The Blue Hour

by Laura Pritchett

  She goes into the bathroom. You hear the water running as your wife washes. You get up quickly and start to dress. As you are dressing, you hear your wife peeing. This makes you laugh and you can’t stop and the purple-blue creature laughs with you, for she too is joyful and in awe at the dumb animalness of us all. You are nearly out of the house when your wife finds you, and she stands in front of the door until you pick her up and move her, and then she hangs on to your waist until you twist away. Then she shouts at you, she shouts your name, she tells you she loves you at the top of her lungs, and she asks you to kiss your children, and that is when you know that she knows, and you are impressed that she knows, and you love her for it, because you realize perhaps you have been wrong, it has only been a lack of good communication, and she has loved you all along.

  When she picks up the phone, you go outside, start up your truck, which at first resists because of the cold, but comes to life with your coaxing, and then you drive. You would have liked to kiss your children’s foreheads, that is true. But the purple-blue creature kisses your forehead instead, helps you conjure an image of their faces, and does this in a certain way as to bring you peace, not anguish.

  You know you must hurry, that you must find your friend Joe, because he has the thing you need. It is starting to snow harder now, little tiny flakes that indicate how cold it is, and how much colder it is going to become.

  Already all the wooden fence posts have little caps of white. You put in those fence posts yourself with post-hole diggers and a tamp bar and barbed wire; your hands still bear the scars. The purple-blue creature is floating next to you, nearly touching you—you can see her quite well now—the veins on her wings, the butterfly qualities about her. She is coming into focus, at last. She floats next to your face and helps you look for a particular truck. She has made it easy for you: There is Joe’s pickup parked at the house nearest you, which belongs to Gretchen, your only neighbor on this quiet mountain road. Joe, your friend, is visiting his new lover. This lover, Gretchen, is your wife’s best friend. Inside, Joe and Gretchen are exploring the crevices and peaks of their desire. Theirs is a love story.

  In Joe’s truck lies a Colt .45, wrapped in warm fleece, insulated, in a box that is locked, for which you have the key, having stolen it last week. Your own guns have been taken from you.

  You leave your friend a scrawled note as a way of apology. The note does not get at the truer part of yourself that you’re wishing you could show, but there is no time now; you had a lifetime to achieve that and you failed.

  You drive up the mountain, for there is a particular meadow you’re hoping for. The snow, it’s beautiful, and silent, and purifying. The snow, it’s disappearing into the black waters of the river beside the road. The snow, it’s rhythmic and pulls you forward, beckons you ahead.

  You know these thick-falling flakes will get worse and be a part of an unexpected blizzard. It is the first day of November, and this coming winter will be an unexpected time for everyone on the mountain. Difficult and yet full of change, full of fight, full of fury, full of love. They will move into a spiral of beauty, the way the snow spirals at you now. You think it a bit funny that the blizzard struck before your town of Blue Moon was ready. Salt for the roads has not yet been delivered; it has been so mild, the aspens still hang on to some gold, the bears are still out. But here is the snow. It will be a bad storm; that is evident by the way the wind is starting to swoop down off the mountain, angry and alive.

  You drive farther up the canyon, careful on the turns, mesmerized by the points of white coming directly at your windshield, by the demons of swirling ghost-snow on the road.

  At the base of the actual Blue Moon Mountain is a meadow. Nearby, you get out of the truck and the creature glides out behind you, floats around your head in calm circles. The snow is picking up, spiraling down one minute, blowing sideways the next, but silent. You think ahead: There will be one loud shot, and that shot will startle the birds and the animals, and even the falling snow, and even the moon, and for a fraction of a second, there will be the profound and deafening silence that is the same sort of silence that resides inside you. As you fall, there will be a moment in which you will finally feel all that has ever risen in your heart exploding into fine white dancing flakes.

