The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,37

nothing underneath. I remember thinking, if I smoked, I’d have one right now, and I’d watch myself in the mirror. I reminded myself of women I’d seen in the movies standing around in their slips, their breasts full as melons and just hanging there, who would hold their streaked hair out of the way as they lit cigarettes at the stove. Well, I didn’t smoke that day. I didn’t even look at myself too long. Instead, I put on my waist-high white underpants and my blue bra and my gray sweatpants and T-shirt and I went to the grocery store. I picked out the best plum tomatoes I could find and I felt wasted.

Sometimes I wish I’d had an affair or two, and sometimes I wish you had too, Martin. Is this a strange thing? Do you wish it, too? There is so much we don’t talk about. Maybe you did have an affair. Did you? With that god-awful Jocelyn who used to work for you who was always making appointments to see you just before lunch or just before you were supposed to come home? I hope if you did have an affair it wasn’t with her. Take the makeup off a woman like that and you have nothing but a pinched-nose whiner, you remember how she used to whine about her health problems, telling you she had a trivial scoliosis that made her back ache and that she once got “poison ivy of the blood”? Of course she also told you her underwear always matched, I was glad you told me she’d said that, but I was furious, too, because I knew for a fact that you found it arousing, that you probably had an erection start behind your desk when she relayed that very professional piece of information.

Anyway, it came to me that if I wanted to, I could have a little session with this young, young man and you would never have to know about it, he would be making love to history and so would I. But when I looked at him again, well, there he was with his gigantic knees and his unlaced sneakers and his carefully ripped jeans, his ice rattling around in his Coke cup—someone for a girl, not for me. I wished him good luck in whatever he did, and I left. I noticed he followed me for a while in a half-hearted, non-threatening sort of way, and please understand what I mean when I tell you that I hoped my butt looked good. I mean I just hoped my butt looked good, that’s all.

Do you ever think about old lovers, Martin? Remember that party we both went to before we got together, the one where the tiny bathroom was painted black? I’d come to that party with one guy and ended up kissing another one in that bathroom. The guy I kissed—and ended up with that night—called himself some Indian name, Rishnu, something like that, anyway, he was dressed all in white and he had an incredible, calm, clear-eyed affect. He lay down with me later in the back of someone’s station wagon and put his thumb to the middle of my forehead and told me to focus on it, to let the tension drain out through that place. I swear to God it worked. I was a little stoned; I thought that he had been granted all wisdom and sent to me for enlightenment, that he was an individual-sized serving of savior, and I was very grateful because in addition to being all wise, he was very, very handsome, and a terrific lay. Yes, he was a very handsome blue-eyed man who used to dress in cowboy clothes and now dressed as a guru and it was fine, it all went together.

I just remembered that not long ago I saw your old dope pipe in the garage. Do you still smoke, Martin? Do you sneak a little now and then and not tell me? Do you think I’d yell at you? Maybe I would. But maybe I’d have a little with you. I wonder too, if you’re still smoking dope, if that is where you put your soulfulness. Because you don’t give it to me anymore, nor have you for a long time. I miss it.

You do know you can tell me anything, don’t you? Have I made it seem as though you can’t? If I have, I didn’t mean to.

This is my last night in Minnesota. Tomorrow I’m