The Judge and the Gypsy (21 page)

Tired of the lies
, one of tonight’s reads,
l@@king for honest woman H/W unimportant who doesn’t care about looks or money. I wish I could stop smoking, but for now that’s not possible, 2 much drama in my life, lol. So smokers OK. Age, race unimportant. Must know how to love imperfect men
.

Another loves
women who are fun. So many women don’t let themselves have a good time. Don’t spend hours getting ready to go out with me, just run out the door and we’ll have adventures. I can be discreet. I understand
.

My favorite tonight, this morning, is a post in list form, a rage against his life in all its top-ten sources of misery. He is tired, so tired of his
3) bills I have no hope of paying
and
5) children who get everything they ask for and still hate me
. He wants a woman who doesn’t like to talk. A woman who will hold hands with him on the couch, watching the news without comment at the end of every day. A woman he can share a pizza with and then go to bed with.
A woman
, he writes,
who is exactly like my ex-wife but won’t divorce me just because the economy sucks
.

Some of them have pictures, but most often they tell me
your picture gets mine
. They use their four-picture limit to post images of women from porn so that I will know
their “type.” Pictures of themselves always seem blurry, or are taken in a mirror splattered with toothpaste with the flash still on so that their faces are obscured by a glowing constellation.

I’m so tired, my thumb and my heart sore and bothered by their slivers, but I can’t stop compulsively scrutinizing ads for—what? A reason to answer? I clear my throat, my heart, because I refuse to cry again. My peripheral vision catches the flutter of the moth as it suddenly reveals itself and finds a breeze to follow out the window, into the wee morning light.

As I scroll through the post titles from the last hour, one catches my eye—
Wednesdays
. When I click on it, I’m surprised to find a clear and high-definition picture. It’s a candid of a man with very short dark hair, sitting in three-quarters view at a conference table. His dress shirt is pushed up at the elbows, his legs are crossed at the knee. He’s holding an elbow with an opposite hand, his body language completely closed, but he’s so long-limbed he almost seems loose. He’s grinning at someone off-camera, and it’s his grin, the dimple it sinks into his cheek, that arrests me after reading so many lamenting personals.

The photo doesn’t hide anything about what he looks like, but it tells the viewer almost nothing about him. If he weren’t hugging himself so tightly, I would think he was modeling menswear in a Sunday circular. Blandly handsome.

Except the knuckles of his long fingers are white from the grip on his elbow. The stubble on his sharp jaw is a little too dark and long for a business meeting.

I read the ad multiple times and the flush doesn’t go away from my cheeks. I look at his picture for so long, I hear my neighbor’s shower squeal to life.
Kissing only
. Celebration Park is right behind my library’s campus. When the weather is nice, like it has been, I take my lunch there to eat.

You can touch me anywhere
. I shudder, and goose bumps break over my hot neck. I click on the picture and my browser opens it in its own window, nearly as big as my screen. He’s in his thirties, likely near my age. With the picture so large, I can see that he
has glasses hooked over his pocket and that his ring finger doesn’t seem to have a trace of a wedding band. His forearms are beautiful, the hair very dark against his pale skin.

I move back over to the ad.

He must have dozens of replies.

My Wednesdays are long; they start an hour early for a meeting with my staff in Teen Collections and end an hour late to accommodate a tutoring program. What if right in the middle of that long Wednesday I sat with this man in the park, kissing and touching him like a living fantasy?

If I didn’t like it, if I didn’t like him, if he turned out to be crazy, or awful, or a bad kisser, or a creep, I would just miss a single Wednesday and he would be gone.
Part as strangers
. Celebration Park is bustling at lunch hour with downtown traffic, particularly during this mild, dry fall. We wouldn’t really be alone.

I flip back over to his picture. I wish he were looking into the camera so I could see his eyes. Was he uncomfortable with the person he was grinning at, was that why he held himself so close? Or was it this meeting he was at? Why kissing? Maybe he was with someone and that part of his relationship had fallen away—I have a friend who complains that her husband never really makes out with her anymore and she misses it.

