Everything Changes

old.
    “What does Worried About the WENUS actually mean?”
    “Ah,” I say. I get asked that question often. “Did you ever watch
Friends
?”
    “Sure,” she says. “In high school.” She is leaning close to me to be heard, affording me a clear view down her flimsy shirt as her breath tickles my ear. The alcohol fumes mingling in the air from our collective breath could be ignited with the scrape of a match.
    “It’s an obscure reference to a particular episode.”
    She looks up at the band skeptically. “They were
Friends
fans?”
    “It’s a somewhat ironic reference,” I admit.
    There comes a point in every one of these types of conversations when you somehow know it’s yours for the taking, and when she leans in to me and says, “I’m Jesse, by the way,” I know I’m in.
    “Zack,” I say. We shake hands like idiots.
    Later, after enough drinks to lose count, we slow dance in the back, right near my table, and if you need another confirmation that sex is in the offing, slow dancing to punk rock is usually a good sign. I am in that blissful state of drunkenness where your impaired senses are not yet aware of the frothing cauldron stirring in your guts, and you foolishly believe your buzz will simply taper off like smoke in the breeze, rather than end abruptly in the acidic violence of a late-night puke. Jesse presses her cheek to mine and I enjoy the feel of her spry bosom crushed against my chest. Soon we’re making out, the deep, wet, wide-open kisses of horny strangers. She brushes her thigh blatantly against my crotch, her tongue flitting hungrily about my lips, the volume of the music somehow granting us license for this salacious behavior. On some distant plane of consciousness where the alcohol has not yet seeped, the guilt is percolating, but oddly enough, instead of seeing Hope’s face there, I see Tamara’s. My benumbed mind is not up to examining the complex stratification of this drunken betrayal, so I choose to forget about it. Consequences are a concept for the sober. My body feels weightless, suspended by the booze, by the deafening sound system, and by Jesse’s arms, and as I close my eyes, I can feel myself sinking into a pleasant oblivion.
    The band finishes their first set to a raucous round of applause, and I feel like a kid in a movie theater when the lights go up at the end. Fooling around with a stranger in public is somewhat more awkward without the comforting insulation of loud music and darkness. Jesse and I return to the table, where we quickly down a few more drinks in the hopes of sustaining the sexy mood through the jarring break while the band takes an intermission.
    Jed comes back from the bathroom, rumpled and lipstick scarred, and nods knowingly at me when he sees Jesse leaning on me. He pulls over a chair for himself and one for his new friend, a tall brunette who looks like a poor man’s Christy Turlington.
    “And how are things on the O.C.?” I say.
    “You’re one to talk,” he says, eyeing Jesse pointedly. He turns and theatrically offers her his hand. “I’m Jed, by the way.”
    Introductions are made all around and Jed calls for a pitcher. The waitress informs us that now that we have guests, we’ll have to start paying for our drinks. “I left my wallet in the van,” I say.
    “It’s okay,” Jed says, discreetly pulling out a wad. “I got it.”
    Jesse flashes me a sly look. “You have a van?” she says.

    This is what happens. The cold air hits your face like a slap as you stagger out of the club and down Bleecker Street to where the band’s van is parked. You’re thirty-two years old, with a fiancée to boot, and yet you find yourself climbing into the back of a van with a sweetly game college girl. She’s ten years younger than you and finishing the last credits of her religion major, and she has about her a practiced air of seasoned sexuality. She will prefer to be on top—you know this instinctively—and will be unabashed in the pursuit of her own gratification. This is all wrong. Even if you weren’t engaged, you’d be too old for her. But her skin is smooth and unblemished as fresh snowfall, and in the dim lighting, it has a satiny sheen, and you feel something apart from the guilt and self-pity that are growing like twin tumors in your belly, a sense of desperate longing to be that young and whole again.

    Matt’s van has only the two seats up front. The back is open and windowless, to facilitate the transport of the