“I know,” he told the dead man. “I know what to do next. You don’t have to tell me.”
“You know . . .”
But that wasn’t the dead man who spoke, who whispered, it was the widow with the dark eyes and the black nightgown, the stuff of smoke and silk, pushed above her hips. His hand passed from there to the curve of her thigh, and it felt like laying his palm upon his mother’s stove, if anything in the world could be both that soft and yet as hot as heated iron. Hot enough to burn the tongue in his mouth until he was as mute as dead men should be.
“Like this . . .”
He knew that her dead husband stood by the bed, an angel in an elegant suit. A Cracow dandy, a rose with splinters of bone for white thorns where his right eye and cheekbone had been. He felt the dead man’s fingers curve around his hand, the way his father’s had when he had first been shown how to bring the cleaver between the compliant ribs. Now he let the dead man cup his palm around the widow’s breast.
I’m not such a fool, he thought. I know all this. I was born knowing.
But he let the dead man show him anyway. Because that was what she wanted.
He knew that as well.
“Kiss her.” The dead man whispered in his ear. “While you hold her. Press tight and don’t be afraid. Be a man . . .”
I’m not afraid. He hadn’t been afraid the first time he had been in her bed—their bed—and he had looked over his shoulder and seen her dead husband with the ruined face. How could anyone lying in bed with a woman ever be afraid? And with her clad only in a nightgown of black smoke and silk . . .
That was what women didn’t know. For all their mysteries and secrets , for even the youngest girls’ knowing smiles—they didn’t know that when men trembled in this place, in the grave of desire, it was not from fear.
He opened his eyes and looked down. Looked down and saw what the dead man above him saw. He saw her with her eyes closed, lips slightly parted, her naked arms reaching . . .
For her husband.
His face burning with shame, he looked over his shoulder to the one who the dark-eyed widow loved, who she would always love.
“Don’t feel bad.” The Cracow dandy’s voice was the kindness of one man to another. “It’s not that she doesn’t care for you. She might even have loved you, or someone like you, if she hadn’t loved me first.”
“I know. I know that,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Here . . .
He no longer knew whose voice it was, that told him what to do. It could have been his own.
Like this . . .
Or hers. He watched his hand, or that of her dead husband, stroke her dark hair upon the pillow. She turned her face toward that touch.
And smiled.
“You see?” said the dead man. “Just like that. just like that. Just like that.”
He closed his own eyes. And kissed her. The tear between his lashes and her cheek burned like fire, if fire were salt.
As he knew would happen—as none of them told him, but he knew anyway—a year passed, from the time a sealed coffin was lain in earth, to the time when he knocked upon her door, his hands smelling of blood from his father’s shop, no matter how much he scrubbed them with soap and vinegar.
A year passed from the Cracow dandy’s death, he knew it had, but he still came and knocked at her door.
The dark-eyed widow opened the door just wide enough that he could see the others inside, the bottles of wine upon the table, and hear their bright laughter. She looked out upon him, standing there in the darkness that came so early in the winter. She smiled with enough sadness to break his heart, then shook her head and silently closed the door. He could still hear the laughter and singing on the other side.
He turned away and saw the cardboard box at the curb, the box of her old clothes, for the trash collectors to pick up and carry away. All the black dresses that she had worn for the last year. The black with which she had mourned her dead husband. A year had passed and she didn’t need them anymore.
He knelt down and pushed his hands through the contents of the box. Until he found, at the bottom, something of silk and smoke. He drew it out and held it against his face, breathing in the scent that was part her and part the perfume of ancient roses that she had used.
He knew. He had always known. A year would pass, and she would forget about both of them, the butcher’s son and the Cracow dandy. She was still young, and a year had passed.
He heard steps running on the sidewalk. They halted, and he looked up and saw one of the youngest girls watching him without smiling, a coil of jump rope in her hand. It got dark so early, this time of year.
The little girl ran past him, toward her home and supper. He let the nightgown slip from his hands, drifting across his knee and a corner of the box like smoke, if smoke could fall.