Read Online Vintage Attraction by Charles Blackstone - Free Book Online Page A

revolving door, waiting for a taxi. Talia handed me the cumbersome parcel to hold while she took a plastic Urban Outfitters child’s wallet from her bag. She began wrenching free a credit card. Her averted eyes allowed me a puerile chance to check her out. In doing so, I was again put in mind of the occasion of our unofficial first date at the bagel place. The counter barista had been so transfixed by the sight of her chest her open coat and low-cut top had afforded that he delivered Talia her change and the cash she’d paid him for her coffee with a tremulous hand. When she said to the lanky kid with Brillo-pad hair who reminded me a lot of myself at that age, “Um, dude, I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to pay you ?” it only made things more awkward. I recalled how rapidly the patches of freezer-burnt skin on the kid’s face reddened, in the time he reached to recollect the pair of dollar bills she held out for him. Everything had worked out according to plan—better than according to plan, since I hadn’t really arrived with a plan. I knew I’d finally found the right time to call Izzy. But standing there I also found the familiar and unfamiliar abundance of Talia’s physicality eliciting a shade of incapacitation similar to that of the nerdy barista’s on my own cheeks now.
    It was inordinately frustrating that despite how I felt about Izzy, Talia still had some kind of hold on me. Things with me and the host of the city’s most watched cable-access television showcouldn’t have been more promising in juxtaposition with this sexual perversity in Chicago. How had I gotten so attached to a twenty-year-old vegan with dyed hair, a music blog, Facebook page, and a Brazilian wax? During the semester, both because of how I felt and of the inevitable institutional repercussions for feeling, I was wary of even venturing close enough to hand back assignments, but when she began to come on to me, I didn’t resist. I couldn’t. She wore ethereally iridescent purple and blue thongs. She sprayed thrift-store sweaters with anachronistic Exclamation perfume. She had a Mac. She read Pynchon and kept T. S. Eliot and Nabokov on her bedside table in off-campus student housing. During our illicit months together, we drank wine (the French provenances she always pronounced unflinchingly), made out in my Mustang, in her Jetta, ate at pancake houses, fucked breathlessly and without condoms. Once, when I was sick, she bought and prepared me instant asparagus risotto—the outcome of which was far more successful than when she tried to cook without a boxed mix—and hot lemon Theraflu. I could argue about philosophy and summary-to-scene ratios in short stories with the precocious underclassman poised to graduate in just two years, three fewer than the average UIC English major. But our connection, like everything else within the speciously protective confines of academia, was, even then, already finite. At the time, being with Talia was everything I needed, but I didn’t want it anymore. No matter how drunk I ever got, I knew how I operated: I stumbled into entanglements, tumbled from one romance with a girl I’d offhandedly select to the next, haphazardly—I always had—but when I fell in love, I catapulted. I was in love with somebody else. And luckily for me—as far as I could see then, anyway—things with Talia were over for good.
    The taxi into which I helped her climb took off and vanished into the night before I’d finished saying good-bye. I was left standing at the curb. I realized that I was still holding the paper-and-plastic-bound bouquet. The orchids, through the vent, looked a little less energetic than they’d been when the clerk first armed me with them. It didn’t matter that Talia had relinquished the gift. With her gone, and out of my life, the flowers had served their purpose. I deposited the bundle into a black-painted