5. The Story of E (excerpt)Stranger than fiction are some of the people you meet in real life. One such was E, the freckled and cute librarian with the horn-rimmed glasses. I was in the university library one day, doing some research on Kit Marlowe, when I noticed this slender librarian in a loose-fitting dress laughing as she read a book. She was in her late twenties, about five or six years older than I. She had dark coppery red hair, thick and braided, and freckles to match. Under the neo-Gothic vaults and stained glass windows of a major university's main library, a cathedral of learning, I heard her laughter peal out. As I looked up, she caught herself and made an oops face while bringing her fingers to her mouth. She shrugged self-consciously and looked left and right. I had only to turn and take two steps, which put me before the dark wood of her counter. "I need a laugh today. Can you share?" She slapped the book shut. "Not on your life." Then she took another look at me and leaned her fine little chin on her fist. "Say, you're cute." "Thanks. So are you. You know what the fine is for laughing in a library." "No, what is it," she said buying into my come on. "I get to torture you with coffee and pastries until you confess and tell me what you were reading that was so funny." "Where?" "Shartenberg's." She thought it over, just for a second. "Well, okay. Will my sentence be long and hard?" "It depends on how modest and remorseful you are." She laughed. "Then we're going to fry in hell for all eternity, because I'm neither." E was in some ways the youngest of all the older women in my life. To me at the time, being 23, she seemed like an older woman who had not grown up. With the thick, round horn-rimmed glasses off, she could pass for younger than I—unless you noticed the first streaks of gray in her hair before she rinsed it. I felt older than she seemed to be. Chronologically, she was older, but in every other way she was a giggly ditz. She was fun to be with, kind, patient, and sexy. She was one of those women that men turn around on the street to look after. I'm not sure what that quality is in a woman. Other women, too, stared, sometimes out of desire, but usually out of envy. Envy, masked as disapproval, is one of the ugliest traits a woman is capable of. I'll dwell no more on this, except to say that E and I hit it off. Her attitude was a bit like in your face, which is what I would have liked if I were more forward and less of a wall flower guy. I'll skip much of the preliminaries. We did meet for coffee and pastry at this fine (now extinct) American imitation of a European style coffee and pastry shop. She wasn't complicated, and she related early the usual palaver about my being tall, thin, handsome, thick wavy dark hair that she couldn’t wait to get her fingers into. It didn't take long to get her into bed, either. She'd never been married, had not settled down yet, was me in a sense but female and five or six years older. Before I discovered her most unique trait, I enjoyed low key sex with her. She was not a starfish, meaning she was not one of those women who believe sex is something the man does while they lie limply and sprawled out waiting for the end. She humped and pumped like a champ. She liked the foreplay and steamed up a few car windows with me (because both of our apartments were too small, with thin walls and nosy neighbors, for much frolicking). She was a slender, soft woman, not an athlete. She was too lazy to be an athlete. She ate what she wanted, but had a metabolism that burned off calories like a furnace, with the result that she was skinny. She was pale and skinny, with many freckles, and with hair the color of reddish copper. Irish, she was, through and through. She wasn’t a drinker, but a fucker. E thought of fucking the way most people might sip at sodas. A day without a fuck was a day missing its sunshine. I might have said that a day without a fuck was [plug in any old somber philosophic thing] but E was light on her feet and didn’t read much into things. E, with that dark red copper hair and quizzical funny expression and cheery if slightly nutty brown eyes and skinny freckled body, was a woman in fifth gear and cruising down a highway with more entrances than exits if that makes any sense. I mean she saw more opportunities than barriers, while she struggled to make more of her life financially. She had a degree in German, of all things, and could say Guten Tag or Wie Geht's but couldn't remember a line of Rilke or Brecht. She was a good fuck buddy. In her own way, she was true. I mean, she didn't pick up men right or left. She was actually quite selective. We talked about all this. God, this Irish girl could talk. Put a bottle of beer in her hand and hang her feet over the edge of a dock, and this girl would put you to sleep. I loved her. She was dangerous. No man could ever tame this wild banshee. I felt sorry for her. I worried, wondering how she would land as she got older, because she'd soon be pushing 30 without a man or a real job or a coherent thought in that funny head of hers…
|
