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I imagined the outline of my body in chalk—imagined filling it in with shadows and colors and lines for body parts—and wanted John to take the same interest as I did in the lines that made me, and so I put his hands on my breasts and he smiled, trying to inch down lower on the bed to position himself below me. His hands moved absently, as if playing a part and so I swung off of him, lying down on my back. I waited for him to push inside of me and he did, his arms on either side of my head. At least that way I could wrap my legs around the shape of him, outlining his form. I did; squeezing them hard when he came and dropped his mouth onto my shoulder. After he was done and I was done I lay facing him on my side and he put his hand on my hand and told me that he liked me. He said this periodically and it made me uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure how much I liked him, but what seemed more important was that I wasn’t actually sure how much he liked me. What was worse, though, was the sentence that came sometimes in its place: “I feel so comfortable around you.” Which always made me want to say: “Really? That’s surprising, because you make me pretty fucking nervous.” The time we spent together was quiet, and although that was okay in the sense that I didn’t have anything in particular to say to him, it sometimes struck me as eerie. Tonight, though, he propped himself up on his arm and looked at me intently and seemed interested in engaging with me in some way or another. I told him about a woman who had come into the library and screamed at me and one of the volunteers until the volunteer, an elderly woman with an enormous handbag, a seashell bracelet, and an unusual amount of dignity, had wept. He touched my breasts and smiled at the appropriate points in the story and then asked me why I had bought the house. I was used to this question: everyone asked me. It was only surprising that he hadn’t asked me already. “I didn’t want to be another twenty-something in the city. I just wanted to be out here—my grandmother used to live out here and I visited her a lot when I was little. So I just wanted to work and live and have my cat go outside and drive around in my car and go running on the beach and stuff.” I didn’t say what I sometimes thought: that I wanted to be a fisherman’s wife and walk the edges of my roof, scanning the horizon, waiting for the fleet to come in. Or that I wanted to look up and down my street and have a well-developed opinion about each cluster of people in each little house, and also to have the patrons at the library see me and know my name, or at least wonder what my name might be. And that I wanted to say to the woman at the bank, with some authority: the greenhead flies are terrible this year, and to have her match my smile and agree. “And you could.” “And I could.” I paused. “You mean I could afford to.” “Right.” “Right.” I laughed. He didn’t. I hoped that he didn’t notice this. “How was that?” “That I could afford to?” “Are you rich?” “Of course not. I mean, I had some money.” “Most people your age have debts, not money for a house.” He didn’t say it unkindly, but it was not a kind thing to say. “You know, when you buy a house you don’t have to pay for the whole thing. I mean, it’s about what I would pay in rent.” “Except for the whole down-payment thing.” “Except for that.” “So you have a lot of money, somehow.” “Not a lot. Some. Are you implying that I got it through shady means?” I laughed at my own joke. He didn’t. I thought of bank robbers in masks, or white-collar swindlers typing frantically, altering the books. I guess he didn’t. “No, just that you’re rich.” “Compared to some people, maybe, but no, I’m not. The money came from my grandmother. It’s not like I grew up with it.” I wanted him to know this. I couldn’t have him think that my house was an extension of lifelong privilege; that I had just fallen into it: seeing, selecting, and grasping. There had been no great obstacles in my purchasing the house, but all the same, it had never been a given. I wanted him to know, although I didn’t tell him, that when I had seen the green of the clapboards I had felt the ache that comes when you know you might not get something that you really, really want. I wanted him to understand that I had debated long and hard whether or not I could afford to rip up the carpets and refinish the wood, and when I had finally decided that I could, I heard for weeks the sound of dozens of footsteps on hard wood floors that weren’t yet there.
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