  Chapter Two

  Under the Apple Tree

  When Joe left me sitting under the apple tree and started to walk across the pasture, he looked back and waved, and then walked on, and then turned and waved, and then walked on, and then he did a complete circle with his arms out, like he was embracing the world. That made me laugh because we were both so happy and so willing to show it. I was leaning back against the tree, most of my clothes back on, wrapped in a blanket, and I watched him go in his spinning cheerful way, and I blew him kisses. Then he got near my trailer and dirt driveway, which is where he’d left his truck, and he climbed in, honked, honked again, and left.

  We’d just made love and we’d both come twice, and my body was feeling full and complete and tired. The contrails from the flying sparks of orgasm were just starting to fade, and I felt them dissipate into the space of my body. As they did, I picked twigs out of my hair and wiped a smudge of dirt from my forearm and let my mind think things like, the only thing grand enough for a human life is to love and this is where wild and gentle get sewn together, and the sorts of things that make perfect sense at a time like that, and only at a time like that, and I just sat still and let them.

  When he was gone, I considered the sharp rotting smell of apples, and the slant of cold sunlight on my bare feet, and the ache of my knees and inner thighs. After some time, I walked toward my trailer home, bundled up in my blanket, spinning around by myself, and once inside, I flopped on my bed, and I closed my eyes and replayed the whole thing—our lovemaking, and my orgasms, and his, and our mumblings. Then my mind wandered on to less romantic things, like the fact that my rear is dimpled with fat, but I like that position; and that perhaps I had said a stupid thing or two, which was too bad, but entirely predictable. I rubbed my head where it had hit the apple tree, and I brushed away the bits of earth still smashed against my spine.

  Joe and I have the exact same hair color—so dark brown that it’s almost black, only his is curly and mine hangs straight to my waist. Our hair is graying, Joe’s near his temples and mine spread all throughout, and his is softer than mine, because the gray in mine has turned it less supple. I love it when he takes my hair up, suddenly, and starts to braid it, which is something he knows how to do from braiding harnesses, and I love pushing my hands up, through his hair, and feeling the soft place where scalp ends and hair begins.

  I thought of our hair, and each other’s hands in our hair, and I made myself come again. I was curious if I could accomplish three, which is something I hadn’t done before. When my body stopped pulsing, I decided that orgasm is the greatest physical pleasure in life—greater than the feeling of being high, being drunk, feeling sunlight, touching water, catching a snowflake, or the taste of something sweet or salty or new, and that this had to be especially true if one was being held at the same time, and being kissed, and being loved.

  I wondered how Joe saw the world, through what lens, filtered through what experience. I pretended to be him. I tried to be in his body, looking in the mirror at himself, touching his own stubbled jaw, seeing his graying curly hair and his own brown eyes, and how he might stare himself down, stare right at his own fears and hopes and hurts. I tried to feel how he might close his eyes and become aware of his whole body and perhaps be aroused, feel a spark, alert and alive.

  Doing this made my heart hurt a little, but instead of evening out my feelings, or tempering them with those ongoing judgments the brain makes, instead of starting in with the he-lacks-such-and-such-a-quality and all those things the mind does so that it likes less and therefore feels less—those things, I did not do. I stared at the ceiling of the room, with my hand still between my legs, and felt Joe and expe
rienced Joe as much as I could, and I let myself continue to do this, despite the very real danger.

  I live too hard and I know it. Every once in a while I get myself into some trouble because of this but generally, over the course of my life, I have come to believe it’s worth it. I drink too much, I smoke too much pot, I sleep around. That sort of thing. My body and heart are getting beat up faster than they should be, but I won’t regret this life as much as some people will want me to.

  I have one bias that I cannot rid myself of. Perhaps we all ought to be allowed to have just one, and mine is that I severely dislike stingy people. By this I mean not only in the cash sense, but in the people of the world who aren’t generous with their thank yous or their I’m sorrys and most importantly, with the people who spend so little time thinking about others, so little energy loving. I do not like miserly hearts.

  Which is probably why I like Joe so much, because he is, at the core, generous. He is, for example, willing to walk away from his new lover, and tell her good-bye in the most charitable way he can, by spinning and holding his arms out to the world. He is announcing: Life is good, that was good, I love you. That is something, really that is something.

