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me of something....
Far away, a drone ... a lawnmower, a prop plane, my ass in
the air....
23
There was nothing at the postal box. I went every day, then
twice a day, and I would have gone more often (the mere un-
locking of the box brought me the ephedrine rush of anticipation)
did I not worry about the guy who worked there becoming
suspicious; I d been told some people use them as drug drops.
Instead I sat across the street, watching for the mail delivery,
in the tiny park with its gated area for children, careful not to
eye them too intently lest I become prey to a different kind of
suspicion, and growing to recognize some of the others who
used the mailboxes, perhaps for a similar purpose. For all I knew
there were thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands! of
such mailboxes all over the city, all rented by people leading
secret lives, though if you bothered to look it was really not so
secret.
Young, old, men, women, straight, gay all seemed to be
receiving more mail than me.
I invented little stories to explain why she hadn t contacted
me, and replayed the language of these stories endlessly in my
50 / JANE DELYNN
head: she lost the address, she s out of town, she was hit by
a car, she has a lover, it s part of her standard torture rou-
tine, I pulled the blindfold off too soon. Or, worse: I got too
wet, I m too old, she doesn t like my smell.
Sometimes I imagined she had put the ad in as a lark and
hadn t expected anyone to respond, that I was the only person
in the world sick enough to answer.
I consoled myself with the thought that it didn t really matter,
no one had to know about it, not even my shrink.
Part of my problem, of course, was that I thought of myself
as no one.
Other times I imagined hordes of women had answered her
ad and that, out of fairness, she was trying us all out, until she
decided who was worthy of her continued attention. In my inex-
perience, my predictability, my over-excitement, my wetness,
surely I was not.
But a voice inside me also said: what was there to be worthy
of?
24
I resented leaving the house, even to go to the health club or
to buy food, as this distracted me from thinking about her.
Narratives of any sort repelled me, as they intruded other stories
into mine. I held the phone to my ear as my friends talked, but I
did not listen, nor did I confide, even in Leslie, what I had done.
It was the first time in my life I had managed to keep something
so big, so hidden.
When I had decided not to join the Current in Sweden, I had,
51 / LEASH
in the back of my mind, a notion of joining some friends in a
summer share at the beach, or renting a small house by myself
for a month or two. But as I lay around time continued to pass,
and the houses and shares were gone. I liked the beach, I really
did. But a passive mode was spreading over me, and I was
unable and did not even care to resist it.
The messages I left on her voicemail changed, from Yearning
for you to Still anxious to please to Why don t you call? to At
least let me know why.
25
I stopped masturbating, a kind of religious self-denial, though
I told myself it was because I did not want to be swollen and
numb when at last she contacted me. After several days, when
this didn t work, I began masturbating constantly, partly as a
form of cargo cult, but also of perverse thinking (she would only
call at the very moment I did not want her, when I was too
swollen to feel her touch).
The next time I tried her voicemail, a mechanical voice said
the number was no longer in service.
26
Telling myself I was going to the movies, I headed east. Normally
I am too impatient to walk, but now I found myself too impatient
to take a taxi. I purposefully took extra-long strides, consciously
pushing off with my toes to stretch my hamstrings, my right fist
52 / JANE DELYNN
pounding into my left hand: fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck...
I soon found myself on her block. The sun beat down fero-
ciously, so intense that it was not just heat, but almost a physical
presence. I took refuge at a little deli, where I bought an iced
cappuccino that was not half bad. As hot as it was, under the
awning it was cool, almost chilled, so I moved back into the sun.
I leaned against a car and the metal burned my ass through
my shorts. After the coffee was gone, I continued to suck the
undissolved coffee-flavored sugar crystals from the bottom of
the cup. Just being on her block, with the shadows of cars and
trees so sharp they looked surreal, I was happier than I had
been in days.
It was not the first time I had stood outside a building waiting
for someone to appear, and I was not unhappy to be doing so
again, for it reminded me of other times of happiness or, rather,
moments when I had thought happiness might appear.
The smart people were inside, though someone was working
on the engine of a car.
A blond but Spanish-looking woman walked out of the
building, with a short burly guy whose hair curled out of his tee-
shirt. This could not be her she was short and stocky, and
young Elvis was thin and tall. Nor was she (I prayed!) this skinny
bleached blonde who seemed in her upper teens, but was
probably almost 30, heading towards the park with a little girl.
Nor that women with monstrous tits, nor the one with the
obnoxious kids, nor was she, of course, a man carrying two
dark-green plastic bags.
I joined the man who was using water from a hydrant to
wash his car, cupping the water in my palms and releasing it
over my head. The sun warmed it almost immediately. I nodded
53 / LEASH
at the man, but he looked away, as if I were an undercover cop
or a journalist working on a drug story. Was this why no one
tried to sell me anything? I smelled grilled hamburger. Out of the
air floated the occasional sentence, clearly audible yet spoken
so softly it was almost a whisper. I could hear the clacking of
silverware on tables. I used to live in a neighborhood like this, a
real neighborhood with real people who had children at normal
ages. A better neighborhood, really, than where I lived now.
People who sat on the steps at night, people whose cars shared
music with you, people who sweated as they made love in a
room without air-conditioning, people who got pregnant without
the aid of hormones and an army of doctors, people with dogs
and cats and parakeets and gold fish in rooms stuffed with
tacky furniture and calendars on the walls.
Without planning, utterly forgetting that I was violating our
agreement (which gave her the right obligation? never to
see me again (was that why I was doing it?)) I crossed the street
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