In Stereo Where Available Page 11

  “I told you, it’s just casual,” I reminded her.

  She held up one hand. “Stop. Discuss it when you get home. Please.”

  Fortunately, my father’s house was only ten minutes away from Jerry’s, and so I managed to keep the conversation on safer subjects until we actually walked in the door. It was two o’clock in the morning, and although Jerry appeared to be wide awake and ready to talk all night, I was on the edge of exhaustion. I could barely stay awake while driving, let alone handle a conversation that was going to require the diplomacy of North Korean nuclear talks.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be an insult,” I explained as Jerry kicked off his muddy sneakers in the foyer. “I just didn’t understand that you were taking it that seriously.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be taking it seriously?”

  “I don’t know, Jerry. We get together, we have a good time, you kiss me like we’re related, you go home. You don’t exactly act like you’re consumed with passion.”

  He laughed. “You don’t know me.”

  “Maybe I don’t. That’s kind of what I’m afraid of.”

  He sat down on the sofa and ran his hands through his rain-dampened hair. “I’m trying to take it slow, that’s all. I don’t want to pressure you.”

  “I don’t mean doing that, necessarily. I mean anything. All I said was that I’m a virgin. I didn’t say I was a nun.”

  “Fine, I caught that part,” he said angrily. “And I’m an asshole. Now we’re clear.”

  One of the cats tried to curl up on his lap, but he lifted her perfunctorily and set her on the floor. In the awkward silence that followed, I twisted my thumbs in the back pockets of my jeans and gnawed my bottom lip nervously.

  After a moment, he brushed a scattering of cat hair roughly from his thigh and said, “It’s hard to stop. That’s the problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Once I’m wound up, it’s really hard for me to stop. I can be pushy. I turn into a jerk. That’s what I’m trying to get across to you. It’s the same way I am with drinking—once I get started, I’m no good at backing off. I’d rather not get started in the first place if I know I’m going to end up in trouble at the end of the night.”

  I leaned against the wall and tucked my hands behind my back. “Oh.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with whether I’m attracted to you, if that’s what you were thinking. Believe me, I’m attracted to you. But if I show you how much, I can bet you won’t be attracted to me anymore. Not once you see me all frustrated and pissy.”

  I considered that. “So it’s all or nothing for you, huh?”

  He looked pained. “I don’t know. Not necessarily. Your being a virgin—it’s sort of scary, to tell you the truth. The stakes are a lot higher. If I offend you, I’ll feel terrible afterward. I’d rather just keep the nice-guy thing going for a while.”

  I smiled. “I’m sure we can strike a compromise. You promise to ease up on being a perfect gentleman, and I’ll promise to poke you in the eyes if you cross the line into being a butthead.”

  He grinned and looked away. The cat tried to climb onto his lap again, and this time he let her. He looked at me questioningly. “Look, you want to spend the night?”

  The rain outside was picking up, pattering softly against the windows and the gutters. I thought of the way Jerry’s broad back had looked as he walked through the football field, and the idea of curling up with him under the covers in his orderly bedroom seemed particularly inviting and homey. But I was tired and rattled by the argument, and I didn’t want to give him the wrong idea.

  I sighed. “I’m really sleepy right now, to be honest with you.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. I really don’t want you driving home half-asleep. Just come to bed with me, all right? I won’t try anything funny.” He laughed. “Unless you want me to.”

