I took a deep breath. “I don’t think this is right for me. I’m sorry. We should say goodbye.”
So it was done.
His last words to me echoed in my head. “Very well. I’m sorry, Jo.”
A click and silence.
I had lost a friend.
Patrick had pretty much decided he’d move into the apartment on Yale Drive if Jo Hutchinson offered it to him, which he thought she probably would. It turned out she knew one of his references, a good sign.
The apartment was small, built over a garage; what Americans called an efficiency and he’d call a bedsit, one large room with a minimal sort of kitchen arrangement and a bathroom. There was a staircase up from outside and a door leading into the house and Jo offered him use of the washer-dryer in the basement and, if he had ambitious cooking plans, he could use her kitchen.
He told her he might well be inspired to bake a half-dozen loaves in that fancy high-tech oven, and she looked at him in a way that suggested she didn’t know whether he was joking or not.
He liked her. She was a bit eccentric, and there was some awkwardness, mostly on his part, that he’d seen her naked.
She spent the first five minutes of this meeting staring at his chin and then told him that taking the beard thing off was an improvement. Given what she was doing the day before, he thought he should be flattered that she’d even noticed his facial hair. He launched into a long rambling explanation of how he tended to sideswipe the beard thing while shaving so it lost definition, but the silent subtext of his monologue was that he wished he’d got a better look at her breasts when she was naked.
Today she wore some sort of blue shapeless dress thing—her legs and feet bare—probably made of hemp or tofu or compost like everything else in the town. He liked her slender body and waifish short dark hair in a ragged sort of style that either cost a lot of money or was a mistake, he couldn’t tell.
She didn’t look the way she sounded on the radio; she was younger than he would have thought, about his age, late twenties. But her voice was sexy in real life, too, and he told her he liked the music she played even if he didn’t always understand it.
“Do you like being a DJ?” he asked.
“I’m music director. I decide on the music programming. The on-air work is only a small part of what I do.”
He felt he was being corrected. For someone who had a geeky sort of job, though, even geekier than his, and looked fey and otherworldly, she was right on the button when he asked about insurance and security and cable access.
By this time they were back in the kitchen, where she poured him a cup of coffee and examined his application. “It says here you’re a web designer.”
“Yeah, I’ll be working from here.”
“That’s fine. We won’t see much of each other because I sleep mostly during the day.” She refilled his coffee mug. “I have a Mac, a laptop. I really like it.”
“I use Macs, too. Three of them and six screens. I’ll show you my setup if you like.” He stopped, because it sounded as though he was boasting, or as if he’d waved his dick at her to prove it was bigger than her boyfriend’s. (It was.)
He told her the brief, bare facts of his divorce, of how he was moving out until his soon-to-be ex-wife had finished her master’s and they could sell the house. She nodded sympathetically and he had the urge to tell her how depressed and horny he was but instead he told her he was stable and financially responsible and so on.
He embarrassed himself trying to look down the front of the blue shapeless thing and musing on how he could persuade her to bend over so he could look up it. He wondered, not for the first time, if women spent as much time and energy, for instance, looking at men’s flies or up the legs of their shorts. Elise had told him once that men were natural sprawlers and it was no big effort to spot, or ignore, a dangling penis in warm weather.
At one point, mildly exciting, Jo stood on one leg with the other foot against her knee in a sort of yoga pose—in this town you had to do yoga or pilates or else risk social ostracism, but he did neither. He suspected there was a crack squad of yoga police who would break down your door to make sure you had your foot in your ear.
Great legs, he noted.
They shook hands and she said she’d let him know.
As he drove away, he decided he absolutely had to forget that he’d seen her naked and stop thinking about what she’d be like in the sack (pretty good, he suspected). It was an honest mistake. He’d heard the moaning and groaning and thought someone was in pain, and looked around the open door and the first thing he saw was her pair of Father Christmas knickers on the floor, the crotch sopping wet.
After that, it was less of an honest mistake. He must have stood there for a good five minutes watching that unimaginative fuck, turned on as hell, seeing the guy’s cock slide in and out of her. He wasn’t particularly interested in the cock, but he could see how it cleaved her, opened her up. She was all sweet and pink and shiny beneath that tuft of black hair, the star of his private porno movie.
Shit. This was a business arrangement. Period. And he should feel relieved that he’d found a place to live, but he felt only sadness.
He couldn’t wait to get away from Elise, but he dreaded the actual moving out, saying goodbye, knowing from now on it was just going to be legal business.
More tears. His if not hers.
How had everything gone so wrong?
Thursday evening at the station we had an on-air staff meeting, me and two full-time announcers and a handful of subs and volunteers. I filled them in on the latest station news and praised them for the quick handling of a breaking news story the previous week. I passed on information from Neil, our program director and my boss, and pretended not to notice the grins and eye rolls.
Sometimes I felt sorry for Neil. Mostly he just annoyed me. He’d come to us from television, and, snobs that we were, Kimberly and I laughed at his liking of expensive suits and haircuts and his blatant ambition. He didn’t know much about music, either, which was a real problem, and mispronounced composers’ names on the rare occasions when he took an air shift. He spoke longingly at staff meetings of talk shows and more news programming.
I found a garment bag on my desk; Kimberly the designer-clothes fairy had visited, leaving the skirt, the shoes and a folder with just about every detail except the inseams of our victims for the night. My date was Willis Scott III, one of our quaint local royalty, in his mid-thirties, president of a real estate company. I yawned as I scanned where he’d gone to school, his hobbies and nonprofit involvement.
On the top of the sheet, in her round, loopy, rich-girl writing, Kimberly had given me the following instructions:
Wax. Go to Azure Sky Salon and mention my name.
No garlic.
Don’t say fuck too often.
Don’t criticize the orchestra.
Don’t cut your own hair like last time.
Just to annoy me she had put a smiley face over the i in her signature.
Wax? Was she kidding? I hoped she only meant my legs and armpits, something I tended to neglect at this time of year.
I took a quick look through the rest of my mail, most of it ending up in the recycle bin.
There was one envelope that must have been hand-delivered, my name neatly typed on the outside. It must be—had to be—from Mr. D. I wanted so badly to open it, but we’d hurt each other and I was afraid of what I might read. Forgiveness might be even worse than any accusation.
Inside was a single sheet