by Karen Brown
Nan thinks Junior will kiss her, but he does not, so she kisses him instead. Her mouth blooms under his. She presses herself against him, bones, skin, fabric. Her hands slip down to undo his pants. The places on her body wait for his hands to find them. Then, he takes her shoulders and pushes her back. Nan hears herself make a sharp little noise of protest.
Junior gazes at her. His eyes are pools deeper and darker than that afternoon in the hazy sunlight. “I don’t want anything from you,” he says matter-of-factly.
And it is true. She discovers him, small and soft as a baby’s hand. The air stills, flattened by their defeated breath. Around them the old hulls ease themselves into the dirt. The elm leaves shiver. The car lighter pops out, and Junior raises its glowing end to his cigarette. Nan sees his eyes, absent of trickery. His silence settles around them, patient, and absolving. There is nothing left but to drive back to her father’s house, warily, up and down the narrow roads, past the tall corn crowded in the fields like spectators and the shadows of barns that have yet to burn. It is their deaths, she thinks, that make them alive. There is the silver lighter flicking open again, a smell of butane. A hand on a stick shift, the knuckles’ ridge. The smooth seams of workpants, the stubborn zippered fly of old jeans. She sees narrow hipbones under her own hands, the way her hair falls to cover his face. There are no lights and the stars are out, the night air on bare limbs, or worn sheets and the hum of motel air-conditioning. Nan is the only repository of these memories. She drives and imagines that with lungs full of seawater, at the moment of the gun’s report, engulfed in heat, on the last exhale, in a synapse spark she occurred to them: her skin, her long arms encircling them, her body surrendered, abject, something they never could forget.
galatea
I married William in upstate New York before he turned out to be the Collegetown Creeper. I took his last name and became Margaret Mary Bell. I was named after my father’s cousin, a wayward nun, who as a novice with the Benedictine Sisters of Regina Laudis took off with three other sisters for a mission in California and was never heard from again. I often imagined them driving in a sky-blue sedan with the windows down and the bright sun on the hood. The air on their faces is cool and smells of wildflowers blooming in the highway median. It catches in their wimples, invades the seams, and soothes their scalps. Their habits flap. They have the radio on, and the Searchers sing “Love Potion Number Nine,” and the sisters laugh. They are young women, wedded to God. Their mouths open and drink in the sun and the wind. Under the black fabric their bodies surge in secret, betraying their vows. Sometimes, I wanted to be pinioned in that faith, in the rules of their love. I felt my heart drawn out in wild longing with the words devotion, ecstasy, rapture, and betrothal.
I was going to graduate school then, and writing, and I met William Bell one day while my sister was visiting, and we went to a park playground by Cayuga Lake. The lake was dark and cold, and the wind gusted off it in an unfriendly way, rattling the bare maple branches, clanking the chains of the mostly empty swings. The playground was the old-fashioned kind, with wooden seesaws and one of those spinning platforms with metal handles, and the few kids there were playing on that, all of them running in the worn circle of dirt, making it spin, feebly, and then jumping on. My sister and I didn’t have children ourselves, but we remembered how fun it was when we were small, and so we told them to climb on and we both grabbed one of the metal bars, and the kids held on with their mittens, and we ran and pushed with all our force. Some of the kids were too small, and the spinning made them afraid, and one even flew off. It was a sickening sight, the way he was flung into the dirt. My sister and I looked at each other in horror, and a few of the other mothers knelt down by the boy, who turned out to be William Bell’s nephew, and I almost cried I was so embarrassed. Then William came over and grabbed the boy by the arm and righted him, quickly, as if nothing was wrong.
“God, don’t hate me,” I said.
William had one of those smooth-cheeked faces that flush in cold weather. He brushed the dirt from the boy’s pants knees and wiped his tear-stained face with his bare hand, and the whole time he kept glancing up at me, reassuring me no, really, not a big deal. Meanwhile the little boy whimpered, and I wondered if he’d bumped his head or sustained some injury of which William remained oblivious.
