by Roxane Gay
Bennett is not romantic and we don’t delude ourselves about the state of our affair. He is, however, intense and always leaves me sore in uncomfortable places. When David is out of town, and only when David is out of town, I sneak away to Bennett’s place. The cabin is small, spare, but clean. It is a home. He heats it with an antique wood-burning stove. He doesn’t want any distractions when he’s writing, he tells me, so he doesn’t bother with most modern conveniences, save for a stereo to play music. His focus can be so singular it frightens me. When he gets an idea in his head, nothing else matters. I don’t matter. That turns me on, too. Sometimes I watch him, hunched over a small wooden desk, writing furiously with a lead pencil and I know he has forgotten that I am on his bed, naked, the flat sheet bunched under my armpits.
There is little ceremony between us. Bennett takes me into his arms or shoves me against the wall, knocking a picture loose, the instant I open his door and call his name. He’s like a teenager, groping at me awkwardly, pulling my clothes off, sliding his fingers between my thighs. “You’re wet,” he’ll grunt, as if he’s surprised, each time, that he continues to excite me. We fuck on his narrow twin bed. The coarse sheets make my skin raw. I grip the headboard with one hand and hold the wall with the other, my eyes closed. Bennett buries his head in my shoulder. Eye contact bothers him—he never wants to reveal too much of himself. I love his body and enjoy marking him with my fingernails, leaving the skin of his back angry and broken. His arms are strong, deeply tanned even in the dead of winter, and tightly woven with sinewy muscles from years of chopping wood and climbing rocks. His thighs are thick from snowshoeing and hiking. He has the look of a man who uses his body more than he uses his mind. It is a contradiction. Looks are deceiving.
With my legs wrapped around Bennett’s waist, my body filled (my lover is longer than my husband), I think of David, who is almost delicate in comparison. My husband is soft where Bennett is rough, handsome where Bennett is not.
After he comes, in a loud, ugly display that always scares me the way I like, my lover and I lie next to each other smoking. We use a saucer as an ashtray, leaving it balancing precariously between us. Bennett is not remotely concerned with the density of my bones. He never asks me why I don’t come. That I return time and again seems to be enough for him, as it is for me. I like the gnawing dissatisfaction I carry home. I will rest my head on Bennett’s chest and listen to him talk about his poetry; sometimes he reads to me or we listen to old bluegrass records. I tell him what’s going on in the world beyond the walls of his cabin. I allow myself to drown in the way he smells, natural and sweaty, and his contradictions. When he falls asleep, I tuck a quilt around him, wrap myself in the necessary layers to brave the outdoors, and I leave. He never asks when I’ll be back. He knows he will see me again or he doesn’t care, which also turns me on.
Tonight, David is home and Bennett is wherever he is. After a last cigarette, I return to the family room and smile at David, his face shadowed by the dim glow of his laptop monitor. I snap the computer shut and sit on his lap, tracing his ear with my finger. “It’s time for bed,” I say. He kisses the left corner of my mouth, then slides his hands, smooth like alabaster, save for a small callus where he holds his pen, beneath my T-shirt. I shiver, pulling his hands upward to my breasts. I remove his glasses, kiss his forehead, slide my lips along the length of his nose, and then we’re kissing, our breath warm with tobacco, coffee, hot pepper from dinner. After eleven years, David knows my body well. While we make love, I think of Bennett. With David, I allow myself to come, extravagantly.
I spend our days apart imagining what kind of lover David must be like with his other women. Is he as insatiable with them as he is with me? I imagine shiny, nubile girls, their bodies shaved elaborately; breasts round, high, perky; calf muscles taut. They have their parts to play in the cliché. I imagine them sitting coyly, in his cluttered office, calling him Doctor, perched on the edge of his desk. I imagine them playing the part of ingenue, all plaid skirts, white shirts, thighs spread wide, revealing pristine white panties, moist all the way to the edges. It turns me on, to think of him and these tarts, tangled in rough, impersonal hotel sheets, making a mess of themselves, and a mess of our marriage. I think of these girls when he’s fucking me and telling me that I’m a hot lay and his hair is damp, clinging to the edges of his face, and in his eyes I can see that he does love me. I think of them when he’s telling me how special I am to him. I start to wonder if perhaps, for him, the word has a different definition.
