On the drive home from that woman's house, all I wanted was to sleep in some other bed than the one waiting for me at my parents' condo. I wanted rest, but not in the room where I used to hump my waterbed. I couldn't go back there tonight, not after that weird thing with that woman. Sleeping in my old room reminds me of my hairless adolescent sexuality, a zit-faced kid haunting the room, jerking off, unaware of his potential morbidity. He's still there though I don't recognize the room anymore. Since I moved out, the space has transformed into someplace tight and clean and sick with pastels that light the dark when I stumble in drunk. Especially tonight, I didn't want to sleep there and leave the crisp room smelling like alcohol and whatever else. And taking a shower at 4 a.m. was not an option because I didn't want to rouse my light-sleeping parents and have them wake to find their son pissed and bleary, asking, "Mom, was I breastfed? Just wondering."

Though it doubles in size every year, Ft. Myers hasn't a soul. Nothing pastel has a soul (except my former bedroom, which harbors an embarrassing soul). There's nothing to do in Ft. Myers except go to the movies or drink. So, when I visit and my parents go to bed at nine o'clock, I head out by myself to the bars on the Gulf where I have seen that woman every Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas night for three years. She disappeared last year, but tonight I finally talked to her, and she told me she had been pregnant during the last round of holidays.

Her hair is Iranian or Indian or Spanish and her skin is the inverse of my ghost-white. I assume she works in a restaurant downtown because she's always wearing a white dress shirt and tight black pants like she just came from playing best man, or waiting tables. We communicated only in intense glances until tonight, after Thanksgiving dinner, when her and I ended up smoking pot in a circle of mutual friends in the shadowed alleyway by the water. The other smokers introduced us; she is Cézanne. But even after we knew our names we still just leaned, casting shadows down the sea wall in our silent space, separate from theirs. In the dark alley, loud with wind and tide, she turned the back of her head to me when accepting the bowl and she disappeared in the blackness of her hair against the night, leaving just a white wedding shirt floating; she was gone and I had a flash of lonely.

But then she'd reappear after she'd passed the pipe along and came back to me, her dark lips smiling, and we continued leaning and refraining from introducing words into our space because we were already close in a way that was perfect and true; until whatever it was we did after the pot.

At her invitation, I followed her to her house. On the way, I wished we had driven in the same car because alone in my truck, I thought about MY EX-GIRLFRIEND, and I remembered that sex destroys me, and as I followed Cézanne's taillights over the Sanibel toll bridge I wished she'd drive faster so we could just act this out and be done.

She lives in an amazing, run-down stucco and stone mansion on the edge of Captiva, with high, high ceilings and a vast living room with stone floors. The 50-degree cold, which Floridians are never ready for, froze the air so that the house was hollow and dead, but still compelling, like a decomposing photo of Florida when color photography was first invented: a photo of a fisherman hosing tennis shoe prints of dried mud out the house's sliding-glass doors, into the back yard, which rests on the Gulf, and is now filled with children's toys that I didn't not want to acknowledge.

Still in her waitress outfit, she walked to the bed, which sat in the center of the big room like an island, grabbed a blanket and wrapped in it. I don't remember if she offered me one, but if she did I said 'no' because I was so drunk that I was warm. We lie on our sides on the cold stone floor of the cave, several feet apart, facing each other, drinking liquor. Whenever I couldn't meet her eyes I'd focus on the popcorn ceiling and imagine it was Antarctica from the window of a plane. Or I'd find my reflection in one of the freestanding mirrors breaking up the space, and follow it from the mirrored vanity dresser across the room, to the nighttime surface of the sliding glass doors. The reflections had us from every angle so that it felt like we weren't alone, and when she talked about her kid, I could hear in her voice that the reflections were set up for just that effect.

"I don't run the heat when it's just me here." She said, explaining that she'd been living with a guy, she'd given birth to their son and then he moved out. She takes care of the child, but the baby was with his father tonight. "It's just too expensive to heat this huge place," she continued. "But I always run the heat when he (the baby - I don't remember his name) is with me". He's the most amazing thing in the world. It's such an amazing thing to be a mother." Her verbalized maternal devotion felt out-of-context and it relieved the sexual pressure, which made me more comfortable, but also took away my interest, so though I was too drunk to drive, I told her I was leaving and she walked me through the maze of mirrors and rooms and hallways (I never would have found my way out) to the front door. When we hugged goodbye she emitted a satisfied hum. Over her shoulder, in the sliding glass doors, I watched my arms wrapping around her waitress shirt and I tried to look through our reflection, out onto the Gulf. Failing that, I peered down her brown neck to her white collar and when I put my face there she hummed louder and pressed her ribcage into mine.

"My breasts are still really sensitive." She said, so I hugged her again and her loud humming vibrated my lungs. We moved to the bed and it is your destiny to BUY THE COMMONPLACE BOOK…

(click here to buy the book for $5)