Tell Me More. Janet Mullany

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СКАЧАТЬ OF AN AIR SHIFT, IT’S CUSTOMARY to tidy up for the next person on air.

      After I signed off for the night—the station is dark between two and five in the morning—I made sure there were no embarrassing damp pieces of underwear lying around.

      I reshelved compact discs and pulled the first few for my morning announcer.

      I took the last transmitter reading of the night.

      I set the satellite for the morning news feed. I knew Gwen, our local host, would do it anyway, but it was what I always did as a courtesy to her.

      I checked my email for the last time, and found two new messages. One from Julie, a serious, earnest music major, saying she could do Friday night, but wanted to be home by midnight. Good enough. I could come in for a couple of hours.

      The other was from the leprechaun, as Hugh had called him—he looked ordinary enough to me, no dumb hat or buckled shoes. I had a vague impression of a shortish, slender man with wild coppery hair, steel-rimmed eyeglasses and a strange patch of beard on his chin. I remembered the amusement in his voice and the lilt of his brogue.

       I’m still interested in the apartment if it’s available. Please let me know when I may view it.

      What a gentleman. No mention of Christmas or underwear or your future landlady having her ass screwed off on the sofa.

      Lights off, bike gear on, alarm turned on and I was out into the cold night, a splendor of stars above me.

      Could Mr. D. see those stars from his cabin or was it buried deep in trees? I was sure he lived in a cabin, high up in the mountains, although most of us in town had hardwood floors and woodstoves.

      I pushed off, cycling hard up the hill, forcing myself. I wasn’t afraid of cycling in the dark—at any time of night in this environmentally conscious town there were cyclists on the road. As I rode, I thought about renting the apartment, the mice in the basement … domestic trivialities.

      Anything to stop me thinking about what Mr. D. had proposed.

      After I’d emailed Patrick, telling him to come—an unfortunate word choice I changed to stop by—anytime after three the next day, I couldn’t sleep. I wandered around the house, now too empty without Hugh. I couldn’t put it off any longer. Had I made the right decision regarding Mr. D.? It had to be, since there was no going back.

      To my surprise, the man who had proved so elusive for many months now wanted to meet me. One orgasm—mine, if he had told me the truth, and I wasn’t quite sure he had done so—and he had a complete change of mind?

      And I was embarrassed and angry. I had touched myself and talked dirty and moaned, broken my phone-sex cherry, I guess. I had shared this most intimate of pursuits with someone who hadn’t reciprocated. I had performed without knowing it. Now I was not in a mood to be cajoled.

      “But of course we should meet.”

      “No,” I’d said.

      “I’ve never been more intimate with a woman. Not even when I was married—”

      “You don’t know me. I’m a fantasy for you. You’re a fantasy for me. It should stay that way.”

      “Don’t push me away, Jo. I understand that you’re feeling wounded by what Hugh did, but—”

      “How do you know I didn’t make Hugh up?” I was angry now. “And this isn’t about Hugh. It’s about you and me. Think about it, Mr. D. I don’t even know your name. You haven’t exactly been open with me, have you?”

      “My name? You want to know my name? It’s—”

      “Stop!” I was panting as though I’d ridden a bicycle uphill. “Don’t tell me.”

      “Jo, what do you really want?” His voice was gentle, sad.

       I don’t know. You. Maybe.

      And then I thought of the men I’d loved, the men who claimed to love me back, the mistakes and infidelities, the withdrawal into indifference. I remembered pushing Hugh away in bed because I felt smothered; I remembered too how I’d reached out for him, when I was overcome with loneliness and regret, and his impatient grunt as he shook off my hand.

      Did it happen with every relationship? I didn’t want that familiar path anymore. I didn’t want to take that journey—not yet anyway. Eventually I knew I could take the risk, but not now, still worn out and disillusioned by Hugh’s infidelity.

      I took a deep breath. “I don’t think this is right for me. I’m sorry. We should say goodbye.”

      So it was done.

      His last words to me echoed in my head. “Very well. I’m sorry, Jo.”

      A click and silence.

      I had lost a friend.

      Patrick had pretty much decided he’d move into the apartment on Yale Drive if Jo Hutchinson offered it to him, which he thought she probably would. It turned out she knew one of his references, a good sign.

      The apartment was small, built over a garage; what Americans called an efficiency and he’d call a bedsit, one large room with a minimal sort of kitchen arrangement and a bathroom. There was a staircase up from outside and a door leading into the house and Jo offered him use of the washer-dryer in the basement and, if he had ambitious cooking plans, he could use her kitchen.

      He told her he might well be inspired to bake a half-dozen loaves in that fancy high-tech oven, and she looked at him in a way that suggested she didn’t know whether he was joking or not.

      He liked her. She was a bit eccentric, and there was some awkwardness, mostly on his part, that he’d seen her naked.

      She spent the first five minutes of this meeting staring at his chin and then told him that taking the beard thing off was an improvement. Given what she was doing the day before, he thought he should be flattered that she’d even noticed his facial hair. He launched into a long rambling explanation of how he tended to sideswipe the beard thing while shaving so it lost definition, but the silent subtext of his monologue was that he wished he’d got a better look at her breasts when she was naked.

      Today she wore some sort of blue shapeless dress thing—her legs and feet bare—probably made of hemp or tofu or compost like everything else in the town. He liked her slender body and waifish short dark hair in a ragged sort of style that either cost a lot of money or was a mistake, he couldn’t tell.

      She didn’t look the way she sounded on the radio; she was younger than he would have thought, about his age, late twenties. But her voice was sexy in real life, too, and he told her he liked the music she played even if he didn’t always understand it.

      “Do you like being a DJ?” he asked.

      “I’m music director. I decide on the music programming. The on-air work is only a small part of what I do.”

      He felt he was being corrected. For someone who had a geeky sort of job, though, even geekier than his, and looked fey and otherworldly, she was right on the button when he asked about insurance and security and cable access.

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