The Night I was All Woman (Being With R, Part II)

The second time we met, we did not recognize each other.  R waited for me in the hotel parking lot, and I walked right by him.  We had been intimate two nights before, and, yet, we now seemed different people.  At least to me, R was not the impatient, exhausted and anxious man I picked up at the airport. This time he was relaxed; he looked smaller and vulnerable. He wore jeans and a polo shirt, and he smelled of Bleu by Chanel.

In his room, we drank the bottle of his vintage bourdeaux;  it was the same wine we spilled on the white sheets after making love.  But, it was not the sex that was memorable that night but the pillow talk and closeness we shared.  All the months we had been chatting online, R never game me more than one line responses to my questions.  Sometimes, he didn’t answer me at all. I thought him arrogant, selfish, dismissive, which he was. But he was also busy in his career, trying to save world by making it comply one document at time.  He didn’t have time for much else.

I wanted to fall in love with R  a little bit or at least enough to justify my sleeping with him. Yet, he wasn’t making it possible.  I  can’t do one night stands, and R was determined to make our dates a series of sexual encounters.  He was an adventurer — a man as rare a breed as the last spotted mountain lion.  And, as an adventurer, he was always on the move lest the gawkers, scientists , tourists, etc. unravel the mystery and hard-earned rewards of  his solitary existence.  I stopped asking questions after I realized that my curiosity frightened him.   I allowed our dates to take on their own life-form.  Then I found myself in his arms, and it was revelation to me: I could be all woman.

For seven years after my divorce, I had been as a good a man as a woman, handling finances, children, work, house, car problems, etc. on my own.  But, in R’s arms,  I was his woman and it was the most natural feeling on earth.  I was facing him and fit perfectly under the nook of his underarm: my chest against his chest, ribs to ribs,  and legs wrapped.  I felt like I was his water cannister, hanging from his shoulder — ready to provide him a drink.  I think now how strange that at that moment I had no awareness that I was taller, stronger or a bit bigger than he was.   I was comfortable, safe and vulnerable.  There was no competition or
awareness of anything but the presence of a man and his woman. 

In his dark hotel room, with the large window that overlooked the bay, the port and the downtown area — all spotty from street lights and the dirty glass — we talked about our childhoods.  I told him that when I was a kid, I needed to hear the sounds of running trains from the tracks outside my house to fall asleep.  He said that the smell of  the oil from his grandmother’s lamp reminded him of being a boy.  And, the sharing of that small bit of nostalgia was the most memorable piece of me being with him that I would have from all our dates.