by Orna Ross
He understands. Kneeling up, he unbuttons his shirt, slips it off his shoulders. I stand, take off my shorts and wait. He copies me. So we go, item for item, the garments getting smaller and smaller until we are both naked. Only then do I move back into his arms. His body is changed too, though not as much as mine: his belly is soft from beer and his pecs have drooped. Above his hips swell two handles of flesh. He is softer but his penis, standing to attention in the candlelight, is just the same.
We are naked, here, outside my outhouse, in full view if anyone should decide to climb the small cliff-face, or come in around to the back of the house and shed. But no one will. We kiss on and on. We are quiet, as always: we never spoke during the act. A small spatter of rain drops hits my skin, as Rory traces a tingling line from the hollow at the base of my throat to loop around my right breast, then gives the same attention to the other side, and follows with his hands until both are high points, sending surges of desire in every direction. I hear myself moan, I hear myself say his name, and the scent of him fills my nostrils, unchanged. I would know him by this if we met in total darkness.
He lies down, pulls me on top: the perfect position for a seven-month pregnant woman. He knows more than he used to know. A sudden shiver of wind tears the air but I ignore it, all thought swirling away into overrunning sensation. Large, separate drops of rain start to ping against my bare skin and they feel good, pinpoints of cold caress. I am close, so close. I bear down and squeeze tight and, yes, I am there. Heart, muscle, tissue, blood pounding, pounding, pounding. There, there, there.
I slump against him. It takes a time to come back into myself. He is still with me, still inside me. His turn, his rhythm now. Another gust of rain-logged wind slaps the back of my neck, then it is falling on us. Heavy Irish rain, all over the rug and the wine and our clothes and the sleeping bag, drenching everything, but we don't care. I throw my head back to feel it on my face as we go on and on, believing we'll go on forever. His breath rises and rises and at the top, just before he lets go, catches in the back of his throat. Beloved, long-lost sound.
And then, in a moment, we are back in the world, jumping to our feet to pick up things, pick up everything, quick as we can, and run for shelter from the rain now pelting down, stabbing our bare skins, plastering our hair flat on our crowns. Inside the shed, I turn on the oil lamp to find towels. I am shivering. Water streams in runnels down my neck. Above us, the rain hammers down on corrugated iron, hurting our ears. We look at each other and have to laugh.
"Is this place waterproof?" Rory yells above the din.
"I don't know," I shout back. "It's the first rain this summer. I hope so."
I hold out a towel to him and he catches my hand, pulls me in close. I feel his lips on my wet scalp.
"How are you going to get home in this?" My shed feels like a boat, tipping and rolling on an open ocean.
"Maybe I'll stay," he murmurs into my hair. He looks across in the direction of my small bed. "Would it take two?"
"Two-and-a-half, you mean," I say, rubbing my bump. "I doubt it."
"Let's try."
I get in first and he squeezes in behind me, my back to his front, his hand settled on the base of my big belly, sealed in tight, like two sheets of paper in an envelope. We are damp and our skin is chilled, but beneath is blood, rising warm.
I turn the lantern off and darkness tucks in around us. Above, the rain pounds on the roof, like it wants to be let in. The noise is deafening, but somehow, almost immediately, we plummet into sleep.
A while later, I waken. One part of me feels like I've been asleep a long time, another suspects not. Beside my ear, Rory lets a snore on each out-breath.
We did it. In the end, after all the pushing and parrying, it just happened. And I don't regret it, do I? No, I don't think I do.
His arm lies heavy across me, strangling my waist, and his body is too close, too hot. I slide from beneath its hold. His breathing changes as he feels my absence through his sleep, then he shifts and spreads himself out across the mattress and his slow, noisy inhalation and exhalation intensifies. Only then do I notice the quiet in the shed. The rain has stopped.
I think of his wife, only a short walk away, waking to find he's not there.
And for some reason, my promise to Gran and Richard rises in my mind: I will do this well.
I can't stay there, in bed with it. My shoes are not where I usually leave them. I have to cross the dirty floor in bare feet to the table where I find what I'm looking for: my torch. Putting my hand over the lamp, I turn it on so my fingers glow transparent pink.
I look across. He hasn't budged, so I release the glow and use it to retrieve shoes and clothes. I dress in a dry pair of jeans and a warm jumper, then go to sit at my desk. I have the overwhelming urge to write about what we have done.
I write quickly, lightly, without stopping to think or amend. As I have written, so it was. Physically, more pleasing than before. When we were young together, I used to pretend it was better than it was, so grateful to be with him that I felt no lack. I no longer love like that. How do I love now?
What now?
I imagine myself writing to Sue Denim, as I often do when I find myself lost or confused. Dear Sue, Tonight I slept with my first love for the first time in twenty years. The only real love I ever had, who just so happens to be married and a father of two... How would she answer me?
Granny Peg's stacked diaries tower over my writing hand. On top of them are Auntie Norah's notebooks and all those loose pages of hers that I struggled to organise into chronological order. Rory has been taking pictures of these, and of the other papers, and the letters. He has also taken a series of me, sitting here like this, writing about them, and brought me outside the shed and made me stand just as Gran did in one of the old photographs of her wedding day, the little slit in the wall near the roof showing in the exact same place over my head.
