She didn’t realize how good it would feel to see a familiar face. Will listens thoughtfully as she tells the story again. About Harriet’s ear infection and uncontrollable sobbing. The forgotten file. The irrational decision to go to the office. How she couldn’t cope, needed to get her work done, never meant to put Harriet in danger.
“As if I need someone else to punish me,” she says. “I fucking hate myself.” It’s wrong to be here, wrong to burden him. She can tell he’s struggling to find something supportive to say, but he can’t. Instead, he brings his chair over to her side of the table and holds her.
Maybe if there was someone to hold her at night. She still misses Gust’s smell. Warm. A temperature and feeling rather than a scent. Will’s shirt smells like lentil stew and dog, but she wants to rest her face against his neck like she did with Gust. She should cherish his friendship and honor it, but she’s imagining his body. Gust once told her about seeing Will in the locker room. Will supposedly has a huge penis, the source of his quiet confidence. She wonders if she can touch it, whether any of his broken birds have given him an incurable disease. She hasn’t succumbed to this state since her twenties, when she would show up at the homes of men she found on the Internet and leave bruised and disoriented.
She stares at the tuft of chest hair peeking out of his collar, begins playing with it. “Can I kiss you?”
He sits back, blushing. “Sweetie, it’s not a good idea.” He runs his hands through his hair. “You’ll feel terrible. I’m speaking from experience.”
She keeps a hand on his knee. “Gust won’t know.”
“It’s not like I’ve never thought about it. I have. A lot. But we shouldn’t.”
She doesn’t reply, doesn’t look at him. She’s not ready to go home. She leans over and kisses him, keeps kissing him when he tries to pull away.
It’s been more than a year since a man’s touch felt decent. After Gust moved out, they continued fucking. When he dropped off Harriet, if Harriet was sleeping. Always with Gust declaring his love, saying he missed her, that he’d made a mistake, that he might come back. He fucked her on the morning of their appearance in divorce court, having just come from Susanna’s bed.
It felt good to keep a secret from Susanna, to steal from her, though it meant that Gust left her over and over. She thought if she got pregnant, he’d change his mind. Some months she even tried to see him when she was ovulating. She still marvels at her own stupidity. She’ll teach her daughter to be different. To be brave and wise. To have dignity. That fucking a man who doesn’t love you, who decided he doesn’t want you, even the father of your child, is no better than a fork in the eye.
Her therapists liked to blame her mother. Her mother had been too distant, they said. Frida never accepted this explanation. She never wanted to examine her behavior. It felt impossible to explain, too horrible to say out loud. When someone desired her, she simply felt more alive. Pulled into a different, better future. No longer alone. Before she met Gust, she would make herself anonymous and numb, convinced that all she wanted was a few hours of touching. She doesn’t remember many names, but she remembers bodies, and the rare compliment, as well as the one who choked her. The one who played porn while she went down on him. The one who tied her wrists so tight she lost feeling in her hands. The one who called her timid when she refused to attend an orgy. She’d been proud of herself for saying no that time, for having limits.
She walks to the living room and shuts the curtains. What wildness was possible now, a decade later, after the divorce and the baby?
“Frida, seriously. I’m flattered.”
Maybe he thinks she still belongs to Gust. Maybe he only sees her as a mother, a bad mother at that. She’s nervous and dry as she approaches him. He doesn’t protest when she begins unbuttoning his shirt.
One day, she’ll teach Harriet never to behave this way. Never to offer her body like the lowliest cut of meat. She’ll teach Harriet about integrity and self-respect, will give her enough love so she’ll never go begging. Her mother never talked to her about sex, about bodies or feelings. Frida won’t make that mistake.
“You’re not seeing me at my best,” Will says. He needs to lose twenty pounds. Needs to start working out. She touches the roll of fat at his waist and tells him he’s beautiful, silently pleased that he has stretch marks too, on his sides and lower back.
She would leave if asked, but he hasn’t asked, so she unhooks her bra and slips off her panties, hoping her sadness is radiant. Will’s broken birds always emitted their own light, big-eyed and bony. At dinner parties, she wanted to touch their throats and play with their long, tangled hair, wondered what it was like to wear sadness so close to the skin and be loved for it.