loose (25 page)

Somewhere in all of this, I decide to contact Leif. Thinking about my relationship with Toby and how I reached that low point brings me back to him, how I never really got over what happened between us. All this time, I’ve never found a way to close the space he occupies in my heart. The fact is, I still love him.

Leif is surprised to hear from me. We chat gregariously for a half hour, and then I ask if I can visit. I didn’t plan to ask, but now that we’re talking, I feel how much I miss him. He’s not seeing anyone, and neither am I. Maybe there’s a chance we could make things work again.

“Why?” he asks.

“Because I’d like to see you.” I bite the inside of my cheek, nervous.

“I don’t know.”

I wait, my heart heavy. I caused his reluctance, I know. But it feels awful he isn’t as anxious to see me as I am to see him.

“I can come next month,” I say. “Just a couple days.”

“You really want to come.”

“I do.”

“OK,” he says. “Let me know when you get the ticket.”

• 190 •

E n o u g h

The week before I leave, Terri comes over and helps me pack.

She lends me a black slip dress, which I try on before I put it in my suitcase.

“Do you think he’ll be attracted?” I ask. I turn to look at my butt, which always looks big to me, no matter what I’m wearing.

“Is he blind?” she asks back. She sits on my bed, holding the glass of wine I poured for her.

I laugh. “I’m so nervous,” I say. I pull the dress over my head, not wanting to think anymore about what I’ll look like to him, whether he’ll still think I’m pretty. “Why am I so fucking nervous?”

“You haven’t seen him in two years,” she says. She hands me the glass of wine. “That’s a long time when you still love someone.”

“I want him to still love me.”

“Just get down there,” she says. “You’ll get your answers when you’re with him.”

When the plane lands in Tucson, I powder any shine off my face.

I reapply lip gloss and fluff up my hair. Then I walk with the other passengers into the terminal. Everyone hugs and exclaims. But Leif isn’t there. I walk toward baggage claim. I look out the doors to see if he’s waiting in his car. But he’s nowhere. After everyone else on my flight is long gone, I go to a pay phone and dial his number, but there’s no answer. I sit against the wall and try to decide what to do.

Just as I stand to try to call him again, I see him loping up the stairs.

The same goofy walk he always had, his dark hair shining under the airport’s fluorescent lights. Soon after we first got together he told me he was a human “L” because of his long feet and short stature.

My heart fills.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I ran a little late.”

I hug him, his scent, that same familiar scent, surrounding me.

“You look good,” I say. “I like the hair.” I rustle his hair, which is cut short now.

“Yeah?” He touches his hair, and I see in the gesture his insecurity. He feels like I do, nervous and uncertain about how this will go.

• 191 •

L o o s e G i r l

I follow him out to his car, not the one he had when I left him, but a van. I watch him as he drives, my Leif, no longer mine with his new hair, his new van. At his apartment, where he lives with one other guy who isn’t there this weekend, he pulls me into another hug. We hold each other a moment, just feeling that after all this time. In his bedroom, there’s a framed photograph of him and a girl. A pretty girl. They’re both tan, their smiles big. Another photo shows him and the same girl from behind as they run hand-in-hand into the ocean.

“That’s in Nogales,” he says. “It’s only an hour’s drive from here.”

“Who is this?” I ask. I don’t look at him, not wanting him to see me. Jealousy’s such an ugly emotion.

“Sarah,” he says. “We went out for a year after the girl from the band.” I watch him look at the picture, trying to gauge what he feels.

“Were you in love with her?”

“Yeah.”

I sit on his bed and take off my shoes.

“Let’s have sex,” I say.

“What?” He laughs, uncomfortable, but his eyes are on me now, not the photo.

I lift my shirt and I set it aside. Underneath I’m not wearing a bra. Then I stand and unbutton my jeans. “Come here.”

He does, and I reach for him. I yank off his shirt, and then his pants. I pull him on top of me, my mouth on his. He gets inside of me, but still it’s not close enough. I want to feel him again. To know him, like I used to, the last two years—and that girl—erased. I want things back to what they were, when I didn’t question whether he was mine. But it’s different. Little things. The way he touches me down there. The way he moves. I don’t recognize our sex as ours. I used to feel so bored with the predictability of our sex, but now I long for its familiarity, to feel that we still know each other so intimately.

