Hair Side, Flesh Side

by Helen Marshall

  IX.

  A bag of bagels lays discarded on the bench by the door.

  Clarissa is crying and she can’t remember why.

  X.

  The crowd moves around her like the muscles of a giant lung breathing in and out. She needs to find him, needs to find Paul. She thought she had seen him moving this way, into the mouth of the subway, down the stairs, through the turnstile.

  Grief is a crazed thing inside her.

  There is a shock of blond hair in front of her. Now it is gone. Where is he? Where is he?

  It wasn’t me, Paul. It wasn’t me. There is another woman living inside my chest and she loves him, and I didn’t want him to hurt so much. I’m sorry.

  Someone who looks like Paul is buying a newspaper from the vendor. No. Paul wouldn’t buy a newspaper, not now. He’d be angry, hurt.

  It didn’t mean anything. He was just someone using this body. It wasn’t me.

  There, by the edge. She elbows her way through the people: the mothers with their strollers, the ones with yoga mats and shopping bags. She is pushing past, beyond the yellow safety line, searching for him.

  I’m just using this body all up until it’s gone and I don’t want you to leave me.

  People are impatient now. There is a light, displaced air, the incipient roaring of the train riding the tracks.

  I am here. I don’t want to die today. Paul, where are you? Hold me, Paul. I’m scared. I’m so scared.

  Someone calls out behind her. “Amanda!”

  She turns. Richard is wading his way through the crowd, but her eyes never make it to him. They are transfixed with the single eye of the train speeding toward her. She stands there, frozen, feeling the air rush past here, and the noise like a kind of applause in her chest. She cannot move. She cannot look at him.

  Paul, she thinks. I don’t want to die.

  And something within her grabs hold—the sweet girl from the mirror, petite nose, strong chin. Hair like lace. That little-girl voice hidden behind the ribcage, the beating heart, now swells up inside her. Synapses fire. Her muscles are not her own.

  I will do this, the other one says.

  She teeters on the edge of the track.

  A last sliver of light, the knife-edge of consciousness. Paul, she thinks desperately. I am afraid.

  [ thigh ]

  DEAD WHITE MEN

  Celia was that girl, every bar has one, the strange girl, the beautiful girl, the untouchably perfect girl—she was short, yes, and thin enough, blonde, though not super-blonde; she had the mascara, the glitzy eye shadow, the black, shiny dress and the high heels—very high, at least four inches, so that she seemed to stab the ground as she walked on it. But there was something different about the way she watched the crowd, always on her own, never with friends, never seeming to talk to anyone for more than a moment or two. And so Ernie found himself watching too.

  He watched her. And he watched her eyes scanning the crowd, bored, disinterested, as if she didn’t really want to be there at all, as if she had better things to do. And he watched as, one by one, despite the boredom and disinterest, despite the something differentness about her, she never once seemed to turn down the men who came to her.

  Some of the others—that vast confederacy of perpetually and happily single men who go to nightclubs to sleep with women—noticed Ernie looking. “It’s not worth it, mate, it isn’t worth it,” one of them said, sliding a pint of Carling over to him as the night was beginning to wind down. On Mondays the pickings tended to be slim, and even the most ambitious of the lot tended to settle down for a pint, a loose camaraderie falling over them that would burn off like fog by Wednesday or Thursday when the competition became fierce. When Ernie asked why, every one of them went silent, still as the grave, and got a look in his eyes that said, don’t ask anymore, just let it drop.

  But Ernie didn’t let it drop—couldn’t let it drop. He didn’t even know himself why except there was that thing in him, alert to that vital knowledge that Celia was, somehow, shockingly and breathtakingly different, and that look, the look the others had in their eyes, he wanted to know what it was, what it meant; he wanted to have it too. And so that Friday, the Friday after when all the others were still playing it safe, still keeping a little ring around Celia and her oddness, Ernie made his approach. He tried to play it cool. He tried to touch her arm with that special touch that said he was a man, that he wanted her, and that he could please her like no one had ever pleased her before—all men have, at some point in their lives, attempted this touch or some Platonic shadow of it. Ernie was surprisingly good at it, perhaps only two or three removes from the Male Touch that existed in the Universe of Ideals. But his hand was clammy from holding the lager, and so even though he wiped his hand, successively, on his pants before the approach, she still nearly jumped when his finger grazed her arm.

