Nude Men

handcuffs. Let’s play with them after dinner.” This thought fills me with such frustration and disgust that tears well up in my eyes. I angrily pull on the oven door like a desperate child, and it slides right off its hinges, as easy as you please. For a second I wonder if it’s not an optical dlusion. I didn’t know oven doors could just slide off their hinges. You just pull them, and they slide. Presto! If I had known, I would have handcuffed myself to the refrigerator. But right now I thank God for my ignorance.
    I rush to the living room to get the key to unlock myself from the oven door, but it’s not there. Minou must have played with it until it got knocked somewhere unreachable. I look for it but can’t find it, and I’m getting so impatient to see Sara that I finally just leave my apartment carrying the oven door like a briefcase. I feel quite embarrassed to be visiting Sara like this, for it will make me seem desperate and pathetic, but oh, well, whatever points of attractiveness I will lose by showing up with the oven door I can try to regain by concocting a witty explanation for it. If Sara, due to her young age, believes it, all the better.
    When I arrive, Sara is wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe, and though her face is hidden by the Mickey Mouse mask, I can plainly see that she seems truly taken aback.
    “You’re staring at my oven door,” I remark.
    “What’s it for?”
    “It’s just a trinket I bought for myself, a trivial ornament of little value called an Imitation Handcuff Bracelet, to which one can attach various charms of one’s choice. Today I happened to choose this nice faux oven door. Next week I might add to it a refrigerator door. It’s a pleasingly masculine bracelet because, as you can see, the charms are not overly dainty or delicate.”
    “Poor Jeremy. You tried to resist me, didn’t you? I told you it was useless.”
    And she throws herself in my arms, and I hug her and kiss her neck. She yanks off her Mickey Mouse mask and flings it across the room in a gesture of complete liberation, and I yank up my oven door to shield my face from the sight, but unfortunately I can see her through the little window. Sara approaches me and kisses me on the oven door. I force myself not to feel horrified by her youth. But what is finally even more striking than her youth is the fact that her features are no longer frozen in a tight Mickey Mouse smile. Her face floods my eyes with expressions of her thoughts, almost as though I can read her mind. She seems quite changeable and serious compared to the paralyzed hilarity I had gotten used to.
    She takes my hands and lowers my oven door the way a man might lower an Egyptian woman’s veil. She kisses me on the lips, softly at first, and then ravenously, which is understandable considering we’ve been so deprived of kissing each other’s faces.
    We lie down, me on my back, and try to make love, but I am unable to become aroused because I can’t bear the sight of her face, which is so immediate and overpowering, so pure and undiluted. Feeling somewhat embarrassed, I pull the oven door over my face. Although I can still see her through the glass, I am able to deal with this maskless reality because we are protected from one another by the pane which prevents us from touching each other. The glass squishes my cheek, and crushes my nose to the side, but it comforts me, it relaxes me, it enables me to make love to her. I stare at her with one big eye as my breath fogs up the window. She knocks on the glass to get my attention, which she already has, and shouts to me in the oven, “Is it strange for you to be squashing your face with your charm, or do I just still have a lot more to learn about sex?”
    I don’t reply.
    Afterward, when I’m getting ready to leave, Sara says, “Mom will be out tomorrow evening again. You can come at five and aerate my fur.”
    “No, I won’t come.”
    “I’ll be waiting.”
    I go back home, disgusted with myself for having slept with Sara a third time. And what will I tell Charlotte when I get home? How will I explain to her this oven door attached to my wrist? Perhaps I could tell her I accidentally picked it up instead of my briefcase when going to work this morning, that I was just absentminded. Terrible lie. I don’t know what I’ll tell her.
    When I get home there’s a note from Charlotte on the living room table, saying she had to go out for dinner and that she’ll be back later.