it was late, as it usually is in stories like this

Jan 21, 2007 09:08

At night, having nothing else to do, she walked over to his apartment, followed him to his room. She took off her pants before she even made it through the door, and as he laughed at her in her boy briefs, she lied down to hold him in his bed, and held him. She held him, carefully, one arm under his pillow, one arm holding his chest, as if he were a fragile thing, as if otherwise he might explode and she were the one to stop him from it. She got to thinking about this, pondered it, and finally, eventually, she guessed what they had was possibly something precious, and rare. She didn’t know it, not really; but she felt she could at least guess it; guess, she thought, was the least she could do, though it was starting to get to her, this guessing, this having to guess, always. This never knowing, anymore.
(All that hair standing up on his neck: what miracle! And here she was, still guessing. How else to feel, she thought, but guilty.)
I guess it’s really precious and rare what we have, she said. She whispered in his ear; made the corner of her mouth touch the end of his neck right before she grew quiet like the insides of snow. It was something a ghost might do, if a ghost were bored with everything, the way she was.
Yes it is, he said, facing the wall, feeling her lower lip wet on his neck. He was grateful for this, for her lower lip, for her wet lower lip, gracing him by his winter dry neck. It was late at night, and no one had seen much of her the past few days. She was always in that little room of hers, playing songs on a guitar, drawing little stick figures, or writing. He did not even know, really. They didn’t talk about it all that much. There had not been a lot of words lately, even when they got together. Just this kind of wetness and other soft things. He was happy, and left it at that. All these blocks and blocks of people, he thought, walking home with bags of groceries, and not one of them walking home to this softness of her, and this wetness. It made him grateful. (Of course it was possible that he thought this way, often enough, just to stay grateful.)
We’re like those people now, he said. Soon there will be handwritten letters, my god and all those ink stains on our hands, isn’t that exciting, and postcards marked with lipstick, and poetry on napkins. Glasses of water at the diner filled with cubes and cubes of ice as we wait for the waitress to return. Shoes on sale, the light of the toaster on early in the morning, smell of tea, soggy cereal in front of the TV. Oh, he said: what it is to love! And how liberating it feels! Oh, I am light as rain!
He sounded so sure; as if in celebration, he took all his weight and let it sink comfortably into the mattress. She felt alarmed and stopped holding him, turned around instead to face the ceiling, joined her hands on her belly as if in prayer, unsure who to pray to, what to pray for. She wasn’t like him, did not know the arrogant ways in which he could love. This business man like, pre-bargained love of him: it made her feel grumpy and old.
I have to say, she said. I have to say I do not really believe in love anymore.
You don’t, he said, still facing the wall. You don’t believe in love. He turned to look at her, and she felt as if he was pointing fingers at her as he spoke, though he wasn’t.
Not exactly, she said. Not with you, not with anyone before you, or after you; not even now, not with your soft hair in my face, or your breath on me when we sleep, not when it’s snowing, and not when you’re cooking and I am doing the dishes, and not when my mother asks about you, not -
I understand, he said.
What I mean, she said, is that I guess I just do not believe in love anymore. In general, or more specifically. Not between two people. Not between three people or between groups and groups of people. Not within oneself. Not in the redeeming quality of it, in the selflessness of it, in the cleansing of it, in it, itself, in its bare truth. Perhaps it exists, and I am incapable of harboring it. Perhaps I have written too many stories. Perhaps I know too many truths, too many truths to love.
She laughed. It was not particularly the kind of thing one could casually laugh at, but by this point, she’d figured, nothing was ever too casual or not casual. Both laughter and casualty had lost their meaning; they were nothing to her, nothing at all, so she could do with them as she wished. That, she thought, was what was really liberating. Not love.
What does that have to do with anything, he said, and you are a beautiful writer. The word arrangements of yours, oh, the way they hop on the tongue. And my god, the truths that you know, my god, and the ways they break and re-make me.
That’s it, she said. I guess I am a good writer. I guess I could be, so let’s say I was. I guess good writers don’t always equal good people. Think about it. All that evil you play with, all that evil you must know, all that evil you try and mold into something. Like fucking playdoh, right? So I guess it is in me now, or stuck to my fingers.
She held up her hands to the light, and scrunched her nose.
I believe in love, he said. I can’t write stories, I never did, but the letters I have coming on the way for you oh the letters if only I could show them to you but you just wait just wait. And the cake I will bake for your birthday! And the winter boots we will walk in to the grocery store in the snow, once it snows again, to buy eggs and milk and flour, to buy candles and gin and ChapStick for our hurting mouths.
And did you see on TV, she said, the way people were killing each other, and how we’d lost the ability to cry. How they were no more real than a hello or a goodbye. How all images gradually, over the years, became another moment of nothing we sleep to forget.
And how, she said, we turn our heads on the subway when we see someone eating fried chicken with their bare fingers, because it would kill us to know we are so ugly and unbearable.
And, she said, the way our feet hurt from all that working? Why do we work, she said, why do something we do not love, something which does not love us back, not really. It must be all this work, she said, that we do, which makes us so unable to cry. She shifted in her place as if she’d discovered something wonderful.
Tell me how to believe in love? she said. When I can’t love you without these ideals: the boots, the candles, and the scrapbooks filled with photographs of us in winter boots and with candles. What if you take all those out, all that desire for glamour and I am left with something not love for you, just a familiarity, just this friendly recognition. And all I want to do then is hold your face and kiss you on the cheek, so that the rest of your self means nothing to me.
He turned towards her, awkward with her facing upwards, unsure what to be, unsure what to be in bed for her, or anywhere at all. He did not seem scared, and he was not going to go away, but he wished that he could at least be something, if only he could quickly come up with something to be, if only just for her. I don’t even know how to hold you, he said. It was starting to get to him, all this being held, and never holding.
I am not sure how to be held, I guess.
Please, he said, taking some hair out of her face. But I am willing to try, he said.

