by Josh Weil
What is it that scares you most? the interviewer asked.
Moving around each other in the cramped corner kitchen, they listened to the voices of the explorers—our personal limits—squeezing close to make room for a swinging fridge door, reaching behind for a saucepan—the psychological effects—occasionally brushing hips.
So much time with Borge!
Laughter.
With Mike!
Laughter.
There was a time, she thought, when he might have kissed her fingertips. When she might have left them there long enough to let him.
Data Log. Day 55. Latest position: N 88° 34’ 10” E 83° 41’ 32”. Distance to go: 160 km. Temperature: –15° C. Days of food left: 13. Average daily distance required: 13 km.
Every few days the men sent word by sat phone, someone updated the blog, and each evening she sat staring at the screen while Todd slow walked preparing for sleep, finally said, Hitting the sack, then shut off the lamp. She knew he didn’t understand—equipment failure, polar bears, their breathless Pitch-dark 24 hours a day!! You cannot see a thing!!!—but to her it seemed miraculous: a message from that desperate corner of the earth sent into space, caught by a satellite, directed down to her. She would read it over until the screen went dim, then stare into the blackness as if it were a patch of night sky brought back from their life before the city, the stars now replaced by a reflection of the lamp, her desk, the three-paneled divider, the rest of the room that was the rest of their home, her husband unfolding their futon bed, willing her to join him. Once, she knew, a director had forbade him to speak, ordered him to show what he wanted with just his eyes. Make her feel it, the director had said. Make her do it.
Stand up, Todd’s look said now. Come to me.
For the past quarter hour she had been staring out from her sweatshirt hood at the words: FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE SUN! Fifty-four days walking in darkness, thirty in such relentless lack of light all either of the men had seen was the other’s headlamp, all they’d heard was the other’s breath, steps, until, far off towards the rest of the world, the blackness had cracked, a red line aglow like a chink in a cast-iron stove, day by day a dim light dawning at noon, for an hour, then two—The light is fantastic up here! It’s bluish violet with a trace of red—the still-hidden sun pushing at the curve of the earth, trying to rise.
Years ago, in a cave in Mexico, Todd had shut off his headlamp. He had reached to her forehead and shut hers off too. It was so black he told her, I can’t see your hand in front of my face. She breathed out, That’s because it’s not. And felt his fingers, faint as breath, tracing her brow, brushing her eyelid, hovering over her cheek, her mouth. I can see you, he had said. I can see your face in front of my hand.
Behind her, the screened divider shook. In a second, he would be there, peering over the blind. She tapped the space bar; the laptop’s brightness bloomed: FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE SUN!
“Anything happen today?” His voice was so close it made her jerk.
We looked at the temperature gauge at the same time, but there was no change.
“No,” she told him, shutting the browser’s window, and then her hood was off—he’d tugged it—and, looking up, she couldn’t help but grin. “What in the world are you wearing?”
“Baby,” he said, in his best Barry White, his arms spreading so the cashmere sweater’s neck revealed an even wider V of bushy chest. “Hugh Hefner—”
“Oh no.”
“—wears sweaters just like this.“
Laughing, she stood, stepped around the screen. Below his waist he wore nothing but briefs, skimpy and light, bought for the backpacking trips they used to take. “Wow,” she said. He looked at her as if that meant she liked them. “No,” she told him. And when he asked, “Well, what are you wearing?” she looked down—baggy sweatpants beneath a sweatshirt stained from that morning’s co-op shift—reached back, replaced her hood, stood there with a sly smile.
“Come on,” he said.
“You don’t know what I’m wearing under this.”
“My boxers.”
“Maybe not.”
“And my T-shirt.”
“Maybe I’m not wearing any underwear. Maybe I won’t wear—”
“Claire, you have to. It buys you time. It gives you something to take off after you’ve taken off—”
“Todd”—she put her hands on his chest, slid them to his shoulders—“we aren’t really going to do this, are we?” He had small shoulders, as if made to fit her hands. She used to like that.
