Details

We're driving up the side of his mountain in his red BMW. He's wearing flip-flops and I'm not sure it's right for the occasion. He's supposed to seduce me, and I'm supposed to be seducable, but it's a plan I don't like to admit, and it's less important than the feeling of the tropical drink, and rising up through hills away from Los Angeles. I'm rising, to look through the window he has for a wall, to sit inside a house with low lit lamps, guitar music and magazines he's told me are smart.
     He pours me wine from a box, for atmosphere, I think, because we've already had the blue drink, the size of a fish bowl, at the secret restaurant, twenty minutes out of town, with private palm leaf booths and giant aquariums next to our heads.
     In the living room he swoops around the couch, no, it's a love seat. He hands me the wine and sits below my knees.
     "I've been wanting to do this for a long time."
     "Oh, you mean this," I say.
     He moves on the couch and switches to the jungle cat from his drama class. "You make me shy, he says and I say "I'm shy too," although I don't think he needs it. He comes straight at me with his dense shoulders, and I think "stop," but say, I like that picture and point to a painting of a girl with a cracked vase under her arm and a halo of yellow, mussed up hair. I wonder why he has her, but he kisses me and I forget. I forget that I've actually made it, that he must see me as sexual, as an intimate worthy of passion. But the kiss feels weird, and I wonder if it's because I'm not paying attention. I try to feel that drink feeling, the rising, the way he put his hand on my back in the blue glow of the restaurant. Instead, I think that size is important when it comes to tongues, because his is huge and fills my mouth and I think, if I just had a little pocket of air in there, some room for atmosphere.
     But it's hard to say this to your professor. Especially when you're about to graduate with a liberal arts degree, don't know what you're doing, except that you'd like to do what he does, but with less bitterness. It's hard when you're good at imagining, and like to be in charge of your own internal world, and when for the last three months most of that world, has been him. Now, you have to match your internal to his external, such things as his shoulders, smell of alcohol, and tongue. And there is a gap, a wide gap, that must be filled with visions of staying at his house and finding the peacocks that sit in the trees, the ones he's told you about in conference, that make sounds late at night and last night he called you at twelve o'clock, just to return a call and his voice sounded weird and you didn't know why but you could imagine.
     He stops and everything gets quiet. He tilts his head and says, "Listen, do you hear the peacocks."
     It's a small gargling sound, like someone drowning on purpose. He bounces off the couch, stands with his feet apart, tilts his head back and imitates the call. I remember how he told me that all great writers are addicts, how he hints about his brain pills, five diet Pepsis a day, coffee, but not mixed with sugar. I take from this that he's vulnerable, so when he lifts me up, I let him. I will be vulnerable too - I think it's part of being in love.
     He carries me into the bathroom and lets me use his toothbrush. His toothbrush! Something we can share from a distance and still keep the shapes of our bodies. It's part of a list of other things we've shared - opinions, a ballpoint pen, the drink, the car ride. I start to feel brave from the accumulation and say, "I've never had sex."
     He moves out from behind me and takes his hand off my shoulder. "Well, that's" he pauses, "something." I feel the momentum of my list thud. He slaps one hand down on the counter and looks at me flat, without his usual glaze. He says he's surprised. He walks around the room a little and moves his arms so it looks like he's trying to shake his muscles out. He says "I'm proud of you," and I say, "I'm not." Then he goes into a private place I haven't seen before, lifts up and whispers, "So that's why."
     "Why what," I ask.
     "That's why you came up here," and he's coming toward me again, faster and more romantic. He lifts my hand and kisses one of my fingers, and I think this is the way he talks about stories, that once he's discovered the conflict, the resolution is easy. He leads me toward his big window, looks out and his eyes focus on one tiny light in the LA skyline. I look but there are too many to focus on one, all shaking and shimmering like rows of fancy evening dresses, and I see he's been trying to piece me together, by watching my bulky denim jacket, my soft short dress, tiny earrings, but red. I think he knows I'm dressed in contradictions not because I'm sophisticated, or playing games, but because I'm unsure. He thinks that he can be my resolution.
     He bounds over the bed and pushes a button on his answering machine, he puts on a deep whispery voice, comes and slides his hands from my shoulders to my back, squats, touches the backs of my knees, then my ankles so he's got the breadth of me, pops back up, lifts me, puts me into bed with my dress still on, lies on top of me and says, "We'll go slow."
