in her throat, but it stayed there. She looked down at the sidewalk. His shoes were shiny loafers. Hers were ballet flats. The smell of popcorn was in the air. She wondered if she cleaned more often than necessary because she was lonely.
“I shouldn’t complain. I’m no catch,” he’d said, patting his ample gut. In his profile he’d called himself fit. Then again, she’d called herself an optimist. “The girl—she’s not my type. She smiles all the time, but she never says anything. It’s annoying.”
“What’s your type?” Audrey asked. She ached so much at the thought of losing this stranger that she thought she might cry, so she bit her lip and looked at the man in the ticket booth, who was counting quarters one by one.
Saraub ran his hands along his suit, straightening the fabric. It was a Saturday. She didn’t think he was going to work after this, which meant he’d worn it for her. “Complicated. My type is complicated. Would you mind seeing the movie, just as friends?”
She nodded. By the time the tennis star’s wife got murdered in the reflection in Patricia Hitchcock’s glasses, they were holding hands. By the third “just friends” date, he’d postponed the wedding.
She was afraid to tell him that she was a thirty-three-year-old virgin, so they didn’t sleep together until their tenth date. To avoid the humiliation of such a confession, she’d considered breaking up with him. But she liked him too much, so instead she braved the adult section of Kim’s Video on 112th and Broadway, and rented three pornos. Dr. Cocksalot, with his fingers made of penises, provoked the most giggles, though it had lacked the desired erotic effect. She studied it until she thought she could put on a decent show and make him believe she wasn’t new to the world of love.
Her plan had one flaw. Sex is terrifying. As soon as he unzipped his jeans, and his little friend poked its way out of his blue silk briefs, she started crying. What was she supposed to do with that thing? Hold it? Compliment it? Give it a cute name? She’d never seen one before in real life!
Then she’d laughed, loud and braying, because this was absurd. After all the bad shit with Betty she’d faced with the kind of poker face that even a stoic would envy, she’d picked now to cry, when she was happy for the first time in her life, and a nice man finally wanted to touch her.
Saraub hiked his trousers. Shirtless and blushing so hard his brown face turned red, he’d looked down at his stomach like it had done something wrong, hunched his shoulders, and tried to make himself small.
She stopped laughing, and leaped off his queen-sized bed. Melted Mallomar crumbs from one of his late-night snack sprees were stuck to her back like freckles. “It’s not you. I—I love you,” she’d blurted, so intent on keeping the immediate secret that she hemorrhaged the more important one. “But I’m…. I never dated, you know? I used to be kind of a shut-in. I was too scared. I never…”
He’d smiled then, a lazy, cat-that-ate-the-canary grin, and dropped his trousers again. “It’s okay,” he told her. “You don’t have to say.” She cried through the whole thing, but not because she was sad. She’d gone and done something stupid. After all the ways she’d let crazy Betty Lucas break her heart, she’d finally opened up and trusted somebody again.
“I’m glad it was me,” he told her when they were done, and lying in each other’s arms. “Because I really love you.”
At those words, she’d felt something inside her crack apart. Her whole body got warm. Sometimes you can feel your walls as they break. “Me, too,” she said.
Six months later, she and her cactus moved into Saraub’s apartment on the Upper East Side. With his wedding officially canceled, his family, who lived twenty blocks away on Park Avenue, cut him off. No more ski trips. No more health insurance. All they had to live on was his freelance income and her tips from waiting tables on weekends at La Rosita. “I’m so sorry,” she’d told him.
He’d rubbed the back of her neck in that way that made her purr. “I’m not. I’m relieved. I wish I’d done it sooner.”
She tried to hide it for the first few months, but after a while, she couldn’t help it; she rearranged his kitchen cabinets, moved the framed poster of dogs playing poker to the space