Bukowski in a Sundress by Kim Addonizio

Author:Kim Addonizio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-05-19T18:30:35+00:00

Don’t Worry

“I GOT YOU a couple of presents,” Margot said as we stood on the sidewalk outside the blues club in San Francisco, amid a swirl of theatergoers and tourists, next to doorways occupied by the destitute homeless. “But I left them in my hotel room. Do you want to come over? Don’t worry, I won’t seduce you.”

When people tell me they won’t seduce me, I believe them. I am credulous. If a man I’d just met were to say to me, “Don’t worry, I won’t come in you,” I would think, How great that he has thought this through. He’s making plans, he’s watching out for the roadblocks far ahead on the highway, whereas I am still considering whether to get in the car with him. It hadn’t occurred to me that Margot, my former student, might seduce me, but here she was, letting me know it was a possibility she had considered. Now she was thoughtfully letting me know what would not happen.

Margot had studied with me for about a week at a writers’ conference. Here’s what I knew about her: She wore a lot of shiny jewelry, had had a piece published in a feminist anthology, and had a novel manuscript that was making the rounds of New York publishers. The day she left home to visit the West Coast, lightning split a tree in her yard. She used the word cleaved. Also, she wanted to create an action doll named Booberella. “Maybe one of those bobble-headed dolls,” she’d said in the club earlier.

“Or maybe the breasts could be on springs instead,” I said.

“Bobble-boobs,” she said. “Good idea.”

“Definitely marketable,” I said.

I was out with Margot on a Saturday night because I didn’t have a date. Single men seemed to have grown scarce since my last breakup. I looked around the club: couples everywhere. We drank Lemon Drops and ripped through a pile of yam fries, and then Margot introduced me to a liqueur called Apfelkorn, which she said could be used to make drinks with interesting names like Appletini, Apple Fucker, and Fuck in the Graveyard. I wondered how one fucked an apple. All I knew was how to make a pipe out of an apple in order to smoke pot. I’d learned that right before going to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference one year and taught it to a number of people there. Fucking in a graveyard was easier to imagine, though I’d never done it. Once, years ago, I had swing-danced on my father’s grave with a man I liked. Maybe, I thought, I should move to New York, where that man is living, and see if he is single now. The last time I’d seen him he’d been with his new wife, but I could tell it wasn’t going to last long.

I got a little drunk on the Appletinis. The harmonica player in the band was standing on a table, blowing like mad and delighting the crowd, and I wanted to curl up into a small dark space, maybe under that table, and sleep for a year or two.

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