Verge

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  Now she’s fingering the tools. She’s asking me their names, what they’re used for. It’s the sort of conversation that makes you feel good about what you know.

  I kind of start enjoying the company. I mean, I still think she’s a little weird, like when she starts asking me about the engine parts. She says, Don’t you think they’re a lot like body parts, like that tube over there that curls underneath that other thing looks like intestines, and that thick curved thing like an arm with a flexed muscle, that big thing in the middle with all the compartments could be the lungs, it even looks like it’s meant for air, and all of it together here under the hood, and us inside it tightening and screwing and greasing.

  So now we’re both oily and curious, I guess.

  When you were a kid, did your dad teach you other things? You know, like how to throw a baseball?

  Not really. Just mechanics. He was real busy. What about you? You look athletic. Those are some shoulders. But I’m lying. My father taught me how to be the man of a house.

  I was a very good swimmer.

  Good for you.

  I guess I was a tomboy. I didn’t have many girl friends. Except for two. One was a cheerleader. The other was a girl nobody else talked to. She had red hair and glasses. She used to sit by herself under a tree all through recess.

  I just keep working, even though by now I’m getting horny. I guess it’s the weirdness, the unexpectedness of her. Everybody gets excited by things they aren’t expecting. Not that she scared me, not really, except that now I see she’s holding the lug wrench and swinging it a bit. I’ve read stories, you know? Women are doing strange things these days. I think, Don’t be silly, don’t be so paranoid. She’s weird, not crazy.

  Then she says the weirdest thing of all, just out of the blue. What do you think about pain? she says.

  I play it cool. Don’t like it, I say. And it’s true. In my life I’m all dom all the time. I have no interest in any other role with women.

  Not even a little? Like when you get a back rub and they hit a really sore muscle and it hurts where they rub it but you just can’t get enough—what about that?

  Now, that shit is funny. Delayed-onset muscle soreness—DOMS—is the pain and stiffness that your muscles feel for hours after exercise or even a massage if your body isn’t used to it. The soreness is strongest for up to seventy-two hours after the exercise.

  Well, I guess everybody likes that. Th’ fuck? Is she messing with me or what?

  And what about fear?

  Now the tools are kind of slippery in my hands, and I start sizing her up, thinking if I see her raise her arm at me even a centimeter, I can swing this monkey wrench around into her stomach, just hard enough to scare her; after all, I’m bigger than she is, could pin her to the garage floor easily. But the second I imagine her really trying to hit me, I realize that I’m wet and throbbing and she’s just setting the tools back down like the most normal person in the entire universe.

  What do I owe you?

  She stares at me.

  My thighs ache, and it makes me feel like someone besides myself.

  SECOND COMING

  Why did she do it? I would say that she did it out of love, for me. But not your ordinary kind of love. She is a very selfish person. Probably the most selfish I know. For example, I’m not sure how conscious she was of the despair I’d experienced in those years. I don’t think she understood what I was going through at all. But she always had a kind of primal intuition about pain. Even when she was a kid, if someone was suffering in some way, she’d run in and try to save them. Injured people, cats, dogs, moths caught inside trying to get out, someone crying or just lonely; once she even designed a sling for an old oak tree with a broken branch. And if you were to look her in the eye and ask her for something, I mean even if a stranger did, I don’t think there is anything she wouldn’t do. Homeless people on the street had big nights because of her. Once she helped a crazy guy get loose out of a side gate at St. Mary’s. So when I asked her, there was a logic to it.

  The day I asked her, I had no idea in hell where to get the equipment I needed. I had a book with directions on proper procedure and a list of things I’d need: plastic cooking basters, syringes, tubing, rubber, oil. She had several different sizes of syringe. I don’t know why I didn’t think more about that. I only felt lucky not to have to go and purchase one. She had one that was the perfect size. We did end up having to buy this plastic-cap gizmo with a hole in it that fit over my cervix. To contain the little devils and increase the chance of success.

