Instant Love: Fiction Read online

  “It’s the chardonnay,” I say.

  He shoves his head underneath the sink, really shoves it in there, and I stare at his ass because I feel that I should, but really, I don’t even care what it looks like. He could have a huge backside, or no ass at all and I would still sleep with him at this point. He is there, and I am ready. I loosen my robe enough to expose the top half of my breasts. I slip a round, soft leg out from the silky fabric. Peekaboo.

  His ass is small, as it turns out, like two saucers in a pair of jeans, and I bet it is rock hard.

  He pulls his head out from under the sink. “Well, there’s no rat,” he says. “At least not any that I can see.” He squats on the floor, takes a sip of his beer, squints at me. He bounces a bit on his calves. He nods at me. “There is no rat. Right?”

  “Right. There is no rat.”

  “OK, so you wanted something else?”

  “Right.” This I didn’t know how to do. Online, everything was already taken care of, fully explained by a system of clearly labeled and color-coded boxes. It was just a question of confirming the agreement. I stretch my leg out further, pull my hands up to my breasts and stroke the sides of them.

  He looks momentarily terrified, and then relaxes. “Oh, I thought maybe you wanted to buy some weed. Because for that I’d have to go back to the apartment.” He stands up and puts his hand on his crotch, starts rubbing it. “You want this though, that’s what you want.” He is hard in moments.

  “Yes,” I say. My voice is low and has edges to it. “I want that.”

  “You want to smoke some weed first? I could—”

  “No,” I say. “Let’s go in the living room. On the couch.”

  “No, we’re going to do it right here.” He pushes me up against the wall, unties my robe, and heads straight for my breasts, takes huge tastes of them, bites them and licks them, as if he has been hungry all night. I just stand there, hands against the wall, letting him fondle and eat my skin alive. I am almost immediately ready for him to get inside me, but I sense that he needs to do this first.

  “You smell good,” he says. He licks and kisses down my stomach, gets on his knees and starts to bite my thighs, and then lick in between my legs. An involuntary noise rises from my throat and I emit it, it hangs in the air in front of my face, and then I release another.

  “Fuck,” I say. I put my hands in his hair.

  He sticks a finger in me, and then another. “Yeah, you’re ready,” he says. He stands, slips off his grungy tennis shoes with one hand, keeping the other on my right breast, pinching the nipple. He is looking at me the entire time. He drops his hand to his pants, unzips, unbuttons, pulls them down over his hips and ass. “You still ready? Check to see.” I stick a finger inside, and it is wet.

  “I’m ready,” I say.

  And then it feels like it is over in an instant, if only because I wish it could have lasted forever. I am dizzy the minute he starts pumping inside of me. I wrap a leg around him and then my arms around him, and he mutters in my ear between thrusts about how he knows I always watch him, that he has watched me, too, that he has thought about my twat—twat, he actually says that—and what it would be like to fuck me in the elevator.

  “Throw down your bags. Bend you over. Make you scream. Every floor. All the way to the top. Back down again. Fucking you.”

  I feel light like a child and I sink into him.

  “You really thought that?”

  “Sure,” he says, and I don’t believe him but it doesn’t matter. I just let him rampage on for a few minutes. I am almost sleeping. And then it’s over; he pulls out, jerks himself off for a minute, dribbles down his leg. I watch this, through a warm golden haze that has clouded my eyes and face. I feel hot, almost feverish.

  “I need to sit down,” I say. I pull on my robe, tie it tight around me, and then go to the living room. He pulls on his pants, grabs his can of beer, and follows me, rubbing the moisture off his hands onto his pant legs. I stretch out on the couch and he lays down next to me and puts a hand on my breast and massages it with his fingers, around the nipple, and underneath, where it’s at its softest.

  “God, you smell good,” he says.

  I thank him. He kisses me.

  “You want me to hang out for a while? I don’t have anything to do. I was supposed to bring the beer to those guys”—he motions his head toward my front door—“but fuck ’em. I can take a night off.”