  He turned out the light, and I followed him up the stairs to his bedroom. The covers were pushed back, the cordless phone off the hook, just the way he’d left it when I’d called. The window shade was still up, letting in just enough light to cast the room in a palette of gray shadows. Jerry handed me a T-shirt and shorts from his dresser, then pulled off his shirt to change back into his pajamas. On his hip, half-hidden by the waistband of his jeans, was a tattoo of a griffin spreading its wings. I reached out to touch it, and he moved toward me, slipping his hand under my hair, his lips relaxed and expectant as he tipped his head toward mine. Drowsy and unsettled, but eager for his touch, I curled my hands around his waistband and drew him closer. And soon I learned that Jerry was the same in bed as he was everyplace else: once he was comfortable and in his element, he wasn’t uptight at all.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I placed a loaf of French bread in the kiddie seat of my shopping cart and then stopped short before getting in the grocery line, lifting a copy of People magazine from the rack. Flipping quickly to the “Reality TV Update” section, I scanned the page until I saw a photo of Madison at dinner with Ashley. Her elbow rested against the table; she held her wineglass close to her face, smiling. Don’t tell Marci! Grace’s date with Ashley went off like a dream, but will she be able to keep Rhett’s eye on her after his hot-and-heavy date with Debbie Jo? Up next week: Marci and Grace face off over a stolen kiss, and the girls make a touching visit to the National Civil Rights Museum. Tune in Thursday at 8!

  “Phoebe?”

  I ruffled the magazine closed and turned around. Standing behind me with a red plastic shopping basket in his hand was Bill, his blond hair uncombed, wearing a faded black Pink Floyd T-shirt and black jeans.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Great,” I smiled. I was happy to see him, much happier than I would have anticipated. All afternoon my mind had been on Jerry, calling up the memories of our previous night like a slide show, feeling the roller-coaster surge in my stomach over and over again. Never had there been a better time for Bill to show up in front of me with his sticking-out ears and socks with sandals and hair that needed to be washed. I felt like kissing him with gratitude for the fact that he had dumped me.

  “Yeah, wow. Hey, you look great. So whatcha doing?”

  I looked over at my cart. “Well, shopping.”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, evidently. Me, too.”

  I peeked down at his basket, filled with TV dinners and Red Bull and a multi-pack of highlighter pens. I looked up at him and grinned. I couldn’t stop grinning at him. I’d once heard that there was a warehouse in DC where they stored examples of the perfect measurement of everything—a one-liter bottle, a one-kilo weight, a yardstick precisely three feet long. I could imagine him sitting on a shelf somewhere in there, cross-legged, wearing exactly that ratty Pink Floyd T-shirt and with those grubby fingernails, with the word Wrong on a sign hung around his neck.

  “Well, I guess I’d better, uh—” He pointed toward the express lane. “You know.”

  “Oh, right. It’s Friday, isn’t it? Almost time for Dr. Who.” I could feel my cheeks tensing from smiling for so long, but I couldn’t help it. In a couple of hours Jerry was coming to pick me up; no feeling would be more sublime than looking out my bedroom window and seeing Jerry pocketing his keys on the way up the steps to my building, knowing that Bill would be spending the evening eating Stouffer’s Macaroni & Cheese on a grungy futon alone in front of the TV.

  Bill laughed nervously. “Yeah. Well, seeya. It’s been great seeing you.”

  He put out one arm in a semicircle, asking for a hug. I eagerly stepped into it and squeezed him tightly, tucking my chin up over his shoulder.

  “Definitely,” I said, patting him on the back. “It’s been great seeing you, too.”

  I came home from the grocery store on Friday to find Lauren leaning over the bathroom sink on her tiptoes, her nose practically touching the mirror, wearing nothing but a lacy blue bra and matching panties. Her long brown hair was swirled back into a messy bun. She was plucking her eyebrows. Lauren had the sexy-geek-girl thing down
to a science. All day long she talked about prescription drugs and drove from doctor’s office to doctor’s office in decorously colored business suits, wearing her heavy rectangular-lensed black-framed glasses, but she also had an incredible body, with a long elegant neck and high cheekbones that gave her an intimidating, absorbing kind of beauty. She looked exactly like the kind of women who show up in male fantasies about seducing the frigid librarian, but I knew Lauren. The guy would make it just as far as the part where he takes off his suit jacket, and from there, she’d eat him alive.

  “Big date tonight?” I asked her.

  “The biggest,” she said. She brushed her fingers against her eyebrow in feathery little strokes. “A Virgo, Year of the Dog medical-school resident in 20816. I think I just hit the jackpot.”

