I lay next to him, wide awake, my blood thumping, my vagina raw and sore. I’d had this feeling before, with other men, this feeling of being a receptacle. But Thomas I could forgive: he was fighting a losing battle, and even if my body occasionally had to serve as its scuffed battleground, he was fighting it for me.
He loved me. He loved me. I repeated this in my mind now, lying next to this snoring man who was, let it be known, willing to literally cheat death, to risk hell, to remain in my company. How many women I knew could say that of their easy boring sex-only-on-the-weekend boyfriends, with their bank accounts and their carpentry hobbies and their anxieties about marriage? None, that’s how many. Zero.
I curled up next to him and stroked his sleeping chest, rising and gently falling, and felt a big zero surround us like a halo, or like a noose—tightening around us, encircling us in its ominous glow.
The next day was Friday. I was yanked into consciousness around eight o’clock, reluctantly, by the drone of Thomas’s snoring. Usually he woke with me—usually, in fact, he was the one to nuzzle or lick me out of my sleep, like a hungry cat. I sat up and looked at him. I’d never seen him sleep this deeply.
Alone in the kitchen, I made coffee, ate a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, tried to read a graphic novel, but my gaze kept drifting out the window. My mind kept playing and replaying the events of the previous thirty-six hours. Thomas had taken up so much of my life in the past month or so, had become my life to such an extent, that I barely knew what to do with myself when I wasn’t with him. I hardly had my own brain anymore.
I picked up my phone and reluctantly scrolled through the messages. There were a couple from Samira and Flor, asking me if I was coming to a mutual acquaintance’s housewarming brunch that weekend. I couldn’t bring myself to respond to either of them. I’d already ignored an earlier call and several texts from Jimmy. The last one said Situation deteriorating fast over here…K found porn in B’s browser history, B accused K of spying, I accused of “enabling,” F says N not leaving…help? Reading this text, I felt nothing but an annoyance so sharp it bordered on disgust. I couldn’t bring myself to care about Byron’s histrionics, and I couldn’t even figure out who F and N were supposed to be.
I tried to consider my friends more deliberately, to imagine a way back to them, but I couldn’t seem to muster the will. I had no attention to spare for others; I couldn’t hope for their comprehension, and I didn’t need their sympathy.
I’d dated unadvisably before—the long-distance architect, the married whiskey distiller, the homeless freegan, the philosopher who’d recently broken an eight-year vow of celibacy. During these brief relationships I’d had to endure a certain facial expression from Flor and Samira and sometimes even Jimmy: their brows knitted in concern, their eyes dark with doom foreseen. I don’t care, I kept wanting to scream. I know you’re concerned for my heart, but I’m not entirely sure I have one, not in the same way as other people. That hard little fist in my chest, it won’t ever completely unclench. So what if I tempt fate?
Now, for the first time, I’d met my match. Complementary weirdnesses. The cratered moonscape of his body. The moony craters of my mind.
I went back to the bedroom and found Thomas still asleep, still in the same position—curled up on his side like a comma, clutching a pillow. Absurdly, I envied the pillow. I climbed in next to him and began to stroke and kiss him awake.
“Mmm,” he croaked. Murmur of pleasure or protesting groan? I didn’t care anymore. I eased him onto his back and climbed on top of him. I straddled his hot hips, feeling his straight hip bones press into my soft thighs. He was half hard but still half asleep, murmuring nonsense words, his eyes fluttering open and then closed again. I kissed his neck and slowly rocked my pelvis back and forth, feeling him stiffen beneath me.
“Good morning!” I said.
I arched back and reached down and pulled him inside of me. His penis was scalding; I sucked my breath in and let it out slowly.
“Oh God,” he said. “I don’t know if I can do this right now.”
“You can. It’s just me. Doesn’t it feel good?”
“It feels good,” he said. “It always feels good. I always want you.” But he closed his eyes again, as if in pain.
I rode him harder and faster. His penis reached up inside of me, higher and higher, but the rest of him lay flat on the bed. He tossed his head from side to side and lightly moaned but otherwise lay inert, simply letting me fuck him.
