We were living in the San Fernando Valley, on one of those endless four-lane roads lined on both sides by tacky apartment buildings. Is this an omen? Have I made a terrible mistake? So what if it’s cold and rocky and exposed. I wanted her to go down on me and she refused and it felt like the moment in an old movie when a dark cloud floats across the sun. I was still inside her when I decided to ask her to marry me.Īfter the wedding, we went to a beach town and wandered along a deserted beach, high bluffs behind us and long stretches of absolutely empty sand to either side. I got a sweet little angel, I love the way she spreads her wings. So we went to bed and it was that warm kind of familiar fucking where everything feels right. Then one night we sat in the yellow kitchen talking and I felt a wave of peace and love wash over me and thought, What the fuck, man, are you crazy? This is a good thing you’re blowing here. I felt guilty for dragging her all the way to New Mexico and dumping her. I started dropping by just to check in, to make sure she was doing all right. She’d fixed it up nice, comfy tan sofa and warm yellow walls, pictures in frames. She was living in an old building in town. After six months I told her it was over and asked her to move out. But I don’t remember anything we did in that bed. When we lay on our bed, the cool night air poured over the rim of the window like water, falling to the floor and rising back up again, and sometimes cows would get through the gate next door and wake us by chewing the long grass outside the window. Like the time we were living in a small adobe cabin down a dirt road deep in a curve of the Rio Grande. This is the stuff that falls between, the stuff we never mention, the stuff we call life and forget. She was twenty-four and I was twenty-eight and it was the winter of 1982 on 110th Street in Manhattan. I remember moving in her and thinking, I could marry this girl. I remember cupping her small hard breasts in my hands when I entered her from behind and the way she drove hard against my lips when she came. Lately I’ve been remembering how her room was almost empty and everything was white, how the winter sun washed her slim girlish body in a cool marble light. To read every Esquire story ever published, upgrade to All Access. This article originally appeared in the February 2001 issue of Esquire.

The life next door