Flesh and Blood

by Michael Cunningham

  What happened with Joel kept increasing. She wanted nothing beyond the sensations and the simple friendship. She wasn't looking for love. She didn't bother with birth control. She'd come to believe she couldn't have babies, anyway. What she loved about Joel was not thinking about babies; not thinking about defeat and insufficiency. With Joel she unabashedly sought pleasure. She straddled him, pushed herself up and down on his big red cock. She thrust herself in his face, tugged screaming at his hair, told him he must not stop. She'd never expected this, the hot ragged climb and the implosion. She'd never imagined herself so washed in it. Afterward, driving home again, she felt cleansed, lightened, as if a layer of dust had been scrubbed off her. The cold air touched her differently. Her skirt lay differently on her thighs.

  Her mother called early one morning the following September. “Hi, honey,” she said in a cheerfully haggard voice, and Susan knew immediately that something had happened.

  “Mom. What's up?”

  “Well, I have something to tell you.”

  “What? Mom, what's happened?”

  “Sweetheart, I've asked your father to leave. He's staying at the Garden City Hotel, for now.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “We've separated. I don't know exactly what will happen. I'm sorry to be telling you over the telephone, but I thought I should let you know.”

  “What happened?”

  “This has been brewing for a long time, honey,” her mother said. “You must have known your father and I have always had, well, a little trouble.”

  “But why now?” Susan said. “Something must have happened.”

  Her mother paused. The line hummed faintly with static. “You know what it really is, honey?” her mother said. “It's that I'm finally coming into my own. I haven't turned into a women's libber or anything like that, believe me. I'm not going to start burning my bras. But. I'm not sure how to say this. I guess I've known for a long time that I need my own life. Your father and I raised you kids, we hung in there, and now that you're all on your own we need to be on our own, too. Does that make any sense?”

  Susan had stiffened. All she could think of was that she had failed. She'd been discovered. She wasn't sure what she meant. She wasn't sure what she thought.

  “I don't know,” she said. “I don't know what to say.”

  “This is a shock,” her mother said. “I understand.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Susan, it'll be all right. We're still your parents, nothing about that has changed.”

  “Mother, I really have to go. I can't talk to you right now.”

  “Whatever you think is best. I understand.”

  “You don't understand,” Susan said. “You don't understand anything.”

  “I don't blame you for being angry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Your father, well. His temper. I just—”

  “I have to go. I'm sorry.”

  “Okay, honey. Whatever you want.”

  Susan was sitting at the dining-room table when Todd came home. She hadn't called him at the office. She hadn't called anyone. She'd kept the receiver in her hand and touched the dial, intending to call her husband, her brother and sister, anyone. Then she'd taken her hand away and walked into the dining room, where she'd sat at the mahogany table that had been a housewarming gift from her parents. She'd let the phone ring as somebody called, then somebody else, and a third person. She felt nauseous and disoriented, as if she was seasick. Through the French doors she could see the back yard, the brilliant living green of the grass. When she and Todd had decided on the house, they'd remarked to each other about the yard, which was well removed from traffic and offered plenty of room for a swing set, a sandbox, a wading pool. A tree house could have been built among the limbs of the celebrated elm. It all rushed in at her, how much she was risking, how selfish she'd been. She saw now—how could she ever have failed to see?—how fragile everything was. She'd made a terrible mistake, and she couldn't offer it as a lapse, a brief failure of flesh. She'd lied. She'd done it again and again. Though she wasn't religious she prayed now, sitting in her empty dining room. Please, let this go unpunished and I'll be good for the rest of my life. She stayed where she was, in a mahogany Queen Anne chair, for almost two hours. She didn't move and after a while she stopped thinking about anything. She couldn't imagine where to go, what to do with herself, and so she did nothing. When Todd came home he found her sitting in the dark. He rushed up to her and said, “Sweetheart, what are you doing?” He brought his smell, his concern, his vocabulary of gestures.

