There is a boy and there is a girl. Jane sees the girl on Tuesdays and Fridays and she sees the boy on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The other three nights she sleeps by herself in her big, firm bed.
She gathers the dogs every morning at 6 o’clock. This requires both the boy and the girl to leave her apartment and to refrain from preparing her breakfast. Given the opportunity, the boy would make eggs benedict. The girl would make cheese omelets. On Jane’s alone mornings she eats cold cereal with sugar.
Jane goes to art school in the afternoons and walks dogs six mornings a week and again at night. She realizes this is a cliché, the student dog-walker, but such is her life and she can’t help it. She lives in an apartment that has been occupied since 1948 by a member of her immediate family. In New York, you treat rent control like an heirloom.
Outside her window there are identical brick buildings surrounding a courtyard with large trees and an exceedingly well-maintained playground. Jane grew up on those swings. Twenty five thousand people in a half-mile radius live in apartments identical to Jane’s, with their metal kitchen cabinets and square pedestal sinks in the bathrooms. She is comforted by this sameness, and her place inside it. Eight years ago Jane’s mother moved to Boca Raton in a nest emptying role-reversal, as per family tradition. Unless Jane produces a child, the corporation that owns the buildings will quadruple the rent when she moves out. Her mother takes for granted that Jane will prevent this from happening. So, she supposes, does Jane.
The girl often gets lost in the maze of buildings when she comes to see Jane. She calls from her cell phone. “I’m at a fountain,” she says. Sometimes there’s no landmark other than a mound of daffodils. Jane comes down to find her.
The girl is a doctor. The boy is a lawyer. If they were married to one another they’d have kids who resent their ambition. They’d live in Upper Montclair and commute to Manhattan. The boy, in fact, does live in Upper Montclair. The boy is someone’s father but the girl isn’t anyone’s mother. Jane is not reminded of her own mother when she looks at the girl, but nevertheless the girl frowns in a disapproving way from time to time that makes Jane feel like lying to her.
Jane has always been this way with boys and girls. She likes boys for their size and for their crudeness, the way they bumble through life thinking all the while they’re in control. She loves girls for their strength but mostly for their skill in the sack. She doesn’t like the way that girls talk so much, the way they sit and talk cross-legged and shirtless on the couch or sit and talk in the recliner by the window or sit and talk on the bed straddling Jane.
The girl is a talker. Often when the talking mood strikes the girl, her lips are pink and maybe still slightly puffy from her vigorous interaction with Jane’s. Jane makes sounds to signify she’s listening.
The girl does not appreciate animals. This is unusual for a lesbian. She plants her bare feet in Jane’s kitchen and prepares a vegetable upside down cake with organic carrots and fresh dill and basil. Jane drinks wine at the dinette table left behind when her grandmother moved to Phoenix in 1981 and watches the girl through the kitchen doorway. The fluorescent lighting makes the girl’s short blonde hair glow like the wood fairy in a picture book belonging to the boy’s oboe-playing daughter.
The girl scoffs at Jane’s paltry collection of spices.
“I’ve survived so far with no sage in my life,” Jane replies.
The girl removes her blouse and finishes her cookery performing an impersonation of Emeril on ecstasy, topless. Jane pours more wine for the girl and holds the glass to her lips. She is wildly attracted to feminine women with an edge.
“I love you,” says the boy.
“I love you,” says the girl.
The boy has purchased a Sims computer game for his daughter. The child constructs a room with no doors and places a woman inside. The character pees in the corner. She grows depressed and lonely. After two weeks she curls up and dies. The boy makes an appointment with a child psychologist, who advises him to ask his daughter how much she really enjoys the oboe. As he tells this to Jane, he cries.
The girl has deeply green eyes. She asks Jane to leave the boy. She says this, and then is silent. Against this self-assuredness the boy doesn’t stand a chance. Lying in the girl’s arms, Jane should be thinking about what to say next, but she ponders instead the unfair advantage of girls over boys. Their adaptable body parts and their ability to say what they mean. She falls into a bewildered silence.
In the subway car the boy sits with his knees spread apart. Jane compensates by pressing her legs together, sideways. Other men on the train sit this way, too. She points it out to the boy. “It’s a physical thing,” he says into her ear. “One mustn’t constrict the package.” Also the boy has a loud voice. He doesn’t mean to occupy all that aural space, but it happens. Often she feels a great need to tell him to pipe down, especially in restaurants.
She calls the girl at the hospital. “I’m sick,” she says. “I think it’s the flu.”
“Drink fluids,” the girl says. Being a girl and a doctor, she knows a lie.
“I’ll see you next week,” Jane says.
The girl doesn’t say anything more. The girl is figuring her out.
