by Amy Hempel
I had a past, and my past contained a marriage and a job and friends. But I had long since dispensed with this past. I had spent the year before moving to the lake at a place where people recover from the bad things that seek them out. For the time I was there, I wrote to this man although, or because, I had met him only once, and because I felt our talk had been not an exchange of words, but of souls.
I read about a famous mystery writer who worked for one week in a department store. One day she saw a woman come in and buy a doll. The mystery writer found out the woman’s name, and took a bus to New Jersey to see where the woman lived. That was all. Years later, she referred to this woman as the love of her life.
It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.
I lived in small rooms with heaps of bleached shells on distressed white tables and antique mantels. His place had the original brick arches between the large open areas of the loft. There were polished wood floors (slate in the kitchen and bath), and a frosted glass–and-steel screen hid the staircase to the upper bedroom. His paintings were hung in the enormous studio on the first floor, the range represented by portraits and landscapes following the early “systems” paintings. There were ordinary workday scenes supported by strict and intricate organization that a critic had commended as “art that conceals art.”
Lying in bed early on: “We had rules,” I reminded him. “I could fuck the wife anytime I wanted. I could fuck the husband if the wife was also present. The wife could, whenever she wanted, fuck either one of us—her choice: together or alone. The husband needed no rules, both we women felt, because, we also seemed to feel, we would have no idea where to start in the drawing up of them.
“They took me up,” I told him. “I was young,” I reminded him. As if he, of all we did, needed reminding!
“Which of you would make the first move?” he asked.
“The first time or any time?” I asked.
“Maybe the wife started it?” I said. “Maybe the first time she made a preemptive strike? Maybe she saw the way her husband was looking at me—I guess she made up her mind to beat him to it? You know, later on she told me that was exactly what she was doing.”
“Tell me what you had on,” he said, “the first time, and every time.”
“The wife said any dress looks good in a heap on the floor by the bed.”
He said he wanted me to tell him about myself and about the woman when the two of us were in bed before the husband came home, how we would not let him join us at first, but let him crouch beside the bed, his eyes at the level of our bodies on the mattress, first at the side of the bed, and then at the foot of the bed. And who had undressed first—had we undressed each other?
“Would you do anything—everything—they wanted?” he asked, although the real question was, Would I do everything with him?
Let him find out!
“It wasn’t always like that,” I said. “Sometimes we just let the cats sleep in the bed.”
“Oh?” he said. “Did they come into it in some way? There was cat hair in the sheets? On the two of you? On the three of you?
“And did you like to be watched?” he prompted. “Did you like it more when she watched you with him, or when he watched you with her?”
“Don’t forget the neighbors,” I said. “The couple who watched at the window where the curtains didn’t close all the way. The man I didn’t mind, but I thought the woman wanted to take my place, and I felt she resented me for it.”
“You had never done anything like this before?” he said.
“I saw no reason not to.”
“It was the great experiment,” he said. “Did you wait until evening? Often you couldn’t wait.”
“That’s true,” I said. “I was supposed to be available.”
“Every day,” he said, “they touched you every day? Even on Sundays—you made yourself available to Saturday night’s predations?”
“All the better,” I said. “The better it was, the better it was.”
“You mean the more, the more of them?” he said.
“Repetition fueled us,” I said.
In the bed where I described the couplings years ago, he would suddenly roll me over so that I was on top. He would tell me to lean over and show him how my hair had made a tent over the face of the husband or of the wife.
The enclave at the lake had begun as a German settlement. The original developer built cabins for his family, and more cabins for their friends. The row of mailboxes at the end of Valkyrie Drive still featured mostly German names.
After an evening in the city, downtown, I would drive myself at dawn up the parkway and back to the lake. Before going to bed for a couple of hours, I would walk the dog through the woods and up the small mountain that is the backdrop for the place. At a point near the top, on the edge of an overlook, are the two cedars the German founder planted to stand for himself and his wife.
There were motion-sensor lights throughout my yard, and the few nights I was there, all night animals set them off. My heart used to race at the thought of intruders, but then I would see the doe nursing a fawn not many feet from a window, or a procession of bucks crossing the front yard to drink from the lake. So I came to look forward to these sudden illuminations.
Replacing lightbulbs, taking out trash, watering plants: exigencies of the tiny life, a life that opened up inside me at night in a downtown loft on an ugly street in a city rebuilding itself.
It started up with us at the place we went for dinner after leaving his friend’s opening at a gallery in Chelsea. I had strained to say something kind, and he had pointed out the flaws in the artist’s logic; he criticized the concept as well as its execution, and was not wrong.
His voice, doing so, was—sophisticated. It was a young man’s voice; it was dignified and persuasive, and made me feel like an accomplice. Under the words, his voice seemed to say, “You and I are looking at this together, and we see the same thing.” When I could keep up with him, that was true.
We walked easily together; I leaned into him, my head almost to his shoulder.