  I am a house cleaner. I sell pot on the side, even now that it’s legal, because who wants to drive to town when they know I’m here, on the mountain, and a good grower? My goal here is to make a living as quickly as I can, so I can spend the rest of my day hiking, or snowshoeing, or reading, or getting high, and now, increasingly, with Joe and his body, or inside my brain, with Joe and his body. The only other interesting thing I can say about myself is that I’ve always been fascinated by sex; which is not to say that I’ve engaged in a huge amount of wondrous activity, but rather that I have paid attention to sex the way some people pay attention to race car drivers or sports teams. If there were a column in the paper, it would be the first I’d turn to, but since there isn’t I follow this topic in other ways. I know about The Hite Report and Deep Throat and I know about Candida Royalle porn. I know what Freud and Foucault have to say, and I try to keep up with what’s been said since, and I know the most basic truth about enjoying sex, which is that it’s part instinct, but mostly, it’s concentration, it’s a learned activity.

  It can’t be learned with just anybody, though, and I’m beginning to think that’s what’s going on with Joe. That is why losing him scares me. He’s going to open me right up, make me understand and feel, and then the loss will be one that I’m not strong enough to bear. He will get in his truck and drive out of my life, back to his horseshoeing and his mountain walks and his hunting and the things that do not include me. Or, more likely, I will do the same to him. I have always prized my freedom above all else.

  I’m just hoping we can both be generous with each other for at least a while, at least long enough for my body to develop the neural pathways of this new feeling. I want to have the body-knowledge and the body-memory of what it is like to be this happy.

  Anya’s two kids are always coming over to my property to pick apples. Anya is my one friend, and she’s also my only neighbor way up here in this mountain enclave. We have a remarkable friendship, really, and I love her. Anya has short blond hair, which she dyes, and she’s married to the town vet, and she’s a therapist, and she’s got these two kids and she exercises and she eats right, and so in many ways, Anya is the opposite of me. That’s why we’re friends, at least in part, so that we can see the other life, the road not taken; we can bounce into that every once in a while without having to live it ourselves.

  The apple tree sits right between our two houses, with about an acre on each side, and the tree lures her kids onto my place, which is more overgrown with raspberry bushes I planted, and the milkweed and mountain mahogany and grasses that nature did. I tell her kids to watch out because there’s a bear. His scat is all over the place, big dumps of apple seed–laden piles. In fact, Joe and I had to work to find a place under the tree that was free of this stuff. I haven’t actually seen the bear, but sometimes I can smell it, the vinegar smell of its urine, the rank smell of the body, and I imagine it’s pretty fat by now and ready for winter. The kids need to be careful, and I tell them this, but they escape out of the house, right when Anya is trying to put bread in the oven, for instance—she is a great baker—and these kids were meant for the outdoors and I think that’s great but I worry about the bear.

  Anya’s marriage is a regular marriage, which means, as she puts it, that sometimes it gets bad, then it gets better, then it gets bad again. As far as I can tell, there’s not a lot of passion, but there is that nice blend of patience and knowledge and affection that marks long marriages, and except for the boredom part, it seems pretty nice. But the boredom thing is a big one; it’s the thing that would kill me. It’s probably more of an issue in her case, because Sy is sick, or used to be, at least, some say schizophrenia and others say bipolar and others say bipolar delusional, but in any case, the meds make Sy particularly dead-ish, dreamy-ish in a way that would make it difficult to be seen or known. I think that’s why Anya’s house is very organized, and she lines up cans in one cupboard and the plastic containers in another. She makes lists. Sometimes I envy the crisp edges of her desire, how it seems to be enough to hold her together.

