Dating Big Bird by Laura Zigman Read Free Book Online Page B

before he turned and walked away toward the distant lights of Sixth Avenue.
    The only explanation I have for getting involved with someone who was frozen was that I didn’t know hewas frozen at the time. And when I did find out, it was too late—too late to change directions; too late to pull myself away from someone who seemed to need so much. Who seemed to need
me
so much. And who I would come to need, too.
    Even the first night he came into my apartment and stayed over after a month of postclass Cedar Tavern conversations, I didn’t know. That first night we spent together, I chalked it up to the conversation we’d had earlier in the evening, when he’d told me, finally, about his son; his wife; his family; his career—about everything he’d lost. This was the kind of conversation you can’t quite walk away from when it’s over, and so when we stood in front of my apartment and I touched his arm and he didn’t move away, I took it as a signal. I tugged at the shirt cuff at his wrist, then slipped my hand into his and led him up the steps, through the set of double doors in the foyer, then up the flight of stairs to my apartment.
    Once inside, he stood in the center of the living room while I dropped my bags and went to turn on a small lamp by the bookshelf in the corner. I knew his mind was working, taking in as many details as possible. To anyone who didn’t know what he’d done for a living for so long and with such skill, he might have seemed as if he were simply trying to get his bearings in unfamiliar territory. But as I moved around the room and into the kitchen to get our water, I watched his eyes dart from point to point. From books, to small framed photographs of Lynn and Paul and Nicole on the shelves, to papers on the desk, to my bedroom door beyond, I knew that he was assessing me, deconstructing me, trying to understand me.
    I sat down on the couch and put our water glasses on the table in front of me.
    “What are you thinking?” I asked.
    He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and pretended to be preoccupied only with the range and scope of books on my shelves.
    “I was just thinking that you must read a lot.”
    “I used to. But I don’t anymore,” I said, responding to his statement but knowing he was really thinking about whether he should leave my apartment before anything happened.
    I tried to read him—tried to decide if I should say something then about how we didn’t have to sleep together tonight if he didn’t want to, or that we could if he did want to—that it didn’t matter—that after the conversation we’d had, all I wanted was to be with him. But before I knew which way to go, he walked slowly over to the couch and sat down. He looked down at my hands, which were gripping my knees, and then he leaned closer and touched the side of my face.
    And then he kissed me.
    It was an unusual kiss, I remember thinking at the time: awkward but passionate; tentative yet urgent in the sense that he seemed to be willing himself over a cliff—as though kissing a woman were an experience he had long since imagined and anticipated yet greatly feared. I remember noticing that he was shaking—his whole body—but I remember feeling certain the shaking would disappear as soon as the lights were off, as soon as we were in bed and our bodies had had a chance to get used to each other; the way that shyness and awkwardness always did the first time.
    I stood up, and he followed me down the short hallway to my bedroom. As we stood next to the bed, he put his hands on my hips to turn me toward him, then he put his hands on either side of my face and bent to kiss me again. He slid his hands over my throat and slowly down my neck to the cardigan sweater that started there, and when his fingersfound the small white buttons, he undid them, one by one, sliding the sweater off my shoulders and onto the floor. It was dark, very dark in my room, and before I closed my eyes, I felt him lay one hand