  Another item that turned out to be incredibly useful was her vibrator. When she asked me if I wanted to use one to get off first, I just looked at her blankly. Don’t you know what a vibrator is? she said. I didn’t. That figures, she chuckled, younger sister has to teach older sister how to use a sex toy. We laughed. When she brought it out, I blushed. What are you supposed to do with that thing, I asked, stick it up there or what? and then we laughed some more, and she told me that when the time came, she’d show me.

  If a woman is going it alone, there are several strategies she can use to increase her chances of success. I didn’t have the money to set up a procedure at the clinic, so I was giving it my best shot. One thing that helps is to stimulate the organs, as during intercourse. The increased mucus and swelling help to prime the vagina and cervix. You know, like motor oil. Another thing that helps is to get into a position where your feet are higher than your ass. Like yoga. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Mixing the semen in warm water in a cup helps the semen collect so that it sucks up into the syringe well and disperses evenly into the vagina. Once the semen is inside, it also helps if you remain in that inclined position so the little fellas don’t leak back out. Details.

  My sister’s husband was in the bedroom, watching TV. I was propped up in my reverse incline on the living room couch. She’d bought this great deep red blanket for the occasion, and I nestled down into it. She’d arranged candles, incense, and flowers everywhere; the room was heavenly. She convinced me to take all my clothes off. I just need to be naked from the waist down, right? I said, but she said, You may as well get some pleasure out of this, and that seemed right. She put on some Celtic harp music, which made the room a little dizzy, unless it was the red wine she convinced me to drink. My skin was warm. Sweat was forming underneath my breasts and between my legs. She brought the vibrator to my hands and turned it on. I didn’t really know what to do with it, so she guided my hands. At first she touched my lips with it, and I had a deep and to-the-bone tingling sensation throughout my body. She pushed it down to my clitoris for a few seconds, and my entire body spasmed; then she withdrew it quickly and touched it to my breasts, my nipples, one at a time. She then moved it down again, and at a certain point she let go so that I was guiding the movement. My eyes were closed, my hands were alive. I was breathing very hard. At a certain point, I opened my eyes; they felt puffy—my lips too—and I looked at her. I was rocking my hips and moving my hands, and my scent rose up between us, and I was looking at her. She was smiling and staring between my legs, and I liked her staring there; then she looked into my eyes, and I felt the deepest need for her to say something, and she said, Touch your tits with it again, and I did that, and then she said, Now put it back in your pussy, move it around . . . and then I closed my eyes again. I think I heard her whisper that she would be in the bedroom and that I should keep going.

  While she was there, I heard moaning, and I came shortly after that. When she returned she had the cup full and I was wet and flushed and filled with my own desire turned in on itself.

  She nestled herself between my legs in a kind of kneeling position. She filled the syringe without my noticing. She told me to close my eyes. She tickled an imaginary line down my body from my breasts to my pussy with her finger. Then two of her fingers entered me, and she rubbed around in circles. She said, Can you hold your lips apart, wide apar
t? I did. I throbbed so hard between my legs I thought it must have looked like a mouth opening and closing. I closed my eyes again. I felt her fingers there still, and then I felt the syringe enter me, but she had her fingers around it in such a way so that it was unbearably gentle. I bit the inside of my cheek. I felt the overwhelming urge to beg her to do it harder, then I felt crazy, then I shot that thought out of my brain. I did not feel her expel the syringe, but she was moving her hand and the syringe in and out when she did it.

  When I opened my eyes, I had tears. I saw her head and face between my legs, the light of her blond hair, the heat of her skin, her mouth, open.

  Later we all had dessert and watched a movie.

  I remember the day she was born.

