12 - DO I DARE
Lacey
I was still picturing Ricardo when I got home.
But Janice wanted me to go to the Second Circle.
I wasn't lying to her, I really did think I'd die of—embarrassment, mortification?
Something, surely. Normal people went to normal bars.
Wasn't I normal? I told myself I was ready.
Things became ordinary through repetition, I knew that.
I had said it to anxious parents more times than I could count.
There was no reason it couldn't become ordinary for me too.
Janice thought I needed her to chaperone me, look after me.
I needed to prove to myself that I could do this kind of thing alone. Right?
No answer.
The next evening, I decided to dare it. I picked a navy dress, fitted enough that I didn't look like I had wandered in from a hospital committee meeting.
I did my makeup with care, wore my hair down, and stood in front of the mirror long enough to decide that the woman looking back went places on Saturday nights, or could pass for a woman who did.
"You can walk into a bar and have a drink and talk to a man," I told her.
She looked completely unconvinced. Tough crowd. But at least she didn't heckle.
I was going anyway. And I went.
The Meridian Bar was on the ground floor of a boutique hotel downtown, the kind of low-lit room with a long curved bar built for people who wanted to be seen while acting like they didn’t care.
Busy, not chaotic. Couples in corners. A table of women laughing.
And men distributed through the spaces between, doing whatever men did in bars, which I realized, with a hum of anxiety, I had almost no experience reading.
Do not think of predators, I told myself, instantly making me think of predators.
Brad had not been a bar person. Our life had been dinner parties and department functions where everyone knew each other and the rules were printed in the program.
I took a stool near the end of the bar, ordered a vodka soda, and arranged my face as though I belonged. It was four minutes before I checked my phone.
A few men came by over the next half hour, but none took a seat.
Then one sat down, decent-looking, polite, and asked what I did, and when I said pediatric cardiology, I watched the small recalibration in his face, the information sorting me into a category he wasn't equipped for.
He finished his drink in less than two minutes and left.
I looked at the mirror and reminded myself compatibility was important.
I ordered another drink. It was 9:13 on a Saturday night and I was a doctor sitting alone in a bar checking my phone. All was fine.
He appeared at 9:27.
Forty, maybe, dark-haired, broad without being imposing, easy in his body like some men are, at home in the room. He caught my eye in the mirror and smiled, nothing calculated that I could see. "You look like you're solving a very difficult equation," he said.
I laughed. "Is it that obvious?"
"Just a little." He nodded at the stool. "May I?"
His name was Paul. Commercial real estate, which he described with enough self-awareness that it didn't land as dull as it sounded.
He asked what I did and didn't recalibrate.
If anything, he leaned in, asked which was the hardest part, the people or the medicine, and I told him about the parents.
He didn't offer a platitude. He said that sounded like carrying a heavy weight every day, and I said yes, that is exactly what it is, and felt the small surprise of being understood by a stranger.
Two years ago at a faculty dinner, Brad had cut me off mid-sentence when I started explaining a case to someone who had asked.
She tends to go into detail, he had said, pleasantly, and steered the table elsewhere.
I had picked up my wine and let the moment pass and not thought about it until now, sitting beside a man who was leaning in and asking me to go into detail.
He was naturally funny. He refilled my drink without making it a transaction. I relaxed. I stopped watching the room.
Around ten-thirty he asked if I wanted to dance.
"I'm not very good."
"Neither am I," he said, already standing, already offering his hand, and I thought, this is how it works, you just do the next thing. I took his hand and followed.
The floor was crowded enough that feet didn't matter much. Paul danced easily, unshowy, hands at my waist, courteous, present without pulling. The vodka had warmed the edges of everything, the lights were low and forgiving, and for a while it was simply pleasant, moving to music with someone.
Then a slower song played, and he drew me in.
And I went.
That was the part. Not that he pulled. That I went, and that I put my cheek down near his collar without being asked to, and that when his hand settled at the small of my back I let it stay there, and then leaned into it, so it would press harder.
He smelled like clean cotton, and the wanting came up so fast I had no chance to meet it at the door. Fifteen years of a marriage with a scheduled Saturday in it, and here was a man's whole body against mine in a dark room and my own hands sliding up his.
Then I felt him. Hard, along my hip, unmistakable through his trousers, and he shifted a half inch like he meant to be polite about it.
I moved with the shift, and felt the shape of him again, and something went off in me. Electric and wet. He wants me. Not a compliment across a table. Not a man being nice about my job. His body responding to me, and I pressed closer so I could feel it better. His breath changed against my hair.
Somewhere in the next turn his thigh came between mine, just a little, but I opened without thinking.