“Is he okay?” I asked. And sure enough his pants had torn, and his little knee was skinned and raw and bloody.
“Oh, shit,” William said. “My sister will kill me.”
The other mothers had silently reclaimed their children, and none of us really knew how to tend to the boy, so William had to take him home that way and suffer his sister’s anger. He told me about it that night when he called me, how his sister’s eyes panicked, and she grabbed the boy away from him so quickly he felt like a criminal.
“You should have told her it was my fault,” I said. I sat on my bed, pulled out from the couch. It had begun to snow. In the streetlight, I could see the snow whitening the branches of the big elm outside my window. I had written my phone number on a ski tag I tore from my sister’s parka that afternoon. I was so happy he had called. I kept remembering his eyes looking at me in the park and the way his cheeks reddened from the cold. My sister sat watching TV a few feet away from me, shushing me every so often so she could hear. We drank hot chocolate spiked with Kahlua and ate candy corn I bought in a moment of nostalgia on Halloween. I told William about my Women and Grief course, how we listened to tapes of keening women from Ireland and Greece.
“I can barely stand it,” I said.
“Is it sad?” he asked me. “Is it awful?”
I tried to explain how it was so awful I wanted to laugh, and how hard it was not to, did he think I was crazy? He told me no, of course not. “You’re interesting,” he said. He lived with his sister and his nephew, and was in between jobs because he’d been kicked out of the university’s College of Engineering. He was an inventor, he said, who could not abide by someone else’s schedule. He called every day that week, and our talking became whispered intimations, everything taking on some imagined double meaning. He said my eyes were the color of moss on the rocks at the bottom of a shallow stream, and asked if he could come over to my apartment, and I remembered he had called me interesting, so I said yes.
He came on a Friday night. I watched for him out of my window, through the branches of the elm. My apartment was only one large room upstairs in a house on Seneca Street. Downstairs lived a poet named Angela who was a student, too. She was very tall and soft-spoken, one of those people you sit with late at night and tell everything to. I could see the light from her window, the way it shone out onto the snow. I often imagined what it would have been like to live in the entire house alone, to move freely through all the rooms, to traverse the stairs and wander into a dining room and a kitchen at the back of the house. Now, someone living a separate life occupied these spaces—Angela, and Geoff and his dog Suzie downstairs, and Professor Harrow upstairs with me. Our lives invaded each other’s in unwanted, unacknowledged ways. The floors were oak and creaky, and I listened to Professor Harrow’s insomniac footsteps back and forth when I couldn’t sleep. I had a fireplace in my apartment. Angela had one downstairs in hers. We were not allowed to use them, but we lit large pillar candles in them, which gave the illusion of the warmth that we desired.
The cold here was bitter. Outside the city the wind spilled across sweeping, open spaces dotted with abandoned farm machinery, and old houses buckling in on themselves. You wouldn’t think they were habitable, but once in a while there would be a tacked-up sheet in the doorway, or plastic nailed over the windows, and the pale spiral of smoke from a chimney. William Bell is not from anywhere else. He was born here, in Tompkins County, and lived here all his life. At one time his father sold and repaired lawn mowers in a shop behind their house, and before that he was an attorney. They had an enclosed front porch with an air hockey game, and a gnome statuary on the front lawn that William, as a child, bel
ieved came alive at night. Before she died his mother grew apples and sold them from a small roadside stand, McCoun and Winesap and Cortland. I imagined, from these aspects of his life, that I knew everything about him. When he pulled up to the curb I found myself rushing down the stairwell to meet him at the door, tugging him by the arm in from the cold. It was still snowing, the light, fluttery, lake effect snow that went on for days. “Come here, you,” I said. He smiled, slowly, unsure what to make of me. His cheeks held their usual flush. He wore a wide-brimmed beaver-skin hat. We stood on the old worn Persian rug in what once was the vestibule. The walls were papered in brown, with tiny pink roses. The woodwork was brown, too, mahogany shining in the weak, yellow light. There was a coatrack and an umbrella stand and a small, rickety antique table. The whole downstairs smelled of Angela’s incense.
