| OCR Text |
Show Heidi was there as well. What did we have to say to one another? How did our conversations wander? When I try to remember, I only find emptiness. Perhaps we spent time just staring at his walls covered with head shots of the musicians he had worked with: Paula Abduhl, the Stones, singing backup for Andy Williams's Christmas Concert. In December he left Lisa, a woman who had moved to Nebraska to be with him, a good Catholic girl who once drank vodka from her shoe, beautiful, and tall, and Irish. The last night in his apartment, empty of Lisa's belongings, white walls echoing without any furniture, John made spaghetti for Heidi and me. It was the first time I had been invited over to a man's house for dinner, the first time I knew a man who had his own place. I was 20. He mixed the pasta and sauce together in the pan, saving a dish to wash, and threw noodles at the cupboards to determine when they were done. We drank wine and listened to music. Late that night, John took out his guitar, a red Fender Stratocaster with a well-worn strap, and sang U2's "Running to Stand Still," while looking right at me. That he rubbed both my neck and Heidi's that night, that he flirted with both of us, held our hands, I ignored. When he kissed me the following January, on the steps outside the Nebraska museum, his tongue so sweet, so soft in my mouth, I thought I had found my everything. That summer, on my father's birthday, I lost my virginity to John in the apartment of his best friend. It was so much less than I had expected, neither painful or glorious. Later that same trip, we stopped on the side of the road and had sex in a cornfield. When a farmer came by, we leapt to our 217 |
