Can't Think Straight:. Kiri Blakeley
a little crazy, and Indian. After the two of them gab to the point where even I can’t get a word in edgewise, Sahana takes me aside.
“He’s unlovable, but funable,” she says.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means you’re safe. He’s fun. But you’re never going to fall in love with him. He’s unlovable. Don’t tell him I told you that.”
Back at his apartment, Rahil carries me to the bed again. I love to look at his expression when I kiss him, the way he leans into me and purses his lips slightly, sometimes licking them, waiting for the next kiss, full of desire. It’s only after getting kisses like this that you realize that something had been missing from your other kisses.
When we’re done, we wrap our legs around each other, and he tucks his head into the crook of my neck, gives two heaving snores, and falls asleep. The desire for sexless affection is so strong in humans, even in those where the relationship is based purely on sex. Aaron had always been such a delicious snuggler, though in the past couple of years, it had been pretty much one sided, up to me to snuggle. But about a week before I left for Los Angeles in March, to attend the Oscar parties, I’d felt him curling around me from behind. “You spooned me last night, baby,” I’d said the next day, pleasantly surprised. “I did,” he’d smiled. Maybe he’d known then it would be the last time.
In the morning, Rahil makes me Indian tea. He never seems in a hurry for me to leave, though we both know it’s going to happen. It’s difficult to keep the conversation at the superficial level. At some point you run out of light banter and things creep toward the “get to know you” talk. It creeps very slowly, but still it creeps.
I fight it. The less I know, the more I can cloak him in my own fantasy. If I find out he voted for Bush, or hates cats, or once spent time in prison for child molestation, the less likely I’m going to want his fingers up my vagina.
I lie with my head on his naked lap, and at some point I realize he’s rubbing his penis while talking to me.
“Good lord, what are you doing?” I laugh.
“What?” he asks, innocently.
“You don’t do that on the subway, do you?”
“Certainly not. I’m only perverted when someone wants me to be.”
I had gone from Aaron, someone so repressed he hardly liked anything touched, to a guy so sensual he couldn’t keep his hands off me or himself. I wondered why I couldn’t find someone in the middle, but maybe this was what I needed now, as maybe Aaron was what I needed then.
I still have dreams about Aaron: short, nonsensical, gut-wrenchingly sad dreams about my best friend leaving me. After one, I awake with a jolt and realize I need to see him more. Cutting him out of my existence is not working. I don’t know how people who lose their life partner after fifty years, who are older and may not have the big city distractions I do, survive. I guess they slowly die of a broken heart.
That night, Rahil calls to make plans for Friday. The “plan” is to go to his apartment … period. Something about the call makes me feel so generous that when I speak to Aaron, I tell him that when he comes over to get the rest of his things, he can bring boxes. I’ll give him some bowls, plates, glasses, towels.
“But I keep all the good stuff,” I say.
That night in my dream, Aaron is animated and emotionally expressive like I’d never seen him—and it’s because he’s free to be himself. I feel so horrible about that, as if he’d been forced to be someone else for ten years.
Then we get into an argument. “Well, you like men,” he says, explaining his own attraction.
“Yes, Aaron,” I hiss. “But I’m a girl!”
Good God, I’m becoming a red stater in my dreams.
I remembered the night Aaron and I had met at Boat. I’d asked him to help me understand how I might spot this kind of thing in future relationships.
“When the sex goes bad …” he’d sighed, trailing off.
How that had galled me! I’d spent years trying to convince Aaron the sex wasn’t quite right, and he’d always played it off like it was fine. Eventually, I’d come to accept that it was better to have a lukewarm sex life and a great relationship than the reverse.
It’s not that you don’t see the warning signs, or ignore them. It’s that after ten years you learn not to freak out about them. You’ve gone through so much crap together and are still together that a gradual widening of interests or dwindling of a physical connection doesn’t set off the alarm bells that they might only six months into it. After a man comforts you through the World Trade Center collapsing before your eyes, through the deaths of relatives, and through hundreds of more minor crises in between, you don’t expect him to suddenly take a U-turn out of the relationship—and into the arms of a big hairy man.
The next afternoon, I go to my hair salon to pick up a diffuser that my stylist, Katie, had ordered for me. Aaron uses the same place, the hairdressers all know him. They are dumbfounded by my news.
“Are you going to get therapy?” Katie asks, wide eyed.
“Everyone keeps asking me that. I’m not much of a therapy person.”
“I’m just saying, you might want to consider it,” she warns. She tells me about a male friend of hers who was with a woman for ten years, got married, and a year into the marriage found out his wife was having an affair with a woman.
“Please don’t tell me the past eleven years have been a lie,” Katie’s friend had begged his wife.
“I can’t tell you that,” she’d answered, less than diplomatically.
Subsequently, Katie continues, the man got into a car accident. “And he died!”
“Because he didn’t get therapy?”
“Because his head wasn’t in the right place. He wasn’t concentrating.”
“Well,” I say, “I don’t drive.”
That night, I go out with Lily, Sahana, and Julie. We hit Union Bar and sit near a group of men ranging in age from the twenties to the sixties: three young guys, their father, and their uncle, out celebrating the uncle’s birthday.
One of the young men is like a game show host. He sits in front of us and barks, “Where are you from?” and points at us one by one for an answer. Then he makes us each guess what he does for a living. I wonder when we get our year’s supply of car wax. After Aaron, who spoke every word with deliberate sincerity, I find myself drawn to the guys who take the conversation off my shoulders.
This game show host and I begin dancing. He’s actually quite good, twirling me around as I flop to and fro, always catching me firmly.
He sticks his tongue in my mouth. It’s stationary and bulbous, like a plug. He tells me, “You’re as good a kisser as you are a dancer.” The line is laughable considering how little I’d reciprocated. But having all of my emotional nerve endings suddenly sliced off is freeing in a way: I’m much less irritated by people I would’ve normally dismissed, more willing to dance, to mingle, to throw myself into the carnival of life and kiss its barker.
Monday night, as I make far too much tuna pasta salad because I’m accustomed to making it for two, and I futilely try to find something on TV, the Aaronless apartment gapes at me, cruel in its aberrant emptiness. I’m introduced to that heart-palpitating restlessness that attacks newly single people, the kind that makes you want to claw your skin off.
I’ve completely forgotten how to be alone.
The night before, Rahil had texted me, asking if I was “recovered”