Amateurs Read Free Page B

consultant evoked galleries of classical sculptures rather than gyms of grunting bouncers. (Well, kind of.) She lately thought often of how his bicep veins had distended as he hovered over her and held down her wrists, how she’d wanted him to stay like that for longer than would have been comfortable, and at the same time how badly she’d wanted to touch his chest, dotted with cherry angiomas. His orgasmic grunt was short, friendly, and workmanlike, as if he were lifting one end of a couch. Later and without encouragement he rehearsed the case for a flat tax.
    After an uncommunicative fortnight of presumed spousal loyalty, he was in the picture again, recklessly liking Karyn’s status updates dating back a week. Partly hoping for this very sort of attention, she’d had Maxwell take several photos of her gardening in their backyard, had this morning posted the most flattering one, presenting it as if it were a PSA for growing one’s own food and not an exhibit of her fairly well-preserved looks and narcissism. (But surely the person who fears she’s succumbing to narcissism isn’t afull-blown case.) It really was a remarkable, if not a wholly realistic, photo: her head tilted in the way of a fixated dog without underlining the association; her chin irrefutably single (not wanting Maxwell to shoot from below, she’d made him stand on a birdseed bucket); her black-fingered gardening gloves elusively sexy. Twenty-four likes, close to double those incited by her recent post about neti pots. There were admiring comments too, which after a mood-lifting while started to embarrass her, started to feel well-meaningly condescending, as if the whole procedure were a collectively presented FOXY GRANDMA T-shirt. She wasn’t that old, but still.
    Though the affair with the consultant was atypical—to deal in numbers, their one afternoon and two nights together represented the lion’s share of her nonsolo sexual experience of the past four years—more and more this was how things went during the time between Maxwell’s bedtime and her own: the posting and liking and commenting and checking, the distracted revising of her play, the shutting down of her desktop computer, the crawling into bed, the distracted reading of a book, the booting up of her laptop.
    Twenty-five likes, the latest from Paul, the systems consultant.
    It wasn’t, usually, that internet socializing was making her lonelier, but that it was just sustaining enough to discourage socializing off the internet.
    A message popped up from Paul: “Hi.” Not, so far, a Cyrano of written seduction. Queasily she responded in kind.
    She thought she craved conversation of a literary-intellectual bent, but in those rare cases when she was with someone who wanted to talk about books and ideas, she found that the revelation of shared enthusiasms meant less than it once did, that her discourse wasn’t as glimmering as her interior monologues augured, that she was sweating to seem sophisticated for one person and constricting herself to seem down-home for another, that her companion’s thoughts on the book were fuzzy compared to those in the more accomplishedreviews, from which Karyn’s own fuzzy thoughts derived. Either there wasn’t much to say, or much to say but no spark of affinity and thus little drive to say it.
    An ellipsis foreshadowed another IM.
    She wasn’t nostalgic for the immodest social needs and modest standards of her youth, but she missed the easy birth of new friendships, the seemingly wild luck of three simpatico women housed on a single floor of a small dormitory, whereas now, to find two people whose company seemed more attractive than solitude, she thought she might need a bigger city.
    A floater crossed one of her eyeballs, a muscle contracted below her right shoulder blade. The message came through: “They’re calling me back to mpls for a few days in June. Looking forward to