  BEATINGS

  His face has the look of a boxer’s mug, but only in certain light, particularly in winter, when shadows and darks and lights stand out in stark contrast to one another. Only when winter gives way to a single barren tree against an almost white sky, or a boulder shoulders its own outline against snow. His fighter’s face emerges or recedes according to the light. So do his eyes, the cups of fatigue underneath each yielding to the flattened spot just above the nose, the jaw clenching and unclenching itself while he’s eating or fighting or fucking or sleeping. You wonder where you’ve seen this face before, and then you think it looks like the faces in those movies, men beating back the world, De Niro in Raging Bull, Stallone in Rocky, Brando in On the Waterfront. The more you watch him move, at night, working out, pushing the body against darkness and winter cold, the more it’s true, it is the film of a man and not the man, or it is the man caught on film repeating himself. Any image of a man that is against itself, that you suddenly see is any image of a man. In some ways men are always fighting the image of themselves in the world.

  Outside in the gray, he works out. Boxing. Short pulses. He faces off against what is called a body opponent bag. It is in the shape of a man’s torso. The man’s face has the look of an aggressor. He hits. The blows land in the head, the chest.

  In his mind ideas seize, recede, then again raise and rise. Fisted speed dug deep and jab extended until it is shot strung back to the shoulder. His thoughts a never-ending drive and end, and end, and end, and end.

  * * *

  • • •

  INSIDE THE HOUSE, where it’s light, he wraps those same hands around a bow and strings and plays. His hands change shape holding the cello, like birds moving from the dull land to the winged sky. A metronome marks time with ticks, with rocking, with regular, adjustable intervals. Its measures and rules give meaning, sense, divisions, and designs to sound. The metronome unvaryingly regular, undergirding the music, with its variable rhythms, melodies, harmonies, and counterrhythms. His hands cup the instrument. His fingers carry the crouch of a dream in which chaos orders and slows and sings. The strings as thick as the bones of a hand. The reverberation bellows up through his wrists, forearms, shoulders, into his spine.

  In winter, even the trees are beaten. Gray of asphalt to gray of fence post to gray of field of dormant growings. Gray of the tips of branches and trunks, gray of the hills’ hues dulling over, gray of the edges of things against the gray-white sky. Like color is bruised, bludgeoned, dead.

  Up close, his fingers on the strings look like something out of a dream. Suddenly the knuckles are fluid and seemingly without joints. The fingertips ride hard and wide; they tremble, then go taut. The white skin stretching between fingers seems more like an infant’s than a man’s. And when the strings pulse and reverb, it is as if the instrument is of the body, not a wooden, hollowed-out object. Between his legs its singing rises. From his spine the tones pull up and out. Against his chest the neck presses; even his teeth resonate. The wood grain as deeply brown as his eyes. The notes rebody a body. You must close your eyes.

  Cadence—any cadence—is what saves him. A rhythmic flow, as in poetry, as in the measured beat of movement, in dance, in the inflections of a voice—all modulations and progressions, moving through a point beyond sight, sound, vision, being. To fall, in winter, without ending.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. He is thirty years old. He gets up to pee, then crashes to the floor in the bathroom. His wife finds him. He is having a seizure. He is not conscious, though his eyes are open. She lifts his feet slightly even in her fear, holds his head in her lap and says his name and says his name and says his name until his eyes flutter open, like a fighter coming to. That’s how his life became this fight. That’s how his fighting became him. When he works out now, you see the fighter taking form. His fight is with his father. His fight is with himself. His fighting so familiar he cannot recognize it, like a face in the mirror after shocking news.

  His wife—what is her part? She thinks of all the men in her life. Her father, heart disease. Her first husband, heart murmur. Her second husband, liver and heart disease. Her first husband’s father, heart failure. Her second husband’s father, heart attack. Her father’s father, heart attack. Everyone has seen this movie. Any movie today must take what has been told a thousand times and give it a form no one expects.

