Coeur d'Alene.

Our last true conversation ended badly, as we came back from the winery, with her driving, of course, and crying into the steering wheel. “I think I love you,” she said, sobbing. And after a pause came something from me worse than a lie: “I love you, too.”


And that makes me think of an evening I had with Jenny Hour:

“I’m looking back on the kind of women I’ve dated – “

“You don’t date women.”

“What do I do?”

“I don’t know what you do with them. I don’t want to know.”

“What would you call what we do now?”

“It definitely isn’t dating.”

“What is it, then?”

“Something that definitely isn’t dating.” She picked up the glass of water off the nightstand and took a long sip. “We haven’t even had dinner yet.”


I think about the first night I kissed her, at the end of the summer after she returned from Czechloslovakia – she had spent a year in Prague. “I missed washing machines so much, you have no idea.” I didn’t, but laughed anyway.

And then I think about the night we almost kissed on the couch of the same apartment I would live in, a summer later. It was her and Reneé sharing rent then, and they never turned on the air conditioning – she explained how her thin skin let the cold creep into her. Plus, she said, as she mussed my hair, my head lying in her lap, this is cool in comparison to Atlanta. I looked up, suffering happily, and reached up to touch her face.


She drove me to put a hole in a wall, and I’m not a hole-puncher type. Technically, it was not me, exactly, but the doorknob of the door that I kicked open after she broke up with me.

I needed a drink, and my friends were nearby, and they had liquor, and a door I knew I could kick with impunity. I still owe Joe $20 for spackle.

It was a big hole. I didn’t talk to her for a year.

continued...