cover. He was doing it again, making intimacy out of nothing more than his own passing pleasure. And just like that, he caught me up in it.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” I said, “but I downloaded that song you played me. And I probably shouldn’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to it, either.”

He blushed. “You can tell me that,” he said.

He slid his hand across the table and turned it open to me. The skin of his palm was damp.

“So,” I said. “I have an apartment…”

“Really? How unusual.”

“I mean—”

“Yes,” he said.

I had grown used to sex as a short burst, a onetime thing, the pleasure keyed to the danger, but leashed by fear. It was easy when everyone did the same, exposing themselves for the quick high. Like the occasional seizure of an otherwise controlled body, flagrant but brief. But there was nothing flagrant about standing perfectly still in my bedroom with the lights off, letting Seth, in no kind of rush, unbutton my shirt, or in feeling the warm contour of his ribs with the tips of my fingers. The script called for speed and gruffness, for the porn-like boasting and debasement of locker-room jocks getting off on themselves and each other, that fantasy toughness meant to ward off exactly the confusion I was in now, unsure what to do and trying not to shake.

Seth leaned in bravely and kissed me on the lips. I drew him closer, as if to shield him from his own frankness, until we were hugging. There was still nothing to this. He could be anyone at all, and gone tomorrow. I knew that I should probably play it cool. But he wasn’t playing it that way. For whatever unknowable and maybe even fucked-up reason, he wasn’t sticking to his side of the line. It was strange to realize that we were kissing and half undressed but hadn’t started the clock yet, hadn’t set the pace toward coming. When I touched him I actually experienced what I touched. For once, each of his features — the little curve at the base of his spine, the slope of his shoulders — wasn’t separated out by my camera’s eye, exported into pornography, and graded for hotness.

I kept motioning us to jump ahead, to speed up, and he kept letting me know it was okay, that we could go slowly. When he stopped my hand going into his jeans, I had the urge to say, All right, already, let’s not get reverential about it, but then his other hand brushed down my back, and I shivered.

It occurred to me that he might be less neurotic than I was. That he might know himself decently well. Which made me think that if we were going to fuck for the first time tonight, I should do the fucking, so things didn’t get too out of balance.

Eventually, he got us naked and under the sheets together. And still we just kept kissing and running our hands over each other. If only I’d had that third drink or a hit of pot, I might have been able to drift. But I was stuck in the moment. He began kneading my ass, but I leaned away from the touch and untangled myself, rolling onto my back.

He waited a few moments, then asked if I was okay.

“I’m great,” I said.

“We don’t have to do anything more. This is fine.”

“I just need to keep it together,” I whispered. I hadn’t meant to say it aloud. But I couldn’t reel it back in.

He turned onto his side, facing me, and rested a hand on my stomach. “What do you have to keep together?” he said.

He wasn’t my confidant. I couldn’t pretend we had any basis for that. “It’s nothing,” I said. “This is good.”

“Yeah. It is. So is talking with you…What’s up?”

“I’m usually not like this. Actually, I hate it when guys are like this.”

“Like what?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m not used to the slow thing.”

“We can go faster,” he said. “I’m just enjoying the ride.”

A framed Ansel Adams poster hung on the otherwise bare wall facing my bed. I had tidied the dresser beneath it before going out, and my desk as well. This was the furniture I’d lived with since the year after college, and for all the years I had now managed to afford this apartment. Friends and dates had come and gone, admiring the light and the view. I had been glad for the security of their admiration. But seeing it through Seth’s eyes, I was reminded how little I had done to make it my own. I hadn’t wanted to interrupt the clean white lines or clutter the open space. Which had left it sterile. One of the thousands of adult dorm rooms in Manhattan, where credentialed children performed their idea of adult lives.

“It’s ridiculous,” I said. “To be telling you this. I don’t know you. But what the fuck? I haven’t felt normal since the other night. Since we met. You don’t know anything about me. But I have a brother — an older brother — and he hasn’t been with anyone for a really long time. It doesn’t usually hit me like this. But he’s alone — and I’m here. And I feel guilty. Really, though. I’m not usually like this. I don’t think about it all the time, I promise. I’m sorry. I’m fucking this up, aren’t I?”