  I didn’t respond. I let my nerve endings unfurl from their tensed state. Calm down, children.

  “I like your place,” he says.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  His hand picks up steam on my breast. “It’s so clean.” He moves his hand down my stomach, and I reach mine out and hold it there, intertwine my fingers with his. I am too tired to start anything else, but I cannot seem to say no just yet. “It’s a real hole where I’m at,” he says. “You could probably guess that, though.”

  “I could, yes.”

  He kisses me on the neck.

  “Man, I’m getting hard again,” he says. “I could get used to this.”

  I am flattered, I can’t help it. I had turned him on twice. Maybe this is no fluke.

  “You know I could come over again sometime. Spend the night. I could make you dinner. We could do this some more.” He squeezes my hand.

  “Maybe.”

  “Because honestly, I’d much rather crash in a place like this than with those guys. They’re just a bunch of slobs. It’s gross.”

  He shifts his arm up, and happily puts it around me. I picture a stack of garbage bags outside my front door, facing their twins across the hall.

  We lie there for a while, our breaths catching in our throats, and listen to the distinct noises of the night turn into the roar of the day: an individual car hurtling through yellow lights, unchallenged; dogs greeting each other on their morning walks before their owners prepare for work; and the sound of a lone bus running the regular route, its breaks moaning for oil and tenderness at the stop below my window. Suddenly there is sunlight through the window, not a lot, because it’s winter and nature is sparing with her love these months. Finally the streets grow anxious and full, the rest of traffic mixing with the sound of doors opening and closing, footsteps made by overpriced high heels and running shoes and scuffed dress shoes; everyone is shifting and moving at once, and the blend of the sounds and the piercing pure light through my window signal that while what happened between me and my neighbor was different from the usual, it is now over. I cannot go back, so now I must move on. I didn’t know how this would happen, this progression, this growth, what form it would take, or how much work I would have to do to get there, but at the very least, I knew I was going to have to find a new apartment.

  “So maybe I could stay here for a while,” he says.

  I look at him, try to picture him here in the morning and the evening, with the sunrise and the sunset, every single day. I can see someone, but it’s not him, it’s not his face. I see Alan’s smile, and I see the legs of a man I invited to my house once, strong and lean, and I see a man with my father’s mind, and I see a man who works two floors down from me at work who makes me laugh all the time in the elevator, and I see someone with my sister’s generosity who can give until he bleeds—I like that sometimes, the bleeding—and I see the satisfied faces who look at me for that instant as they groan like I’m the woman they love. I see bits and pieces, parts, fractions, hundreds of people comprising the one perfect man, and I know suddenly that he’s out there, even if this one, he’s not the one.

  1.

  IT IS morning now, and Sarah Lee sits and waits for the bus.

  2.

  SARAH LEE falls in love every time she takes the subway, so she’s started taking the bus instead. The L train from Williamsburg to the East Village is killing her, with all these cute young boys, with their lovely young skin and doe eyes and mussed-up hair, mussed up just so and their vintage-store winter coats, some military style, stiff and
serious-looking, some more textured and glamorous, as if they should be walking the streets of London circa 1932; and all kinds of crazy kicks on their feet, expensive tennis shoes of vibrant colors, sturdy walking boots, and lately, cowboy boots with heels, but those are worn by the gay boys, so she just admires their feet and ignores the rest. And they are all reading books, worn paperbacks mainly, she imagines they’ve borrowed from roommates or girlfriends, or listening to their iPods on shuffle. Some of them are checking out the girls—their glamour-puss counterparts, equally casually yet strictly attired—looking at their asses or their hair or their new shoes, wondering what those shoes would look like wedged between bed and wall of their crappy, crumbly apartment, their naked bodies splayed out in some uncomfortable, pornographic position. They are wondering what it would be like to fuck them, Sarah Lee firmly believes. And while she doesn’t want that, want them to only want to fuck her, she wishes, still, that they might glance at her. But they don’t. They look anywhere but at her, in the old winter coat she bought at the ninety-nine-cents-a-pound Salvation Army outlet in Seattle, fading pink wool with childlike bejeweled buttons she sewed on herself, not as tough as it used to be, sometimes coats just die, she needs to admit that to herself one of these days; and even if they looked beyond the coat she knows she is too old and not cool enough for them, and sometimes she still speaks with a stutter when she meets new people (though it is much better now) so that even if they could see something in her, once she opened her mouth they might move on to the next person, pretend like she didn’t exist, until suddenly, she simply didn’t. And there is nothing worse than not existing.

