Be Mine (15 page)

He said nothing more. There was a knocking on the other end of the line, as if he had dropped the receiver and it had bounced or rolled across the floor.

And then a click. Someone had hung up the phone.

I
STOPPED
by the grocery store on the way to my efficiency, bought a bottle of Merlot and two glasses, two steaks, two potatoes, and a bunch of asparagus that looked so green and robust it was impossible to imagine that it had been picked and bundled in California then shipped across the country in a crate. This seemed like local produce. The stems had about them all the lushness of spring, and the tips were such sharp arrows they seemed dangerous. Weapons disguised as vegetation. I stood for a moment in the produce aisle, drew them to my face like a bouquet, and inhaled.

An old woman passed me then, both pushing and leaning on her grocery cart, which was empty except for a few brown-spotted bananas.

She looked at me, and I looked at her.

The skin on her face was powdery and thin, and I felt sure that if I touched it something white and sparkling would come off on my fingertips.

I'd seen her before, I felt certain—once, in a room at a lab in the basement of the hospital where I'd been waiting for some routine blood work. Cholesterol. Hormone levels. Iron. White blood cells. A count of those things circulating in the blood that could be quantified, interpreted. She'd been there knitting, wearing a gray dress, and the quiet sound of her needles clicking against one another had felt, that afternoon, like a quiet affirmation of time passing. Seconds adding up to something. Eternity being parceled into baby blankets, being turned into winter scarves.

But the old woman didn't seem to recognize me, or to like me, in the produce aisle. Her eyes on me were small and watery, watching skeptically as I inhaled the greenness that had stabbed out of the ground two thousand miles from here, as if I were still trying to get the sun and water and earth out, after it was gone, as if she knew how futile that was.

She looked at me as she passed, pushing those bananas in her cart, as if she had some notion of who I was, what I was up to, and she did not approve.

A
T EXACTLY
eight o'clock, Bram arrived in a bleached white shirt. Outside the door to my efficiency, through the peephole, he looked like the kind of dark and mysterious stranger you might think twice about letting in—but the kind of stranger you would, eventually, let in.

I opened the door.

For a moment we stood awkwardly in the one room. Then, I nodded to the bottle of wine on the counter next to the kitchen sink, the two new glasses I'd rinsed and dried and set next to it, and I said, in a voice that seemed to come from behind me, from some other woman, one I'd never met, "Would you like a glass of wine?"

He smiled and glanced down at his own shoes, as if he were willing himself not to laugh, and then looked back up at me with his eyebrows raised, directly into my eyes, and said, "Sure. But I had something else in mind first."

He reached over, took my hand, drew me closer to him, and brought the hand to his mouth. He put his lips to it first, moving them softly across the knuckles, and then his tongue.

The solicitous warmth of it, and watching him do it, seeing his head bowed over my hand—and my hand, as if it were detached from my body, the focus of this intense concentration, by this gorgeous younger man—made me feel, briefly, as if I might actually swoon. I had to take a step toward him, lean my shoulder against his, to steady myself.

He turned the wrist over then and kissed the thin skin there. Delicately. He looked up at me. I was breathing deeply. He turned back to the wrist, brought it to his mouth, making small circles on it, and then his teeth, lightly, biting at the cool white flesh, the veins and nerves so close to the surface I could feel it shoot through my whole body.

I leaned over and put my face to his neck, moaning as I did it, smelling him, smelling what must have been exhaust fumes on him, machine, and oil, and masculinity.

And then we were on the floor, on the matted gray carpet of the efficiency.

He kissed me deeply, and I kissed back hard, my mouth wide open, my hands on his shoulders.

He pulled back to take his shirt off, and after he tossed it in the direction of the kitchen table, he leaned over with the expression of a serious physician, or a mechanic—an expert about to take a look at some part of me that concerned us both, and began to undo the buttons on my blouse.

The first button, undone, and I began to tremble, and he said, "
Shhh.
Everything's okay, baby. Baby."

And then the second and third, and he opened it and pushed the blouse away from my body, and reached behind my back, unhooked my bra, pushed it up over my breasts.

