How Does Your Garden Grow?

Photo by Muriel Barlow

He tells me he felt it once—love. Lust, mainly, though he had hoped it would turn into love. He, a friend I know from work (we handle subprime mortgages on the retail side of a major bank), is dedicated, driven, as good a salesman as there is (they taught us at a seminar in Dallas to learn one story and to tell that story well, tell it to any potential client: the birth of your kid, the day you won the big game, your most recent vacation—it doesn’t matter what story; its only use is to begin a conversation, which will lead to a sale). He is quick, incisive and, we all tell him, a wonderful listener.

In his personal life, however, I believe my friend is laid-back, fun to be around, attractive in all ways. I don’t know him too well, but I admire him. Something about his easy way.

His lover, this woman, almost ruined him. He holds his glass of scotch and soda up to his lips and says he couldn’t believe it: it was, in his life, the first and only time he knew he was feeling stress. Anxiety. He had been studying for the Series 7. He said he’d wake up at night in a panic. What with all that was going on with her and the test.

My friend has a chest like you wouldn’t believe, thick and strong, like a swimmer’s. Thick, black hair.

The woman was his boss from two jobs ago, before he came to our office in San Diego. She was tan, fit, had short, blond-brown hair—the type of woman who looked like she might have been a tennis instructor or a high-impact aerobics instructor. She liked it in the ass, he tells me. That was one thing that turned him on about her. It was her favorite way, actually. It was also how he knew there was something different, and likely wrong with her, and part of what made him fall for her so badly.

How it started those few years ago he does not tell me. Not this night, the ocean rolling up, the canopy of the bar we’re at pulled back, the sky blue and void of clouds, us two just having drinks; no pressure, just two guys having cocktails, an upscale bar in Encinitas: slacks and shirts and gleaming black shoes and thin belts and bodies and us healthy and young and, if I am to be honest, quite good-looking, quite handsome. A moment without a past or a future. Well, a bit of a past, a story. His story.

This woman. Maybe they met for drinks after work, had a few (him more than her), took a few bumps of coke (he does it, but only when it’s around him), fired up a joint, had a cigarette, and then the sex. He said her body was clean and unblemished, tight; her pussy was waxed—beautiful, he tells me, just beautiful. He had been with pretty girls before, but mostly not. This one was. There was also the issue of her being his boss. It excited him, he says. A thrill.

He is the type of man who lives for such things: the big sale, a rush. Four black coffees in the morning and four scotch and sodas at night. A different kind of man than I, certainly.

He kept his apartment, and she hers. People at work knew—it wasn’t a big secret. The guys at the office (it was in Arizona) thought it was cool. They thought she would have been wild in bed. Was she? How was it with her? Good?

He never really told them. He never told them that once they did it in her office, during work hours—well, toward the end of the day, but still. He never told them that there was a pathos to how she liked to do it, what she liked to [End Page...