The Barn Manager’s Grief Is Hotter Than Foreplay
An excerpt from The Lonely Girl’s Vegetable Patch by Genevieve Plunkett
I met Tristan at Grandview Stable, where he was training me to take over for him as barn manager. Tristan had recently had his heart broken. The woman responsible, who was seventeen years his senior, was married to a man older than her by another seventeen years. It seemed to me a wonderful stack of numbers, seventeen on seventeen, with Tristan at the bottom, trying to extract himself in a game of emotional Jenga. He wanted to quit the horse farm and leave Vermont for good.
Cleo could pull hot bread from the oven with her bare hands, he told me.
Cleo had a gold fleck in her left iris like a grain of mica—that was her left, from her point of view.
She had come to Grandview last year to buy some hay bales, and Tristan had been the one to help load them into her truck.
“How many horses you got?” Tristan had asked her, throwing in the last bale. Some dust went up between them and Cleo sneezed, the force of it sending goose bumps down her arms and across her sunburnt chest. She was wearing denim overalls with the suggestion of a sweaty white tank top underneath. Tristan had felt himself get stiff—
“Like, how stiff?” I wanted to know at this point in the story. He looked surprised and then, slightly irritated, asked me if I wanted him to consult the Mohs hardness scale. I told him that would be nice, and he said, with some reluctance, “It was more like half-mast.”
Bless you, Tristan had said to Cleo, his crotch mercifully concealed by the open tailgate.
Yes, she answered. Not thank you. Just yes, which had seemed to Tristan a tad wistful, and so sexy. She climbed into the truck and drove away, tailgate still down, haybales bouncing lightly. Oh boy.
It seems unwise to get involved with a man who is obsessed with another woman, but I was twenty-one, and Tristan was like whipped cream on an already free sundae. He was like a kid’s treasure map. I could not conceive of falling for him hard enough to get hurt. Plus, all the other men I’d been with smelled like strangers sprayed with mall cologne. When Tristan hovered his lips close to mine, he smelled so familiar it was like kissing my own armpit. I was big into smells, which was one of the reasons I drove a scooter instead of a car; how else could I know where I was, without the musk of the world pushed into my face, swilled inside the visor of my helmet?
Cleo worked hard hours in the sun but still wore glitter around her eyes. Painted her toenails pink. Was in love with Tom Hanks and Gordon Lightfoot.
Cleo had a stretch mark on the side of her belly button that made it seem like it was squinting suspiciously at you. She had been married at twenty. Divorced when she was twenty-one. Married again at twenty-two.
I had not been entirely truthful on my resume when applying for the barn manager position, meaning that I had exaggerated everything. I knew nothing of equine first aid, only that if a horse was limping, one should not ride it. That probably summed up my riding skills as well: Don’t get on a limping horse. My experience came from the two summers I spent as a spotter at an equine therapy center for children with special needs. Most of the young riders were nonverbal, some wheelchair aided—two were legally blind—and it had astounded me how confident they became once they were in the saddle. Their spines stretched tall, their faces opened in the kind of unrestricted joy that somehow put me to shame, as if I had, all my life, been carrying around false and stupid reasons to not feel that way also. I walked hundreds of laps around a dirt-padded indoor arena, keeping my hand on a little leg prone to wiggling or a shoulder that wanted to list. I would have walked an eternity for those children, their happiness the only way forward. The exhaustion I felt after those long days was clean and final—no small latches of anxiety left undone. No question lingering about whether it had been time well spent. What else was time made for?
Sometimes in the spring, when the horses tended to be rowdier, the program’s director, Paula, would have me ride them, just to burn off some steam. She would watch me go around at a posting trot and grimace.
“You ride like you’re waiting for a bomb to go off,” she said, but allowed me to continue—after all, I was only there to exercise the horses, not win ribbons. Once, however, she marched over and took my horse by the reins, stopping it short, then placed a gentle palm on my knee.
“Drew?” she asked. “Have you ever taken a proper fucking breath in your life?”
