Florence Gordon by Brian Morton Read Free Book Online Page B

home.
    Today she saw six students, went online to do research for a paper she was writing, and tried to get caught up on her email. If she had just two and a half more hours of free time today, she thought, she could finally get her inbox down to a reasonable level, but she’d been thinking the same thing every day for the last five years.
    Normally she enjoyed every moment at the lab, but today she was conscious of a feeling of constraint. Now Daniel was here. She hadn’t done anything she needed to feel guilty about, and yet she felt guilty. She had had a secret little crush, which might be seen as the most commonplace thing in the world, except that she hadn’t had a secret little crush in years.
    At 6:30, Lev was at her door. They were going to a retirement party for someone who’d worked at the lab for decades.
    She’d asked Daniel if he wanted to come—spouses were welcome—but he had looked up from the TV and said, “Believe me, darling . . .”
    It was a reference to a line they’d once read in a review of Dennis Rodman’s autobiography: supposedly, after Madonna gave him detailed instructions about how to pleasure her in bed, Rodman replied, “Believe me, I won’t do that, darling.” Daniel liked to quote the line from time to time.

22
    “Are you sure this is okay?” she said to Lev on the way. “I hardly know her.”
    “Doesn’t matter,” Lev said. “You’re part of the team.”
    He was the strangest man in the world to have a crush on. He wasn’t young, he wasn’t handsome, he wasn’t particularly masculine.
    What he was, was warm. He was warm, warmer, warmest. When she fantasized about being with him, she rarely fantasized about sex. She fantasized about cuddling. She fantasized about lowering herself slowly into a warm bath of Lev.
    The lab—formally the Center for the Study of Motivation—was a distant outpost of the Columbia University Department of Psychology. It took up all five floors of a converted townhouse on Seventy-fourth Street near Central Park West.
    The party was in a rented space on Seventy-second Street. When they got there, Janine drank a glass of punch too fast, and it went to her head.
    The room was too crowded and the music was too loud. She leaned against a wall watching Lev talk with people, watching him transporting his benevolent portliness around the room. Emily had seen Lev once, just after she got here, and had taken to referring to him as Santa Claus. This wasn’t completely on target, but it wasn’t completely off.
    He made a circuit of the room, and then he came back to her.
    “People-watching?” he said.
    “Not really.”
    “Then what? You look like . . .”
    “Jim Thorpe?”
    “That’s not what I was going to say.”
    “It’s funny,” she said. “Getting used to someone again. Even if you’ve lived with him for twenty years.”
    “You mean Daniel?”
    She raised her eyebrows, which somehow meant yes.
    “I know what you mean,” Lev said. “I used to feel that way sometimes when I was away from Rachel for a week or two. It was like, ‘Who are you again?’”
    To what other man could she have said that it felt a little strange to reacclimate herself to Daniel? None. Not because it was too intimate, but because most men wouldn’t know what she meant.
    He had a quality of mind that she couldn’t help but think of as womanly. He was tall; he was heterosexual (even if she hadn’t known anything about his life, she would have known this: you can feel these things); but there was something about him that was best described as maternal. And thus, her friendship with him felt dizzyingly genderbenderish. Daniel occupied the masculine space in their relationship so obdurately that she felt as if she had no choice but to occupy the feminine space. With Lev everything seemed to be sliding around. It was the psychosexual equivalent of Twister.
    She’d spent all too much time trying to figure out if he was flirting with her. She was still