ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 106
Don’t have sex with your roommate’s girlfriend. Don’t have sex
with your roommate’s girlfriend on your roommate’s bed. Don’t have
sex with your roommate’s girlfriend on your roommate’s bed when
your other roommate is his best friend, and sleeps in the next room.
Don’t have sex to feel better.
The plane tree is big enough that its branches hang over the bedroom window as well as the balcony, and when the morning wanders blithely through them and the window, it trips and gets caught
in Ashley’s hair and around her breasts and her smile, and when
you switch positions to you on top, that halo becomes a spotlight,
and when you switch again and look up over her sparse gold pubic
hair, the spotlight and the halo and the green tinge in her grey
eyes collude to tell you that you are doing something good, and her
triangular smile agrees, even as it closes to bite down on her lip. Sex
scribbles on morning, some diaphanous film, an overeager argument
that you are not two people. The mess you’re making seems swollen
like a berry that bursts under heel to glue you to the pavement.
Her eyes close, and later you’ll think that your inability to know
why says something about the whole thing, something you are
missing. But even her eyebrows are glowing when you think she
says, “How haven’t we done this before?” and you stop thinking
entirely.
This is a reasonable reconstruction, I think, of having sex with my
roommate’s girlfriend, on his bed, while he is at the radio station.
Brian, my story at the time told me, was asleep, and Bobby was at
work. Brian had actually been awake for about half an hour.
“Hey Bobby.” I couldn’t think of much else to say when I woke up
to see him framed in the door, about four hours early.
98
“What’s up Bowie? Ashley, were you having sex with Bowie?”
