“Don’t leave me up here alone,” she said.
Her tone, so simple and yet so starkly and unbearably vulnerable, startled him and he halted instantly as if jerked by a rope, and then he was falling, falling on his clogs—that was the first thing Ralph and Ellen had remarked about him, that he wore those clogs—and he tumbled out of them onto the floor. She was laughing so hard her face was red. She let the towel fall and crawled to him and held him in her arms against her lap and breasts as if he were some kind of fallen soldier.
“Is my little Dane hurt?” she said, and kissed him on the forehead. She withdrew for a moment as if trying to convince herself of something, and he was still gazing at her thinking this must be a dream, don’t do anything, don’t do anything, when she bent again and kissed him with her tongue, without pause, she could actually breathe while kissing him and he was trying to kiss her back. Then she was moving from under him and was over him and on top of him on the floor and her hand was sweeping his chest, gliding down toward his jeans, and unzipping him, all seemingly in one movement, and they were still kissing and he was still telling himself don’t, don’t, and thinking don’t what? Don’t let her do this in her state or don’t come yet or what? And she was all over him and he was kissing her and just holding on tight and he was out of his pants and underwear and she was out of her pants and underwear and his hand was under her jacket and shirt—she still had that jacket on!—and she was straddling him and then something happened and he couldn’t help himself. He said, “Am I in?”
“Haven’t you done it before?”
“Of course,” he said.
And she was moving atop him and he was thinking about how lucky he was on such an unlucky day and he was thinking it felt different than he thought it would and he was thinking he was starting to ache a little, that somehow it was starting to hurt.
“You’re supposed to too,” she said.
“What?”
“Move.”
Move how? he thought. The truth was he didn’t know. He’d seen parts of some porn films, but they were kind of gross and he hadn’t learned anything from them. He moved sideways.
“What are you doing?”
“Moving,” he said, and he worried it came out like a question.
Then her face collapsed and she was crying, really crying, her chest wracked with sobs, and she sank fully upon him, and then she slid from him and lay atop him weeping and her face was pressing against his shirt and he didn’t know where to put his hands—certainly not on her bare bottom—and he held her tightly through her leather jacket and she cried and cried.
After a while she stopped and her hand found him again, and again she slid him into herself and was moving with an almost seriousness of purpose.
“Why are we doing this?” he asked.
“Shut up,” she said. “Just be quiet. Okay?”
He knew enough not to say even okay. She kept going and he was trying to move somehow—how could he be so ignorant about this, so unknowing?—and then she swallowed hard and her eyes didn’t appear to be looking at all, and she stopped and patted him lightly on the chest.
“Okay,” she said.
She maneuvered herself off him and stood and went to the bed for the duvet and came back and lay beside him on the floor and covered them both because it did seem suddenly colder than it was.
“You’ll be so much different when I come back in a year,” she said. “You’ll know how. The girls here have never seen a Dane and they’ll be curious.”
And neither of them could know—how could they?—that she wouldn’t come back in a year but in two and a half months, because it would turn out to be so awful over there, so horrible, in silly backward small-town Denmark, and her face would be so haggard and gaunt that she’d look at least thirty, sitting across from him in the breakfast nook as she smoked her cigarettes and rolled her eyes. And he couldn’t know and she couldn’t know that in just twenty years both her parents would be in the ground and she would be in the ground, that they would all be dead, leaving nobody behind except maybe him and he didn’t count.
He could feel her groping around and she dug out a cigarette from her jacket pocket and lit it and lay on her back smoking up at the ceiling.
“You know, we talked about it,” she said.
“What?”
“Ronnie and I. We talked about doing it. Fucking. I mean, we weren’t—” her voice caught at that. “Weren’t related, really. So we could have. And we talked about it. But we didn’t do it.”
“Oh.” For an instant, he had a vision of them doing it and it made him shiver.
“Is my little Dane cold?” She moved a hand toward him. “My little Dane who’d never done it before.”
“I know,” he admitted.
“You’re going to be fine,” she said.
And he was, he was going to be fine. Although they wouldn’t ever sleep together again, he would last the year and go to university and marry and have kids and, in all the ordinary meanness and tragedy of life, experience happiness. But none of them here in this house would experience that after today. Yesterday would be their last day. The police would determine that Ronnie wasn’t drunk, he just hadn’t been a particularly cautious driver. He liked to go really fast. Jens could remember that, how the trees whistled at them on their way to Race Point, how Ronnie turned Province Lands Road into his personal quarter oval. He could remember sitting in the passenger seat and thinking it was so dangerous he couldn’t even admit to himself just how terrified he was, the way Ronnie would look over at him grinning insanely but in a not unkind fashion as he brought the car up to ninety and then one hundred miles an hour, his zany American brother.