The therapeutic riding center eventually closed for the same reason that all good programs are forced to end—lack of funding—and I found a job at a women’s clothing store where I was forced to model the signature chunky jewelry that they sold. For six months, I was Jacob Marley, rattling my chains at upper middle-class women who were just there to buy a scarf. I graduated from high school and worked at a doughnut stand stationed at the exit of a corn maze, handing oil-crisped cider doughnuts to disappointed tourists who had been hoping that my stand was the outhouse. When the season ended, I worked at a used bookstore, where I was paid under the table by a fifty-five-year-old man named Byron who once asked me, out of nowhere, how rough I liked it.
“Praying mantis rough,” I said, because never in my life had I admitted to taking offense. I was the kind of girl that could dish it back, cool and unbothered. And, as I was quickly discovering, you did not actually have to be clever to be that kind of girl. You only had to position yourself like you were clever, and smile like you knew more than you were saying; the men were never actually listening. Eventually, because I was living in my friend Nico’s basement and not paying rent, I saved enough money to buy a scooter. It was a used Vespa, sold to me by a college grad who did not want to deal with transporting it back to California where he was from. He looked at me skeptically and told me that, around here, you only get three good months of riding before it’s too cold, too windy. There’s too much winter here. He shuddered.
“I’m very hairy,” I told him, handing him the cash. I swear to God, you don’t even have to try. You just have to say the first thing that pops into your head. You can cringe at yourself later, and I did, although it was at fifty miles an hour with the wind fluttering the inside of my tank top. I spent the rest of that summer huffing the grass-sweet air, gulping the fishy odor of wetlands as I zipped by them. I sniffed and sniffed, feeling always that I was searching the outdoors for that perfect nest of soft, green conditions where I could inhale deeply. Paula had been right: I needed to learn how to fucking breathe.
I found myself out on the scooter on one of those sniffing excursions after receiving an email from Byron that read BECAUSE YOU WORE THOSE PANTS. With it, there was an unnamed attachment, which I knew not to open, because I didn’t want to see his middle-aged erection. But then I’d begun to doubt myself, because there was a chance that I was misreading things. It seemed too sloppy of him, leaving a digital dick print on my computer, like mailing someone a severed thumb. I knew that I had to look at the attachment, had to confirm with myself that it was a penis, that I was not crazy, self-absorbed, overly sexualized—maybe the pants that I had worn, which were tight, button fly corduroys, reminded him of something from his own wardrobe that he wanted to show me? Maybe he was too old to be familiar with the traditions of the unsolicited, online dick pic. Could he even take a selfie? I clicked. The photo loaded bar by bar onto my screen, and my first reaction—I am sorry to say—was triumph: I had been right. That feeling was followed by a twisted sense of satisfaction: it was an ugly, strained thing, gripped too tightly, as if to keep it from deflating. If it had had a face (thank God it didn’t), it would have been a whiny, insulted one, like when Marv from Home Alone takes an iron to the forehead. Then, before the disgust and shame rolled in, I felt a sense of resolve: I changed into the pants (they would always be The Pants from now on), and instead of going to work at the bookstore, I got on my scooter to chase down that green, green patch of unblemished nature that I knew existed somewhere.
That scooter ride did not lead me immediately to the farm where I met Tristan—that would have been too seamless, and I don’t usually take to opportunities delivered to me by fate. Although, now that I think of it, everything that would transpire over the next year could be interpreted as suspiciously well-timed—ill-timed? I wish there was a word to describe whatever sort of timing exists in between these two possibilities. Maybe that’s what irony is: coincidences that are too creepy to be good and too exciting to be bad. The scooter ride was important because, although receiving a haggard dick pick from one’s boss seems like an obvious reason to quit and never go back, for me, it was the ride that solidified my decision. Zipping between those striped hills toward the buttery horizon was like ripping a length of duct tape off my bare skin. Oh! I thought with a shiver. I have free will!
I saw the ad for the barn manager job in the paper the next day, and I, still free-falling and looking for a place to land, thought of the circles I used to walk at the therapeutic riding center. MUST HAVE 5 YEARS’ EXPERIENCE RIDING AND CARING FOR HORSES. Okay, so maybe I didn’t have five years—two summers at best—but I had put in the miles, round and round on the soft dirt, and that seemed to count for something.
Grandview Stable was a tourist destination that offered guided rides on horseback through the woods. It was a place that was especially popular during leaf-peeping season for those peepers who wanted to ditch the tour bus experience. Anyone who worked there needed to be firm with horses, and even firmer with the clientele.