Late in the afternoon, we drive up into the Catalina Mountains.

• 192 •

E n o u g h

As the road ascends, saguaro cacti give way to Arizona oak and Doug-las fir trees. In the distance, the range’s sandy slopes, lined with wind and water erosion, look like a woman’s curves. The afternoon sun sends shoots of orangey light onto the road. This is where I had planned to live, among the southwest’s dusty, airy landscape. Ever since my father and I traveled to Taos, I was sure I belonged here.

Now it belongs to Leif. For the first time I see the meaning. Leif applied to the school here after he knew I wanted to come. He came out here to be with me.

We set up camp on a raised ridge where we watch the sun sink into a ravine. It’s too warm for a fire, but he makes one anyway, and he opens a bottle of beer for me.

“So, here you are,” he says, and he raises his bottle.

“Here I am.” I clink his with mine.

“I didn’t think you’d ever come back.”

I take a breath. “Sometimes I wish I never left.”

“Why did you?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I watch him, wanting to say the right thing.

“I was confused. I needed to get out of here for a while and find something else.” He looks up at the star-filled sky while I talk. I can’t tell what he’s thinking. I want to make this better, to tell him the truth after all this time, but I’m not even sure what that is. “It wasn’t about you. I was empty, and no one, not even you, could have filled me.”

He looks back at me now, and I see he’s crying. After all this time, he’s crying. “You just left me.”

My throat clenches. I see what I’ve done, how much I’ve hurt him, this man I care for. “Oh, God, Leif,” I say. “I’m so sorry.” I get up and hold him, and he sobs like a little boy in my arms. “I wish I could take it back.” I really, really do.

The next night I watch his band perform at a bar, and I see how settled he is here. He has friends and flirtations. People know him as Sarah’s ex, not my ex. They don’t know me at all. The following

• 193 •

L o o s e G i r l

morning, Leif drives me to the airport and we hug good-bye. I’ve been a fool in the past. That’s for sure. But I’m not disillusioned enough to think we’ll be together now. He has a whole life he’s happy in, and his life no longer includes me.

K

a t t h e e n d of July, I fly across the country to attend an artists’

colony in Vermont. I fly into New Jersey, where I’ll see my dad for a day and pick up a car. Then I’ll drive to the Berkshires to see my grandmother, who is alone since my grandfather passed, and finally to see Bevin before I head up to Vermont. On the flight over, I sit next to a handsome, well-groomed boy. Three hours into it, we make out. I can see by the little tent in his pants that he’d like us to do more. I briefly consider jerking him off under the tiny airline blanket, but he doesn’t push for it, so I don’t offer. We exchange numbers, but he lives in Philadelphia, and I’m on a tight schedule this trip. I know I won’t see him again.

Dad takes his new girlfriend and me out for dinner at an Italian restaurant we went to often when I lived here. Perhaps it’s the familiarity of the place that leads me to tell his girlfriend about the things Dad did when I was a teenager. Or perhaps it’s been brewing inside me too long. Over dessert and coffee, I tell her how he used to make sexually suggestive comments about my friends, be inappropriate in front of me with his girlfriend, and smoke pot with my friends.

With each debasement I mention, she slaps Dad hard on the arm.

“What’s wrong with you?” she says with play anger.

He laughs uncomfortably. “It was years ago.” And then, “Check, please.”

“You can’t run from your past,” I tell him, and smile.

“Maybe not,” he says. “But I don’t have to sit here and take this abuse.”

“Yes, you do,” his girlfriend says.

The waiter places the check on the table.

• 194 •

E n o u g h

“Everything was OK?” he asks.

“Everything but the food and company,” Dad says, his standard joke.

“And you have to pay for our dinner after we abuse you,” his girlfriend says after the waiter walks away. I smile, thinking of Nora and her list of what men are good for. I guess Dad likes this sort of teasing from his women. I know inside he believes it’s true. He has to do things for the women in his life to be worthy of them, to make up for all his mistakes.

Dad gets his wallet out. He shakes his head and laughs while he pulls out an American Express. “That’s right,” he says. “I’ll never be paid up, will I?”

I just laugh and raise my eyebrows. That’s for him to determine.

