Josh Russell is one of my favorite writers. His stories and novels are funny, sad, and deeply human. His sentences are deceptively easy to read. Try reading them out loud and hear their music. Here is a story of a college hookup that, like all such things, usually mean more than they do to at least one of the people involved.
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Will met Paula at a poetry reading. She was there with Emily, a girl Will knew from the Women’s Studies seminar they were both taking. When Emily introduced Paula to Will, she mentioned he was in the seminar, and Paula looked him up and down with a bemused smirk that tweaked her pink lips into a cute curl.
“Paula’s home from Vassar to put her cat to sleep,” Emily explained as they sat down.
“We went to high school together.”
Someone began to introduce the poet, and while he half-listened to the list of awards and fellowships the visitor had won, Will wondered why Paula had come all the way from New York (where he was pretty sure Vassar was) to Atlanta to put a cat to sleep, and why she was out at a poetry reading when home to do such a thing.
The poems were all about orgasms, which made Will both uncomfortable (he was in a crowded room in the English department) and horny (he was twenty-one years old and hadn’t had sex in seven months). He tried to think about putting cats to sleep to avoid a boner. In the middle of one poem—_You never know when your passionate, moaning lover is having a lyrical orgasm_—Will tipped his head to scratch an itch below his ear and inadvertently caught Paula’s eye, and as the poet continued the epic orgasm, a long-winded orgasm in which one lover plays the hero or conqueror and relishes his victory, Paula winked.
In a singsong voice the poet went on and on about orgasms and Will began to enjoy two things: the poems were not only titillating, they were good, and Paula was pressing the side of her knee against the side of his knee. Dead cat, he thought as the poet tried to fill his head with other thoughts, dead cat dead cat dead cat.
Thirty minutes later the reading was over, and Paula was inviting him to come with them for a drink—they were meeting Emily’s boyfriend at a bar in Little Five Points—and then they were at the bar, and there was a pitcher, and when it was empty Emily and her boyfriend left because he had to get up early, and then Will and Paula split another pitcher and talked about Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (Will was reading it for the seminar, Paula had read it the previous semester), and then Paula said, “I can’t drive, can you?”
Will admitted he couldn’t, then told her they were less than two blocks away from the house where he lived. “I can sleep on the floor and you can have the bed,” he offered.
He truly expected he’d spend the night on the rug and in the morning maybe they’d get breakfast, not that he’d come back from brushing his teeth to find her sitting on the edge of his bed wearing only her panties (he was still fully dressed) and reading the copy of the book of poems he’d bought and had the poet sign. “I like these poems,” Paula said very seriously, not looking up. Will tried not to stare at her breasts, which were small and pink-tipped, or her underwear, which was yellow with green elastic and had what looked like a crest of some sort silkscreened on the crotch in green. “And I think I’d like them even if they weren’t about fucking—but clearly that helps.” She set the book on his pillow and patted the bed beside her and he sat down. For a few minutes they kissed sitting up, then he eased her back onto the sheets and they kissed some more. He hadn’t even taken off his shoes, and that made him wonder if he was going too far when he touched her breasts and then rubbed his fingers against the fabric between her legs, and even as she kissed him deeply and moved her hips he was still unsure what she wanted to do, how far she wanted to go—until she stopped kissing him and asked, “Why aren’t you taking off your clothes?”
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Will woke to find her standing naked before his window, watching something in the back yard, and when she saw he was awake, she asked if he wanted to come with her to take her cat to the vet. “Ever been to Peachtree City?”
“No,” he said, sitting up. “That’s the place with golf carts, right?”
She nodded. “Don’t laugh, my cat’s named Garfield. He’s nineteen years old. I’ve had him since I was, like, two. This is going to suck, I warn you.”
The way Paula stood nude in the sunlight—neither bashful nor seductive, just comfortable and alive—made him happy she’d asked him along, even if it would suck.
