The Blondes Read Online Free PDF

of love-making.
    It was just before Labour Day weekend, and the younger stylist had propped open the door of the shop. A fly came in and landed on my pant leg, then another. I jostled my knees and they lifted off, zipped around the salon, then returned, settling defiantly on me.
    Karl and I actually slept together six times, if I counted the night in his Mini Cooper, when he had begged me to masturbate for him just once, then give him a hand job, just a hand job, then cried afterward while I rooted around in my purse for a package of Kleenex to clean up. I usually didn’t count that one. I had seen men cry before. My dad, when I was really young. But watching Karl cry was different. He was too tall for that car and the space felt small to begin with. He was a married man, and he wasn’t mine, and I wasn’t sure why I got crying Karl while
she
got stoic Karl. And he didn’t just tear up and hold his fingers across his eyes like my dad had. No, when Karl cried he blubbered like a hundred-and-seventy-pound baby. I had never seen anything like it. His whole forehead wrinkled up. There were more wrinkles there than I’d ever seen in one place, and Karl’s emotion seemed to surge upward through his whole body as if the cacophony, and his soul, would emerge out the top of his head in a big mess. A volcanic eruption. It was like watching someoneorgasm, but uglier. Ours was an ugly affair. And now the flies were back, four of them, big black ones.
    “Shoo,” I said, “shoo.” I shook my knees and they took flight, only to return a minute later. In the mirror, my hair looked positively white, fuzzy with the bleach. I had taken my glasses off, and they lay folded on the vanity. My stylist came over to check on me. She gave me a magazine to swat the flies away, but the flies kept returning.
    If I were to try to guess when
it
happened—this thing, this strange thing,
your conception
—I would say the fourth time. And that’s what I sat there thinking about, in that hair salon, sweating under that smock. Even now, I still think it was that fourth time.
    Karl had shown up at my place unexpectedly. It was close to eleven at night, a Friday, and suddenly he was at the alley door, standing on the fire escape, his drunken face on the other side of my window. I was straining Kraft Dinner for a late meal. I dropped the strainer and the pan together in my sink and sprang halfway across the room I was so surprised. Drops of hot water had splashed my wrists, and they burned, but I said nothing, just wiped my hands on my shorts. I don’t know if shock always leads to good sex, but in that case it did. That he’d come to me was thrilling. Watching him move through my space, touch my things, was more of a disinhibitor than alcohol or the weed no one ever shared with me.
    That night, I felt as if I filled my entire body for the first time, was as present as I could possibly be. The only time I’d ever felt even close to that way before was in a women’s historyelective in second year, when I’d sat behind a girl named Catherine Lee—I knew her name only because she raised her hand a lot, and the professor would call on her. And every time she raised her hand, her scoop-neck shirts would gap and I’d stare straight down her perfect back at her black bra straps. I don’t know
why her
, but when she did that, especially if she leaned forward to get the prof’s attention, I felt as if I would burst out of my own skin. It might have been the fact that she didn’t care if her bra showed, that she’d seemed to have a sexuality all her own—I certainly never felt like I had that. Even the couple of men before Karl that I’d messed around with had been like experiments in tactile sensation and physical mechanics rather than fulfilling contact. And until that night in my apartment, Karl had also been an experiment.
    I fell on Karl and kissed him in the hallway. He was about to use my bathroom to urinate but somehow I pinned him against