Mute

I talk dirty in bed. I'm not apologizing for this. I'm forty-five, I know what I like, and if that's too much information you're already in the wrong place.

The man last Friday was in the wrong place.

Fine at dinner. Fine enough. Acceptable face, passable conversation, nothing that should have predicted what was coming. I made a decision and brought him home and felt reasonably good about the decision for approximately four minutes, which is when I started talking and he didn't.

I like talking. Specifically I like talking dirty and I was doing exactly that, fully committed. I was in it. Completely in it. My entire personality deployed in one direction, which is considerable, and which requires, at minimum, a conscious adult on the receiving end.

He said nothing.

Not thoughtful nothing. Not pleasantly overwhelmed nothing. Disconnected line nothing. His body was there and technically functional but the person who owned the body had apparently stepped out and forgotten to mention it. I was talking into a void that had a jawline.

I kept going. I know. I kept going and I escalated, actually, on the theory that perhaps the problem was specificity. I got more specific. I used material I don't use lightly, at close range, with full eye contact, delivering it directly to a man who received it the way a fax machine receives a sentimental letter.

He made one noise. One. Nonverbal. The sound a dishwasher makes switching cycles. I've heard more expression from an elevator announcing a floor.

That's when I stopped.

Both hands flat on his chest. And I asked him, with what I would describe as genuine curiosity and what he would probably describe as unnecessary volume: what the fuck is wrong with you?

He blinked.

That was it. The complete reply. Slow, steady blink. The blink of a man who has been addressed in a language he doesn't recognize by a woman he can't quite locate in the situation. No words. No attempt at words. Just the blinking, patient and unhurried, like he was waiting for me to realize I'd made some kind of procedural error.

I got off the bed. Found his shirt. Handed it to him the way you hand someone an invoice.

He said: huh.

Huh. Not sorry. Not what. Not even the first syllable of anything that might eventually grow into a sentence. Huh. The sound of mild ambient surprise. A distant car alarm. An item you don't remember ordering arriving at your door. The sound of a person to whom something has occurred and who has absolutely no position on it.

I pointed at the door. He looked at the door. Looked at me. Looked at the door again. The door had not changed. He got dressed with the slow methodical confusion of a man trying to reconstruct a sequence of events that had gone off-script somewhere and couldn't locate the exact moment, and he left, and I closed the door behind him, and stood in my hallway in the silence that follows the removal of a silent person.

Better silence, for the record. Considerably better.

I knew by minute four. Not suspected. Knew. The configuration was wrong and I could feel the wrongness from minute four onward and I kept going anyway because I had committed to a decision and I don't like admitting bad decisions that fast. That's vanity, not optimism. I know the difference. I talked dirty to a wall for the better part of an hour because I didn't want to be the person who'd misjudged this badly this quickly, and all I got for that stubbornness was a man who blinked at me and said huh and shuffled out of my apartment still buttoning his shirt.

He texted the next day. Hey, you okay.

You okay. As if the variable requiring monitoring was my emotional stability. As if the events of the evening had produced in him some concern for my wellbeing rather than, say, any reflection whatsoever on his own contribution to those events.

I said yes and blocked him.

Some people are quiet. I accept this. Quiet has its place. Libraries. Galleries. Long-haul flights. Funerals.
Not my bed. Not when I'm talking to you, at you, about you, with full commitment and some of my better lines, and you respond by blinking at me like I've asked you to explain quantum physics.

-Laura