But that was a long time ago, before many of you were even born. Don’t think about it, there’s no point in thinking about it. There’s no point in trying to look back.
VIVA REGINA
BY BEN GREENMAN
Woods Hole
I was minding my own business.
I was at home watching television.
The show was a police drama.
Everyone told me that it was fantastic.
I didn’t see the appeal.
The older detective was always shouting at the younger detective.
The younger detective was always champing at the bit to solve the cases quickly.
Their female sergeant wore her uniform comically tight.
The show was set in Boston and the accents were broad.
I couldn’t keep track of anyone’s names.
I had started with the sense that I would watch the entire hour and while I did my best I was soon overcome with fatigue and I started to lean back into the couch and consequently into sleep.
I was so tired I thought I would never be alert again.
I could not afford to be tired.
I had too much to do.
I needed to stay awake.
That was the first thing I had to do.
I went out for a walk.
My father always told me to walk when I was tired.
He said that no one ever fell asleep in the middle of a walk.
My father had died some years before in bed.
His words on sleep seemed especially important as a result.
Off I went into the night.
I walked up Bar Neck Road.
The night was quiet and I said so out loud.
When I had taken about thirty steps I turned and looked back at my house.
It was a riot of rectangles and triangles.
The upstairs windows looked like eyes.
My father had died in the right eye.
I turned away and went off down the road.
It was spring but it did not feel like spring.
I had been in Boston all winter long surrounded by trees but also by cold and I worried that I had lost the ability to relax into weather.
My reasons for going to Boston over the winter were stronger than my reasons for returning home in spring.
I had gone
to forget a woman and I had returned because I thought I had forgotten her.
I had gone with another woman and I had returned when she was gone.
I made a right onto Albatross Road.
It was mild because it was spring but I shivered.
I still felt I was in winter and I said so out loud.
After the aquarium I turned onto Water Street and went up toward Luscombe Avenue.
The water was off to my right making the faintest noise as was the wind coming through the trees.
It was going right to left like a sentence being read in reverse.
The idea reminded me of the past and so I felt for my phone and called a woman.
She was not the same woman I had been seeing over the winter though they had the same name give or take.
One was named Gina and the other was named Regina.
Names were important in a situation like that.
I called.
This was the second thing I had to do.
She was home.
She was Regina.
I asked her if I could come over.
She said that would be nice.
She told me her husband was in Boston for the weekend.
I said that I hoped he was having a good weekend.
I vaguely remembered that he played in a band and I took a stab at the name.
One of those two things made her laugh.
She hung up the phone.
I went to her house up on School Street.
She opened the door before I knocked.
She was wearing a man’s dress shirt and women’s underwear.
She said she was psychic.
Then she said she wasn’t psychic somewhat apologetically.
She said that she had seen me out the window.
I told her that I knew she wasn’t psychic.
I told her that if she was really psychic she wouldn’t have gotten married to her husband.
She told me not to mention him.
I said okay but reminded her that he was in Boston.
I told her that if she was really psychic she wouldn’t have introduced me to Gina.
She told me not to mention her either.
I said okay but reminded her that Gina was in Maine.
I told her that everyone was so far away.
I told her that whoever was left should stick together.
I asked her if she wanted to take a walk.
She said that she was too tired.
She asked me if I wanted to come in.
I said that I would.
I went to the kitchen to open a bottle of wine.
Regina went to the couch and turned on the television.
The same cop show that I had been watching at home was still on.
There was a clock on a mantel over her.
It was an antique clock that was probably the most expensive thing in the house.
More than an hour had passed since the show started.
I expressed my confusion.
She said it was a two-hour season finale.
I didn’t say anything.
She said she loved the show more than life itself.
I didn’t say anything.
Once I had told her the same thing about herself.
At that time we were younger.
Back then she had a habit of wearing men’s underwear and no shirt.
We had watched many television shows and almost always ended up in the same pleased position.
I had pledged my love and she had responded with an identical pledge.
We had decided that she would do away with her husband and come to me.
In my mind I saw it all play out and in my mind it was glorious.
My love for her was a blinding light and admitting that to myself did not feel melodramatic in the least.
Shortly after that my love for her had turned into something else.
