Philip

FICTION

by Jackie Sabbagh

        It was a strange unnerving summer in New York City and I’d been a woman for three years and I wanted someone to make me feel like I was one, and I opened up Grindr and stalked through the recursive squares of empty avatars and flawless-looking gay men and disheveled red-eyed transexual chasers until I got a message from an account named Philip, and in his picture was a gorgeous muscled redhead in a bathroom mirror selfie smiling with purposefully too many teeth like a child instructed to smile, and his message read Hello beautiful stranger and I replied Hi darling Philip and he said What’re you doing with your summer day on planet Earth, and I said I’m at home reading Wuthering Heights on my phone and surmising it’s about depressed landlords in love and Philip said I didn’t know landlords could be in love, and I said What’ve you got going on and he said I’m on the L home from work sweating myself into apoplexy and I said Nothing sexier than an acute cardiac event, and he said You wanna hang out or something and I said Yes come admire my small desolate apartment and I messaged him my address and the number to buzz, and with a cornered animal’s celerity I douched my ass and applied moisturizing serums to my face and donned a tight black leotard and jean shorts and after an hour my intercom rang, and after I buzzed up Philip he strolled in slowly with a muted smirk like those boys in high school did when genuinely amorous but also craving veneration, and he hugged me briefly and said Great to meet you Emily Brontë and I said Wow nice memory for AP English, and he doffed his pair of leather industrial work gloves onto my dining table and I said Are you a construction worker and he said I’m actually an environmental field geologist, and I said Did you excavate any good sapphires today and he said Sapphires are not so common in my line of work and I tried to hide my disappointment of an origin I couldn’t pinpoint, and he cupped my face in his hands with a weighty lightness like Jesus’s in all the pictures and said I’m really into all this you’ve got going on, and I kissed him softly on his lips and he braced his arms with serpentine tightness around my angled torso and I thought maybe this would make me enough of a woman, and we climbed atop my lofted silk-sheeted bed and Philip ripped open the buttons of my clothing and began my kissing my body in seemingly random assorted points like nodes on an electrical board, and when I finally let him inside of me he made an astounded helpless face like he’d realized how the world could feel and he came within a minute, and afterward we lay there naked and breathing in the warm pheromonal air and I saw Philip was gazing out the window at some scene on the street below, so I angled my head where his was and saw a small man in a beret attempting to shove a fat blue armchair into the open trunk of a taxi cab, he was tilting and pushing the chair at awkward futile angles as the taxi driver stood nearby covering his mouth in bemused awe, and when I looked Philip’s eyes were damp as if moved at the innate and majestic failure of the human condition and I said It’s not gay to fuck a trans girl, and he turned stirring from the tableau and said Sorry what’d you say and I said You’re worrying it’s gay to have fucked me just because I have a dick, and with startled sincerity he said I don’t think that and I said Because I’m always giving myself to people without knowing if they have the right idea of me, and he sat up from the bed staring at his concave silk-strewn lap and said I’m sorry it’s been difficult and I stared at the wall wondering why I’m always talking, and wiping some sweat off of his florid neck and upper chest Philip said I think I’m going to head out and I said Yeah of course, and we quietly redressed in separate corners of the apartment and after walking to my door he kissed my cheek with conciliatory slowness and said Thanks for having me, and I smiled and said Get home safe and closed the door lightly behind him and slumped silently across my dented white loveseat, I heard through the window the muffled click of a trunk finally closing around an armchair and the sputtering drone of the engine driving from the scene, and I held my face in my hands and wept and wept and wept because you love people without meaning to, you love them because they exist in your life and then they do not and what else can you do but keep loving them.