by Amy Benson
He stared out over his hands on the steering wheel. A full year of drywalling had cut itself into his knuckles and the cast of his mouth. The woods were absolutely black, and their quiet was on the edge of a scream. “I’m so sorry about last summer,” he said.
“Sorry for what? There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
“You know. I’m sorry for acting the way I did. For not coming to see you.”
“Oh, that’s no big deal. We’re all free to do what we want to do. It didn’t matter one way or the other.” I could tell I was hurting him. He wasn’t sure whether to believe my nonchalance or not. And I wasn’t sure I wanted him to. He might give up. He might let me go and not make me feel things. Part of me wanted to be driving home to the cabin alone, safe, triumphant. I wonder what the different parts of him wanted.
He pressed on, braver for his fear: “It’s just that you were so skinny and you wouldn’t eat around me and . . . I didn’t know what to do.”
For a moment I was stunned outside of myself. I saw a flash of a scene from the previous summer: We were at the beach under full sunlight but I was covered in goose bumps, quiet, sad, unable to hear him for the din of suspicion and the constant tally of calories in my head. I never imagined that these things showed. Could a boy really have cared about my health, my mind? Then I said, with more honesty and insight (and frankly, more words) than I had thought myself capable of, “But we were friends. We were always good friends. And then, I was sick and needed you. And you ran away. What kind of friend is that?”
“You’re right. I screwed up.” We were both crying now. “Can I have another chance? Can we try again?” Didn’t he know that I should apologize, too? For always making him be braver and truer?
We were kissing and crying and I felt that with this talk we had just grown up together even though it lasted all of two minutes and we were still children. And with this gesture—our hands in each other’s hair, foreheads pressed together—we were finally home, balanced precariously against each other. But we had already lost our moment. Even though we had one more summer together, I was already protecting myself, knowing I would soon be elsewhere. And he? He was already, protecting himself, knowing he would let me go.
When Have We Not Been Weak, Summer 1999
The glass of ice water he has given me is sweating between my knees. I am sitting next to him on his couch. My friend sits in a chair nearby. Just beyond his head, I can see the outline of a baby swing.
“I guess men,” he says, “just like sex a lot.”
My face is frozen in a smile. The sparkling-eyed boy, who never would have even alluded to the word sex in front of me ten years ago, is making sweeping statements about it. He must find comfort in the easy cliché: men want sex; women want . . . what? China sets, babies, good recipes? Behind my frozen grin, I think, I could tell you stories, sparkling-eyed boy, that would cross your eyes. When, I wonder, have men ever liked sex more than women? But I play along because I am there and his wife is not and I want to know how I can be better than she is. Is it palpable? A sort of I-wouldn’t-have-done-you-that-way tilt to my head? A nod that implies, You would have gotten everything with me, baby—Madonna, whore, Donna Reed, Joan of Arc, Marilyn Monroe, Leona Helmsley, JonBenet Ramsey, Yoko Ono, Tonya Harding, Golda Meir, Barbie, Martina Navratilova, Bessie Smith? Which one does he want from me tonight?
Later, I think he winks at me. We are talking about anything to avoid saying something that really matters or admitting that we have nothing to say or realizing that it is long past the point when my friend and I should have left. He is telling us that after I left him he took up competitive archery. To give a sense of the scope, he raises a circled finger and thumb to his eye and then he turns it toward me and—I think I see this—winks. He slowly lowers one fringed lid over a sparkling eye and continues to look at me, never missing a beat in his story. His other hand is resting on a pillow between us cross-stitched with the command “Bless This House.” When he gets up to go to the bathroom, I turn the pillow face-down. I picture the bedroom upstairs, the sparkling-eyed boy and his wife rolled to opposite sides of a wide bed. The mere touch of the blankets makes him ache, and he trembles silently, adrift in the darkness.
Still later, not long before we must finally leave (it is, after all, close to two-thirty in the morning), we stand in the kitchen as he refills our water glasses. Only, when he hands the glass to me, his fingers touch mine longer, I think, than they need to. My head swims, and again I am frozen, able neither to cover his fingers with mine nor pull my hand away.