For a moment he just leaned back on his heels and looked at me, my body spread out under him. I was still trembling. He was breathing steadily, but my breath was ragged.

I felt cold on the floor—an object, an anesthetized patient, or even a corpse, being observed in a laboratory, except that my nipples were stiff, and I couldn't help but arch my back toward him, involuntarily.

I was pushing myself toward his touch, aching toward it, dying for it, and finally gasping and groaning when he did touch me, one hand lightly brushing a nipple, and then the other, and then two fingers on a nipple, squeezing, and then the other, hard enough this time that the shock of it shot straight through me, and I made a loud animal sound I'd never made before, and then he reached with his other hand under my skirt, inside the crotch of my panties, pushing a finger into me, and I knew I was so wet there it shamed me, and then he pressed his palm against my clitoris, rubbing it as he pinched my nipples with his other hand, knowing exactly what he was doing, what it was doing to me, watching me from what seemed an amused but excited distance as I came in shattering waves beneath him on the floor.

Afterward, Bram just sat back and looked at me for a minute, and the silence and his appraisal of me grew so uncomfortable I tried to pull the blouse over my naked breasts.

But he laughed and said, "Oh no you don't," and opened it again, pushed my skirt over my hips all the way and pulled the panties down over my ankles, spreading my legs, and said, "Now I'm going to fuck you, sweetheart."

I
N THE
middle of the night I woke up on the futon to find Bram standing over me. Moonlight shone through the window that faced the alley, and a garage, and, beyond it, the parking lot where I'd parked my car.

He was putting on his boxer shorts, and the shadow he cast over me was cool, blue, long.

Seeing the length of him over me—the dark line of hair from his crotch to his breastbone, the flesh of him made tangible by moonlight—I thought it was the most sensual, earthly thing I'd ever seen.

The pure masculine beauty of it.

The
forbidden
beauty of it.

I was a married woman sleeping on a weeknight with a man many years younger than I was. We had fucked on the floor of the apartment, and then again on the futon, and then taken a shower together that had ended with me on my knees, the hot water shattering across my back, his erection sliding in and out of my mouth until he came in warm and salty pulsing intervals in my throat.

In the dark, his shadow over me and the sight of him in the moonlight, the thrilling terror of it, made me catch my breath, and then he looked down, and saw that I was awake. I thought I saw a flash of sympathy cross his face. He was sorry. He hadn't wanted to scare me. He said, "It's just me, gorgeous."

"You're not leaving, are you?" I asked. I couldn't help the note of longing in my voice.

He said, "I was thinking I should go. So I can change clothes in the morning. At home. Not go into work smelling like pussy."

The crudeness of it made me catch my breath again. It had been high school since I'd heard someone use that word, or any word like it, meaning me. I said, "Oh."

"But now I'm not so sure," he said. He was smiling, the flash of it reflected in the light from the window. "It looks awfully inviting to just get back in that nest and cuddle up with you."

I reached up, and he knelt down into my arms and crawled back under the sheets with me. We woke again together in the morning to the sound of a garbage truck—
beep, beep, beep
— backing up beneath the window.

***

D
RIVING
home that night, between thoughts of Bram, I thought guiltily of my father, picturing him in his chair, in his room—that enormous rose in the Styrofoam cup on his windowsill, and the way it had sunk low over the ledge until it had fallen onto the floor.

In my imagination, this time, there was no one there to pick it up, just a puddle of water and shredded petals on the linoleum at my father's feet, the cold and damp of it soaking into his slippers. Who knew how long it would lie there on the floor before a nurse's aide found it and cleaned up the mess?

I'd go to see him as soon as I could arrange it, I thought.

Maybe, I thought, the Zoloft would help.

I liked the name of it, anyway.
Zoloft.
As if joy could be made into some kind of airship, a ship my father could board, and be lifted,
lofted,
from the despair of age and physical decay into—what?