  And then she looked at him. It was not a casual look, that; it was not a look that glided over the body, a copped feel of a glance. This was an invasive, probing stare that assessed every damp spot on his clothing, every misplaced hair, every personality defect from infant bedwetting to unpaid parking tickets, the tone, subject, setting and quality of every wet dream he had ever had; all of these counted up, processed, assessed behind eyelashes stiletto-sharp with mascara. This—this was the Platonic ideal of all Female Gazes.

  Ernie felt himself begin to sweat. He tried to speak. “Hello,” he wanted to say, but already he was forgetting how the words fit together, how the h might glide into the e-l-l-o. But then she leaned in close, her mouth next to his ear, voice soft and low and sexily British, the way he imagined, dreamed, it might be: “Meet here in two hours”—those long, stretched vowels and gently curving r’s.

  Ernie was so surprised that the seduction had taken place, that he had been the seducer, he barely knew what to say in return. But that was a good thing, because by the time he recovered, she had already disappeared, and he was left holding a scrap of paper in his lager-sodden hand.

  And that was how it began.

  ST. GILES-IN-THE-FIELDS, LONDON

  ANDREW MARVELL

  1621-1678

  Ernie forced himself to coolly suck down the last of his pint of Carling, to smile easily at the girl at the bar, tip generously, walk slowly outside into the cool London air where a heavy fog still hung close to the ground. He would play it cool. He would play it calm. He would not rush, he would not hurry—no, he knew better, he was wise in the ways of women and a savant in the accompanying mathematics of lateness arrival politics.

  But.

  The address was not easy to find.

  His difficulty came not because it was out of the way. On the contrary, Ernie found himself in the West End in an area he knew well, just east of the Tottenham Court station. His difficulty came because it was a place entirely unexpected, and so he spent a solid twenty minutes tracing and retracing his steps, his eyes unwilling to find the required address. So when he finally did spot Celia, he was out of breath and sporting a brand new set of damp patches around the underarms. She on the other hand was perfectly cool, as if she had been leaning against the wall of an old church for all of eternity, cigarette clutched between two fingers, quiet puffs, and her uneager eyes glancing up and down. She had changed out of the shiny black thing she had been wearing earlier, and now she was dressed in a comfortable black turtleneck and loose pants.

  “Hi,” he said, and the word came out smoothly for which he was desperately glad.

  “Hi,” she said.

  She blew out a stream of smoke through her nostrils. Should he kiss her? It was hard to tell. He took a step forward but before he could close the gap to kissing distance, she stubbed out the cigarette and motioned for him to follow. The puddles beneath his arms spread like creeping mildew.

  “Bit of a maze, isn’t it?” he asked.

  A stupid thing to say. But she was busy now with a set of lockpicks at the side door. When she didn’t a
nswer, he puffed at his hands to keep them warm. They stood together like that in the stone arch of the doorway, Ernie unsure what to do with himself. She was shorter without the heels, her presence smaller, but somehow more intimidating. There was a quiet “click” and then, for the first time, she smiled, and she looked at Ernie, and Ernie looked at her, and she led him in.

  Ernie hadn’t been in a church—not a real one, not something more than the high school gymnasium—since his confirmation at St. Christopher’s in grade eight. His parents hadn’t been much for religion, were barely talking at that point and hardly seemed invested in the sacraments they had ostensibly subscribed to. This was a proper church, though, and it felt strange for Ernie to be there, surrounded by the bare, white outlines of saints and prophets and, somewhere up above, the watching eyes of a Jesus affixed, grimly, to the cross. The air was different; Ernie’s sense of space distorted and he found himself not wanting to be in this place. But even then, even as he recognized the growing sense of unease, he could feel Celia keeping hold of him, her hand warm in his—despite how cold it at had been outside, it was very warm—and his penis twitched in a half-stutter of desire and began to press against the front of his trousers.

