It was a moist Santa Monica evening smelling of Eucalyptus and flowery must. I hadn’t been able to put down the little tinge of pride I’d entertained in having had something to do, something mine and independent. I felt self-contained and whole when I unfolded from the back seat of the little car. I said good-bye to Maritza and to Jim and then turned to face the staring shirtless Russ. He looked different. Not like any Russ I knew.

He wasn’t wearing his glasses. This always made him look softer and, even, vulnerable. His round steel-rimmed glasses I associated with his constant corrections of my grammer; "that’s `to whom I spoke,’" "it’s `out of which it came,’" so that their absence usually gave me a small feeling of relief. But this time it was more than just his glasses. He was waiting there outside his father’s condominium complex as we pulled up. Completely unadorned, in jeans, barefoot, he clutched a red shirt to his ribs with one hand. His eyes were wide, intent.

He came toward me, did not acknowledge Maritza, whom he knew somewhat, or her new husband Jim, to whom he had not yet been introduced, and put his hand on me. He drew me to him and, slowly, pressed his face deep into my hair. I heard the car start up again. Russ didn’t move. I put one arm around his waist and the other up over his shoulder since his hand had stayed put with the shirt. I heard the car drive off.

Russ made me dizzy.

He hadn’t known when we’d be back. He told me he didn’t know how long he’d been standing outside waiting.

"Let’s walk," he said.

We turned, not losing contact, and he wrapped his arm tightly around my waist. He smiled at me. A smile of joy, not necessarily of happiness. When we turned at Santa Monica Boulevard, Russ sat us into the first bench we came upon in the blue dripping lamplight. We were at a sidewalk near a small apartment building. Traffic on the Boulevard was light. It was an odd spot. Aside, but nowhere.

He was silent and watched me. His eyes darted all over my face and his rich wide lips stretched and fell, stretched and fell. A weight grew at the bottom of my throat.

When I first met Russ Kanter in a tiny corner market at 20th and Pine in Philadelphia, I thought he was sort of ridiculous. He’d stared into my eyes in this absolutely earnest, deeply felt way that made me laugh out loud. At him. Russ was pressed and creased in his big suit and flashy tie, his brainy looking glasses. He actually seemed stiff to me then. The big lawyer on the loose from his office.

Then came the day I ran across him jogging. He wore only shorts and stood there wiping himself down with a small, perfectly white towel. Right outside our supermarket. He smiled calmly as I oogled his surprisingly perfect chest. The picture fell together, and when he took my hand and bored once again into my eyes I felt something give over.

He allowed my stammered request for the loan of a hammer without giving away his understanding that I already had one.

His small, painfully neat apartment was right above our grocery, and he asked me to wait while he rinsed off in the shower. I did. When he brought me the hammer, we stood leaning toward one another on a thin podium-like bureau by his front door. He kissed me, a soft warm pillow kiss, and pulling back, said "That ought to break the ice, huh?" and ushered me out the door.

I scraped up excuses to go the store. I glanced at his window compulsively, involuntarily, when I walked by in the mornings on the way to my bus. But Russ made me wait a week before he caught me in the grocery again.

Alone, at home or at work, I would baffle over this hold he seemed to have over me. I would be convinced it was silly. Call upon my own self-respect and control. Remind myself how buffoon-ish I found him at first. Surely the sight of a buff chest couldn’t be responsible for all this. But it wasn’t his body, it was his eyes. It was the cast of his moodiness. I was embarrassed to find myself caught in something I thought was only the invention of daytime television.

Russ took me home that night. He cooked me dinner. Penne with vodka sauce. The vodka came from his freezer and frosted up the thin, tube-like glasses he poured it into. He gave me little chilled purple things and told me to guess what they were.

"Cherry?" I guessed.

"You’re good," he said.

When we made love it wasn’t the power of my coming, it wasn’t the fussing over me he did afterward, it wasn’t even his grace and intuition in the act, it was the tugging in my throat as we moved. I didn’t cry, but I felt kept at an edge of something. Not despair, I don’t think. Some kind of state of being profoundly moved, perhaps. Could it have been my own intuition?

