Page 48 - WTP VOl. X #3

Warm moonlit nights are a chemical assault on celibacy.
I’m cruising Grizzly Peak Road with the windows down and one arm outside. Medium twilight, clear dry indigo air. The radio switches from Marley’s
No Woman No Cry to U2, Mysterious Ways, music to match the curves in the road, curves I lean into like the car is dancing with me, swaying left, swaying right. The moon rises like a slow bubble through branches of eucalyptus and live oak. A breeze gusts through, smelling sharply of eucalyptus and much warmer than the surrounding air, like something freshly baked. My heart is swelling. For the first time since Alex left, I would like to go out and find another man.
Are you relieved? I think to Alex. After four months apart—after ten years together—I still want to tell him everything. My instincts are terrible. But yes, he would be relieved. You’re missing an Eleusis game tonight. At Jacob’s house, the usual crowd, Jacob, Anna, Rajiv...
Actually, I hope it’s not the usual crowd. I hope Jacob has invited some men I haven’t met before, men I would like to meet.
The invitation was for dinner. Jacob doesn’t cook, so dinner will be take-out, but good take-out, sophisti- cated pizza or Thai. The important thing is the game. We’ve been meeting to play this game twice a year for ten years now, since we were grad students and roommates at MIT. It’s a card game in which one player, God, invents a rule. God doesn’t tell the other players the rule, only whether the cards they attempt to play are right or wrong. Jacob, Rajiv, and most
of the others are physicists, who are by training and inclination excellent players. That other god doesn’t reveal his rules, either; physicists take this game very seriously.
None of them know yet that Alex has left me. I’ve only recently started to tell people. I’ve only re- cently started to believe it. I always tell the story of our breakup in exactly the same way, a condensed account that emphasizes the dramatic elements of that night while avoiding genuine explanation of
our problems. How Alex called from a conference in Toronto and said he was flying back early. At the bag- gage claim he hugged me urgently. He was drunk. He never drank, but he was drunk. Walking to the car he gripped my hand too tightly. He wouldn’t talk, shook his head in answer to my questions.
When we got home, Alex went to the kitchen, still without talking, and poured another sweet drink,
a glass of sherry. He asked what I wanted to drink. Nothing yet, I said. He sat down at the kitchen table. I sat down, facing him. He took both my hands. Squeezed too hard. “Tess, I’ve realized that I must leave you,” he said. Just like that, that suddenly. He had met someone else.
~
The drive to Jacob’s house is all downhill, and to- night, much too short. I pass his house and recognize the cars gathered there, which has always, before tonight, made me smile. I find a lucky parking space only two houses down, pull in, turn off the car. The radio cuts out mid-song. Mid-syllable. It doesn’t feel right. My fingers are still gripping the key. They turn it again, and the car and radio come back to life. I phone Jacob: I’ll be late, eat without me, I’ll come for the game.
The gas tank is full. The car chooses narrow winding streets into the Berkeley hills, back to the wide sky and distant lights. But this feels too much like go- ing home. So it starts down again, not to Jacob’s but closer to campus, streets with shops, cafes, crowded sidewalks. My windows are open, radio off. On Tele- graph, which I choose for its stalled traffic, its smells of pizza and coffee, its human noise, someone leans down to the window and makes eye contact. He startles back—“I thought. Sorry! My girlfriend has this car.”
Then his face is back in the open window. “Hey, I
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Everything Flirts
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