In the morning, we are in bed, David’s heavy arm draped across my body. He is very possessive when he sleeps, likes to keep me close, he tells me. It is cold, and from our bedroom window I can see that it is still snowing. Before winter’s end, more than 350 inches will fall. I extract myself from his embrace and go to the kitchen to start coffee. When I return he is sitting up, channel surfing, looking more like a young man than someone in his late thirties. His chest, bare, is covered in goose bumps. Our relationship is like this—I need these moments to remember why I love him even when I hate him. David grins at me, takes the proffered coffee. He nods toward the window. “We should go for a walk,” he says. I shrug. I am not one for the outdoors, but I can make these small sacrifices.
Outside, the trees are bare and skeletal. He holds my hand, and I follow in the large footsteps he makes with his boots. “I want to show you something,” he says. We head into the thicket of trees behind our home and after fifteen minutes, come upon a small creek, the water still inexplicably running over frozen stones.
He wipes a few snowflakes from my scarf, tightens my jacket around me. “Don’t you love this place?”
I lean against a thick tree trunk and bite my lower lip. David pulls his camera from his coat pocket. “Don’t move,” he says.
I glare into the camera. He knows I hate having my picture taken, and yet he persists. This is what our relationship is like, the not really knowing one another. He makes a silly face and I finally crack a smile. David furiously presses the shutter release to capture the moment. His earnestness makes me smile wider, and soon I am playing it up for the camera. He pauses, looks at me carefully. Then he closes the distance between us and he is pressing me against the tree, studying my face carefully. I clasp my hand around his neck, trying to keep a small separation between us. I look away. We ignore the camera as it drops into a soft pile of snow. The branches above me are beautiful, encased in snow and ice.
Later, I am in our bathroom, drying my hair. David stands behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist. We watch each other in the mirror. “I have to go out of town tomorrow,” he says. “It’s a last-minute thing. I’m taking the place of a guy in my department at a very important conference. Can’t be avoided.”
I roll my eyes at David in the mirror and throw the hair dryer onto the bathroom counter. It clatters loudly and I bite my lower lip. I don’t want David to think he gets under my skin. “Very important?”
David kisses my right shoulder. “You know how it is.”
I smile tightly. The day after David leaves, I will pay Bennett a visit. I will bring him a new record I found at the Salvation Army. I will miss my husband.
The winters here are long, but they are even longer when you spend them alone. There’s Bennett, but I know where I stand with him. Such clarity is uncomfortable. After a big snowfall, the white flakes turn to gray sludge, then dark with sand and salt. A fresh layer of ice covers the streets and sidewalks. I long to wear shoes instead of the clunky boots necessary to navigate the outdoors. David is gone for eight days on his very important business. I fill the days with my work, which takes a darker turn. It is hard to write about happy things when you can never escape the kind of cold that sinks into your bones and stays there. I am in Siberia, I decide. I am comforted by thoughts of exile, cold solace, meditation, and inspiration born of emotional deprivation. It is all very dramatic.
My evenings are filled with dinner with friends, bad television movies, an
d planning dream vacations in sunnier climes. David dutifully calls me three times a day, as regular as three square meals. Our conversations are brief during the day, longer at night. He loves to hear me come, he tells me. I love to give him a show. I tell him all the dirty things I am doing to myself in excruciating detail. He makes me beg, over the phone, and I can hear his satisfaction when I do. He revels in the knowledge that no matter the distance, he has a hold over me. The specificity of these conversations and the ways I am willing to debase myself are two of the reasons he enjoys being married to a writer. He often tells me I have a knack for details. I wonder if he’s alone during these calls, or if his hand is running through a lover’s hair as he listens to his wife playing the part of his whore. A part of me hopes he isn’t because sometimes, I am not.
When David returns, he is full of stories about drunken engineers in swanky bars in downtown Philadelphia and the inferior intellects of the people in his field. He beats his chest. “I am a god among men,” he says, winking. “But more than anything, I missed you.”
