by Amy Benson
This would be the great pleasure of an affair like this—the timelessness that purifies all things in its simplicity. In the imagined moment we two are so simple. Nothing will come of this, we would tell ourselves, no burdens of construction, of “we could be doing this wrong and the future will punish us.”
And this is the great sadness—that without a future we are essentially without a present, for we can give someone only so much now, and the rest is a promise of benefits to come. This, too, is a great sadness—that we will never be able to argue for our own goodness again.
Here is one remaining wish: I hope that someone will pull a pin so that we fall into sleep like hair tumbling from a bun.
…
I think he grows impatient with my laborious fingers. (Even in my imagination I am plodding in the moment.) They are nothing like his silvery digits. Surely he can do this better himself. Nothing about me is as quick as he is. Not my hands, not my skin, not my smile, my confidence, my eyes, and certainly not my tongue. I have always admired quick people because we value what we are not. I have lovingly watched the mouths and hands of the witty and agile, because these people control the present. I merely stand close, hoping to be implicated in the wit and movement by my mute presence.
The sparkling-eyed boy is agile and his skin is smooth just where it should be. Why has he allowed me here, spilled across his sheets, a collection of limbs and pregnant pauses? Maybe he likes my freckles; maybe he likes the scars on my knee; maybe he thinks I have something to give him. But it won’t be words, I’m afraid. At least not yet. I have only the spaces between events and thoughts, between thoughts and the words that almost never come. You see, I have to go away, write words down and then bring them back. I’m waiting for someone to stick around and love me for that.
…
I imagine saying, “Bring your breath to my ear. I am sick of talking.” He moves silently to where I sit on a maple dresser, my legs crossed in front of me. I watch where his leg attaches to his hip. It had seemed to me impossible that something so perfectly functional could still exist among humans. And yet here it is gliding toward me: a hip I love, a hip I want to either smash or deify, a hip that now bears bruises from my teeth. “Like this?” He covers my left ear with his mouth and slowly lets his warm air seep into me until I uncross my legs and circle them around those rolling hips. He can be dark when he wants to be. He looks around for the most uncomfortable spot in the room. There is a short flight of stairs by the door. We can take turns laying our backs across it, bruising in strips. He plucks me off the dresser and I cling to his upright body, trying to kiss him rather desperately with the whole of my mouth at once—tongue, teeth, gums. We are frantic against the wooden steps; we feel as if we’re being cut to bits. He rolls me on top of him and I feel dirt sticking to my damp shoulders. I try to sit up but he holds my face close to his with two handfuls of hair. He is just breathing, but if he could he might say, “The rest of the world is gone, isn’t it? Do you feel it anywhere?”
…
I saw a movie once in which a geisha and her lover become sexually obsessed with each other. They push and push each other into more and more dangerous territory, until, at the climax of both the movie and their relationship, she cinches a silk cord around his neck too tightly and strangles him. There is something of a Protestant ethic in this story: anything that’s worth doing is worth doing right. That is, if you have not killed each other with your passion, it wasn’t truly passion.
Even in my fiction, though, our passion ages:
I hold my arms around his rib cage, which expands and contracts as if it were something that could be broken open and set free from his spine, rhythmic like moth wings. I push my lips against his shoulder until the shudder of violence has passed through me and my fingernails, the heel of my hand, the sharp ends of my teeth, again can be trusted with his skin. We are dulled enough to be safe with each other after all.
…
I still dream of him regularly. But, since the birth of his daughter, the dreams have changed dramatically. Instead of both of us dropping effortlessly from the lives we’ve built into something earlier and seemingly elemental between us, the new dreams are guilt-hemmed. In them there is no question of his leaving his family, and so we are furtive, meeting for a quick exchange of words, sometimes a kiss. Often we are caught by someone—our faces in casts they wouldn’t be if everything inside us were innocent. There’s a softness to our expressions, an openness to our bodies turned slightly toward each other that gives us away. Then we usually scramble for propriety or excuses.
