I went to hear Jami Attenberg read last week at Powell's with Dylan. Jami is my mother's college roommate's daughter, which makes us approximately semi-sorority-sisters twice removed, reunited through the written word. I had met her only once, the last time she came through Portland to read. Jami looked enough like her mother-- whom I had also never met but seen in pictures-- to string it all together into a cohesive narrative. This time, she was reading from her freshly minted first book, Instant Love. It was 100+ degrees outside even at 7:30 p.m.; I was happy to see Jami and I was happy to be ensconced in the cool, thick silence of a city-block-deep circumference of books. 

Something happened to me when exiting the bathroom one level below where the reading would be taking place. As I reached through the antiseptic soap smell and blinding halogens toward the metal handle of the door, I was stopped in my tracks by the advisory on the inside of the door: Caution: Door Opens Without Warning. My mind spun out into the supine standstill of its own rhetorical soundtrack. Was this some new kind of bathroom mantra? Don't all doors open without warning? Don't most of us by now have enough of a handle on the ins and outs of what doors do that we can approximate what to expect? 

I wrote this little aphorism down on an index card as I walked toward Dylan who, unwarned, was waiting innocently for me on the other side. Carrying my insider's knowledge of door danger with me up the flight of stairs, I selected my very own hard-backed copy of Jami's book and chose a plastic seat toward the back of the room. 

Instant Love seemed to be prickling with this very same premonition I stumbled upon in the women's room: anything could happen in a public bathroom in the middle of a heat wave, in the first blush of love. The front cover had a melting Popsicle on it. According to Jami, who was thrilled to have narrowly escaped the standard chick-lit high heels and martini glasses, there is a gender divide in response to this image: women loved it; men hated it. Evidently, some saw in this ambiguous pink Popsicle puddled in its own eventual disappearance an erect, post-ejaculate penis. Others saw a corn-dog. And still others: sushi. This brought to mind my afternoon in the Whitney standing before Picasso's portrait of Olga. As I stood before her spine of spoons, a life comprised of cutlery, it occurred to me that what you see is who you are. 

A Popsicle is created to survive under certain conditions, for a certain purpose. Instant Love was already demanding that I consider, before even opening the cover: Under what conditions does love survive? 

Jami gave us warning, but it was a bit vague. If she had received the women's room gospel as I had, perhaps she would have been inspired to say something more along the lines of: Caution: some sex leads to violence, where as some violence inspires sex. It was a night of imminent danger in Powell's. 

In the story she read, a woman-- finding herself surprisingly disgusted with her husband's one-dimensional appreciation of her niceness-- tells him about the drudgery of her last summer at home serving the unanswerable demands of rich people at the local country club. It escalates from living with a father whose disappointments and disappearances she could not rise above to the air-conditioned heavy metal of a passenger-seat blowjob of a man whose persistent degradations culminate in a razor blade in a pocket, between fingers, making a delicate slice just over the leather of his wife's driver's seat. 

I was nauseous. I was riveted. She called it going crazy. She ran home to her father. 

Jami finished reading. When the room came into focus again, I peeled my sweaty hand from Dylan's, marveling that a story read by a single woman into a listening room could bring me to this precipice of metal and blood and fear. This is love, I decided. 

Love is the listening that receives a story and keeps it alive. There's no way to predict the right conditions through which the story catches, the wheels start spinning and anything is possible. It doesn't matter who cuts whom, or if you've read the warning signs. 

Sage Cohen is a monthly columnist and managing editor of www.writersontherise.com. Her essays and poetry have been published widely and can be viewed at www.sagesaidso.com. Contact her at sage@sagesaidso.com.

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