“People aren’t going to know how dangerous this is, even if you tell them,” said the woman who had greeted me when I arrived. She had a gray ponytail and a resilient notch between her eyes. She spoke to me as if I had already been hired, and I wondered briefly if she was mistaking me for someone else. “You must have danger on the mind at all times, so your clients can enjoy themselves. You understand?” I thought about Paula’s words to me: You ride like you’re waiting for a bomb to go off.
“I’m good at anticipating disaster,” I said solemnly. The woman’s head ticked slightly backward in approval. I thought: I am going to work here and my arms are going to get so toned.
I started my training the next day and was at first disappointed to find Tristan there, and not the flinty woman who had hired me. Tristan walked across the dirt driveway as I was unclasping my helmet, carrying a pitchfork in each hand like he was going to toss one at me. He was wearing your standard Carhartts, a faded gray T-shirt, and work boots, and his hair was cut uncharacteristically short, even though there was no way I could have known that. He seemed to hold the pitchforks with some humor, which I misinterpreted as judgement, as if he could see already that I was not up to the task. I stood straighter, trying to match this humor, a defense mechanism that I had developed for all kinds of situations. It was especially useful when men flirted with me and seemed like they’d turn mean if I refused them. Around this kind of man, I would change my demeanor, my whole posture, to imply that there was a larger joke going on, one that was greater than his pickup line—something totally omniscient, and I was in on it. It was like hitting an emergency meta switch that confused the man long enough for me to slip away without having to reject him outright. I matched myself to Tristan this way, squaring my shoulders, ready to scoff at his pitchforks, as if I had been shoveling shit my whole life, and none of this would come as a shock to me. But as he came closer, I saw that he had a lovely, kind face. A humble, downward smile. How awful, I thought. Now there would be no hope of relaxing. I would have to resign myself to being perceived all morning by a man that I did not find repulsive.
I would have to resign myself to being perceived all morning by a man that I did not find repulsive.
We did shovel shit. We shoveled so much horse manure that I started to suspect that this was no training at all, but a way of tricking gullible people like me into free labor. If so, it was the most scenic trap that I had ever been lured into. All around the property, there were mountains so thick with trees they reminded me of my grandmother’s bunched-up knitting. The clouds were firm and unhurried, and all around us there were horses grazing and swishing their tails. They looked drowsy in their mesh fly masks, which fit floppily over their ears like jester hats. After two hours of mucking the paddocks, we moved on to the stalls. Tristan had been showing me his favorite poop-picking method when he stopped. He looked around as if he had just remembered that I was there.
“Do you know all this already?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I don’t even know why I was hired.” Being around Tristan made my body eager for work. I liked the growing ache in my shoulders, the twisted-rope feeling in my spine. Even then, before my attraction to him became undeniable, I could feel the possibility of that attraction, as well as the allure of allowing it to unfold at its own pace. When the work is tedious, I thought, one would be wise to prolong the seduction. If one were wise.
We were a few days into my training, and so far I had learned, besides the correct poop-flinging technique, how to administer a pasty dewormer to the horses via syringe and how to tie and quickly release a safety knot. It seemed that I was learning everything haphazardly. I could tell that Tristan was preoccupied, his mind elsewhere, while he demonstrated how to clean a leather strap with a toothbrush. As if I would ever need to know such a thing. I wanted to ask him, What? What is troubling you?