  “You’re very . . . beautiful,” he said, his tongue almost-but-not-quite tripping. A moment of panic. Breathe, he told himself. He could hear the sound of their shoes, had forgotten what shoes sounded like against a proper stone floor: tap, tap, tap, they went. “I’ve seen you before, you know, at the club. I come in most nights. After work. And sometimes I see you there.” She led him past the aisles and benches. She seemed to know her way. And then the tapping stopped, and she tugged at his hand very gently. “I never thought we’d, well, you would, you know—” God, he was an idiot. “I wanted to talk to you before. I think you’re, oh, right—”

  It took him by surprise, the sudden feel of her skin against his, the light press of her lips and the flick of her tongue against his teeth. He didn’t know if he should say something else, but he’d tried, hadn’t he? Maybe that kind of girl—Celia—wasn’t chatty, maybe she just didn’t want to talk, that was all right, wasn’t it? And then her mouth was gone from his, and she whispered to him, “Can you be very quiet?”

  Ernie knew what to do; he had done this dozens of times before and he managed to find his way around the precise combination of breasts and thighs and arms and legs that was Celia even in the dark; and then they were both of them on the cold flagstones of the church, her nipples as sharp and cold as bullets, and she was guiding him into her so that when he entered, his desire having quickly ratcheted up past his uncertainty, it was like slipping into a warm pool. The ground was hard underneath them, and he was sure it must be uncomfortable.

  “Do you want me to . . . ?” he asked, but he didn’t know what to say.

  And Celia said, “No, it’s fine. I’m fine right here,” and then she moaned.

  And she did something with her hips and so did he. He thrust away, and he felt his knees grazing against the cold flagstones, he got sight of a name and a date underneath her, but, really, it wasn’t the time for sightseeing, it wasn’t the time to be thinking about anything except . . .

  That’s when it happened.

  That’s when he felt something shuddering through him and it wasn’t quite normal, not quite an orgasm, it felt like something was pushing against him, something cold and silent and it wasn’t part of him, it was stealing into him and pushing him out and then—pop!—

  Ernie thought he might be dead. He thought maybe, maybe, he had had a heart attack like his Old Man had, forty-seven, strong as an ox and healthy as a man could be, but cursed with a body that nevertheless had up and stopped one day. But he hadn’t felt any pain, had he? Surely there would be pain? And darkness, he thought, or light, very bright light—but it was still the general dimness of the church, lacking either the black of eternal damnation or the brilliance of Heaven.

  And Ernie looked around him but there was his body, still very much alive, there it was, thrusting away. And it looked curiously funny, all those flailing arms and legs, all the bits of him pretending very much they knew where they were supposed to be going and what they were supposed to be doing when really, he didn’t know all that much about it at all. He tried to imagine a form of punctuation that might describe that body, but all he could figure out was a series of imaginative symbols pulled from the top row of the keyboard accompanied by something that might have been an umlaut.

  Ernie felt very scared, and as the thrusting came to a crescendo, the grunts turned into a series of guttural engine grinding noises—“G-g-g-g-g-g!” He wondered if it was because he was in a church, if the sound echoed differently here, if God had struck him down for what he had done, if God was real and he had determined Ernie was a sinner, a real sinner. . . .

  But then his body climbed off Celia, and she had a look on her face, a look he had never seen before, a look of . . . peace maybe, happiness, almost certainly. All the cold was gone from her, all the aloof reservation, and she looked almost childlike, as if her face had been scrubbed clean of the mascara and makeup until it glowed. His body collapsed on the tiles beside her, its eyes were closed, but it was definitely his face. Definitely his lips that now nuzzled her nipples and when it spoke, it was his voice that murmured into her ear. Celia laughed, and she smiled, and Ernie suddenly felt very awkward watching himself, awkward watching Celia with him.

