Thou Shalt Not Covet
You invite His Girl for lunch. Dinner or drinks would be too obvious. She’s got a boyfriend, after all. Part of you knows even lunch is sleazy. This part of you is fundamentally decent, essentially moral, basically principled. This part of you responds viscerally and forcefully to the simplicity, the symmetry, the overall rightness of the credo “Pals before gals.”
Another part of you wants to have sex with her.
His Girl is wearing a short black skirt. His Girl smells like a spring morning after a night of thunderstorms. A bright little golden sun bursts from each of His Girl’s earlobes. They are beautiful, fleshy (but not too fleshy) earlobes. Her teeth are big and white and evenly spaced; her gums, pink and healthy; her eyes, big and smiling. His Girl’s fingers are long and tapered. When she laughs _ and she laughs a lot _ I see small children running in circles in tall grass beneath a bursting a golden sun until they fall down, dizzy and gasping and delirious with joy. She is laughing now, and I am staring at her hands. I can’t get over her hands. Her fingers are so long, so soft. Those fingers could cook wondrous meals, I’m sure of it, and dry the little one’s tears and nail up bookshelves while I’m at the gym playing hoops. I see those fingers bringing me morning tea in bed, ripping through the newspaper, stroking my hair, unbuttoning my wrinkled shirt, slowly, rubbing…
“…and I finally got to move into my new office, and then the computer didn’t work. I mean, I couldn’t believe it, you know?”
His Girl is talking. But I’m not exactly listening. Move my gaze from her graceful fingers to her big, smiling eyes. They are eyes that have known pain. They are eyes that hunger for connection. They are eyes that demand truth. I tell her I love her. I tell her she should leave her boyfriend, consider being with me. I tell her we can be happy together, that sure, there will be some rough patches, but we can work through them shoulder to shoulder. I tell her the way she smells makes me think of little kids making themselves dizzy in tall grass. I describe the Sunday mornings we’ll read the paper and drink tea and make love, the Friday evenings we’ll rent a romantic thriller and watch it together while we hold hands, with the popcorn she made with her long fingers on the table in front of us. I say all of this, but I say it with my eyes, because this is, after all, just lunch. But I think she understands. His Girl holds my gaze a little longer than is necessary between just friends. When I touch her arm in a purely friendly gesture, she smiles. When we say goodbye, she kisses me on the cheek.
His Girl, I say, holds a great deal of appeal for me. That’s because His Girl is pretty. And because she wears short skirts and golden sun earrings and she smells good. And because she is wanted, cherished. And, big bonus here, because someone else is doing the heavy-lifting part of the wanting and cherishing. All you (by which I mean I) need to do is share some lunches, some coffee, maybe a movie when he’s out of town. You don’t have to share a bathroom with her. You don’t have to argue over who will do the dishes. You don’t have to cut short your France-Brazil re-run on ESPN to visit her mother. You don’t have to worry about her bad-mouthing your mother. You don’t have to worry about sex getting old. You don’t have to worry about anything getting old. She doesn’t demand anything from you. She can’t demand anything from you. She’s His Girl, not yours.
His Girl tells you things. Things she doesn’t tell him. Things like her hopes, her dreams, and what a schmuck he is, and what a manipulative ferret his mother is, and isn’t it just kind of creepy, almost unnatural, really, how close he and his mother are, and how she feels lonely sometimes, and how he doesn’t really understand her taste in literature, because he doesn’t read much besides Robert Ludlum, and how their sex life isn’t so great and sometimes she gets jealous when his old girlfriends call, but it’s not like she’s asking to know everything. I mean, she doesn’t tell him about her lunches with you, you know? (Actually, you didn’t know, but now that you do know, you like.)
His Girl is beauty and safety and the chance to indulge your wildest and the most exotic notions of romance and love. His Girl is a fragrant, charming repository of your most impossible, consequence-free fantasies. His Girl in unavailable.
We have lunch, then another lunch. She tells me he has asked her to marry him. Then she tells me they’ve been fighting a lot and she’s been having disturbing dreams about me. She doesn’t go into detail about the dreams. We have more lunches. I tell her how great she looks. She complains about him. I listen. We progress from kiss on the cheek to kisses on both cheeks. I come to believe that His Girl deserves better. I come to believe that His Girl deserves me.
I keep it light. I have learned to keep it light. I have learned that her luminous eyes and delicate scent and the way her laugh sounds like wind chimes in an alpine meadow notwithstanding, it’s important to keep it light. At least for the time being. At least while she’s engaged.
“I really enjoy our lunches,” she tells me one day. I think about this statement for the better part of a weekend. Did she stress “enjoy” or “ lunches”? Did she mean she would enjoy something more than lunch? Is it time to tell her with my mouth what I told her with my eyes a few weeks ago? Is it time to shift to nonlight mode? Yes, I decide, it is time.
I invite her for another lunch. She’s busy and says she’ll call back. But she doesn’t call. I wonder. I wonder if, in the same way that she serves as a bejewelled and well-dressed non-bathroom-sharing screen upon which I can project my most blissful fantasies, I am functioning for her merely as a well-scrubbed guy who offers maximum understanding and minimum maintenance. I wonder if to her I am nothing more than freedom and possibility, a lark, a motherless mark who always pays the tab and never gets any action. Wondering can do ugly things to a man. That evening I wonder how many other poor suckers she “enjoys lunch” with before sashaying home to Him.
Finally, she does call back. She “needs to talk.” We meet for lunch. Her ears are naked, her eyes puffy. Her blouse is wrinkled. I tell her she looks great. She laughs, then cries. I ask what’s wrong.
“Nothing much,” she says. “I called off the wedding. I’m moving out.”
Something moves in my throat. I realise that I’m thrilled. Also terrified. Picturing His Girl and me with popcorn on Friday night is easy when you only have to see her once a week and don’t have to deal with things like actual spoken words and real live sex and taking out the garbage. This is different. So what am I supposed to do?
I realise I’m still not breathing. I also realise that she’s staring at me. Can she read my thoughts? Is she disappointed in my predictability, disgusted at my cowardice, justified in her no-doubt long-held suspicion that deep down all guys, even smooth-talking, lunch-buying keep-it-light Lotharios like me, are all the same?
I breathe, I swallow. I breathe some more. This is the time for me to do something. I know this. If Friday nights are ever to be filled with popcorn and love, if my chest is ever to feel the cool caress of fingers on Sunday mornings, I need to be brave.
So I’m brave. Silently, I take her hand. Her palm is sweating. I tell her I know that His Girl and he have been together for years, and that breaking up is always tough. I know it’s complicated, and I don’t want to put pressure on her, but I’ve really grown fond of her, and I think maybe there could be a chance for the two of us if we gave each other the chance. I’d like us to give the chance. I’d like to see her more.
I say this with actual words.
“Shhhh,” she says. She says this with an actual sound.
She says she’d like to see me, too.
I suggest dinner.