Free Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich Page A

her thighs. She never takes her eyes off mine.
    I point. I shoot. It’s all in the thumbs.
    The music stops then starts again, slow saxophones, brushes on the drums this time, and Selena whirls into my arms. Her warmth staggers me. I feel dizzy.
    “You’re trembling,” she whispers in my ear, her breath shooting laser light through my head.
    “I know.”
    “What are you thinking?”
    She wants to know what I’m feeling, but she doesn’t want to be unpleasantly surprised. I don’t know what to tell her. Men are not open. We have ages of practice in not saying it; we’ve got it down pat. We are bull elephants, footloose and free in the forest and the grasslands, apart and aloof but endlessly irritating, sniping at the edges of the herd of females and calves, trunk slapping each other on the ass, saying, what a shot, man, and how’s the market this morning, and the best leaves are on the jujube trees, and way to go, Key Moe Sobby! We’re bears, sufficient unto ourselves, always chased away afterwards in case we are seized by an urge to eat the children. We’re snakes and, like her goldfish, we have no use for bicycles. Pigs. Oink, my man, you getting any lately, and what you got under that hood, and how about those Lakers?
    Selena nips at the lobe of my ear with her teeth. My left foot gives way, and I stumble forward out of her arms and fall to my knees.
    She pulls me up and helps me back to the table and kneels before me and removes my shoe and sock. I pull my foot into my lap and see that the bones of my toes are missing. My toes hang like limp pale pink balloons at the end of my foot. I touch my big toe with a first finger and thumb; it feels soft and silky, but empty, the nail a hard imperfection that I’m tempted to scratch off. I flip my dangling toes with my fingers and they swing back and forth. I put my sock and shoe back on.
    “You’ll have to let me lean on you when we leave,” I say.
    Her grin makes me want to howl at the moon.
    “Okay, you can lean on me,” she says.
    Our waiter comes round with the desert cart. Selena selects a chocolate mousse. I go with the cheesecake.
    “Tell me something astonishing,” she says. I notice there is a smudge of chocolate at the corner of her mouth. Her tongue flashes, licks it off, and I miss my cheesecake and clang my fork loudly against my plate.
    “Well?” she says.
    I open my mouth to speak, and my tongue shoots out, long and thin and stiff like a wooden tongue depressor, and the squatting figure of my father on the end of it opens his mouth to speak, and his tongue shoots out and on the end of it the hunched form of my grandfather opens his mouth to speak, and his tongue shoots out and on the end of it the knotty form of my great-grandfather opens his mouth to speak, and on and on, until from somewhere deep in my primordial past, a small, lonely voice says, “I love you, Selena.”
    “What?”
    I put cheesecake in my mouth and smile around it. Men are not romantic; we don’t have much to say. Maybe we really have no deep feelings. We cannot wait to get out of our pants. We see only body parts, we think only of conquests, we never want to stay the whole night. We’ve got things to do.
    Our waiter puts a little black lacquered tray with the check on our table.
    We fence with our gold cards for a few minutes, finally agreeing that since she paid for the picnic this afternoon, I can pick up the check for dinner. I ask our waiter to pour us some coffee and call us a cab.
    Selena drinks her coffee and nods her head from side to side in time to the music. I drum my fingers on the table.
    Before I know it, our waiter is tapping me on the shoulder, whispering our cab is waiting. I push myself up from the table. Selena comes around and offers me her shoulder to lean on. I put my arm around her, and she looks up at me.
    “You okay?”
    I have to swallow hard; there is danger I could fall into those eyes, fall and fall forever. I nod, and she steps forward. I