  “Sitting,” she said. “I'm just sitting here.”

  “Why? What is it? What happened?”

  “My mother called today. She and Daddy are splitting up.”

  “What?”

  “Splitting up, separating. He's gone off to a hotel.”

  “Jesus,” Todd said. “What do you know?”

  “I just, I can't.”

  “Darling. Oh, darling, it's a shock, I know.”

  “I. There's too much.”

  “Come on,” he said. “Come in the kitchen with me, I'll make us something to eat, and then I'm putting you to bed. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He made scrambled eggs and bacon for both of them, and after she'd eaten he took her upstairs and drew back the covers on their bed as tenderly as Joel had once done in the guest room. Her face burned with shame. “Get in bed with me,” she said. “Okay? Don't stay up and work, don't read.”

  “Sure,” he said. He undressed and got into bed beside her. His body was exactly that, his body, almost as familiar as her own. She tried not to stare at his penis, the marvelous commonplace of its shape and color.

  “I thought they'd gotten through the worst of it,” she said. “I really thought that if they went this far—”

  “Give them time,” Todd said. “I'll bet old Constantine'll be back home within the week.”

  “Maybe. I'm not so sure.”

  “Trust me. What'd they do without each other?”

  She put her hand on the smooth soft plane of his chest. An emptiness was opening in her, a fear like nothing she could remember. Forgive me, she said silently. I'll never do it again. She kissed Todd, ran her fingers along his ribs. She whispered, close to his ear, “Oh, I love you, I love you so much.”

  “I love you, too, sweetie,” he said.

  She kissed him tenderly on the mouth. He was her only true friend and she'd betrayed him. The kiss held and he worked himself around, got on top of her. She parted her legs and he slid himself in for the first time in—what?—a year? Longer? Here he was, pumping, and here came the old familiar flush, the red shadow. She lay as she always did, clutching the hard muscles of his back, smoothing them out. She put grateful kisses on his cheek and ear. The old warmth filled her, the sweet flickering agitation. She was careful not to do anything unusual, not to practice any of what she'd learned from Joel. She might have asked Todd to thrust more slowly, to give her time to catch up with herself. She might have asked him to touch her, down there, with his tongue. But then he'd know, he'd figure it out. She felt translucent, her faithlessness ticking just under the surface of her skin. Her greed and lasciviousness; her capacity for destruction. She whispered, “Todd, oh, I love you.” He grimaced, sighed, and fell away, his outer arm resting companionably across her breasts. He kissed her and she lay beside him, praying silently. In another three weeks, when she found out she was pregnant—possibly with Todd's baby, more likely with Joel's—she'd take a final vow. She'd be faithful forever. She'd quit her classes, stop thinking about a job. She'd be perfect, unfailing, a miracle of kindness and good works.

  1982 The sight of him nude on the fire escape, singing “Didn't It Rain” as the darkness thinned around his sleek dark body and the hooker upstairs screamed at him to shut the fuck up—the sight of him that way was everything Zoe needed to know about love. She sat on the mattress humming “Dark Angel.” Those two words, ove
r and over, as music leaked into the brightening air and the furious hooker stomped a counter-rhythm on the plaster overhead. “I got a dark angel gonna visit me tonight.” If Zoe had that kind of talent, she'd write the song. Black wings, smooth flanks, the cut and tumble of muscle stitched straight to the bone. No mortal fat. The last of the acid sifted through her blood and she hummed “Dark angel in my window.” He'd said he wanted to sing a hymn for Annie, floating crazy-haired somewhere in the East River, a silent angel of the drowned drifting amid the glitter of fish and lost jewelry. There were other people between him and the water but this music wasn't for them.

  “Hey,” Zoe said, and she watched her voice cut through the fog of the room. She watched it dart to the place where Levon was standing. “Hey.”

  He didn't stop. She watched her voice swim into his ear and stay there. Another part of her was inside him now. He didn't always give back.

