Crush

Chapter Fifteen The PowerPoint Presentation

Fifteen

The PowerPoint Presentation

“You and David better not be doing that!” Paul said. We were watching TV when two of the show’s characters who’d been on an amusement-park date started making out and expressing their feelings for each other.

“Playing mini golf?” I said, though I knew what he meant.

He’d begun to feel left out and overwhelmed. I wanted to reassure him, and I tried. I also did not know what was going to happen once I saw David. If we were strategic about it would we burn off the desire? Or would it grow stronger? Would being together in person ramp up the erotic or tamp it down?

Paul: “What’s the plan exactly? I don’t want you sleeping in a bed with someone else. That’s more intimate than sex. If you have sex with someone else, that turns me on. If you’re cuddling with them, I want to start breaking dishes.”

“If I’m going on this trip, I’ll ask that you not make me travel with lists of approved and unapproved line items. I’ve slept in the same bed with other people plenty of times,” I said. “Remember when Veronica and I shared a bed the night of her dad’s funeral?”

He rolled his eyes. “You know that is very different.”

“You were the one who wanted me to be with other men in the first place,” I said. “What did you think it would be like?”

Asking Paul for shore leave to go see David with no rules was a completely unreasonable request. But I pointed out that I’d never asked for much, from him or anyone. I’d always been a self-cleaning oven. And I was ready to cash in the goodwill I’d built up through decades of forbearance for those two days with David.

The muses handed me argument after argument in defense of my request that I not have to say what I wanted or didn’t want or would do or wouldn’t do. I requested two days of intercalated time—a break from the ordinary scheme of things. I sold it like I was looking for angel investors in my tech start-up.

To my surprise and delight, my impassioned PowerPoint sales deck and third-quarter projections worked.

Paul said, “Okay. Fair. Go with God.”

It made me love him more.

When I thought of David, I was so discombobulated that I felt feral. On my way to a teaching gig, I felt heat spreading outward through the lower half of my body. I looked down to see if my period had come early and extra heavy, or if perhaps I was hemorrhaging to death. I expected to see my clothes soaking through with blood. But no. My dress was spotless. It wasn’t blood—it was heat. Warmth being generated by my own body, warming me up like a space heater.

Leonard Cohen wrote that the only way to avoid seasickness is to become the ocean. I’d originally heard the line as “ becalm the ocean,” and I had no idea how I was going to go about making the ocean calm. When I heard it the right way, I thought, oh, becoming the ocean; that’s no problem.