There are other stories in this fiction of our affair: he wants to know more about these dreams, the nice ones—he asks how often, what kinds. I can tell he thinks I’m obsessed with him, and a smile he can’t help seeps across his face. I indulge him with as many distinct dreams as I can remember, demonstrating the at-long-last kiss repeatedly: You stand there and I stand here and then we lean toward each other, my cheek just brushing yours.
I would rather not recall a dream I actually had recently: There is a small crowd gathered for a football game he’s playing in. I am down by the sidelines with him, as if I’m his girlfriend. I look up into the splintered bleachers and see his wife watching us, and, rather than slink away, I join her in the stands and commiserate about her husband’s faults. Neither of us wants him at the end of our conversation.
…
A leaf limps across the gravel driveway, and I think at first it is a small animal. Can I help it? Everything is animal. Even the air smells furred and sinewed. It hangs, full of vesseled intent. A half an hour ago, I thought the fringe of my eyelashes was a bat flying across the room in search of a voluptuous fig. These mistakes are not problems of perception; they are gifts. Let us see animals wherever we look and let us read in them intention and passion and failure. Let us not believe that we are alone in this room, one species, sad and isolated, feeling that which crumbles in a moment and blows away—nothing out of something. No, the ceiling is thick with bats. I feel the pulsing of their hungry throats.
…
Sometimes I think the emotions of an affair would be no more real than this fantasy—sooner or later something true and ugly would blast the film from the adulterer’s eyes, after which passion, or even good humor, would take a monumental self-deception. I want to get this fiction right. What is the moment that would make the glamour of deceit or invention blister? I imagine that I, too, could be blasted by a scene like this:
Ten minutes ago, I couldn’t imagine her. She wasn’t real to me. Then I picked up the hairbrush lying on the dresser and saw several of her hairs wound around the bristles. They are longer than mine and a rich brown. I pull out a few and slide my fingertip up to the little white nodules at their base. I think about the tiny void in the follicles from which these hairs were tugged. I picture her sliding these bristles across her scalp, the private pleasure that must ripple outward down her neck, across her face. One small daily ritual. A piece of her body here in my hand. What else brings her pleasure? Cracking eggs over a stainless steel bowl. The first chilly September night she needs the comforter. Fresh socks on her feet and her baby’s earlobe between her fingers.
When one takes somebody’s husband, somebody’s wife, all one thinks about is oneself. That’s it. If I’d had an affair with the sparkling-eyed boy, I might have said that the worst part of an affair has nothing to do with vows or propriety, that the worst part is what you let yourself become, what you will be unable to cease being. Unrepentantly monstrous in your selfishness. But, I would have been wrong. There’s something worse, and this conclusion would merely be further evidence of my self-obsession. I would have called my actions many other things—human, necessary, a historical arch completed. I would have done anything not to see my ugliness. Look. See it. See her.
…
He has almost never been the leaving one. I hope, if he ever left this place, he’d feel as if he’d left his skin behind, dangling from branch a
nd rock and hanging in coils from his back like the bark of a failing birch.
Affairs, by definition, end. And, so, I must imagine an end to this one:
Before I go I tell him the one thing I’ve learned: When you leave what has been your one and only place, you forever leave places. You must concede an interchangeable sameness. When there is no longer only one place, there are millions of dishearteningly similar places. And, when there is no longer only one person, there are millions of dishearteningly similar people. The floodgates of disillusionment open. The way I see it, he has struck a bargain. To stay here he has had to forsake all of the other features of the world—and what he has, perhaps by default, loved deeply was not enough to keep me here long ago.
We don’t talk about it, but he must love her. They stay together, make things together, like a baby, like the visceral comfort of this house. Like promises. They must give each other moments of deepest relaxation when there is nothing else they need and no one else they’d like to be. If he loves me at all, it’s because I leave.
