“The one before him?”
“Why do I feel close to you? I feel close to you, heart to heart.”
“I know.”
“Redemption is their word,” she said.
He pulled her to him in the dark, or perhaps she pulled him to her. It was better in the dark, that neither one of them would ever know who had first gone to the other. At first he couldn’t quite dispel from his mind the idea that she could see him in the dark even though he couldn’t see her, because he didn’t have his glasses and he couldn’t get over it, the idea that without his glasses he was either blind or invisible. But now that she pulled him to her he knew he wasn’t invisible.
In the black altar room the air was thick with wine. He clutched her dress; its tones of earth and ash and blood, not unlike the color of her skin, ran between his fingers. The feeling of its cotton, not unlike the touch of her body, ran through his hands. His head pounded with wine and blood. For a moment he thought of the glasses, he worried they would be smashed underneath, and then the idea of it — his smashed glasses — went straight to his head like wine and blood. When he kissed her he emptied wine and blood and the freedom of smashed glasses into her mouth.
The air was thick with possession. The sound of the wine bottle against the wall was thick with defiance; and then the crash of the altar in the corner, though it sounded very far away, much farther away than the corner, though it sounded like the distant collapse of another altar in another country, was thick with submission. In the dark he felt her breasts fall from her dress. They fell so heavily it shocked him. He wanted to pull the string on the light above and assure himself it was she. But he knew that even with the light on there would be no assurance because he couldn’t have seen her anyway, his eyes spinning like wild blue suns in the sudden light, all their vision leaked into the black of his hair. He caught her beneath him. As he’d been stunned by the heavy fall of her breasts, he was now struck by the speed of her nakedness: possession was everywhere. It opened itself to him, bared its wrists.
When he took her in the dark of the altar’s ruins they both knew it was more than she’d ever given and more than anyone had ever taken, and that neither was enough. She was touched that Etcher would make love to her so tenderly but she felt no choice except to insist on ferocity: possession was everywhere, and now she demanded it. She’d be restrained by him or, if he couldn’t restrain her, she’d devour him. In their struggle either her best nature, the part of her that spent her whole life coveting freedom, would triumph or her true nature, the part of her that spent her whole life choosing slavery, would abide; and in this moment in the dark she would accept either the triumph or the abiding, whichever it might be, as the truth of who she was, until once again her other nature stirred inside her and she wrestled with its relentless nagging. “You,” she said, because she couldn’t remember his name, “oh you,” she said, waiting for him to claim her. But he wouldn’t do that. The part of him that would enslave her was overwhelmed by the part of him that would free her, if it was up to him to free her, which of course it was not: it had always been up to her to free herself. So he felt her grip him inside, he felt her contractions swirl around his invasion of her; and he would have thought, in the dark, that his hair had gone white, the wine and blood and freedom of smashed glasses rushing to the only moment of him that was real, lashing the uterine passage to that place inside her where nothing is possessed and nothing possesses.
The tears rolled down her face. He felt them in her hair. No light penetrated the black of the altar room, instead the black rushed from her. It poured from the middle of her, more blackness than she’d ever believed was hers, the truth of her rushing out even as the blackness of the altar room became wan with the tears that rolled down her face. It was only at that moment she realized her wrists were tangled in the string of the light above; and now at the moment she slipped from its bondage, in the jerk of her wrists, the room’s light flashed on and off long enough to leave a small rip in her memory through which she couldn’t bear to look, even as her lover saw everything. And there was that suspension again, not unlike the one they had felt when the all-clear siren had sounded. Everything was still, the dark was clear of wine and possession and choices; neither of them could be certain she had said she loved him or he had said he loved her, but all that mattered was that he was sure he had said it and heard it, and she was sure she had said it and heard it, and both were sure it was true. And in the dark there was no telling whether it was wine or tears or blood or the torrent of blackness that passed between them, but in the slick of their love they slipped into each other; and only much later did he hear a little voice on the other side of the altar-room door. “Mommy,” it said, and started to open the door, and then another voice, a man’s voice, said, “Don’t open that, Polly.”
In the dark Sally pulled on her dress. It was intact, untattered. Etcher found his glasses; they were intact, unbroken. But everything else was in pieces. “Sally,” he whispered. “Yes,” she whispered back. Beyond the door a child and the child’s father waited. At that moment Etcher couldn’t be sure he would ever have her again; he grabbed her to him, by her hair. He would have crushed her into him.
She opened the door and the little girl stood looking up at her.
It was night, but the curtains had been drawn again, as when Etcher first arrived. Some of the beads and trinkets of the jewelry on the table had been strewn on the floor, where the child had played with them. Gann Hurley was sitting on the couch reading a handbill. He didn’t even look up; to have looked up at his wife and the other man would have been a concession that whatever passed between them mattered to him in the least, that he could be affected by anything that was beyond his control. At the front door Sally stood holding her daughter; for a moment the little girl looked at Etcher and then turned away. Etcher gazed back at Sally in confusion. “Will you be all right?” he finally said.
“Yes.”
Will I see you again? he wanted to ask. But he was afraid of ruining everything.
He left the circle, and after waiting a long time caught a bus on the road back into the city proper. Whatever I do now, he said to himself on the bus, staring out the window at the volcano in the distance, I cannot do for her. I cannot assume she’ll be mine. I must act on the assumption she’ll never be mine, that it will never be less impossible than it all seems at this moment. I must act on the assumption that I’ll never see her again, except for a passing moment in the street or the Market, and that love has been left hanging in the black space of a small room, and that in the light, with a husband and a child, she’ll feel very different tomorrow, if she doesn’t already. Therefore, whatever I do now ultimately has nothing to do with her. It has to do with the life I’ve been living. It has to do with the man I’ve been and who I am now, without her, and what my life is now without her.
He went home and left his wife.
27
IT HAD NEVER BEEN in his temperament to understand power. In all of his passivity he had never felt the oppression of other people’s power over him, which was why he resigned himself so easily to it; his resignation was born not from his fear of others, after all, but himself. Nor was it in his temperament to revel in power, which was why he had never understood why women like Synthia needed him to exert power over them. He had thrilled to his own power only in the throes of sex, when he didn’t have the presence of mind to know that pleasure wouldn’t last forever, and in the flush of freedom, when he was too innocent to know he wasn’t free.