Three worn old beach towels later he’s clean and proud, scattering around the house like a whirlwind of canine muscle, nails clicking the kitchen tiles and hallway floorboards. He rolls on rugs to dry himself more. Jumps onto forbidden territory: leather upholstery, downy bedcovers. Barks, acts coy, goads us into playing catch with the football-length rubber biscuit I bought him at an overpriced pet store in Beacon Hill. I look at Bren. We’re dirty ourselves, tired, our clothes grimed. Pitching the rubber biscuit down a hallway, I realize that the place seems smaller without Kay in it—glossy wood, rustic style and the exposed ceiling beams notwithstanding. Some things are put away. It is Bren’s place now. In it, she looks taller, more alone.
Ajax. Torn sponges. We scrub the tub clean of dog hair and dead twigs. The smell sifts up into steamy, fluorescent-lit air, collides with the fresh breezy damp of the night. The manufactured; the natural. Of both elements this human life consists. I resign myself to it: Walking down a supermarket aisle, or walking down a pine-softened, tree-shielded dirt trail, we humans are still creatures apart; never really, fully participating in any immediate environment. Perhaps, in the end, that’s what gives us consciousness. Awareness of continual observation in lieu of natural connection. Separate from each other, too—although, for sure, we seem to strive for something different; and, to be sure, none of us start out that way. Born alone, die alone, the old saying goes. But it’s not really true. We aren’t born alone—we come out of the body of the mother. We do die alone, though. And that—that conflict, between the way we begin and the way we end—that is the friction and the loss, the subtle underpinning of grief, that informs this human existence.
“Bath for you, Chick?”
I nod. What about her?
“Shower. You first, though. Hungry?”
“To be honest, Bren, yes, but not for that health-food stuff.”
She grins wryly. “Scored big with my latest fad, I see.”
“Yes, you Spartan. Is it the sports thing or the WASP thing that makes you so extreme?—tell me. Anyway, let me take you out to dinner.”
“Nah.”
“Why?” I tease. “Still afraid of running into your crème de la crème?”
She shakes her head, gets a look in her eyes that’s part mischievous, part serious, part something else I can’t read.
“Just for you, Chick. What about pizza?”
I agree. Ask can we please order delivery, like all the college brats? because I’m feeling distinctly childish right now, a little spoiled and regressive? and she tells me Of course, of course, who would want it any other way?
Bath, shower. Baby powder, fresh scent on skin. I wipe a circle in the mirror and look: Not bad. Early middle age. Growing knowledge of self. Knowledge of self collecting, in fact, like the proverbial moss on stone. Each wrinkle, each deep line that sleep did not put there, that sleep will not ever take away—look at it, woman; look at it hard. Your face. Aging. You have earned all the dents in this fender. Earned every disappointment and desire, every loss, and every win. Which makes me more aggressive, somehow. Assertive. Lets me know more fully what I want. Need. The difference between. What I can do without. And what I must not pass up—or, rather, what I would pass up only at a great unendurable cost.
Cost to what, Chick? To self. And why? Because it would be an avoidance of truth. A banishing of real, raw beauty from my life. Like they say, after all: truth is beauty, beauty truth. Because, in the beginning and in the end, the only truth worth making a big stink about is love. And the truth here is that you love her.
Early middle age. The perfect age to be.
I don’t know why I think that, but I do.
Clean clothes, cool night breeze. Two fresh-scrubbed, good-looking women and one fresh-scrubbed, ugly-looking dog in a kitchen, in the country, pulling napkins and platters from cupboards, getting out salt and pepper. When the doorbell shrieks, Boz goes temporarily, protectively mad, and a red-faced teenager stands there shyly while Bren restrains the dog and I fork over bills. He hands back change and a big, flat cardboard box that smells hotly like spiced hell, thanks us for the tip. When he turns back to the gaudy lit sign on top of the delivery car I wonder, briefly, the way I wonder at every momentary human encounter—I can’t help it, it comes with the professional territory—whether or not he will have a long life, and what kind of life it will be. Gay? Straight? Full of honesty, or of lies? A life of tenderness and courage? Of pain, violence, love? The headlights flick on, recede down the long, long driveway. I wish him good-bye and good luck. I will never, ever know.
