by Matthew Klam
She said, “I love when you’re above me. Did you know you close your eyes? That’s when I like to watch you.”
Maybe she wasn’t so irresistible. Maybe she threw herself at men because she wasn’t so high on herself. Maybe the early hardships somehow reinforced an innate insecurity. The crummy childhood, rusty car, and crappy house, set against standout athletics and straight A’s, and that psycho who tried to bash her head in, her father’s death, the unexamined grief and confusion, the humiliating rituals of male oppression that had to be tolerated, had to be withstood. Maybe she liked to be treated badly. I could handle that. Treating loved ones badly was a talent of mine.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” she said. “It’s our anniversary. Happy one year of insanity.”
We made out for a while. It was total heaven. “I waited for you to come back,” she said, “and now you’re here.”
“This is my bed.”
“You’re the only thing that matters anymore. Are you real?”
“Yes,” I said. “Are you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I am real.”
I imagined an easy, raucous, searing, sexually explosive bond that would carry us through our days. I imagined our multiple houses, landscaped gardens, marble pastry block, weekends with blended families, visits to the Cheneys, a generous stipend, hush money for Robin, a little gold Rolex for Beanie to suck on.
“A year ago we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into,” she said, “but now we do. We know the deal.”
“What does that mean?”
“We won’t be as lost or sad or lonely. I’ll know you’re listening to me. And I’ll listen to you.”
“Okay.” I sensed intent, a firm design, a direction.
“We can make each other’s lives endurable, and even better, we can be more loving and kind to them. We can do that for each other.” She was determined, and seemed to be steering us back on course.
I had to admit that the bulk of our emailing had been tame. In our diligent way, we’d tried to know each other. Contemplating this woman from a distance, commiserating, holding her firmly in my mind, responding humanely, tuning in to that shimmering idea had required faith. Thinking about her was an escape, but the sheer volume of time and energy had turned it into a kind of meditation, at times approaching bliss. Although it was also a recipe for fragmentation and unrequited horniness and misery, an overwrought emotional substitute for love.
“We can trust it without challenging the other, without disrupting our lives. With you on my side, I think I can handle anything.”
“Sure.” This was more of the same old baloney. My love for her made her strong. Loving me helped her fuck him. I sat up and took off my sneakers and poured out the sand. I could hear it sifting through the cracks of the floorboards, into the apartment below.
I had to figure it out. What the hell, I guess I didn’t want to die. The shame of this undertaking became enmeshed with the mechanics of survival. If it was a choice between hanging myself and making a comic about this crap, I might as well give it a whirl. I’d sign up for another year as her emotional waste dump, affording her this sense of camaraderie, so she’d be nicer to him and not think anymore about leaving. We’d learn to live with nothing, we’d give this to each other, it would be our sacrifice.
“I guess I thought I could train him,” she said. “I thought I could handle it.” She associated his unyielding stupidity with masculine power. “But I need someone, too.”
“Tell me everything.”
She went on listing complaints, fresh ones I hadn’t heard before: hadn’t packed his own suitcase in years, couldn’t be bothered to carry his plate to the sink, or change a diaper, or change a lightbulb. “I have to put his clubs in the car like I’m his fucking caddy.” The Escalade sat outside his office all day, motor running, blocking traffic, emitting greenhouse gases. Took the jet to Miami or Cleveland even though there were thirty-five commercial flights a day.
“Two years ago, he took the fund public without telling me. I’m on the board. He had to forge my signature.” I started rubbing her rib cage, to soothe and embolden her. “I’m a trustee. I’m legally responsible.” I nodded. She was talking about a $20 billion entity. “Don’t get me started on the island he rented for half a mil to go surfing for two days with his regulatory compliance team.”
“Holy shit.”
“My kids don’t even look up when he walks through the door at night. Does that seem odd to you? Seems odd to me….” She went on like that. I don’t think she was aware of rationalizing her own behavior. I think she believed his actions were indefensible and beyond retribution. When she lifted her good arm, I remembered the bracelet as it slid and turned slightly. My daughter’s pre-K tuition: shiny, subterranean, luminous in the dark.
There was something going on between the three of us, between him and her and me. I couldn’t figure out how this thing worked, whether I was being used for their marital enjoyment, or she was being used for his sadistic pleasure, or he was being used for ours. I had a fear that one of us would collide with the other two and end up dead, most likely me. His abuse seemed to satisfy some need in her. Maybe it made her feel different from all those stuck-up assholes at her country club. It gave her a sense of control in an otherwise untethered abundance. Or it made her feel saintly, or it was her miserable Irish suffering, or she dug the whole mentality. I’m abused, I’m an outcast, I’m misunderstood.
“From the start, I knew it was wrong. I had to do something, but I all I could do was lie there. Then kids come. Life is busy. But nothing’s changed. The years go by. A couple weeks ago, I set up the thing for our burial plots.”
“Oh, bunny.” I raised her sleeveless shirt and opened her bra.