“Of course you did,” I reply. For the next several weeks, I will tease him mercilessly, and remind him that he is a god among men. He will find this endearing, until he doesn’t.
When I unpack David’s suitcase, I create neat piles of clothes that can be put away, laundered, or sent to the dry cleaner. I organize his toiletries, making sure he has enough toothpaste, lotion, shaving cream for the next occasion when he must conduct very important business. The routine relaxes me, reminds me of my part-time role as wife. I search the pockets for matchbooks, coins, receipts, pens, design ideas on cocktail napkins. Once, I found a joint and before bed we smoked in the shed in the backyard, giggling like teenagers until we singed our fingers on the roach.
This time I find a Polaroid image of David posing with a young brunette, attractive in her own way. She is smiling. He is not. She is hugging him from the side, looking at him the way I imagine all his young lovers look at him—adoringly, desperately. They don’t know the man I married, how betrayal comes so easily to him, so they can afford to look at him like that. David looks like he’s trying to slide out of this girl’s embrace. It’s a sad little scene. There’s a phone number, written across the bottom of the picture in red lipstick. I leave the Polaroid on his side of the bathroom, perched against the toothbrush holder. This isn’t the first time I’ve found an artifact of his infidelity. It won’t be the last. I leave the tokens for him to find, because he has left them for me to find. We play games because we can and we like it. Most days these games keep us together, somehow.
Later tonight he will tell me it’s time for bed. We’ll slide, naked, between our sheets. He’ll lie on top of me, and I will relax, enjoy how my chest constricts beneath the weight of his body, like I’m suffocating. I’ll drown in the scent of cologne and his hair products and body wash. We’ll make love like we haven’t shared our bodies with anyone else, like we are still the people we once promised to be.
After I’ve finished putting his things in order and I’ve cooked us dinner and we’ve made the small talk married people who know each other too well make, we sit in our family room, on our couch, in our familiar positions between laptops and secrets and lovers and the silence of the snow that continues to fall. The old radiators creak as they struggle to cough hot air into the room.
“Are you cold?” David asks, with a shy smile.
I nod and he pulls me close, wrapping his arms around me. His body feels narrow, almost frail against mine, as if his bones have lost some of their density. I return his embrace. I realize I am holding less of a man than he once was. I wonder how much stamina we have left for the games we play. And then I stand in the back doorway for a smoke thinking about Bennett, rough and merciless, necessary. I accept that I am, perhaps, less of a woman.
I Am a Knife
My husband is a hunter. I am a knife. Last deer season, he took me on a hunt with him. At four in the morning, he shook me awake. He made love to me. He always fucks me before the hunt. There is a quality to his efforts that is different, better. He takes me, he uses me, he marks me. I allow him to. When he finished he told me not to shower. As we dressed, I could still feel him inside me, sticking to my thighs. It was cold outside. In the cab of his truck, I leaned against his arm, my eyes closed. He drank coffee from a thermos that used to belong to his father, who is dead from black lung. His beard would smell like coffee for the rest of the day.
We spent hours in the deer blind, doused in deer piss, waiting. I grew bored but stayed silent. I am a knife. Several does passed before us but my husband held one finger to his lips. We were waiting for a buck. “I want to kill something majestic today,” my husband said. He believes killing brings him closer to God. More time passed. Our bodies grew stiff. My stomach felt hollow. I hungered. His shoulders slumped as his hope faded but then a massive buck galloped into our sights. The creature was indeed majestic—its musculature pronounced, body thick, standing tall. My husband raised his rifle, inhaled deeply, held his finger against the trigger. He waited. The buck turned his head and looked at us with his black, glassy eyes. I held my breath, too. We waited. My husband pulled the trigger and exhaled slowly. We waited. The bullet hit the deer in his neck, making a neat black hole. My husband nodded his head once, set his rifle down. I am a knife. He is a gun.