He told me about Cleo one morning while we were in the upper paddock, attempting to catch a horse named Murray, so we could give him a bath. Murray was a short, dun-colored horse with a donkey-ish face. He reminded me of a sardonic butler, someone who could convey a creative range of complaints with a single sniff. It was easy enough to slip the halter on, but after Tristan had led him three steps, Murray’s legs buckled, and he flopped down on his side with a groan. This was not a medical incident, I learned, but a strategy to keep himself from having to go to work. Tristan gave the rope a serious tug, and I thought that he was going to laugh and fix the situation, just as he seemed to be able to fix everything else. But what I thought was a laugh was in fact a strange, phlegmy sob. Murray’s act of defiance seemed to represent a breaking point for Tristan. He tossed the rope down and let his body land, half humorously, on the sun-hardened dirt. If it had not been for that sliver of humor—a subtle flapping of arms—I might have been truly concerned. Murray mirrored Tristan’s theatrics, thudding his donkey head on the ground and blowing through his nostrils. Sometimes, even now, when I see or hear the word “futile,” I remember this scene. What was there to do? Man and horse were out of commission. I felt taller than a streetlamp, and just as awkward, standing above them on the peak of that hill. Below us, the stable was a long wooden box. Beside it, there was a fenced-in area set up with various obstacles made from poles and plastic blocks. It reminded me of a room that I was sometimes brought to in elementary school, where a teacher offered me many games to play that all turned out to be tests. I did not blame Murray for not wanting to go. Tristan’s sobs turned bitter, then mockingly bitter, and then he was laughing and sighing.
“Are you losing it?” I asked, finally.
He sat for a moment with his hands on his knees, then a surge seemed to move through him. He stood, picked up the lead rope, and began helicoptering the end of it. He brought this spinning end closer to Murray’s hindquarters, until I was sure that it would strike him. Murray lifted his head and looked at the threat to his rear without alarm, the same look of resignation that a husband guilted out of a recliner might have. He stood, then allowed himself to be led down the hill as if nothing had happened, his long face as blunt and droopy eyed as ever. Tristan was silent as we passed through the gate and as we hitched Murray to a post near the stable door, where our buckets of soapy water and car wash sponges were waiting. I had been ready to forget the sobbing incident, to never speak of it, having been conditioned all my life to absorb and break down the particles of male humiliation. I was an emotional bivalve, a mollusk. But Tristan cleared his throat.
“Yeah,” he said, as if continuing a conversation that we were already having. “I recently had my heart broken.” I dunked a yellow sponge into the water bucket and watched it darken. Tristan’s sudden and formal sincerity disconcerted me more than his collapse.
“Her name was—is—Cleo. Is. She’s not dead,” he said. Tristan may have corrected himself that one time, moving Cleo into the present tense along with the living. But from that moment on, we spoke of her in the past, as the perfect ghost that she had become. We pressed the sponges against Murray’s hide, creating long stripes of dark, dripping hair, and then swept them with a rubber squeegee, flicking the runoff onto the ground. Meanwhile, Tristan told me about Cleo with the same cadence that he was using to teach me the ways of the farm: temperamentally, fueled, it seemed, by his mood. Now it made sense. Now I could learn from him how to tighten a western cinch, how to find the toothless groove inside a horse’s mouth with my finger, all in tandem with these stories about Cleo. As if the memory of her was the driving force behind all our tasks, Tristan’s heartbreak the binding logic of our days.
There were other stable employees besides us: girls who strode in wearing tall English riding boots, with impeccable asses, as smooth as chestnuts. They were athletic but also aesthetically unaware, the implication being, it seemed, that horse girls were too obsessive for vanity. They had a doe-like blend of hyperfocus and obliviousness. If their asses were perfect, let the saddle be the sole beneficiary. I watched for signs in Tristan’s face to determine how moved he was by this fleet of summer blondes, but if he reacted to them at all, it was with businesslike cool, with an undertone of slight irritation. Could they not walk their horses over the hose? Could they turn their music down when customers were at the barn? These girls were my peers, I understood, but I could not fully accept it. They seemed hardy and capable—and astonishingly friendly—but also like their parents would have named them Harvard had they been born boys.
It soon became clear to me that the girls who were responsible for leading most of the trail rides were headed back to college at the end of the month, and with Tristan leaving, the bulk of these duties would land on me. I needed to learn the route. I needed to get back on a horse before anyone found out how inexperienced I was.
We rode up the mountain path, Tristan leading on a hot-tempered mare while I followed closely on butler-faced Murray. The flies were out, and Murray had taken refuge in the sculpted crease of the mare’s buttocks, his fleshy nose resting against the coil of her anus. What tenderness there was in this act. What trust! I did not even need to keep my reins taut, so strong was this link between the bodies of our two-piece caravan.