We turn on a couple of soft living room lights, toss cushions onto the rug and set up dinner: a dishtowel, cardboard box open on the floor and pizza mist rising, paper towels for napkins. The fireplace is clean, dark, cold. A simple black mesh grating covers it. I wonder if Bren used it at all this winter—or were flaming Sunday logs, fresh coffee, the New York Times Book Review, just Kay’s choices really?
“What kind of music do you want, Chick?”
“Something from the late sixties, please, or early seventies. To remind me of my youth. Not that my youth was all that memorable.”
She selects a cassette. I watch her move through soft circles of light, through long angular shadows. Her face keeps changing; sometimes it’s obscured, at other times gently illuminated, intent, gracefully no-nonsense.
We eat pieces of the thing I’ve ordered, in what was undoubtedly a mood of childish excess—or maybe just rebellion at Bren’s latest ascetic health-food phase. An extra-large deep-pan pizza. Very oily. Double cheese. Onions. Green olives. Black olives. Hot peppers. Mushrooms. I realize it’s the fulfillment of a long-term frustrated desire; the kind of pizza I always yearned to order during all the years working my way through a state college to pay for books and food, through the summers to pay off loans, trying to study for exams standing at cash registers or deep-fry vats, through all the lobster shifts and swing shifts of graduate school, pleas of poverty to financial aid committees; always jealous of the rich people who sat beside me in classrooms, envious of those wealthy straight white folk who taught us all—taught us the ways of the mind, gave us an edge in the world which, in the end, was really another ticket into privilege and power. For the people I envied, a way of maintaining the advantage they’d been born into. For me, a way of elbowing into it, once and for all.
At any rate, I’ve gone all this time without treating myself to anything so frivolous as pizza. It’s terrible-tasting, like most wasteful things. I will, nevertheless, enjoy it.
Bren stares at me, smiles.
“You look so happy.”
“Mmm. Living well. It’s the best revenge.”
Revenge for what? she asks. For growing up without a trust fund in America, I tell her. And she nods, knowingly; she has had to work hard too, to hammer out a place for herself.
She pats oily tomato sauce from her lips. “You know, one of the kids on the team told me the other day that she believed in reincarnation.” She imitates a husky young voice. “‘It’s like, I figure that, like, if I don’t, like, do real well in this life, I’ve, like, got a bunch more other lives to do well in. So, I mean, like, what do you think about it, Coach?’”
We laugh, long and loud. Settled flat under the coffee table, Boz cocks his head at us in brief alarm before deciding it’s nothing, then curls back to sleep.
“Well, Coach. What do you think about it?”
“I told her that I try not to worry about things like that. I figure we’re here, alive, in this life, now. And the best approach is to just get on with it.”
“Ah,” I tease, “but is that what Coach just says? Or really believes?”
“Yes, that’s what Coach believes.” She smiles. There are tears in her eyes—from the laughter, or from something else, I’m not quite sure. “As for me—I don’t know. Maybe. Although only partly. I mean, in the sense that maybe there is something—you know, like an energy force, or an electrical current, or some such phenomenon,
that inhabits a form—a human form, an animal form, or plant—who knows? and when the form dies, it becomes no longer viable for conducting the energy, and so the energy, or whatever, travels on and occupies some other, living form. Maybe there’s something like that. I couldn’t begin to say that I definitely believe it, in the sense of having any kind of absolute faith in it, you know. Anyway, where’s the proof? Okay, yes, these thoughts have crossed my mind—while Kay was sick, and of course afterwards, and probably once in a while before I even met her. But do I believe in reincarnation the way I think this kid meant—that is, in the sense that the same person with the same memories, or whatever, gets reborn again and again? No. Absolutely not. I think—I mean, I have this gut sense about it—that whatever might live on has got nothing to do with personality. You. Me. Kay. As you, as me, we’re here just once. Whatever else continues, after our bodies die, it’s a lot more impersonal than you, or me. The individual, distinguishable characters that we are, right now, in this life—this is our one and only shot. Maybe some energy survives. But the thoughts and the memories? Talents, failings? All the love and hate that a single person has? I doubt it, Chick. I doubt it.” She pauses, a little uncertain now, shy somehow. “Which is why it’s important—”
“To work hard and make the most of it, right?”
