“That the body and mind are separate, Bren. When your mind’s gone, your body may still be technically alive, but it’s worthless. So nothing—certainly nothing like fear—is innate to the body. Fear is all in the mind. And personally, I think it’s your wonderful Mr. DeKuts who’s putting it there.”
That’s when she gave me the foul look, blushing slightly in resentment, her lips compressed. And said it, for the first and only time out loud: “Shut up, Chick. You talk too much.”
I told her she was rude, a stuck-up jock. Typically, a combination of superficial pride and genuine core-deep decency kept her from responding.
It caused a rift between us, for a while.
*
The present rift heals quickly, without further discussion. We walk until the dog’s tired, then head back to my place, where we feed him, watch him settle in a corner, twitching with dog dreams, and we think about feeding ourselves.
“Let me take you to dinner, Chick.”
“Why? You feel like stepping out?”
She shakes her head, a little embarrassed. I understand and avoid saying anything; it would only lead us back to the old argument again:
But Bren, if they are there dancing in a gay bar, too, it doesn’t matter if you know them from somewhere else, does it?
Yes, she’d say, yes, you don’t understand. You don’t have my job. You don’t know all the risks.
Risks? What risks?
Suppose some rich parent on an alumni committee catches wind of the fact that his eighteen-year-old daughter, his pride and joy, is spending hours a day in a wet racing suit under the watchful eyes of her lesbian coach? Do you honestly think the reaction would be favorable? They’d be howling for my blood.
Why? You don’t mess with those kids, do you?
Of course not! You know me better than that, Chick. I like mature women, not girls. And even if—I would never! I think that’s immoral.
So?
So? So? You don’t know straight people the way I do. You don’t have to work with them day in and day out—and maybe you’re lucky—well, good for you. But I know the way they think, and when it comes to us, believe me, their minds are full of sleaze. They think we want to jump someone’s bones twenty-four hours a day. Perpetual sex on the brain. Especially in sport—anything to do with human bodies. Like we’ve got nothing else to worry about.
Then I’d sigh, and say something like: For God’s sake, Bren. Maybe they don’t all think that way.
But it’s another argument I’d fail to win. So I keep my mouth shut, and make us dinner. I tell myself: Listen, lady, who do you think you are anyway? Marching around in the gay-pride band. Thirty-five years old, two years out of another rotten relationship and you’re still going on casual dates with friends of friends, having occasional mediocre sex, no new love on the horizon, certainly no threat of intimacy to speak of. But you’ve got no problem preaching the therapeutic party line to others. No qualms about telling them how to live their own gay lives. Exactly where has your oh-so-open existence landed you?
Then it comes to me, like a blessing: I ought to be more charitable. More merciful. To Bren. To myself.
I realize that this saving grace of mercy flows, not from my own nature, but from my mother’s. I thank her for it now, silently.
The sky’s dark outside. Chill blows in the window. I move through a few minutes of blessing and peace while vegetables steam, rice boils, sea trout bakes. Sensing, behind my back, the thump of a dog tail on finished floor. My friend hunched over the table, now, in inexpressible grief. I move all the stove knobs to off and turn to her, reach for her. Her shoulders are shaking. Her face hides in her hands. But she isn’t crying at all—no sound comes out, not a single tear. I offer arms, shirt, breasts. She lets herself fall against all of them, and I hold her while she tries to weep. Painful, I think, terrible. Monstrous aching inside. No cure for this loss, my arms around her a pathetic bandage.
And still, despite that, they feel right.
*
Dinner stays half-cooked. We talk about a lot of things.
Kay, the house, Boz. Her job. This new kid on the team, who will help them win big meets—some girl with a Spanish-sounding name I won’t remember. She asks about me, too: Do I still love my work? Have I been seeing anyone since Marianne? I tell her, Yes. And: No one important.
Mostly, though, it’s good to feel comfortable in her presence again. Even though she’s a wreck, and I feel the dim jangling danger of unexplored emotions sloshing around in the bucket of myself, at least we’re both finally, fully here—at a kitchen table, on a living room sofa, holding hands like friends, reaching to touch a cheek or shoulder.
