What a Man Looks Like After He Has Sex
Jilly and I were up in her room, playing with her dolls. She was Molly, her most recent acquisition. I was Samantha, the one whose hair she had cut a while back, before she understood what a bad idea it was, giving a haircut to an American Girl doll.
The dolls were having a fight. Molly had just accused Samantha of being mean. The voice Jilly employed when being Molly was higher than her normal one, the words delivered in something approximating an English accent. Jilly’s idea of one.
“I’m not mean, I just have a stomachache,” I said, trying to come up with an alternate voice of my own for my doll—Southern, maybe—and having a hard time at it.
It wasn’t a very inspired response, but I wasn’t into the game.
I was thinking about Forrest, though not in the happy way I had in the early days of summer.
I was thinking about Forrest as he was now.
A version of him I still loved, though I wasn’t sure I liked him.
That night he took us all out for fried clams. We were sitting at an outdoor table, a giant bowl of clams in the middle.
French fries, tartar sauce. All my favorites, with my favorite person at the table.
Even now, in the Post-Brenda World—even now that he didn’t seem to be too interested in hearing about my life the way he had been previously—I couldn’t help feeling good just being around him.
Forrest looked distracted—a little like the way I got, it occurred to me, when Jilly wanted me to play tea party with her and her dolls, and I wasn’t really into it.
But I told myself this wasn’t so bad. He might be cheating on Regina, but he wasn’t cheating on me.
Our relationship could still be the same.
One thing remained the same, anyway: I could still be who he’d told me I was.
A girl with an amazing life ahead of her.
A girl he considered part of the family.
This was the night I decided I’d tell the Emersons about my tennis lessons. Not that it was the group of them that mattered to me. I just wanted to tell Forrest.
“You remember that girl, Olivia,” I said, dipping my clam in the sauce.
I wanted to tell Forrest about how she’d walked off the court, and the free lessons Jonathan had been giving me, and what he’d said about my potential as a tennis player.
I wanted to tell him how it felt when I was running after the ball so hard I thought my heart might explode, actually connecting with it at the last second—and not just connecting but returning it.
Hearing Jonathan’s voice calling out from across the net, “Good get.” The high five afterward.
I didn’t get that far into my story. I was just getting to the part where Olivia walked off the court. Forrest checked his watch.
“I hate to cut things short,” he said, “but we’ve got a full moon tonight. I’m going on a nighttime ride with the guys.”
He wasn’t fooling either of us. Regina and I both knew where he was going.
Forrest got up from the table. As he often did, he lifted his bike from the back of the Jeep. “You take the car, honey,” he told Regina. “I’ve got my ride.”
Jilly protested, of course. Jilly was the one who gave voice to what the rest of us were feeling and not saying.
“Daddy!” she wailed. “Why don’t you ever stay home with us anymore?”
“I’ve got some steep hills to tackle tonight, Jilly Bean,” he told her. “You don’t want your old man to drop out of the triathlon because he can’t keep up with the young guys, do you?”
“I don’t care about the triathlon. I just want you,” she told him. For once I agreed with her.
There remained one source of reassurance—Regina’s words to me that Forrest’s affair didn’t really mean anything.
This would pass, as it had with Pam Oliver and the others before her.
I told myself the fact that there had been many women before Brenda was the good news.
Forrest’s affairs meant so little. This one would be over soon, same as the others.
Meanwhile I was feeling a surprising new connection with Regina.
As little warmth as I sensed coming my way from her in the past (even when she gave me the fishnet stockings and the wooden owl, and the Maria Callas album, and the awful Fourth of July dress, and when she played me the Elgar concerto), I’d come to feel something for her—not affection, exactly, but a weird kind of sisterhood that I could never have anticipated.
Forrest mounted his road bike. Regina and I exchanged a look, shared a mutual recognition of the fact that the man we both loved was likely to find himself, within the hour, nuzzling the flowing auburn hair of Brenda Barnett.
It was after midnight when Forrest returned.
His bicycle made no sound as he pulled up to the house, but for some reason, even though I’d been asleep up until then, I knew he was back, and when I looked out the window, there he was in the moonlight, resting the bicycle against the house, unbuckling his helmet and setting it on the seat of his bike.
He didn’t walk into the house right away. He stood there for a moment, facing the lake. From my small bed three stories up I watched him out the window. Even knowing what I did, the sight of Forrest Emerson standing there in the moonlight still lifted my heart.
He ran his hand through his hair. He stretched his arms out wide, as if he was reaching for something. His back was arched, his head thrown back. I couldn’t see his face, but I imagined it. His eyes would be closed, as if he was going over in his head everything that happened that night.
The thought came to me. This is what a man looks like after he has sex.