Bob dressed me, his long arms forming a thousand slender, firm bridges between us, his forehead wrinkled in concentration. I concealed my inhalations of his scented breath, the hibiscus oil of his shoulders and chest. (I concealed everything.)
I was at last a mannequin, starved down and petite in my pale yellow Sahara Club polo shirt and jeans like powder blue leggings—and I collected and memorized every stare, every approving, longing glance as I walked in the city.
The first outfit—whatever it was—had to be scrapped. Ruth insisted the skirt was an important item in her wardrobe. Her jaw became more set as I was transformed. Bob's decoration of me was for Ruth the gold leafing of an annoying, inferior object recently being paraded into their apartment.
We were going to Henry David's Halloween party at the Warwick Hotel. Bob's face was heavily painted, and over three decades later when I saw a picture of Josh with dye elongating his face into a sinister pout, I couldn't remember why it seemed so familiar.
As we entered the hotel—so brightly lit, just off of Rittenhouse Square—it struck me as the kind of place I wouldn't ordinarily get to.
In fact, it wasn't the kind of place Bob would ordinarily get to, and like everyone else, I suppose, he lived his life entering shut doors, as I lived mine fearing even to knock on them.
I don't remember the room, but there was someone—someone who seemed to be from a kinder world than Bob's—who came up and talked.
"You're a guy, right?"
I understood that I was imperfectly—and therefore perfectly—beautiful. Melancholy and timid, dark-haired and smooth under my clothes, nervous and sensual, narrow as a bone, I was easily spotted and frequently approached. Yet even then I viewed this as if from without, holding my breath, speaking no more than necessary. It was as if, having found a great deal of money, I was too frightened to spend it.
I was Cinderella, going to the bar.
After the night of whatnot that Bob put us up to, after he had achieved something I could not understand and cared nothing about, we were back on his futon, our bodies lit only by the street lights.
As proof of my ghostly demeanor in his presence, I could feel no sexual desire.
Suddenly he rolled us like a carpet together onto the wood floor, as if to force a reaction, to disengage my good manners and gratefulness—to discover who I might actually be.
I was never able to tell him.
The affair burned a hole in my life—on which I kept snagging my fingers and toes, my psyche—that remained into my forties.
Whenever I am in Philadelphia, like Tennyson I creep back to his door, which still has a little bit of the enchantment.
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