ANDY

He was from Minnesota and beautiful as they come. He probably made his wings and halo visible to me the first time I saw him. They must have the best acting schools in heaven. Everything seemed heavenly work: his birthday was my mother’s birthday—and I love my mother—, we had the same brand of car—mine much crappier than his. He had been 5 km away from my hometown when he was in the navy—and probably has some children in the area too.

At the time he appeared, I was not exactly looking for the love of my life. Experiences were all I wanted. Good ones. My friend Diana, born matchmaker –the topic of La Celestina was often mentioned when talking about her—played a metaphoric violin while we talked looking down to the ocean. Her job did not stop that night, and she finally sold me and everyone the true romance story that maybe still lays buried in her mind. We were the perfect couple. Little did she know, little did I care about little details like the fact that I would never go skinny dipping in December, in Rhode Island, or that I don’t have the patience to play chess, or that I don’t like animals—no matter how breathtakingly good he looked holding that black cat in his arms, his pale skin in the red flannel bodysuit, standing in the morning sunlight.

A man like that did not need to be so sweet to get in a woman’s pants. He did not need to cook me breakfast in the morning while I was still in bed. You don’t do that if you don’t mean it, man. The whole thing was so blissful that I lost my muffler on the road coming back from his place one Saturday morning and did not notice until I saw the catalytic converter on the ground once I got to my final destination.

As all things that seem too good to be true, this felt too blissful to me. As blissful was the silence the Tuesday after that Monday night he begged me to come over to his place and we studied and went to bed but had no sex. And I asked him why in the morning and he gave it to me in that blissful silence that would end the nineteen days’ story. Plof!