I don’t realize I’ve clicked the email link until the box pops up. MetroLink assigns each post an anonymous email address that forwards to the poster’s actual email, but posters can see the sender’s real email address. I hesitate. My address is librariansdeweyitbetter@villagemail. It’s clichéd, in addition to being immature, but setting up another account is not conducive to the impulsive nature of this email.

The idea that his in-box is likely clotted with replies actually helps. What’s one more he won’t answer? As I start typing the subject line, I suddenly realize I could always just sort of stalk Celebration Park some Wednesday until I saw him in person, get a better sense of the man who wants to spend a lunch hour every week kissing a stranger.

Of course, maybe it isn’t just Wednesdays. I have the sudden fanciful notion that maybe on Mondays he meets a stranger to just chat. Tuesdays, he meets another for hand-holding, then Wednesday he meets one for kissing, and so on, until Saturday. Saturdays he meets a woman for
fucking only
, completing the entire mating dance with six different women with an excruciatingly prolonged bout of foreplay. Sundays, of course, are his day of rest.

I can’t stop giggling, and try sounding out a dirty version of the “Monday’s Child” poem, until I realize that Wednesday’s child is “full of woe.”

I finish the email, only trembling a little.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Wednesdays Only

I’m certain you’ve filled the position, but it’s late (or very early) and I’m intrigued despite the judgment I should possess staring into the second half of my third decade. My IM handle is “lieberries” on villagemail.

When I send it, my breath comes out in a whoosh and my heart is pounding in my ears. I don’t really expect him to answer, but I open my villagemail account anyway and turn my laptop’s volume up so I can hear the IM chime. I can’t quite work out why I answered him.

Sure, he’s pretty, and maybe I’ve gotten a little comfortable with things, or maybe the insomnia is getting the better of me. It’s been a long day that has stumbled into a sad and quiet morning. I can’t stop thinking about stupid things. My dad’s arm around my mom’s shoulders while she takes pictures of the Alaskan coast. Will and Shelley kissing in their tiny urban goat shed, their homemade cheese in their old beer fridge. I look at my thumb, where the sliver has made it red and swollen.

I pull my T-shirt over my bare legs. Sit up straight and try to think straighter. Practically speaking, meeting a MetroLink stranger for anything, but especially
kissing
, is not entirely safe. I touch my throat, where a blast of heat burns in the hollow.

Is it really something bad to have a life that’s safe? To wear skirts at a sensible length, to let a friend walk you home from the bar, to meet a man for coffee in a busy diner days before you’re alone with him on your stoop?

I look at his picture, how his cuffs bunch at his forearms.

While I value my contentment, I do apparently have a little fight left—for adventure, for capital “R” romance, for the
certain cures
that Shelley teased me about—somewhere deep in my lizard brain. At least the part that, say, motivates happy sea turtles to leave their familiar waters and heave themselves up on the scary beach and lay eggs. Not that my eggs have anything to do with this.

I resolve to at least lean back against the pillows and rest before I have to get ready for work, but as soon as I set the laptop on the nightstand, my IM calls out.

In the quiet room, my gasp sounds totally Victorian.

When I spin the screen toward me, the IM box is as real as can be, and the handle is no one I recognize.

GearTattoo: I haven’t filled the position. Still interested?

lieberries: I’m not sure. You’ve done this before?

GearTattoo: Yes.

lieberries: A lot?

GearTattoo: Three other people. Is that a lot?

lieberries: Well, your proposition is unusual enough that one person might be considered a lot.

GearTattoo: So what intrigues you about my proposition?

I worry the hangnail on my thumb, my hands shaking, thinking about how to answer that. If this were a fancy online dating-site date, I might cheat toward wit in answering his question. But this is not a fancy “98% match” date. This is a man who wants to make out with a stranger once a week during his lunch hour and asked for it, directly, on MetroLink. Surely I can be just as direct.

lieberries: In your picture, you’re very beautiful.