Though I went to our market every single day after that first night, I only saw Russ once about every week and a half. I would be in a state of near panic from having not seen him by the time he finally reappeared. But on those occasions he would take me home, cook for me and love me. We couldn’t go out to the movies because he only liked pre-war films. We couldn’t go dancing because Russ does not dance. He refused my own invitations to dinner because I had a housemate. He explained that any other outing in this small city was impossible because the breakup of a past relationship had been too recent. Though the split was final, they had lived together for years and he still felt sympathy and caring for her. He felt sure that if she caught sight of him with me, it would be immediately apparent to her how deeply he felt for me. And it was too soon for that.

"Did you have a nice time?" I asked, trying to diffuse, to pull this stuff down. To get back to earth. We were on a bench in Santa Monica. A bench nowhere, dangling next to the highway. Cars whooshed by at odd intervals.

"I was out of my mind," Russ said softly, "missing you. I can’t stand it. I don’t want you to go away again."

I leaned in and I kissed those lips. Like plums, I had told him. Rich and supple and ripe. They gave me little zinging sugar-rushes.

It was early summer, we had only been at his brother’s condominium for two days, but the humid coastal air was heady and confusing after the speed and the highway and the motels and the rules. Russ’s rules. That we don’t sleep together.

"Yeah, right," I’d said with a bawdy laugh.

Russ drove on unsmiling. Yellow street-light wiped across him and the dashboard and the floor of the car between us. It was the first leg of our trip.

"What do you mean?" I asked, my voice surprising me with a rather hysterical crack and quaver. "You," I slowed myself down, "You don’t want to sleep with me anymore?"

"Emily," Russ said calmly, with measured consideration. "Emily," he reached over and placed a hand on my thigh. "You know I do." He turned his face to me and gave me a slow private smile. "That’s never been a problem for us."

And my spinning mind landed on last night. The long night of my attempts to please him. His refusal to release me of that task, and the glowing red 4:37 on the clock-radio when we finally rolled over into exhausted sweaty sleep. I’d failed. He wanted some simple shut-eye and I was an obstacle to that.

"In fact that’s been so good, I don’t think we’ve gotten the chance to really know each other. To become friends." He took his hand back. "What we have," Russ said watching the road, "is so valuable," he spoke slowly, "and rare," slow enough to make the cliches sound like they meant something, "that we have to give it the chance to be real."

"But this makes no sense to me," I said, "I don’t understand what you’re saying. Can’t we get to know each other and still sleep together?" I could hear the desperation in my voice and rather than pulling me out of it, just sank me deeper in.

Russ was moving to New York and taking his car out to his brother in Santa Monica. This trip was my payoff for being so patient, my opportunity to show worthiness of a formal invitation to come to New York.

That night I lay awake under chilly smooth sheets in a field-like bed and listening to my walkman. Alone in this fragrant room. It was cavernous, and seemed to glow even with all the lights out. There was a chandelier over the bed and a giant color television on a swivel stand.

I remember the trip, in fact, as a progression of motels.

The second day’s driving took us through Pennsylvania and into Indiana. When we pulled into a big chain motel at around 10 that night, the heavily bouffanted woman on duty informed us that there was only one room left. Russ tapped his fingers on the counter and looked out the glass front of the office to the other motels along this stretch near the exit.

"It has two double beds—there’s plenty of room," the woman said giving both of us a good looking-over.

I stared at the wall to one side, carelessly.

"We-ell," Russ said. He looked at me. "Do you promise to keep your hands to yourself?" he said with no levity.

I looked up at him, speechless. The woman chuckled. "Do you?" Russ insisted. "We can stay here, but only if you promise, otherwise we’ll have to be on the road for quite a bit longer," he finished distractedly.

"I," I croaked, volumes dammed up behind every syllable I uttered. "I promise."

