If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories by Laura Kasischke Read Free Book Online Page B

little interest in literature, and when he asked his questions, she always made a funny little pursing kiss with her lips and looked at him longer than was necessary.
    Well, maybe he couldn’t fool her, but Tony could fake it for the instructors, so homework never interfered with his relationship with Melody. Neither did work. She would come to the library where he worked part-time while he stamped books, sometimes sitting on his lap.
    He’d had, by this time, a few girlfriends, but Melody was the first one with whom he’d slept in the same bed night after night after night. He learned how to slip out of bed to go to the john without waking her up. He learned how to match his breathing to another person’s as sleep came on. And from Melody he learned about biology—the female side of things. Together they paged through aborrowed copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves , looking for a better method of contraception than the one they were using, which was coitus interruptus. With her, he studied the line-illustration of the internal organs of the female with care. The cervix seemed particularly mysterious, being neither flesh, actually, nor an organ. A sea animal sort of thing. There was nothing in the male anatomy to compare it to, as far as he could tell. Tony read about the incredible sensitivity of the clitoris, and felt jealous. He read of the many diseases of the female reproductive organs, and felt relieved. He studied the symptoms of the diseases—mostly pain and itching—and the way men passed on the diseases, as lovers, and then ignored them as doctors and actively encouraged them as politicians and oppressors. He was aghast when he saw the photographs of naked pregnant women, although he pretended not to be.
    “Isn’t that beautiful?” Melody had said.
    “Hell, yes,” he agreed.
    But something blocked his throat—mucus, phlegm?—and Melody seemed to notice.
    “Don’t you think that’s beautiful?” she asked again.
    “Yeah,” he said, “Definitely. Yes.” But she looked at him longer than she usually did.
    Soon after that, Melody stopped shaving her armpits or her legs. “Do you mind?” she asked, holding up her arm, under which a little nest had grown. “It’s just so unnatural, shaving.”
    No. It didn’t matter to him in the least. He liked it. The muskier she was the more she seemed like another human being—not like his other girlfriends who smelled like Pine Sol and looked like pictures. They had sex straight through her periods. Cunnilingus even! Blood on everything. Yes! On his face, in his hair, on the dormitory walls. They had sex straight through the winter until it was spring, and the lawn of the college commons was hopping around with pregnant birds. On his way to class one morning, Tony crushed a pale blue egg under his shoe by accident, and gagged, scraping it off with a leaf. Everything was having sex.
    This was, of course, the common life, but his common life was animated by an extraordinary love. No one had ever loved this waybefore. Technicolor! Tony was charmed! He’d been chosen! This was your Average Joe pumped full of light and oxygen and set afloat.
    After the semester ended, Tony and Melody moved out of the dorm into a sublet together. He would walk down the street on his way to his job at the library, and suddenly be transported by the realization that, back at the studio apartment, his girlfriend was rinsing out his cereal bowl! It was incredible, waking every morning next to Melody, or waking to hear her puttering around in their kitchen (only a few feet from their bed on the other side of a plywood partition) making a pot of coffee for them. It was incredible, finding her beaded earrings on the bathroom sink. Her toothbrush leaning casually next to his in the toothbrush holder! It was only for the month of May and half of June, but in that span of time they became an elderly couple, complete with routine and cat (until it got out.) Simple chores became an adventure in