The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank

afraid the rumor would prevent some hypothetical man from hypothetically falling in love with her.
    She said the rumor wasn’t going to prevent anyone from anything, just the opposite: According to Georges, ninety percent of men had lesbian fantasies.
    I said, “But what if he’s in the other ten percent?”
    She said, “The other ten percent are gay.”
    Then Venice met Hugh, and that was that.
    . . . . .
    Technically, Hugh wasn’t as handsome as Venice was beautiful. He had dark hair and always a few days’ worth of dark beard. His skin was bad—red and rough and maybe damaged from acne; there were scars. Yet this seemed to make him more attractive, as it never would a woman. Like Venice, though, Hugh was admired from afar, and he affected women as strongly as she did men, and maybe more deeply—not that he had any idea.
    He lived off campus, in a dingy apartment with worn-out upholstered chairs and an olive vinyl sofa, but leaning against the walls were his own beautiful landscape paintings. The apartment had an unheated sunporch facing the lake, and Venice said he’d bundle up and paint out there, wearing his winter coat and gloves he’d cut the fingers off of.
    The two of them were always inviting people over to his apartment before and after parties. He always offered Pimm’s—he’d been to London the year before and had brought back cases of it. If you wanted to drink something else, you brought it.
    It was Venice who kept these evenings going. Hugh was no good at parties, even in his own home. He seemed older—much older—than his guests, almost grandfatherly. He reminded me of someone deaf, or nearly so; he had trouble keeping up with conversations, and contributed the non-est of non sequiturs. I once heard him interrupt a joke about Reagan to say that Millard Fillmore’s birthplace was innearby Locke, New York. He didn’t seem to know how awkward he was, or if he did, didn’t care; I don’t think he cared what anyone except Venice thought of him. He trusted her opinions and sought them out; when she didn’t like something he said, he wanted to know why—he was really eager to hear.
    They didn’t call each other Honey or Babe, let alone Flea or Cabbage; to each other they were Venice and Hugh. They hardly touched each other in front of other people. Their kisses hello or good-bye didn’t say, Sex. But there was something private between them, enviably private. They were a couple in a way that didn’t exclude anyone but seemed superior to every other relationship in the room.
    . . . . .
    I never saw Venice get upset. Even after her worst fight with Hugh—he’d read an aerogram from Georges—Venice just said, “Hugh’s being idiotic.” So it was shocking and terrible one afternoon to find her crying in our room.
    I didn’t know what was wrong, and for a long time she was crying too hard to tell me. Finally, she got out enough words to let me know she’d gotten into Brown.
    She hadn’t told me she’d applied to transfer, and I wondered if she’d told Hugh. Not that it would matter; Hugh was graduating, anyway, and Brown was closer than Rogers to Manhattan, where he was looking for a job.
    â€œYou don’t have to go,” I said.
    She gave me a look that reminded me of the first night when she’d wanted a drink and I’d told her about the soda machine.
    Then more tears.
    I told her I’d do anything if she would just stop crying, and right away she said, “Play your fiddle for me.”
    â€œShit,” I said, but I got it out of its case and looked through my records for one to play along with. The only songs I knew were the cowboy and miner ballads of the variety called High Lonesome, but I put on the happiest one I could think of—one about a cowboy’s love for his horse.
    I hadn’t played for anyone in a long time,