Come Down: II.7

Dolly had asked me to a late lunch, and I worked early, but nevertheless the two times overlapped, and not wanting to turn her down (or, worse, to try to shift the invitation to either a weekend or an evening, which would have been tantamount to informing her that I expected us to have sex when we’d never so much as kissed before), I made my first couple of rounds of the day and then wandered into my supervisor’s office after having rubbed my eyes bleary and splashed my face damp in the bathroom.

“I’m not feeling well,” I told her. “Any chance I could take a couple of hours of sick time?”

Meredith didn’t glance up from whatever email she was sending. “You’ve been using a lot of sick time lately.”

“Just the one day,” I said. “I think there are a few things going around.”

She looked at me over the top of her monitor, took in my appearance, and nodded. “Go ahead. Get some rest.”

“Thank you so much.”

She was already typing again when I closed the door behind me, at which point I returned to the bathroom to attempt to undo all the damage I had done and make myself presentable for Dolly.

The restaurant at which she had asked me to meet her was tucked away behind the big theatres near the Common, close to neither my apartment nor the university, and I stood on the humid platform changing trains, running my hand through my wilting hair over and over. By rights I oughtn’t to have been half as nervous to see Dolly, with whom I was under no obligation to perform and who I was certain liked me, as I was whenever I saw Élouan, who did nothing but keep me, thrillingly, on my toes. But the absence of expectation from Dolly unnerved me, and I could not stop thinking about the possibility that she might want to kiss me. She probably wouldn’t, I reasoned -- lunch was the unsexiest meal of the day by a wide margin -- but what if she did? It was what I wanted, of course, to be shared between Dolly and Élouan, bound so tightly into their world that neither could let me go without losing the other, without the whole neon-lit superstructure crashing in on everyone’s heads, but much as I most enjoyed imagining hypothetical firsts with Élouan, I could only imagine the after with Dolly, the comfortable settled period in which we would sit side-by-side at the theatre, watching Élouan perform (at least when I was not onstage with them), perhaps delicately holding each other’s hands, but no more than that. I was perversely grateful to be coming from work, to be a little ruddy, a little worn out. But all this, I told myself again as the orange line pulled in to take me to Chinatown, was ridiculous, I knew it was ridiculous. It was only lunch.

Through a glass door, into a bland tiled lobby, up a set of stairs carpeted fraying red, and then I was in an expansive waiting area with a big bubbling fish tank and a booth by the hostess stand and Dolly on the booth, dressed -- it occurred to me only then that I had never seen her in anything but party clothes -- in a bright yellow sundress printed with tiny white birds. It fluttered around her knees when she stood up, a bit shorter than usual in flat sandals instead of her going-out heels. A round woven purse, rattan, I was fairly certain, dangled from a leather strap on her shoulder. She looked like a magazine cover designed to sell me hundred-dollar sunscreen.

“You look beautiful,” I told her, unclear as to whether I should be saying so but feeling the need, nevertheless, to state the very obvious truth of the situation. “I should have dressed up.”

“There’s really no need.” She flashed two fingers at the hostess, who nodded and led us into the restaurant proper. “For one thing, you would have upstaged me, but for another, I work from home. I’ll take any excuse for a nice outfit that I can get.”

The restaurant proper looked like a restaurant in that it contained tables, round, glass tops over white tablecloths, but that was where the resemblance ended. I actually stopped, feet planted, in the doorway for a moment to take it all in and had to run after Dolly and the hostess when I was certain I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. I learned afterwards, upon looking it up, that everyone in Boston was already well aware -- so well aware that if you look up ‘Boston,’ no other qualifiers, it’s among the image results -- that there is, on Washington Street, a Chinese restaurant built in the corpse of an old theatre, that probably hundreds of tables sit comfortably beneath its soaring ceiling, that you can still tell where a mezzanine would have gone back in its dusty glory days, that diners are supervised by the ghostly faces and foliage of carved friezes, Muses above murals of pandas and temples and stalks of bamboo, that the strains of some operatic aria still practically echo through the restaurant. I didn’t eat out much. I hadn’t known. But the few other patrons ate and talked and appeared for all the world like unwitting extras in some forgotten spy thriller on whom a tuxedoed assassin would burst in any moment. 