He continued the analysis over dinner, and as we were finishing, he said, “What if one told every truth! Recorded the most evanescent reactions, every triviality, an unimpeded account of lovers’ minute-by-minute feelings about the other person: Why didn’t she order the braised beef the way I did? She raved about the sea bass, wrongly. I set my watch three minutes fast; she set it back.”
Here he took us into the future—he reached across the table to stroke my hair. “And I’d say, ‘What about her hair across the pillow? I had thought it would be finer.’ ”
His stance was not unlike the one I had proposed to him in my letter, that we observe the Wild West practice: We put our cards on the table.
We moved into what he called “the precincts of possibility,” of anything-goes, of nothing undisclosed.
He wanted to hear “cock” and “cunt,” but I was more likely to want to show him what the man and woman did to me all those years ago. He had told me to say we did it twelve times. Did what? What we did, well, wouldn’t that be up to me? Didn’t it have to?
I told him what they did to me the first time, and the second, and the third through the eighth and ninth—some nights I teased him: “That’s it. I can’t remember the rest. Sorry. Only remember nine.”
But he was persistent, encouraged me to continue, to say more, to remember, to get it right. And when I really could not remember what happened the tenth time, I made something up. I made up something I guessed would be what he wanted. For example, he wanted to know when the husband was with both of us at once, whose name did he cry out when he came? He asked for the tenderest time, the most violent time, the most nonchalant time, the classiest time, the first time and the last time, all twelve times.
“And everyone was the better for it?” he said with admiration. “You were each made to feel more yourselves?”
“
Of ourselves,” I said.
I was never more myself than when I was lying in this man’s arms. But was I ever much of myself in them?
“Don’t you ever get jealous?” I asked.
“Of course I do,” he said. “I admit to ineluctable jealousy—comparisons, comparisons, real and imagined. And, as it happens, there exists in me—not pathologically, but all too humanly, I think—a species of delight arising from this knowledge. Darling,” he said, conspiring, “are these conflicting sentiments and the mystery they point to not at the core of our alliance?”
The town whose main street ends at the river draws tourists who come to shop for antiques. The prices aren’t bad, and the town is picturesque and you can walk off the train and be pricing iron garden chairs before you’ve caught your breath. Boaters wave from the river that is, at this point, miles across. But the Jet Skis are annoying, and dogs are not allowed on the restored promenade. I had been there just long enough for the owner of the delicatessen to know how I took my coffee, and to avoid the speed trap on the other side of the bridge.
There was a backup generator on the north side of my house. It kicked on on its own once a week at noon, startling me each time. It ran for a while to give the impression it would be in good working order when it was really needed. An engineer down the road explained it to me; he said that during a snowstorm mine would be the only house with lights and heat. He told me not to use more than two appliances at a time.
“You’ll have all your neighbors coming over to get warm,” he said to me, either believing the observation a comfort to me or a threat.
I filled the dog’s water bowl about half the way full. I set it back on the porch. I could use a larger bowl, but I would rather the dog see me fill it many times in a day, see me think of her needs and move to meet those needs oh so many times each day.
Sleepy from the night before, I watched the kid from the next town mow my lawn in half the time it took me the times I did it. He charged very little. I would see him being careful out back where he would circle the maple tree not to nick the metal grave marker with the German name of a woman and the date of her birth and the date of her death. Ashes, I had guessed, but forgot to ask the owner.
That night in bed in the bed downtown, I said, “I know you don’t know anything about ashes or lakes, but is it legal—can you put someone’s ashes anywhere you want to?”
“There is no lake,” he said, the words slurred against my neck. “There are only the two domains: this bed, and the bed of memory. Get rid of the lake,” he said. “Two people can go anywhere they want to go right here.”
I was never late.
By eight o’clock, he would already have ordered dinner for us. The sushi would be delivered in an hour, and left by the door.
Some nights we did not make it past the entryway before dinner arrived. Some nights he would close the door and then press me against it, or against a wall, and hold me there until we dropped to the polished wood floor together—we would not have said anything to each other. And we would stay there until we heard the brush of the delivery man outside.
When we finished dinner, he would put on music for us, something he had looped to play over and over again, a piece he had chosen or something he knew I liked, something we both liked to hear behind us.
Then he would be inside me again so quickly I was, each time, surprised.
Kissing my eyes, he said, “Did Phillip start like this?”
And that night the husband would be Phillip.
The first time I went to see him at the loft, I found something he didn’t drink in the kitchen. I didn’t like it either, and on subsequent visits I checked to see if the level of juice in the bottle was lower, if the juice-drinker had been to see him. This changed the night I told him about the twelve times. He asked me to come back the next night, and the next. Each time I looked, I saw that the level of juice was the same. That is when the place became a sanctuary for me, and which of us does not need sanctuary all the time?
I tried to remember what I had told him the time before. That Katherine—I was calling the wife “Katherine”—took me home after taking me to lunch at a grimy place in China Basin, a fishermen’s supply shop that sold bait next to the coffee and doughnuts you could take out onto a dock and eat while oil tankers got overhauled.
