The Sea Came in at Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page A

and hope that in the previous forty-eight hours she might have lost a few of those ten extra pounds. Later she would have to analyze it for herself in order to truly understand the insight, but there and then, in the booth at Jay’s Grill in Baghdadville near the beach, Kristin had her first realization of how pathetic male sexuality really was. It has nothing to do with their dicks at all, she thought to herself with some amazement; rather it’s all there in that ludicrous little lump of lapses and impulses they like to think of as a psyche. We’ve had them right in the palms of our hands all along. There in the grill it was all she could do not to burst out laughing.
    But because she was even more desperate for what he offered her than he was for what she offered him, she submitted herself recklessly. Blindfolded in the backseat of his car on the way to his house, of course she considered the possibility he would chop her up with an ax or sell her to sex-crazed Moroccans or maybe, if she were lucky, only lock her away in an attic for two or three years until he was bored with her; but now all she really cared about was the prospect of spending a night indoors, perhaps even in a bed, regardless of whose it was or what happened to her in it. That seemed worth risking everything: take me home with you, she had said to him in the booth of the grill, and if you like me, you can keep me. If you don’t, you haven’t lost anything. On the other hand, lying blindfolded on the backseat and aware of his many quick and erratic turns as he drove, as though he was trying to lose the psychotic boyfriend he suspected was following and for whom she would unlock the front door of his house in the middle of the night, she tried to reassure herself that he was vulnerable too, a hope emboldened by the way she later noticed he had stripped his house of all identity—photos removed and no name on the mailbox, no bills in sight or any personal correspondence, the address labels torn off all the magazines and every possible self-reference hidden from her except the junk mail addressed to “occupant.” The only personality the house had was someone else’s: a woman’s jewelry box in the main bedroom, in the bathroom a woman’s lipstick and eyelash curlers that appeared to have been there for some time, and, saddest and most mysterious of all, the empty bassinet in what would come to be her room, with soft cotton blankets arranged on the chest of drawers alongside, awaiting a baby.
    When they got to the house an hour after meeting at the grill by the sea, she was led, still blindfolded, into what she figured was the middle of the living room, the sound of the front door closing behind her. After a moment of waiting for him to say something, she broke the silence by taking off her clothes. In the dark of the blindfold she stood nude until she finally said, “I need a bath.” All right, he answered. She took off the blindfold and he was still standing at the front door, as though to stop either her or himself from escaping; and her clothes that she had dropped to the floor at her feet were nowhere to be seen, as though they had evaporated, falling into the silvery afternoon light that came through the living room window.

S HE SUPPOSED SHE WAS already violating the spirit of the arrangement, but she locked the bathroom door behind her. While the bathtub filled with hot water, she analyzed the remnants of a lost female presence, the small blue art-deco atomizer and the bottles of French bubble bath, the old hair spray canisters and the little plastic bottles of nail polish remover, all beginning to crust over and take on the film of age. For an hour she sat in the tub drifting dreamlessly in the steam, wondering if he would break down the door for her.
    Please don’t fake it, she heard him whisper harshly in her ear that first night. She wasn’t aware she had been. After her bath and a meal, which she ate alone, she had gone to her room as