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<\/a><\/b>She\u2019d been ready.\u00a0 Or so she\u2019d thought.\u00a0 She\u2019d rehearsed what to say, even written down key words and phrases.\u00a0 She\u2019d tried on different outfits.\u00a0 She\u2019d bought a black lace something.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t know its name — a teddy, maybe.<\/p>\nHe was out of town.\u00a0 Her husband.\u00a0 So far out of town there was no chance he\u2019d appear unexpectedly.\u00a0 Even so, she had a story on hand: a trip to New York for the museums and the streets and her old aunt.<\/p>\n
She went.\u00a0 And she did walk the streets and lunch with her aunt and see a photography exhibit from China and a perplexing sculpture show at the Museum of Modern Art.<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t have his number.\u00a0 She knew the building where he lived, but it felt at once too bold and too pitiful to loiter there on the chance of encountering him.<\/p>\n
She thought of staying over in a hotel anyway.\u00a0 To show that seeing her old lover was not the main reason she had come.\u00a0 But it seemed silly.<\/p>\n
The black lace was folded in pink tissue inside a zippered compartment of her purse.\u00a0 She heard the paper crinkle when she dug in the bottom of the bag for change for the bus.\u00a0 She was glad now that she had hesitated to wear it.\u00a0 It would have added to her sense of defeat.<\/p>\n
She decided to walk to Penn Station, even though it was a good mile away and her feet were already tired from the day\u2019s meanderings.\u00a0 She forced herself to take long strides, tacking around other pedestrians so that she could keep up a good pace, and soon her spirits began to lift a little.\u00a0 As she marched along, she remembered how they used to spend whole days in bed, and how she\u2019d feel weak afterwards when she walked, a light, anti-gravitational sensation very different from the aching in her legs now.<\/p>\n
She hadn\u2019t felt the need for black lace in those days.\u00a0 Then, she had believed herself beautiful and adventurous simply because he had desired her so thoroughly and so recklessly.\u00a0 Sometimes, when they found themselves alone for literally minutes, he\u2019d pull her hand against him and want her to coax him into a hardness that couldn\u2019t be slaked.<\/p>\n
It had been like a river, his desire, and they had both thrown themselves into it, he, it had seemed, because he knew no other way, and that gave him a kind of purity in her eyes that she did not allow herself, for she saw always, out of the corner of her eye, what she had cast off to enter that river, and what she had cast off was no less than everything else she was besides the object of his desire, and so, of course, she was aware in every pleasurable moment of the specter of disaster.<\/p>\n
She stopped at a curb to wait for the traffic light to change.\u00a0 It was getting dark.\u00a0 Some cars had put on their headlights.\u00a0 The window of a dress shop on the corner was brightly lit.\u00a0 She turned and went inside.<\/p>\n
She thumbed through a sale rack, selected a red knit dress, and took it to the small fitting room at the back of the shop.\u00a0 A bored salesgirl looked up from a magazine and nodded at her from the cash register.<\/p>\n
She hung the dress on a hook and gingerly unzipped the purse compartment.\u00a0 She took off her blouse and skirt and her underwear, and put on the black lace.\u00a0 An alluring stranger stared back at her from the mirror.\u00a0 No, not quite a stranger.\u00a0 She was there.\u00a0 Only she was in disguise.\u00a0 And she recognized that, too.\u00a0 She put her clothes back on over the black lace and left the shop.\u00a0 She felt secretive when she passed the salesgirl, as if she were a shoplifter.<\/p>\n
She walked more slowly than earlier, mulling over the day.\u00a0 She found that in a bittersweet way she was relieved to have been thwarted in her hope of meeting her old lover.\u00a0 It was his idea of her she wanted, not him.\u00a0 And his idea of her had rested on a carefree pose that wasn\u2019t true.<\/p>\n
It was dark by the time the train pulled out.\u00a0 Occasionally, she saw a lighted apartment window and glimpsed a table and chairs or a stuttering television, but her eyes were tired.\u00a0 She leaned back against the hard headrest.\u00a0 It smelled like the sofa section of a Salvation Army thrift store.<\/p>\n
She slid two fingers inside her blouse and touched the black lace.\u00a0 It was warm from her body, and so thin it was more like a second skin than a garment.\u00a0 She fell asleep like that, rocked by the train\u2019s laggard sway.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cBasic Black\u201d was published in the journal Fathoms<\/i>, #4, Tallahassee, FL, 1995.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"