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Recently in Salon Health & Body

Curing with compassion
Beth Israel Hospital in New York brings in the Dalai Lama to dedicate a new space.
By Alyson Mead
[06/21/99]

Urge
Girl fight, boy fight
Is barroom brawling good romantic bonding?
By Lily Burana
[06/19/99]

Column
Bar food
Can a Mounds addict find happiness with a women's nutrition bar?
By Mary Roach
[06/18/99]

Johnny get your pills
Are we overmedicating our kids?
By Rob Waters
[06/17/99]

Drunk like me
My last drink of tequila came on Easter -- resurrection day.
By Steve Burgess
[06/16/99]

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I was visiting her roommate, but my friend was working that evening. An old movie was on the TV, but we weren't watching. Gina had found out I was a writer. She'd asked me to read some of her work.

"Your rhythm is good," I told her when I was done. She'd given me a two-page scene she'd written for her creative nonfiction writing class: "Valentine's Day, 1996."

"He was a drunk," she'd written of an old lover, "and I had, as can happen, become one too."

"It sounds like you," I said, although I knew it wasn't a compliment to tell a writer that her prose sounded like her speech. But she thought it was, so I continued: "The way you arrange clauses. You have a voice. This is your sentence." And I meant it.

"Really?" Gina said, and leaned toward me, her right hand supporting her head with her elbow on the couch's arm, her left hand reaching across the inner thigh to hold her right hip as she twisted closer. She had long legs and arms well-muscled from practicing karate; she wore an orange corduroy button-down shirt with the sleeves pushed up, and I could see the tendons in her olive forearms flexing like a ship's rigging. Gina's face was equally strong, a broad jaw holding big white teeth, one slightly discolored, her umber eyes set deep under plucked, sharp-edged eyebrows, arched like the roof of a colonnade, inviting but controlled. Now her eyes searched, looking for not only praise but ambition, mine and her own. To her I was a writer from New York, and I was telling her she was a writer from Northampton.

"Let me show you," I said, and moved a book I'd been reading from the cushion beside me to the table on the other side. I edged forward and leaned on my knees. She sat beside me and did the same, two craftsmen consulting. Here, I said, pointing to a sentence, and here, and here. But you don't need that one; did you add it in a second draft? Yes, she said, and her toe brushed against my left foot. I moved my foot away.

"I add things, sometimes," Gina said, taking the left side of the page in her hand so that we held it together. "I like it to be clean, but then I worry that it's not, I don't know, written."

"So you add words like 'allotted' and 'inebriated,'" I said.

"Yes," she said, and her toe touched me again. This time I only moved my foot a little. Her toe followed.

"You're 25," I said, "and you're back in school, and at last you know what you want to do."

Next page | She smelled like clean sweat