Boz whines to go out and we walk him together, bundled in sweaters against the breeze from river and bay. Ambling between streetlights, fire hydrants. The dog seems happier, jumps against my thighs in some sort of supplication and gives a canine version of a smile, I think. I rub his chest. Taking a shine to the idea of him, of keeping him, despite myself. Watching us, Bren laughs. A full laugh, prematurely ended—she’s cut it off intentionally like an unwanted digit. Walking back against the wind, she takes my arm. Whistles some tune. The good mood begins to make me nervous. It’s like being on the edge of something—her grief the true reality to take into account, the more permanent underlying condition she is likely to relapse into at any second—and, instinct tells me, I ought to maintain a certain detachment. But I let her take my arm; because we’re friends, because she has done it so many times before. I let her press the arm with her fingers; because, I tell myself, sixteen years means something, and it’s okay to trust.
Keys in the door. A burst of comfort and warmth. Boz off the leash, light dimmers turned, sweaters off. We broil dinner, throwing everything together: too-dry fish, stale rice, fatigued vegetables. Bren eats with surprising appetite. Watching, I feel good. And I eat too. The danger signals fade away. Between bites she is matter-of-fact.
“Ever cremate anyone?”
“No. When my mom died they had a wake—the whole traditional thing. Billy got drunk again, it made Dad furious. They went into the basement and yelled at each other. Marianne showed up late, she and I had our last big blowout fight, in front of everyone. Pat’s kids started crying. So did his wife. The whole thing was a mess. Still—it was good in a way. It was a time and a place to get it all out, you know? All the grief, all the mess.”
“Well, when you cremate someone—”
“What, sweetie?”
“—They make you pick out an urn. I chose one—just any old one—it didn’t seem to matter. Later, though, I had second thoughts, that maybe Kay would have wanted something special. Like a vase in the shape of an old whaling ship.”
She laughs. So do I. She scrapes her plate clean, drops fork and knife across it with a sudden clatter.
“Anyway, they give you the remains in a plastic bag. It looks like dusty chips of gravel—not ashes at all, really. The bag is sealed. And you put it in the urn, you take it away.” She glances up at me, her face uncertain. “I’ve been fighting with the bunch of them long-distance, the whole Goldstein clan. They told me the cremation was some sort of defilement, they wanted a regular burial—a coffin, gravestone, all of that. And some rabbi to bless her. As if it would wipe out everything about her life that they didn’t care to see. Me, for instance. But she hated that stuff, you know. ‘Keep me out of the ground, Bren!’ she said. ‘Keep me out of the ground, and away from those men in their little black hats!’”
It sounds just like Kay. I can feel myself smile.
We clean the table, wash dishes, wrap food up and stash it in the fridge. Bren dries utensils, places them neatly in rows in the cupboard drawers. She hums softly, seems happy again.
Now it’s late. Boz is sacked out on the pseudo-Oriental rug. I scratch his ears for good-night, give Bren a forehead kiss and tell her to sleep well, ask one last time if she needs another blanket. No, she says, not a blanket.
In the bathroom
I wash up, brush teeth, glare at the mirror and mentally slap myself around. I am putting on a little weight. Short-featured Irish face hovering at the borderline of early middle age, wrinkles etched around eyes and mouth. Always too serious to be cute; now, too old as well.
Instinct blinks some danger signal again, warning me to think a while, figure out what is going on. Bren. Food. The dog. The ashes.
Phrases well up in me—from prayers, I think, from long ago. Our light, our sweetness, and our hope. Banished children of Eve.
And I tell myself: Stop it, Caroline. Give yourself a break. These dynamics are exhausting. Grief’s dynamics always are. But the day is over, and so is the pain. Just go to bed. Just go to sleep.
My bedroom light’s on. In the hallway, she stops me.
“Chick. Come here.”
I am here, I say. Then my face is between her hands and she’s kissing me.
“Bren, no. Just wait.”