  She is a decade older than he is. She had thought of herself as the one closer to the far edge of life, closer to genetic undoing. But it is now that she sees the death in all of us. What she has begun to see is that we are all an audience watching the image of someone fighting. What she has begun to learn is the black and white of slow motion. If she stands at the window and watches him working out, what she sees is a frame at a time. One move following another. The fist pulled back to the shoulder, then—a separate movement—launched at the false body of the opponent bag.

  Zocor decreases triglyceride levels. Aspirin thins the blood. Fish-oil capsules and flaxseed oil wage enzyme war against the body’s fatty walls. Arteries and blood roads and blued vessels bulge and thin in heavy rhythms. A glass of wine each night, once pleasure, is now prescription. Red meat torn from animal, the old instinctual longing, is replaced with white rice, broiled fish, food for bodies hairless and light. He obeys the regimen. He fears the weakness that may attack his bulk. He cannot picture himself; he is afraid he is changing in ways he cannot live with.

  * * *

  • • •

  HE DECIDES THAT he will begin to film himself working out and playing cello. At first he doesn’t know why. Later he decides, or realizes, that the films will be for his son.

  He never had any home movies of his own childhood. He never knew his father. Everyone these days takes color home videos on their phones, but he shoots on old-fashioned black-and-white film. The rushes hang in strips down the bathroom door, then coil onto white reels. He tells himself that he and his son will watch them together, as movie stars do in private. The images living and turning forever like old movies of prizefighters. He remembers something someone once told him: that the last scenes of a film determine whether you want to watch it again.

  She watches him work out. She admires the violence with which he fights, because he is finding a place to put the violence, a form that is beautiful.

  We believe in fighting, somehow, still. We want to see the raging bull, the boxer beaten by a tragic flaw. We cheer for Rocky; we want to see a man’s love bring his violence to life, see his fighting save him and provide a happy ending, the sequel, the sequel. We want to see a fighter who is forced into labor that is not his own die a heroic death. We want to see him maintain his integrity even if it kills him.

  Aikido, karate, judo, tae kwon do, arts of combat, of beauty, of sport, of self-defense, of speed and thought, of the body unbodied from its tasks and let loose into movement and rhythm, arms unarming themselves, wrists cocked back to fluid animal rotations, shoulders dipping and curling, neck forgiven its upright burden and relearning the side-to-side and back-and-under tricks of instinct, chest and biceps pumping and bulging like meated masses, hands letting go of tools and becom
ing not a part of the body but the body itself, of all the internal organs in symphony and not against one another, not individuated but of continual measured movement, as if the entire corpus was what drove things, and not the heart alone.

  * * *

  • • •

  HE DOESN’T KNOW IT, but his numbers are improving, the good cholesterol beating the bad, the fats fading in sebaceous white waves. He doesn’t see it, but his weight is dropping, muscle, spine, and nerve replacing the old soft buffer between the world and his heart. For isn’t it his father’s body he has inherited? He doesn’t feel it, but his heart’s beating is no longer against him, though he fights as if everything, even the moon, were against him. Still, inside his body, invisible, his heart is finding a rhythm that will bring him life, calm, like the soft pink of an open palm.

  What is it? What was it? Why? His father dead at thirty-three. Heart attack. The blood blocked, the oxygen cut off. The muscle, that fist-shaped meat, unable to breathe. His father. Thirty-three. Heart attack. Words like thrusts. And all that living up and through him. What is it? What was it? Why? His fists asking.

  He is working out in front of the house. His fist connects whap-smack solid with the heavy bag. He catches a glimpse in his peripheral vision of his wife and son inside the house, as if they were a heart inside a body, smelling like infant’s skin and milk. Then he strikes a blow straight to the chest of the false body. It is a kind of hope, this beating.

  A WOMAN GOING OUT

  Leave the legs for last.

  Take the razor up smooth against the slight resistance of stubble, flick the wrist at the top, dip the head into the water, swish it around, then back down to the ankle for the next run. Flesh smooth-appearing in a track through white foam. Do it again. Expose the leg in stripes of skin.