They found her car on Euclid and stopped at a Starbucks before getting on the highway. NPR negated the need for small talk, and though he assumed she was thinking sad thoughts about her childhood cat, Will began to worry that her speechless concentration on the road might mean she’d decided she’d made a mistake by inviting him. Between two exits a row of brand new townhouses with vinyl siding stood in the middle of a field of red mud.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone my age named Paula,” Will said to snap the silence— then felt stupid and blurted, “Will is short for Wilmer.”
Paula laughed. “Family name?”
“Grandpa,” he agreed.
“Paula’s my aunt’s name. What time is it?”
Will checked his watch. “Nine-thirty.”
She nodded. “Okay, here’s the deal, I have to get Garfield to the vet and then I need to take a shower. My flight’s at one-thirty, which means I need to be there at twelve-thirty, which means we need to leave at eleven-thirty.”
It was the first he’d heard of the flight. When she’d invited him to come with her, he’d imagined comforting her after Garfield was dead, driving back to Atlanta when she calmed down, drinking beers on his back porch, cooking her dinner, waking to find her standing naked in front of his window again.
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Peachtree City was a sprawling series of stripmalls and subdivisions linked by paved trails cut through stands of scrub pines, trails along which golf carts sped, most piloted, it seemed, by reckless teenaged boys in Auburn hats. Paula told him it would be quicker to take the cart, and she held the cat in her lap and directed Will. Garfield calmly watched the passing pines while Paula cooed to him. Will had never driven a golf cart before, and he was sure embarrassment waited for him around the next blind curve, but they made it to the vet’s without humiliation.
As he set the break, Paula began to weep and Garfield began to howl. Will led her inside and was ready to speak for her, then realized he didn’t know her last name. Luckily there was an appointment, and they knew Garfield, and they acted like weeping women come to kill their cats were worth no more than a sad smile, and they led Paula and the cat into an examination room and left Will in the waiting area with a cage of kittens up for adoption and the TV playing Tom & Jerry.
He sat and watched mouse torture cat and wondered what was going to happen next. Seeing her standing calmly in the sunlight, his head cleared by sleep, he’d convinced himself there was more to it than beer and poems about lyrical and epic orgasms, and when she’d asked him to come to Peachtree City, his conviction had been strengthened, but now he wondered if he’d been fooling himself. Jerry hit Tom in the face with a hammer.
Paula was carrying a cat collar on which hung a tag shaped like a clover when she came from the exam room. “Okay, okay,” she said, then took a long, stuttering breath and let it out. “Okay.”
She drove the golf cart back to her house and they didn’t speak. Will could tell she was fighting tears. He wished she’d lose it, pull off into the trees, fall sobbing into his arms.
In the laundry room between the garage and the kitchen she pulled her t-shirt over her head and reached around behind her back to unsnap her bra. For a few quickened heartbeats while she shrugged off her bra and then pushed down her pants he was sure they were about to have sex, but she picked up her dirty clothes, dropped them into a basket beside the washer, said, “I’ll be quick,” and walked out.
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Heading north toward the airport Paula told him her father was a Delta pilot and that she
was pissed at him for not being able to take Garfield to the vet—what kind of man has to fly his daughter home from college to put a cat to sleep?—then she abruptly changed the subject and they laughed about the poet and her orgasm poems (Good old-fashioned men and women never tire of the pastoral orgasms that appear in the midst of rural scenery), about the ticket Paula had gotten for parking in a loading zone on Euclid. It was clear to Will this joking was a way to talk about when they’d been together in bed, Will inside her, their arms around each other—the most significant thing they had in common, therefore the thing impossible to talk about—by talking about everything else they’d shared: poems, Emily’s boyfriend’s ridiculous clam-diggers, the freakishly cheerful guy manning the Starbucks drive- through window. He knew as well she was distracting herself, thinking about sex so as not to think about Garfield.
In the parking garage Paula used a fine-tip Sharpie to write her email address on the back of his hand and his on the back of hers. She didn’t kiss him. Will watched her hurry toward the terminal, not looking back even once, and wondered if he should be upset that she’d been fending off heartbreak, nothing more, when she shared the night with him instead of sharing it with the old cat she had to put down the next morning, rather than happy that perhaps life could truly be that simple, her motives that pure.
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