Had she been a girl, I would have named her Sadie.
I raised my glass to my lips and swallowed a mouthful, wondering if she ever crossed Aaron’s mind.
Wondering if I ever crossed Aaron’s mind.
By the second glass, the wine was no longer battery acid to me. It quenched thathunger, thatthirst, like nothing else in the world was able to do. It spilled through my veins, anesthetizing my arms and legs, dulling my senses. I hadn’t had a drop to drink in quite some time and so it didn’t take much for the room to start to blur at the edges, for the stool to feel insecure beneath my seat.
With every sip thereafter I became a more youthful version of myself, someone more energetic, someone more carefree.
With every sip I became blissfully forgetful, forgetting at once that I was a soon-to-be divorcée, a woman who would never have a baby.
It was a quiet night, a Tuesday night, and so the bartender happily filled his free time speaking to me—about what, I hardly remember anymore—and, after that second glass of chardonnay was poured, I plucked a credit card from my purse, one that wouldn’t be denied, and the bartender started a tab for me, telling me his name was Josh.
“You have a beautiful smile,” he said to me, and I blushed, grinning, and he pointed at it and said, “Yup, that’s the one,” while smiling his own beautiful smile. For whatever reason I dug a tube of lipstick from my purse, a light shade of pink, and applied it to my lips, leaving light pink prints around the rim of my wineglass that he filled each time with a bountiful pour.
I unbuttoned the top button of my blouse, leaning farther over the bar, fully aware of just how pathetic it was, me, a lonely, depressed woman hitting on a bartender in a near-abandoned bar.
I had become a cliché.
“What’s your name?” he asked, setting a bowl of nuts before me, a single finger brushing against my skin as he did, and I told him that it was Eden. He equated it to the garden of Eden, in other words,paradise, and I smiled and said I’d never heard that before, though of course I had, from each and every one of the lowlifes who came before Aaron when they were trying to pick me up in bars far less classy than this.
“What are you doing here all by yourself, Eden?” he asked while swirling a dishrag in circles before me.
I shrugged my shoulders and said that I didn’t know.
What was I doing here?
I reached for my glass and downed the last few drops. At once it was refilled, and I downed that too, scarcely able to recall what came next.
Only bits and pieces stayed with me until morning, a montage of what may have occurred. Sliding from the barstool with the third glass of wine. Laughing at myself as strange hands helped me to my feet, refreshing my glass. A face far too close to mine. The deep groove of dimples. Words whispered in my ear.
“Wait for me,” he said.
Standing on the street corner in the dark autumn night, I leaned against a streetlamp that didn’t give off an ounce of light. Getting absorbed by blackness until even I wasn’t sure if I was still there. It was raining still, a fine mist in the air, one which seemed to levitate and not fall.
And then suddenly there were lips on my neck, hands kneading my skin, though who they belonged to, I couldn’t see. It was far too dark to see, but it didn’t matter to me. I knew only that my extremities were numb from the alcohol, and it was cathartic to me, strange hands wandering along the landscape of my skin, exploring the valleys and hills with a certain vehemence I’d never felt before. A body pressed against mine, pinning me to the streetlamp, whispering breathless words into the lobe of an ear.
“Where’s your car? I’ll drive.”
I heard the sound of an engine gunning, the stars coming at me at a dizzying speed before the world turned black again, and then the scratch of facial hair on my cheek, a hand groping at my chest with the impatience of a sixteen-year-old boy. A hasty man pawed at me, tearing at my blouse. What buttons remained clung to the fabric by strings, as he pushed me into the back seat of the car, moving with the deftness and agility of someone who knew what they were doing, of someone who had a history of strange women in the back seats of cars.
I felt the force of my skirt getting thrust clear up to my rib cage. The scratch of a fingernail as he tore at my panties, pushing them aside. The sound of a moan, my own forced moan tolling through the airless space because, even with the continuous thrust of his hips into me, I felt nothing and I wanted more than anything to feel something, to feelanything, because feeling something was far better than feeling nothing, and in that moment all I felt was nothing. Nothing that mattered anyway.
Instead, hot breath on the lobe of my ear. Handfuls of hair being clenched between hands, tugged consciously or unconsciously, I didn’t know. Reggae music on a car stereo.
He panted out a name in rhythm, “Anna, Anna.” Did he think that that was my name, Anna, or was there another woman in his life, a woman named Anna, and he was only pretending that I was her? I replied with “Yes, yes!” deciding that I would be his Anna if that’s who he wanted me to be. A seat belt buckle drilled a hole into the small of my back, plastic plunging itself into me with every thrust of his hips, leaving its mark, though still I felt nothing, nothing at all, not until finally a spasm tore through him like a lightning strike and he collapsed against me, and then there was the weight of him, no longer supported by his own hands.
The weight of him. That I felt.
And then weightlessness.
A car door opened and closed and then there was silence.
He was gone.
I woke up in the morning in the back seat of my car, parked at the far edge of a public playground parking lot, beneath the shadow of a tree, my skirt still thrust clear up to my rib cage, the rest of me exposed, hidden only by the dewdrops that had settled on the windows overnight.
jessie