  Anya thinks I’m amusingly wild and I like regaling her with stories, and so when she came over for our five-o’clock whiskeys, which is something we do every other day, I told her about Joe. Anya’s kids, who are now five and six, play at something or another, and mostly they are agreeable although sometimes they are irritating, and even though it’s sometimes hard to like other people’s kids, these kids I do like. So, while the kids were playing in the grass, near the apple tree, Anya and I sat wrapped up in blankets and drank and commented on how golden the aspens were this year, as if heralding a special winter, and I told her about how Joe’s kisses had a certain pull to them, his hands had a certain knowledge, how his fingers listened. I told her that it was startling to suddenly, at this age, be experiencing such orgasms. Orgasms that came so easily, with the muscle contractions spreading through my body with unexpected lightness and force, great crashes of sparks that danced as they shot from my inner regions to my skin. But orgasms that, despite this force, were grounded in the most tender gentleness. I had never believed that a man, or the world, could seem so safe.

  Anya stared at me a long time. She said, “Sy and I never have sex like that. Not anymore. Maybe we never did.”

  I could hear the waver in her voice, so I said, “Well, there’s a lot of days when I wish I had one particular person. And that I had kids.”

  “Sy and I haven’t really kissed in, well, about thirteen years,” she said. “Since he got sick. Not a real kiss. Not full of love. Unbelievable.”

  “I don’t have anyone to sleep with me at night,” I said. “Not most nights.”

  “Well, Gretchen, we could all use more than one life.” Then she said, “Are you ever scared at night? Noises and stuff?”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “Sometimes I’m scared too, but for different reasons.”

  “But you feel physically safe, and that’s something.”

  She nodded her agreement. We sat for a while and ate some of her homemade bread with Havarti cheese and the last of this year’s raspberries, the sweeter kind that grow over by the edge of my property, in between my land and hers.

  “Can I ask you something?” I finally said. “When you orgasm, during sex, you’re telling yourself a story in your head, right? You’re imagining another scene, other than the one that is occurring, right?”

  Anya tilted her head and considered this. Then she chewed on her thumb and thought about it some more. “That’s probably true.”

  “Can you orgasm without it? Without a story going on in your head?”

  Her eyes moved across the pasture, as if the pasture was the landscape of her brain, and she was examining the horizon for memories and experience. “I don’t
think I can. I think I need the story. I’ll pay attention to confirm that for sure.” She stuffed some bread in her mouth and looked up at the sky.

  “Because I couldn’t. Without a story,” I said. “But then, with Joe, I suddenly could. I mean, it’s ridiculous! It sounds like a romance novel! It sounds like I’m one of those women doing a disservice to womankind by granting the man too much, by having too much pleasure, by exaggerating the possibilities. It also sounds like the beginning of a love, not the harder part that tests and tries you. I know that too. But I just want to be happy. I want to store these moments up for later.”

  “That’s sounds smart. Have another drink.”

  “I’ve had bad sex before,” I said. “Plenty of it. Bad sex, mediocre sex, standard sex. But suddenly this. It has to do with how there we are. Anya, it’s a whole different way of being, really. And it’s confusing my body, and I just didn’t expect that kind of surprise.”

  She said, “Joe sounds better than any of your previous choices. By a long shot. Maybe you should figure out a way to make this work. Maybe you’re really in love.”

  Anya chewed on her lip, which is something she does, and I could tell she was telling herself all the things she didn’t like about my life, so she could confirm her choices. As part of her righting of herself, her eyes veered off to her kids, as if to say, There, that’s what you have, there they are.

  After she was done looking at them, I said, “Can I ask you one more thing? These stories, the ones we tell ourselves, they have violence in them, don’t they? Spankings? Forced blow jobs? Being tied up? At least sometimes?”

  Anya raised her eyebrows and then laughed. “Yes.”

  I said, “I think most women do. Link violence and arousal. What’s that all about? Some buried remnant, some cultural leftover. It’s true for me. Or it was, before Joe. But here’s what I’m getting at. I was thinking about this while I was cleaning today. Humans are going to evolve. Someday, when you and me are long gone, you know, humans will be different, they’ll change for the better. One, they’re going to figure out how to communicate on a higher level. Two, they’re going to be able to see another person better. Because three, they’re going to be able to see inside themselves better, with some clarity. And four, this violence, it’s going to disappear. For some women, it’s just not going to be inside anymore.”