I was not sure what it had turned into exactly.
It had turned into something darker and more solid.
It had started to darken when she told me that she was not sure that she could leave her husband and had solidified when one evening she introduced me to Gina.
She had told me that the two of us would get along nicely.
We did not.
I was still thinking constantly of Regina.
I did not know how I would get through the winter without her.
I got through it with Gina in Boston and mostly in bed.
From the outside it might have looked a little bit like love.
When she left to go back to Maine I felt nothing.
I did not even have a twinge of sadness seeing her go.
I returned to Woods Hole in the spring and my heart started racing.
Regina and I sat and watched the show.
The younger detective was certain he knew where the killer was hiding.
The older detective had his head buried in a file.
The female sergeant kissed the younger detective in a stairwell.
The older detective drank too much and looked at himself reproachfully in the mirror.
The killer got a job mopping floors in the police station.
The female sergeant had a dream that the younger detective shot and killed the older detective.
I poured us more wine and moved closer to her on the couch.
I was no longer tired.
I told her that I was tired earlier but had been revived by the walk.
I told her that I had taken the walk when I had remembered my father’s advice.
She had known my father and at the mention of him she moved closer to me.
The outside of her thigh had a noticeable pulse that I always said was her leg’s heartbeat.
She always told me that if it was pulsing that much on the outside of her leg I should feel the inside.
I did for a moment during the commercial.
That was the third thing I had to do.
When the show came back on she asked me what I thought would happen.
I said that I thought that the female sergeant’s dream would come true.
She said no.
I was hoping she would say that she was not asking about the show.
I was hoping she would say that she was asking me what would happen with us.
I told her that.
She said no.
She said that the female sergeant had dreams every episode and they never came true.
She said they were supposed to be read as clues for future cases but that they had nothing to do with this episode’s case.
I asked if the female detective was psychic.
She said that’s what she meant by saying that her dreams were clues to future cases.
She told me to be quiet so we could watch the show.
A baby I did not recognize was rescued by a woman I did not recognize.
A man I did not recognize beat another man I did not recognize with a tire iron.
This elicited a gasp from Regina.
She said that the man might die.
I said that was too bad but that I would feel worse if I knew who he was.
A boy on a bicycle rode across the screen ringing his bicycle bell excitedly.
She asked me if it was that time already.
I told her I didn’t know what she meant.
She explained that ten minutes before the end of every show there was some kind of scene like this.
Once it was a tugboat blowing its foghorn.
Once it was a dog leaping right at the camera.
She told me that the last ten minutes were always a doozy and this was a way of reminding audiences to stop getting snacks or going to the bathroom or talking.
I said that was interesting.
Or talking she said.
The older detective died of a heart attack.
The younger detective came upon the killer as he strangled a woman with a scarf.
The younger detective shot and kill
ed the killer.
The female sergeant wept at the older detective’s funeral as she held the hand of the younger detective.
The killer’s funeral was not shown.
The show ended.
I did not like it any more than I had at the beginning.
I turned to tell her that I didn’t see the appeal.
She was crying.
That prevented me from saying anything critical about the show.
I told her that my father had always told me that when I saw a woman crying I should do something about it.
She said she always liked my father.
She said that she was crying because she couldn’t see me anymore.
She said she thought this was the last time.
She was standing right beside the antique clock.
Her words on time seemed especially important as a result.
She unbuttoned her men’s dress shirt and pulled my hand inside it.
The touch of her skin created both pleasure and pain for me.
I withdrew my hand from both.
She said that she didn’t know how she would get through the summer without it.
I agreed that it was a great show and much better than I had expected.
She took me to the bedroom.
She took off the shirt and the underwear.
She was not talking about the show anymore but she was still crying.
She told me that she thought something big was about to happen.
She said that if she had a bicycle bell she would ring it.
I told her that maybe she was psychic after all.
She pulled my hand toward her.
I withdrew my hand again.
This time there was more pain in it for me than pleasure.
I walked around the room.
I was so alert I thought I would never sleep again.
I found the shirt she had removed and wrapped one sleeve around each of my fists and placed the span of the shirt across her neck.
At first she was amused because she thought that I was making fun of the show.
Then she was excited because she thought that I was not.
Then she was terrified because she knew that I was not.
She tried to say my name and then her husband’s name and managed to say both in a sense which meant that she was saying neither.
She said my father’s name which I did not understand.
She said no.
Her right eye went blind and the left eye soon followed.
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