Free Be Mine by Laura Kasischke Page B

little at a time over the many miles traveled—72,735 of them on the speedometer this morning—and being spewed back at me in the form of warmth.
    I turned the radio to the classical station, but it wasn't classical music. It was, instead, some kind of half-modern symphony, the soulless straining of violins and synthesizers in disharmony.
    A gray frost on the dead grass.
    The trees were bare and black against it.
    The snow had melted just enough to expose the shoulders of the road, littered with fast-food bags and cigarette packs.
    April may be the cruel month, but March is the dirty month. The garbage month. The white had turned to the color of ashes, receded enough to reveal the litter that was there all along, but there were no leaves or flowers yet to distract the eye from the trash piling up around us on every side—our own trash, of course, but seeming to be nature's trash, the trash of the gods, so much of it.
    I merged onto the freeway, feeling, as I always did, the rush of it—the smooth tar of it under my wheels and the way the traffic parted and shifted to let me in.
    I was an object among other objects. A particle in motion. I didn't need to think about driving, I was so accustomed to it—so I thought about
him.
    Bram Smith.
    Had I ever, really, even seen him?
    I wasn't sure.
    I had been over and over that scrap of memory from—when? A year ago, two years ago? That man in the corner of my eye, in the olive T-shirt, with the chiseled features—could that really have been him? Was I really even remembering anyone at all?
    It didn't matter.
    I had already burned the image of that man into my brain within a few hours of Garrett's having mentioned him at dinner—an image built out of what I thought I recalled and what I had been told, until the fantasy had a smell (oak, engine) and hands, and a voice. And then I had gone over it and over it, that burned image, during the making of dinner, and the cleaning up afterward—the dishes wiped with a paper towel before stacking them in the washer, the crumbs wiped off the table with a sponge—and the shower, turned so hot I could feel it in my bones, and while Jon and I made love, and as I lay awake afterward—hearing the fantasy's voice in my head, speaking my name—and making the bed this morning, pulling the floral sheets up, and putting on my makeup, eating a bowl of oatmeal at the kitchen sink. And all the time I was thinking of him, I was also feeling sheepish for thinking of him. I scolded myself for thinking of him.
You don't even know it's him.
    Even if it is, you don't know who
he
is.
    In truth, by the time I was traveling down the freeway this morning at eighty miles an hour in my silk dress, whoever Bram Smith really was didn't matter.
    He was, already, a fully developed character in my imagination:
    He would have a deep laugh, I thought. His hands would be large, but skillful, a little dirty because he worked with them. His knuckles would be battered, the palms calloused. Younger than I, but a grown man. His body would be solid. He would smell like earth, and soap. Making love with him would be exhilarating, terrifying. A man who left love notes for complete strangers was a man of passion, a womanizer. I would never be able to trust him.
    But did I want to trust him?
    No.
    What
did
I want from him?
    What I wanted, I thought, really, was to ask him if it was true.
    Did he mean it when he'd written
Be Mine?
    Was I really the kind of woman who could inspire such interest?
    From a younger man?
    A man like you?
    I was imagining asking him, and his answer
(yes),
and his hand tracing a path from my neck to my shoulder, and then from my shoulder to my breast, and then leaning into me, telling me
yes,
breathing my name (
Cherie
) into my ear with the smell of the dust of the car's heater, a hot breath of it entering me, whispering
yes,
when it happened—when it leaped out of the sky and into my path:
    Shit.
    I slammed on the brakes, but it was too late, as if