He'd been a good man, but he'd always been morose, I thought. My friends had always said, "Your father's so easygoing," but they only knew him from a brief and occasional conversation in the driveway, a moment or two passing in the kitchen on a weekend. My father had been anything but easygoing. I could still picture him at the kitchen table on a morning he didn't need to go to work—cigarette dangling at the edge of an ashtray, his fingers drumming dully on the surface of the table, staring at some point ahead of him, on the beige wallpaper. If I didn't clear my throat before walking into the room, he would start, and gasp, and swear.

"Shit, Sherry. Why are you sneaking up behind me?"

I was thinking of this when I saw
her.
If I'd been looking for her, I didn't register it consciously—but then she was everything out the windshield, in the median, that dead doe, looking as if she had fallen from the sky, had landed softly, but that the fall had killed her nonetheless.

The grass around her had begun to grow. Not yet emerald, but a color of green that held the promise of more greenness in it. Her fur had begun to bleach out. Now, she looked a little like a pure, white deer—the kind that might wander out of the forest, in a fairy tale, nuzzling the hand of a virgin.

But, other than that, she was unchanged. She hadn't moved an inch.

Wasn't there supposed to be, I thought, some county service that came out and hauled the roadkill away? And, if not, what other changes would I see in her over the spring as I passed her on the freeway? Coming. Going. How long, I thought, until she'd melt completely back into the earth? Would her shadow last all summer there? The impression of her lingering in the grass? Or would the grass finally grow up around her, fertilized by her, and cover the whole bad memory over?

"Y
OU LOOK
worn out," Jon said from the love seat when I walked in. "Rough night?"

The front and back doors were open. The kitchen window was open, too. From the Henslins' farm, the smell of manure wafted in. But it wasn't a bad smell. It was sweet, and only if someone told you what it was would you have known that the smell was waste, was shit, spread all over their fields.

"I'm tired," I said.

Jon was wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt I'd bought for him during a trip we'd taken with Chad to Mackinac Island. The long expanse of that suspension bridge was stenciled onto the T-shirt, each end of the bridge aborted, as if it connected nothing to nothing.

The summer we'd gone there, Chad was four years old and didn't want to drive across the bridge—the longest of its kind in the world—but we'd taken him anyway, although we had nothing to do on the other side of it but turn around and drive back. We just wanted him to be able to say he'd been across it, and to show him that there was nothing to fear.

It was August, a windy day, and fall seemed to be blustering down from the Upper Peninsula already—a dark purple sky over the bridge, portending rain—and each time a gust of it rocked Jon's sedan, Chad whimpered.

I kept saying, "It's fine, Chad. It's fine"—turning around to smile at him in the backseat. "It's fine. Mommy and Daddy wouldn't take you across a bridge if it wasn't safe."

This seemed to comfort him. He progressed from covering his eyes with his hands to looking fearfully out the window. At one point he was distracted enough from his fear to notice a boat in the water below. "Look," he said—but then the wind blew the car again, and it rocked hard to the left, and Jon said, "Whoa," and Chad began to cry. My hands were wet with sweat. I'd read newspaper stories, plenty of them, about cars being blown off the Mackinac Bridge in high winds. It
wasn't
safe.

I knew that, but Chad didn't.

Maybe, by now, he did.

And, if he's learned that by now—that cars do blow off that bridge—and he remembers what I said (
Mommy and Daddy wouldn't take you across a bridge if it wasn't safe...
) would he think it was amusing, that false comfort, or that his mother had simply been ignorant, deluded, or a liar?

When Jon stepped toward me with his arms open, wearing that T-shirt, I started to cry.
Chad. Bram. The dead doe. My father. Jon.
All the losses and betrayals, and even the love, the dreams, the fantasies—burdens made of memory, burdens made of air, so easily blown off a bridge.

No.
I was, I thought, just tired.

"Oh," Jon said, kissing the top of my head. "Sherry, what's wrong?"

I looked up at him.

Jon. Jon, just as he'd always been Jon, looking down at me. He took a step backward. He brushed a tear off my eyelashes. He said, "Tell me what's wrong," and the expression on his face was so kind, wise, so bright with love that, I knew, if I told him the truth, he would say,
Of course. I know. Didn't you know? I always knew.