And still, we make messes at night to have something to do with the day.
Here is what I want, I said, meting out tequila in two glasses. I might have been a child holding a glass statuette — knowing not to drop it, knowing I would to watch it break. You’re not going to like it though, I said. And that’s how the role-play comes about. We curl Anita’s hair with an old iron; it’s darker than Amy’s and her skin darker too. Outside, the whistling black winter is a banshee train caroming through the streets. The loft’s light is bleak against the dark, the room as empty as a stoned mood. Anita sits at the paint-stripped vanity we found on Keswick one afternoon, the two of us out exploring the city in the idle improvisation of early love. We apply makeup, a little to lighten her complexion and return a hint of dewy youth — not that Amy ever wore much. We give her black jeans, a loose sleeveless top, a bra to hold in her tits. She looks, when we’ve finished, like neither Amy nor herself, but maybe a monster’s dream of human beauty, a child’s crayon drawing of lurid glamour.
I don’t know why you’re doing this, she says. There’s nothing in the rocks glass when she sets it down.
I don’t know. It’s exciting to me.
To pretend your girlfriend’s someone else.
Christ — she’s right of course, I am the monster — but Christ, aren’t we past that? I say. Those ridiculous little stories about identity? I’ve got mine, and you’ve got yours … It’s all such nonsense. What’s the point of role-playing anyway?
To play a role, Anita says. Not someone else. When I don’t respond she says, Look, just tell me how this isn’t demeaning, okay? Just walk me through it.
It’s my fucked-upness, isn’t it? My perversion? If it’s demeaning to anyone, it’s demeaning to me.
You are such a fucking sophist, she says and laughs bitterly.
I clear her hair from her face. I’m sorry. Forget it. Forget Amy, I say. Be my high school crush from Bible study, that’s all I wanted. And maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t, but it would be too much to say it is exactly Amy I want when I sit Anita down at the desk with the Bible between us, caressing her as she reads, words from a book that says love does not dishonor others, is not self-seeking, and keeps no record of wrongs. That says so many ridiculous things it is hard to know what is contradiction and what is just violent longing for a world not our own. With my lips at her shoulders and the floral sweat of her hot skin in my nostrils, I say, Let’s study something else. Okay, she says, what? God’s image, I say and laugh. We were made in God’s image, right?
She lets me lead her to the bed and lay her down. She lies there tremulous, rigid, wide-eyed in the role. And how do you enact the fallen moment? Sneak a finger up her pant leg and under the elastic of a sock. Pull it down. One, then the other. Touch her thigh. Feel her flinch. The waist of her jeans, the button at the fly. Undo, unzip. Take the jeans down around her ass so they come inside out. The skin below crimping to gooseflesh. Hairs rising together and flesh cold where her thighs bulge. Watch a tremor pass through her. Circle her and ease the shirt up over her body. Let your hands brush her sides. Her breathing is an audible wind. Pinch the bra clasp, let it go — let the fabric calve from her, nipples alive, tight. Circle each with a finger. Let her shudder … Underpants last. Take them down so slowly they grip and release each tangle of hair.
She breathes in.
And I stop.
I can’t go on.
Something is off.
Or no, that’s not right. Something is gone. But who can say, really, what founders on the dull thingness of a body? Who has ever been able to say? It is not what Anita says later, that I am in love with Amy and stopped when I saw it wasn’t her. That keeps things legible, so that’s where Anita goes. But it isn’t so simple, not when desire turns in on itself, switches back, burrowing like roots into the hollow cavities of what inside us is hardest to fill. May never be filled. May never want to be filled. Or perhaps we make peace with those pockets of wind. Or perhaps we keep costuming strangers in our vain hopes. But either way, right? Either way.
Or let us go deeper for a moment because this is a religious story — that is one way to understand it — and every religious story is a love story, and every love story a story about childhood. For how are we to know if the noise we strike on after is more than the echo of our footfalls? Would it be too fanciful to say we are pearl divers in despoiled harbors? Blind archers among wet trees, forever hunting the phantom quarry of our perverse compulsions? The blackbird sits in the cedar-limbs, the arrows in our ribs. I have been single since she left.
This is not a decision, exactly, but perhaps the repetition of a choice. I paint. I clock in, out. Walk Peter, paint some more. Sometimes I call my mother, who tells me God is keeping her cancer-free. It’s nice he’s come around, I say. She is quiet on the other end — the beauty of inflection, or just after.
Hey, do you ever talk to him about me?
Sometimes, she says.
And what does he say?
He says you’re stubborn.
Ha. You say that too.
We both know you very well.
Okay, it’s not wrong. God is stubborn too. In our battle of wills we at least respect each other. He and I, She and I — whatever. Sometimes it’s a blessing, sometimes a curse, this ability to keep to myself, to brook unhappiness before compromise. I don’t miss Anita. I wish I missed her and I don’t. I miss missing, if anything, the belief in the nonabsurdity of your life that seems to be a precondition for valid longing. I spend hours in the studio, watching time spill through the paint-flecked windows. Peter dozes in the geometries of puddled sunlight. And although I spend morning and evening here, those hours when the day reconstitutes itself most radically, not even this secondhand sense of movement can push forward my stone-bound spirit. I drink wine from a water glass, stop leaving the bottle in the kitchen. This is my hermitage, I think, my chrysalis, my penitence.
One day I decide to take a trip. It is a day quite a while later and it happens to be spring. Rather, it is spring the way it is sometimes spring, without warning and just everywhere, mild air charged with that unmistakable damp estrus. The breeze is fragrant against my skin, the day heavy with the prurient scent of flowering trees. Chalkboards line the sidewalks in front of cafés. People shout to one another across the street, flirting. And I feel something steal over me, a happiness so tepid it might be the smell of cut grass. A spiderweb falling across your face. The sense of someone’s hand just above your spine. I will visit Berlin. I’ve always wanted to and now I will. I ask for the time off work, book a ticket, get a friend to watch Peter. And of all the people, on all the days, who do I run into at the airport, but Amy.
No fucking way.
Jesse.
She smiles, startled.
And then we hug. And then we say the things you do. How crazy is this? How are you? What are you doing here? She’s on a layover, she says, heading home. Nothing serious, I hope. No, no, just a visit, she says. I have an hour. Get a drink? She hesitates, glances at her watch. What the hell. And as we walk to the bar and sit down, it might be that we are stepping out of the river of our lives, out of time itself, to watch it flow on without us from the banks.