Free Love Me by Garrison Keillor Page A

New York apartment and live in both places. She shook her head.
    “Have two homes? Why would we do that? Some people don’t even have one.” She looked at her watch. “They’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”

5
    Lover
    The sirens were calling from the shore. The Prodigal Son was dreaming of the Far Country. Iris was in San Francisco, at a conference on aging. I dropped by Macalester College for Katherine’s poetry reading. Five of us sat in a room for sixty. Painful. We all felt miserable for her, especially when she said, “It’s okay. It’s two more than Emily Dickinson had.” Katherine is no Emily. Afterward, she kissed me lightly on the cheek as if I were cracked porcelain and said, “I’ve been worried about you. You’re so busy. I hear your novel is doing well, though.”
    In fact, Spacious Skies had gotten a nice review in the Times (“a dark and witty midwestern homage to Flannery O‘Connor by way of Raymond Chandler”) and was selling with gay abandon, but it’s bad luck to discuss success, especially with another writer.
    “It’s doing okay,” I said. “Your new book looks terrific.” The cover art was one of those lush tropical leaves meant to look vaginal, spattered with dew. “Is that semen on the leaf?” I said.
    She laughed. “It’s been ages since I’ve seen you,” she said. “Why don’t we get together?”
    She opened her book—“I wrote this one with you in mind”—
    Everything
    That is
    Of
    Importance
    Begins with
    One dog
    Crossing
    The lawn
    To sniff
    Another
    A lady whose hair smelled of Lysol stepped in to talk to Katherine and Frank Frisbie cornered me and asked how my book was doing (“Fine”) and referred to it as The Big Sky and said he’d heard good things about it. I escaped and headed down Grand Avenue toward my car and there was Katherine in the doorway of a bookstore, smoking, her foot up on the windowsill.
    “Waiting for somebody?” I said.
    “Yes. For you.”
    “What’s up?”
    “There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she said. “For one thing, you’ve always felt sorry for me, Larry, and you’ve got no business doing that, so stop it.”
    She took a tremendous hard drag and said, “I’m not a charity case. I’m a writer. You should never be sorry for another writer. Today, you’re up and I’m not, tomorrow it could be the other way around.”
    She touched my arm. “If you can’t recognize a fellow human being, Larry, then you’re in the wrong line of work.”
    She moved over close to me. “It all goes by so fast, doesn’t it. I think of Corinne every day. I keep wanting her to come back, and then I realize that what I really want is to step outside of my own boundaries and live my life as she must have wanted to live hers. Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying—Kiss me.” She put her skinny arms around my neck and I kissed her and she held on.
    “It’s so simple. We’re writers. Writers open themselves up to experience. We’re not here to win awards for good citizenship. Why should we give a shit what people think?”
    She took a deep breath.
    “I wish I were in bed with you right now,” she said. “I just feel bad that you and I never were lovers.”
    I took her hand and felt a sharp twinge in my left glute, like an ice pick. Too many hours sitting on planes. I groaned and she said, “Kiss me again.” So I did.
    She said that the thought of being naked with me was making her wet.
    It occurred to me that Iris was gone and that our house, a mile away, was empty. It also occurred to me that this was a dumb thing to do. I felt guilty for not being attracted to her. She wanted to sleep with me. An old friend ... an old friend who’s been darned lucky himself and could afford to be kind. I heard myself say, “What are we waiting for?” It was my voice.
    There was a swelling in the shorts that accompanied this, and she noticed. “I’ll bet you’re good in bed,” she said.
    “Nobody’s complained yet,” I said.
    It