He looked around, somewhat sheepishly, and removed his hat with one hand, grabbing it at the crown. “I like this place,” he said, nodding.
“Your hat is different,” I told him.
He looked at it in his hand. “Well,” he said. “It was my father’s hat.”
When he glanced up at me his face was sad. Once, I thought, women met their lovers here and pressed by decorum demurely took their hats and coats. I wondered if those women had ever thought, like I did, that sex might add some sweet dimension of loss and sorrow conquered for a moment. I didn’t know this person I had become. I had always assumed I would demand things of boys and men, bargain with my body, holding out until they proved themselves in some way. But that night, I didn’t wait to kiss him. I wanted to ease that sadness about his mouth with mine. His lips clung and trembled, kissing me back. Upstairs in my apartment, by the wavering fireplace candlelight, I undressed for him. All year, except in July and August when the summer heat rose to make a sweltering pocket, my apartment was cold. William slid his hands up and down my body and felt the raised bumps on my skin. “I can’t warm you up,” he said. So we climbed into my bed under the quilt and the blanket. That night the palms of his hands skimmed the surface of me, and he talked, his voice a soft hum that I had grown used to on the phone. I didn’t know what he wanted with me. When I touched him he took my hands away, sweetly, like a correcting parent. Then he fell asleep.
My bed was lumpy with springs, and I had a certain angle in which I slept. But with William taking up the space, and my body burning and bright from his fingertips, I could not. I imagined I was Sister Margaret Mary, who at my age entered the abbey. I’d always pictured her alone in her chaste bed, consumed with desire for something ineffable and bodiless, but lying there I knew you could not separate the two—body and desire. I watched the shadows of the elm on my white plaster wall. I listened to the silence of the snow. The branches, sheathed in ice, clicked together like delicate bones. I listened for Professor Harrow’s slippered footfalls, their shuffle across his oak flooring, back and forth: sometimes, a deliberate, thoughtful pacing, and other times, a slow, anguished dragging. I rarely saw him in our upstairs hall. When I did, I must have worn an expression of sympathy, because he avoided me, and hurried down the stairs as if he knew I knew and was ashamed of his wakefulness. The times we met, his face was white and startled. His hair was damp, combed back. He wore a camel overcoat with soiled elbows and smelled of the cigarettes I’d seen him smoke furtively, like a teenager, at his cracked window.
On the first night William slept with me, Professor Harrow was quiet. I envied him. I tried to breathe in and out, regularly, to feign sleep. I propped my head in my hands and looked at William Bell’s face. Were we still strangers? I wondered. Or had something been forged about which we would never speak? I wouldn’t know just then how he felt. His sleeping, slack expression revealed nothing, and I felt a small stone of fear. How easily I could be abandoned. At least, in sleep, I would not have to wonder what I wanted. When I did sleep, it was near morning. I awoke to find William Bell watching me in the gray light. We were like sentries who had traded places.
I looked at him looking at me. He seemed sad again, defeated.
“You could never love me,” he said, somberly.
His cheeks were flushed again. His breath came out in a white cloud, and the candles in the fireplace had burned down to flat saucers of wax. He sat upright with his bare chest exposed, and my grandmother’s crocheted afghan swaddling his waist, multicolored and garish.
“Well,” I said. I didn’t know how to finish. I could not admit that I was thinking about his body below the covers. “You look cold.”
He stared at me, his chest pale against the afghan. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care about anything right now.”