  Sometime later, there was a gentle tug, as if someone had a set a hook inside him and that someone now slowly, inexorably, was reeling him in. They were twined together—Celia and his body, and her head rested against his—its?—chest. He slipped back into his body like coming home after a long vacation to find all the appliances still worked the way he remembered they had. His fingers flexed involuntarily, and then Celia was awake, she was turning away from him. The place where her head had rested felt cold and empty.

  She slipped on her turtleneck. She slipped on the loose-fitting black pants, and when she turned back, there was that look in her eyes again, that look that all the girls had when they looked at Ernie the morning after. And he tried to smile, he tried to give her that boyish charm, but the disappointment was so thickset in her eyes that Ernie suddenly felt ashamed that he wasn’t whatever it was that she was looking for.

  “We should leave now,” she said. “It won’t be long before someone comes.” And this time it was Ernie who was nodding, though he didn’t quite know why. “You’ll be able to find your way home?” she asked.

  He bobbed his head again, and he wanted to say something else to her, something that might unravel in some small way the secret of what had just happened, the secret of the church and the thing that had been inside him and what they had said and why, despite all that, despite the strangeness and the fear, despite whatever the answer to those question might be, that he still wanted to be near this woman. “Please,” he said.

  Celia looked at him with surprise. “You can’t fall in love with me, you know. This was just sex.” Ernie didn’t say anything. After a moment, something in her expression cracked just a bit, just enough. “All right,” she said. “Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, tomorrow.”

  BUNHILL FIELDS BURIAL GROUND

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  1757-1827

  Ernie brought a flashlight. Celia hadn’t told him what time, and so he waited, nervously, in the courtyard by the Artillery Fields. The place was strange in the moonlight, where a thing half-glimpsed could be any other thing in the world. When Celia arrived she too could have been anyone, the light making silver tracks in her hair and polishing her skin to a semi-luminous glow, and it made Ernie wonder, just for a moment, if he too could have been anyone in the world. Ernie tried to kiss her, but she turned her head at the last moment so he grazed her cheek instead.

  “I didn’t know if you’d come,” Ernie confessed.

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” she said and the words could have been hurtful, but she smiled sli
ghtly, just a little bit. She took his hand like two sparrows cupped in her long, slim fingers and she led him through the gates. When he tried to turn on the flashlight, she shook her head. “We can’t use that here,” she said. “The guards will spot the light.” And Celia led him to a stretch of lawn by a big tree. “Here,” she said, “here.” And Celia leaned in to him, and she kissed him until something like vertigo, like the world was falling away from him, stole away the nervousness. She brought him down, very gently to the grass, and when she slipped off the turtleneck her skin was pale and her ribs were a lattice above the contracting muscles of her stomach. “It’s cold,” she said, and the word puffed out of her mouth like a speech bubble.

  “Sorry,” Ernie said, “I should have brought a blanket.” And he felt stupid saying it, but she smiled anyway and so did he.

  Ernie tried to take his time; he tried to explore around her, to tease the ridge of her ear with his tongue, to suck gently on her lower lip. “No,” she said, “could we just have sex, please?” And this time she didn’t smile.

  So Ernie entered her carefully and the feeling was rough and unforgiving, but it still felt good somehow, it felt really good, this just sex. He pushed against her and her body gave beneath him like the chassis of an overburdened car. He thrust again and again but as he did, as her body grew softer and pliant beneath him, Ernie felt something reaching into him, something eager and insistent, and the hands were cold, and he could feel himself inside Celia, moving there, but now his spirit—he supposed—was deposited beside his body on the lawn. And they were moving and they were moving, his body and hers, in the obscene gridlock of punctuation you only saw in comic books or Internet chat rooms. The noises she made were different somehow, as if they came from a different throat, a different set of lips, but his were the same, annoyingly familiar. When they stopped, when they were finished, they whispered to each other in the darkness. . . .