I cried out, shuddered, collapsed, felt him spurt and wither inside of me, flopped down next to him on the bed. I looked over at him. His mouth was open, his eyes closed. He appeared unconscious.
“Are you asleep?” I asked. He didn’t answer, but then something started to happen, something that hadn’t happened before: his entire body flickered, like a strobe light—on-off, on-off, there-gone, there-gone. For a second I thought, I’ve killed him. My sex has killed him, my monstrous desire. What have I done?
I knelt beside him and gave him a series of light slaps on the cheek. “Come back to me, Thomas,” I whispered. “Come back.” Gradually, he did: the pulse of his disappearing slowed down, the gaps between his absences widened, and finally it seemed as though he was all there again.
He opened his eyes and looked at me and said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m just so tired.” Then he closed his eyes again. This time, I let him go.
I dialed work and told them I was sick. While Thomas slept, I panic-cleaned my apartment, scouring the windows and bathroom tiles in a flurry of fearful remorse, using six or seven Swiffer cloths for each room, convinced that if I only liberated my home from every last speck of dust, I might free myself from this sludgy feeling of wrongness, the feeling that I’d taken things past some inevitable crisis point, waded into the swampy sucking territory of no return.
I was so furiously absorbed in my task, crouched in the corner of the living room to swab dust from the baseboards, that I didn’t feel Thomas enter the room, come up behind me, crouch down; I just suddenly felt his warm hands on my ass, his stomach on my back, and then he was enveloping me, pulling me backwards onto his lap. I fell into him with relief. He kissed the side of my neck. “I’m awake now,” he said. “I think I’m better.”
“I’m sorry about before,” I said. “I was scared. I’m not used to—”
“Don’t apologize,” he said. “Don’t be a downer. Please? I’m feeling good right now. I want to keep feeling good.”
I turned around, cupped his face in my hands. “Listen,” I said. “Let’s go outside. Let’s go do something. Eat pancakes or fried pickles. Go to Coney Island.”
There was a moment of hesitation—a moment when I saw the question flicker across his face, the What will happen if?—but then he smiled, and took both my hands, and pulled me up to stand. “Go put on your nicest dress, Rachel Starr,” he said. “We’re going out.”
The nicest dress I owned was my bridesmaid dress from my sister’s wedding. It was green satin, with a scalloped bodice and a wide tulle skirt. It was a little too chilly now to wear only the dress so I covered it with an old tweed blazer.
“You look like Miss Havisham,” he said. “Or like a homeless debutante.”
“Do you like it?”
“I love it.”
We practically ran down the stairs of my walk-up, then flagged down a green Boro taxi without discussing where we were going. “Brighton Beach,” I told the driver, then looked over at Thomas for confirmation. He nodded in approval.
The whole taxi ride, we were too nervous to simply rest; we drummed each other’s palms, spidered our fingers up each other’s arms. I kept shifting around, the green satin of my dress moaning against the coarse imitation leather of the seats. He jiggled his leg. Already the trip had a manic Hail Mary energy, a frantic limit-pushing glee.
We got out at Brighton 6th Street, in front of a big Russian grocery store that had a suited attendant who removed your bags from you when you entered, giving you a
thick plastic baggage claim ticket. We toured the island of steaming prepared foods, royal-purple cabbage and fragrant pierogies and blood-colored borscht and the robust steamy balls of potatoes; we marveled at the meat counter, where a sullenly made-up teenage girl, eyes shadowed and mascaraed as if for a dance club rather than a butchery, sliced us thick bright-red portions of sausage. Here were the iridescent red jewels of wrapped candy, here the thick stinky flesh of fish. Here the dark cherries and imported chocolate, the thick buttery almond-laden cakes. Here was bounty, abundance.
We filled our grocery cart, then walked with heavy plastic bags to the beach. We sat down and spread the food out before us, swatting the seagulls away, not worrying about the sand in our shoes. We ate until we were ready to burst, then lay back on the beach. He took off his jacket and made a tent of it above our faces, and we kissed in the sudden dark.
“I don’t regret anything,” he said.
