Maybe she’ll come visit one day. Our final phone call, from the ranch, was brief, halting, awkward—but perhaps over time, in my absence, her hard judgments of me will soften, turn into questions. They will lead her to me, across the long grass, and I’ll look at her and nod. I’ll recognize her. She won’t try to ride me but I will allow her to approach, put a hand on my forehead, feel my horsey warmth.
There are touches like bridles you can kick away, and then there are touches that startle you into temporary submission, like the universe catching its breath: body against stunned body, mind against bright mind. A sudden snare of recognition. Wildness regarding itself.
Black Stones
To whom can we turn in our need? Not angels, not humans…
—Rilke
I.
At midnight, Sarah awoke to find an angel hovering above her hospital bed like a hummingbird. Aside from his large white wings, he looked like a regular naked man—but abnormally good-looking, with dark eyes and hunky shoulders. He wore a grave expression on his face.
“Oh,” said Sarah. “I get it.”
The angel shook his head. “Don’t worry, you’re not dead yet,” he said. “This is just a preliminary visit.”
He stilled his wings and floated downward, landing next to her, on his side. He folded his wings behind him and propped his head up on his elbow.
Sarah rolled onto her left side to face him. The rough blanket grated her skin, and she felt the ache in her abdomen where they’d cut her open. But then the angel reached out and touched her shoulder, and an amazing thing happened: all of the pain departed her body, in a great vertiginous rush so strong that she let out a little moan of pleasure.
“Open your mouth,” he said. He slowly transferred a hard object from his tongue to hers. It felt smooth and round, like a stone. “Swallow it,” he instructed, and she felt the little stone making its way down into the dark swamp of her insides.
He reached out and ran his warm callused hand down her side, and her body rose like bread. She could feel his straight and purposeful penis pressing into her leg. She started moving her hand in its direction.
But just then, as if this gesture reminded him of somewhere else he had to be, the angel leapt off the bed. He hovered above her again, beating his feathered wings.
“I’m going to come back tomorrow,” he said. “I’m only authorized to give you one stone each day.”
“I want you to stay,” said Sarah. “I want to suck your cock.”
“I know,” he said. He glanced down with a slight shrug, as if to acknowledge, who wouldn’t? “You can, eventually. And then, when you’re ready, I’ll perform intercourse with you, and you’ll die. But everything has to happen in a certain order. That’s what they told us, anyway.”
“This is a stupid system,” she said, bitterly.
He stared at her for a moment. “Maybe,” he said. “But it’s the only one there is. The only one I know of, anyway.”
She closed her eyes, because it hurt to look at him. She kept them closed until her pain returned; when she opened them, he was gone.
II.
She couldn’t hold even a smoothie down. She shook her head no.
Her husband, John, leaned back in the folding chair, the glass in his hand, the straw dangling off the side like an unanswered question.
“This is what I get for being a smart-ass,” said Sarah. “When you don’t take life seriously, death starts to take you seriously. It assumes you’ve been playing for the wrong team.”
“Don’t say that,” said John.
“What, death?”
He closed his eyes. “Please stop.”
“Maybe we could have a safe word,” she said. “You know, one of those phrases to prevent kinky sex from going too far. Like broccoli, or beeswax, or surfboard.”
“Surfboard,” he said.
He reached out and took her hand between his palms—the first time he’d touched her all day—and narrowed his gray eyes behind the black-framed glasses, as if trying to bring her more sharply into focus.
“Go home,” she said. “I’ll fall asleep in a minute, and then you should go home.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“No.” He squeezed her hand tighter. “I mean—I’m sorry. For, you know—”
“Surfboard.”
He cleared his throat. “I do love you, you know,” he said. “Very much.” She recognized the tone from his tort-law classes. This is A Very Important Thing, what I’m saying. Pompous and insincere. But she noticed that his hand, holding hers, was shaking.
She closed her eyes. She could have said something to ease his suffering, but she found that she didn’t particularly care to.
She could still feel the angel’s touch, humming inside her like brandy.
III.
The angel returned just after midnight.
“Is it tomorrow already?” asked Sarah, turning to face him.
“Yeah.” He leaned in and gave her another stone. She swallowed.
“Can I ask you something?”
“OK,” he said.
“Is karma real?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
She frowned, and propped herself up on her elbow. “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “For all the sexy way they portray it in the movies, it’s not very sexy to be the other woman. Because you’re always the other woman. Never the woman, even if he ends up with you. At first John said he wanted kids with me. But now he comes back depressed from the custody visits with the kids he already has. It’s terrible: he takes them out for lunch and they don’t even talk to him, they just pull the batting out of rips in the diner seats while their ice cream melts.”
“What’s custody?”
“King Solomon. They cut the baby in half and nobody’s happy.”
“Whose baby?”
But she didn’t answer.
“Now,” she said, finally, “he’s disgusted by my body. My skin feels like paper. I smell like sour milk.” She lay back down, and pulled the blanket up around her shoulders. “He tries to hide it, but I can tell.”
The angel stretched his wings, then folded them back again.
“I feel sad,” he said, finally.
“Can you hold me?”
