The Blondes Read Online Free PDF Page B

the doorway, and in spite of his condition, we began, right there, standing up. I remember I got the feeling almost right away.
That
feeling. It’s one where you feel limp and full of adrenaline at the same time, and your head is suddenly a black-and-white movie, and you can hear the ocean crashing a thousand miles away and radio static and snatches of songs at full volume, and there aren’t any words for it. It wasn’t exactly the sound of violins, but … I hadn’t felt anything like it before with Karl. Maybe he sensed it too, because he got nervous and stopped.
    “We shouldn’t,” he said.
    But then we went into my bedroom.
Professor Karl Mann
was in
my
room. He was breathing my air, and then his hands and his hair and his scent were in my sheets; he was leaving behind his skin cells; he was trailing a finger over my books and saying something innocuous, and out of the dresser drawer I pulled a condom—the only one I owned, procured two years before from the university women’s centre along with a safe-sex instruction kit. I threw the condom on him, and we finished what we had begun. But because I was still going, could have continued indefinitely, was having my first orgasm with him, he stayed inside me with the condom on after he’d already finished. That must have been when it happened.
    In that Midtown hair salon, I shooed the flies away again.
    Karl had always seemed delicate. He was tall and thin—much thinner than me. He had a long thin face, and long thin fingers, and a long thin penis, which I didn’t love but also didn’t mind. I had made a lot of noise that night, which I hadn’t done before. Because we’d never been anywhere where I could. Except the one time at the cottage.
This cottage
.
    But that was early on in our relationship and I was too nervous to make much noise then.
    At my apartment, it was different. It was mine and I was comfortable there. I couldn’t tell if he liked it, my being loud, or if it bothered him. He called having an orgasm “getting off,” which I found alienating, impersonal:
Did you get off?
I felt a little ashamed, and I remember I walked around my room, cleaning the place up, because I couldn’t look at him.
    A little while after that, we mixed the cheese powder and milk into the Kraft macaroni and ate it cold. “This is just awful,” he said, laughing, and I hoped he meant the instant macaroni. I thought he did, but I knew he was upset with himself for coming over, for staying too long, though it had been only an hour or so. He said he was going to go. No,
had
to. Had to go.
    He kissed me at the top of the fire escape, his clavicle against the top of my head when he hugged me. It was the second week of July. The smog of the city felt like a blanket on our shoulders as we stood in the open night air and said goodbye. Then he was going down the steep metal stairs out the back of my place, and because I knew his feet must not fit entirely on the slats, I watched him as he descended carefully from the second floor. I wanted him to look back, and when he got to the bottom he did. He grinned for a second, like a seventh-grade boy in spite of the wrinkles around his mouth, like he had accomplished something. His glasses were in his pocket, and he looked younger with the streetlight from the alley streaming across his face. The fragrance of the Magic Thai restaurant downstairs was belching out the back door into the heat. The moment felt perfect, reckless, floating, and I thought to myself:
Remember this
.
    Remember this—and here we are, and I have.
    And then he ruined that moment. “I wish you could be my girlfriend,” he called up, still grinning, as if he had said something profound or beautiful. As if he had said, “I love you.” He turned, and I watched his tucked-in blue shirt driftaway through the dark. A large wooden bead tumbled in the back of my throat.
    It was that time, then; that was when you happened. I was punished for my desire. (The fifth