Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain (NYPress)

(Originally published in NYPress, 1994)

The night we finally kissed, we kissed a lot. At first, she didn’t want to open her mouth to my tongue. By 4:30 am, she was coming against my thigh. At least I thought it was 4:30. I thought, If it’s 4:30, and I get in a cab right now, I can get home in ten minutes, and I can tell him we went out to eat.

I had this idea where if I kissed her, if she would just kiss me, it would be okay. I would have everything I needed, and it still wouldn’t be cheating, it would be okay. An honest kiss, out of love and respect, and only once, to make the wanting go away — better, I knew, than letting it haunt me. I didn’t want to be unfaithful. After four years of hard virtue, I wore my monogamy like a medal. Yet lately I was brimming with furtive dreams, woke up fevered and damp, and I knew I had to thwart myself somehow, kiss temptation away. Just a kiss and I’d be okay. I thought, One kiss, and I’ll happily go back to fine.

Notions of fine had now dissolved. Fine was a petty, asinine dream, essentially lacking in imagination, we were way past fine. I was verging on a death-defying level of rapture. We hadn’t even taken our clothes off. I was on top of her on her sofa, fully dressed including sneakers, mashing against her in an ecstatic panic, when I thought I noticed in her pitch dark back apartment the beginnings of a faint light.

“Holy shit, I need to go,” I said, knowing it intimately throughout my body at once. I had a stabbing vision of Danny, waiting up worried in bed, and all the happy in me went sick. “Eliza, listen, I really gotta go.”

Eliza flipped open her saucer eyes and boggled at me. “You’re not going to go,” she said, incredulous, having done me the rare favor. I mean, she was the sexiest celibate macrobiotic lesbian poet on the scene. Her lips switched into a fetching pout. “I wish you would stay,” she commanded, pulling me in tightly with her thighs.

I, however, was forced to live it in real time now. I had that dash or die adrenaline in my belly and legs. If it’s 4:30, I’ll tell him the reading ran late, I’ll say — there were just too many missing hours. I started frantically counting forward from when I should have been home. We were at Yaffa Cafe, in the back with some people, and — I was screwed and I knew it. I hadn’t planned on needing to lie. Most Friday nights of late he didn’t roll in until four. I could have made it in time, I still — We were watching a movie, I sacked out on the couch, she didn’t — It was no good if I was at her apartment. It was no good and he knew I was with her tonight. It was no good, he knew I was with her, and we both knew I was in love with her, and I was coming home really late.

I was instantly on my feet. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am but I have to go right now.”

There was this long moment where she pretended not to understand why, holding my shoulders and searching my eyes, and I thought I’d rather kill somebody than have to speak his name to her now, but then she had it dawn on her. She looked perfectly dewy and stricken. It was compared to the hurt she’d endured in her lifetime. Then she was resigned to be brave. She was mezemerizingly good, fluid as a gymnast, and briefly, like a premonition, I hated her. She knew, she should have started fucking me at two.

I reached for her face. She took my hand and kissed it. “I’ll call you as soon as I can,” I told her. “Take care,” she said in her deep meaning voice. She blinked, opening the door for me. “I’ll be thinking of you.” We kissed again, deeply. God, I should just give up and stay. She murmured against my lips. “Tomorrow,” I promised, meaning I don’t know what, as I pulled away and took off down the hall.

My vision was impossibly distorted, the hallway supernaturally long and bright as I was coming, quicker now, out her fron door where the sheer heaven of it suddenly hit me. Full daylight, beaming like a hot brick. Daylight — the sun forty-five degrees in the sky, already burning the summer mist off Avenue B, already junkies getting a fix on the day, the haze not even dim grey anymore but golden.

The glorious night was past. Today in the world it was morning. That sun bust me wide open. I broke into a sprint.

It’s pretty difficult to cry as you run. Look, I’m sorry, we were just talking. Of course there’s nothing strange about booking for your life in the earliest morning on the Lower East Side. Look, you’re the one I love, that’s why I’m telling you, and you can trust me. I started to feel stronger, but more like throwing up. I love you, my god, I would die not to hurt you. I was flying down the street like it was a dream. What if I promise not to see her again.

