Page 79 of Our Crooked Hearts
“Like,ever? I bet it worked for Tennyson. No one else, though.”
Without meaning to, I smiled. “Did you want a reading or what?”
“Prettiest aura you’ve ever seen. Where do I go from there?”
“Well,” I said, remembering with a warm rush that I’d already been paid. “That depends how much of a taste for bullshit you’ve got. I could tell you all about your aura and what it means. I could read your palm as a chaser.”
“But it’s all bullshit, huh.” He sat on the bed, knees pointed toward mine. “Aren’t you not supposed to tell me that?”
His eyes were brown and his hands were big around the neck of a bottle of Rolling Rock. He had excellent hair. “Here’s what I’m not supposed to tell you,” I said. “It’s real. Magic is completely real. The bullshit part is believing anyone would ever want to hear theiractualfortune.”
He grinned, not believing a word. “What’s your name?”
He was cute, I decided. He was tall. I didn’t really think he was the groom. I could already see the way he’d look at me just before unlocking his apartment door, the shy, conspiratorial smile. I foresaw the shaggy contours of his place. Its clutter of books and papers, its messy single-guy scent of deodorant and takeout if I was lucky, cat piss and black mold if I wasn’t. I didn’t care so much, I just wanted to spend a bright stripe of hours inside that sky-colored aura.
“I’m Dana,” I told him.
I knew by the way his body shifted, eager and pleased, that he could see the decision in my face. “It’s nice to meet you, Dana,” he said. “I’m Rob.”
Some of the things Rob said to me. In November and December and in the new year.
“God, it’s sored.It’s like a crayon.” We were lying in the freeze-dried grass of Winnemac Park, Rob hanging over me so I didn’t have to squint against the winter sun. “That’s the first thing I wanted to do when I saw you. Get my hands in this hair.”
At the Peking duck place down the block from my apartment, his glasses fogging over with steam. “You’re my girlfriend, right? I thought you were, but then I woke up worried in the middle of the night.”
Standing in the Powell’s on Lincoln Avenue, whispering in my ear as I browsed the overstock table. “I used to work at the shop on Fifty-Seventh. I still have a key.”
Lying on his futon by the window, street light coming in. Early February, each of us pretending we didn’t remember it was threemonths exactly since we’d met. “I know you don’t want me to say it.” His breath warm in my hair. “I know you’re not ready to hear it. But, Dana…”
I sat up, into the light. I’d gotten lucky, his place smelled like books and coffee and the must of wet laundry. And likehim,a scent that had crept up on me, that made me equal parts restless and inflamed, oppressed andheady.Sometimes when Rob was sleeping and held on to me too tight, my brain said,Run run run.When he was awake he kept hold of me so lightly. Like I was a sparrow on a palm, a wild thing that might take off at the first sign of curling fingers.
Now I stepped swiftly from his bed. “You don’t know me that well.”
He sat up to look at me. At the blurred planes of me, he didn’t reach for his glasses. His face was in shadow, his torso lit pale as a piece of statuary. “I know you as well as you’ll let me. I want to know everything.”
“That’s a childish thing to say. Also, a lie. Nobody wants to know everything.”
His hair stood up like a wave in a surf video. “Fair. But I want to knowmore.I love—I love all the things that I know. Can I say that much?”
My body was hot and cold, stay and go, stalled in place by opposing pressures. “You know all the good stuff and almost none of the bad. I love things about you, too. Okay? I love enough things that I feel sick thinking what it’ll be like. When you know the bad things about me.”
When I saidlovehis face sweetened. When I said it again, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. At least not tonight.
“What could be so bad?” he said softly. Twenty-three years old but somehow younger than I was at nineteen. “Are you married? In the mob? Do you stand on the wrong side of the escalator? Did you kill someone?”
I laced my hands behind my neck, hoping he couldn’t hear the tremor in my throat. “I’m not doing this on purpose. It’s not an act, I’m nottryingto be mysterious.”
He put his glasses on then and really looked at me. “I would never think that of you. I’m just asking you to trust me a little. To let me know you better.”
My grad student. My earnest man. He still liked to smooth my hair over the pillow when I was falling asleep.
“Okay,” I told him, and climbed back into bed.
“Okay?” he said, into my neck.
I breathed. “Yes.”
I brought Rob to meet Uncle Nestor. He showed up with a bottle of wine that was five bucks better than what we usually drank and taught everyone how to play cribbage. Fee had already met him a few times, and by the end of the night my uncle loved him, too.
