Annoy Me why Don't You

Annoy Me Why Don't You

    I was distracted by the rain outside the car window.  It splashed and wiggled against the passenger’s side and I was trying to figure out a way to run to my car when suddenly I felt his hand on my knee.

"You have a good night," his voice hit a high note.  He was in his late thirties but sounded like his voice was still trying to find itself like a thirteen year old. I stared at his hand on my knee then immediately looked up to find his eyes meeting mine.

"Yeah, okay" I said slowly, deliberately.

"I'll call you later "

"okay."

I jumped out of the car not caring that I didn't have an umbrella but caring instead of his hand on my knee.  Did he think I was easy?  Did he think I was flirting with him?  I shut his car door and ran to mine.  Once inside the car I sat there.  I had not been touched by a man in five years. When I say touched I really mean ravished.  Robert, my last boyfriend, held my hand, squeezed it lightly and kissed me on the nose exactly five years ago.  I remember looking up at the orange leaves slipping off the branches and the cold Boston wind whipping itself around my hair as it stuck out from under my beret. My black beret with all the lent on it, the one Robert use to wipe his soft hands on.  He would wipe and wipe as a gesture of love but the lent never came off and his efforts were in vain.  But I loved him and I loved him deeply.  The kind of deep that never goes away and you feel like it is cemented to your ribs and it causes you to take deeper breathes than usual because that's all you can do.  It was a love that hurt and sometimes I still curl up and cry.  I would curl up in the tub without warning, in the warm water. I would curl up when I woke up at two in the morning and cry because there was nothing else to do.  Imagine five years later waking up from a dream about the day you broke up with your boyfriend, the special one.  It's the damn orange leaves that I run from in my dream.  I figure in my dream state that if I can run from the leaves before it touches the surface Robert and I would still be together.  Insane.

    So, here I am taking a graduate Japanese literature class five years later at Harvard and this guy I will call Mickey, because he looks like a Mickey, and sounds like Mickey Mouse, not all the time, only when he is uncomfortable with saying no to someone and then his voice does this weird thing; but his real name is Andy, and he is trying to be my friend.  God knows I need a friend.  But he’s not weird; he’s cool when you get to know him.  And what do I do? I become his friend.  And then his lover; but it does not stop there.  It never does. Does it?

     So we become lovers and I am sitting here trying to tell you how this happened but I can’t remember and I want to call him and ask him when the first time we made love but I can’t; because he isn’t answering his phone.  He would, I know he would; but he works in a cubicle with other people.  He’s a paralegal, at this swank office in Cambridge, Ma. His i phone sounds like it is on speaker phone with steroids -- only it is never on speaker phone and he has the volume on low but still you can hear everything.  Of course I learned that too late.  Of course.  Because I called him, and I know you are not supposed to begin a sentence with because but I have too! Anyway, I called him one day because I wanted to tell him that I was sitting – no, laying in our army green, bamboo sheets in my birthday skin, meaning naked. And I proceeded to tell him and I was giggling with the corner of the sheets wedged between my front teeth and I felt sexy as hell.  And my feet were sticking out and I swung them from side to side.

“Hello?”  He said in his perky way.

“Remember what I smelled like last night?”  I was getting a high from the rush of what his smile might look like, with my feet still swinging.

“Hell – low” his emphasis was on the O.

“I remember what you smelled like” I kept talking like a run on sentence and singing as if I were singing a nursery rhyme.

“And I remember how my breath pushed past my lips into the opening of your ear –“ but I never got a chance to finish what I was going to say because he cut me off.

“I work in a cubicle” he was rushing, pushing his words forward before mine could fit in.

“Annoy me why don’t you” I swear I was finished with him.  He was cutting off my long awaited feeling of wanting someone. There is a poem by Emily Dickinson called, I taste A Liquor Never Brewed.  In one of the lines she writes, Inebriate of air am I, basically she is drunk with an intense feeling for nature and I could relate.  I wanted to be drunk with a longing for someone I was growing in love with.  I prefer to say growing in love instead of falling in love.  So I hold the phone away from my ear and scream into it.

“What?  So you mean other people can hear me?”

“Um, yeah something to that degree”

“Whatever” Sexy was out and perturb was in.  The moment was gone and I was back to my reality.

I never got a chance to tell you what I was doing besides trying to take a class in Japanese Literature, studying The Tale of Genji.  I was trying to find a way to make my thirties truly memorable.  Since thirty is the new twenty I felt inspired to be adventurous and open-minded about this decade.  I am thirty-five, so I am half way through.  During the day I work for an advertising company part-time as a copywriter.  In the evening I take graduate classes to get a degree in comparative literature.    

     I am so distracted lately because of Andy.  I can always smell him.  His scent is so distinctive.  He smells like curry powder and patchouli and it drives me crazy.  He only eats Indian food because his parents used to live there in India doing missionary work.  He speaks some Urdu and volunteers to work with Indian and Pakistani students whose family have immigrated to America and needs legal advice on obtaining educational vistas. So this is Andy and I really like him.  I know I sound like a teenager in love and okay maybe the word love is a little strong.  If you want to be fair about this let’s just say it‘s an infatuation and I think it’s mutual.  I’ll tell you why.  It was another rainy day and I was sitting in Harvard Square at the coffee shop, Au Bon Pain and Andy comes from behind me, wraps his arms around me and whispers that he has been looking for me his entire life.   It’s the kind of romantic act that makes a woman smile.  He has flowers for me every time we meet and always surprises me with small gifts.  He tells me he does this so that I can shine my winning smile that stole his heart.  So I wanted to resist but it was hard and my heart was beginning to wither.  I used to read a book of poetry a week.  It was a secret between me and the universe.  I read the poems so that I could feel love, dream about being loved one day and keep the romance in me alive.  So Andy comes along and I decide he will be the one for now.