Perfect Strangers

Part II

When you start to live outside yourself, it’s all dangerous.

Ernest Hemingway

10

I come awake gradually,floating up into consciousness as if on a whisper-soft cloud. When I open my eyes, I’m lying on my back in bed, nude but covered with a sheet. It’s early in the morning. Pearl gray light sifts through the curtains, brightening the edges of the room.

I’m alone.

I take a moment to simply breathe and marvel at this shiny new feeling of happiness.

James carried me to bed last night. Picked me up in his arms from the sofa and carried me into the bedroom as easily as if I were a child. He laid me down on the sheets, then curled up behind me, curving our bodies together and tightening his arm around my waist, nuzzling his nose into my hair. I fell asleep listening to the sound of his even breathing.

But now I’m awake, and there’s a book on the pillow beside me, lying open with a yellow sticky note stuck to one of the pages.

I sit up, pick up the book, and look at the note. In neat handwriting, it reads, “How can you say this is the worst fake biblical prose? This is the best fake biblical prose ever.”

The book is For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Hemingway. James must have retrieved it from Estelle’s library.

The note is stuck directly under the line I ridiculed during dinner: “Now, feel. I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other. And feel now. Thou hast no heart but mine.”

My world must have tilted on its axis, because I have to admit, at the moment those words look pretty damn good.

Then I stop and wonder how long it must’ve taken James to find this particular book in Estelle’s large and disorganized library. And, upon discovering it, how long it took him to hunt down that exact quote. Or did he know what page it was on by heart?

“Oh no,” I say aloud, alarmed. “Is Hemingway his favorite writer?”

We’re going to have to have a serious discussion about this. I don’t know if I can continue to fool around with a man whose favorite author once famously said that the only real sports were mountain climbing, bull fighting, and car racing.

I mean, come on. Macho much?

Personally, I think he was overcompensating for some deep-seated feelings of inferiority, but that’s just me.

Out of nowhere, a flash of inspiration hits. Fully formed, a scene in Technicolor arrives in my mind’s eye. It’s as clear as a picture, sudden as a slap, and accompanied by a burning rush of adrenaline.

I leap from bed and run naked into the library, where I throw myself down into the chair in front of the big roll top desk, snatch the pencil up from where I abandoned it in my last attempt to write, and begin to scribble furiously on the yellow lined legal pad of paper.

I don’t stop until three hours later, when my right hand begins to cramp.

Drained and amazed, I lean back in the chair and flip back through the pages I’ve written.

It’s rare that inspiration hits me like that, in one fell swoop, the characters, dialogue, and scene so detailed. Normally, writing is a grueling process, whole manuscripts completed page by painful page as I beat my natural self-doubt and laziness into submission. But this…

This is what writers call “flow,” a unicorn state of total immersion where time loses all meaning and words pour out like water from a faucet with no more effort than it takes to blink.

The muffled sound of a phone ringing is what finally makes me rise from the chair.

I pad into the living room, the parquet cool and smooth under my bare feet. Finding my handbag on the floor of the foyer, I retrieve my cell phone from it and smile when I see the number on the screen.

“Girlfriend,” I say after answering, “I hope you’re sitting down, because what I’m about to tell you will pull the rug right out from under your feet.”

Kelly shouts, “Oh my God! Did you do sex with James?”

She’s always using verbs in unique ways like that: “do” sex instead of “have” sex. Her husband finds it irritating, but I think it’s cute.

I say coyly, “I don’t know…what’s your definition of sex?”

“When the outie enters the innie! Duh!”

I roll my eyes, headed back to the bedroom to find something to wear. “Genitals aren’t belly buttons, you weirdo, but by that definition, no. We didn’t have sex.”

She sounds confused. “Did anything of his enter anything of yours?”

“Yup.”

A thrilled gasp, then: “Omigod, tell me quick.” She pauses. “Unless there are toes involved. I don’t want to hear anything about toe sex. That’s just nasty.”

Crinkling my nose, I say, “Toe sex? Is that even a thing?”

“Babe, you have no idea. Remember how I said I was gonna Google sex stuff for you? Well, I did. And there’s a whole world out there of kinkiness I had no idea existed. Did you know some people get off by having stinging insects crawl all over them? That would just make me shit myself, not come.”

I can’t help but start to laugh. “I told you to stay off Google, you nut!”

“And you were right. After some of the pictures I saw, I’m gonna need extensive psychotherapy.”

I grab my robe off the hook on the back of the bathroom door and shrug into it, switching the phone from one ear to the other. When my stomach emits a loud rumble, I head into the kitchen to hunt for something to eat.