I admit, I am elated. I came to his house knowing nothing, not having had an unguarded moment with him for ten years; and I leave his house knowing that, whatever else has happened in those ten years, the sparkling-eyed boy has not completely forgotten me. He seems to be sending me signals. What signals? That he is sad, that he is lonely in his marriage, that he misses me?
It occurs to me several days later in a dizzying moment that I could be misreading the signal. What if he’s not sad? What if they don’t sleep at the edges of their bed but in the middle, in an indistinguishable lump? What if—really—what if he’s thought of me only once, twice, over the years and that the whole night—the talk about sex, the wink, the press of his fingers—happened only because I was there and his wife was not, and because I let him?
Does he hold me lightly in his mind—as a whim, a joke, an ember to blow on and then mock its ready blush? Did he rest easily that night and say truthfully on the phone to his wife the next morning that “nothing much” was happening? Did he fail to commit the nuances of my face, the moments of possibility in my glance to memory, while I, months later, am writing this all down?
To him I am certainly not the name he can’t bear to hear on anyone else’s lips. I am not a fever that gets under his skin and makes him restless and sweaty in the clutch of winter. I am not, as I had secretly hoped, the love of his life. Why else would he have winked at me, baby pictures on the coffee table, a sweating glass between my knees?
An Aside About Sex
Whatever you’re thinking, whatever evidence to the contrary, this book is not about sex.
I remember fighting on the phone when I was maybe nine or ten with the girl who lived across the street from us in Detroit, the girl my sister and I vied for throughout elementary school. I don’t remember what I’d done, but she yelled at me, said I was schizophrenic and I needed help. Though she was probably just throwing out a word she’d heard somewhere, I was shocked at what I thought was her clairvoyance. I was so changeable, I was a danger to myself, to others. She had seen through me. I thought I knew what she meant—that I was a different person to every person. That I tried to carefully control my image, make myself what I thought someone needed me to be in the moment. I have been, all of my life, a private person, secretive even, consulting a baroque manual to see what’s safe to say or do. This one might like me if she knows this snippet but not that one; he will smirk at this gesture but grin at that. Though I have said too much already, I want you to see me as unassailable. So let me get close, because I want to tell you and I want you to believe that this is not about sex, none of it. There are things at stake hère for which sex is a poor substitute, and I am whispering this in your ear.
When do we have sex? When we’re happy, sad? When we can turn our bedrooms into a stage? When our hormones lead us to it almost entirely of their own accord? When we feel that the noises of our bodies, the texture of our arches and thrusts, are too precious to escape the notice of another? When we are bored and can’t think of a good reason to say no? When we are trying to prove to ourselves that we are, in fact, beautiful, powerful, alive; or, conversely, bruised, careless, and expendable? When we find someone with whom, for whatever reason, we are willing to take the greatest risk: the risk of realizing mid-act that he or she is not it. You may love this person so that you daily weep with adoration; still, he or she will never be the real object of sex. The real object is a nonobject. No matter
the position we take, we will never possess what we desire. We will never even embody it, because what we desire is something beyond our skins, beyond the skins of our partners. And since we take this risk, we must also be ready to hate them—in fact, we must already hate them just a little bit so that we might someday discard them—saying, You, you have failed to make me happy, failed to make me rise above myself for more than a moment at a time—and then forget our own failures, our inability to make our moans give noise to every feeling for which sex is a substitute.
And just as we are disappointed, so must we disappoint. We should be sleepless with the fear of laying our fingers—however briefly, slightly—on the tender spot, the intersection of every fiber that tells people who they want to be. We should, none of us, have this power. As our bodies know nothing but decay, so our desires are malignant—they cannot hover, feather-light, around such sacred spots; we sink heavily, we press down our thumbs in their opposable brutality.
