Sex and Death

by Sarah Hall

  Maddy was waiting on the other side of the door and she held up both her hands, palms flat and right in my face. She pointed at our daughter and made the shush sign with her fingers on her lips.

  Lila was face up in the middle of the other bed, arms and legs starfished beneath one thin blanket. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was deep and regular and steady.

  ‘How did that happen?’ I whispered. ‘Tranquilliser dart? Something in her milk?’

  ‘Nope,’ Maddy said and she smiled. ‘Nothing we did, just a summertime miracle.’

  She raised Lila’s limp wrist about a foot off the mattress and let it fall back down.

  Nothing registered. The girl’s breathing kept that steady pace.

  ‘Gone,’ I said. ‘Completely gone. Unbelievable.’

  We were both clean and we smelled better than we normally do. There was an opening.

  I kissed Maddy and when our tongues touched, it felt like both our mouths were wetter than usual. She put her hand on the back of my head and I felt her fingers going through my hair directly to my skin. She stroked the ridge where the back of my skull tapered into my neck.

  We took the bucket and quietly went back into the bathroom and closed the door almost all the way, leaving only a crack. There was barely enough space to stand so I put the bucket in the tub and stepped in there with it. When I pulled it out, the bottle was wet and sweaty and I undid the tinfoil and twisted out the little wire. I shook it a bit, enough so that the white plastic cork flew with a muted pop and hit the ceiling before rattling back down. The fizzy wine ran up and over my hands and we quickly poured it into the bathroom glasses.

  ‘Here we go,’ I said, and I held out my glass for her to clink it. ‘To this.’

  ‘Yes, to all of it,’ Maddy laughed and she gestured to the lump of wet towels shoved into the corner behind the door.

  We clinked and downed our glasses in one gulp and then quickly refilled. This was the first drink Maddy’d had since we found out about the baby, but we were only a few weeks away now.

  ‘One more of these is not going to hurt anybody,’ she said and she drank again.

  I stepped out of the tub and we sat there on the edge and leaned into each other. Our pinky toes touched. The carbonation made a kind of mist in the glasses and everything in the room was so tight and so compressed, it felt like you could almost hear every separate bubble bursting.

  I put my hand on the soft part of the inside of her thigh and my thumb grazed the edge of her underwear. We stayed still and silent for about thirty seconds, thinking it through, and then we went for it for real, kissing again, harder. There was no room and we had to kind of spin around and almost elbow each other in the face as we tried to get our shirts off. As we kissed, she ran her fingers down the bones of my spine and then brought her hand around so her palm was flat on my chest. I pulled her in close and hard.

  It had been a long, long time for us. Every little flutter with Jack’s pregnancy worried us and all we wanted to do was get through unscathed. Again: there were mysterious chemicals flowing through our bodies and our brains, especially in these final stages, and we felt like there was a delicate balance that shouldn’t be fooled with. There were words, names, in our What to Expect When You’re Expecting book and we said them out loud like a kind of incantation but we did not know what they meant. It seemed like no one knew for sure. Progesterone, oxytocin, prostaglandins. Nothing behaved in the same way every time and there were reactions and counter-reactions that could only be experienced and never explained or predicted. The doctors had told us that our miscarriage was nobody’s fault and that nothing had gone wrong. A completely natural occurrence, they said, a thing that happened all the time, but we did not feel that way. Now though, at last, in that tight bathroom, it was all coming back and it felt like everything inside us was working again, accelerating and rushing down the right channels.

  ‘Maybe just a lick,’ she whispered. ‘Please.’

  We took the last good towel from off the rack and put it down on the toilet seat. Maddy spread her legs, resting one foot on the edge of the tub and the other in the dip of the gooseneck from the tiny sink. She braced her hands against the wall and I went down on her. My left hand moved back and forth, resting on her stomach or touching her full hard breasts, while the fingers of my right hand went in and out of her, very gently, and my tongue stayed on the right spot.