“Baby,” he said, his voice back to his voice this time, “we could just stay home, stay in together.” Open some wine, take it to bed. Even after these fallow weeks, she could feel how his fingers would stroke her spine, his lips would brush her eyelids, the wetness of his mouth switching from breast to breast. When had his touch begun to feel like it was wearing out her vertebrae? When had the rhythm of his breathing begun to bother her? She wanted to keep her eyes open, tell him, Stay on one nipple, wished his thighs weren’t so hairy, his shoulders so slim, that the worry would leave his touch, the doubt disappear from his breath. When had his lovemaking become so desperate? When had it begun to make her feel desperate too?
Data log. Day Some Thousand Some Hundred and Something. Latest position: Brooklyn, Park Slope, btwn 8th and 9th Aves. Distance to go: God knows. The rest of her life? Another year? Another night? And in the morning?
Sometimes, coming back from work, climbing up the subway stairs, she thought she could feel the ice slipping away beneath her. When they first left their families, their homes, flew north for Cape Artichesky, they had felt the wind with them. But by the time they stepped onto the frozen sea, just the two alone, the gusts were blowing against them, the island of ice beneath their feet drifting backwards, pushed so steadily by the sea chop that they would slog a dozen hours northwards only to wind up standing farther south.
For a year after college she and Todd had traveled, just backpacks and boots and a different place to sleep each night: a hammock-hung porch beneath a quiet volcano, the two of them swinging in their own cocoon; a sheetless hotel where they rolled on the floor, dirt pasted to their sweat; even a mist-thick mountain pasture, him in a saddle, her on his lap, the horse drifting through the fog, the feel of it moving beneath them.
They’d come to New York for Todd’s career—I’m not getting any younger, he’d said at twenty-four—but she had wanted it, too: the dim sum Sundays and Senegalese in Clinton Hill; mariachis on the subway home; the old Puerto Rican men blasting Juan Tizol from boom boxes in the baskets of their bicycles; the documentary festival that left them feeling they had explored the farthest corners of the world. How had it gone from that to this? Their reliable wine store, neighborhood Thai; the tailor who hemmed all his pants; the stylist who’d done her hair since ’98, ’97 … For six years they’d been members of the massive food co-op in Park Slope, triweekly work shifts wheeling out wet boxes of mysterious greens, smashing the cardboard in the crushing machine, manning the register alongside men in turbans, dreads, tailored suits, making change for women wearing hijabs, or with tattoos on their shaved heads, too many to ever learn more than a smattering of their names. At first it had been almost an adventure. Now it was just what they did some Saturdays if they couldn’t find another member willing to swap: a fellow actor who understood Todd’s callbacks, a lesbian whose crush on Claire made it easy to ask. He used to tease her about that. She used to ask how his auditions went. But now every time he came back giddy Claire knew it was from some connection, some buzz, something he’d felt with someone else.
Sometimes, in the black of night, fissures would open, cracks in the ice. They were called leads, and they struck straight down into the sea—the water dark, the depths unfathomable. Sometimes they would appear in the headlamp beams. Sometimes they would start to split right between your feet. Snow obscured thin patches of ice. Darkness hid the telltale blue. A potential minefield. We have to test the ice cap with our s
ki poles, tapping the tips in front before we place our feet. And, last week, after her last class, after she’d come home to the cracks opening all around her and told her husband it wasn’t working, they were breaking apart, she didn’t want them to, after he had told her, I know, I just don’t know what to do, that night she had not been able to get the words out of her head: It tests our personal limits, Horn had written, the drive to go beyond, it tests our personal limits, mental, spiritual, physical, it tests our personal limits … She had fallen asleep to the sound of his voice, the image of the two men held in her mind. They were putting on their survival suits, zipping them shut over their heavy clothes, sealing their faces behind clear plastic, peering through the steam of their breath at the freezing water below, jumping in.
