But youre not a cliché anymore, probably. What are you afraid of now? he asked.
Now? I thought for a moment. Youre very direct. Why do you ask?
Because you dont look like youre afraid of much. You dont look like the afraid type.
The afraid type? Exactly right. Im not. Well, since you ask, I am opposed, emotionally I guess, to open spaces, I said. They get to me sometimes. Fields. They make me slightly loopy. Any place without a boundary. I have mild agoraphobia. Also Im terrified of being bored. I get bored, and then I get scared of the way Im bored. Nothing I cant handle, though.
My ex, he said, was afraid of dogs.
A pause. He didnt say anything, and neither did I. The thunder and wind outside made a theatrical sound-effects din, but externally, distantly, an irrelevance to people in a shopping mall, except those who wanted electric light and couldnt have it. You know, he said, pressing his luck, sometimes, when Im working here, I look out into the recesses of this place, and I see all these people walking by, and I think about what they like and what theyre afraid of, and what makes them feel desolate. Desolate. Id never heard anyone use that word in conversation. What would be next? Disheartened? Forlorn? What a strange counterproductive and counterintuitive way to flirt! The style beyond a style. He kept on smiling, despite the turn in the conversation and despite his ineptitude at this sort of talk.
I still didnt know his name. Shopping specters slid past us on their way somewhere. Winds belted the mall, whipped it.
It felt and looked weirdly sweet, that smile of his, and then I took the time and the initiative to glance at his hands. He had nice hands. There was a physical intelligence there. He didnt have he would never have the visible attractiveness that David had, the sexual power to make you painfully aware of his bodys presence in the room with yours without your even having to look at him, and he would never have Davids shoulders and his way with words, but David was beautiful and wrongful and already spoken for. He was as assuming as this guy was unassuming.
And then I think he was still talking while I considered what he, this guy, might be like in bed, long-term, or on the sofa on Sunday morning, married, as it were, as the sun poured in the windows, how he would be behind the wheel or raking the leaves about how even that what people are afraid of can make them attractive. And after Ive been through their fears, I start to imagine, not that I have all that much time, how Id get along with them, if we were ever a couple, you know, where wed travel to and so forth, Bali or Fuji maybe or the Orkney Isles, and how
You mean Fiji.
What?
You said Fuji and you meant Fiji. Ones a film. The others an island in well, you know where it is.
Oh, he said. He was trying to smile, but it was a brave smile, a sickroom smile, and I was sorry I had caused it. I had apparently taken the wind out of his sails. His discouragement wasnt a good sign. Men should stand up to me more than that. They have to fight back to satisfy me. They have to face me down.
Here, I said, interrupting his silence. I took a business card out of my purse.
What?
Im writing down my home phone number. My name is Diana.
He took the card and stared a bit dumbly at the number on it. Thank you, he said at last, as if hed found an eyedropper of eloquence and was determined to use it.
And now, I said, as decreed by custom, you tell me your name.
Well Im Bradley, he said in a rush, as if the kids in elementary school had always made fun of that name, and it was a wound for him. Bradley Smith. Could I ask you to do something?
Whats that?
Could you stand up, so that I could give you a hug?
Well, that was cute. But Id rather have a tracheotomy than hug a man the first time through. No, I said, no, indeed, I certainly wont do that. Not yet. Nope. Too soon for hugs between strangers. Actually, I will stand up, but if there are going to be hugs, Bradley, theyll have to come a bit later. Thats one of the things youll learn about me. Youll excuse me, but I have to get to the office now, power failure or not. Times a-wasting.
I shouldnt have said that, that minute condescension in tone, but Im not sure he noticed. So I rose to my feet, and he watched me do it. He appraised me. Oh, the poor guy: I bet he knew he was overmatched already. I think he knew I would always be quicker, and not just verbally, my edges would be sharper than his, more acute angles, I was the superior animal and he was in for the time of his life. Im good-looking, but I will come at you. Im one of those women who cant see the beauty in any kind of weakness or pathos. Most men wont trade up from themselves, theyll walk away from a matchup like this, even if the woman is scarily beautiful, which Im not, though almost, if you like intelligent eyes and gestures that correct themselves halfway through. But I saw him pocket my phone number and keep his fingers on the card, that little brand-new fetish curled up safely in its nest. He must have been a brave soul, in his way.
Then he went behind the counter and came back and gave me a slip of paper. It was an expertly drawn sketch of a dragon erasing, with his nose, the sign in front of Jitters. I was sitting inside the door, in his drawing, reading. Just a few strokes of the pencil, and you could tell it was me, just from my posture. I put it in my pocket. It had been signed by Bradley. An original.
