Modern Love

MODERN LOWE /Abigail Thomas SOMETIMES HE COMES UP BEHIND ME at the stove and lifts my skirts and we do it right here in the kitchen like a couple of kids. Quite a change from Noah who could only stay hard by imagining me being sawn in half. Robbie is the tallest, nicest man I've ever gone out with. His back and shoulders are broad and strong and make me think of the word wingspan. When we go to sleep he folds me in his arms as gently as if I were an origami bird. But nothing is perfect. He is dead broke. And worse. He burned his own house down. WeU, not entirely down. He set fire to the Uving room and then he took a shower. Don't ask. It was late and he was watching basketbaU and I was in New York and he was probably stoned. The candle must have faUen over when he got up. Anyway, when he opened the bathroom door ten minutes later he almost choked to death on smoke and was lucky to get out the bathroom window with his Ufe. When he was Uttle, Robbie had asthma and learned how to breathe through an opening no bigger than the ones in those Uttle plastic stirrers that come with a drink sometimes. That's how he escaped, using that calm. Nothing much was lost because there was nothing much. Robbie's wife took it aU when she left him four years ago. He had a mattress, a rug, a color tv and a kitchen table. Most of the damage to the house was smoke damage, but Robbie got a new mattress, which is in the living room. To get to it we walk on this plastic road Robbie unroUed from the kitchen. Robbie has always slept in the Uving room, at least since his wife left. He Ukes to Uve Uke a refugee. Everything in the house is filthy with smoke except the kitchen and the bathroom which Robbie has cleaned. The only thing we can touch is each other. Robbie had a business once with his wife who made jewelry but it aU fell apart when she left. "I lost my designer," he likes to say, shaking his head. He does odd jobs now: hangs a door, paints a room; he used to deal but I don't want to know about that. When he's reaUy broke he takes to the streets with his fiddle (or vioUn, to my mother), which is how I met him. I had decided to find my own true love once and for aU, that afternoon, no 244 · The Missouri Review Abigail Thomas joke. I was tired of waiting for men who were sixteen hours late. I took off my bra and headed up Broadway in my sUky red dress with the polka dots, and there on the corner of 115th was a big taU galoot playing bluegrass with a crowd of students gathered around tapping their feet. I worked my way to the front and had a look. I liked his shoulders under the t-shirt; I liked his long curly hair and the intense expression he had on his face. I liked how low down his jeans hung, and the sUver buckle on his belt. I found out later his wife designed it; it's in the shape of a bird. I thought he had noticed me and I knew it was one of my better days because a woman standing next to me whispered, "You don't have a stitch on under that dress, do you?" which gave me the shivers and I went up and dropped a doUar in the guy's hat. A PhiUies basebaU cap, actuaUy. He looked at me and smiled and said, "Can I buy you a cup of coffee with that?" and I said, "What, my own dollar?" and that was pretty much that. We walked off together and I must say I loved being the envy of all those Uttle undergraduates, being as I am thirty-eight years old in my stocking feet but I can still reel them in now and then. We...