“Cleo could smell my moods,” Tristan shouted from his saddle. “She would sniff the inside of my ear canal or ask me to breathe in her face.” As he explained these things to me, I watched Murray huff his lady friend’s asshole. Around us, the sweaty summer foliage gleamed, the far-off cornfields shimmered in the heat. I knew that Tristan was showing me the path so that I could navigate it myself someday, but in that moment, swaying and half drunk on the summer air, the notion that I would ever be without him, that I could even survive out here on my own, seemed preposterous.
“She said that I smelled like wet straw when I was lying to her. Like beer and wool when I was coming down with a cold. Maple syrup when she was ovulating.”
Oh right, I thought. This was why Tristan knew better than to go after the tall boot girlies in the barn. He was a categorical weirdo.
“What about when you smelled like horse dung?” I asked. Tristan twisted in his saddle to face me.
“That’s how she knew I was tired.” He smiled, timidly, as if to convey that he was humbled to find me still there, with my horse all the way up his horse’s back end, still willing to listen.
When he asked me at the end of the day if he could buy me a drink, I said yes, thinking that this was part of the balancing act of our working relationship; it was a date, yes, but more of a conciliatory one. A clinking of pints to the two weeks I had already spent with him and his heartbreak. We both showed up at the bar wearing a fresh set of clothing, but with dust still in our hairlines and in the moons of our fingernails. What a comfort that was, as if there were no surprises left, no hidden expectations. As we drank our beers, straddling the corner of the bar, I noticed that I had not heard Cleo’s name since our ride up the mountain. Cleo was not there with us. She hadn’t even made it through the door.
“You must think I’m a trainwreck,” Tristan said to me. His voice seemed somewhat untethered. It might have been the change in environment, the need to speak over the jukebox and the idling trucks outside the open door. Also, I reasoned: I had never seen him when he was drinking.
“Trainwrecks are very long,” I said. “Long, as in sprawling.” Tristan looked offended.
“I don’t sprawl?”
The bartender asked us if we wanted another. He was hoodied and grim. It seemed that saying yes or no would annoy him equally, so I told him yes. It gave me a moment to think about what I wanted to say to Tristan.
“No, I think you’re better than that,” I said. “You’re like a department store explosion. Sad and messy, but with no human casualties.” I wasn’t saying it right, but it did not matter. Tristan cocked his head appreciatively, and I took him then for a man who did not require a constant stream of praise, but merely a show of effort. He was not a narcissist. My stout arrived and his Long Trail. He liked that I only drank stouts, he said, because he found it unusual and a little silly. I agreed, feeling excited that we had both contributed observations about the other and that it had gone smoothly.
It was possible that I was turned on by Tristan’s obsession with Cleo, that I had already envisioned us together in her figurative shadow.
I recognized, even then, that this was the moment where Tristan and I could have broken away from the conventions that we had created for ourselves. Here was my opening to ask Tristan about his plans for the future—he had not spoken of where he was headed after my training was done. I might have asked him about his favorite movie, if he had any siblings, pets, grandparents still living. I could have offered a detail about myself that was more intimate than my preference for beers that tasted like burnt gingerbread. Could I possibly convey that my happiest moments had all taken place in a large pinewood arena, walking circles in soft dirt and holding firmly to a small orthopedic sneaker? Or that my idea of a hobby was riding my scooter near wetlands where I could sniff the primeval dishwater of the earth? Maybe I did not have the emotional maturity for such confessions. Maybe I did not believe that Tristan and I could survive on our own, small and unwatched by the past. Or—and this is why I take full responsibility for how events unfolded—it was possible that I was turned on by Tristan’s obsession with Cleo, that I had already envisioned us together in her figurative shadow, Tristan showing me what he liked based on what Cleo had taught him. It might grant us a kind of immunity: freedom to experiment within the bounds of Tristan’s memory, inside the hot climate of his grief. It would be like roleplaying, except we’d be ourselves, puppets to the whims of a woman who we had granted goddess-like power.