  She would have said, “Come here, come back to bed,” but she didn't want to let go of that. She didn't want him to keep it. She rose from the mattress and wrapped the spread around her. Paisleys sparked. The fabric was electric in the cool, damp air. A nimbus gathered, and followed her across the floorboards to the window.

  “Hey,” she said again, climbing out. From above, the hooker's voice rained down. “You fucking maniacs, shut up or I'm calling the police.” She wouldn't call anybody. Zoe was sorry she didn't know this one's name. Floretta had been sweet, and Luz funny and harmed, but since then there'd been three different girls and all were black holes in the world, without generosity or even glee in their own meanness. You couldn't know their names.

  “Levon,” she whispered, one limpid word he could keep because it was his, anyway. He sang on. He was lost in his singing. On the far side of the cemetery, scattered lights burned in tenement windows. Zoe thought the people awake behind those windows might look out and see Levon, perfectly naked, singing a hymn into the first hesitant light. She thought they might feel comforted, or they might feel afraid. Big naked black man singing a song aver the cemetery. Judgment Day, just as you were starting the coffee and checking to see if your socks dried on the radiator overnight.

  “Levon, it's like an ocean out here.” She wasn't sure what she'd meant, but she'd found that if she let her mouth go, it would say things her brain didn't know yet. “It's like standing at the edge of Atlantis,” she heard herself say. And she began to understand herself. New York in its last foggy darkness was like a lost city, cupping underwater caverns of deep black as the sky thinned and lightened overhead. An aqueous silence floated through the old graveyard, and a pilot whale paddled languorously, its flukes studded with barnacles, among the tombstones and the electric lights. Fish swerved, quick and silvery as thoughts.

  “Oh, Levon,” she whispered. “Isn't it strange? Isn't it just so beautiful and, well, strange?”

  She knew he could hear her. He heard everything. His whole life had taught him how to listen. But he never took risks. He was a fisherman who kept everything he caught.

  She stroked the hard plates of his shoulders, walked her fingers slowly down his spine. Levon was wholly visible. Here were his muscles, shifting under the satiny, eggplant-colored skin. Here was the ladder of his spine. The inner workings of his body were implicit under his skin the way most men's nakedness was implicit under their clothes, and she imagined undressing him, peeling the skin away from the wet purple skeins of muscle and reaching in for the lungs and intestines. She imagined taking out his rampant, glistening heart, and holding it—rits obstreperous thump—in her hands. Levon's body was blatant, unashamed, unmysterious. His only secret resided in his brain, where he kept a tight little knot of Levonness, strange griefs and needs that nothing, no comfort or sex, no ceremony, could touch.

  “Levon,” she said, and she was glad he didn't respond. What did she mean to tell him? That she loved him so much she wanted to dismantle him, organ by organ, and hold each part reverently as the sun rose over the tenements. That she wanted to fuck him right there, on the fire escape, to be blotted out and sung to and moved around until she was something else, another shape in the changing world.

  He finished the song in his own time. While she waited, running her open hands over the ropy surface of his back, Zoe knew what it was like to be a sea captain's widow, out on the walk with her husband's ghost who was wailing her the news an hour before the messenger arrived. She knew the shock, the echo, and the windy, hollow satisfaction. Mourning was straightforward, a simple anguish. From now on, your life would be easier. No more wondering if he was safe. No more worrying that his love had started to ravel and fade.

  “Levon,” she said, one more time, just to see the shape his name cut out of the air.

  “Mmm.” His voice was always soft and guarded. Anyone could be listening, taking notes, plotting a future in which Levon counted less.

  “Baby, it's daytime. Better come in, you could get arrested/'

  He nodded. The cords of his shoulders shifted, thin lazy snakes warming in the sun. He stood, considering, as if getting arrested might be a good idea. A purgative, something harsh but redeeming. Then he turned to face her. His erection bumped against her hip and she thought, 'He's been standing out here singing a hymn with a hard-on.' He held her. From upstairs, the hooker screamed for the police.

