Dear Violet
Dear Violet,
Sex with Michael started as we walked to visit the potbellied pig, and everybody knew. “What are you still doing here, mommy?” said my eldest from atop her training wheels, sequined helmet bobbing left and right, the 18-month-old squinting and smiling from a bunched Mexican blanket in the red wagon. “We’re just coming to see Ophelia with you, and then we’re going to go out, and then I’ll be back tomorrow, lovey.”
I needed an interlude, a measured trombone slide, a transition less jarring than stepping from a house strewn with tired parenthood into an 18-hour date with an old lover. My husband pulled one child and pushed the other; we floated on a raft of small talk until Ophelia’s fence came into view. She trotted up, grunting a hundred pound greeting and squealing as we shoved tortillas through the chain link into her muddy pink snout. Goodbye kisses all around, and I tried with my eyes to convey to my husband the depth of my need and gratitude for this grand escapade.
Michael and I sauntered back down the block, slipped into his car after a hasty house tour. I was briefly ashamed of our sprawling chaos and ready to be compacted into an adult space. We hadn’t talked face to face in five years, hadn’t had sex in nearly seven, hadn’t ever conversed this long in the eighteen years of our friendship. For weeks I wasn’t sure how it was going to feel, and then, like every part of our physical connection later in the hotel, the memory of being with Michael re-emerged with a feathery familiarity.
Talking with him, at a bar, in a restaurant, with the imminent promise of a bed - it is enveloping. Violet, you and all Michael’s lovers must know what I mean. It is a slow, sexy, layered descent. It is stepping down a wide spiral staircase in glasses and a gown, teetering on sparkling heels. Surveying each unfolding idea like so many eager party guests coming into view, crowded together in some vast, many-windowed vestibule. I tried and failed to convey this feeling to Michael, how exquisitely long that staircase feels, how grounding it is to make it down there and mingle, feeling gorgeous and observed.
We sipped bitter virgin concoctions and bubbled with months and years…
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