I don’t want to, she says. But there’s a kind of terror on her lips, in her voice. I pull back, see the struggle—between the terror and her mastery of it. Part of the mastery, though, is a masking that doesn’t work. The failure makes her sullen.
“Bren, listen to me. We need to talk this one through.”
“Oh no. Talk, talk, talk.”
“It feels like a land mine.”
The mask falls into place and grins. “Don’t worry, okay? I’ll make it feel better.”
“For God’s sake, Bren—that is hardly the issue.”
Then she says it, out loud, for the second time in sixteen years:
Shut up, Chick. You talk too much.
She says it softly, though, and for a second the mask falls away, the tears refusing to spill are real, raw need mingling with fear on her fingertips touching me. Please, she says, please. And I know it’s wrong, but what I know offers no alternative. Something else seizes power. Tosses me up in the rift between body and mind. Mercy. Desire. With nothing to betray but a vase full of ashes. She rocks against me, I rock back, and I just can’t help it. I love her so.
*
A rule—one of Bren’s, in fact: When set in motion, physical acts appear graceful if unimpeded, allowed to find their natural rhythm and inevitable cessation. Stopped midway, however, they appear clumsy, full of error.
Another rule—one of mine: When error begins, analysis follows. This is the distinguishing quality of human nature.
So it is graceful, almost perfect, to move into a room with one hazy light on, pushing clothes slightly aside, and feel this swaying together, this swell that comes with the electric pulse of mouth on flesh. To hear breath, only breath, not know if it pours in and out of my own chest, or hers, motion of her hands against a thigh, then this fluttering wave of wet dissolution, crumbling of knees, curling up of toes, and the force spreads through each nipple, arches the back of my neck. I let my tongue trail the perimeter of her ear, can sense her making short, short sounds that seem lost, and urgent. But in the middle of this trembling half-blindness I feel wisdom rear its ugly head again. And I begin to see. That her eyes are shut tight against something monstrous. Her face remembering pain. She is pulling clothes off left and right, very quietly—mine, her own—in a terrible hurry. As if anxious to get this thing over with.
That’s when grace begins to elude me.
“Bren, wait.”
“No.”
“Can we just—”
She waves it away.
I sit on the bed’s edge, half-dressed, half in and half out of a deep, enveloping want. Light blurs the walls. She has opened her eyes now but doesn’t look up, concentrates on removing each sock, letting down a zipper, undoing buttons, until she is naked and, watching, I feel something push up inside me and cry to get out, examine the shape and breadth of shadows darkening her body, quick surge of pain in my own throat at this sudden rush of recognition: how much I adore that body, the skin taut over bone and muscle here, but a little flabby now with the onset of age there, altogether strong yet wildly imperfect—a body to be adored, and also forgiven. I ask myself if I can take the punishment of self-denial. Tell myself: Of course you can, lady, you’re not some saint in a frayed-rope shirt, and this is no demon and no angel but your friend here of sixteen years. You are both just women, nothing more, nothing less. In the twentieth century, thankfully, and not the fourteenth. Where there are no heavenly rewards, you say, and no hellish punishments—only life to be lived. So just do the right thing.
That’s when I decide not to fight the tide. Realize that I must not be the one who rejects, not tonight. Maybe she is making the right moves with the wrong person. Or else maybe the wrong moves with the right person. But only the future can show which is true.
For now, grace and perfection have fled utterly, clumsiness reigns. I offer a leg and she pulls a sock off with one strong motion that lacks even a touch of romance, tosses it emphatically to the floor, as if to say, It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it. I offer the other leg. Same thing. Then stand, feeling cold and dry, peel down everything else I’m wearing, dump it all without ceremony, and sit completely naked on the bed. Doggedly, she sits beside me. I see it bubbling up just below the surface of her eyes and twitching lips, a barely suppressed panic. She is functioning, now, on stubborn automatic. Places a hand on each side of my neck, closes her eyes, pulls me forward to kiss. I press against her arms and feel them shaking. Run fingers over her breasts, where the nipples are soft and flat and the sweat is of fear, not arousal.