  Zoe didn't remember going inside. It happened; they were outside and then they were in. They were back on the mattress, fucking, sending moans and small moist suction sounds into the room. This acid wouldn't quit. Zoe felt his cock inside her and she felt the colors it shot through her blood, the hot oranges and yellows, liquid and jangly, like spurts of electrified water. She felt herself with her legs slung over Levon's shoulders, whimpering, and she felt the room, the old furniture draped in sheets and bedspreads, the pictures in their chipped gilt frames. She saw that it was a storage room, made only of waiting. As she fucked she lost track of herself. She floated out. She began to see that she and Levon were fucking in a dead room in a building full of hookers and drug people and ancient, mortified women. Someone in another room boiled an egg. Someone searched in the gray light for a vein. Traffic rumbled up Second Avenue, and a bus driver sighed over the thin pleasures of the night before. The present stretched until it bled over into the past and the future. Shadows of immigrants and sailors and merchants threaded their way among the drowsy living, and there was Levon on the fire escape, with his song and a hard-on, putting out music for the shade of Crazy Annie, who'd decided that the violent ecstasy of the long drop and the shimmering, oil-black water was better than another day of wondering. Here was Levon, fucking with silent, sweaty absorption. Fucking was a tunneling process; he had to dig his way out of jail with a teaspoon. Oh, she loved him. She loved his patience and his disregard, his habit of disappearing before he'd left the room. She loved him and in sopie way she could not quite name she wished him dead. She saw the future, in which Levon would leave her without explanation, with mournful, deliberate reverence, the same way he sang his hymns.

  Then the fuck was over, and the hot colors cooled to blue. Levon sighed, rolled away from her. She could never come on acid; she didn't think about it. Coming would have been too much. It would have blown her up like a firecracker inside a melon. It would have opened her too wide. Her body was cooling and she put her head on Levon's sweaty chest, inhaling his sharp citrus smell. She played with his limp, wet cock. He was different from other men, not just because he was dark. He kept all his hatred, cupped it inside himself as if it was something precious he refused to share with the world.

  “Pretty,” she whispered.

  “Huh?”

  “You're so pretty.”

  He grunted, in boredom or disdain. He kept her words, scraps of ribbon he'd hold forever inside his skull. She held on the way she'd taught herself to, with invisible hands that embraced her insides. You could flip if you let yourself count your losses and your human flaws.

  “You're beautiful,” she said. Just let it go. Just don't w
orry about what gets kept and what's returned. “You have the most fantastic cock I've ever seen on a man.”

  He chuckled, as a parent would over the rampaging enthusiasms of a child. “The Negra is famous for his physical endowment,” Levon said. “Explorers to the dark continent sometimes brought them back as curiosities. It ain't personal. It's a African thing.”

  “I might love you,” she said. “What would happen if that was true?”

  He grunted again, ran the palm of his hand up her thigh. Outside, a dove called. Ants crawled busily over the trees that stood among the old graves, the battered brown hulks of the buildings.

  “Listen,” she said. “Maybe we should sleep a little.”

  “Mmm.”

  She reached into the crate beside the mattress, shook two reds out of a crystal bottle. “Let's just sleep a little,” she said, handing him one.

  “Yeah,” he murmured, swallowing the pill. “Sleep and dream.”

  She swallowed her own pill and waited for the gray lull, the gloved feeling. Levon breathed beside her, eyes closed, though he couldn't be asleep that quickly. She touched him, lightly, with a fingertip, on his forehead, chest, and belly, as if looking for the button. The mechanism that would spring it all open. She wanted what he wouldn't give her. His childhood, his fears. His explanations. He was not unkind but he lived in his own country. She could only learn the rules by breaking them. In Levon's country, compliments were insults and stories were lies. Of all human sounds, only music carried no hidden taint of defeat or domination.