“Me neither,” I said. “Who said anyone regretted anything?”
“No one,” he said. “I’m just saying.”
“Okay, okay.”
After we’d kissed and dozed for a while, succeeding at losing track of time, we removed the jacket from above our heads to discover that the world had changed unwelcomely. The sun was low in the sky now, half gone behind the cauldron rim of the ocean. In the last half hour the world had tilted toward darkness. Everything was chilly and metallic, the stored-up sunlight gone out of things, the shadows long across the grayish-beige sand.
We didn’t say anything. We just got up, shivering, rubbing our arms. The big Russian lunch sat in my stomach like cement. Or perhaps something else sat there, a thick gray slab of undigestible feeling. Either way, I felt so heavy I could barely walk.
We dumped our leftovers in the garbage can, disgusted by the half-eaten sight of them: the hardened cave of the whitefish salad, the briny waste of the pickled peppers, the crusty rims of the bread. Then we walked to the subway, silent, arms folded, bodies contracted into themselves for warmth. On our way I looked around for cabs, but there were none to be seen; they didn’t roam this neighborhood at this time of night. We were on our own.
We swiped our MetroCards and sat on the bench to wait for the train. Thomas kept looking around the subway platform nervously, though no one else was there—as if one of the shadows might suddenly leap out and seize him.
I took his hands in my lap and held them between mine. He didn’t resist, but he didn’t say anything either; he just gave me a tight half smile and then went back to darting his eyes around the platform. One of us, I felt, had to say something. One of us had to perform the necessary distractions.
“Did I ever tell you,” I asked, “about my first-grade teacher, Mr. Goldberg?”
“Who?”
“Mr. Goldberg. My first-grade teacher. In our school, each class was required to put on a class play once a year. Most of them did, like, Stone Soup or something like that. But Mr. Goldberg was this big opera buff, and every year his first graders put on an opera. Condensed, of course, and they just lip-synched along to recordings of the arias. But real operas. My year we did Tosca.”
“I’m no expert, but isn’t that pretty dark?”
“Yeah. Of course she kills herself at the end. Mr. Goldberg told us that all the best operas have a big loud lady who kills herself. Maggie Glenn was the lead, and at the end she jumped off the stage and kind of collapsed onto the auditorium floor. Goldberg had to teach her how to jump in a way that looked like falling but was still safe. You know, lawsuits—are you okay?”
He’d started to shake noticeably. “Yeah,” he said, trying to sit up straight. “I’m just tired.”
“I know,” I said. “We’ll get you home soon. Look, here comes the train.” Its headlights were rounding the bend in the track, the long metal snake of its body following behind.
We got on, blinking and shielding our eyes against the painfully bright fluorescent light of the train car, then found a seat.
He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Keep telling the story,” he said. “About Mr. Goldberg.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, I was in the chorus, of course, because—oh my God.” He had suddenly started to flicker—not all of him, thank God, but the worst part: his eyes. The rest of his face was intact, but his eyes blinked on and off, there-gone, there-gone, like bad Christmas lights.
This had never happened before. These black holes in his head were more terrifying than any of his previous unravelings. He leaned over, his head between his legs. I lunged to cover his body with my body, then took off my jacket and covered his head.
Then I looked up and saw what he’d been looking at: a poster on the subway wall, right at our eye level, in which a Nordically good-looking blond man in a leather jacket points a gun right at the viewer, his blue eyes narrowed in some kind of photogenically badass emotion. Underneath him were the words THOR HALVARSSON, and in smaller letters below that MALE MODEL, HIRED GUN. It was an ad for a movie, probably a made-for-TV one; Thor Halvarsson’s flawless face was generic and unfamiliar. But his gun looked real, pointed directly at you, its dark barrel like an empty eye, its blunt gaze accosting you, accusing you of your killability.
Was this a clue about his death? This flinching at the poster? I closed my eyes and imagined all the scenarios that might have involved a gun. We were Americans, in the early twenty-first century, and there were so many possible variations. School shooting? Drive-by? Hunting accident? Gunned down in a movie theater, in an airport, on a bus? I wanted to know. I wanted to picture it: who had held the gun, who else had been there, where he had been hit, how he had crumpled and bled, who he might have held or who might have held him. I wanted to hold that memory with him, for him, so that he didn’t have to hold it all by himself.