“Well, yes. Just like that.”
Oh, I say, I believe in that too.
Then I lean across a cooling pizza box on my hands and knees, through the dark clean shadow of unused fireplace, just like that, and kiss her.
*
Some things we remember in detail; others, in metaphor. Maybe that’s why, later, it will come back to me as a blur: the long, long time that the kiss went on, became not a kiss any more but an exploration of skin; the beginning of how we touched hair, lips, cheeks, breasts and thighs through cloth; the moment she started to take off my clothes, there on the floor in front of cold pizza and a snoring dog, and I let her do all the work—sensing somehow that seizing the physical initiative was what she needed. There had been something vaguely frightening and unfamiliar about my saying where and when. Her power to control and to please was linked inextricably to her passion; and if I wanted her passion, and mine, I would have to give up a measure of my own control—not something I ever did lightly. But I realized, through a cloud of anxiety and desire, that the control was a much-overrated thing I could do without. And, anyway, we must all give it up in the end.
For Bren, I know, the physical look and feel would be remembered with a great deal of clarity. We are different that way. Bodies are ultimately more important to her than they have ever been to me. I can live quite happily in my head; it’s the way I am, I really can’t help it.
Still, there is this part of me that yearns to know all the ways of my body. And a part of her that yearns to express all the ways of her mind. If, in early middle age, I finally began to know and appreciate the physical channels of being—the electrical currents she had described as being potentially immortal, the dendrites and axons and synapses that conduct the mortal impulses, cause tissue and organ to secrete hormones, process oxygen in blood, make the raw muscle of the heart pick up pace, eyes drip tears, cunt excitement, and tendons attaching raw muscle to bone, the ache and tickle and longing and vulnerability of the flesh—which, she said, was the body’s largest organ, derma, an entirety into and of itself—I owe the pleasure and the terror of discovery to her. Or rather, to her and to myself; because it was in the combination of us together that the discovery happened. What I began to see was that a part of me that felt necessary to full human existence came alive in her hands. It bloomed in the measure of control I handed over to her. She evoked it; but, after all, it was I who’d made all this happen, and neither of us forgot that.
Talk, you, I demanded, when she stretched naked over me. Stay here, stay. No. Don’t shut your eyes, Bren—I want you to see.
See what? she breathed.
Me, I insisted. This. And yourself.
She opened her eyes to look then, broke into sweat.
“God, you’re pretty. I’m so afraid.”
But she reached to touch me, anyway, where I was softly hot and wet. The fear didn’t stop her. Electricity tingled through.
“Tell me how, Chick. I’m out of practice.”
Slower, I told her. Like that, yes. Nice and strong and slow.
In the blur of what was, certain things would come back to me later, the odd detail here and there: that she pressed down and took each nipple into her mouth in turn, sucking with a raw infantile need, as if real milk was about to flow, and her life depended on it. But every once in a while catching herself, pausing to nibble and tease, smiling, when I moaned, with a triumphant sort of slyness; and her hands slid everywhere, fingers slowly, firmly caressing, tortured my belly and thighs and then boldly went inside without an invitation, twisting around, exploring, filling me more and more until I could feel myself swell closer around her, hungry for the intrusion. That’s when I got afraid, and had to pause for a while. I told her. So we both were still. She leaned on an elbow and one hand played with my hair while the other stayed motionless inside me, looked down at my face with a pleased and fearless look, and a warm, old kind of wisdom in her eyes. I understood that she wanted to take me to some place that was different in fullness, more truly textured with pleasure than all the lands of perfunctory spasm I’d visited before and called love, and I wanted very badly to be taken; but then wanted to take her, too, and wasn’t sure that I could, or that she’d let me. Looming over me like this, handsome and beautiful and nearly all-powerful, she seemed much more than I’d bargained for, and her strength began to scare me.
