Free Love Me by Garrison Keillor Page B

was remarkable to come into the old familiar kitchen with my old classmate who had spent evenings there with Iris and me and even brought a boyfriend once, and now I was the boyfriend. We kissed in the dark and I felt her hand in my pants. Why am I doing this? Because it is an experience. Jumping off a cliff is also an experience. This is not the same thing. It’ll be okay. Settle down. She needs to seduce you, it’s her way of showing she’s your equal.
    We went upstairs and undressed and she lit the candles on the dresser—I stuffed a stack of Iris’s underwear into a drawer—and she put a James Taylor CD on. She had lovely breasts, small, with button nipples, and a rose tattoo just above her pubic hair, and she clenched me to her and whispered, “I’m going to make love with you until the sun comes up.” This struck me as bad luck, to make a prediction like that. It also struck me that I wasn’t hard anymore.
    We lay on the bed and did some stuff and rolled around and she was breathing hard and I was trying to do the right thing, as if it were a project and I was going for the merit badge in adultery, and then she reached down for my member and found it in a diminished state.
    She gave me a brave smile. Woman, the Bringer of Hardness. And she got to work on it and meanwhile the candles are blazing and James Taylor is crooning. And my back hurts. Stabbing pains when I roll over. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
    Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
    She interprets this as a moan of delight and goes to work even harder, her curls shaking, panting, grunting, Woman at Work, and I twist the wrong way and feel a knife in my back. “Oh, Jesus!”
    “I’m dying for a cigarette,” she says.
    She sticks her head and shoulders out the window and lights a cigarette. She asks if I have any wine. “I do, but I can’t move. My back went out.” She tells me to relax. She disappears and comes back with a bottle of rose from the fridge and two cups. My member is now the size of a salted peanut.
    It is so clear to me why adultery should always take place at a hotel: easier to make an exit if things don’t work out. Never commit adultery in your own home. This is a rule never to be broken.
    She reads me a poem:
    The big raccoon
    With diaphanous hands
    And utilitarian businessman
    Eyes
    Drinks from the sky
    Reflected
    In the
    Puddle
    On the
    Promontory
    Of my
    Insomnia.
    I wanted her to vanish. “Could I give you a massage?” she said. I shook my head. “There is so much I want to tell you,” she cried. She pulled out another poem.
    “I wrote this on a camping trip,” she said. “To the Boundary Waters.”
    What is the body?
    It is billows
    Of masked fish
    Speaking lucently
    Of
    God, which is
    The power
    Of
    Kindness (Eros)
    Like a moon
    Pulling
    The sepulchral sea
    To shore.
    “What do you think?” she said.
    I said, “I like the way that under the surface of the poems so much is happening.” I say I feel that her poetry is in transition, trying to find its own course, like a river—
    “Someone told me that I eroticize everything in my poems. That everything, especially the animals, is sexual.”
    “I don’t know about that,” I said.
    The phone rang. I didn’t pick it up. It was Iris, unable to sleep in San Francisco, wanting to tell about her exciting day—something about schizophrenia, she had done some good deed for schizophrenics and she was happy and she missed me and she couldn’t sleep, she was sorry it was so late, she wanted me to know how much she loved me—we listened to her voice and Katherine said, “She sounds tired.”
    “I’m exhausted myself,” I said.
    “I’m too drunk to drive home,” she said. “Can’t I sleep for a few hours?” I told her no. Drive slowly. But go home. Please.
    “That’s not a kind thing to say.”
    “I’m not kind. I’m a cruel novelist.”
    I managed to stand up, sort of, and I held on to the dresser and handed her her clothes and nodded toward the door. She wanted to meet for lunch.