She hadn't run over him with a car to create those arthritic movements in the bedroom nor had she cast some spell on him although she was loosely affiliated with bewitching organizations like WICCA despite their ecclesiastic and congregational ambiance. His pathetic reaction was strange although undoubtedly provoked. Sure, in bed together she had guffawed at his ridiculous post-sexual statement that he could not leave his wife as if women could not have sex with handsome men for pleasure. She apologized to him immediately afterward for this egregious chortling. After all, he wasn't so mistaken. Most women were there to mate with a man for the purpose of perpetuating their selfish genes by breeding. Most could not sense themselves beyond that feeling, that rush of love, that dopamine addiction that was cajoling them to breed. In fact, she had to admit that she had never met a woman who was not like that; but then, unbeknown to him, she never categorized herself as a woman. She was a female with nothing womanly inside of her. To her knowledge, there was no pathetic lonely neediness or "womanity" that brewed within her. Hearing her guffaw in bed an hour earlier and her bashful apology afterward, he probably did not think about anything in particular except how best to create an amicable departure. But then, still in bed, she made an analogy of sex to stale potato chips, which upon occasion she did not mind eating for the salt that was contained there. This faux paus must have made him feel as if he had had intercourse with a cannibal for soon there was that arthritic rustling with his clothes. The corollary of seeing him look for his clothes feebly was the igniting of her "miso-him-ony" (a word that she coined gabrielishly).
She went into the kitchen and to her satisfaction she found the man transformed into bacon. Anyhow, he wasn't there so she ate her breakfast snack, went to the bathroom, and then came out only to imagine that she heard him crying in the closet between the muffling of jackets, with empty hangers lightly clanging against each other. She felt a sorrow for him and took on his mental void. She saw, however, that he was outside and felt foolish. Had her senses been more astute than her cognition? It sometimes happened. From the window she saw him in the tiny park swinging alone with the full moon diluted by the rising sun.
Sex, she thought, as she watched his body hit the winds, was being massaged by one's own hormones, turned on by oneself, or more accurately one's sense of pleasure, and making love to fantasies of one's mind rather than the individual locked into one's body. Yet she was titillated if not inveigled by such physical pleasures that kept her imagination more bound than what she would have liked. Sensate hungers of animals and men were ineluctable but inconsequential "things" that she would not allow to be the synopsis of herself even if upon occasion she explored these appetites fully. This night was more than just diving into sensual experiences when she could no longer stay logical without slipping into a philosophical void: it had been a sociological experiment of seducing the opposite sex in a gay bar called "Heaven" more from compassionate and empathic dialogue than sexual ploys; it had been because of the humidity of Houston; it had been…she was not sure what it was. She, having gone with some of her gay friends to "Heaven," had become one of those "fag hags" that such non-lesbian gay bar-going women are often called. Ostensibly, the night had been so different and so speciously amusing but really any nightclub was the same: that same loneliness and that same sense that appetites were fueling a human form like a smart bomb that was out of control. She scorned having had sympathy for him. She rebuked herself for having sympathy for situations that did not exist, which was so much worse. To think that he had been in a closet crying was worse than insane for one who was so proud of her logical skills, and so believing that she could stare down the eyes of wild leopards and not shirk from the eyes of lepers. Sorrow for him, she told herself, was a brief misfiring of neurons in an awkward situation that brought on a second of a brief hallucination and an emotional barricade that she now had to scurry around.
Gabriele ate a piece of cold toast abandoned near the bacon. She did not delude herself: he had prepared this meal (such as it was) to minimize his feelings that he had used her, although really she had used him. She was hungry so she ate. The fact that it was cold showed his hostility toward her. She knew this but ate the toast with a smirk on her face. A minute later, she took out some snuff from her purse and a cold beer from the refrigerator and then went onto the porch. Outside, the wind was still bringing the coolness of winter nights that the sun beat down with the days. She drank and watched him. She felt repulsion for her one-night stand and wanted to get into her car, which would move her to her apartment, exclusive to herself and her logic. The impulse to play, however, was too much; so after mildly draining the tobacco-saliva from her mouth into the beer can, she crossed Dunlavy street to join him on the swing set.
"Y-e-s!" said Gabriele in a tone of affected romanticism of the trivial, kicking the air beneath her as his swing lost momentum. She giggled like a schoolgirl. She reduced her swinging gradually to cessation careful to not just stop because he had done so. After her feet were dragging and cutting into the dirt, he pulled out a cigarette to hang in his face.
"I fixed some bacon," he said indifferently after she was equally stagnant and inert.
"So you did," she responded less zealously.
He didn't say anything but she could read it all the same. He didn't say, "I'm sorry, but could you go?" He didn't say, "We enjoyed each other's company, I think." He didn't say, "I've got a relationship, more or less, with my wife although she doesn't know my other side." He didn't say, "I thought being with you might make me feel more desire for women, be more romantic, and get her back into my life again. I hope you don't think I've used you." He did not say that predominant thought that was in his eyes, "I'm sorry, but could you go, please?" There would have been a pleading "please" in it if he had been able to "find the backbone" to articulate his request. There was none of that "stuff" said among nearly all men from one generation to the next with a few extra contemporary novelties that saved men from being completely trite. She liked wordless empathy. It could be shut off at any second like tap water."
"Relationships: they are plural, complicated, and opposing for you, it seems." Gabriele said this with her hand under her chin as if her lover were an interview for a dissertation. "Don't be so worried." She smiled. "My fear of you hunting me down has more merit than any fears you might have of me." She chuckled at herself. Her mind repeated his laconic words: "I fixed you some bacon." They began to echo in her mind. "What is this?" she thought. "Does he want me to think this breakfast of his is my reward for this bit of a roll in the hay?" She snickered to avoid piercing him with dilating eyes of hate. Then she smiled at her former professor. It was a contrived smile and although she hated artifice, in a world of getting one's needs met one needed to behave insincerely.
"Complicated and opposing, are they? Okay, if you want to look at it that way," he retorted. "Well, you can't exactly say that you weren't in Heaven, can you?"