“He’s right next to me,” she said. “I’m stuck with him forever.” She sighed, her body sliding against mine. “I asked him point-blank how he’d feel if someone treated his daughters the way he treats me, which is always a good way to end the conversation. He got up and walked out of the room. He doesn’t know how to act. He never had a girlfriend. He grew up in a house where no one paid attention to him, and figured it all out on his own, and now everybody wants him and he doesn’t need anybody.” I put my hand down her shorts. “When I met you, I’d been praying for some way to get through it. I thought I could start all over again. But now it’s worse, because I know how good it could be. I’m sad all the time, dreaming of a life without him, and I was sad last night, waiting for you to text me, and I was a mess when you left my room today.”
“Me, too.”
“Keep doing that.” I did. “But while I lay there talking to my roommates, your come was running down my thighs, spilling out, dripping down, and I can’t believe I’m saying it, but I was happy to feel that. It was beautiful. I didn’t want to go home, but I thought I should, to get away from you. And that’s another problem,” she said. “It hurts here, under my ribs, all the time.”
“Same.”
“The only time I can breathe is when you’re inside me.”
I pulled off my shorts. “You can leave him.”
“I can’t.”
“I’ll help you.”
“No.” She shook her head. “But we can go away, somewhere, for a weekend, just the two of us.”
“We already are somewhere.”
“Somewhere else,” she said. “There’s a beach on Minorca I want to show you.” I yanked off her shorts. “I love international flights. I love the whole thing, the international terminal, arrivals and departures, everybody making out at the gate!” We were excited, pretending together. I’d been here before, hoping, believing. My hope was completely dead but somehow still strong, marching with zombie power and conviction, trampling my sanity. But then she gave me that chastising, serious, injured-gymnast look.
“Even if I’m alone for the rest of my life, I’ll never be as sad and lonely as I am now, married to him.”
I guess this kind of talk was therapeutic. She was smilin
g, although the ponytail had come undone, and in the shadow inside her hair it was a sad smile. Beyond sad. Disturbed. “We don’t need him,” she said. “I told Lily right in front of him, ‘Never let a man treat you the way Daddy treats me.’ ” That line of thinking seemed to revive her. She turned toward me. “Will you do me a favor? Don’t sleep with anyone else after I’m gone, or at least don’t bring her here. It’s our place now.”
“Stop.” I was sad too, and that she couldn’t tell how sad I was made me sadder.
“Don’t be sad,” she said. “We can be sad later. I’ve been sad all summer. I feel alive again.”
I felt weak and tired. I had nothing to offer, no tricks, and she knew me too well for any pretending. We were closer now, we’d been through some hell, we were into something less mysterious and not so fun. This would’ve been the place where something real would start, but there was nothing, no future, no gimmicks. I was afraid of the intense bond we’d formed on this crazy day, afraid that I’d never be able to shake it off, that I’d fallen too far. These were the panties I’d pulled off earlier, nude with scratchy lace. I knew her body now and worked it like it was my own. I sat up and banged my skull on the beam over the bed and grabbed my head, thinking I’d probably just gotten brain damage.
“Something else I need to tell you,” she said. “You’ll be happy to hear it.”
“Okay.”
“I’m getting my period.” With her shoulders back and boobs out she looked like a bust on a wooden ship. “I know how it freaks you out to think of some little towheaded kid popping out of me. You don’t have to worry.” But when I thought about it, I wasn’t afraid of the possibility, or maybe I liked the idea. “No one will ever know.”
“Okay.”
“My dalliance,” she said, staring into my eyes.
“Your what?”
“We’ll take this to our graves.”
I let go of her and lay back on the pillow and rested. On closer inspection, the skylight above us was plastic, not glass, and had cracking ice patterns and chips around the flanges. It was not what it appeared to be, and neither were we. This was something between us, a lapse, a misdeed. Light drizzle came down from above us, but if you tried to pull the skylight closed, pieces of rusty stuff rained down on your hair.
I drank some warm club soda. We had nothing else to say. I was ready. I’d been like this at seventeen, like a cow that needs milking. It was nothing at all but the relentless durability of our attraction. It turns out that all you need for kundalini multigasmic monkey sex is two people who know each other just well enough to feel safe but don’t share a kitchen. I’d never have her, I’d never lose her. It wasn’t real, it didn’t matter, would never sour, never fail.
It was more intense than the afternoon session, crammed into less space, both of us more desperate, all of our movement so fluid, sliding my palm down to shield her glaring white hip, caressing the dizzying nexus, moving in with the confident momentum of athletic routine. We cursed softly as we banged against that beam, then toughened up and suffered through the thump of bone on wood. I worried that it would ruin the sex, but nothing could. We stuck our tongues and fingers in each other’s ears and mouths and asses, like a single crazed body reconnecting, or like a family of Chihuahuas molesting a turkey leg, and sucked on each other’s lips and privates.
“Angel.”
“Oh my God, I love you.” She fell back, and in the dark I could see her tan lines, her splint, blue and white, her fingers dark, almost purple. Just look at her, laid out on my bed. You can’t have it. The guy who can have it anytime he wants it hates her. She planted her feet on the ceiling and made lovely faces as she lay there, staring up at me, taking me in. “This is how I’ll remember you,” she said sadly, “just let me look,” and as she stared at me I realized she was stupid and had no judgment, because I was horrible and dead inside.
