Ninety-Three Million Miles Away: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy Page B

small waist and heart-shaped bottom, the dreamy tilt to her head.
    She began to shiver. She wrung out the cloth and folded it over the faucet, then patted herself dry with a dish towel. Then, pretending to be examining her fingernails, she turned and walked over to the window. She looked up.
    There he was, in the window straight across but one floor higher. Her glance of a quarter of an hour ago had registered dark hair and a white shirt. Now she saw a long, older face, a man in his fifties maybe. A green tie. She had seen him before this morning—quick, disinterested (or so she had thought) sightings of a man in his kitchen, watching television, going from room to room. A bachelor living next door. She pressed the palms of her hands on the window, and he stepped back into shadow.
    The pane clouded from her breath. She leaned her body into it, flattening her breasts against the cool glass. Right at the window she was visible to his apartment and the one below, which had closed vertical blinds. “Each window like a pill’ry appears,” she thought. Vaguely appropriate lines from the poems she had read last year were always occurring to her. She felt that he was still watching, but she yearned for proof.
    When it became evident that he wasn’t going to show himself, she went into the bedroom. The bedroom windows didn’t face the apartment house, but she closed them anyway, then got into bed under the covers. Between her legs there was such a tender throbbing that she had to push a pillow into hercrotch. Sex addicts must feel like this, she thought. Rapists, child molesters.
    She said to herself, “You are a certifiable exhibitionist.” She let out an amazed, almost exultant laugh, but instantly fell into a darker amazement as it dawned on her that she really was, she really was an exhibitionist. And what’s more, she had been one for years, or at least she had been working up to being one for years.
    Why, for instance, did she and Claude live here, in this vulgar low-rise? Wasn’t it because of the floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the windows of the house next door?
    And what about when she was twelve and became so obsessed with the idea of urinating on people’s lawns that one night she crept out of the house after everyone was asleep and did it? Peed on the lawn of the townhouses next door, right under a streetlight, in fact.
    What about two years ago, when she didn’t wear underpants the entire summer? She’d had a minor yeast infection and had read that it was a good idea not to wear underpants at home, if you could help it, but she had stopped wearing them in public as well, beneath skirts and dresses, at parties, on buses, and she must have known that this was taking it a bit far, because she had kept it from Claude.
    “Oh, my God,” she said wretchedly.
    She went still, alerted by how theatrical that had sounded. Her heart was beating in her throat. She touched a finger to it. So fragile, a throat. She imagined the man being excited by one of her hands circling her throat.
    What was going on? What was the matter with her? Maybe she was too aroused to be shocked at herself. She moved her hips, rubbing her crotch against the pillow. No, she didn’t want to masturbate. That would ruin it.
    Ruin what?
    She closed her eyes, and the man appeared to her. She experienceda rush of wild longing. It was as if, all her life, she had been waiting for a long-faced, middle-aged man in a white shirt and green tie. He was probably still standing in his living room, watching her window.
    She sat up, threw off the covers.
    Dropped back down on the bed.
    This was crazy. This really was crazy. What if he was a rapist? What if, right this minute, he was downstairs, finding out her name from the mailbox? Or what if he was just some lonely, normal man who took her display as an invitation to phone her up and ask her for a date? It’s not as if she wanted to go out with him. She wasn’t looking for an affair.
    For an hour or