You Lost Me There Read Free

in through the window and brought the forest, the smell of thawing ground. I still had another appointment that evening, but I lay there in my underwear, staring at Regina’s ceiling.
    How many other men had occupied my place? Was there a Thursday date? One who could make love properly?
    On the wall was a poster of a young female singer dressed like a Japanese robot, her hair tied up in two buns. I reached out for Regina, but she snorted through her nose and scooted away, slurping her wine.
    “So how’s work?” she asked, crawling back.
    “Fine. You?”
    Truthfully I was thinking about that beach moment in Puerto Rico. I remembered feeling slow to the rescue.
    “Oh, please, come on,” Regina said, changing into an old T-shirt with “Kiss Me” scrawled on the front, promising “The Cure.”
    “What?”
    “At least complain about someone. You never talk.”
    “Maybe I’m not the gossip type.”
    “Aren’t you high on the hog.”
    Regina wiped her lips with the back of her hand and smiled. “Well, don’t you wonder what people say? Aren’t you curious?”
    “Believe me,” I said, “by now I am too old to care.”
    Regina stared at me as if she wanted to share something, then turned away. Not many women, I thought, can appear wise and naive simultaneously.
    “All right, what?”
    “Forget it.”
    She unclasped two barrettes and threw them at the wall, one at a time.
    “Well, what do you want to talk about?”
    “Oh, Christ. You know you sound—” She watched me for a minute while I dressed. “ Chéri , the least you could have done was clean your wife beater.”
    “My what?”
    “Your wife beater.”
    “What’s a wife beater?”
    “Oh, don’t tell me.”
    Regina laughed deep in her throat and pulled her T-shirt down against the breeze. Such chubby baby cheeks, I thought, staring from my position by the door, and grabbed my keys off the dresser.
    I was leaving when she said, “You really don’t give a fuck about me, do you?”
    Out of the blue, just like that.
    So flat it could have been her alarm clock going off.
     
     
     
    Friday evenings, I had a time-honored date with Aunt Betsy in Northeast Harbor, preceding Regina by several years. Aunt Betsy was virtually my only companion. She was an eighty-six-year-old gossip who shredded other people’s lives between her fingers over breakfast. Her family had long inhabited Mount Desert Island and she knew everyone, year-rounders like me as well as the summer people, and collected our personal affairs not for wampum, but like a pack rat, for the joy of hoarding. No one was beyond her reach. Her dispatch board was a dining table cluttered with newspapers, coffee cups turned into ashtrays, and a large black office phone. In town, she’d pick up tidbits at the post office, the hardware store, and from the owner’s twin daughters at Pine Tree Market, who’d inform her which customers were doing what and to whom. As an amateur anthropologist, Betsy studied misbehavior. She tracked her stories doggedly and did not hesitate to use them. She loved playing vigilante. A few years earlier, when one of her neighbors, Tim Winston, hit the lotto, he’d secretly financed a breast augmentation for his girlfriend, while his wife, Maureen, still worked two jobs. During the winter, Maureen had shoveled out Betsy’s car a few times and helped carry in her groceries. When Betsy got wind of things, Maureen soon was filing for her share, represented by one of the area’s most expensive divorce attorneys.
    But Aunt Betsy didn’t know everything about us. If she suspected where I’d been before dinner, I would have seen it in her face. Aunt Betsy rarely blinked. Her eyes behind her glasses were always wet.
    “You look terrible,” Betsy wheezed. She patted my arm. “Did you watch the tennis?”
    “I have a job,” I said. It came out short. After Regina’s, though, I wasn’t in the mood.
    “Not much else besides, I’d say.”
    That made me