I spotted a cab on St. Marks and A and threw myself in the back, driver unimpressed with my desperation. I had to do real work now, compose myself into the right story, pull it together convincingly. What was the thing to say when I came in the door. How could I lie the least to him, without ever telling the truth. I was feeling so fried and gut-empty, the idea of more lies was exhausting, I just wanted to be free — single, maybe, answering to neither of them, just coming back careless in a cab to my empty place, never needing to lie for anyone’s sake. I had been trying so hard to tell the truth, stupid, how I’d gone on and on about my poet friend, my girl crush, this woman I met at the Cafe, like I’d wanted him to know. I hated lying to Danny, and both times he’d found out, once writing letters to an old boyfriend, Sebastian, once kissing a guy in the stairwell at CUNY, and both times I begged to be forgiven, and was, but terribly, so I was perpetually making up to him, and sick with myself — I think we both knew I’d fail us one day. Good, then, I thought violently, vicious in my relief. So I’d finally dropped the precious vase, and now my arms were empty. So good.

I felt myself becoming placid with disaster. Barreling over the Manhattan Bridge with all the windows open, I decided to take the rest of my time just to rest, to let the flashes of hilarious grief pass, soon enough, breathe in, but they were constant. When I felt terrible I would always call to him, whether he was there or not; I couldn’t call to him now, and a moan stuck sharp in my chest. Four years, and I treasured him like a religion, could never believe my good luck, the way he called me twice a day if he couldn’t come over, how he’d ask me who loves you and hold out his arms. I had missed him so much, these two months since I’d fallen in other love. Now I mourned him catastrophically, like he was dead. He appeared to me now, radiant with virtue, so physically beautiful it astounded me sometimes that he was real, gigantic and safe and nurturing, and absolutely lost to me now. I started shaking my head in denial, no, oh no, oh no, oh no, but knowing and shaking all over now, oh no, oh no, oh please please please no. Please go back in time and do it again, please, do it again and don’t come back late, please give me another chance to do it again, please, not this.

We pulled up to the curb and I paid the man, stepped out into the sunlight on the sidewalk. I took one second at the apartment door before I turned my key, thinking, Goodbye, old life.

The cat was at the door. The lights were out and the tv was on. Danny was sitting up in bed watching the end of “Branded.” It was 5:55 am.

“Hello,” he said politely, not looking at me.

I leaned against the bedroom doorway. “Hi.”

There was a crawling death in my solar plexus. I was waiting for a good time to burst out sobbing. His arms were folded and he didn’t regard me. “How was your night,” he asked, very normal and cool.

“Uh, okay,” I said, gasping a little on the “okay.”

He was looking straight ahead at the tv. I sat down on the edge of the bed and watched his face. He took a minute, and then he looked over and smiled, just briefly, and then it was gone. Such a small, awful smile, a grimace, really, seeing me sitting so close and knowing, both knowing what I had to say. Like a bitter little wish that I just couldn’t grant us, no moment of peace too precious for me to wreck. He wasn’t going to ask me. he didn’t want me to tell him. He wanted nothing more than to be left out of the whole putrid affair. It would have been an excellent moment to drop dead.

“Look, I have to tell you,” I said, and he winced. I chose every word as though it were my last. “I was…talking, with Eliza, and I have these…strong feelings for her, and I would be…very sad…if you said I couldn’t see her again.”

There it was. These…strong feelings. The room was humming against my skin, so full of air, and neither of us breathing. Things seemed to expand or swell, maybe it was my eyeballs, grainy and pained with kept tears. I could hardly see his face, impassive, then collapsing with a drawn out sigh, oh man, a quiet sigh of defeat and disgust, his head in his hand. Not crying, just thinking, and I’m waiting for him to hate me, and I start hating him for hating me — my god, I didn’t mean to love anybody but him. I had thought from our first night together that we would be married someday. I belived for so long that we were as we should be. It was almost funny, how naive I’d been just hours ago, thinking things could ever be different from now. The air came out of me like a laugh, felt like a retch, like the punch of his judgement I was waiting to bear. Meanwhile, on tv, cars were being sold.

“I knew,” he said, tired. “By the way, if you care.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, light-headed, glad it was done with.

“Don’t say that,” he requested. He looked seasick. “Just, please.”

I could hardly suffer the sight of what I’d done. Instinctively I moved closer on the bed, reached out as though to touch him, and he closed his eyes. My hand fell short. I slumped back, exhausted, against the wall. That was it, then. He turned off the tv and rolled under the covers onto his side.

“It’s over,” he said. “Let’s just go to bed.”

I know I was crying, and the light was dim in the window, and I turned out the hall light and lay down next to him in my clothes. Over the covers, I rolled close to him, almost as close as to touch him.

“I love you,” I begged him, just once. We listened to it, we let it die, and then we were both asleep.