We got back on Saturday. I'm still a couple of hours off. DF went to MD to see his kids so I've been left to recover peacefully. It's for the best, of course. It was our first period of time together so constantly. And our first vacation. It went better than I thought and worse than he thought. He's more sensitive than I am. And has more of a fantasy. But he's also more resilient. So when we got back – waiting for our bags, riding in the cab, squeezing everything into the elevator for a one-floor ride to my apartment – he was his usual affectionate and good natured self, while I was irritable and carnivorous. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m seething and critical, flinching at almost everything he says, and he asks what he can do. “Remember you love me,” I say, not sure why he does. Meanwhile I sit quietly beside him cataloging what’s wrong with everything he says. Technical. Inorganic. Inaccurate. Naïve.
When we get back he goes to get a haircut from the Russians across the street. They always make him look like a college kid, and I look and feel much older by comparison. I always imagine the difference increasing exponentially as we age. He’s twenty-three days older than me, but undamaged by years of California tanning and obscene teenage and college drinking. He was an athlete, and he still wears the discipline, and the youthful vigor of hours of training and conscientious rationing of protein and carbs. I picture our evolution, his Jack LaLanne to my Courtney Love. Sometimes I can feel a martini yellowing my eyes and weighing down my cheeks and drying out my cells and polluting my liver and eroding my brain stem. And beside me: his vigor. Muscular, upright, sex-ready, legs too thick for most jeans, breathing evenly in sleep, nothing malodorous save his morning dump, which smells the same day after day, his body working ever so steadily on whatever goes into it.
He wakes up amorous. Ever amorous. I remind myself this is a good thing, even though I wish he had something to tell me about besides his desire. Back from breakfast I coax myself into wanting sex. It’s always good with him, but the birth control pill squelches most of my desire. The vibrator helps. The hum of it is soothing like a glass of wine would be. And soon I feel the fire and it’s almost like the first months we were together, before we pumped my body full of extra hormones. Again I feel the Mrs. Robinson to his Benjamin Braddock, but now I don’t mind so much.
Soon after, he checks the train schedule and takes a cab to Penn Station and gets on the Regional. Soon after that he’s shopping for milk and macaroni and cheese and picking up his sons for a sixteen-hour overnight visit. He would drive thirty hours for that visit if he had to. He would drive that far for me, too.