…
An affair (even this imagined one) is an aquarium of human experience, a controlled experiment with loving. The constant bubbles rising and breaking, neon castles, a bit of real kelp. When I finally leave the house, I lose not only love but the progress narrative that overlies our unions. We think: our actions must build to something. But he and I take nothing with us except a clutch of memories that will die when we die or probably sooner. We have been gasping at our own little bubbler, occasionally staring at our reflections in the glass. We are safe, but, dear fellow swimmer, this is a far cry from the ocean.
What does one do when one cannot go forward? When, in fact, there is no such thing as forward or backward or any other direction? Does one write another page and another until there is a neat stack that can be numbered one to ninety-three so that one may literally add up to something? Or does one remain a point forever rather than becoming a vector? I wish I could stop compulsively imagining myself with him. I wish I could sum up once and for all what I’m missing. I wish I could cull from myself that part of me that would never want to leave the sparkling-eyed boy, that could breathe sameness like air and never suffocate, that could love without doubting, and laugh without wounding, that would never, ever even think, “What the hell do you know? You’ve never even been to college!” This part of me would recline on this bed and gesture him toward me. It seems sometimes love is a hand held in the air for a moment, lightly moving. “Me? Do you mean me?” Yes, my darling, come over here. He would come and press his chest to my back, matching me length for length and spilling over at the head and feet like liquid.
…
I have done this thing. With my mind.
I know there is a difference between the body and the mind. The body takes as its province the present, space, accountability. And crime. But I am more afraid, at times, of the province of the mind. Our thoughts alone can alienate us from our powers of self-defense. And what about you, in your many-storied lives? Would people guess that you only ask them what’s wrong to get your turn to speak? Does your boyfriend know you imagine someone else as you slide your hand down his spine? This week is something I carry around in my mind, dangerous as powdered glass.
The Bath
A Simple Thing I Can Only Imagine
Years in the future, you bathe him at the end of the day, your legs molded around his, the parts of your body he finds mysterious, always mysterious, pressed around the small of his back. You squeeze water over his white thighs (they are almost translucent, like skim milk, not cream), ascend the peak of his knee with your sponge.
There is the love that speaks and then the love that washes. There is also, of course, the love that makes love. But at night, when it’s over, there is no further you can go—you are just two skins facing each other, or curling, or touching back to back—two skins filled to the top. Not enough room inside for the entirety of another. What should you call intimacy, then? Can you get it with the lights on? Must you know the other’s favorite song? Must both agree on the definition? Can you be alone? Must you see the other on the toilet? Must it include the worst thing that you feel inside or else you’re lying? Is there any other way but the sharing of food? Must you see every season of the year together, put on your T-shirts, your sweaters, your overcoats, together? Can you have it once you know the scent of the other, which drifts unbidden from his or her skin and hair despite the salves we dab and sprinkle on? Could it be pushing your butterscotch into his mouth when he leans in for a kiss? Does it mean knowing more facts than anyone else: “I know that when you were twelve, you had a khaki parka that was mannish and ugly and made you cry on the inside but you wore it every day to school with a stiff, unglossed upper lip”? Must it require the damp nearness of time and space? If you imagine it’s real, is it real?
Through your cheek and the corner of your mouth you can feel the heat of his back. Every day at the construction site the sun dements his cells, eggs them on to greater feats of darkness and spots. Above the waist he is deeply brown, and you are embracing a dying animal. Imagining the speed of malignant cell growth literally takes your breath away. At work he pounds, climbs, carries, measures, and burns, sometimes with a slight frown, sometimes with a grimace of nails, always unconcerned.
Just this morning you tried again with the sunblock. Your new tactic is a noble, puzzled, genuine indignation that he could love himself so little as to risk his own life. How could that be? you wonder aloud with a tilted head and moist, widening eyes. But he left without it, bare to the waist, driving away in his vulnerable, blameless skin. There is nothing between him and the sun.
