him to set them down.
“I hope we can be normal with each other,” she said.
“What?”
“I hope that you being Greg’s friend doesn’t mean we have to avoid each other at the supermarket or in Old Town or wherever.”
“No, absolutely not.” He’d never run into her at the supermarket or in Old Town before, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen in the future. Eureka was a small enough city that you sometimes saw your dentist or hair stylist or friends’ ex-wives at restaurants. You perfected an ever-readiness to talk about your teeth or hair or neutral, non-friend-related gossip. You skated across the surface reality like a water beetle, and only when the surface broke and you fell in did you feel that drowning was inevitable, that staying afloat had been a fantasy.
Elaine said, “I just—maybe you feel the same I don’t know—I don’t want to feel like getting divorced means that a whole world of people will disappear. You know? All of Greg’s friends and patients I’ve met. I’d hate to think that now we have to act like we’ve never known one another.”
“I know what you mean,” Steve said. “I agree.”
Elaine held out her hand. Still holding the bags, Steve shook it awkwardly with his whole upper torso. Then she turned and walked to the street, massaging her left shoulder with her right hand. Steve watched her get in her car and drive away, someone else’s former everything.
Several blocks away, Sadie Jorgenson’s willpower deserted her in the wall-to-wall linoleum sparklage of her kitchen, with batter all over her hands, making one Swedish pancake after another, smothered in powdered sugar the weight and consistency of pixie dust. She was a therapist whose client list was longer than any of her colleagues’, meaning that at the end of a grueling workweek she owed herself a little—or rather a lot—of pleasure. And so didn’t she feel magical with each bite of pancake, a wild transport to zones of physical ecstasy she never experienced otherwise? Sadie, thirty-seven, hadn’t gotten laid in years, which she knew was partly because of morning binges like this one, but what could she do since the cycle was already started and each production of one kind of happiness diminished her chances for the other? Undress another stick of butter. Fondle the pan handle. And the radio on and she with a lot of boogie left to her bottom that hadn’t lost its attitude, so she let the pancake sizzle while she clapped her hands and danced around the island counter and nodded (“you know it, ah-hahn”) and licked an ample finger.
And yet all this might soon change. Her sister Marlene had called the night before and known the perfect guy, an academic. An academic? Yeah. What’s that mean? Someone who traffics in ideas for a living. That doesn’t sound as lucrative as, say, trafficking in narcotics. It isn’t. Is that why he’s still unmarried? He’s new to town and hasn’t met anyone. I think you two would hit it off. Why? Because he’s interesting. What’s he look like? He’s tall and— How tall? I don’t know, five ten. You call that tall? It’s taller than you. Don’t be rude. How old is he? Thirty-seven. That’s my age. Yeah. Guys don’t go out with women the same age as them. It’d be better if he were older. He’d appreciate me more. He seems above all that. And he’s bald. As long as he has the right head for it. Not too big or bumpy, like a smooth small skull that draws attention to his face. Yeah, sort of. And there’s one other thing. He’s missing four fingers on his right hand from when he was young and worked with heavy machinery. Oh. Other than that he’s normal and attractive. Oh. I didn’t even notice until it came up in conversation. Oh. So what do you say? I wish he hadn’t lost those fingers. I’m sure he does, too. Can I set something up, completely nonbinding and informal, like the four of us have dinner at Folie à Deux this weekend? What four of us? Greg makes four. How can you go out with Greg in public? He and Elaine have a new understanding, an unspoken agreement not to pry into each other’s personal lives. Their personal lives? They’re married. You know what I mean. So what has it become, an open arrangement? With their kids so young? Not open, in that they haven’t discussed it in those meaningful terms, but they’re having problems and are basically separated for a while. Marlene! Homewrecker! He’s a doctor and you’re a nurse and it’s so predictable. How long do you think this can go on? It’s not about worrying about the future. So are you in for dinner? I’ll arrange it and call you back. I don’t know. What else do you have going on in your love life? My love life. Spoken of as a thing in the world. This guy is not an ogre. I didn’t say ogre. I just think after Stan. Stan was three years ago. Yes but the scar tissue. You owe it to yourself to get out of the kitchen—I mean the house, get out of the house for a change and move forward. I can’t believe you said kitchen. What’s this guy’s name? Roger Nuñez. He’s Latino? He’s many things. Does he speak Spanish? How should I know? Do I speak Spanish? How’d you meet him if he’s so new to the area? At Dee Anderson’s. And I’m supposed to be reassured that you met him there? You know for certain he didn’t lose those fingers because of syphilis? It was in the middle of the afternoon, at a respectable artists’ guild meeting. Roger is doing some work on Yurok blankets with someone else at Humboldt State University from the Native American Studies department, and he was at Dee’s on a purely business-type level. It wasn’t anything weird. Hmmm. Okay, I’ll meet him. That’s my girl.
Sadie scraped the last runny spoonfuls of pancake dough from the mixing bowl and dropped them onto the frying pan. So many calories. One dinner with a six-fingered man wouldn’t be the end of the world. And later that day she might go to CalCourts and do a bit of Stairmaster to counterbalance the morning. Patterns of behavior were only unbreakable if you didn’t try to break them.
The next afternoon she fell asleep while watching a documentary about black lesbian poets, this being one of Roger Nuñez’s academic specialties and so part of her homework before the blind date because with the possibility of love you’ve got to be prepared to meet the other person halfway, give-and-take, and when she woke up she remembered a few of the key phrases used—indigenous liminal subalternism, covert clitorogeny—and the pictures of close-cropped Afros and the loving women who sported them.
She was sweaty and had to take a shower. She was also starving and wanted to have some macaroni salad but thought it would spoil her appetite at dinner, which on second thought might be good. Dieticians recommended having six small meals a day instead of three big ones. Marlene’s doctor boyfriend, Greg, had told her this wasn’t true, although Greg was a philanderer who, if he was capable of cheating on his wife, was capable of cheating on Marlene and other lifestyle prevarications. Sadie worried about her sister and took off her blouse on her way to the kitchen and then felt an empowering self-denial and redirected herself to the bathroom.
There she fully stripped and untied her frosted hair, removed her penny-sized earrings. While waiting for the shower to heat up she faced the mirror and thought of how difficult it must be to be black and gay and a female poet all at once. An incredible quadruple whammy. Yet we were all born with certain disadvantages, handicapped in some way or ways from the get-go, condemned to spend our lives developing strengths to make up for our inherited disadvantages. Obesity, religious unorthodoxy, a big nose, eczema, hairiness, hairlessness, a poetic bent. When it came to gender, Sadie could empathize with black lesbian poets, she could say right on and there was that automatic sisterhood, though when it came to being black and lesbian she was just a honky breeder. Some important circles didn’t overlap.
There was a rustle behind the shower curtain and a male voice said, “Oh, ahhh, what the hell!”
Sadie froze. Someone was in the bathroom with her and the door was closed. She felt a fear so heart-lurching of what was about to happen to her that she couldn’t move. A man was lurking and scheming in her shower, hidden by the curtain but there. Surely there. She closed her eyes