  So she takes the bus into the city instead, the B39 across the bridge, from the Southside of Williamsburg to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She likes to think of her bus stops not by streets but by proper names, as if she were traveling from one kingdom to another, or at the very least, from one town to the next, so that she feels like she’s really going somewhere very important, and not just across the bridge to work. On the bus, she is pretty again, a pretty thirty-two-year-old woman with nice waves of brown hair that go past her shoulders and cover her oversized ears (she has finally learned to cover them), and a full, healthy face, shiny like a silver dollar, with a smattering of freckles on her cheeks that make her look a little bit younger than she is, though not much. Enough to confuse the guy checking IDs at the door sometimes. She likes to think. She likes to believe.

  The people who live in her neighborhood, she wouldn’t consider them her neighbors. They, too, ignore her, won’t meet her eyes as she walks down the block. She had tried greeting people the first month after she moved to the Williamsburg sublet, cheerful morning hellos that used to work sometimes in Queens, and in Oakland, and in Eugene, and in Portland before that, and in Seattle, too. No one wants to say hello to her, except maybe the deli guys who call her “Sweetheart” and “Mami,” and serve her first when there’s a long line, or the car-service drivers idling on the side streets who call out to her as she’s walking. Sometimes she forces the Hassidic women working at the grocery store to interact with her, just so she can hear the sound of her own voice, asking them how they’re doing, telling them to have a nice day. Are they timid or do they dislike her? She can’t tell by their quiet responses, but she’ll take them anyway.

  On the bus she is surrounded by these so-called neighbors, the Dominicans from the projects, young women in sharp lip liner gabbing on cell phones while their children in tow suck quietly on hard candies, older women smoothing back their hair and sadly fingering the buttons on their coats, and young, agitated men who seem wired, pacing the aisles sometimes, checking pagers, waiting for information, waiting for something to soothe them.

  Then there are the Hassidim, mostly men, they’re allowed mobility more than their wives, she’s noticed. They’ve got places to go, people to see, while the women seem to have children to raise, maybe some grocery shopping here and there, shuffling around the neighborhood, but it’s the men who are free to fly throughout the city on short-term missions like homing pigeons, across the bridge and back again.

  When Sarah sits behind them on the bus she stares at the backs of their heads, on occasion pulling out her sketch pad to draw them. She is mesmerized by the ruddiness of their skin, grubby stubble on the back of the neck and sometimes higher, how the folds of flesh (they are almost always overweight) bubbles over in layers on the collar of their shirt and jacket, like the lower part of her belly does onto her upper thighs after she has eaten too much pasta and drank too much wine. She has dozens of drawings like this, grainy black textures on heads of wavy pavement, all leading toward a stopping point, a block of black, the hat. Those thick black hats, conduits to their God, but also, she feels, protection from the world around them. They wear them to let everyone know they’re in a posse, don’t mess with them, because there are more, and they will take vengeance. Like gang colors, she mused. But there is only one color. Sometimes you only need one color.

  3.

  IT IS COLD. She blows on her hands to warm them, hugs her arms close around herself. She has been cold for days in her cursed sublet. There are three huge windows in the loft, and they face the East River, so early in the mornings and late at night the wind blows off the water and turns the apartment into a giant icebox. During the day it’s better. There’s sunlight, and it streams through the windows like a golden river.

  4.