That wedding picture is lying on my desk now. It is old and cracked and somebody has torn a small piece off its bottom right-hand corner. Wedding Day, November 14th, 1923, it says on the back, in Gran's beautiful writing, the kind of handwriting that is both legible and ornate, the kind nobody does any more. She looks out at me from this picture, her eyes unreadable, but as I stare into them by torchlight, I feel something give in my chest.
I put down my pen, go across to the bed and try to shake him awake. "Rory, get up. Rory!" I shake him harder until he feels me, until I cannot be ignored. He groans, tries to roll over. Another shake.
"What?" he grunts. "What is it?"
"You have to get up. You have to go home."
"Don't be silly," he says, eyes shut fast.
I shine the torch full in his face.
"Hey! Stop!" His hand shoots out from under the duvet, pushes the torch aside. "What are you doing?"
"Get up."
He rubs his eyes. "What's happening?" His voice is exasperated. "What's the matter?"
I retrieve his clothes, dump them on top of him in the bed. "Put these on. You need to go."
"I don't understand," he says.
I shake my head, stubborn. "Come on, get up."
I shine the light on him, searching his face. Wrinkles crag his forehead and fan out from round his sleep-starved eyes and I want to smooth them out with my thumbs. He puts his arm up across his face against the light. "Will you put that thing away?"
"Please," I turn to him. "Please, Rory, don't say anything else. Just go."
I cross back to my desk to wait for him to do it, shine the light again on Gran's photo, on the four young people dressed up for the day: bride and groom in front, the groom in military uniform, a rifle resting across his knee, face scrubbed up, looking off to the side.
Rory sighs heavily and my bed creaks under the weight of him getting out. I hear him search out his clothes, the rustles of him dressing behind me.
The bridesmaid looks in the other direction, locked inside the casing of her thoughts. Both she and the bride wear c
ostumes in the faux-traditional Irish style, fashionable among nationalists of the time: over-the-shoulder capes held in place by Tara brooches. Their heads are bare, their hair tied into chignons at the base of their necks, the bodices of their dresses embroidered with intricate Celtic designs, like those that illuminate the ancient manuscripts held in Trinity College.
Only the bride looks straight at the camera, her gaze serious but steady. The same expression she wears in another picture, of four girls in their early twenties, tweed and gabardine coats over their Cumann na mBan uniforms, pointing their guns at the photographer. "Peg, Molly, Cat, Kathleen. February 1922," that one says on the back. It's a staged picture and it's shocking. And I'm held by this feeling that it — like all the other pictures here, and the diary entries, and the letter — is trying to tell me something.
Rory is behind me now, standing over me. He touches the back of my neck. "It's okay, Jo." His fingers are cold already.
"Is it?" I whisper.
"Yes," Rory says. "Everything is going to be okay now."
"Really?"
He pulls me in close and, for the first time in twenty years, we stand together, leaning into each other.
"Yes, really," he says. "You can stop worrying now. Just leave it all to me."
Swell
1986
Grace Jones purrs her hymn to her Jamaican Guy from two massive wall-mounted speakers, pained vocals underwritten by a pounding bass drum. At the head of the exercise class, an instructor faces the group and leads them through jumps and bends and stretches, shouting her commands to be heard above the music: "...and reach, two, three, four..."
At her bidding, nineteen people arch their arms over their heads and bounce into a waist stretch. She lifts her left knee, they lift theirs; she moves right, they all shift in the same direction, swinging their arms just as she does, half a second behind her in synchronized unison, like one multi-limbed organism.
She is fit, this Lycra-clad instructor: strong, supple and lean. She can run six miles in under forty minutes, bend from her waist to touch her nose to her knee with palms flat on the floor. She can bench-press eighty-eight pounds, leg-press one hundred and ten. While instructing her classes, she stretches further, jumps higher, lasts longer than those following her instructions, though this is the third class she has given in four hours.
Sometimes, the control she has over these people's movements bewilders her. She's tempted to do something silly or lewd — pretending to pick her nose or rub herself between her legs — just to see if they might copy her. She never does, though; she doesn't want to slight what they do together: the giving over of their bodies to the music, letting the beat drive them, push them further and faster, until every muscle is primed. When it goes well, it's a high like no other, and tonight is a good night. This group is one of her most advanced, well trained, responsive: she can push them hard. As the apex of the class approaches, as the faces contort with effort and the smell of sweat rises in the room and the ceiling-to-floor mirrors fog over from breath and perspiration, her shouts grow more excited: "Yes...and just eight more: eight...seven...push harder, that's it...and five...four...three...two...one...And again...ten...nine..."
A good class.
When it is over, after she has cooled them all down with slow stretching and breathing exercises, a short line of people forms, waiting to ask her questions or share their food or fitness dilemmas. Her friend Richard also waits, but over by the window doing extra hamstring stretches, as she works through the line, advising, counselling, consoling or deflecting.
When the last of them has gone, he comes across, pecks her on the mouth. "Terrific, as always." His grey vest is streaked with sweat. "Just what I needed."