I’m suggesting that, evolutionarily speaking, sex for humans has become (beyond its peripheral reproductive function), roughly, only the response to some mixture of sadness, joy, love, anger, impatience, ambition, and melancholia bubbling over. Can an action, an embodiment, truly be a metaphor? Certainly, think of a salute, a wink, a hand slamming a door. But this particular action falls prey to the same foibles and failings as any tuft of words: imprecision, opacity, double entendre. In fact, sex is not even a metaphor—it is merely a simile. It is endlessly “like” something, “as if” something else. For me, almost three years completely single, heading into my thirties, teaching in a small town, sex with anyone, really, would be both too much and not enough. It doesn’t seem worth the enormous risks. I would like to say this is what it’s like to be single, but I think this is just what it’s like to be when every gesture risks untold losses. My biggest fear is choosing wrongly and having regrets from which I cannot recover. Everything is very, very heavy when you’re alone and ponderous and wary and you don’t know anymore whom to please or how to do it.
Of course, I fear that I may have gone off—turned rancid like a bottle of olive oil. Imagine, if you will, the genes of a hyena perishing because the act of sex itself could not adequately embody the desire behind it, and the partner of the sex act could not be expected to be responsible for such inspiration. Imagine the hyena paralyzed, abstinent, plagued by visions of passionate kisses, unable to follow up on her momentary impulses. She pours her excess energies into activities for which she will not be remembered—oil paintings of sunsets, long walks through the desiccated grasses. I will, perhaps, think differently about sex someday. It is only a matter of time before I trade in one idealization for another. For can one actually have sex and not want to believe in it, however briefly? But for now, I will have friends and not lovers. I will idealize the almost of love, passion, envy, respect, the longings more exquisite for their inertia.
I am never far from the sparkling-eyed boy when speaking of these things. I am well aware that, whatever else he may be, the sparkling-eyed boy is still eighteen and the lover I will not let myself have. I conjure his dear, distant self preserved in the glow of an arrested summer sun that has the power neither to warm nor irritate me, his self that I cannot disappoint and with whom I cannot be disappointed, the perfect elsewhere on which I might dwell.
I can hardly believe what I’ve said already, not knowing how to please you. Yet I can tell you this because it is so innocent. Who is harmed? To what could anyone object? I was wrong about the greatest risk. It is not disillusionment or regret. The greatest risk is being known, fully, by anyone else. Which will not happen.
Ethics of Nonfiction
Don’t be my friend. Don’t tell me what you might fear, what you really think about your sister, how you got those bruises. Don’t tell me anything. Don’t even come by my house and laugh with your mouth open. I will count your fillings and know what you find funny. People who have very little to say for themselves are careless with the lives of others. I am a spiller of secrets—they plash easily out the sides of my mouth.
Writers have no ethics, if by ethics you mean respect for the lives and truths of others, and if by respect you mean leaving them alone, and if by leaving them alone you mean not ever seeing them as material. Words are a currency and the lives of others an entire economy. How much to tell? How shall it be told? What you know of someone else’s life has one value when kept to yourself and a different value when told. One power when you shut the door behind you, lean in close to my ear, when we go to the movies together, laugh behind cinder-block buildings, send notes to each other from our own pens in our own hands. When I watch your face change like clouds moving over water. We feel so close, these intersections of our lives like a secret conduit. We actually believe we might feel the same way about something.
And then there is the power of turning your sigh into a metaphor, our car trip into a narrative with a significant ending. The power of turning you out of the inner folds of my life and into dialogue.
That time when we were kids and your father yelled at you in front of me and you didn’t guard your face, which crumpled, as we would never want our faces to crumple, into the folds of an old man who knows for sure it won’t get any better. I saw that. It was mine. And you knew I saw it, so it was ours. And now it is not.
We all want to be loved, but some of us are willing to gut our lives of secrets, their moist insides stiffening and cracking in the sun, then look, like a dog, for approval. Some of us are willing never to live a moment again until we’ve inked it on the page. Some of us don’t know how else to live. I don’t know how else to live. So don’t be my friend.