His girlfriend goes to bed early, and Dad and I sit in the living room. He turns on the TV and lights a cigarette, his two biggest vices. He’s too old to still be smoking and though I shouldn’t encourage him, I light one too.

“What really happened with Nora?” I ask.

Dad sighs. He leans back and blows out smoke in a thin stream. “A lot of things happened,” he says. “You know how relationships go.”

I do. “What sorts of things?”

“For one, she drank too much.”

“Really?” Images of Nora come back to me, the glass of wine always in her hand. And the night they came home, her weird loose-ness, her breath reeking. “I guess I never understood that.”

“I didn’t feel you had to know.”

I nod, appreciating he thought to protect me like that.

“There were other things. Her insecurity. My immaturity.” He smiles.

“You’re getting pretty old to be pleading immaturity,” I tell him.

He smiles again. “True story.”

“So what about this one?” I nod my head in the direction of his bedroom. “Are you feeling more mature?”

• 195 •

L o o s e G i r l

He raises his eyebrows, looks toward the TV a moment. “Let’s just say I don’t expect her to be perfect this time.”

“So you are more mature.”

“Maybe I am.”

Later I find my senior high school yearbook and sit on my childhood bed. In my picture I gaze out at the camera, not smiling. My makeup is too heavy, my nails bitten down and ragged. It’s easy to see how unhappy I was, why I made all those bad choices I did with the boys in Manhattan and with Heath and the Jennifers. I flip through the rest of the book, looking for myself there. My classmates fill the pages, playing soccer and volleyball, performing in plays. They look happy, involved. But I’m nowhere to be found. I close the book and put it away, sadness filling my chest. I want to believe I’m different now. I’ve overcome the pain that made me act so impulsively and harmfully. But I don’t really know if that’s the case.

K

a f t e r i s p e n d time with Bevin, I start my retreat in Vermont.

The summer here is hot. The landscape is lush and green. Birds lazily circle overhead. Crisp river water rushes by beneath a bridge.

Days, I work on my novel. When I grow restless, I walk in the warm sun down to the main house, hoping to find others procrastinating too. Or I head up to the gym in the college nearby and run on the treadmill. There aren’t any boys for me here, but it’s one of those rare times I’m OK with this. I like the friends I’ve made, especially three painters—all guys—with whom I go to the local bar some nights.

We shoot pool or sit with beers and cigarettes and discuss music and art. I’m attracted to one, Frank, who has sharp blue eyes and skin around them that crinkles when he smiles, but he’s married, so I don’t go there.

The first week, Frank and Jerry, another painter, and I go to the bar, which is two miles away in the next town. Locals play pool and

• 196 •

E n o u g h

classic rock sails down from overhead speakers. When I order wine, the bartender, a scruffy man with a big belly, laughs at me and then calls into the back for someone to find the box of Franzia. Frank laughs at me too.

“You don’t come from a place like this, do you?”

“And you do?” I smile.

“I know my way around a dive bar.”

“Maybe that isn’t something to be so proud of.” I light a cigarette. I can feel those blue eyes on me, the way he’s watching my mouth. Jerry gets up to watch the pool game, maybe feeling something happening he doesn’t want to be a part of.

“You think you’re so smart, writer girl,” Frank says.

“I do.”

He pulls a cigarette from my pack, and we both watch as it comes out.

“You have paint on your hand,” I tell him.

“That’s because I paint.” He smiles, watching me watch his hand.

He lights the cigarette.

“It’s sexy,” I say.

He leans toward me. “You,” he says in a low voice, “are a very dangerous girl.”

During the week, after a few hours of writing, I go to find him painting outside on the bank of the river. We sit together in the sun and talk seriously about our work. Two days before I’m to leave, during one of these times by the river, he tells me he’s crazy about me.

At first, I try just to be flattered. I like him, too—a lot. But he’s married. This guy is married. Somewhere his wife is going about her day, assuming Frank is in Vermont, innocently painting away. Perhaps she rushes home every afternoon, checking to see whether he’s called. Perhaps she would never consider that he’s hitting on me, that rather than thinking of her when he’s alone in his bed he’s thinking about what it would feel like to touch me. But as the minutes pass, as we sit together and talk about this thing that could