He looked away. I heard him breathe deeply. But he didn’t make a move to get up and leave. “You don’t have to stay,” I said. I rolled away from him to the metal edge of the bed. I thought of Professor Harrow waking, what his routine might be on a Saturday morning—toast, coffee in a china cup. I imagined him with buttery crumbs on his fingers, listening through the walls. William Bell sighed again and heaved himself out of bed. He was tall, and I heard his body unfold. I listened to him find his clothes, to his soft sighs retrieving them, and the sound of the fabric slipping over his arms and legs. Finally, he put on his shoes, big boots that clomped, one after the other on the wood floor. I turned around and he was standing over the bed.
“Tell me not to go,” he said.
“Tell me you want to stay,” I told him.
“Ask me to kiss you,” he said.
“Do you want to kiss me?” I was confused. I saw it was useless to talk.
“I want to kiss you more than anyone I have ever met,” he said, but he made no move toward the bed. His eyes were troubled and dark. He turned then and went out the door. I heard him thump down the stairs. I didn’t get up and lock the door behind him. I lay there for a long time wondering whether or not to believe him. Finally, I slept again. When I awoke it must have been early afternoon. Weak sunlight shone across the end of the bed. And William Bell was there, sitting in the armchair I had found in an antique store, its worn upholstered arms curving over wood inlaid with the carved heads of ducks. He was watching television without the sound. He ate from a carton I recognized from the Korean place in Collegetown. I thought I should be a little afraid of him, coming into my apartment without asking, but I was not.
I moved on the bed, and he glanced back at me. He smiled, wide and happy. I hadn’t seen him smile like that before. There were many things I hadn’t seen about him, things I couldn’t know. None of that mattered then. My body was warm, my limbs slid across the soft sheets. He brought the food over to the bed and sat on the end.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. I rose up onto my knees and put my arms around his shoulders. His face changed, quickly, like clouds moving over the sun and the shadows lengthening on a lawn. He set the food down on the floor. I smelled its spices on his mouth. I heard his breathing catch, felt his body’s sudden shift, its tension, like something coiled and tight. His hands were cold. It felt wonderful, his hands on me, his mouth moving, his groans. I thought: he came into my room while I slept, and I grew breathless and greedy for him.
We stayed in bed all that day. I heard Professor Harrow come up the stairs and slip his key into his lock. William Bell held me in his hands. I felt my body transform, heighten and strain and sigh. What else would make me happier? The light moved in its pale way across the foot of my bed, across the worn oak floor. It settled in the lap of the antique chair. We let the room grow dim and darken and match the outside. When the streetlight came on, we watched the snow falling in it.
“Does it ever stop snowing here?” I asked him. His hand was heavy, pressed to my bare stomach.
“It’s winter,” he said, as if this was an answer.
My stomach rumbled, and he said we needed to feed me, and so he pulled me up and my nakedness was light and airy in the dark. I stood on the foldout bed. He slid off the end and stood in front of me.
“Look at you,” he said. “G
alatea.”
I posed, rigid, like marble.
William Bell reached up and put his hands on my hips. I remembered this moment for a long time after—the press of his thumbs, his cradling of me. He leaned in and kissed my hipbones, my thighs. I didn’t need food. I wanted to be ravished. This was, for the most part, what became of us: his devotion, my submission. That night we dressed and went out into the snowy street. The houses lined up in their rows, their roofs thick and white, the lampposts and power lines and tree limbs all leaden with snow. The snow falling was eerie and oddly warm. He held my hand, and I let him. Every so often he stopped and pulled me in to kiss. A passing car’s headlights would light us up.
“Isn’t this being in love?” he said.
I told him I didn’t know.
We stood on the sidewalk, under someone’s porch light. Inside the house we saw people watching television, just their feet in socks propped up on a coffee table. They still had their jack-o’-lanterns on the porch. Nearly buried, you could just make out the carved grimaces. I noticed, all around, things caught unprepared by snow—a rake propped on a fence, a child’s bicycle tossed down on the grass. On the porch a pair of socks, pulled off and abandoned, frozen stiff in its contortions.