  “Have you met him yet?”

  “Not yet. I have to be in Bethesda at six. He said he’ll be driving an Integra.” She grinned like a used-car salesman and pointed a finger at me. “You see? Am I right?”

  “Right about what?”

  “About my system. I knew I’d find him eventually.” She leaned into the mirror again and started on the other eyebrow. “I am sooo going to fall in love.”

  “How do you know? You’ve never even seen the guy.”

  “You know what?” she asked slowly. She was still plucking. “If you can fall in love with some absolutely random guy who calls you up totally by accident, I can definitely fall in love with a guy who’s perfect in every category.”

  “I never said anything about being in love.”

  “Well, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I think I am, but it seems like it should have taken longer. I’m worried that I might just be infatuated.”

  “With Jerry?” She laughed and put the tweezers back in the medicine cabinet. “Yeah, he’s definitely got that star quality.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Nothing. When I think ‘infatuated,’ I think, like, Brad Pitt look-alike, expensive dates, sense of danger. I’m not thinking—what did you say he was? A high-school English teacher?”

  “Yeah. He rides a motorcycle, though. Does that count for danger?”

  “I don’t think so. But if you want to be infatuated, be infatuated. Where are you going tonight?”

  “I’m not sure. Jerry said he was going to rent Chicago, but other than that it’s still up in the air.”

  “Didn’t you just see Chicago last week?”

  “Yeah, but we really liked it. I probably won’t be back until late. But I want to hear all about your date, when I do.”

  She sighed and ran eyeliner lovingly beneath her bottom lashes. She had her contacts in; that meant she was serious. Usually she kept her glasses on for the first date. “Cross your fingers for me.”

  Jerry came by at six to pick me up. The whole car smelled like rotisserie chicken. On the backseat was a big brown paper bag with the top folded over and a couple of rented DVDs.

  “I take it we’re staying in tonight,” I said.

  He frowned. “You know what the problem with dating is?”

  “No, what?”

  “Novelty. Always feeling like you have to be out someplace. I mean, if it were the spring or summer, fine. There’s plenty of things to do. But at the end of November?” He shook his head. “I just want to be warm.”

  I smiled at him in amusement. “I don’t mind staying in.”

  “Good. I got Chicago and Gangs of New York. And I stopped at the Peruvian chicken place for carry-out—have you ever had that stuff?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, it’s great. We’ll have a living-room picnic. I’ve got salad at home.”

  He picked my hand up from my thigh and laced his fingers through mine. I looked over at him in surprise. He sat slouched down a little in the seat of the Jetta, still in his English-teacher work clothes. This was the most comfortable I had ever seen him, just chatty and relaxed, no edge of tension in his voice. It was as though, thanks to our romp in his bed the night before, he’d finally stretched out his legs into our funny little relationship and decided that we could move past our fifteenth first date.

  “How was your day?” I asked him.

  “Good. Really good. I started my seniors on Native Son today. I love doing that book. It’s easy to get the kids into it.”

  I looked over at him. “Into Native Son? Seriously?”

  “Yeah. All I have to do is mention that there was an indecent part that was removed, and that they’re fortunate to have the clean version. They all run home like the cops are chasing them and look it up on the Internet. Once they’ve read the dirty scene, they all love the character. They’re totally into the book, at least for the first couple hundred pages.”

  “What’s the dirty scene?”

  “Oh, it’s just a page or so of the main character and one of his friends having sort of a contest in a movie theater. It’s kind of silly, but the kids can relate to it, I guess.”

  “Sort of a contest?”

  “Yeah, you know. A self-pleasuring contest.” He shifted into fifth gear. “And you wonder why I always want to sit toward the front of the theater, when we go to the movies.”

  “Oh, that’s gross.”

  “I agree. Both antisocial and unhygienic. It’s a nice little moment of character development, though.”

  “None of the parents have complained that you told the kids about it?”

