dessert

"You're not being a very good lesbian," my best friend says after I've finished ordering dessert from our cute waiter at Zuni Café. Aside from the lack of subtlety I showed when flirtatiously asking for the pot de crème, I've just revealed to Suzanne the more lascivious details of the hot makeout session I had last night with a guy we both know.

"Nope, not a good lesbian at all," she continues, shaking her head and wiping a stray scrap of radicchio leaf from her chin. Suzie says this matter-of-factly, as if there were rules, certain incontestable rules, and I've broken all of them. She takes a few firm-lipped sips of her ice water and then extends her left index finger, wags it disapprovingly at me. With her blond-streaked bob, cherry-red nails, and, aside from the "Porn Star" T-shirt she's wearing, Suzie looks like a young, hip, urbanite Miss Manners. "Not at all," she repeats, even though I'm not sure if she's much of an expert in the matter. To be honest, she's a bit of a tease herself, jostling between two guys she's with right now (one serious, one not), splitting the week between beds.

With her napkin, Suzie flags our waiter down. He gives us a wary look, then comes over. She asks if they will make her a rice milk cappuccino. I grimace, he frowns, tells her he will find out, then goes away again. I scrape the last bite of my four-cheese fettuccini off my plate. Suzie taps her fork against her unused knife. I don't understand how salad could possibly have been enough for dinner.

"But Suz," I remind her, "I'm not a lesbian." My argument's significantly weakened, of course, because for the last seven months I have, in fact, been dating a woman. This latest snag - the makeout session, that is, and the yelling match with the girlfriend that followed, and the breakup which followed that (not to mention this passing fancy for our server) - adds new dimension to the dubious debate that's been raging for months over my sexual identity.

"I know, I know, you're pansexual," Suzie says, rolling her eyes, exaggerating the first syllable of a word I adopted last summer to explain my un-pin-down-able dating life. "You like everybody."

Suzie's being a little crass, but I admit, I'm not set on this lesbian thing. I do like men. Certain men. I mean, I have liked this certain guy, the one I made out with last night. It wasn't the first time for us, but it had been a while, a year or so, and I wonder if maybe I was missing something. Maybe I was missing that...smell. Whatever smell the Y chromosome might contain. The musk smell. I missed that.

Afterwards, after I'd politely dismissed myself before things got too hot `n heavy with the boy, I came home realizing that I missed more than just being kissed by a man. I missed being clutched in the dark in that tight, heated way men hold onto women. Missed the comic fumble for the condom, the lost look that men get when they're meathooking onto a woman's thighs. Missed the sweat, the curve of a man's back as he's reaching for climax. Missed the vicious, animal pounding against the bedpost, and the deep, soulful mewling of a man coming, and the collapse, and a cock, still inside me, softening, soft.

"Why'd you do it?" Suzie asks me, tapping her fingers against her wineglass. The image of a penis softening, disrobing itself of its rubber sheath, blinks out.

"But we only kissed," I insist, my voice a bit whiny. We only kissed, I remind myself. "I have my boundaries," I add aloud, as if to convince both Suzie and myself of my virtuous nature, even though this morning's tense moments with my now ex-girlfriend included a general bashing of my morals and featured a memorable parting shot ("You give new meaning to the word `asshole'") that echoed loudly in the hallway before she slammed my front door.

Silly me. I'm a woman much more familiar with the straight relationship code when it comes to sex. I assumed penetration was the barometer for cheating. I thought maybe that meant I was off the hook, not having gone there with the boy, and I had told this, no pleaded, to my girlfriend this morning as she stood there with her arms crossed, ballooning with agitation.

But maybe I didn't know girls. Maybe I didn't know her. And from the litany of accusations that came dominoeing out of her mouth after I tried to explain myself, it became clear that for her, kissing was an equally unforgivable violation. Or worse even, it may have been worse, the way she made it sound. Kissing was somehow even more intimate, more personal, more crushing. It was my mouth on his mouth, it was his tongue against mine. It was wet and hot and wild and it was the same, it was worse, than if we'd been fucking.