Then the pressure, exactly where I hadn't been touched by another person in longer than I wanted to count, and my hips found the movement on their own, small, in time with the music, hidden in it. Oh, that's good.
I did it again. Three or four bars, my face against his shoulder so I wouldn't have to have a face, riding his leg in the middle of a hotel bar on a Saturday night, and my whole body went liquid and certain and pleased with itself. I could take him home, a dreamy voice said. Feel him inside—
And then I made a sound.
It wasn't loud. It was barely anything, a small catch of breath against a stranger's shirt.
But I heard it, and the hearing put me back on the outside of myself, and I saw the whole thing from four feet away, the way you'd see a patient.
A woman I didn't know, grinding on a man she'd met an hour ago in the middle of a crowded floor, wet through her underwear.
Anyone could look. I looked around before I moved.
No. No, too fast, not now.
I didn't know his last name. I knew he sold commercial real estate and that his mother lived in Ohio, and my arousal had already gone by itself, and I hadn't caught it until it was most of the way down the road.
I got my hands flat against his chest.
"I think I need some air," I said.
"Sure." His hand stayed at my back, guiding me off the dance floor, and I let it, because I didn't know how to discreetly remove it.
"So." He was closer than he had been all night. "What does the rest of your night look like?"
"I should head home soon. Early morning," I answered.
"On a Sunday?"
"The hospital doesn't observe weekends."
He smiled, and it was a different smile, less open, something brewing underneath. "Come on. We've been here for hours. Your place or mine, you pick."
It took me a second. "I'm sorry?"
"We're having a good time." Patient, like he was explaining to a child. "You came in dressed like that, we danced, we've been having a good time."
"We have," I said carefully. "I thought maybe we could exchange numbers. I'd be open to dinner sometime."
"Numbers," he said, dry. "Dinner." He set his glass down. "Do you know how long I've been talking to you tonight? I bought you drinks. We danced." His voice stayed low, controlled, pitched for me alone. "You were practically humping my leg. I misread this situation, apparently."
I started to agree with his misunderstanding when he continued.
"You know what you are?" Almost conversational.
"A tease. Dressed like that, dancing that way, letting a man spend his whole evening, and then.
" A small gesture at the phone in my hand.
"Numbers. Dinner." He shrugged his jacket on.
"Some men would call you frigid. I'm just calling it what it is. Good luck with your 'early morning.'"
He walked away. The music kept going. I retreated and sat at the bar.
The words hung, almost physical. Tease. Frigid. The whole evening reweighed in thirty seconds of quiet venom.
I was angry. But under the anger another feeling. The flush went down my neck into my chest and then lower, settling somewhere unwelcome. I pressed my thighs together against the stool, stared at the mirrored backsplash, and ignored it.
Then my father's voice, on schedule. Dresses like that give men ideas, Lacey.
Is that what you want, to give men ideas?
The old shame, the original one, moved through me in a wave.
It was older than Brad. Older than my marriage.
It had been hiding in me the whole time, and a stranger in a bar had released it in one sentence.
And within the shame, not separate from it, the pulse was still there. What the hell is wrong with me?
I walked out to my car, but didn't start the engine right away.
I touched my cheek and my fingers came away with a faint smear of mascara, and I looked at it on my fingertip for a while before I drove home through the dark, both hands on the wheel, not crying, still in the gray space between the event and the feeling catching up to it.
Whiskers was on the couch when I came home. I didn't turn on the light. I sat down next to him and let him climb into my lap and purr against my hands, and I thought about the woman in the mirror three hours ago, so proud of having decided something.
I had done everything right. I had been good, exhaustingly, all the way down to nothing, the faithful wife and the careful daughter, and I'd swallowed the wanting, the grief, and the loneliness until they were a noise low enough to sleep through.
And here I was. Thirty-five, alone, in a dark house that still faintly held the smell of a man who had been lying to me for years. No children. No husband. Nothing.
The first sob came with no warning, and then I couldn't count them.
I folded forward over my own arms and cried for the seven-year-old who came home to no mother and no goodbye, for the girl taught to apologize for her own body, for the wanting that had nowhere to go, for the children who were never going to exist.
When the worst of it had gone through me, I stayed where I was, wrung out, face wet, Whiskers pressed warm against my leg, the one thing in the room that felt entirely real.
Then I sat up.
"I don't want to be good anymore," I said to the empty room.
My voice was small and wrecked. I said it again and again until I was screaming it.
The sound faded. The room settled.
I picked up my phone to text Janice. She never slept before one.
Okay, Janice. I'm ready. Set up the date.
I put the phone face-up on the cushion and looked at my own dim reflection in the dark window. Seconds later it lit.
THAT'S SO AWESOME!! This is gonna be the most fun thing EVER!!