At the last restaurant I’d worked at, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I’d fallen for the bartender. Hard. I hadn’t expected it. William was as quiet as his name and easy to work with. He wore vintage women’s clothing to work, mostly Asian pieces—kimonos, sabais, qipaos—but on occasion a Chanel suit or a fluttering flamenco dress. He swept through the dining room in silks of sunflower yellow or scarlet red, delivering a bottle of wine or the gimlet you forgot about. He didn’t seem to want attention for his clothing, and the one time I complimented an outfit—an embroidered turquoise sari—he thanked me curtly and said my six-top was waiting to order.
I ran into him at Au Bon Pain on a Sunday morning. He let two people go ahead of him so we could stand in the long line together. He was wearing men’s corduroys and a wool sweater. Everything in my body shifted, as if it had known, as if it had been waiting. The way he put his hand in his pocket for his cash, the way he handed over the money and slid his coffee off the counter, the way he stood at the condiment stand and poured in some cream. The dresses had hidden the span of his scapulae, the narrowing of his waist, the hard muscles of his ass. Fuck. I’d heard he had a girlfriend. I left without milk for my tea.
He caught up with me, though, and we walked together with our hands on our hot drinks on the cold day. He asked if I’d seen the new sculpture outside Widener and veered into the yard to show me. We sat on the steps of the library and pretended we went to Harvard. “What’s your major?” I asked him and he said “art history” and I said “me too” and he said “no way” and we tried to figure out if we had any classes together. We made up our courses: Hangnails in Modern Sculpture, Western European Scowls Versus Smiley Faces. Not surprisingly, he was good at getting into a role. I felt like I was in college again, that he was a cute boy I’d just met and he was about to kiss me. And he did. At 11:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning in November. It was the first time a first kiss made me want sex. Immediately. He looked at me like he felt the same and like it was nothing new. He relaxed against me, like my father sinking into the couch with his first drink. In the distance there was the sound of a little kid squealing, and William pulled away. It was a little boy, just entering the gates, running toward us. William took my hand. “C’mon.” He tugged me down the steps toward the boy and the woman who trailed him. They were both dressed up, the boy in a silk bow tie and a tiny camel hair coat and the woman in heels and a black mackintosh and a flash of turquoise between.
“How is God?” William called.
“Good,” the boy said, still running. It took a long time for him to reach us on his very short legs. “He’s very good,” he said crumpling his face into William’s thigh.
He was still holding my hand when he introduced me to them, his son, he said, and his wife, Petra.
He insisted she didn’t care, that their relationship had absolutely no restrictions, that they let each other be exactly who they were at any given minute. He always said that, any given minute, as if after sixty seconds you became someone else, wanted something different. I wished that were true. I only kept wanting him.
He liked to quote Ralph Ellison: “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”
He wore nothing under his dresses, it turned out. Up they came, so easily, in the handicap bathroom stall, the coatroom, the walk-in. Petra and I got pregnant the same month.
A robust month for my spermatozoa, he said. He loved it. He saw nothing wrong. My abortion made him sad, but he didn’t argue and paid half.
In early April she came into the restaurant before we opened for lunch. She was only there a minute, handing him a set of car keys, but it was a warm day and I saw the curve of her belly below the belt of her wrap dress. I put down the tray of salt and pepper shakers and walked out. I called my brother, stuffed my crap into Hefty bags, and drove up to Burlington.
A week before Saskia’s wedding, Wes and I made plans to go to the movies. I had a night off and Mandy was visiting her sister in Rutland. I met him at the bar he went to after work. He was in the corner, playing pitch with Stu, his work buddy, and Ron, the one who was always going into the hospital for his heart, and Lyle, who’d just gotten out of jail for a drug transport gone wrong at the Canadian border. I sat and waited for him to play out his hand. There was another guy at the table I didn’t recognize. He was young, probably still in college. He and Wes were both chewing on toothpicks.
Wes won the trick with the jack of clubs.