* * *

It does not mean all that much to me to be loved anymore, she said, because I am too scared of being loved for all the wrong reasons. I've considered a whole list of things and nothing. Nothing that would put my conscience to rest. What motivates you to love me, and furthermore, what motivates you to voice that love? She spoke as though she had drunk a whole bottle of something, or else she was going insane with thirst: To hear her say these things, blurt them so outright, it would surprise one to know she was actually well-hydrated, and not at all dying.
The truth is that he knew she was inconsolable, but had loved her, despite that, from the very beginning.
I’ve loved you from the very beginning, he began, despite this. Despite your inability to be consoled.
Despite this, she asked, or because of it?
And this ball of fire you have become, turning, turning always as in a vacuum, your fire burning at your insides, your fire consuming and then feeding its own heat. And if only I could blow at it, he said.
Despite this, she repeated, or because of it? And all those people with the postcards marked with lipstick, with handwritten letters and ink stained palms - do they love one another despite this or because of it? Despite the fire or because of it?
And how about the ugly people we try so hard to make over, she said, and the overweight people we come up with diets for, and people with smoke on their faces with their houses blown up, and the people with guns in their pockets instead of a bagel, and the wives who can’t cook well, and the men who can’t get it up, and the men who jerk off to images of tortured women, and the new kid in the classroom scared out of his mind. Who will love them? Who will love them before they decide they too have something to offer? And if they don’t, who will love them without it? Who will they love and why will they love the people they eventually do, other than for this acceptance they have been waiting for all along to have appeared at their door step, finally? All that love like gratefulness and not like love? Is that all there is to love - the desire to be absolved of yourself? Or does it ever exist independently?
And the way all those bricks have slowly become piled dust at your ankles, he said. If only I could whisk them all away, if only you would let me.
And when I am clean, she said, when I am spotless and modern, when my windows reflect the light from the ground up once the snow melts, and the surfaces of my kitchen will exist without the crumbs. What then? Still this Love word? Will you not be finished with your task? And where will you go, where after that?
He seemed relaxed at this, and took her hand and kissed it, laughed in her face respectfully, said: I do not love you because you are broken, silly. This Love word is a disguise, you understand. No more truth of the thing than Mother or Buffalo or Sweatshirt. It’s just another image, a picture of the thing, and not the thing itself.
What is your picture, he said. What is your picture for it? What is it, after all, he said, that you hear when I say it?
At this, she started to cry. She started off quiet, but switched to sobbing: She didn’t know her pictures. She could not tell them apart. Her mind: a mess of things, drawers of overflowing images; steak knives, strawberry jam, desk calendars; memories mismatched, the goodness in her having shriveled, all hope having packed and left, her insides carved like a jack-o-lantern, eaten at and spat out, so that she could not pinpoint and say: This is Laughter. This is Pain. This is Regret. This is Love. They were one in the same, all of them, and they were nothing.
He was taller than her, so pulled himself down, pulled until his mouth was level with her collarbone, pressed his lower lip upon it, so that the upper lip did not know what to do but stayed mid-air, frozen, like the coyote from the cartoon, and how he looks at what waits below him right before he falls. Shh, he said: now I asked the question, now I wait. It’s late at night, but we’ve got all the time in the world. So we will wait.
Wait is what we do next, he said.

* * *

He held her hand. There was something hopeless about her; it made his jaws ache. He looked down, saw her legs in her boy briefs, and he smiled, that lack of hope slowly leaving him. Those pale legs, and the toes of her: Where was all this doubt emanating from? If only he could know, and hold gauze at it, stop it from bleeding.
She didn’t know, so she bit her lips. She guessed she had once known this four letter combination but that at some point it had escaped her, though it was hard to figure out why, or when. All this having to guess, and never knowing anymore. She breathed some air into her bangs. All that TV, like cancer. All those editorials she read; the argumentative intellects. The holiday candy that stuck to your teeth. The Halloween costumes of all the wrong things, and all this wrong cheering, everywhere.
It was like trying to win in a heated round of scrabble, knowing it to be a four letter thing, just a four letter thing, but soon realizing you were out of half the letters so that you were stuck with, instead, an ambiguous OV , while the player across from you was overflowing with L's, and E's.
And what was it to him? And why were they miles apart from one another, in their knowledge of this four letter combination, though they had grown up together with it? And heard it in the same commercials? And watched it subjected to abuse in the same wrong songs? How had they grown so far apart from it, if they’d found it in similar playgrounds, at similar dinner tables; if they’d fed it to likewise ducks at lakes?
It was late. It was the kind of hour these kinds of people - with their postcards tucked in, their letters closed away in drawers - should be asleep, holding one another. She couldn’t look at him, though she knew his eyes were on her. Blue of daylight, green of pond: His eyes were see through, and playful, like a limerick. What was hardest for her to understand was this, that it took him no strength at all to be this person. That he could be this as soon as he woke up, and he didn’t even have to wash his face for it.
It was late. It was the kind of hour those other kinds of people - the children with smoke on their faces, the overweight father out of newspapers to read, the abandoned son who couldn’t cook, the stewardess with the imperfect teeth - would be sleeping, alone, face to wall, wall to back, palms joined in prayer, unsure who to pray to, what to say. He held her hand, and pressed his mouth upon her collarbone again. There was only one second of nothing, just nothing, and then, she held it back, held it in hers, held on to it like the claw of an eagle on a rock. His mouth on her collarbone, her hand fearfully in his, and they were silent for a very long time.
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