It is not my fault that I feel clumsy when I am naked. It is not a new development. It is since she moved in next door, since I had the conversation with her where she told me that “doing something is an art.” Her English was poor, it took me several days of short conversations in the elevator for me to discover that she was mis-speaking. I am sure of this because she said it again, two more times, and she didn’t mean doing “something”, she meant, quite literally, doing “someone.” Her point was, that sex is an art, something to be explored; it is a palette on which to express oneself creatively.
Yes, I agree with you, this was a strong statement to make to a stranger. That is my point.
I found her frankness alarming. After all, we only ever met at the mailboxes, and our conversations were on the way upstairs in the elevator, so the conversations lasted no more than 18 seconds. (I have counted how long it takes to get from the first floor to the ninth many times. This calculation does not include door opening and closing, but rather begins at the moment when the thin shaft of white light from the street lobby disappears, to the first moment that I can see the dull, cracked yellow light of the ninth floor corridor.) In our elevator conversations, she told me about her priorities in grocery shopping (“vegetables, only fresh.”) her new job (“they like me answering their phones because of my accent”), and also about her views on sexuality (“an art.”) I found that she does not consider herself to be special, but rather that she feels that everyone from Brazil has to know two things: 1) how to free oneself enough to dance and 2) how to properly enjoy sex. She says that her opinions are not her own, but come from her countrymen.
She is not tall, nor is she buxom. But she is beautiful, with speckled skin, kinky hair and a long torso. Naturally I was attracted to her. We began to date, which began like this.
Me: “Nathalie, I would like to take you out to dinner. Are you free tomorrow?”
Her: “I thought you would never ask! You New Yorkers are all tight, like old men.”
That was three weeks ago and we have shared our sheets any number of times since then. But I feel clumsy around her; she is free, loose, judgmental and (to be frank) amazing. Just now, she is sitting across from me at her little kitchen table, and the gray light is streaming in from a November afternoon sky, through her tiny kitchen window. The window in her kitchen is high up, so high that it cannot be reached to open. We are drinking tea, I mention that the window is too high, and makes the walls feels close; why do they build apartments like this? She says I am crazy, the walls are just perfect, and then she is offering up yet another generalization to me about New Yorkers. I have not mentioned to you yet that I am a New Yorker, but I am, though I also consider myself to be a great many other things. Among them, an excellent cook and fine conversationalist. She sees me purely as one who lives in the Great New York City, as she calls it.
“I do not know,” she says with her soft accent, “how it is that a people can be both soft and uptight. To me this is a mystery! Where I come from, there is much softness too, but a softness grown from when I care about you, and you to me, like a mother to a child. Here I feel that New Yorkers, (here it comes) are soft from… fear?” And I listen quietly, as is my way. The words are not important, so I watch her beautiful lips (more brown than red!) form the words.
To her credit, she also appreciates the scent of urine in the subways, (as do I) and she has fallen in love with the little Italian restaurant three blocks down, which has endeared me to her in no small way. It has been my favorite also for several years. It seems that Tony cooks for only me when I sit there, and now he rumples her hair when we sit there together, and snaps out our napkins with a flourish before tucking them into our shirts, under our chins.
But to address my nakedness. As I have said, being clumsy in my skin is new to me; I do not remember a feeling similar to this since I was 11 years old at Camp Ossaway up in New Hampshire, and we were forced to shower in communal blockhouses made of cement. The age range of boys there was 11-18, so obviously being 11 at the time was a liability. I do not need to describe in detail the furtive glances that were cast in the hot haze of those shower rooms, nor the derisive comments shouted and shampoo that was squirted onto this young man’s body. There were grand bushes of pubic hair to be glimpsed in that shower, and tall, muscular bodies. My body was none of these. Instead, I was dolphin smooth, and thin-limbed. Suffice it to say, that standing naked in front of her, I was brought back to those feelings of thin-ness and inadequacy again in a stark and not painless way.
To complicate things, I was a swimmer all through my college years, and so spent no few hours in front of crowds of strangers in just a thin swimsuit. Where did I lose this confidence, this aplomb that I previously possessed?
I swim twice a week at the rooftop pool of Asphalt Green, and am near enough to the Hudson Path to get in a jog or two a week. My body if fine, better than fine, it is lithe and functional! So why is it, when it is late, and we are home, and the Italian red wine has gotten us to laughing and telling stories, and finally she has turned on the lights in the bedroom and we are getting out of our clothes, why do I suddenly hesitate, what is that makes me feel suddenly like I am awkward and un-manned? Perhaps it is her bravado. “Get off the bed now! I want it on the floor!”
Yes, she has said it in those exact words, and not less than three times!
Perhaps it is the way she moves, like a dog stretching on hot sand. Perhaps it is the fluttering of her eyes after lovemaking, and her need, suddenly, for food. She prefers a pear or a piece of buttered bread, untoasted.
Whatever the reason, I have decided that I will not fall in love with her. No matter that the smell of her armpits lingers with me. (Even when I cannot smell her I remember that scent.) Never mind that when we eat at Napoli’s I find myself laughing, as I look across at her, and I am suddenly feeling warm and remembering the house that I grew up in, outside of Saratoga, in the dead of winter. (I am wrapped in a blanket, my sister is with me, it is late at night, the fire is popping in the grate and we are playing battleship quietly. I am drinking a tall glass of eggnog, with one ice cube.)
Falling in love with her would be a disaster- she is Brazilian, and so obviously considers herself to be above we who live here, who love this city as we love ourselves. I know it has been only a few weeks, but my friend Phyllis who says that I am “completely smitten” is wrong. Nathalie carries her sexuality like a flag, and this I protest. I will not fall in love with her; the waste of that gesture! I have thought it over, and as we move toward spring-time, even as the weather warms and she continues to teach me to dance every Sunday (she says that dance is her religion, and I find myself enjoying it more than I had hoped) I will end this. She is sucking me away to nothing, threatening to turn me into someone else. I see it, and though I know my weakness I will stop this at all costs.
I have purchased the car that I said I would never own, I have mailed away for a full set of beach-towels, and I have begun to shave daily. I am researching how to fish in their peculiar way, and I have freed up all my assets. My plan is coming together. Come the day after Easter, we will no longer be a couple, but until then, I plan to enjoy myself to the greatest extent that I can. Indeed, time with her is nothing less than an exquisite experience. Doomed, Phyllis said. Doomed!
She has forgotten who I am.
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