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The Mathematics of Being Alone

Maya was close to orgasm, but afraid that Thom would come just before she did, as usual, she faked it. Better to wait and finish herself off while Thom was in the bathroom than to hope for a miracle and be disappointed.

As Maya slid off of Thom’s sweaty body, he grabbed her back into a hug.

Ouch, watch it, she said, prying her long hair lose from where it was trapped under his shoulder.

Hmmm, baby, I love making love to you, he hummed into her ear.

Thom was the first man Maya had known to use that expression, make love, without irony, and while she could never say it herself, normally she loved hearing him say it. But that night it made her shiver.

Thom responded immediately to her body: What’s wrong, sweetheart?

Nothing. Just cold, she lied.

He pulled the bungled blankets up from the bottom of the bed, smoothed them over her, then kissed her forehead and went into the bathroom. This post-coital purging of her from his skin was new for Thom; she wondered if it meant he was having an affair.

As soon as Maya heard the water rush on, she kicked off the covers and rolled onto her stomach, slipping two fingers into the slick between her legs. With Thom’s shower echoing in the next room, the sound of their connection beginning to dissolve, she thought about the intense man on the subway that afternoon. His eyes were the biggest and bluest eyes she’d ever seen.

≠

Thom didn’t have the slightest inkling who Katherine was when Beatty introduced them at an opening. Yes, of course, Katherine Norman. Nice to finally meet you. I remember your work, it was the…

Mathematical Torture Devices, she said.

The Harness for Obligatory Self-Love was my favorite, Beatty piped in. She’s a great poet too.

Right, right, Thom laughed, then sipped from his empty wine glass. In our fall group show.

Since he’d guessed this much right, Katherine decided not to hold the rest against him. Clearly, Beatty ran the gallery that bore Thom’s name, but that wasn’t an unusual arrangement. Besides, Thom was kind of cute, in that bony boyish way she’d always found oddly attractive, odd in her friends’ eyes anyway. She particularly liked the way he rolled his feet down onto the sides of his sneakers. This couldn’t be good for his ankles, but the nervous shifting of his weight countered his pompous countenance.

Can I get you a glass of wine or something, he said then.

White, please.

While Thom skated through the crowd with a grace unusual for such a lanky man, Katherine noticed Beatty, still panting at her elbow. Beatty was quiet and mousy, both terms applying equally to personality and appearance, though his instinct for art was impeccable. His shows were a bold mix of emerging media and they almost always sold out. Katherine knew he had a crush on her—a sticky situation she’d only exacerbated by referring to her live-in boyfriend as my friend. Where was David in this crowd anyway?

He’s married, you know, said Beatty.

Who?

Beatty looked at her. Katherine looked at the floor.

≠

≠

That’s better, David said when Jaime took off her knit cap. The angular planes of her face needed a dark frame of hair to look complete. She pinched her cheeks to warm them, unsure what to say, reminded of her boyfriend, Jake, who insisted that she wear a tightly bound ponytail to deemphasize her tiny nose.

Had the bar not been so poorly lit, David would’ve seen that the color didn’t surface on her pale skin and so he wouldn’t have said, I love to make a good woman blush, in which case Jaime would’ve been saved the embarrassment over her reply of And what makes you think I’m a good woman? But as she would soon realize, it didn’t matter what she said. She could recite her grocery list in place of conversation and David would remain determined to pick her up, as would his sidekick Beatty.

When Beatty rejoined them, inch-walking not to spill the three overflowing pints, Jaime decided that he looked like a smaller version of his friend, but their shared features were far more handsome when brought into sharper focus on the freckled heart-shape that kept grinning right around her eyelevel. Though perhaps this was because when Beatty spoke to her, it was always as if in an intimate whisper, while David had one of those voices in search of validation from every stranger in the crowded bar. His words sounded practiced at home in the mirror, particularly when he raised his beer and said, To the freedom to maintain the alienation of youth well into adulthood.

You’re like mercury on a sheet of glass, Jaime said to him then. The concentric circles of his eyes pointed in her direction, steady for a moment, but blank. Poisonous and sliding all over the place, she finished.

David nodded, puffing out his bottom lip in imitation of thought, then he turned to Beatty and shouted, Let’s tell her the story about that time you bagged a deer.