“I wanted to eat here just for that reaction,” Dolly said with a sharp laugh when I caught up to her at the table, one in a sea of empties, to which the hostess had assigned us. “It seems like your kind of place.”

“God, it really is,” I said. “What’s good here?”

“Everything I’ve had, which isn’t helpful.” We scanned our menus in silence for a minute or two, then conferred, then scanned again, finally settling on a dim sum selection that amounted mostly to different kinds of dumplings. We ordered. Our menus were whisked away. Dolly regarded me steadily with her dark eyes.

“You work from home?” I asked, seizing on the only piece of information she had yet revealed atop which a conversation could be built. “What do you do?”

She waved a hand listlessly, her index and middle fingers pressed together like there was a cigarette between them, like she didn’t know how to gesture in this way -- fluid, uncaring -- unless she was also smoking. “I’m in IT,” she said. “Security.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I make sure nobody can break into my company’s computers and steal our data, and nobody ever has -- honestly, I think nobody’s ever tried.”

“I’m taking that to mean you’re good at your job.”

She shrugged. “That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”

“How big are the bucks? Out of curiosity.”

She named a number that was four and a half times what the university was paying me, and I whistled and said, “I’m never buying you a drink again.”

“You and the rest of them,” she said with another sharp little laugh. “Whenever we go out I just open a tab. Lou would drink through half my salary if they could. I tell them they’ll pay me back when they’re on Broadway someday.”

“Frankly I’m not sure anyone makes that much on Broadway.”

“Lou would.”

I tipped my head toward her, wondering if she and I had the same connection to them, if speaking Élouan’s name was enough that they would float through the door any moment and join us at our table. “They would.”

“Do you wish they were here?”

I blinked a few times. Her expression hadn’t changed -- pleasant, if intense, her eyes fixed on my face even as her hand reached for her water and she brought it to her lips for a sip. There was a right answer to the question, there had to be, but she had offered me not a single hint as to what it could be, and I doubted the rhetorical tricks Élouan and I traded with each other would work on her. I did wish they were there, desperately, not just to get me out of the position Dolly had maneuvered me into but also to perform with me, opposite me, do the thing I knew how to do instead of whatever I was, at that moment, doing.

“I wish our food was here,” I said, and she laughed and took another sip of her water, and a silence that might have been companionable or tense half-descended over us, but a waiter did actually come by with the first of our many steamer baskets of dumplings, so I did not have time to decipher what Dolly might have been thinking.

Whatever it was, it was enough that she tipped 25 percent on the check and let her fingertips brush mine when she handed me a fortune cookie -- “excuses are easy to manufacture and hard to sell” -- and took me home with her when our food was finished. I gave the restaurant another glance over my shoulder as she led me out, wanting, unaccountably, to easily manufacture some excuses and hope they sold, let her go off into the torpid afternoon alone, and stay in the old theatre a little longer.

~

Dolly’s apartment was so close to Rachel and Zach’s that I imagined I could locate their building with only a minute or two on the roof of Dolly’s, scanning the skyline. Although of course Dolly did not bring me to her roof but to her bed, fifth floor via a sleek elevator, studio with separate kitchen and the largest shower I’d ever seen outside of a hotel, white walls hung with swoopy floral tapestries in muted colors, a blue-and-white rag rug at the foot of the bed that looked handmade, a blond wooden desk with two sharp black monitors and a mechanical keyboard, plants on the windowsills, a tasteful assortment of plush-looking furniture in shades ranging from eggshell to ecru, central air conditioning, everything scrupulously neat except the unmade bed, petal-pink sheets and a thin green comforter patterned with squiggly leaves. Her bedroom window had a view down to the end of the street, where the buildings gave way to the Emerald Necklace.

I hardly had the chance to see any of this on our way in, because when the apartment door clicked shut behind us Dolly was already kissing me breathlessly, almost giggling.

“I really shouldn’t be doing this,” she said under her breath as she made her way down my neck.

“We don’t have to.”

“Marco, I have been thinking about it since I met you.” She batted her lashes at me, doe eyes, dark eyes, drop-dead gorgeous eyes. I considered the possibility that I was not, in fact, bisexual.