Suzie mumbles, bending low to sip at the foam of her rice milk cappuccino. The drink looks like an anemic cousin of the whole-milk version to my right. I take a long, deep drink from my cup; Suzie looks unsettled, still hungry. There is a half-pile of bread on the table, but she's watching her carbs now, won't touch it. I take my fourth slice, daub it with butter. Our waiter returns, bearing dessert. Suzie steals a glance at the dish of pot de crème now holding court at my place setting. "Looks great!" I exclaim to the cute server, who is so not looking at me but oh well.

Suzie fidgets with her spoon. "Try it," I tell her, moving the ramekin of chocolate closer to her, but she refuses. "No really, I just want a bite," she says. "So have a bite," I say. "I'll wait," she responds. "Fine," I say, grabbing my spoon. "It's here if you want it."

I dive into my pot de crème and rewind twenty-four hours. Rewind to the kiss in an upstairs bedroom with no one but me and the boy. Rewind to the way I felt the tops of his shoulders announcing themselves from underneath his flannel shirt. Rewind to the hard-on announcing itself from the Bermuda Triangle of his jeans. Rewind to the darkness, the moon, the crowd downstairs, to music, to a dog barking, to wind, to midnight. I am lost in pot de crème and midnight, lost in the bedroom we were in, his, piles of clothes on the floor to our left, a cat to our right, the smell of pipe smoke embedded in the walls, the murmur of the guests downstairs in the living room, far away from us.

"You know," I tell Suzie, "I really don't want to talk about it," but she's already sneaking half-spoonfuls of the chocolate from the dish between us.

"So much for the diet," she grunts in my general direction, and I can see I've already lost her to dessert. I relinquish my end of the dish and push it further towards her. Her mouth closes around her spoon as if she were French-kissing it, and her eyes flutter shut, and for a moment it looks obscene, my friend here with chocolate bubbling at the corners of her mouth, the spoon now sliding in and out between her teeth. Chocolate fellatio. She doesn't even realize I'm watching.

"Ya gotta stop this diet shit," I say, getting a little queasy from the visual of Suzie's head bobbing in her pot de crème blowjob.

Her eyes pop open. "And you've got to stop this cheating shit," she retorts, alert, ready for the offensive. She gets this way, I remind myself, these brief but intense dalliances with whatever diet manual makes it to the New York Times bestseller list. Currently, she's in her first weeks of the South Beach thing. Two months ago, it was something involving a lot of protein. Last year she fell in love with Fergie's Scottish accent and the siren song of Weight Watchers.

"I'm not really cheating," I say, taking a peak at the bill now glaring at us from the center of the table. I weigh the benefits of leaving a generous tip because the waiter was cute or leaving a stingy one because he wasn't flirtatious enough.

"Well, I'm not really cheating," Suzie responds, swiping up the last of the chocolate.

"Fine," I say, as much to ward off any additional attack about my questionable fidelity as to keep Suzie from launching into a complicated analysis of the parameters of her diet.

"Fine," she says, and her spoon clinks to the bottom of the dish. I let myself graze a little longer on a scene from last night, the final kiss between the boy and me, one last lip lock before the guilt set in, before "I'd better leave," before loss and departure and oh no and the tinge of regret I knew I'd feel the next day. There was something else before that, something private and perfect. Some delirious fog passing between us. A wave of immense and immediate relief. Some hungry part of me feeding itself again. Dessert.

I'm watching Suzie, who finally looks happy again, satiated, and I'm wondering if I'd ever have the discipline for these diets of hers. It must be so hard - the restrictions, the number-crunching, the rigorous attention to caloric intake, the "no thank you"s, the "none for me"s, the "not allowed"s. How could you not slip? How could you not feel empty at the end of your low-carb, low-fat meals, your stomach, your soul, begging for the very things you aren't allowed to give it? My belly, full of four-cheese fettuccini, quadruple slides of bread, and a ramekin of pot de crème, murmurs its contentment. No way.

"Why don't you just pay fifteen bucks," I tell Suzie, slipping my hand into my wallet for the credit card. "I ate a lot more than you did." I'm thinking of the boy, of course, and the girlfriend, and the waiter, thinking of diets and dessert, thinking of what it would feel like to swing both ways for real, to swing as wildly as you needed.