If his freckles are lethal, though, you will take them on. There is room enough on your skin. What a stark canvas! And when that is full, they can cover the skin of your esophagus, your duodenum, that wettest, palest, cavity-dwelling skin. Your palms, the soles of your feet—wasted space! You have been careful enough with the sunblock for the both of you.
Is this intimacy?
…
It is not nobility or goodness. It is not love, precisely, this suggestion of biblical sacrifice and salvation.
You have stayed in the bath long enough for your skin to take on the wrinkled bloat of the drowned, and the bedroom is filled already with the stillness of his sleep. There is no one to tell you that you have had enough, it’s time to get out. The water is cloudy, thicker on the surface. This must be intimacy, submersion in his sloughed cells, the dirt of his day.
There is the love that marries and the love that stays, your inevitable deaths the scaffolding around which you arrange your lives. You will watch his slow decay over the years, unable to do a thing. He will watch yours, inert. Surely this is intimacy, wearing the burden of two doomed bodies starting now.
Part V
The Final Days of Romanticism
Dearest Boy, (Take 3)
I am afraid that people will see me as betraying my own kind: another story about a girl incomplete without a boy and his transformative love. But I hope that you understand: I don’t want your seed, your ring, your paycheck, your security. I don’t want to complain about work to you. I don’t want you to drive when we go to the fish fry or throw your arm across my chest when you break for a deer. I don’t want you to surprise me with flowers or plan an anniversary cruise to Alaska. I don’t want to wake up next to you and tell you about that dream I had, ask you to scratch my back. I don’t want to become frustrated with your taste in music or grow my hair long because you’d like to hold it in your hands and lay one strand, two strands, three strands across the bridge of your nose at night. I don’t want ever to have to imagine the end of your imagination, my imagination, or feel, like a switchblade through my brain, the hope that yours is not the last body I’d like to be under, over, under again.
These things are fine in their own way—I mean that. But what I really want from you, and what you can expect from me, is to have my name scarred on your heart and yours on mi
ne. So when we die, if they cut us open, they will know someone lived in us—me in you and you in me. Whatever that might mean.
Property Lines
I like to think of his property touching ours, a touch most legal and binding, and of roots crossing under the survey line and twisting around other roots or trees falling across from one side to the other. The business of living is no gentle affair, and no détente exists at property lines.
The sparkling-eyed boy rolls the humorless graph paper over the table. It is saturated with the air of an object well studied, adored. At this moment, as in other gestures of his most sincere effort, he belongs to a different age. Our generation is a generation of quitters. If we don’t like something, we move on; if something becomes difficult, we scald it with irony. But he is like a root before me now, tenacious and digging, but prudent.
He points to uneven graphite lines with his last name on one side and mine on the other. He has been buying land behind his house in amounts that immediately bespeak loyalty and permanence in a place that can keep fewer than half of its young people. This place seems now only to sell its land to rich investors from the Lower Peninsula. The investors are hoping to make a killing when the eastern Upper Peninsula might someday become a tourist spot in earnest, or when it is the only scrap of wilderness left in the state. He is proud to show me his map, proud to come of age in this old-fashioned American way. I taste envy like the peel of a grapefruit in my mouth.
When I was a kid, I used to see the forest behind our cabins as boundless. I wasn’t an idiot; I could work out the geography. But I’d step into the woods and the trees would leak into my brain and I would lose all sense that if I kept walking and walking, I’d eventually hit other houses, roads covered with asphalt. Perhaps it’s the way forests refine our vision: we look only as high as the canopy lets us, our periphery is always framed by trunks. Our empirical brain kicks in—our eyes tell us all the world must be green and gray with leaf and trunk, fern and rock. Don’t folktales warn us that there is something dangerous, disorienting about the woods? Our human powers falter there and we teeter into vertigo. We have left the highway and our houses of slaughtered trees and stepped into that which multiplies, multiplies, multiplies without us.