  ‘Slow,’ she breathed. ‘Go slow.’

  It was perfect. I could feel her tensing and relaxing, tensing and relaxing and blowing out these long, long breaths.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘So good.’

  After a few minutes she put her hands in my hair and pushed me back. I moved to the left instead of the right and I smashed my head on the stainless-steel leg that propped up the sink. She wanted me to stand up, but when I backed against the bathroom door, one of the hooks jabbed me in the neck.

  ‘Smooth,’ she laughed. ‘Very smooth.’

  ‘This is not easy,’ I said.

  ‘Now you,’ she said. She put the towel on the floor in front of me and knelt down on it. Then she pulled my shorts down and put my cock in her mouth and worked the shaft with her hand. Too many things were happening at the same time, the new and the familiar were mixing and I couldn’t keep up. I looked around the room and imagined our next move. Us trying to do it standing up in the tub or somehow crouching down into this square of tile. The angles were all bad and I didn’t think any of them would work. We were running out of space and time.

  ‘Out there?’ I whispered. ‘Do you want to try out there?’

  I opened the door. The curtains to the parking lot were still half open and a beam of end-of-day light fell directly onto Lila’s face, but she didn’t stir. I took two or three quick strides across the room and pulled the velour drapes closed so that they only glowed around the edges.

  Maddy was on her back on the other bed, on top of the blankets. We would have no cover if Lila woke up.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’re fine. Come on. Right now.’

  In the beginning, all I could do was concentrate on Lila, watching her for any sign, and imagining how Maddy and I could maybe both roll off the side and duck down behind the bed if we needed to. I did not want to get caught by a four-year-old and end up leaving some scarring image that would be seared into her brain.

  Then we shifted positions, standing up with Maddy pushed against the wall. The pressure was rising and the pace increased. From that stage on, I closed off and did not care any more. I don’t clearly remember exactly what happened or the order things followed. Something gave way inside of me, in both of us, and after months and months of stillness it felt like we were moving again, doing what we were supposed to.

  ‘On top,’ she said after a little bit. ‘I want to be on top.’

  I rolled over onto the bed and she straddled my legs and put her hand on the headboard. She pushed down very hard and I pressed back up against her. We were getting closer and there was no concern for Jack any more. Raw sounds were coming out of us and we were saying words we would not normally use. I could just vaguely sense that things were getting louder and louder, more insistent, but I wasn’t sure any more. Maddy’s eyes were closed and she was grinding down and sliding herself back and forth very fast. The headboard was making steady regular contact with the wall and the lamp shades were moving. We both had all our weight, all our strength, behind every movement.

  I was breathing hard and my legs were actually starting to burn. I was just going to say something when we heard these three booming blows coming out of the wall on the opposite side of the room. The spacing was even and methodical, like a machine with a two-second delay between each movement. A thud and then a thud and then a thud. We glanced at each other, both our chests expanding and contracting. We were close, but we could not be sure if this sound came in response to what we were doing or if it was entirely its own action. The two were likely
connected – the timing too close – but we could not be certain.

  It felt like the blows were coming through the whole wall, like a repeating wave of sound, the echo from some piece of roadwork machinery, or the concussive vibration you feel in your chest after a firework explodes or when they are excavating for a new underground parking garage in your neighbourhood. It did not seem like this could be the work of a single hand or a forearm or a shoulder hitting just one spot. When I turned to look at the wall I thought I watched a crack opening up and actually moving down through the plaster. In the dresser mirror, I saw the two of us, still moving furiously. Her back pounding down, my hips rising up. We were seven months pregnant with our second child, but he was not in the world yet. In the other bed, Lila, his big sister, did not stir. The noise from us and the noise from the other side did not reach her.

  I looked into Maddy’s face. Our eyes locked and she shook her head. Before I could say anything, she reached down and clamped one hand over my mouth. Our rhythm increased.

  ‘Do not stop,’ she said.