WHAT WAS IN IT FOR ME? A relationship with Bradley Smith? Was this the classic instance of a smart woman selling herself short? As the weeks went on and I grew to know him better, I thought of all these default-mode negatives: he seemed not ignoble, not ill-spoken, not a bully, not inconsiderate, not obnoxious, not a boor, not violent, not distressing, not disdainful, not a bad dresser, not unmindful, not dirty or smelly, and not particularly ironic. He was not unhandsome. He was not unattractive.
In other words, he was husband material. Simple as that.
I didnt need a husband, Ive said that. But I hadnt had one, not yet, though there had been half-hearted offers, and I was ready to have the experience, retro as it may have been, of being married, to say nothing of the fact that it seemed about time for one of them, one of these unattached default-mode fellows to wander into my life and choose me. God, I sound awful. Also, I wanted a baby sooner or later, and I didnt want to do the baby thing without having a husband. I didnt want the weird political progressivism and the faint pathos of the single mom label hanging over me. Myself, I wanted to do the whole scene in the old-fashioned way.
As my mother once said to me, Theyre quite crazy, dear men are. What you look for is one of them whose insanity is large enough, and calm and generous enough, to include you.
I WATCHED HIM PAINT his canvases in his basement. We went canoeing on the Huron River. I played with his companion, Bradley the dog (a special-needs dog, I am sorry to say, cognitively challenged, and a slobberer). We took some weekend trips to Chicago and listened to jazz. He drew a picture of the Dragon with the Rubber Nose giving me a ride on its back. That picture actually made my heart do a back flip. How could he possibly know that I had wanted to ride dragons from the time I was a girl? We had candlelit dinners at his house. We had sex, successful sex, good-enough sex, though when I compared him to David in that category, which I could not help doing, he lost. It seems a shame to say so, but one orgasm is not as good as another. So what, I thought. We sat around on Sunday morning, funky and grungy, and traded opinions. We went to galleries, where he expounded his views on the art we saw (he rarely liked it and denounced and demeaned it in whispers to me). He showed me his copies of ARTnews. I met his neighbors, the Ginsbergs. We went up to Five Oaks and met his sister and brother-in-law, the barber. We worked in the yard, we went to my health club. There was a peacefulness to it. I would talk about the law, and he would zone out a bit as he pretended to listen. I scared him and, humbly, he tried to cover it up. I gradually settled down into him the way you settle down into an easy chair. I accepted, conditionally, the kindheartedness he offered me, though I thought it a bit dull, the way a comfortable familiar thing is dull, and its dullness is totally beside the point.
I found myself, at odd moments, leaning over him and kissing his bald spot, the one toward the back of his head. I met his parents. He met mine. He was always nervous around me, afraid that he would say something that would unmask him as a fool or a dolt. Poor guy, he was unmasked right from the start. If I loved anything about him, it was his plainness, his lack of mask, his failure of costume. This is the sort of man he was: he made balloon sculpture every two weeks or so to amuse the neighborhood kids who lived up the block and sometimes wandered into his yard. He criticized himself for not being better at it. What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight. He was uninteresting and genuine, sweet-tempered and dependable, the sort of man who will stabilize your pulse rather than make it race.
He proposed. And I accepted.
THE NEXT TIME DAVID came over because peacefulness is insufficient he brought wild rice chicken soup, along with a perfectly chilled wine he liked, a sauvignon blanc. No leather jacket this time hed come from the office.
Somehow hed gotten a streak of ink from a ballpoint pen on his face, the right side. (Hes clean-shaven.) Once he was inside the door, but just barely inside, I curled my leg around his and licked my finger with spit and slowly and pleasurably wiped the ink off.
As I did that, we talked about our usual news, but somehow I didnt get around, at least not right away, to telling him about Bradleys proposal and my acceptance of it. After the soup and the wine, we went into my bedroom where he kissed me and undressed me, unsnapping my skirt smartly and kneeling before me, slowly lowering my underwear. He liked to get on his knees before me while I was still standing, doing homage to me. He would put his arms around me, kissing me, and then he would hold his face against my abdomen, and I would feel the nubs of his beard, and I would sigh with pleasure. He made me, I have to admit it, weak in the knees. After that, I took off his clothes. I noticed his body a bit more this time, caring for it, appreciating its musculature. I saw his reflection in the dressers mirror, on whose side I had lodged Bradleys drawing of me riding the dragon.