“Why—what do you mean?”
“Look at me, Clay. I’m a mess.”
He lets his eyes wander on a long, slow trip down my body; I start to blush furiously. By the time he’s looking at my face again, I feel like an overheated tomato. “You look great,” he says, an impish glee in his eyes.
“Well, whatever,” I reply. “Maybe there’s a taco joint or something?”
“Mmm, there’s a great place just a few blocks from here. Best carne asada you ever had in your life.”
We get five minutes into Operation Chance to Explain and things are going all right, even if I am more shy pubescent than icy sophisticate. He’s messing with the cash register and gathering up his things and every move he makes telegraphs that he’s infected with precisely the same prom-night jitters I’ve got. Bizarre. Here we are, full-grown adults (how old is he, anyway? Twenty-seven? Thirty-seven? I have no idea), and we’re bumping into things and forming incomplete sentences at the prospect of going out for tacos.
Then the phone rings. He gives it a blank stare. It continues its soft electronic bleating twice before he says, “Let’s let the answering machine get it,” and reaches for his coat. On the fourth ring the machine picks up and something deep in the pit of my stomach knows who it’ll be.
“Hi, Clay? You there? Pick up, okay? It’s Monica.” Long, poisonous pause. Clay hovers near the phone but does not touch it. “I need to talk to you.” There’s a quick sniffle. “Clay, please. I really need to talk.”
Clay snaps the phone up. “Hi,” he says softly. “What’s up?” I walk away from him, feeling strangely numb. Seconds ago, I was struggling against the heat in my blood just looking at him, and now there’s ice water in my veins. I try the door, but it’s locked. I lean my forehead against the glass and will myself not to listen, but his words float across the small shop to my ears. “I know…it’s not easy for me—don’t say it’s…I just mean I’ve had my rough days, too, you know? Okay…no, I was just closing up.”
After he puts the phone down he stands there a couple of seconds; I stay perfectly still, waiting for a cue, wishing the door was unlocked so I could just slip outside and let the air clear my head.
“That was Monica,” he says, and his voice seems very far away. “My, um, wife. Except she’s not really—we’re not really…anyway, she’s having a rough day. It happens.”
“Of course,” I whisper, still not turning around.
“What?”
I turn and face him. “Yes. Okay.”
“Claudia…” He takes a couple of steps in my direction, but I stop him with my voice.
“Obviously, you’re busy—”
“I wanted to see you. I wanted to explain—”
I laugh, but it’s not a pleasant sound. “I don’t think there’s anything to explain.”
“The situation’s complicated, okay? I’m not trying to lie to anyone.”
“Married is married,” I say. “Divorced is divorced.” Finally, my voice has all the icy conviction I’d dreamed it might. Where’s this moral fervor coming from? How many times have I slept with married men—guys I didn’t even care about? “I think this whole thing is just—” the word is slow in coming, because it’s not one I ever use “—wrong.”
I try the door again, ruining my little speech with a futile shove. “Can you please unlock this?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I want to explain to you where I’m coming from.”
I lean my forehead against the glass, suddenly tired, and say, “Please. Just unlock it, okay?”
He crosses the room and I give him plenty of space. Proximity is dangerous right now. Already I can feel the sick emptiness brought on by the phone call giving way to an urgent need to smell his skin. Once he’s got the door unlocked, he turns to me again. “I wish I could just tell you how hard this is,” he begins, but he interrupts himself in alarm. “God, your face is white—are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I say tersely. “I’m fine.”
“Do you feel sick? You’re really pale.” He moves closer, and I back up.
“Look, don’t worry about me, okay? You’ve got a wife who obviously wants you back. I just don’t understand why you had to drag me—a total stranger—into your little domestic mess.” My voice rises on the last two words and my lower lip trembles slightly; I need to get the hell out while I can. One problem: he’s in front of the door.
He’s staring at me with a stunned expression, and then he gets a hold of himself and steps out of my way. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me, too,” I mumble, and bolt.
That night, lying on my Pine-Sol-scented futon, watching as the occasional headlight sweeps ghostly shapes across my cracked ceiling, I think about Clay Parker. I think about his hands and the almost imperceptible half-moon scar on his left cheek. I immerse myself in elaborate recollections of his tongue sweeping across my clavicle; I play that moment over and over, like I used to do with my Saturday Night Fever 45, never tiring of the repetition.
I’m so paralyzed. I can’t pursue the guy with his desperate, grieving wife trailing after us all the time. And yet I can’t stop thinking about him: his gentle laughter, his easy way with cats, the dad who hit him and the mom who loves him more than anyone.
I think of our Freaks and Treats Tour, how exhilarated and young I felt. The roller coaster at the Boardwalk made my stomach drop in the same delicious, terrifying way it does now when I replay his tongue on my clavicle.
Infatuation. What a country.
It’s not just that he’s married. That’s part of it, yes, but there’s something else I can’t quite put my finger on.
God knows I’ve had affairs with married men. It never really bothered me before—at least, I told myself it didn’t. There was the fading underwear model in Calistoga, then Roger, a fellow massage slut at Lake Austin Spa. He kept trying to “release my tantric energy,” which meant I had to lie there forever while he performed the worst cunnilingus I’ve ever experienced. There was Jerry Moss, the professor with the Tom Waits voice. That one nagged at my conscience, not because he was married, but because it was the only time I’d ever cheated on someone myself.
That was how I rationalized it: in all but one case, they were the ones breaking their vows, not me. Cheating on Jonathan with Jerry was the only time in my vast decade of tartery that I actually betrayed someone’s trust. I have a peculiar moral code, yes, but I do have one. I told myself that the institution of marriage was, in itself, a scam, so it’s hard to get sentimentally attached to other people’s vows. It’s like asking a Marxist to give a shit when a capitalist goes bankrupt.
This time, with Clay, everything’s different. It’s quite sickening, really. I think about the moments before his wife burst through the door with all that sunlight behind her, when he and Medea and Sandy and I were all lying there peacefully, listening to crows cawing outside, watching dawn turn the windows and the skylight an electric blue. I wanted that moment. I wanted to keep it, live inside it again and again. And now I see somebody’s gotten there first.
I guess when you don’t really want the whole person, when you just want to borrow him for an illicit afternoon or two, an affair is easy. You never meet the woman you’ve borrowed him from and you forget about him soon enough, caught up in the next fleeting