“You don’t touch someone if she doesn’t want to be touched. You don’t ask again, you don’t say please, you leave her alone. And you? You don’t have to say yes. You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to take your clothes off. But you can. If you go into a playroom, you probably should. Even if you just want to watch. You can do that. But you can’t take pictures, you can’t shoot video, you keep pulling out your phone we’re going to ask you to leave. We catch you doing drugs, we’re going to ask you to leave. We see you engaged in intercourse, we’re going to ask you to take it to a playroom.”
Claire was sure she’d seen the woman before: the buzzed hair at her temples, the face red as if her thick throat was squeezed by her turtleneck; over it, she wore one of the stained quilted coats that hung outside the co-op freezer door. In one hand she held a clipboard like shift leaders used. In the other, a Sharpie tied to a string.
“Say you go into a playroom”—the woman tapped the pen against the board—“and you see someone else engaged? Say you want to engage with them? Do you just jump in?” She looked at Todd. “No.” Her jowls shook. “You wait, you watch, you ask. At an appropriate time. The middle of an orgasm is not an appropriate time.”
When exactly would be? Claire wanted to ask. And what might be an appropriate method of asking? From the way Todd glanced at her, she could tell he was thinking the same thing. My name’s Todd, this is my wife, nice to meet you too, why yes she is. Watching him fish through his wallet for the suggested contribution, she half expected him to ask, And what, when your wife wakes you in the middle of the night to suggest something like this, is the appropriate response?
“A little advice?” The woman was looking at them with unsettling concern, as if she had lain there in the sheets between them. “Before you go up, take a second together.” Her voice was almost kind. “Figure out just what’s okay, what’s not okay.” She smiled at them.
On the corner, a Town Car pulled up. The clipboard woman’s face swung towards it—another couple stepping out—and Claire heard the vestibule door buzz behind her; she could feel the thrum straight through Todd’s hand on her back. It was in his eyes, too: he looked so determined, so intent on going through with what she’d said she wanted. She imagined him looking like that at some woman in there. She imagined having to tell him it was okay.
“I want you to know,” he said, “that no matter how hard this is …” She had an urge to pull him towards the cab, drag him in, but he went on: “No matter how hard it would be for me”—he bit his bottom lip—“if you want me to ‘engage’ with some, say, sex-crazed supermodel …” He stared straight into her eyes, tried for earnest: “I want you to know it’s okay. It’s okay with me.”
She fought down her smile, furrowed her brow, nodded her head. “I appreciate that.”
“Even if there are two of them.”
“Even twins?”
And they were laughing.
Inside, the apartment smelled like an attempt to smother old dog scent with candles. A tiny East Indian man with a giant black beard was taking coats. He’d rung her up at the register once or twice—she remembered his difficulty reaching over the counter, the eye-widening odor when he had—and for a moment she wondered if they would all be co-op workers here.
Parties, one of the women at the cheese-wrapping table had called them. Salons, the LISTSERV had said. And, riding the freight elevator up to the main floor, Claire had asked how it worked: By invitation only and no unaccompanied men and sure you can bring your husband, that’s what it’s for.
Now, the East Indian man was handing them a small stack of cards, varicolored as the flyers people thumbtacked to the message board. She turned one over: Kiss me, in cursive. Claire looked at Todd.
“Okay,” he said.
She flipped another: Touch me where you want to.
“Not okay,” he said.
And, together, they went through the next few in the stack: Got a tattoo? Okay. Tell me a story. Whatever. Lick my neck. Why not.
But the pump-top bottle of hand sanitizer beside the cut-crystal bowl filled with condoms? A little creepy. The bottle of lube? Claire shook her head. Especially not there, in the hall, on the sideboard with the family photos and Chag Purim! holiday cards.
Votives flickered on the living room windowsills; a few lamps glowed in corners. She could just make out the figures dancing, others come together on couches, the floor. They searched for a place to sit that wouldn’t land them on someone else’s lap and, having navigated that—the bench by the baby grand was free—discussed, above the din, what to do next.