Part IV
Our Lives—with a Lead and a Hook and a Close
Dearest Boy, (Take 2)
Smoke and water, the burning of old wood. I’ve kept this night to myself so far. It’s as if just because the sky was smeared with a red-gold paste, I remember that scene more clearly than most events of my youth. A barn was on fire. Do you remember? Were you there? It was just a half mile from my cabin, on a hill overlooking the bay. I have told stories that made you the mute and muddy hero of that night, pumping water from the volunteer fire truck long after hope for the barn. I can see you, happy because you had something important to do, stricken light washing across your body. But I have lied in worse ways, I suppose. When is a story a lie? When it forgets to leave something human and difficult at its core.
I had never seen anything burn uncontained before, and at that moment I felt time slide sideways, as if I were allowed to feel other, older moments within this moment combusting in front of me. Every time I’ve described this night before, I’ve had to invent something more dramatic to try to convey the experience: efforts to save the barn, love among the firemen, a trapped cow—god help me. It was just a leaning barn used for winter hay, but the scene didn’t need embellishing. The truth is, the sight of that barn on fire thrilled me through every last neuron: the tremendous spitting roar, the orange light rippling across our faces, making us look like fanatics. The air around our circled bodies was thick with smoke and the smell of fear. Something missing had returned for just a moment—the threat of death.
I like to remember that night as if you were there, as if you understood me. But, honestly, I don’t remember seeing you. I don’t even remember how old I was or how I happened to be there to see it burning.
I must have looked around me, though. The faces in the small crowd must be my own memory and not a movie scene. They were beatific, orange, raised to the highest tongue of flame, as if it were a sign of the beginning of the end. Their backs were turned black with night. It was as if our lives in time-lapse photography were playing at high speed in front of us, as if our own skins were rippling with heat, as if the sun had actually set into the field and was reducing itself to ashes. In our pulse points we felt the tap of our meltable hearts. There is nothing more thrilling than looking at your own demise and finding it beautiful. Weren’t you there? Wa
sn’t it a gorgeous night?
Epistolary Evidence, Summer 1999
A few summers ago, the same night our fingers touched in the sweat around a glass of ice water, the letters slid into the conversation—another weighty lump between us—much as they had slid into his home again after many years. My best friend, my chaperone as it were, was on the porch smoking her last cigarette when the sparkling-eyed boy said casually: “A few days ago my dad cleaned out his basement and dropped a box of my things over here when I wasn’t home. And apparently there were some old letters from girls in there. Some old letters from you. And, well, my wife got pretty upset.”
“Letters?” I say, listening hard now to my breath in my own ears, as if I’m in deep space or under water and just breathing is a triumph.
“Yeah, letters from you. Well, she read them and, well, I was in for it when I got home.”
“Letters? From me? Are you sure?”
“Yes. Old letters. From you.”
“It’s just . . . I don’t remember writing any letters . . . except one . .. you know . . . a few years ago. I don’t remember any letters.” I can feel the pulse in my eardrum as if a tap on the inner chamber of a stranger.
“Well, do you remember going out? You know, we did go out for a while.”
“Yes. I remember. Of course.”
But I don’t remember letters. Real words on pages, maybe dingy envelopes, misspelled words. The truth about the girl who wrote them, maybe about the boy who kept them. The part of me writing about the remnants of the sparkling-eyed boy and my own dumb, young self has been struck a walloping blow. No matter what, I think, we want a self that seems knowable at least to us, defensible. In moments like this, my self is a glass dropped I didn’t know I was carrying—startled and broken all at once; it is impossible to tell how the pieces should fit together or even if they were mine in the first place or just stray bits swept in. I viciously need to know what a younger me might have written to a younger him, and when and why. I want to start breathing again and demand that he place the letters in my palm; I want, essentially, to say, Tell me about me, make me whole again. I need to not know that the kind of truth memory offers turns us irreparably into liars and cheats and strangers to others or ourselves.