“I’m like a cow,” I said, and tried to explain.
“What?”
“Moo.”
I knew it was sick, knew it was wrong, but had to keep going. Anyway, she wasn’t dying of cancer. She had one broken bone and the best drugs in the world and there was never a question of whether we would. I touched her and she turned and hugged a pillow and I kicked off my undies and sank into her, my eyes rolling into my head, my face wedged into the ceiling, forgetting to breathe, having and losing the feeling of flying, soaring, swooning, falling.
“Holy moly,” she said. “I prayed for this.”
It was the pill I needed to survive, to get me through another year, a scene, a place to park my soul through months of cold and diapers and screaming. The fog of goodness and responsibility needed to be burned off, gotten past, needed endless badness and rebellion.
It didn’t feel so much like an abrupt mounting, more like a frenetic angling with these parts pressed into service, and then a distinctly new angle and new sensations, and in between in a herculean feat I crawled down between her legs and she came, kapow, gesundheit. When we began again it was like the B side of an album. I hovered over her, quietly, in control, no movement to it other than the movement itself. She shivered a little, saying, every now and then, “You’re killing me,” shuddering while I made delicate adjustments, like an artist with his pen, and we fell into a timeless rift of hopeless, helpless, perfect contact. I had no thought in my mind except that I would pay dearly for this or maybe had already paid and earned it. One hand supporting her head, sifting the soft secret hairs of her nape, the other touching her collarbone, measuring the hollow place along it, covering the thin freckled plate of muscle across her sternum, kissing her forehead, kissing her mouth, saying I love you.
In the kitchen I found an old muffin tin and filled it with water to make ice cubes for her, for the morning, and placed it in the freezer. I felt good. It was like driving sixty miles an hour through a car wash and coming out on the other side, shiny and clean. Then I ran the faucet until it got warm and found a washcloth. The windows rattled in the breeze and the Barn creaked, breezes blowing in on all sides, flinging curtains. The rain came harder, slashing the roof.
She lay calm and still while I pressed the warm washcloth to her and cleaned her gently, and for that moment I think we both imagined this as our home. Then she got bored and wondered instead if she could make it to a meeting in the morning, since she couldn’t paint and didn’t want to waste the day.
“What meeting?”
“A brunch. Really interesting thing. Amazing.” She was being asked to fund a project in Afghanistan where farmers were paid to swap poppies for saffron, inspiring foodies while fighting the Taliban with capitalism. It didn’t matter what it was, one small part of her overall push to reform our planet, one small ship in her armada.
“Where?”
“Midtown.” She meant Manhattan. I asked how. “Chopper,” she said, using his word, saying it sarcastically. I smiled to acknowledge her sarcasm, and to allow the absurdity of choppering into Midtown to pass between us. I kept my smile in place, surprised to feel newly devastated and betrayed. The talk of choppering silenced me, forcing me to accept the unrelenting farce of my position. I lifted the washcloth to show her that it was tinged with rust.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” she said, unmoved by the sight of her own blood. “You just wait.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “I’m a bleeder.”
I’d grown used to the heady, tainting power of our lovemaking, our biochemical froth and forgivable expressions of joy and despair. But blood carried some unnerving element of permanence I hadn’t considered. She didn’t seem bothered by having shared it. She thanked me for cleaning her, and I felt dismissed, and tossed the washcloth on the floor. She put her hand over her heart, with my bracelet on her wrist. “I have never in my entire life been treated this well by anyone. Never been this well loved, until now, by you.” She studied me with renewed intensity. I felt puzzled over and adored. I’d forgotten the feeling of this scrutiny, of being marveled at by another living being. It had been
a long time since anyone had looked at me that way. I remembered that look from my mother.
“You’re gifted.” Now came the pity.
“It’s my blessing.”
“But you never get it at home.”
“It’s also my curse.”
“Let’s call it a skill.”
“A knack.”
“If you could package it and sell it, you’d make a fortune.”
“Okay.”
“There are so many women I know who could use it.” She tried to pull me to her, but I resisted, and instead mentioned price points, naming my services and dividing them into grades, Standard, Elite, and Concierge class, for the discerning lovelorn lady. I might’ve been having fun to combat the choking power of her arrogance, or maybe I meant to engender more pity, or maybe I wanted to remind her of the uselessness of her dough, that financial remuneration devalued our bond.
“Hopefully my new customers will pay a little better.”
“Stop it.”
“You started it.”
“Come here,” she said, exhausted.
“You’d dress me like a gigolo and sell me to your friends.”
She pulled me to her. “We were both joking,” she said.
I lay there, depressed as hell, with my head between her boobs, and tried to put a value on the services I’d provided to her, the sacrifices I’d made, like a common-law spouse, significant contributions to her well-being, which now seemed beyond measure, like that dough of hers, which fit no human scale, or was scaled to all humanity.