  SARAH LEE goes where the sublets take her, she has for the last decade. Up and down the West Coast, starting in her undergraduate days at art school in Oregon, and then back up north to Seattle, down to Eugene, wherever she could find work, mostly as a seamstress, and a quick-and-easy furnished place to live. Everything she owns she could fit in a few boxes with the exception of her sewing machine and her sketchbooks and other artwork, much of which she still keeps in three storage units outside Portland. (Besides her cell phone, that’s her only regular bill for 387 a month. Everything else she pays up front.) She briefly lived with a man in Mendocino, a hearty crabber who had moved down from Alaska, for one lost summer of love, but when winter came and he headed back to work, he told her she’d need to move on or start picking up the rent herself. He’d be on his boat most of the time, and even though he’d be back on occasion, he didn’t anticipate wanting to see her.

  “I can’t just have you staying here for no reason, can I?”

  Why not? she thought. Why can’t you take care of me?

  Good for the summer, but not for the year. She’d heard it before.

  She didn’t mind this life at all, she liked the freedom, of course, but sometimes she thought about settling down in one place. She didn’t even have a plant. She took care of other people’s plants awfully well. Maybe if she had her own it would grow twenty feet high like in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” If she had the time she could make things flourish. If she had the space.

  But sublets were so simple. She didn’t need to do a credit check, most of her moves were through word of mouth, so the references were covered, and she often didn’t need to put a deposit down. The rent was never exorbitant—most folks just wanted someone who would take care of their stuff, their animals, their plants, their record collections, who would somehow even leave their house better than when they left it. Sarah sometimes stitched up tears in blankets, or sewed loose buttons back onto shirts or coats. She had hemmed a few curtains. Simple, easy fixes. Her references came easily. And then there was always someone who needed to sublet a new place. There was always someone on the go, waiting for a reliable young woman like Sarah Lee.

  Use any of the spices you like. Just don’t touch the liquor.

  In Oakland Carter Michaelson tracked down Sarah Lee—he was always tracking her down, he’d been doing it for more than a decade—and asked her to come to New York for two months and watch his place. Carter was an old lover from art school who had made it big in New York with his vast, testosterone-infused sculptures that had people calling him the new Richard Ser
ra, which was always funny to Sarah Lee, because the old Richard Serra was still around: Why did they need a new one? But Carter was irresistibly weird: He had a rolling mass of dark curls that stuck out like a thick bush around his head, matched with a plain, calm face, skin the color of a washed-out beach, and persistent blue eyes that popped out against his pale skin, all atop a set of gangling legs and arms. He looked like he should be famous, and therefore he was. It worked that way in the art world, that was always Sarah’s understanding. Not that he needed any money: He had a trust fund that shot out a check for several hundred thousand dollars a year, some of which he blew on guitars and recording equipment for his rock band comprised entirely of aging artists, with the exception of the drummer, a recent art-school grad who kept the band full of weed and brought in young girls to their shows. Carter had a huge loft in Long Island City and two crazy dogs, a bulldog named Sasha and a lazy-eyed pit bull named Marcus. The pit bull hated practically everyone, but he loved Sarah Lee, which was why Carter was calling.

  “I need you, Sarah Lee. You’re the only one Marcus loves.”

  Carter was planning on going on walkabout in the Australian outback.

  “I’m going to need at least two months,” he said. “Maybe more. I need to be in a place where there are no buildings, just sky and land all around me. I need the absence of metal in order to contemplate it.”

  Whatever, it was a free place to stay.

  On the night Sarah arrived in Queens, she slept with Carter, because she always slept with Carter when she saw him. He was just so impressive to her, even though she knew he was also full of shit, the way he mumbled and pretended not to understand people in order to dodge conflict, acted like he was in some sort of artistic space in public, isolating himself from the group, when he was really just stoned or bored most of the time. Or fucking with people, she knew he did that, too. He had admitted it to her before. She was his little sponge, soaking up his personality disorders, and they were legion.