But for now there is the movie proper, with its better lighting, and, offered up by this, the revelation of her body.
There is a thin luster of sweat on her skin, and her near-nakedness is explained. The old boiler heater’s gusts have forced me myself, even with my coat shrugged off, to sweat through an under-shirt and sweatshirt, and for a moment, watching the suite of human motion that is laid bare by the sheer fact of her skin, of her flesh, pale and taut, it seems we are sweating together, connected in our agitation.
She is short, with chin-length blond hair pulled austerely back away from her face. Her shoulders are sturdy and square, but her torso tapers down away from them shyly, into an impossibly delicate waist. There are the legs all out of proportion; the long, slick thighs; the abbreviated curves of the calves. Her silhouette seems to belong in a ballet. I am transfixed by a large freckle hovering catty-corner to her bellybutton, which itself sits strangely high on her stomach, as if to accentuate the faintest glance of tiny, downy blond hairs on the stretch of skin held taut between her hips.
There is also, of course, her underwear, the way the briefs seem to almost float on her up there on the stage, as she turns this way and that. They are not loose enough to be unsexual and not form-fitting enough to be a thrill, exactly. She is not quite vulnerable in this state of undress, but yet there she is, mid-performance, reenacting perfectly, without ever turning to look, the screen behind her, and there will be nothing more intimate in our life together than her body in this stretch of minutes, than the discovery of the way she unconsciously stands with one foot turned outward like she might plié at any moment, just for me.
And who could ask for more chance, for life to prove itself more the curiosity that one in one’s youth always secretly hoped it will be?
Arbitrary a point of experience it might be, in the scheme of things, but here persists that night, reaching out for me again. It’s nostalgia that holds me at such a delicate remove from that feeling, that night in the ruined theater. It is this age of nostalgia — maybe the only true age — which casts the sense that the episode is not yet completed, that I may, in my present or future, be somehow reclaimed.
How does one tell oneself such a story, if not to pretend a beginning? It is inescapable: her body, organizing principle.
It is at least true that what jetsam of memory left unruined by what came after is ensouled by her body, particularly this pale bough of a body in her youth.
“Well, don’t you just hate people who come into movies late?” she said, when the reel was done. “You’re not off to a very good start.”
•
That night she took me to her apartment. It was in a nice complex, built up just on the edge of campus in that bright, blocky way that often makes student apartment buildings indistinguishable from prisons.
As we took the first few steps into her apartment, I looked around. The entire apartment was empty — not a stick of furniture, nor decoration. When I turned my face to Charlie’s I remember the look on her face. It seemed such a vulnerable, honest expression — an ingenuous shame.
It turned out she spent all her money on rent, knowing she’d be able to afford nothing else, just to claim a space in this upscale complex. It turned out, as we sat on the carpeted floor Indian-style, like little kids, that she spent half the night in the old auditorium to minimize her own heating bill, which she could barely make. In the fridge there was nothing but a magnum of vodka and a bag of thawing corn, the former of which she retrieved.
Later, when we finally stood next to her surprisingly ornate bed (“moving day dumpster dive”) I moved to kiss her. With a graceful motion, she locked my face into a tight hug, pressed side by side to hers, her grasp strong. I blushed.
“I’m nervous, OK?” she said.
“You’re nervous?” I said, her soft, anxious breath in my ear.
To what end these sentimentalisms? To what fire go these uncorrupted bits of memory? I suppose Haim was there, even then, mixed up in all of it, our little homunculus observer, energies still coiled in a quiet, patient ovum inside of her, years away from his birth. He will not even live long enough, it occurs to me now, to posses it as his own story, privately recalled.
But that night I looked down at Charlie under me, her leg bent slightly to the side, us both moving, her eyes glued downwards to where we intersected, mouth and brow formed into (mysterious to me, even now) surprise, and I remember the way the air seemed to crackle with a kind of ambient electric static as I looked down at her, as I watched her body as it moved and writhed and squirmed, unbearably sensate, alive.
•
Let me be clear about what kind of world we now find ourselves in: Haim’s stretch marks have opened. Haim’s stretch marks have opened, meaning that the long-term use of the steroid meant to control the swelling around the glioma in his brain has caused his skin to thin out from the inside, forming open wounds all over his stomach, back, and thighs.
The steroid is also what causes him to always be hungry, and to have gained tremendous amounts of weight (thus the stretch marks, thus the open wounds which, because of his chemotherapy, refuse even the basic bodily dignity of closing).
I can’t say what this small detail of his medical treatment has done to him. I can’t tell you what it is the first time you don’t recognize your own son.
Before his diagnosis Haim was a small child, skinny but also short for a seven-year-old. We have a picture of him getting ready to go to Hebrew school one Sunday where he’s wearing only a new polo shirt and underwear, and it almost looks like an optical illusion, the way the shoulders of the shirt fit him perfectly but the collar, even buttoned to the top, hangs off his neck and the rest of the material billows down over his thighs. For boys that age, their size balances out their novel, baffling personalities (their features starting to resolve and solidify into what you think, for the first time, they might look like when they’re men). This reins in the slightly terrifying suspicion that they’re really adults-in-miniature, that you’ve failed at protecting them, at preserving that unknowing age when their love for you is still focused, can still be seen, you are convinced, in everything they say or do.
And so at first the sickness is an insult because of his size, because it seems impossible, no matter what the pediatric oncologists say, that a brain so small and malleable could harbor anything of real magnitude or strength, anything that could survive the vast powers that twenty-first-century medicine might bring to bear on it, but also simply because it seems unclear, exactly, what a human being so physically minute might possibly do to defend himself. It’s only later, in this second year of treatment, when the steroids begin to unmake Haim’s body, that I begin to understand the real insult, the way in which he would be taken from me even as he lived.