But on the other hand she was just Bren, after all. My friend of so many years and—who knew? that kid on the team might be right—perhaps of many lifetimes.
The fear dissipated. I could smile.
“Don’t stop. Not really.”
Oh, she said, I couldn’t stop now.
We began to move again, very subtly, a mere simultaneous quivering at first. It took a long, erratic and doubtful time, almost stopped being graceful once and I cried out in a frustration that was tangible—at myself, at my mind that would not shut down no matter what, at this mingling of bodies we’d committed to which was somehow so familiar, yet at the same time near-foreign. I was more frightened than I knew. But in the end what she willed and what I gave over to her will were stronger than the fear. We moved farther and rougher, more extravagantly, she was on me and inside me, moving with me, against me, until there was nowhere else to move into, and I heard myself yell in a bubble of silence, electricity flicker my eyelids, and I breathed faster until, for a moment, breath ceased. Then gave myself up to the surge that washed me against her thighs and breasts and fingers like a wave, jolting me so hard that the wave broke with impact, shattered into successively smaller, sweating currents, then ripples, trickling back now, back, into damp and ragged calm.
Something blocked my throat. More tears. They dripped down my face with the sweat, and her lips smudged them, tasted them. The pain oozed, eased. I breathed quietly, began to feel shy, turned away and she held me with wet arms and hands.
I love you, I said. But the words came out throttled, so that only the middle one sounded, and only its first letter echoed. What? she whispered. I didn’t respond. They’d rung pallid and insignificant, clattering in my skull like a bad cliché. Early middle age, and I realized it wasn’t exactly love I wanted, but love and something more. Truth be told, my own standards were coldly austere in their way, as high as any of Bren’s; I wanted nothing less than a magnificently heart-wise fellow traveler in my life to visit new places with in body and in mind, mingle electricity with, abolish unnecessary borders with, see.
I wondered if she’d be all that for me. Wondered what she had in mind herself—was it me she wanted now after all the years, me with all of my chatter, demands, failings, gifts, excessive hidden dreams of my own in which I, too, won what had once be
en unattainable? Or did she want a stand-in for Kay? an old comfortable and available friend to step into this recently opened slot in her life the way some new recruit might occupy full scholarship position on her team, fill the vacancy left by an especially favored, just-graduated All-American?
And if she wanted none of the above, or all of the above, or some complex combination thereof—which was most likely—what then? If the result was loss of something I’d never had before, and only now just tasted, could I live with that?
If the result was winning what I’d never had before, and only now just tasted, could I live with that?
And what if I failed her standards? Or what if she failed mine, was not and would not or could not be this idealized companion of my fantasy cosmos? and offered just herself, with all of her moody silences, rigid demands, failings, gifts, dreams of triumph? Offered mere, faulty love—nothing more? Or less?
“Chick?” Her palm stroked a shoulder, smelled like me, like my own insides. “What are you thinking?”
“That I think too much.”
“Mmmm. I could have told you that.”
We chuckled. The floor was too hard, hurting my hip and ribs. I turned back to face her.
“What about you?”
She blushed. “I’m fine. I mean, I don’t need—this is good with me, right now—”
“Okay, toughie, but that’s not what I meant.”
Toughie.
She was. We laughed.
“Maybe, Chick. But it’s what I meant.”
“Listen, then, let’s just forget about it for now. Take the pressure off—”
‘Thanks.”
“Off, off, off.” And I snapped my fingers, blew something invisible away. I was disappointed, but also relieved somehow; and the look that flooded her face—relaxation, affection—made it all okay. “Talk to me, Bren.”
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