At a young age, I had already established myself among a close circle of girls as the one “most likely to.” Sure, I had boasted, I’d suck a dick, I’d swallow stuff—lord help me, I did not even know the proper terminology. At the time it had little to do with having any sort of robust sexual appetite. The way I saw it, I was also the girl who collected toads on hikes, who allowed daddy longlegs to crawl up my shins at the school picnic. I sniffed spittlebug foam, rubbed it between my fingers to feel it melt away. Sex seemed like any other sensory experience that most girls were squeamish about and I was not. There was an especially memorable conversation that took place at a friend’s sleepover party. Six of us were sharing a tent that the host’s mother had erected on the patch of wild, compressed grass behind the house. It was thrilling for us, all eleven or twelve years old, to have this space to ourselves, when so many of us were starved for privacy, whether it was from sharing a bedroom with multiple siblings, or, as was the case for a girl named Tiff, who was the wealthiest of the bunch, being forced to use the hallway telephone within earshot of her parents’ room. I am sure the inside of that tent was as foul and greasy as the lining of a potato chip bag by the time we spilled out of it the next morning, exhausted from binging on junk food, holding in our farts, and dreaming up filthy scenarios involving Leonardo DiCaprio (who some of the girls called “Leo,” as if they knew him personally) or an eighth grader named Evan (all hot boys were named Evan). Tiff had lectured us on the inappropriateness of fantasizing about grown men, even celebrities. Her father was a detective, she explained, although none of us understood what that had to do with anything.
“Okay, whatever,” said a girl named Ashley. “What would you do to Evan if you were locked in a closet with him?” We had all agreed earlier on the locked closet scenario because, though none of it was real to begin with, the presence of the locked door implicated us even less. To us it seemed that, should you find yourself shut in a closet with a boy, to not make out with him would be a waste of time of criminal proportions.
“What do you mean, ‘what would I do?’” Tiff was confused, which confused the rest of us because we had been talking about sex for nearly two hours by then. There was a brief and awkward silence during which none of us picked up on the fact that we had, all this time, been narrating what we would allow to be done to us, not once considering the acts that we would choose to initiate, whether the door was locked, unlocked, or swinging wide open.
“Well,” Tiff said finally. The bulky red flashlight cast her face in unbecoming seriousness. She was about to confess something icky. “If it was dark in the closet—like totally dark—we could do it.”
How unimaginative. Another girl tried to help things along.
“Dark because you don’t want to look at his thing?” she asked.
“I don’t want him to see my orgasm face!” Tiff said, almost shouting. There was silence again, as we digested this statement that was uncomfortable on so many levels. So: There was a face to be made. For those of us who had had orgasms, this realization felt like a sickening line of fine print. For those that were not as far along in their self-exploration, it was met with still more blank confusion. I admit that I was tremendously impressed by Tiff’s candor, her apparent lack of dignity-preserving techniques. What she was admitting to was something that I would have never dreamed of admitting to: that it wasn’t the swallowing, or the touching, or the looking plainly at wrinkled genitalia that threatened our sensibilities; it was the notion that we might stoop so low as to enjoy ourselves enough to be perceived as enjoying ourselves. It was a terrible, terrible thought.
The bar was growing crowded. There was a group of guys waiting to order who were standing closer to us than we were seated to each other, and that felt wrong. I knew that the date had not yet built to the intensity that would warrant one of us to propose going home with the other, but I wanted to leave, so I suggested that we walk by the river. Tristan eyed the door, as if the river were out there and he could gauge whether it looked inviting. For some reason, this made me wonder if a river walk had been a bad idea. Why had I even thought of it? But then he nodded resolutely and put down some bills for the tab, and I knew that it was not the river that had needed consideration, but me—did he want to commit more of the evening to me? The answer seemed to be yes.
“What made you think of this place?” Tristan asked when we had walked the few blocks to the floodwall. Here, on the edge of town, the lights from the streets and businesses stopped abruptly and the dark roar of the river took over. It was such a river that, if a full-grown tree happened to uproot and fall in, that tree would be swept away like a twig. Again, I had the opportunity to tell Tristan that I sometimes came out here because I liked the smell. The gray rushing water smelled like wet rocks, like a slippery cliff face, with an interesting hint of foulness—moss and sewage. I came here when I still lived with my mother and needed to smell something that wasn’t her.
“I dunno,” I told Tristan. We walked along the grassy crest of the wall. I could tell that Tristan was trying not to say whatever it was that he wanted to say. I was not giving him anything else to work with, however, so he gave in.
“Cleo and I used to come here,” he said. Relief washed over me. Cleo was back. I wanted to talk about her—I knew how to talk about her.