GearTattoo: Do you like kissing?

I think about my married friend’s husband. About the kind of man who would ask for this and nothing else. About safe kisses on front stoops at reasonable hours.

lieberries: Yes, I do. Are you married? Involved?

GearTattoo: No, there isn’t anyone. If someone entered the picture while we were meeting, if you want to start meeting, I would miss a Wednesday.

lieberries: And we would “part as strangers.”

GearTattoo: Yes.

lieberries: So you care about fidelity in this? Do you want to know if I’m married/partnered/involved?

GearTattoo: I care about it for myself. I don’t feel like I can ask the same of you. If you were single, I admit I would feel better, but you’re not obligated to share anything with me.

It seems to me that he is being very miserly with himself. I can touch him wherever I want, but he stays in chaperoned territory. He keeps himself for me, while I could be married with three kids.

I also feel weird that we diverted into an establishment of ethics over something stated pretty plainly in his ad. I wonder again, what is it that he needs?

Recently, I was helping a high school student in our tutoring program with an essay on chivalry, and we got into a pretty interesting discussion about how chivalric code, a kind of objectification of the purity of loving a woman, has sort of devolved into “chivalry,” which we agreed was the sexist objectification of regular manners. I really don’t want GearTattoo writing odes to my dropped hankies.

lieberries: Is this something more to you?

GearTattoo: What do you mean?

lieberries: Than just kissing. Like a self-denial or temptation fetish or something?

He doesn’t immediately chime back. I am starting to get nervous when he finally responds.

GearTattoo: I don’t think so. I’m drawing a boundary around it, but it’s not the boundary that interests me, just the kissing, losing an hour to it. It doesn’t bother me if you can do that with me and be with other people, too, I’m just not made that way. Making out loses its escape if I’m thinking of someone else.

Fair enough.

lieberries: Where do you do this?

GearTattoo: Do you know where the teahouse shelters are?

Celebration Park was built to honor the 150th anniversary of our midwestern city, and the planning committee divided it into sections based on the countries of the world in a sort of essentialist, theme-park way. The teahouse shelters are in the “Asian” section of the park and consist of small picnic tables with a carved pergola over each one. They’re visible throughout the park, but afford the idea of privacy when sitting inside one of the pergolas. He’s thinking of safety, my comfort, again.

lieberries: Of course.

GearTattoo: I’ll meet you at the shelter closest to the bank of water fountains this Wednesday at noon. My first name is Brian.

lieberries: You don’t want me to wear a blue scarf or carry an umbrella or something?

GearTattoo: I’ll assume the strange woman addressing me by name is you. Certainly, wear and carry what you would like, though.

I snort at that. I do realize that he hasn’t asked for a picture or description, or anything like that.

lieberries: It’s just that I have a decent picture to go by, to find you and decide this. Don’t you want a picture from me? What if I’m not your type? Won’t that sort of defeat the whole idea of losing an hour to great kissing?

GearTattoo: I’m not worried. Librarians dewey it better.

I laugh, for real, at that. Finally, there seems to be something kind of sexy seeping into our strange chat. Maybe it’s just my own realization that I’m doing this, and it’s already Tuesday morning. Anticipation of my own daring.

lieberries: And I guess, if it’s awful, you just aren’t there the next Wednesday.

GearTattoo: Or you aren’t.

lieberries: Or I’m not. Good night (good morning?), Brian. BTW, my name’s Carrie.

GearTattoo: Good night, Carrie.

I snap my laptop closed. It seems impossible, but suddenly I am drowsy. When I close my eyes, I can hear the streetlights under my window start to snap off, one by one.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Danilo Jannot said, gazing at Sandor with a disapproving frown. He quickly closed the door and turned the lock. “I could have handled everything here in Belajo. Safeguarding the Ballard woman isn’t worth the risk of your getting captured. If Naldona got his hands on you, we’d be in a helluva mess.”