"Oh?" She returns the kiss. "Stressed out again?"
He shudders, and she motions for him to turn round. She puts her hands on his shoulders, under the towel, just at the base of his neck. "Let me see." Her fingers slide over his damp skin, her thumbs kneading the bunched muscle underneath. "Work? Or Gary again?"
He lets a long, low groan, physical delight in her ministrations, combined with frustration. "You won't believe what the little B has done to me now."
She nips the flesh of his shoulder. "Ow! That hurt."
"Then don't talk about Gary like that."
"Wait till you hear, though. On Sunday — "
"Tell you what, hon..." She gives him a final manipulation of the trapezius and releases him. "Save it for dinner. Then you can give me the full treatment." Richard's stories are always part performance, and she enjoys the entertainment. "Hit those showers," she says, "and see you down at reception in twenty?"
This engagement for dinner after her Wednesday class has become a fixture for them both. She sees Richard on other nights too, and with other people, but Wednesday's tête-à-tête has become the bedrock of their friendship. There's no one in this city she'd rather spend time with. It was Richard who encouraged her career in fitness. When she started teaching aerobics classes part-time in a local hall she wanted to be more than just another Jane Fonda clone. As she experimented with new moves and methods, Richard urged her on. Whenever she hit on something uniquely her own, he loved it. "Don't be afraid, Squirrel," he used to say. "You're great at this; go for it."
So she did. She shunned the pure dance music used by other instructors in favour of songs by artists like Talking Heads, Marvyn Gaye, Grace Jones, songs with slow beats that allowed muscles and joints to be put through a fuller range of movement. She devised routines that took the body from its highest attainable point — leaping through the air — to lying prone on the floor and back up again, all in a series of controlled moves. To an onlooker, her class might look less strenuous than the more usual fast-stepping, high-impact workouts, but those who did the routine knew just how tough — and effective — it was.
Richard was right. The more experimental she became, the more the punters loved it. She quickly got slots in the top gyms in the city and people began to book for her class in advance, sometimes weeks ahead. Instead of taking one of the full-time jobs she was offered by the gyms, she set up her own company, Rí Rá.
"In Ireland," her publicity material read, "a rí rá is a rollicking and raucous good time. That's just what you're guaranteed with a Rí Rá Workout. A pulse-pounding, dance-based aerobic routine set to an eclectic musical mix — from Classical to Celtic Rock — that will challenge every muscle in your body. In Ireland, a rí rá sometimes turns into an outright ruaille buaille. What's that? Well, why don't you come along and find out?"
It felt hypocritical to play on her Irishness this way, after years of renouncing the place, but Richard convinced her. "You are Irish," he said, "and if for some misbegotten reason the Irish are suddenly cool, you might as well take advantage."
She knows that other people consider what she does to be superficial, or worse. Another of her good friends, the defiantly large Susan, has put all the arguments to her. Susan is scathing about what she calls "body fascism" and carries every one of her one hundred and eighty pounds with pride, a testament to her resolution to "take up space".
Susan does not approve of exercise classes, and considers exercise instructors to be implicated — "up to their necks" — in a system that uses ideals of beauty as a weapon in the war against women. Susan's arguments sway her, but she knows too, to her core, that exercise saved her.
Often, she sees both sides of an argument; sometimes more than two. This used to worry her, until she read what the American bard of liberation, Walt Whitman, wrote in his 'Song of Myself':
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
She had the lines written up in large letters and framed, to hang on her wall.
She has men in her life, this woman. Lovers aplenty. Generally she loves them serially, one after another, but sometimes they overlap. Monogamy no longer seems to her like the only way to live. With so many people in
her life, she is rarely lonely and if she — just sometimes — finds herself marooned in a moment of yearning, she is able to extricate herself. To catch herself on, as her grandmother used to say. She no longer believes in "The One".
She, of course, is me. I like her, this creation of mine, though I don't quite believe in her. Living in San Francisco has changed me: I am not the person I was when I arrived. If I had stayed where I was, or gone somewhere else, I would be different again. Knowing this makes me feel strange.
Conditional.
Richard and I sit at our table in Mani's, drinking "love bombs": alcohol-free cocktails of passion-fruit juice, wheatgerm and ginseng. We are both dry, one of the many things we have in common. This makes us mildly self-conscious — since its lawless, boomtown beginnings, San Francisco has been a hard-drinking town — but it's just beginning to be cool to be clean. Health is a burgeoning business and sober clubs are opening up.
Over the menus, Richard is making a tale out of his complaints against Gary. On Sunday afternoon, after an argument about Richard's staying out all night after a trip to the Glory Holes, his favourite bathhouse, Gary "flounced" out of their apartment and hasn't been seen since. The word on the gay grapevine is that at least one of those absent nights was spent with Reno Lewis, who just happens to be an old flame of Richard's.
"Reno Lewis," wails Richard, dropping his face into his hands. Under the dramatics, I know his dismay is real.
Real, but misplaced, it seems to me. For weeks — months — I have listened to Richard bemoaning Gary's predilection for monogamy as if it were a vice.