Read Online Paper Lantern: Love Stories by Stuart Dybek - Free Book Online Page A

Italy, the relationship with Buck had seemed a romantic adventure, but once back in the States she began to suspect that Buck, despite the macho way he dressed—the Wolverine boots and his prized Stetson Gun Club hat that he had worn during their trip to Europe—was gay and didn’t know it. She returned to her ne plus ultra—Rey.
    “Once someone has taken you across a line into the best sex of your life, you can’t go back. It’s not easy for other men to turn my head from Rey,” she said. I didn’t ask what she meant by “across a line,” and I wondered how many other times Rey had been there to collect her yet again.
    The sleety horizontal snow had plastered my wipers to the windshield. Given the alcohol, the hour, and the weather, Lise suggested that rather than find a hotel, let alone trying to drive back to Michigan, I sleep on her couch.
    The couch was more about decor than comfort, a quality shared by most of her furnishings. Stuff—chiming clocks, threadbare tapestries, knickknacks, ornate mirrors, and murky oil paintings—crowded her small apartment. The room looked as if it might have a musty resale shop smell. I supposed it was decorated in Great Eye. There was a sense of recycled pasts that brought her phrase “so much history between us” to mind.
    “Like it?” she asked.
    “Very quaint.”
    “Please, the operative term is whimsical. I meant the grappa.”
    “The operative term is thank you, I never tasted anything like it. ”
    “So what do you collect?” she asked.
    “What do I collect?”
    “Everyone collects something,” she said. “First editions, baseball cards, saltshakers…”
    “Frankly, since moving to Michigan, I’ve been trying to get rid of shit.”
    I interpreted the alarmed look she gave me to mean that we were on a subject sacred to her, beyond anything in common between us.
    She unrolled an unzipped sleeping bag over the brocade cushions and fluffed a pillow faintly scented by her shampoo against the single fin of the couch. “At least you’ve dared to remove your shoes, or do you always sleep fully dressed?”
    “I forgot to pack my footy pajamas.”
    “Will you be warm enough without them?”
    “If my feet get cold I might need the loan of that fur hat.”
    “It’s been a lovely evening. Thank you. Sweet dreams, Jack,” she said, and tucked the flap of the sleeping bag over me.
    “No peck good night?”
    Amused, she leaned toward me, chastely kissed my forehead, and let me draw her in. Her mouth tasted of rose petals and white lightning. She pulled away, and went about the apartment switching off lights, then, silhouetted against the street glow of the windows, stood as if she might be listening for something. Neither of us spoke—a silence made palpable by ticking gusts of sleet. She was shivering when finally she returned to the couch and slid in beside me under the sleeping bag.
    From that first night, I always preferred that room in the dark. The windows above Dorchester, steamy with radiator heat, appeared tinted by the northern lights—an aura reflected from the blinking neon hangers in the dry cleaner’s shop window below. The storm faded to a tape hiss in the background of her breathing as we kissed and she lay back with her mouth open, waiting for another kiss.
    “I think we can dispense with the pretense of you sleeping in your clothes,” she said.
    “In my wildest imaginings I couldn’t have anticipated this. Not to be forward, but besides no jammies, I don’t have protection.”
    “Me neither,” she said. “Just so you know, I’ve never done a one-nighter.”
    “I’ve been tested since the last time I was with someone.”
    “You’re safe with me,” she said, and though I hadn’t the slightest idea on what that assurance rested, I couldn’t at that moment summon the nerve to ask.
    The following evening, when I phoned from Michigan, more than a hundred miles away, I said, “That thing about you never having done a one-nighter,