She’d fixed it up nice, comfy tan sofa and warm yellow walls, pictures in frames. She was living in an old building in town. After six months I told her it was over and asked her to move out. But I don’t remember anything we did in that bed. When we lay on our bed, the cool night air poured over the rim of the window like water, falling to the floor and rising back up again, and sometimes cows would get through the gate next door and wake us by chewing the long grass outside the window. Like the time we were living in a small adobe cabin down a dirt road deep in a curve of the Rio Grande. This is the stuff that falls between, the stuff we never mention, the stuff we call life and forget. She was twenty-four and I was twenty-eight and it was the winter of 1982 on 110th Street in Manhattan. I remember moving in her and thinking, I could marry this girl. I remember cupping her small hard breasts in my hands when I entered her from behind and the way she drove hard against my lips when she came. Lately I’ve been remembering how her room was almost empty and everything was white, how the winter sun washed her slim girlish body in a cool marble light. To read every Esquire story ever published, upgrade to All Access. This article originally appeared in the February 2001 issue of Esquire.
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