Page 5 of Lucky Night

I have to pee, she says.

What? No. She can’t—

He sits up, lunges. Wait!

But in a dozen quick steps she skirts the bed and rounds the corner. He hears the bathroom door slide on its track, the latch snap shut.

He falls back onto the pillows.

Well, hell.

The smoke detector blinks at him from the ceiling. The only ugly thing in this place, which, incidentally and for the record, is not cheap, because El Cheapo is not actually cheap, okay, does she have any idea how much this room cost? The room she just fled.

He’d been so close! But he’d lost her, lost the scent. All he can do now is paw the ground, circle the tree. Whine softly and wait.

Because what, you’re a hunting dog, and she’s your prey? Not entitled to leave your presence, even to perform necessary bodily functions, required instead to dance attendance as you recline on this bed, upon its many pillows, like a pasha?

No, not a pasha, not a hound. Just a man, thwarted despite so much privilege. Pillowed by privilege. There really are a ridiculous number of pillows on this bed. He replays her escape to the bathroom. He’d missed the finer points, intent as he’d been on finagling her back into a horizontal position. Now he recalls the high-stepping way she walked, on the balls of her feet. Her legs. Her lovely long back. Her ass.

Oh Gad, her ass.

He’s not supposed to do this. Parcel her out, reduce her to her component parts. But what’s the harm? Here, secretly, in his head and nowhere else, what’s the harm? He’d love to take her in the ass someday. He dreams about it. How he would enter her slowly, consumed by her intense grip. He’s never done it with anyone. He’s proposed it to her once or twice, just casually suggested it. She’s not enthusiastic.

Which is fine. Obviously.

A memory surfaces, floating up from out of nowhere. A yellow room, Jenny walking across it. An old room, high-ceilinged. Walls the color of butter. Where was that? Doesn’t matter. Be here. Becontent. Tall windows. She was walking away there, too, naked. And he was…they’ve never stayed in a room like that, have they? Six years now—Jesus, six years—meeting once or twice a month, in places like this, blandly luxurious. In the apartments of out-of-town friends. Once, memorably, in the Alonzo F. Bonsal Wildlife Preserve. Never in an old yellow room.Where my hand is set.

Toblerone. That’s the name of the triangular chocolate in the yellow wrapper. Great. Glad we got that straightened out.

How could she bolt out of the room like that? Couldn’t she tell he needed her? Did he have to spell it out? This is the problem with Jenny. She can be a little oblivious. A little obtuse. He lifts the sheet. His cock slouches against his thigh, squat and truculent. He reaches down and wiggles it loose from its sticky moorings. A few leg hairs cling, protesting.Noooo! Don’tgo!

Obtuse? Because she can’t read your mind? It’s not her job to minister to your moods. To guess at your unspoken needs. If only you weren’t so reluctant to flat-out ask for what you want—stay close, keep touching me, I don’t know why but I’m always sad after I come—if only you didn’t choose to connive and harangue rather than—oh, horror!—express vulnerability,you’d be content right now, not sprawled here bitching about what you don’t have. When you have so much. Gifts. Achievements. Virtues? Let’s say qualities. Success, as it’s conventionally understood. Gobs ofit.

Was it a dream, the yellow room? Dark polished floors. Jenny padding away from the bed, toward—whoa, hey, hang on. Notpadding. Walking. Don’t get fancy. She’s the writer, okay? You’re the boring one. The one who gave up his shining dreams.

He’s going dark. He doesn’t want to go dark.

Jenny! he shouts.

Just a sec! she shouts back.

He doesn’t get why she won’t even entertain the notion. She likes his finger up there just fine. Still, he doesn’t nag. He’s not a Neanderthal. Although he thinks she’d love it. It could be their thing, the sex they have with each other and no one else. The idea captivates him. The shamefulness of it, the basic physicalwrongness. Not that anyone else seems to see it that way, sodomy being all the rage nowadays, to the point that it feels like at any given time half the world is penetrating the other half anally. And all parties are perfectly content aboutit.

You wouldn’t be. Not even if you got it. Listen to you now. Carping and complaining, when you have so much. He plucks at the crisp sheet, rubbing it between his fingers.How blessed am I in something something.He’s going to kill himself if he doesn’t figure out where these lines are coming from. Happens all the time now, fragments of poetry, skittering in from the old life. Erased and corrupted, recorded over, but not lost entirely. Golden boy. So much promise. Don’t go dark. Remember the blessings, the gifts. He has the whole world. Just not Jenny, who prefers dithering in the john to diddling him in this wide, white, brand-new bed.

He hears the distant alarm again. A short burst, three or four seconds. Must be faulty. New building, new systems. Or another couple has in fact scored a mutual O. There should be a prize. It’s hard work, holding back when he knows she’s close. Her body tenses. Her expression becomes concentrated. She looks so young. How she must have looked before he knew her. Tom knew her then. They met in college.

A prize. What would it be? An engraved platter. Kudos on Completing the Sexual Response Cycle in Tandem! A pair of etched goblets: Thank You for Coming! It’s an accomplishment. It happens rarely. How could she disappear right after?

It comes to him now, all at once:

Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee.

As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d mustbe,

To taste whole joys.

And the glow bursts over him, a rushing, tumbling torrent. Whole joys! They have the whole night. He’s on his way to Texas for a deposition. She’s returning from being on set. Her family thinks she’s coming home tomorrow. His thinks he’s already gone. They’re both supposed to be somewhere else, but they’re here. In a few hours they’ll fall asleep together. He’ll wake at three, as hedoes most nights, but instead of hating the clock, rolling over and forcing himself back to sleep, he’ll reach out and find her warm and willing. He’ll have her again at dawn, and, if his cock hasn’t fallen off by that point, once more after breakfast, among the room-service crumbs, before he heads to the airport and she to the train.

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