ness, and she found herself strangely relieved to confess that Reynold?s intellectual rigor had turned her on to being sought after by another man?s deft hands in an hour or two if the conversation kept flowing.
Not that Tom hadn?t noticed, watching Delia cover her teeth when she laughed or lean in to touch Reynold?s elbow when making a decisive point, gestures he had not witnessed since his and Delia?s courtship a decade ago. Tom recalled countless, less-tender conversations with his wife on the subject of playing with others, during which he had described himself as ?simply not a jealous person.? He deflected his soreness over how well Delia and Reynold got along by barraging Reynold?s wife with drinks while Tom and the increasingly inebriated woman laughed at nothing? her saliva-jetting Daffy Duck impression, which caused Delia to squeeze Tom?s thigh. Margarita leaked from the corners of the woman?s mouth when he asked which presidential candidate she would vote for in the coming election. Zero chemistry existed between them, and Tom much preferred brunettes to blondes, but the woman had been born with the kind of legs he?d silently yearned for on more than one night of making love to Delia? slim from ankle to hip and plump in the calves like a marathon runner? though he would never admit that to his wife. A sexy pair of legs? it was enough, Tom told himself. And while the tone of Delia and Reynold?s conversation softened with intimacy, Tom and the woman?s nonsense mounted into shrieking? a manic laughter that made him half-expect and half-fear the woman?s head would turn blue. She asked for another round, then another. Desperate to keep her loose, Tom repeated, ?Anything.?
Before Delia realized where her conversation with Reynold was taking her, she had been converted to ?the lifestyle,? at least for one night, and the moment of having sex with someone who was clearly not her husband closed in. For a few hours then, life became poetry. Instead of feeling as if a missile were approaching the hull of her vessel, which had been sailing perfectly well on its own, the thought of colliding with this man she liked, of having him inside her for a few brief hours, made her heart lighten as if with helium, so that it no longer beat but bobbed like a balloon, fluttering against the tender backs of her ribs, its string tethered to his wrist because it did want to be drawn home by him and to enjoy the feeling of being drawn home by him until her heart hit the ceiling, then grew less buoyant, so that when its string curled like a tail on the carpet of the man and his wife?s bedroom. Delia lay at a safe distance, eyeing it lazily, calm now under the bed sheets, listening to this very nice man talk about the broken wrist he earned in a fistfight over a girlfriend when he was sixteen and how much he had changed in twenty years. Mostly, though, Delia listened to snow fleck against the windowpane, wishing she possessed the independence of a cat, and then she stretched like one out from under his bed sheets. Reynold rubbed her belly, tenderly kissed her breasts again, and she slinked out of his pale hands in search of food. He served coffee with warmed pineapple upside-down cake, and they planned a double date to see some pop-trash vampire film, about which they already shared an inside joke. Then she slipped out of the condo?s front door, softly pawing down the steps into the tepid darkness, where she again became a woman, crunching across the crisp ice of a lover?s parking lot at five o?clock in the morning, feeling somewhat silly, yet nevertheless as if she might never
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