Maybe it hadn’t been a gun. Maybe there had been no weapon. Maybe he was responding to what the gun represented: death itself, the same menace always, no matter its disguise. There were so many different kinds of accidents, so many ways the body could collide with harder or sharper things, so many vulnerabilities nestled even within the body, like land mines. The entire body was an Achilles’ heel.
It occurred to me, eventually, that he could put on my sunglasses and close his eyes and pretend to be blind, and I could guide him by the elbow all the way home. So that’s what we did. We exited the subway and walked back to my apartment, he in my cat-eye prescription sunglasses, me holding on to him and whispering our route. His deathliness remained undetected; we had averted the worst. But I could feel him bristling under my hand, desperate to get home, resentful at being forced into this public admission of defeat.
That night, we didn’t have sex. Exhausted, he fell asleep as soon as he hit the pillow; I lay awake longer, turning the day’s events over and over in my mind, then finally drifting into a restless, prickly slumber.
The next morning, I woke up feeling the itchy, ominous kind of uneasiness you feel when you know you’ve forgotten to do something but can’t remember what. Thomas was still sleeping, so I decided to go for a walk. I wrote a note: Gone out 11am, back soon, R.
As I left the building, I suddenly realized I was ravenous, which came as a relief: my hunger might give purpose to my wanderings. I could go to Brooklyn Provisions and return with unnecessarily fancy sandwiches, or perhaps a wheel of cheese and some rosemary crackers—something to affirm our bodies’ material instincts, to remind us that there was more than one reason to feel good about being alive.
But as soon as I entered the store, I froze in my tracks: someone had spoken my name.
“Rachel!” said the voice again. I turned in its direction.
It was Samira. She’d been standing right by the door, by the refrigerated case holding designer sodas and kombucha; the only reason I hadn’t recognized her was that her hairstyle was different. Instead of the long corkscrew curls, her hair was now cut short, forming a black cloud around her face. In a rush I remembered the kitchen fire, the singed tips of her hair; I
recalled that I hadn’t seen her since then.
“Oh my God!” she cried, embracing me. Samira was known for her ardent, clutchy hugs; they always made me feel both affirmed and vaguely oppressed. Weakly I moved my arms around to her back, gave it a half-hearted pat. I felt my heart pounding against my ribs.
“It’s been forever!” she murmured, releasing me and holding me at arm’s length, searching my face. “Where have you been? Are you going to Claire’s brunch? That’s where I’m heading now—I told her I’d bring a baguette.”
“Oh,” I said, pulling away. “No. I can’t go. I have…another thing.”
She folded her arms. “Jimmy told me you have a new guy.”
“Yeah…well.” I felt myself blushing. “It’s been kind of intense.”
“Intense how? When do your friends get to meet him?”
It would have been easy to make up an excuse, but I found myself speechless. Looking into Samira’s face, its wide-open candor, was doing something to my insides—making them quiver as though I’d burst open from the middle. I froze in place, immobilized by the presence of alien warmth, trying to still my trembling long enough to respond to her question.
Samira’s warmth should not have been alien; it was deeply familiar to me, a specific warmth I’d known since our freshman year of college—since we’d whispered from adjacent sleeping bags on our orientation hike, giggled while squatting together behind a bush. Why was it so threatening now?
She reached out again and laid a hand on my arm. “Are you okay, Rach? You look kind of—”
I didn’t hear the end of her question; I had already whirled around and pushed my way out the door. I found myself sprinting back toward my building, my thin Keds slapping the pavement clumsily, trying to outrun the feeling her concerned gaze had provoked.
The problem was, Samira knew me so well: I couldn’t fake her out, and I couldn’t tell the truth. Until that moment, it hadn’t been clear to me just how far I’d drifted from my previous reality, how impossible it would be to connect that reality to this new one, in which a dead man lay waiting for me in my bed.
The Regrets Page 10