“We came here because it was discreet,” he said. “We’d go to Wily’s because the people there were not likely to know her husband.” Wily’s was the bar where we had just been. I felt a thrill pass through me that I can only describe as the thrill of wondering if Tristan had been imagining Cleo, not me, on the barstool across from him. In retrospect, I do not believe that this was Tristan’s intent, but the thought excited me. I wanted to take it further.
“Did you, like, ever make out on this path?” I asked. We had stopped walking.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “One time it started to rain and all you could hear was the crashing of water. I’d never kissed anyone in the rain.” He paused, and I could feel his hesitation, maybe wondering if he had gone too far. “It was kind of . . . slimy,” he said. He was suddenly irresistibly vulnerable, his arms slack at his sides, his waist small, and his shirt tucked into his work pants.
“Show me,” I said, and I could feel his relief as his arms came up and folded me in. He smelled faintly of pine dust and the deep, earthy scent of the horses. Beneath that layer was the smell of someone who came from a clean house, who slept on clean sheets. And then deeper still was something tangy and unidentifiable, like the core of a distant planet. I pressed my mouth hard against his and he broke away, looking me up and down.
“You’re taller than she was.”
“What else?”
“What do you mean?”
“What’s the same and what’s different?”
“Your hair is straighter. Your teeth are rounder.”
And so we kissed and pressed our bodies together while he gave me the list.
Back at the lot where his car was parked, I started to ask him, “Did you two ever—”
“Yes,” he said, and pulled me into the back seat. It was clean back there, with only some light dust in the crevices of the upholstery, wood shavings from the barn. He sat and I straddled him and we waited like that, with our clothes on, until the interior light turned off. It was unnecessary to pretend that back seat sex was anything other than an ingenious idea, one that Cleo herself had invented, and that Tristan and I were helplessly fated to reenact. We quickly separated for long enough to pull our pants off—Tristan had the male privilege of only needing to lower them to his ankles—and then I got back on, although not on on. Not yet. In the darkness and with the enclosed feeling of my head pressed into the ceiling, I couldn’t help but think about the locked closet scenario, about Tiff’s fear of being seen, and how it connected to my own sense of liberation: that Tristan’s eyes were aligned with my breasts, not my face, but also that if, by some miracle, I managed to come and Tristan managed to perceive it, we would both be concealed by the darkness, as well as the warm bluff of alcohol in our bloodstreams, and the illusion that we were merely humble reenactors in the first place. There were too many safety mechanisms engaged to worry about one of us accidentally stumbling into unflattering reality. I was hovering, ready to lower myself onto him, while he tore open a condom. For some reason, I got it into my head to make a joke to distract him, and to maybe take away the seriousness of the condom. Condoms are crucial, yes, but yet another ego violation, like plugging your nose before diving into a pool. Nobody wants to be seen plugging their nose. I gathered up one of my breasts and wagged it at him, as if to say, I am up here and impatient. Tristan acted pleasantly offended. He finished with the condom, then pressed his mouth over my nipple and sucked.
“Did Cleo like that?” I gasped. He nodded his head without pulling his mouth away, and I resisted dropping down, because I guessed that Cleo would want to tease a little. She was the one that got away, after all. Outside, the darkness of the parking lot was broken only by the sheen of the windshields of other parked cars. These cars had the look of vehicles in it for the long haul, some with cardboard-patched windows, or tires so flat that they pooled cartoonishly. Still, I did not want to become too complacent and forget that we were now naked in a public setting. With Tristan buried in my tits, I had to be the eyes for both of us. I felt his hands on my sides, pulling me gently downward, angling his hips upward, caught helplessly, I imagined, between the ache of memory and the ache of now. Also, was there any man worth having other than a man tormented, a man who sees you as the remedy? Was there any other sex worth giving into? And here I was about to give in, when I saw a flicker at the edge of the parking lot. No, it was more of a blinking. I thought for a moment that it was a bicycle headlight.
“What?” Tristan was out from under me in an instant, working his pants back up. I felt compelled to give him an answer, even though I was still trying to figure out what I was seeing for myself, so when I said cop, it wasn’t necessarily that I believed this, only that I had come to realize that the flickering was the beam of a swinging flashlight.