Going to the kitchen for a drink seemed fine, despite the man jerking cocktail shakers without a shirt, bells bouncing on his nipple rings. Even over the music, Claire could hear them jangle. The music—some new age mix of sitar and synth—was turned so low it left the partyers dancing in the living room unhinged from any beat. Watching them, they could make out jiggling flesh in the low light, pale flashes flapping in and out of sight. Most of the men had lost their shirts, though some still had ties swinging from their necks. Around them swung the breasts—barely bumps or stretch marked with weight, browned beneath tanning booths or tub-soak pale—and Todd was saying, “Not okay, not okay, it’s going to ruin them for me,” but, to Claire, it was fine, fascinating, even beautiful. She wondered why the women with implants had done it, what they had been trying to fix, whether it had worked. She heard Todd’s “Gin and tonic?” his “Be right back” but she couldn’t seem to answer, couldn’t stop trying to picture herself out there.
It was only once he was gone that she grew aware of those right around her. Over against a window, two men stood, naked but for a single yarmulke pinned to the back of one’s head. Arms crossed behind them, hands cupping each other’s rears, they peered out through a lifted blind as if pretending they were somewhere people could see stars. For a moment, the image came to her: Horn and Ousland standing on the ice outside their tent like that. She smiled. They never mentioned how they felt about each other, the loneliness, the needs. She couldn’t remember them even once mentioning the stars. That seemed so strange it knocked her back into the room: the men, now kissing; the cluster of women laughing together on the couch; the dancing crowd. She wished she had a headlamp; she would look at each person, light up her face, find his eyes, move on to the next.
Behind her, the piano shook: a woman leaning against the lacquered wood, her back to Claire, her arm a piston. The man pressed to her making chimp sounds.
Claire picked up the icebreaker cards, tried to focus on flipping through them: Love your lips. The creak of weight lifted onto the piano lid. Taste me. A thud.
“Check it,” she heard behind her.
The woman was on the baby grand now, the chimp man’s grin sinking out of sight between her legs, his eyes on Claire. Great, she thought. No matter how long it was before Todd went down on her again, she’d wind up seeing that. The next time she unzipped his jeans, there’d be that piston hand. It struck her then: what was taking her husband so long? Standing, she looked out at the milling crowd, tried to find him coming back from the bar. She would catch his eye: This? her look would say. This is not okay. And he would send her back his own: No, no it’s
not, now let’s go home.
But her eyes never made it to him. They caught on the woman’s stillness: she stood at the edge of the roiling crowd, motionless as the wall behind her, alone but for the men and women who approached to ask her questions, hold out drinks, hands, even a few cards. Some tried to touch her; her body showed no sign of feeling it; they drew their fingers back. And not once did she so much as look at them. She might have been thirty, forty, it didn’t matter: swan necked, dusk skinned, black hair done by someone who knew to get out of the way of those cheekbones, she looked like the kind of woman you saw behind the windows of Tribeca wine bars, on billboards, movie screens, but not alone in a swinger’s club, letting her glance slip across you.
Claire turned: Todd coming towards her. And maybe it was simply that. That she knew what he was going to say when he reached her—at least we gave it a … and maybe it’s just not …—and tomorrow the adventurers near the top of the earth would add an entry to their blog, and it would say the world had changed, the sun had hovered on the horizon all the past day and all the night, and would for the next, and the next, the darkness become a ceaseless light, and on Monday, home, they would cook another supper same as a hundred others, and say the same things to each other they always said, and not say the same things they never did, and, sometime later, go to bed, to sleep, still themselves. In her hand the cards clicked and clicked at her fingernails. In her ears, the crunch and crunch of crampons on ice. And she was reaching into her purse, taking out a pen, scribbling on the back of a card, already starting to push through the crowd, moving away from her husband before he could stop her.
They had just finished their drinks and were rising to head for their coats when the woman came up to them, held out a card, and said straight to Claire, “What does this mean?”