“Did she want you to undress? Or did she want to undress you herself?” he wanted to know. He was twisting my hair as he spoke. He could not braid it with only one hand, so he twirled it around his fingers and let it spring loose again.
“Show me how she kissed you,” he said.
I kissed him in a way I imagined Katherine might have done.
He said, “When you kiss me like that, my heart is so stolen.”
Back at the apartment, he patted himself down.
“It must have slipped out of my pocket in the theater,” he said, “when I reached over to button your coat.”
I said, “Why don’t you call the theater and ask them to check our row.”
The book was a rare one. He had underlined parts throughout.
He returned to the kitchen to make the call, and—“Oh! Oh, look! I must have taken it out without thinking,” he said of the book there beside the stove.
And when the phone rang, he said, “That must be the theater calling, to tell us the book has been found.”
It was midnight when we removed the clear covers from the containers of densely packed sushi. He could not stand the green plastic fences that separated one kind from another, so I removed them and removed the ginger as well. I mixed soy sauce with the wasabi. I would have eaten from the containers, but he arranged the pieces in a pattern on good china.
We watched the late news while we ate the tuna and salmon. When he had cleared the plates and turned off the television, he asked me to put my black dress back on. He led me to the leather club chair near the bed. He sat down first, and brought me to him so that I faced him. He pushed the black dress up to my waist and pulled me somewhat roughly onto his lap.
“Did Phillip feel left out?” he asked, moving slowly inside me.
I told him that after a couple of weeks of going out with just Katherine, the three of us went to a party. I told him we drank and drank and then went to their house late. “Phillip got out his camera,” I said, “and attached a different lens. He said, ‘Show me what the two of you have learned about each other.’ ”
“Those pictures,” my lover said, gripping my shoulders. “Where are they now? You have to get me those pictures.
“Ask Phillip for those pictures,” he said, out of breath.
When he had me: the word “slown.”
It was a thing between us—slown. One night I heard him say on the phone, “We were stoned, or I was stoned, and she said, ‘You hear what you said?—you just said slown.’ That was nice. It was nice, the way she heard me say it wrong and then went ahead and made it a thing between us—the word slown. ‘Time has slown down.’ It was like this woman was getting just as slown down as I was, even though she never touched the stuff. It was honor, it was allegiance. It had an effect on us—the word.”
I listened to him talk to his friend, and, happy, went into his kitchen. I got silver polish and a rag from under the sink, and contentedly polished a pair of candlesticks.
Cast-iron bookends with embossed baskets of flowers on them—these are a morning’s find on Main Street. The shops sell mirrors with milk-painted frames; I’ve bought several of them for gifts, but not for him. I am not allowed to bring him anything but myself. He has returned gifts to me the times I disobeyed (“We do not quite forgive a giver”), and I gave those things away.
Not lewd, not urbane, not leering or concupiscent, but devotional. That is how I felt about Katherine and Phillip, and about the man I offered them up to. He looked for jolting carnality, for physical imperatives. “Didn’t more rules appear with a certain periodicity?” he wanted to know.
We were awake in the night, in the early morning,
really. I had been lying still, rubbing a finger on the mended spot on the sheet where hydrogen peroxide had made a hole when he rubbed at a spot of blood—not mine. He got out of bed to turn off the air conditioner, and wrapped himself around me when he returned. With no need of a segue from my hurried-off clothes on the floor, I said, “I can’t remember—does the week in Acapulco count as one time?”
“I want each time in Acapulco,” he said, as I knew he would.
I gave him a familiar travelogue just to see how long until he’d interrupt with “Cut to the chase—the beach, the waves, sunset, dinner, you’re back in the house in bed.”
I pushed him off me so that he could come back even closer.
“We chose a room with a skylight above the bed. It was smaller than the other bedrooms in the rented house, but we wanted to see the stars. Phillip would not be joining us for another day or two, so the mood was hen party, sorority house.”
He moved steadily inside me, so wonderfully inside me as I spoke. When he asked me a question, he spoke into my mouth. I had to turn my head and tell him to repeat it in my ear.
He smoothed his hand down my silk camisole and asked me if I needed to be coaxed. “Did you reach for Katherine first?”
“Not then, maybe not ever,” I said. “It was not a lack of desire,” I told him. “I took an active part by setting desire in motion. To be in a condition of readiness is to participate fully,” I said. “As I am now.”
“Show me what she did to make you come that night,” he said.
In showing him, I took him to the other side of himself.
A short time later, he pulled me down to the thick carpet in front of the tall oval mirror. He put a pillow beneath my head, and another under my hips. He said, “When Phillip arrived, did the three of you spend that night in the room with the skylight?”
In fact, I remembered pleading exhaustion that night, and sleeping by myself downstairs. But there was nothing for him in that. I gave him instead a scene from a live act I watched through a one-way mirror in a South-of-Market theater. Phillip had taken me there on a night when prohibitions turned into permissions. Neither of us had told Katherine.