  We carried through all the way to the end. Our actions did not trigger the premature birth of our son, and our daughter slept through to the morning and no other sound ever rose from the other side. No secret door knobs were turned and no phones ever rang and no inquiries were ever made. The night of May 31st faded quickly and completely into our shared past and on the morning of June 1st, our new lives began and continued on for almost two years.

  But then the TV showed his picture and the other story – the bigger one that includes us all – began. The detectives visited our house and sat around the kitchen table while the children slept upstairs. We told them almost everything – our move, our plan for the Bide-a-While, the house, the sunscreen, the taps and the Mr Freezes – but we kept the last part only for ourselves and we never gave that away. The booming signal sounding in the night – the message that may have been sent directly to us, or maybe through us into the larger world – did not make it into the official record and it did not become information and you will not find it in any of the reports. When they took us to the station, Maddy and I gave our independent statements and we delivered them in different rooms to different officers, but when they were placed side by side, they matched up perfectly, the same gaps inserted into the same spaces. For years, we have kept that sound just for ourselves and it is not something we share with other people.

  I think about it a lot, though. Or maybe I think that we think about it a lot or we hear it repeating in our memories. The sound and our silence are combined now and the consequences of our choices – the things we did or did not do – are hard to understand even though I have tried to play out all the different scenarios. Perhaps our quietness saved our lives and saved the lives of our children. Perhaps we were spared. Or perhaps the noises we made and the noises we heard but never reported led to very different results for other people living their lives in other places. Perhaps we are partly responsible for what happened to them. Perhaps the strange possibilities he was trying to open up on his side of the wall shut down other possibilities in our lives. It is hard to know. I cannot tell where privacy ends and the rest of the world begins.

  But I know that our lives are much quieter now and that there is a different kind of stillness in our house. Maddy gets tired earlier than before and we go to bed at different times and we do not share the computer any more. Now we have our own devices, amazing cellphones with hand-held video screens, and we use these to usher ourselves into our own unique versions of sleep. It does not feel strange. The kids go down and we clean up the kitchen together and we take our showers. Then we sit for a couple of minutes before she says, ‘I think I’ll go up now,’ and we kiss. In separate rooms, we choose the shows we want to see and the pictures and the sounds we select bring us a specific comfort. They help us rest. I think she watches old sitcoms or YouTube episodes of Grand Designs or House Hunters International, but I am not entirely sure. I never ask and I know she is not interested in my sports teams or wherever I go when the games are over. When I come upon her in bed, I try not to disturb her, or even touch her body, as I take my place beside her. We both have to be ready to go in the morning.

  This house has served us well and we have never regretted our decision. All the old character is still there in the walls and the mouldings and the place is filled with the histories, the trace elements, of other people who came through before we arrived. Some nights when I have the fire going, I can imagine them, the former residents, generations of strangers, staring into this exact same spot and stretching out their hands towards the heat and the light. But they are all gone and this place belongs only to us now. We have made it the way it is. Our particular actions and inactions, our most intimate longings and revulsions, have come together to form a daily domestic shape that only we designed and only we can fully recognise.

  But I go back sometimes and I see us at the beginning of everything. We are together in the mirror of the motel bedroom and we are seven months pregnant with Jack and we cannot help ourselves. Then the wall dissolves and now I am looking down from above and I can see him too, just a few feet away, his hand in the air, waiting for a signal. At other times I picture him sitting silently in his own kind of quiet room, the cell where they keep him today. I imagine a cot and some books and the stainless-steel toilet. Mark and I and Maddy and Lila and Jack: we do not know where we are in the arc of our lives – old or young, safe or exposed, closer to the beginning or the end, brushing up against death or far away from it. We do not know if the decisive moment has arrived or if it is yet to come. Led only by what we desire, we go out into the world and we make our way. And then we sleep, each of us in temporary beds that will one day be occupied by other people.

