RoseMarie London
 

MATING
 

"What's that?" I pointed to his glass. I wanted to be sure he was drinking drinking. He'd just come from some chic salon and cocked his colorful high-and-low-lights like a bird. Nearly a decade ago we had the same long hair as everyone else--just better. I couldn't help but miss his, visibly, even rudely. Enough for him to squeeze some of my thigh which pressed against his and hiss the word "fleshy" with a corresponding irrevelant mourning. Still, neither of us had crossed the other completely off the list.

We systemically sought each other's company when feeling anxious and desperate for a renewed sense of self, but lately it felt more like reliving a plot in a movie whose ending you already know. Our bodies sat facing with our soft-lensed eyes looking past, describing to each other once more the uneasy state of everyday failing in our respective marriages; we began almost at once crunching vodka-soaked ice between our worn complaints and sour disillusionments.

He tapped another Nat Sherman against the pack. "I've got to be home by ten." Normally I would enjoy the irony of his attempt at self-discipline--finding endless amusement in how effortlessly I could cause him to break his own rules.

"Of course."

"No, really. I can't leave the cats alone for too long."

"But they're cats..."

"They're her cats," he clarifies. "And they both have some kind of urinary tract infections. I've had my nose in their litter box for the last ten days. This is the first time I've been out all week."

He'd called me last Tuesday, the morning after his wife had come home with an animal communicator and the usually poised kitties began to shockingly behave like pets and circled with immediate interest, excited to have a translator. The group gathered in the living room amid the cluster of bordello-looking floor lamps that were trying hard to be a serious collection. Here the feline brothers were able to voice their opinions on a myriad of issues. His wife busied herself taking notes and collecting food and toys from various rooms for a pass-or-fail grade.

"They seemed very clear," he told me, "on what they wanted to eat, what was helping them and what they would rather do without."

I'd be thrilled too, I thought, for the opportunity to be so sure of everything.

"She told us, the animal communicator, that Willow, the bigger cat, is my creative partner and he's the one who helps me catch the music."

"There goes my name from the liner notes."

*

Over a stainless steel basin, I shook the water off my hands and flirted with the mirror to assess myself with a practiced distraction. There it was, the deliberate smear of good cosmetics that seldom needed re-application--and that achingly familiar look one gives oneself at 32. If this had been an introduction I would not have been able, if asked, to correctly guess the color of my own eyes. Because of these disconcerting, mildly-educational thirties things that have happened to my own body, which make me careful to only sleep with a peer, I turned my back on myself, leaving without self-acknowledgment.

I unapologetically and quite deliberately brushed against his unmoving knees to sit down and reported, "By the way, the bathroom stall has a full door that locks with a deadbolt." But my suggestions was intercepted by a waitress in a slinky dress who'd rather superfluously since we were at the bar slid her tray beneath her breasts and in front of his chin to ask if she could help him with a selection. Dessert? His head bobbed from me to her to me. I sat back to better frame the shot and through a plume of blue cigarette smoke hinted to her with a casual note that her tip relied on my generosity not his.

"Proprietary, not jealous--I remember," he laughed his little self-satisfied laugh that made his lip curl like a surprised window shade.

"She's cutting into my time," I said when she bent over again to relieve her little tray of our drinks.

Shamelessly enlivened by her plastic surgery, he asked, "Have you seen the Pamela-Tommy video."

"You?"

"Got it as a gift."

"Don't you think she looks bored?"

"You're doing that thing with your eyes."

"What thing?"

"That thing that says you know yo're about to be disappointed in what's next but you're still hoping."

"Not bad, I suppose...after eight years. But what's that got to do with my question?"

"Oh, you were serious?"

"There's one of Aric and I--somewhere." I reposted over the plop and sizzle of a doused cigarette.

"Who has it now?" he wanted to know.

"Couldn't say. When he died no one would let me back in to pick up the pieces of me."

"I didn't realize he was into that?"

"I'm sure he felt it was a job requirement--who knows? At the time I was too young to realize I should be paying better attention."

"Young, but not inexperienced," he almost complained.

"Or bored. And all to your eventual advantage, if I remember your face as clearly as I think I do."

"What do you think would have happened if we'd gotten married?" he asked the ceiling. "You think we would have made it?"

"Check please."
 
 

I wasn't drunk enough to completely ignore his floundering about how to get home. "Share a cab with me or don't," I shrugged, tipping the bartender less than I would have naturally which felt more dangerous than anything else I'd done this evening. I fingered around my bag for the plastic numeral I would have set aside if forethought had ever been my strong suit.

I dragged my coat over the counter and wrapped myself up in its generosity, closing him out--viewing hours were over. In the street I stopped the first yellow thing I saw.

When sliding into the open mouth of the Mid-town tunnel I was aware he was talking but I had too many other ideas to index. When we stopped on his corner I realized, if I'd chosen to acknowledge an almost imperceptible hesitation, I could have followed him upstairs. But I didn't. And my decision only concerned me in that this inaction might weaken the link--diminish the current. Regardless, some fish will always swim upstream.