     I can go slow without him. I try to think about my dress and how in the restaurant it felt tight against my ribs and opened at the bottom, how I felt excited in front of the aquariums, like I was in an unknown element, wasn't sure where I was swimming, but could see enough details, like the plastic pineapple lights, the shivering fins of fish, and now, wait, his leopard-print underwear? I think about how my friends will like this detail and start to feel the first piece of the story. I wonder how it will build and fill and change in everyone's ears. I wonder what my friend Alice will hear, who looked me in the eyes and said, "don't do it," in her most solid way.
     He has all his clothes off.
     I ask, "What about my dress?"
     "Leave it on."
     "Why?"
     "It will protect you from me."
     'But, I don't need to be protected,' I think. I've been accumulating - growing means opening and I've been opening to him and secretly adding him to me, and I would like to do it with him knowing. I am brave and say, "I want to feel close to you." But he isn't listening. He's bending my knees. He says, "I like a little obstacle."
     And he pushes in, and his head has dropped off to the side and I feel stupid just lying there, so I try to join by adding observations. "This sort of feels like riding a horse," I say and he says "Yes." I say, "I feel like one of those things that quarterbackers run into," and he says "Yessss," and he's going fast and he's heavy and his eyes are closed and I see that's so he can be alone. I ask "Could we take a break?" and my voice sounds funny, like a chipped of part of it, and it hurts, but he said it might hurt, right after he pushed in. So I try to be a sport and remember the time my dad said I was a wimp. I try to think of it like getting a loose tooth pulled, I'll buck up, I have to learn sometime. But then I remember that I didn't let my dad pull my tooth. I walked around for weeks with it dangling, and when it finally fell out I tied a ribbon around it and kept in my jewelry box. I feel myself concentrating like that tooth is in my stomach. I say it louder, "I want to stop."
     He stops, gets up from the bed and walks into the other room. I wonder what he's doing. I hear him running water. I hear him going to the bathroom. He comes back and I'm lying on my stomach and he lies on top of me and says, "I know you wanted to stop, but sometimes little boys..." He pushes inside again and I'm back down in the mattress. I try to think it's better face down, I don't feel obligated to comment. But mostly I don't think, I hold on to the pillow and listen. I try to keep my head up because it's hard to breath.
     
     In the morning he looks embarrassed. He brings me dried figs and cheese arranged in a circle on a china plate. He wants to sit on the patio so we can look down on his landlord's trees. I pick up a fig and examine it. "Why don't you eat?" he asks. I'm thinking that it looks like a part of the male anatomy. He has half a fig in his mouth and he chews it slowly. He watches me watching him and smiles.
     He's careful with me, now that he's reached closure. Now I'm something left over, a different person, probably a little dangerous. I'm like one of those strange out of the blue images that are initially so exciting, but must be eliminated when they begin to take on lives of their own. Or maybe kept on file. I wonder how many other girls he keeps on file. I push my chair out and walk to his room to get my things and to search for one last detail. There are six red flashes on his answering machine that weren't there last night. There's his already made bed, with the covers smoothed out like a blank space.
     We walk down a zigzagging path through the gardens. In one of the trees I think I see a flash of blue feathers, but it's the underside of leaves in the wind. The tree is full and shimmering, and the leaves are big enough to wipe across a face. I walk ahead of him. I want one. I go down, and I'm about to pass in front of a window, when he yells, "stop," and I stop the way he didn't, the way he tells me to stop my stories, to go back, revise, to never get out of control. He's afraid of where I'll go. He runs down, saying, "I'll get it." When he comes back up he's smiling, "Professor Barry lives there." He knocks me in the arm with his elbow and covers his mouth as if to conceal an "oops."
     The ride down the hill is too slow. He takes his time, leaning with the curves, whistling through his teeth at his movement. I fix on my token, my leaf with the turquoise blue back, and let myself float into the realm of possibility. I imagine that the car has stopped, that he's already kissed me and touched my hand conspiratorialy, and that I will have stashed in my bag, details of later use.
     I imagine how I'll step out at the pet store, where we started - me pretending to stare into the aquarium of goldfish, while he moved in behind. No, this time I'll start without him. I'll walk out of the pet store, past the shoe shop, and the bakery. I'll stop in front of the bungalow with the flaming pink flamingo, the tacky, out of context, brilliant pink flamingo with the tiny wise eye. I'll start there.