  THE FORTUNE FISH

  Clare Wigfall

  ‘So it is you,’ she said, coming up alongside as I was getting myself a glass of Zinfandel.

  I’d only just stepped into the party and not even had the chance to check it out. She was younger than myself, with curly sandy-blonde hair and a good figure; a little shy-looking maybe, but that only made her all the more attractive. My type for sure, but nothing about her was familiar. I glanced over my shoulder to check it was me she was addressing.

  ‘Don’t remember me, do you?’ She kind of laughed, but like she’d just realised something stupid. She looked away a second before turning back again, and it was in that movement that I saw the girl I once knew.

  ‘Arlette?’ Must have been near fifteen years since I’d spoken that name, but the memory of her came back to me. A girl I’d run around with one summer. Sexy. Young. A little bit high most of the time.

  ‘Ray,’ she replied, and the way she studied me, like I was something surprising to her, something she’d misplaced, it was intense; this could get interesting, I thought. And so I smiled at her, but she was still too absorbed to smile back.

  ‘Always imagined maybe I’d bump into you one of these days,’ she said. ‘You’re looking old.’

  I’d first met her on Haight. An afternoon – that crazy summer of ’67 – when I’d driven across the bay to visit an esoteric bookstore a guy at work had told me about. There she was on the sidewalk, trying to make a buck reading tarot. Her hair was loose and long, down-to-her-ass long, and her fingers flipped the cards on the grey paving. She was sitting cross-legged, in a long Indian skirt and a bunch of ethnic jewellery – beads and bangles, and these heavy silver rings on her skinny fingers. Like a little kid playing dress-up who no one had told not to speak to strangers. When I came out the store she was still there, and she looked up and smiled. Her face was very open, very young, and two bucks didn’t seem like a lot to talk to this girl. I offered her a ride along the coast after. We smoked a few and watched the sun go down. She was sleeping on a girlfriend’s couch in the Upper Haight, everything she owned in an army duffel bag almost as big as herself. I helped her carry it up the stairs to my apartment when she moved in.

  ‘I teach thei
r daughter dance,’ she said now. ‘And you? How do you know them?’

  ‘I play squash with Ted.’

  ‘You play squash?’ she said.

  ‘You teach dance?’ I countered.

  She shrugged and smiled. There was a reserve to her manner that was new, but when she smiled it disappeared again. It was a nice smile. Her lips were full and glossed, her teeth straight. She’d changed a good bit since I’d seen her last – matured into her features, lost the skinniness, changed her hair – and it suited her well.

  The mention of squash had made me draw in my stomach instinctively. I keep myself pretty trim, eat healthy – vegetarian for the most part – but for all the squash I play there’s a bulge I just can’t seem to shake any more. I’m vain enough that these things bother me – like the way my hairline is receding, or the grey in my beard – even if I know that for a guy of my years I’m looking pretty good. I still keep my hair long, though mostly I wear it tied back now, and my beard I keep neat; I take care of my appearance. Today I’d dressed nice for the party; a slim-fitting shirt unbuttoned at the neck, Levi’s, a string of Himalayan prayer beads.

  It was Ted’s party. An architect I’d met on the courts down at the Y. We’d had a few games together. He was a good player and we were well matched. He laughed easily, even when I beat him, which is a trait I admired because hell I wish I could take losing so lightly. He and his wife Marion, a professor of women’s studies, had just bought a house up on Stanford Avenue. ‘We’re having a housewarming potluck Saturday,’ Ted had said, last time I’d seen him, wiping at his forehead with a hand towel as we headed back to the changing rooms. ‘Want to come along?’

  I knew it wouldn’t really be my scene. Architects and academics from the university, all of them talking gender politics and timber cladding, their noisy kids ducking through our legs and knocking over plates of food. I’d planned on bringing a date, a recently divorced yoga instructor called Judith who I’d been seeing on and off, but she’d cancelled on me that morning because her cat had vomited; I had a feeling already things weren’t going to work out with Judith.