Her habit was as casual as was possible, and had been so since the beginning. It was why she could almost believe it was not a habit, and never would be. Like someone else who loved eating chocolate a little too much and from time to time decided chocolate didn’t exist and never had, blotting it from her visceral memory with a thoroughness that was itself a serial compulsion. She would go for many months-once even a year and a half, in the period following her swift marriage to Ames and their first attempts to have a child-and not feel the smallest prickle for that cool, sweet burning, that glimmering river, if anything marveling at the fullness of her distance from it, her perfect liberty. And yet what would spur a change was not some unhappy memory or incident or a physical need but rather a sudden, panicked thought that this free state could not possibly go on. In this sense her lapses were predicated upon what could only be seen as an evaporation of faith. Her thoughts would branch and multiply, and it was inevitable then that certain remembrances would take over, or maybe it would be her feelings of shame and guilt before Ames. He had little idea of the woman he had married, and treated her only with adoring, deep respect for her abilities and her mind; he had encouraged her plans to attend medical school, even after she became a mother, and they’d talked about her restarting his pediatric practice as he continued with his ministries.
He couldn’t know how she had passed her adolescence after she returned from China, how in her second year of college she befriended a fellow volunteer named Jim while working at a mission soup kitchen. He was a middle-aged man, in his early forties. She had pursued him, always initiating their conversations and even asking him to get a coffee at the diner around the corner. He worked as the night watchman at a textile factory, and after her aunt went to sleep she crept out of their bungalow, holding her shoes in one hand and her purse in the other, trying not to breathe, and ran down the hill to catch the night bus that would take her toward downtown. Jim was gentle and soft-spoken and obviously bighearted, but there was something ruined about him and it was this that she always saw in his face when he opened the alley door, his expression pleased but with the shattered eyes of a man who could see perhaps only the drenching sadness in beauty. He never talked about his life or anything further removed than a few weeks in the past, and they would sit together in a tiny office, drinking the root beer he’d brought for them. Jim had a youthful face with a white scar that ran from the corner of his left eye to his ear, the top of which was gone. They talked about books and sang songs and eventually he apologized for being the worst kind of depraved, awful man who would have a schoolgirl as a drinking friend, and it was then that she would lightly kiss him, on the mouth, to quell his conscience. He kissed her back with his dry hard lips and she had to hold him tight, for otherwise he’d push away, and then they wrapped their arms around each other while lying down on the wood floor on which he had spread a thick bolt of surplus velvet curtain, worthless because of the malformed pattern of its brocade. He’d lined the walls, too, with other, mismatched, defectively manufactured curtains and bedspreads, and the effect beneath the dim electric light was of a carnival funhouse owner’s idea of a bordello. But to Sylvie it was simply Jim’s attempt to make her feel comfortable. He suffered from a severely bad back and the floor gave him some relief from the constant pain, but it was the sips he took from a dark brown bottle that finally seemed to transport him. His voice grew husky and the suddenly huge discs of his eyes took on the same shade of the bottle glass and he clung to her tightly, telling her again how ashamed he felt that she should be wasting time with such a sorry man. Of course he knew something had to be wrong with her, too, by virtue of her presence.
“You’re not sorry at all,” she told him, as always. “Please don’t say that.”
“Then what am I? Why do you keep coming here? You could be going out with any boy in your school.”
“I’m not interested in any of them,” she said, which was true. The boys were nice enough and certainly interested in her but she found them all too keen and bristling, like frantically spawning fish. But she didn’t answer Jim, either, for although she would have liked to say that she was here because he was thoroughly kind (which he was, without any effort, to her and to everyone he met), it was in fact because he was also frail, if not somehow wrecked, that she was drawn to him. He was overtly slung with the weight of time, but to her he wasn’t a pitiable sight, rather as if he had been stitched with one of the marred but still beautiful bolts, this forlorn cape, and could no longer take it off.
What he sipped along with his root beer was a tincture of opium, which he had been given many years earlier for dysentery while hospitalized in France at the end of the Great War. He always had some now and although she kept asking him if she could try it he refused, saying it was dangerous medicine, but one night when he left her for five minutes to make his rounds she dug in his coat pocket and took a small swallow, and then another. The thick, sweetly fragrant syrup instantly coated her entire insides, the sensation the exact opposite, it would turn out, of the precipitous detachment she would later suffer, hotly fusing her to herself in a manner that made her feel whole again, even if she were no more substantial than ether and light. Years later, married to Ames Tanner, she would seek out that feeling again, though it would come in the form of a vial and needle, procured in the service alley behind the city hospital by a person met, again, through a mission, though this one a client.
When Jim returned he could tell something was different and immediately smelled the tincture on her breath but before he could get cross she kissed him again. He balked at first but then melted into her as he had not allowed himself previously, the sudden force of his arms momentarily alarming her but then just as swiftly firing her desire to make love to him. She was not saving herself for any reason or person-for what propriety, what realm, would she be doing so?-and as such there was nothing stopping her from being with him now, in this oddly, lovingly enrobed little room. She tugged at his belt to unbuckle it but he twisted away and when she clutched at it again he held on to her hands.
“Please turn off the light,” he said.
She rose and flicked it off and the room went completely black. She didn’t know if it was the perfect dark or his medicine but she floated back to him on a silken wing and when they began kissing again she felt a wonderful new ache flooding her limbs, filling her torso. She slipped off her underpants. Then he was busy kissing her and caressing her hair and she found his belt again and undid his trousers. Her long skirt had ridden up and he lay atop her but there was nothing but his bare thighs against hers and she kept waiting for the pushing that didn’t come. She reached down to touch him and when she found him he was hardly there, not tiny but empty, more skin than blood, and beneath it there was almost nothing there at all, just a node seamed by a hardened, smooth line of a scar in the flesh.