At home, I put on the dress and for the first time in a while, I feel like a person someone might want to kiss. I sit in front of the mirror and apply makeup, my hand unsteady and the kohl too heavy around my eyes. I put on lipstick, scrub it off, and then put it on again. I watch Rebecca drive away and I go down to the basement, where Eric is looking through the largest collection of vinyl I have ever seen. When I see him, I feel short of breath, and I pause on the stairs and consider turning back. He glances at me and pulls a record from a thick, plastic sleeve. All of it is coordinated and strategically filed, shrink-wrapped and, in some cases, refrigerated, all the dials set to fifty-five, all of twelve-inch Philadelphia funneling into the derivative and French, into the 4/4 and South Bronx, the minimalist German records most apparently handled, the entire room kind of hairy and out of time with the dirty shag and wood paneling and green La-Z-Boy. He lets the needle down, and I continue my silent tour as something is made of the polymer and spiral groove, something preserved but ultimately Jurassic, the sound opaque and full of grain, which I understand as a function of authenticity and also as a condemnation of my ears, which find this cool but mostly just okay. He hands me a glass of gin and wipes the lipstick off my face with the back of his hand. The gin is warm, and the record is Brazilian and very reliant on the theremin. He pours himself a drink and circles the room, pausing only to fuss with the player, which is a beautiful machine but within this context a stark digression with its digital numbers and sleek, aluminum deck. No record is right. At the two-minute mark, Eric swaps one out for another, and then again, the interval between records smaller each time, so that by the fifth it is an erasure, the business of replacing the vinyl bracketing the lyric and unresolved brass. When he finds a record that is satisfactory, he crosses the room and pushes me into the wall. He rolls up his sleeve and wraps his hand around my throat, a thoughtful, preliminary squeeze, as if the hand is not his own. He tries the other hand, and this one, the left one, seems to be the one he prefers. He says, You want this, like it is a question and then like it is a statement, and the most immediate cost of our two-week silence is that I have forgotten his voice, which now seems too soft and too high. Up close, every detail is slightly diminished. The assessment is mutual. His hand slackens as he searches my face for where the memory became corrupt, and then his hand tightens, becomes deliberate, each one of his fingers jointed and distinct, everything reduced and anatomical, my cartilage and salivary glands explicit, my breath half-drawn and made into something sharp and unexpressed in my chest. That I can’t breathe does not immediately feel like a problem. There are things happening in the interim, a door opening upstairs, an eyelash on his cheek, and before he fully commits to the grip, he lifts the glass of gin from my hand. Thank you, I almost say. But my voice is gone, and the room is gone, though on my way out I notice that the record has begun to skip.

7

In the weeks that follow, we are new. There is some attempt at an apology he doesn’t mean and that I don’t want, and then we stand at different windows and wait for Rebecca to drive away. He lets himself into my room and we trip over ourselves while we undress, the contact tenuous and inexact, kisses spoiled by fervor, full of air and teeth and always off the intended mark, though I am just happy to be touched. We wait for the moments Akila and Rebecca are not home, but ardor is a kind of negligence. Rooms are chosen indiscriminately and sometimes doors are not properly closed. The days are shorter in October, and we take full advantage of the nights.

* * *

We don’t talk about what brought us here, the spontaneous asphyxiation hanging between us like a silent, low-gravity dream. Instead we meet in the dark, and all the wholly unoriginal, too generous things men are prone to saying before they come sound startling and true. Tender, silly words. Vocabulary you receive as a good sport and volley back with your eyes closed. Because when it is over, when he is bending over to collect his pants, there is a world beyond the door with traffic and measles and no room for these heady, optimistic words.

* * *

We have abbreviated dinners in Princeton and Hoboken. I draw an anchor on his forearm and the rest of the night we pretend that he will soon be at sea. We go to Paulus Hook in Jersey City and watch party boats cut slick circles around flat, brown barges, and when the water stills, he tells me that he will write me a letter every day. We always arrive home separately. When Rebecca is home, our conversations are curt and about insignificant things, about weather and whether the coffeepot should be cleaned, but as we develop this careful, mundane language, it becomes its own intimacy, the laundry and the miscellany beneath the silverware an irony that softens his face as he pulls my dress over my head. Of course, I am waiting for the other shoe to drop. Bobby pins are left behind, and a crystal centerpiece is destroyed. We crawl around in our underwear and try to find all the broken glass. Eric says he will come up with an explanation, but Rebecca does not seem appeased. She says there is a shard in her foot, and she talks about it for a week. She says she can’t remove it, and sends me to the store for peroxide and gauze. When I look at her foot, nothing is there. Look closer, she says, and the next time Eric and I go out, I suggest we get a room.

* * *

I feel Rebecca reassessing my presence in their house. While I have learned how to use a mop and maintained the appearance of tutoring their daughter in the Pineapple Method and everything else African American 101, my résumé has been revised so frequently that my career in publishing and soft cheese has become a career in scientific journalism, the zebrafish trials at Sloan Kettering surprisingly easy to riff about over the phone, though not as easy in person when the interviewer, a distant relation of Jonas Salk, wants to talk about the moral implications of giving mice cocaine. During my interview with CVS, I try to be convincing in my assurance that pointing young adults in the direction of Plan B has always been a part of my five-year plan, but after the interview I go to the parking lot to drink some cough syrup and notice one of the managers watching me from his car.

* * *

And the money is still coming. It appears on my dresser with no indication of who it is from. I spend the money on paint and deposit the rest. I am tempted to ask Eric during the times we are together if it is him. If it is, I worry our relationship will become transactional, not in the way it already is, re: my twentysomething pussy and his fraying telomeres, but in the way I might have to parse the irregularity of the payments, the four hundred dollars one week, and the measly five the next, and confront the inconsistencies in my performance.

* * *

Eric takes off from work so we can have a picnic. I see him before he sees me. He is on his hands and knees smoothing the wrinkles from the picnic blanket, and there is something so undignified about this that I return to the bus stop and come back in ten minutes when he is waiting with a bottle of wine. When I sit down, he takes my face into his hands and I can feel the salary in them, the forty-plus years of relative ease. He arranges the crudo and the cheese and I roll a loose, dry joint. When we light it, the cherry tears through the paper and we pass it back and forth like an emergency. Just as it begins to rain, a 747 slants toward Newark. He pulls me into his lap, and it is all a little weirder in the afternoon when he can see my face. I fall back onto the blanket and feel the sun on my arms. I think to ask him about the money, but he is kissing my palms, telling me about a family picnic when he found out he was allergic to silver. We drain the bottle, and he tells me that his parents are alive and still together, that in his old suburb outside Milwaukee, there was a genuine neighborhood witch, who in Norse tradition is called a v?lva, and that she gave him his first guitar. I tell him about the last birthday gift I received from my mother, a Polaroid camera, and I slide the ring from his hand and put it into my mouth. For a moment he watches, flushed and happy as I taste the alloy and the sweat, but then he straightens and tells me that I always go too far. We leave separately and at home we don’t talk. I haven’t forgotten to ask him where the money is coming from, it’s just that I realize I hope it’s coming from Rebecca.

* * *