A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I'll Never Read

Won't you please fawn over me?

For You, The Stars
Chapter Twelve: Never Could Reach It
Installment 1

Then Maura showed up on my doorstep. I wasn’t sure what day to expect her or maybe I did and I just lost track of the time. It turned out she had been in town for two days already. I had just been up for less than half an hour and was thinking of getting some coffee when my doorbell rang on Saturday morning around 11 am. I ambled down the stairs to open the front door and was shocked to see Maura standing there squinting in the sun, looking prettier than I remembered her, with her Scandinavian features, straw-blonde hair, nearly button nose, slightly round ruddy cheeks and a wry smile on her lips.

She tilted her head to one side and said, “Daniel Dermott, as I live and breathe!”

She really talked like that, but she was being facetious. Nobody talk like that in real life, outside of the movies, at least not any more. She said it in a kind of Judy Garland or even Ethel Merman kind of vintage tone, so I knew she was goofing around, playing a part. I leaned forward and gave her a hug. At the same time she went to kiss me and ended up grazing my cheek as my face rushed past hers on the way to hanging my chin over her shoulder.

Maura was a little taller than me. Bigger than me, stronger than me - that was probably always part of the problem. We all played at being enlightened and post-feminist but on some level we all wanted to the guy to be bigger and stronger than the girl. We guys wanted women who were on a slightly smaller scale than us, and the women wanted guys they could look up to, literally. Margaret, my first girlfriend back in seventh grade, had been taller than me.

I was used to it - being only about 5’7” on a good day. I didn’t want to limit myself to just the women who were smaller than me. I was even attracted to Bettie at work, who was an Amazon, in the same way that I was starting to notice older women, like a lawyer friend of Bo’s brother who was in her thirties and had flirted with me all night at a Gomer party. Something about me made me want to play beyond my league, but that was just the point. These were known limits even if I was trying to violate them.

And like I said, Maura wasn’t just big, she was strong too. She was an athlete, something I never way. She rowed crew, she played basketball, she played softball. Even I didn’t know better I’d have assumed she was gay. In fact I seem to remember people whispering things about her back at school, and who knows? Maybe she did some experimentation with the other team members, maybe in the lockerroom after a hard fought race. Or maybe that was just prurient porn-influenced reveries. Sometimes I have trouble distinguishing between fantasy and real life.

It was good to see her. “I’ve missed you,” I said, and for once I was being sincere. I realized it suddenly as the feelings rushed in. Suddenly all of my annoyance and frustration with her over the last three or so years melted away and I realized that in some ways I felt closer to her than I did to anyone else and that I was glad she was there.

We went for a walk. We headed down to the park and then cut the corner and ended up in the Haight. It was the natural route to take. We wandered down the panhandle for a while and then caught an afternoon brunch at the Pork Store Café. I knew she’d like that place. It has character and the food is good and hearty. She was as good an eater as me. Also, I wanted to show off my haunts, all my favorite places. I had considered the now long-closed Crescent City Café, with its New Orleans inspired cuisine, like spicy crawfish omelets, but we had eventually wandered so far down the street, almost to the lower Haight, that the Pork Store was closer and in retrospect it was probably the best choice.

For a moment there I worried that we might run into Simone but then I realized that enough water had gone under the bridge and that she was probably past the point of flying into a rage any time she realized she had to share the Haight-Ashbury with me. Also I reminded myself that she and Dave were now having some kind of little fling, so that should earn me some form of immunity.

We wandered back to my place stopping off on ninth ave to do some used bookstore and then used recordstore browsing. This was kind of my perfect idea of a Saturday. The fog had burned off, the weather was crisp, the air was clear and the slanting light had that Mediterranean quality that painters love. Maura reached out to hold me hand as we strolled and I felt like we were a couple. For the moment Cecilia was a thousand miles away from the back of my mind.

It was nearly dusk when we rolled back into my place. Dave and Hopper and Chad had left a note saying they’d been looking at a house and were now going to a movie. We hadn’t given up on the dream of finding one big house for all the Gomers to live in, instead of the two houses a block apart we were using now. The house those guys had looked at belonged to perennial San Francisco mayoral candidate and sheriff Richard Hongisto. Given our drug-taking ways, the idea of renting a house from a sheriff seemed kind of daft, but the place was this huge ramshackle Victorian near Fillmore and there were more than enough rooms in it for all of us and the rent was even doable, only slightly more than the total we were paying for the two places now.

So for the time being Maura and I had the place to ourselves. I put one of her mix tapes onto the stereo and we sat down on the couch as the sun was setting. We kept talking as the room got darker until I wasn’t sure I could see the expression on face. I may have been looking at a cartoon of her that my eyes were drawing in the gloom. She was touching my hand and we were sort of snuggling together close. I didn’t sense that air of inevitability I sometimes felt when it dawned on me that I was about to end up in bed with someone. As always there was a teeter-totter feeling of imbalance with Maura. It could go one way or the other. I didn’t feel like asking if I could kiss her. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Maybe I just wanted to sit there close to her. She told me some word her Danish grandmother used that seeemd to mean petting or lightly touiching someone in an affectionate way. My skin was feeling very sensitive. The fair hairs were standing up on my arm.

“My room’s on the other side of these glass doors,” I said.

“Let’s go,” she said.

In my room she sat on my futon and looked around but it was dark and there wasn’t much to see. I turned on the lamp that sat on the low plank shelf next to the bed, the one that rested on marbleized looking cinderblocks, and then took off the black linen shirt I was wearing over a black silk t-shirt. Maura was looking at me. “Your clothes are the kind women like,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you dress the way we want guys to dress.”

I sort of knew what she meant. My clothes were just a little more stylish than the preppy button downs and khakis that were so familiar at Princeton. The basic outlines were still the same. Cuffed trousers, shirts with collars. But the colors were decided not pastel. Bit by bit my entire wardrobe was becoming shades of black and gray. My trousers, which were some sort of poly-wool blend, were charcoal and pegged, tapered down to the narrow cuffs. I knew it was Cecilia who had helped me find most of the stuff I was wearing now but I didn’t feel guilty about that. She had gotten a lot in return for her lessons in coolness.

I shucked off my black wingtips and gray socks, undid my belt (also black) and stepped out of my pants, draping them over the chair at my desk. I stood there in my t-shirt and boxer shorts. The latter were white. Then I came over to the futon and sat down next to Maura. She stood up and stripped in front of me.

She took off her aqua colored sweat shirt and then took off her tanktop. From the waist up she looked like a little girl, almost, or maybe a girl just starting puberty. Her breasts were small and puffy. They were separated by the broad expanse of her chest. She stood there looking at me, still wearing her jeans and shoes. She looked vulnerable, subjecting herself to my gaze, as if to say, at long last, “Here I am. Was it worth waiting for.” It was her very openness and unselfconsciousness that turned me on. Without saying any words I let her know that it was not about having large perfect breasts or a tiny waist or this or that kind of ass. I beckoned her over to me and I took off her pants. She wore plain cotton panties. She obviously hadn’t dressed to seduce me.

I put my arm around her hips and pulled her gently back toward the pillows just below the one window in my room, then I pulled the comforter up over us and held her.