"Hmm," Russ looked at me doubtfully. "I hope I can trust you," he said, turning to sign the register. He smiled at the woman behind the counter, and she scrunched up her nose at me.

The room was plastic. Dim. Regular. I went directly into the bathroom. I stood there still wearing my jacket, ripping the shrinkwrap off the stumpy glasses on the plastic tray with the ice bucket. "You didn’t have to embarrass me like that," I called when I heard the door close.

"Hmm?"

"Why did you do that down there, it was embarrassing."

"Because I really want to stick to this," he said plainly.

On our third night we’d gotten as far as Tulsa. We took a single room once again. I’d proved myself trustworthy by not sneaking over to him the night before. But this single room had only one single bed. I was once again reminded of the trip’s rules, but this time they were delivered with a kind of warmth. Sleeping next to him, I tried to pull his scent from the odd and confusing mold and cabbage smells in the room. His smell, warm and sweet, came to me like a solid center in a swirl of other people, other foods, smokes, excrements, sweats, perfumes, nerves, feet and hair.

On the fourth and last night of the trip, Russ didn’t want to stop until after midnight, and we found ourselves in the middle of the Arizona desert without a town, let alone a rest-stop within miles. We drove on and finally entered Gila Bend. The front office of the one motel in town was a trailer. We banged on the tinny door, waking the whole family up, and finally the young daughter was sent out to check us in.

Once again we were forced to take a single room with a single bed. But the sheets and cover were stained a blotchy brown/grey. The walls were covered with black spots that turned out to be insects in the morning light. Russ, through his exhaustion, indicated that he would accept contact this night and momentously asked me what it was that I would like to do. I wanted to make love. We did. I fumblingly, Russ submitting. I went into the dingy bathroom afterward and found a dead cricket pressed into my thigh. The thing was dry and it flaked like a scab when I picked at it. Fine red wrinkly lines were tatooed into my skin and it stung a little as I scratched the last pieces of dark brown off. I caught a glimpse of myself, a large white formlessness in the mirror’s dirty reflection. When I came back into the darkened bedroom, Russ was asleep.

That first night, after his brother had gone to bed, Russ disappeared for a few moments and then quietly beckoned me down the stairs to the livingroom. He bent into a cabinet, something clicked and he stood and looked at me. There came the crackling of an old LP and Marvin Gaye singing "Let’s Get it On," Russ took my hips, pressed us slowly, tightly together and we began moving to the music. Dancing like careful listening.

"You’re dancing..." I said.

"I love you," he said.

I loved Los Angeles and I had Russ. I had him and he clung to me. I wore dresses. We made love when we woke up. We played in the afternoon sunroom. Russ showed me his Los Angeles. His favorite restaurants. His views. His nighttime roll through Beverly Hills.

Sitting on the nowhere sidewalk bench, two days later, I pulled back from Russ again and reached toward his bunched shirt. He still held it in his lap, and it was rendering that arm useless. Russ flinched away from me when my fingers brushed the cloth.

"Did you hurt your arm?" I asked.

"No," Russ said, looking down the street behind him.

"What’s in there?" I said, with a little more insistence. I reached at it.

"Wait," Russ said, "wait." And he put the bundle square in his lap. He looked off the other way and moved it with his hands. I followed his gaze up the street. "See it?" he asked.

I looked down. There in the red folds of his shirt shone the dull gleam of a pistol. Big. Incongruous. Embarrassing. "What," I said. "Why’s that here?" I asked.

"Protection," Russ said. Gaining back certainty now. A new kind of certainty. He seemed relieved to have shown me. Like it was okay to be this new person.

"Russ," I said, "I don’t really get this."

He covered it again and snugged it into his lap.

I shifted, a little away from him. "I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this," I said.

"You’re not," he said, "I am."

I felt the weight in my throat drop into the pit of my stomach.

Having wrapped the thing up again, he returned his gaze to me. "I’ve got to protect you," he said, bringing a hand to my face.

Then he kissed me.

© 1997-9 Erika Wood