The Withdrawal Method Read Free

occasionally jotting something down. After a few minutes, he fetched a notebook of his own, one with a fancy leather cover her mother had given him one Christmas and he'd never used.
    If after the skin change she emerged a different person, he figured it would be useful to have a record of how she used to be. This he wanted to seem covert but mysterious, and kept eyeing her at the other end of the couch and saying, "Oh!" and then scribbling something down. But she was watching the movie and working and didn't ask what he was up to.
    Stats were first: height, weight, hair colour, birthdate, and so forth. Then he moved into slightly more personal information. Her favourite food was tomato soup, she had lost her virginity at seventeen while watching The Hunt for Red October, her desert-island disc was Graceland, and she could not abide the squeak of Styrofoam against Styrofoam or the thought, even abstractly, of eels.
    And then he wrote this: I like the way she scrunches her eyes up like a little kid when she eats something she doesn't like. He wrote, Sometimes she laughs too loud in public and I complain but really I find it amazing. He added, Sometimes I find her amazing.
    YEARS AGO, FOR their second Valentine's Day together, they decided to eat at separate restaurants - the idea being that loneliness would reinforce their love. It worked: he pushed his food around pathetically with an empty chair across the table, the over-attentiveness of his waiter a poor mask for pity. Later, he clutched her in bed with what could be described only as desperation. It had become a Valentine's Day tradition ever since.

    He added this to his list the next night, while she screened something irreverent from France. It required a few pages and an expository style that at first seemed odd beside the pointform notes, but then he liked. He looked up: in the movie one of the characters said, "Je t'aime," to another character, and that character said it back - although there was something Parisian and disaffected about the exchange. The French! They were so mean and great.
    Opening his notebook again, he added another little story. The third time they had sex he grunted, "I love you," when he was coming, and afterwards they lay in awkward silence on opposite sides of his futon. "I love having sex with you," he whispered after a few minutes, trying to make it sound like something he'd just covered and was now reiterating, casually.
    He was reminded then of this story: one night a few months later they were at a thing for one of their artist friends. Over the crowd of people in complicated shoes they locked eyes and she winked. Something in that wink sang through him, warm. He stumbled beaming (away from some guy detailing his process) across the room and planted one on her, as dumb and happy and slobbery as a puppy. They had pulled away, unspeaking, and for the first time in his life he could see in someone else's eyes exactly how he felt.
    On the Tv the woman was now wandering morosely around Paris; her lover was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, at the far end of the couch, she was making notes.

    He kicked her.
    "Ow," she said. "Don't."
    "Hey," he said, nudging her with his foot.
    "Hush, will you? This is for school."
    He nudged again and she looked at him, exasperated. "What?"
    "I love you," he said.
    She stared at him. "And?"
    "And do you love me?"
    "No, I hate you."
    "Really?"
    "Yes."
    He looked at her. She gazed back, her expression impatient. He looked into those eyes, from one to the other across the beautiful nub of her perfect nose, searching for something. But he couldn't find it, because he wasn't sure exactly what he was supposed to be looking for.
    AT NOON THE next day he went into the bathroom at work and locked himself in a stall. He put the lid of the toilet down, kept his pants up and sat. There was someone in the next stall over; he could hear the toilet paper being whisked from its dispenser, the scrub of it between ass cheeks, a