She hauls me down sideways on the bed.
That’s when I halt all the motion.
When I reach—simply, surely, as if I’ve done it a million times—hold her face calmly in my hands, thumbs stroking her eyelids, gently, until she opens them, and looks, and sees.
“Bren. I’ve known you so long,”
She hears, lets it sink in. For a moment, it seems she might cry. We watch each other’s eyes. Until she rips my hands away like scabs, clamps her own hands over my eyes and pushes with force so that I roll far away on the bed, blindfolded.
“Don’t,” she says fiercely. “Don’t look. Don’t you dare.”
*
Girls used to say it, say it all the time. At sleepover parties. In bathrooms. Locker rooms. I’m getting undressed. Don’t look. Don’t look.
Most didn’t.
Some were like me, and—once in a while—would steal a peek.
I do that after a while. Peek across the bed, where Bren is stretched on her back over the peeled-down blankets, one arm covering her face. Her body’s tense, the muscles fixed, and she seems frozen in the soft light of the bedside lamp. After a while I move closer. I dare to pass a hand over shoulders, breasts, belly, then back up to neck and chin, run a hand over the arm she’s thrown across both eyes.
“Sweet lady. It’s all right.”
But I take my hand away. It’s all this touching in the first place that caused everything, anyway, caused such tension and terror.
I tell myself I should have known. Then accept the fact that I knew all along, just ignored it.
The radio alarm’s digital face glows bright green. Seconds shift rapidly. Minutes. Not touching seems to work. Soon her arm slides away to reveal the entire face, stiff with humiliation, apology. Her eyes meet mine. Silently say they are sorry, so sorry.
“Bren, it’s okay.”
“No.”
“It is. Don’t hurt over this. I think it was a mistake, you know? Maybe you’re just not ready to be touched.”
She blushes. Even in the dull light, I can see it, and am suddenly amused. Knowing so well how very properly mannered, controlled, terribly formal this woman can be. A stickler for propriety and discipline, stiff spinal pole, regular pain in the ass. And despite that, so sweet sometimes. So gentle, really. I’ve seen it, in the way she would touch Kay.
She clears her throat. “Do you mind if I turn out the light?”
“Go ahead.”
In the dark, her struggle is palpabl
e. I sense it. And stay well on the other side of the bed this time, avert my eyes to watch the glow of Cambridge streetlamps filtering through blinds, listen to an occasional car pass by.
“Bren.”
I wait for a response that doesn’t come.
“Bren, look—do you need to be alone? You can tell me, you know.”
But she reaches for my hand, presses it lightly in hers. Then our hands rest together on the bed. Our fingers interweave. And I feel, suddenly, very tired. Capable of this, and no more: one hand, lightly holding. It makes me know, suddenly, certainly, that she was not the only one flayed by fear tonight; and this one action, this holding of hands, has taken all our strength.
She pressures my fingers. Her own are shivering.
“Chick—”
“What is it, sweetie?”
“The last few days with Kay, I saw something weird. It was once, when we tried—never mind.” She tells me fractured, half-comprehensible things then, in between long dead pauses. Something about objects washed with light, and burning. I encourage but she can’t continue. I wait. Finally feel her effort crumble on the other side of the bed.
I am praying silently now, thoughtlessly. Praying to any saint who might exist, and listen. To my own mother, dust in a dark, dark coffin, deep scar in my memory. Asking for assistance. Patience. For mercy and courage.
Holy Mary. Mother of God. Our light, our sweetness, and our hope. To you we something or other. Something. Or other. I’ve forgotten the words. To you we lift up our voices? To you? We cry. Maybe. Banished children of Eve. No. Yes. Banished children of Eden. Of Eden? Of paradise. Your different children, the ones locked out of paradise. Instruments. Of thy peace. So let me finally know it. You. The act of it. The art of you. Teach me the true act of love.
After a while I can feel her sleep. I ease our fingers apart, pull a sheet and blanket up to her chest. Then I leave space between us on the bed, huddle under blankets myself. Until I sleep, too.
The Sea of Light Page 13