The Ice Cream Cone

the rocking chair soliloquy
answering machine messages
he only had one fork
the haircut
things
tenderness

work in progress … the parts as of now do not add up to a whole, but I’m workin’ on it. Most of my friends have read this whole thing, they will recognize it.

the ice cream cone

She and Zachary walked through the drizzle, side by side, heading to her bed three blocks away. Erin didn’t worry about making nice chit-chatter with him. They did not hold hands; Erin felt that that would have been ridiculous. Erin’s fingers were jammed in her pockets, face down as she walked. The rain beaded up on her glasses, pointless to wipe the drops away. They strolled beneath the coliseum walls of darkened Wrigley Field.

Zachary suddenly said, breaking their silence, “It must be pretty cool to live so close to Wrigley Field.” He stared up at the looming quiet structure in the middle of the block.

“Well, it gets kind of nuts, actually.”

“Can you hear the roar of the crowd at your apartment?”

“Totally.”

“Wow. That’s great. I’d love that.”

And then her scuffing sneakers squashed something on the wet pavement. She turned back to look, and saw a soggy flattened ice cream cone. It looked so pathetic, so forlorn. A whole world swam before her blurry eyes: baseball games, fathers and sons, joyous sunny afternoons, a child weeping over dropped ice cream. A day ruined.

“Ohhhhh,” she breathed, as though it were a crushed Monarch butterfly.

Zack turned and squinted at the object of Erin’s pity. He saw what it was, but said not a word, only straightened up, and the two of them continued on, Erin leading the way across the empty avenue.

A block and a half later, Zack said, without looking at her, “Uhm … excuse me … but did you just feel sorry for an ice cream cone?”

The empathic moment with the soggy cone was already completely forgotten by Erin. She had moved on and had no idea what Zack was talking about. Then she realized and burst into laughter.

“Yes! Yes! I did!”

He grinned down at her sideways, husky eyes gleaming in the shadows of the side street. “Yeah. I thought so. Just checking.”

Erin’s brother Nate said to her once, “Erin, you idolize men. Don’t do that.” Good advice. Which Erin proceeded to completely and repeatedly ignore.

She made an idol of Zack, and his subtle acceptance of her.

But there was no subtlety in the way he attacked her in the elevator ride up to her apartment. He pounced, jamming her up against the wall, holding her head still, kissing her. She resisted for about two seconds, attempting to maintain some decorum, after all she had just met the man, but then it was useless to resist and she attacked him back, in true sex-starved librarian fashion. The night felt like it lasted eons; or a millisecond. There were more dinosaurs, bursts of laughter, timeless wordless stretches of liplock, Chinese food ordered in at 3 a.m., an intense discussion about the difference between meteors and comets, more liplock, lazy eternities where she lay with her head in the crook of his arm, the two of them breathing together, not talking, and a spooning formation as they passed out as one.

Erin was accustomed to boyfriends who treated sex as something precious and sacred, who read The Kama Sutra and suggested new positions to keep things interesting. To be honest, this did nothing for her. In the middle of the Bounding Kangaroo, or the Downward Anteater Maneuver, her mind wandered off, going through her To Do Lists. But the anarchy of sleeping with Zachary never gave her a moment to ponder, “Okay, so when will I go grocery shopping tomorrow?” The thought of doing this was ludicrous, actually. Also ludicrous was trying to imagine Zachary showing her a Kama Sutra diagram, saying, “That looks cool – Wanna give it a go?” There was nothing conscious in his sexual behavior. It was all instinct. And listening. On a supersonic level. But Zachary would never have talked about it in this way. He was too busy doing whatever the hell he felt like doing, when he felt like doing it.

Erin’s face was rubbed raw the next day. She had a hickey, for God’s sake. It was June, and she was forced to wear a turtleneck to her downtown-Loop temp-job the next morning. There were tiny grey bruises on her twig wrists. On the L-ride, she kept bursting into laughter like a crazy person. She was completely unable to concentrate and kept transferring calls to the wrong people. “Hi, Erin, that last call is supposed to go to Dave in HR …” “Erin? Who was that person you just transferred back to my phone?” “Yes, hi, I have someone on hold here who is looking for someone in R&D … could you handle it, please?” Erin spent the entire day murmuring, “Sorry … sorry … sorry … Yeah, I’ll handle it … sorry …” She felt transparent, as though everyone on the planet had Infrared vision and could see the lingering hand-prints of Big Z all over her body. Glowing redly through her black turtleneck on a humid summer day. The Mark of Zorro.