Only Women Bleed

Jackson almost waited too long to come over. I was damned restless by late afternoon.

Most of the time from when I left Leslie's house until Jackson came over I spent stewing and pacing. I'm not good at sitting around, and it was a hot day. As the afternoon wore on, the dry wind began to blow, making my house a regular oven. Like most Southern Texans, I can only take so much of those winds before I go a little nuts anyway.

So I paced around, sat and tried to cry, but couldn't. Got up and paced around again. Cody sat watching me, twitching his fat tail nervously. At one point I felt so wound up, I took off my leather pumps and hurled them as hard as I could against the wall. I didn't pitch them anywhere near Cody, but he decided he'd had enough and took off through his cat door.

It was hard to find anything worth thinking about. If I thought about the past, I mourned the end of days with Bryan. If I thought about the future, it was to cancel plans. Nothingness, sharp as a knife. I paced barefoot.

I knew that the time would come when I could really indulge in this feeling-sorry-for-myself stuff, but now wasn't the time.

In the midst of these thoughts, I heard someone on the front porch. The silhouetted figure of a tall man stood looking in at me from my front door, shading his eyes with his hand against the screen.

"Audra?"

"Jesus, Jackson. You startled me. How long have you been out there?"

"How about letting me in? It's hotter than hell out here."

I took off the latch and opened the door for him. I flopped down on the couch and gestured toward my big arm chair, but he waved it off and leaned up against a table instead.

"You okay?" he asked.

"I'll get there. You know me."

He smiled a little and said, "Yeah, I guess I do." He was quiet for a minute, then he stood up straight. He was studying me, and I felt uncomfortable. I decided to watch my toes for a while.

He started over. "Look, I know you're tough, but I also know how much Bryan meant to you. Nobody could have gone through what you did today and walk off whistling. So you don't have to talk about this now if you don't want to."

I glanced up at him. He had a funny kind of concerned look on his face. It scared me or I probably would have started crying after all. Something in his sympathy moved my feelings to the surface. There he was, big, handsome, and a mere four feet away, looking concerned. But there was no room in me at that moment for old history or rekindled anything.

"Have a seat, Jackson."

He sat down. Tall as he is -- somewhere in the neighborhood of six-three or six-four, I'd guess -- the back of the chair was still taller. I love that big ol' chair. Nobody since Bryan had looked that good in it.

"Go ahead," I told him. "Take out your notebook. Ask questions. It'll be good for me. At least I'll be doing something."

He just sat there for a minute, still quiet, as if undecided. Then he reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a notebook.

"Why don't you take that jacket off? I'm not so formal here with my shoes off."

"Thanks," he said, standing up again for a moment. He took off his suit jacket and folded it neatly over the back of the chair. Even in the long-sleeved shirt he looked a lot more comfortable. He sat back down, loosened his tie, and flipped his notebook open to a clean page. I felt nervous again.

"Look, how about something to drink?"

He gave me that questioning look again. "Sure," he said.

Oh, fuck, I thought. I've got to stop acting like an idiot. I realized that every time one of us was on the verge of discussing what had happened between Bryan and I, we fumbled around and stalled.

I poured a couple of glasses of iced tea and brought them into the living room.

Outside the window, the heat waves made the streets look like a river. A big dark-blue car ferried its way past the window. I could see Cody stretched out in the sun on the lawn.

I handed Jackson his iced tea and sat down again. "Sorry -- I should have offered you something sooner. I'm a little distracted, I guess."

"It's okay. I guess I'm distracted too. Anyway, you saw Bryan last night?"

"Yeah, we went out to Banyon's. He was in a mood, you might say. He did quite a bit of drinking, but I was driving, so I quit after a Guinness. He was thoroughly enjoying himself with a group of three girls." I thought about Bryan and the dancers. I stopped the story for a minute and looked outside. Cody had moved into the shade. I took a deep breath and went on.

"Anyway, I dragged him away from the girls. When we got to the car it was probably about twelve-thirty. We argued and I drove him to his friend Jared's house. He insisted on it. Got there around one. He got out of the car and puked. He yelled to me on the way in."

Why was it so hard to tell something I'd been thinking about all day?

"Did you walk up to the house with him?" Jackson asked.

"No, but I watched him go up the porch steps -- he wasn't too steady on his feet. Jared was home -- at least his car was in the driveway."

There was a knock at the front screen door. We turned to look, and it appeared that no one was there.

"Cody. My cat." I explained. "He's got a cat door, but this way he can make a nuisance of himself." I opened the door and let him in. He pranced over to sniff Jackson's shoes -- shoes must be to cats what crotches are to dogs, although cats are more delicate about it -- and Jackson bent down and picked him up. Cody is a sucker for attention, and even with the heat he was happy to be scratched behind the ears. Jackson stood there holding Cody and looking out the window.

We stood there in silence for a while. I thought of a spark of attraction between us when we met all those years ago. We were much younger then, not so much in years -- Jackson and I are about the same age, nearing the final approach to thirty -- as in experience.

I thought back to Austin, to the nights when we'd go for coffee and long four-in-the-morning talks after our classes at University of Texas. God, we were both so full of confidence in our ability to change the world -- he as a psychologist and myself as a novelist.

I tried to figure out how many years ago all that had been. It was about eight years ago that I published my first novel and made enough profit to move to Houston, Jackson's hometown. It took him a year to get down here from Austin; by then we were both seeing other people. He got in touch with me once when he first moved back, but other than hearing word of each other from friends every now and again, our lives had stayed separate.

I wondered if Jackson was still seeing the same woman he had been with five years ago. Or any other woman. I'll have to ask Leslie. She is a patient of Jackson's -- she must have seen a photograph somewhere in his office.