“Well—”
“I feel like it’s the least you could do.”
He got up and lay down next to her in the bed, climbing underneath the thin coverlet. He wrapped his arms around her.
“This is very uncomfortable for me,” he confessed. “It just makes me want to have sex with you, and I can’t do that. We’re still in Prelims.”
“I’m dying. My needs matter more than yours right now.”
“I guess you’re right.” He pulled her a bit closer, and started to pat her lightly on the head. “Does this feel good?”
“Sort of.”
He patted for a minute or two, and then he stopped, resting his arm down the length of her side.
“I want to say the nicest possible thing to you,” he said.
“Tell me I’m beautiful,” she whispered.
“You’re beautiful. I really want to have sex with you right now, because you’re so beautiful. But I can’t.”
She still said nothing, but her rib cage rose and fell more rapidly.
“Do you want me to tell you anything else?” he offered.
“No, thanks,” she said. “That was fine.” But her voice was small and tight and distant.
A thin strip of lemon light showed beneath the industrial-gray hospital blinds. This meant the angel was already late for his next client—high school girl, car accident. After that he was supposed to visit a housewife counting the pills in her cabinet, contemplating suicide.
The black stones lay tucked in the folds of his wings, waiting. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave.
The Cleas
I found the Cleas on Craigslist, accidentally, while looking for a mattress frame.
The ad said Two families looking to share after-school care for six-year-old girls. You: energetic young woman who loves kids. Background in art/early childhood education/creative movement a plus!!! I didn’t know about any of those things, but I needed money. Applying for graduate school was more expensive than I’d realized, and revising my undergraduate thesis on the complexity of Beyoncé as a feminist icon was taking longer than I’d thought. I’d begun stealing tampons and energy bars from my dog-walking clients. Extensive experience with young children, I wrote in my email. Whiz at arts and crafts!
They didn’t call my bluff, or my references. At my interview, I learned that the moms had met at a Gotham Kidz Club and become friends upon discovering that their daughters had the same name. They were both named Clea. (One was short for Cleopatra, and the other was not short for anything.) Then they discovered other similarities: they lived three blocks away from each other on Riverside Drive; the four parents, between them, had five Ph.D.s.
When I met the girls, I could not believe they were the same age. One Clea had about thirty pounds on the other. The bigger Clea was a stocky blond peasant type with a big gap between her front teeth. The smaller Clea looked vaguely malnourished, with large eyes in a pale heart-shaped face. They told me I could call them Big Clea and Small Clea. I said I would not do that, it was horrible to define someone by their body.
“I don’t mind,” said Small Clea.
“I do,” I said. “Pick a new name.”
Big Clea thought for a minute. “I choose Rainbow Clea,” she said.
Small Clea just stared at me and stuck her pointer finger up her nose.
“Don’t you want a pretty new name?” I said.
“I don’t care,” she said, and shrugged. Then she said, “OK. I choose Grass Clea.”
I thought this choice was unfortunate, but I did not force her to change it because it was her life, not mine.
Then Rainbow Clea turned to Grass Clea and said, “Let’s play Slave.”
“OK,” said Grass Clea. She lay down on the floor and Rainbow Clea began to whip her with a fun noodle.
I wondered how they knew about slaves. Or why they had a fun noodle—there wasn’t a pool or anything. I thought, isn’t it interesting how quickly children’s relational personalities solidify into dominant and submissive. I considered the early-childhood roots of violence. I’d come up with several plausible theories for Rainbow Clea’s behavior before I realized it was my job to stop it.
I picked the Cleas up from school on the Upper East Side every afternoon, waiting along with the blond mothers in Banana Republic or Lululemon and the Caribbean nannies in long skirts. I was the one thing not like the others. I wore dime-store earrings, duct-taped boots, hoodies, and leggings stretched from too many wearings between Laundromat trips: the uniform of the white twentysomething with a liberal arts degree and Medicaid, perpetually on the verge of a graduate program.
We’d go to this one playground in Central Park that had several knee-high hippopotamus statues, and the Cleas would pretend to ride them. Sometimes I squatted down onto a hippopotamus myself, and they shrieked with pleasure. There was probably something Freudian about their reaction, but I did not pursue the line of thought.
Sometimes, I just sat on a bench and watched them from the corner of my eye while texting the person I was sleeping with. At the moment, this was Zander, who I’d met at a midnight screening of Rear Window, because we were the only people there. I was there because I’d been bored in my apartment, and he was there because he was homeless. So I took him home, which worked out well for both of us: he had a place to sleep, and I was no longer bored. In fact, I learned something important that night about Zander: he had a zeal for cunnilingus, a real one, not one he affected to seem like a feminist. Some guys think you can’t tell, but you can.
He also had one habit I did not like, which was touching my face all over with his fingertips in between makeout sessions, like a blind guy in the movies. Some people find this romantic. I find it creepy. But I did not stop him.
In case you were wondering, Zander wasn’t homeless as in sleeping on the street. He was homeless as in he’d forgotten to re-sign his lease, so his landlord had evicted him and he was temporarily couch-surfing, which sounds like more fun than it actually is.
