Louisa Meets Bear by Lisa Gornick Page A

life-sized, lifting my eyelids ever so slightly to glance around the room, careful not to reveal my unfamiliarity with the scene before me, my uncertainty as to how to find my way back to Port Authority should Juanita not arrive—which she did not during the hour before I left with Andrew.
    And, if I am honest, I noticed him before he noticed me, recognized in him even though I did not then recognize it in myself that he was posing: a pack of European cigarettes on the table, a copy of Le Monde spread out before him, a leather bomber jacket across the back of his chair. I’d seen both that he was posing and that it was an interesting pose, one that Corrine and I might dissect over a long telephone conversation and a string of cigarettes, and now I can see that I must have arched my neck in a way that would have invited a tiger to bite.
    Later that night, after Andrew had taken me uptown for Japanese food and then downtown for Brazilian jazz, I called Corrine.
    â€œDid I wake you?”
    â€œNo. Lily’s been driving me crazy, climbing in and out of my bed. I just got her to sleep.”
    â€œI met someone.”
    â€œShoot, girl.”
    â€œHe’s a law student, here in New York, but he grew up in Berkeley. He looks like a California boy, tall and blond, but there’s an edge to him. He seems to be always on the road. He spent a year after college running some kind of weavers’ collective in Guatemala, though it sounded like there was money in it for him too. This summer he’s off to South America. He carries a beeper in his pocket.”
    When it comes to men, Corrine is a mistress of distinctions. She can talk about men with the same level of refinement that her mother can discuss upholstery. About Andrew, she asked what his hands and shoulders were like and what kind of car he drove. Does he listen? What does he read? What does his father do for a living? She wanted to know if I let him kiss me and what kind of kisser he was.
    â€œLong and thin, broad, an Alfa. How he listens, that’s hard to say.” I paused to think it over. “I’d say he listens for the gist of things, and he gets that quickly, but he’s not too interested in the details. I don’t know what his father does, but his mother is a hotshot feminist professor at Berkeley, though maybe there’s some kind of family money because he has that rich-kid way about him. The kiss—he didn’t ask if he could kiss me, he just did it, but he did it so fast, a brush of the lips and with this air that of course he could kiss me, that it was as though it was nothing.”
    â€œDid he pay for your meal? Did he talk about girlfriends?”
    â€œHe paid. American Express. No talk about other women, but I’m sure they exist.”
    â€œI’ll sleep on it,” Corrine said. “It’s the beeper that’s got me. Sounds like a guy with a taste for dirty business.”
    I was still in bed when Corrine called the next morning. In the background, I could hear Lily asking for cereal and the canned laughter from a children’s show. I looked at my clock. It was 11:00, 8:00 a.m. Corrine’s time. All I wanted was to get on a plane and sit in Corrine’s kitchen, drink coffee, and wait for the fog to break so we could ride over the Golden Gate to the beach, Lily singing in the back seat, a raft sticking out of the trunk.
    â€œYou’re in big trouble,” Corrine said. “He found his way into my dreams. I could see his bomber jacket and there was an Alfa too.”
    â€œWhy trouble?” I was thinking of you and how long it had been since I had slept alone and how you must be wondering why I didn’t come last night to your room.
    â€œYou got yourself a heartbreaker. One of those too-dangerous-to-resist guys.”
    Everything felt stale. My hair smelled of cigarettes. There was dirt under my nails.
    â€œListen, Louisa, I’m not saying don’t go for it,