I hadn’t ever really acted bisexual -- Rachel’s coworkers could attest to that, thinking, as I was sure they did, that I was entirely, flamingly uninterested in women -- but in college, before coming out, straightness had been considered passé at best and politically regressive at worst. And I had known, of course, that something about attraction did not line up, for me, with the stencils for heterosexuality that I had been given, so like everyone else I shrugged, faux-dispassionate, when asked about my preferences and stated that gender didn’t really factor into the equation for me. At parties and onstage I kissed anyone whose role dictated that they kiss me and was perfectly happy doing it, and though coming out had put me, finally, among gay men, whom I considered to be so much more my people than the bisexual theatre girls had been that it felt inconceivable that I had ever not been one of the guys, I had still never consciously dropped the bisexual label, hadn’t even thought to -- after all, I was desperately attracted to Élouan, whose gender could not be contained to any affordance of traditional identity, and I could see that Dolly was one of the most beautiful women alive, in her sundress and especially out of it, her skin almost blurry in its smoothness, her bra and underwear a matching set in Eton blue. But when she kissed me, it felt like having a mouth on my mouth, and when she touched me, the reactions her fingers on my skin produced were mechanical rather than emotional, and when she held my wrist and guided the placement and rhythm of my fingers, showing me the very particular way she liked to be touched, thumb here, index and middle in there, like that, I thought of Élouan doing this to her and improved the experience for myself by picturing their fingers in place of mine, and when she came, extravagantly, high-pitched and gasping, I kissed her quickly and went to the bathroom (and observed the gigantic shower) with the explanation that I had a personal rule about doing so immediately after sex, although really I just wanted to wash my hands. It was good -- very good -- and Dolly was perfect and I was more than adequate. It just did very little for me, from an erotic perspective, and I could not stop feeling the hole in the air of her bedroom where Élouan ought to have been.

When I came back to bed, dawdling to take in how lovely her apartment was, she had one arm thrown over her eyes and the sheets tangled around her ankles like a woman in a Frederic Leighton painting.

“How are you holding up?” I asked her, sitting on the edge of the bed and resting a hand on her shin.

“Wonderfully.”

I paused, considered how to phrase my question. “You’ve been thinking about this?”

“Of course. I haven’t been subtle.”

I snorted. “No, but -- I don’t know. Why me?”

She lifted her arm just enough, just up to her brow, so I could see her looking at me through her thick dark lashes beneath it. “I love people who love attention,” she said, and dropped her arm back over her eyes. “Feel free to stay and have a nap with me if you’d like. Or a smoke. I’ll need one when I wake up.”

“That’s alright. I should get home,” I said. And then, because it was the thing to say, “But, if you’d like, I would love to see you again sometime.”

“You will.” She yawned, feline-wide, so I could see her whole pink throat. “If nothing else, you and I are going to plan Lou’s birthday party together.”

“Are we?”

“We are. I’ll text you.”

I stood up and began climbing back into my clothes. “Oh, that does remind me. Where did you get my number from?”

“Lou,” she said, nearly asleep by the sound of it. “Via the university, I guess. Apparently you put it on your continuing education paperwork.”

“Oh.” Dressed, I turned back to her, sprawled out, glorious. “Sleep well.”

“Mmm.”

They’ve had my number this whole time. The elevator sank with me in it. And they never once used it. They waited for me to seek them out on Instagram. Possibly it would have been some kind of breach of some kind of university contract to use my personal phone number to contact me after class was over, but if that’s the case giving it to Dolly can’t be acceptable. If I hadn’t tracked them down, would they have texted me first? Why give it to Dolly? They must have known I’d find out she got it through them.

And though I didn’t like the way the inside of my mouth tasted -- though I stepped out of Dolly’s building into a muggy late afternoon that made the city feel thick and bloated around me and made my body feel rather the same way -- though the knowledge that Élouan could at any time text me and had chosen, was continually choosing, not to text me bubbled nauseatingly in my stomach -- I was so perfectly occupied by the puzzle of the phone number and Élouan’s intentions therewith that, by the time I arrived home to my blessedly cool basement, I decided that, given how alive my brain was, how full of interest and rumination, I must have rather enjoyed sleeping with Dolly after all.

Might Makes Write and all the writing shared herein are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.