Your Face in Mine by Jess Row

Author:Jess Row
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

23.

Six weeks ago, when we met the first time, when I handed her the tacky laser-printed business card I’d just made—Kelly Thorndike, Freelance Journalist—Robin made a quick notation on her phone and said, I get an interview, too, right? Want to set one up? My schedule’s pretty full.

Mine’s not, I said. Send me a time.

Done, she said, and the next day her assistant emailed me a date at the beginning of May. Lunch 12:45-1:50. I wrote it down on a Post-it and stuck it on the window next to my desk, and nearly every day for weeks I wanted to call her and suggest another time, tell her I’m traveling, that my deadline was moved up—to find a polite and neutral way to cancel. I am not a practiced liar. I am not an actor. With Martin there as my alibi the whole enterprise makes sense; without him Robin and I will just be two people, two adults, out for lunch, in the ordinary everyday world. Two adults with some business to discuss, some matter at hand, but not without a mild frisson of companionable attraction, a little lighthearted flirtation. Nothing is more terrifying for a conspirator, I’m realizing, than the temptation to relax.

Let me put it another way.

Part of getting past the first stages of grieving, my therapist told me, is learning to surprise yourself again. In a traumatic event, your senses shut down. Taste, smell, temperature—you forget to wear a hat when it’s five below. Bite into a piece of sushi and it’s like eating a sponge. Then, gradually, it all comes back, but it’s different. There’s a reset button. Like pregnancy. Or chemotherapy. Ever seen someone whose hair has all grown back a different color?

I’ve never in my life been attracted to a black woman. Not at all. Not ever. You could call it simple socialization: that in those defining years, thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, the bodies I saw, the faces I saw, were white girls, skinny white girls, by any historical standard—the standard being somewhere between Molly Ringwald and Kate Moss. Girls whose breasts disappeared in the palm of your hand, whose hips, whose asses, described a gentle curve, a suggestion of something, you could say, more than the thing itself.

And that’s still my type, if I have a type. Not long after my dinner at Martin’s, not more than a few days, I found one of the sites I look at when I need to remind myself to jerk off—which I’ve had to, ever since the accident—and nothing worked. So I crawled into bed, with half a hard-on, read a chapter of a Paul Bowles novel I’d had on my night table for months, and finally smoked the end of a joint I’d kept in the freezer since Christmas, a last-ditch effort at deriving some sense of pleasure from the world. It happened quickly after that: I could describe, in my mind’s eye, every part of Robin, the shape of her kneecap, the frictionless skin at the very base of the thigh, the taste of her as I put my mouth between her legs.

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