  “I didn’t tell the kids about anything. We always do a little history-of-the-novel thing at the beginning of a unit. I just tell them which edition we’re reading.”

  I laughed. “That’s sneaky.”

  He turned off the highway onto the street that would take us to his house. “You’re pretty judgmental for a Satan worshiper.”

  We settled down on the sofa in front of his TV to watch Chicago, dipping our chicken in the mustard-and-green-chile sauce and wiping our fingers, greasy from the French fries, on the little folded white paper napkins from the bottom of the bag. After all the chicken was gone, we snuggled down on the sofa beneath a big fluffy fleece blanket and watched the rest of the movie, feeling the air beneath the blanket growing deliciously warm and drowsy. My senses were nearly overwhelmed with the nearness of him, the soft fabric of his shirt, the scent of his skin, and the sounds of his heart and his breathing, muted the way things are when you hear them underwater. When I moved my head I could feel the coarseness of his chest hair beneath the fabric. Jerry stroked my stomach slowly, his hand under my shirt, his hips pressed snugly against mine on the narrow space of the sofa. Once the movie ended I wriggled a hand out from under the blanket to find the remote and turn off the TV.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” I said.

  Later, lying beneath Jerry’s fluffy duvet with my head on his chest, I asked him, “So is this that afterglow thing you were telling me about?”

  “I think you actually have to have sex for it to be afterglow, but yeah, more or less. As far as I can remember, anyway. It’s been a few years.”

  “A few years?”

  “Yeah. That’s typical for me. A few months on, a few years off. I’m used to it.”

  I traced the tattoo on his chest with my finger, a cross with a bunch of flowery stuff around the bottom of it. “Lauren kept trying to convince me you were gay.”

  He snorted. “I’m not even remotely close to gay. She’s not the first woman to think that, though. Just because I don’t try to hump everything female that passes by. Women are funny about that. They get offended if you try to move in on them too quickly, but if you’ve got too much self-control, you must be gay. I don’t let sex rule my life, that’s all. I like sex, but there are plenty of other things I like, too.”

  “Like Trading Spaces, for example.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, Trading Spaces. And Don DeLillo novels and Iron Maiden and my bike. And Chicago. Sex is good, too, though. Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Of course.”

  “How
have you managed to make it to age twenty-nine and still be a virgin?”

  I moved my head and nestled it beneath his shoulder, between his arm and his chest. “By accident.”

  His laugh was electric in the dark room, resonant against those shell-blue walls and thin white curtains. “I don’t believe that for a second.”

  “It’s pretty much true. I was—am—waiting for the right guy.”

  “For marriage?”

  “Not necessarily. For love, at least. Real love. I didn’t set out to be a twenty-nine-year-old virgin. That’s just the way it worked out.”

  “So it’s not, like, a religious thing?”

  “No, I suppose not. Well, maybe a little bit. I’d expect that if I was in love enough to sleep with someone, I’d be in love enough to marry him. Save it for that one guy, I guess. Maybe that’s risky, if you’re not actually married yet. I don’t know. Marriage is risky, too. It doesn’t guarantee anything.”

  For a moment the room was quiet, and then Jerry said, “Yeah, that’s right. Your parents are divorced.”

  “Yeah. They got divorced when we were ten. Madison lost her virginity when she was fifteen. I think that had a lot to do with me holding on to mine.”

  “Fifteen’s pretty young.”

  “Yeah. How old were you?”

  “I was twenty-one. I think I was the last person in my entire college class to lose it. I started out philosophical about it, too. It just didn’t work out that way.”

  “You changed your mind?”

  “No, I got drunk and it just happened. It’s a bad story. You don’t want to hear it.”

  “You can tell me.”

  “No, seriously. You don’t want to hear it. Tell me about your sister.”

  “Oh…she just got her heart broken a lot. It seemed like every month she was petrified that she was pregnant. It didn’t seem worth it. It just kind of reaffirmed that my Sunday school teacher was right about why you should wait.”