The buck was still alive when we got to him, breathing shallow. I pressed my hand to his matted fur, felt his warmth, the strength of the muscles beneath his coat and the bones beneath the muscle and the blood holding him together. My husband reached for his knife, preparing to slit the buck’s throat. I grabbed his arm, shook my head. I am a knife. I placed my hand over the buck’s heart, waited for it to stop beating. We waited. We waited for quite some time. My husband prayed, offering acts of contrition into the air around us. When the buck was finally dead, I used one fingernail, cutting the creature open from his neck to his rear. His flesh fell open slowly, warm innards steaming out into the cold air. The air became sharp and humid with the stench of death surrounded by prayer. I am a knife.
My husband reached into the dead animal, then stared at his hand covered in dark red, almost black blood. He ran his thumb across my lower lip, then slid his thumb into my mouth. I sucked slowly, tasting the deer’s blood, salty and thick. I moaned. My husband rubbed his bloody hand over my face and as the blood dried, my skin felt thin and taut. I lay back on the ground, now soaked with the deer’s blood. My husband undressed me slowly then stood and stared at me naked, shivering next to the animal he killed. I wondered if he could tell us apart. The woods around us were so silent I felt a certain terror rumbling beneath my rib cage. When he lay on top of me, I spread my thighs, sank my teeth into his shoulder. My husband smelled like an animal and took me like an animal. I left my mark on the broad expanse of his back. I am a knife. He is a gun.
Later, we bound the deer’s forelegs and hind legs and my husband carried the open, bloody animal across his shoulders. I carried our guns and followed in his footsteps. When we got home, he took his kill to the work shed behind our home and I began to butcher. I am a knife. It is a long, bloody affair, butchering an animal. There are things that need to be done in order for the kill to provide. For the next several months, we would bring our friends all manner of venison wrapped carefully in brown butcher paper, tied with strong twine. He would make jerky and sausage to share with the men he plays poker with, his brother, strangers at the bar. I would eat none of it. I do not care for the taste of venison. It tastes too much like the flesh of an animal.
We live in a large home that is beautiful and empty. We never talk about the emptiness or our failed attempts to fill the void. It is a sorrow we share but do not share. Sometimes I sit in one of our empty rooms, perfectly decorated, frozen in time. I sit on the floor and stare at the pink wallpaper and the wooden letters on the wall spelling a name and the linens my mother made for a perfect, tiny bed. I rock back and forth until I cannot breathe and then I crawl into the hallw
ay and gasp for air.
My husband’s family is religious. His relatives believe in God. Their God is angry and unkind because they made him in their image. Every Sunday, my husband and I go to church with his family—brother, mother, stepfather. This is the only time I spend with them. My husband’s faith is weak. I have none left. We sit in church on the hard pews pretending we believe, pretending we belong. Sometimes I feel his mother staring at me with her narrow eyes, pursing her lips. When I feel her staring at me, I dig my fingernails into a hymnal or the pew or my husband’s thigh. I am a knife. After church, we go to my in-laws’ for a meal. They don’t trust me because I don’t eat venison. His mother resents having to accommodate my culinary peculiarities but each week she prepares me a dry breast of chicken, carelessly broiled, unseasoned, and I eat the rubbery meat and smile while doing so. This makes her even angrier. I help wash the dishes while my husband and his stepfather work in the barn and then, mercifully, we can leave. His mother always stands on the porch and watches as we drive away. I make sure to sit so close to my husband in the cab of his truck, it looks like I’m sitting on his lap. I make him kiss me, and I kiss him back so hard, it’s like I’m devouring his face. I want her to know: I am a knife.
My family lives far away in the heavy heat of South Florida. My relatives rarely visit us, don’t know how to deal with the cold. They can’t understand why my husband and I stay in the North Country. When we visit my family, my husband is overwhelmed by the humidity and by people who look so different from him, few of whom speak English. He always grips my hand tightly when we’re in Florida, and he looks so scared, so young. It is only when we leave our home that I realize it’s not that he won’t live anywhere else but that he can’t. My sister, my twin, comes to visit often because she understands why I stay with my man in a place I do not love. She understands he loves me so good I would live anywhere with him. They get along well. She too is a knife.