Tonight I’m sitting here and it’s late and I’m lying about who I am but it’s not really lying, just heavy embellishment on the fabric of my life. So this guy (whose chat alias is Perseus) sends me a private message and says, “Do you want to talk?” Because I am difficult I say, “About what?” and he says, “About anything,” so I say, “Let’s talk about pigs,” and he goes, “What about them?” and I say, “They might fly,” to which he replies, “Are you single?” And so I’m laughing, not so much at him and certainly not with him but sort of near him when my computer lets out that too-happy, surreal little chirp that tells me I have new email. I see that it is from Seth and suddenly my vitals are filled with cold lead.
I can’t read it just yet, not in the flat gloom of another squandered Saturday night spent alone. Whatever he has to say can wait until the morning. I turn off my computer, a purple iMac so shiny and new that I want to lick it like candy and I hear the soft staticky pops that come as it settles to rest.
I let the dog out; she slips on the back stairs and bangs her way outside, barking just to hear herself. “Tarot!” I yell and Mrs. Berkowitz’s light comes on and rinses the snow outside her window. I have woke my neighbor. “Tarot!” To the west the Citgo sign looms and flashes over Kenmore Square. That sign has replaced the moon for me.
I let the dog back in and she tracks snow all over the floor. Seth preferred cats. With dogs, you give them a warm house, a cedar-chip bed with their name on it, you feed them, scratch their ears and they think, “Wow, this person must be a goddess.” You do the same thing for a cat and it thinks, “Wow, I must be a goddess.” That was how it was with Seth, too. Six times in one formidable night and he still wouldn’t hold me. “Please let me sleep,” he said, turning one sharp brown shoulder and
tugging the sheets. He pulled away when I tried to put my cold toes behind his knees.
I lie in bed and kick the sheets so much that I feel like I’m fighting and then I realize it’s him, it’s Seth; his name keeps running through my head, a chant, a prayer, a curse. “It’s all sex with you,” he told me once. “I feel like this guy attached to a penis you really like.” Three days ago at breakfast I opened up the Phoenix and there he was, a newsprint likeness of the man I used to sleep with. He was getting an award for something. The public access cable channel he runs, probably. Anyway, I took the chance to email him my congratulations and tell him that, in honor of the occasion, I’d like to buy him dinner at Grasshopper, the vegan place he likes so much.
I didn’t expect to hear from him and that probably would have been better. I’m a little disgusted with my behavior these days. I was never in love with him though I think I could have been. Even now, though, I’m not sure what was really him and what I wished was him. Cats are that way, too; they’re either butting their head against your leg or they’re sitting high on a bookshelf like statuary and you never really know what they’re like. I finally fall asleep and I dream of him, naked on his bed, his erection thumping against his stomach, a churning sea of cats grooming him with their sandpaper tongues, his pubic hair all wet and curly. He was much more beautiful than I had remembered.
When I wake the sky has that aching look of expectancy, that unstable haze of the predawn. I delete Seth’s email without reading it.