The morning after—which was very morning-aftery, bleary and incandescent—I went to my dog-walking job, and left Zander my keys so he could sleep late. That afternoon, he met me in Central Park to drop them off.
I was playing with Rainbow and Grass on the hippopotamus playground. When he called out my name, I acted shocked to see him. “What a surprise!” I said. (This was the agreed-upon signal, to make our meeting appear accidental.)
Zander spoke his line: “Tess! Hi! I was just walking by, and I saw you.”
“Girls,” I said, “this is my friend Zander.”
“Nice to meet you ladies,” said Zander, and he grinned.
Let me describe Zander. He was like a sexy clown. He played accordion in a band called Baby. They were big in the Bushwick scene. He wore an old tweed jacket with elbow patches that was about two sizes too big. He had a lean body and a lopsided smile and a face as pretty as a girl’s: dark curly hair and eyelashes long and black like calligraphy brushes. Most noticeably, though, he had extremely unusual eyes.
“Your eyes are two different colors,” observed Rainbow Clea.
“Yeah,” chimed Grass. “One green and one blue.”
“That’s true,” said Zander, thoughtfully, as if he’d never considered this fact before. “You know, it must be because my mom is part mermaid.”
The Cleas’ eyes widened like satellite dishes.
“Like Ariel?” whispered Grass Clea.
“Yeah,” he said. “But she has legs and stuff. She’s only part.” He shrugged self-effacingly.
Rainbow Clea was about to lose her shit. She actually started hopping from one leg to another. “Rainbow, do you have to go to the bathroom?” I asked.
She didn’t hear me. She was about to explode with the effort of racking her brain for the thing that would most impress Zander.
“I have a guinea pig!” she finally yelled.
“It actually belongs to our class?” said Grass. “Its name is Toothbrush, and—”
“We voted about what to name it,” interrupted Rainbow.
“‘Toothbrush’ was my idea,” said Grass.
Rainbow stood stricken mute; she had no idea how to compete with this.
“Did you guys know that guinea pigs aren’t actually pigs?” said Zander.
“Yeah, obviously,” said Rainbow, thrilled and grateful at the change of subject.
“Yeah, obviously,” echoed Grass.
“They’re related to trolls,” said Zander.
Rainbow frowned. “That’s not true,” she said.
“You think so?” said Zander. “Well, the next time you see a troll, look closer.”
They stared up at him. They were two girls in love. Collectively, we were two girls in love and one girl who’d achieved an almost poetic level of horniness.
“Come away with me to the hippos, Zander,” said Rainbow, breathlessly, like she was asking him to elope. She grabbed his hand.
“Okay, for a minute,” he said. But as the girls turned and ran in the direction of the statues, he slipped his hand into my back pocket and cupped his palm against my butt. Then he slid it back out, leaving my keys. I had to give it to him: that was a nice touch.
Over the next few weeks, I texted Zander the funny things that Grass and Rainbow did. He texted back lots of emoticons, and asked to see me.
We hardly ever met up, though; I usually lied and said I was busy. When I like someone, I try to keep things hypothetical for as long as possible. Everything eventually disappoints. There’s always that moment of turning away, on one side or the other. The best part is the waiting: you’re Ariel on the rock, windblown, full of desire.
During these weeks, Grass Clea developed
a new and eccentric clothing habit. She insisted on wearing the same outfit every day: black leggings, black Mary Janes, and a brown cable-knit sweater of her mother’s that she’d retrieved from the dirty-clothes hamper. The sweater reached down to her ankles, the sleeves dangling limply several inches below her hands. It was cute, in a disturbing sort of way. She looked like a little Precious Moments street urchin. She called the sweater Mommy’s Dirty Sweater, and then just the Dirty—“Dirty” apparently both modifying the noun and serving as a noun itself. Once a week, her mother managed to wrestle her out of the Dirty long enough to wash it. But during the wash cycle Clea grew extremely anxious. She’d press her face to the washing machine, weeping quietly. Her mother would try to tempt her away—with Dora the Explorer, with Barbie, with Popsicles—but she wouldn’t budge. The cleaning process was a kind of death, one for which she was never prepared. She mourned the sweater’s absence like a military wife; she moaned and twisted her hair, refusing comfort. When it eventually came out of the dryer, she put it on and hugged herself into a tight, fetal little ball and whispered unintelligible messages into her stomach.
I wondered if she was depressed. I wondered if it was possible to be depressed at six. Then I thought, if anyone could, it would be Grass Clea.
Let me describe Grass Clea’s family. Her two parents had three Ph.D.s: in Russian Literature, German Moral Philosophy, and Holocaust Studies. The mother, Nadine, had the same wispy hair and large eyes—the same starving-alien beauty—as her daughter. When we got home, we usually found her sitting in an armchair with a book in her lap, staring into space, frowning. (She was the one with the Russian and Holocaust degrees.) Walter, the dad, was a little uptight, but at least he tried to have fun. He had one joke. His joke was the German language. He put “das” in front of everything. Like “das macaroni” or “das pajamas.” Nadine did not find this joke funny. Neither did Clea, really, but she smiled weakly anyway.
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