My chest was adequate. My arms were adequate. My legs were adequate.
Everything was adequate, in the way that a Honda Civic is adequate, functional and reliable but unlikely to inspire poetry.
And then there was the matter of what Benji would no doubt call “Little Peter,” a phrase I was constructing preemptively because Benji named everything and there was zero probability that this particular anatomical feature would escape his naming convention.
Little Peter was not rising to the occasion.
This was a physiological reality rather than a reflection of desire, because the desire was present, had been present all afternoon, had even been building since the zoo and the truck and the kiss. Unfortunately, that particular body part operated on its own timeline, and my body’s assessment of the situation in that moment was that its owner was standing naked in a chilly apartment with a twenty-poundcat staring at him from a refrigerator and a bulldog wheezing from a dog bed. The circumstances were not, from a purely biological standpoint, conducive to the kind of physical enthusiasm that the moment arguably warranted.
Little Peter looked, honestly, like an elderly man who had fallen asleep in a turtleneck on a chilly day. He looked compact, unambitious, possibly conserving resources for a future event that he was not yet convinced was ever going to occur.
“This is fine,” I said, to no one—but really to Little Peter—while standing in my empty living room, naked.
General Tso’s tail twitched once from the refrigerator.
“I said don’t look.”
He stared harder, if that was even possible.
I sat on the couch.
Stood up.
Sat again.
The couch was leather, which introduced a temperature variable I hadn’t accounted for. The leather was cool against my bare skin in a way that was not uncomfortable but that was certainly not helping Little Peter’s confidence situation.
I shifted.
Crossed my legs.
Uncrossed them.
Crossed them again.
My pose was wrong.
Sitting upright on a couch while naked communicated “a man who has forgotten to get dressed” rather than “a man who has intentionally undressed for romantic purposes.”
I needed to recline.
Reclining communicated intention.
Reclining said, “I planned this,” which was important because Ihadplanned this, and the planning should be legible in the posture.
So I reclined.
I stretched my naked-ass body out along the length of the couch, one arm behind my head, the other resting on my stomach.
Then I assessed the result.
The result looked like a man at a doctor’s office who had misunderstood the instructions about the gown . . . or possibly the “donation cup.”
I adjusted, turning slightly onto my side. Then I propped my head on my hand and assessed again.
This was worse.
This was a pose from a calendar, the kind sold at gas stations. The disconnect between the two poses implied confidence, and my actual emotional state, which was approximately forty percent determinationand sixty percent terror, created a visual contradiction that even Benji’s generous interpretation of my behavior could not bridge.
