Silence and the Word

by MaryAnne Mohanraj

  The passengers were walking off the plane, some into the arms of family or eager lovers. Ruth walked down, wearing a dark dress, her eyes puffy and red. She had been crying on the plane. Ruth had never cared what people thought about little things. She cried freely in public. She had occasionally tried to provoke screaming fights in parking lots and malls. She had been willing to have sex in the woods, in open fields, had teased and persuaded them all until they joined her. It was only in the big things that she was at all conventional.

  They had once travelled east together, two couples in a car, perfectly unremarkable to all outward eyes. They had stopped in Wisconsin, had decided to camp that night instead of staying in a motel. Two separate tents, and the night sky overhead. While Daniel and Saul finished washing the dinner dishes in a nearby creek, Ruth had taken Sarah by the hand and let her into the woods, searching for fallen branches to build a fire. Sarah had dutifully collected wood until Ruth came up behind her, lifting her skirt, kneeling down on dirt and twigs and grass. Sarah wore no underwear in those days, at Ruth’s request. So when Ruth’s mouth reached for hers, Sarah had only to shift her legs further apart, to try to balance herself, a load of wood resting in her arms, eyes closed. Ruth’s tongue licked under her ass, tracing the delicate line at the tops of her thighs. Ruth’s tongue slid up over her clit, then back again, sliding deep inside her. Ruth’s hands held onto Sarah’s hips, her fingers gently caressing the sharp protrusions of hipbones, the skin that lay over them. Sarah was usually quiet, but in the middle of the empty woods, she let herself moan. Ruth’s tongue flickered over and around, licking eagerly until Sarah’s thighs were trembling. Her heart was pounding, and just as she began to come, waves of pleasure rippling through her, as the wood fell from her arms, Saul was there with her, in front of her, holding her up—his mouth moving on hers, his chest pressed against her breasts, and his hands behind her, buried in Ruth’s hair. Then they were all falling to the ground, Saul and Ruth and Sarah and Daniel too, a tangle of bodies, clothes discarded, forgotten, naked skin against dirt and moss and scratching twigs. Leaves and starlight overhead, and Ruth laughing in the night, laughing with loud and shameless delight. It had always been that way with her.

  Ruth paused at the bottom of the walkway, eyes scanning the crowd, passing right over Sarah. It had been over a year since they’d seen each other last. Between Christmas and New Year’s, Sarah had gone up to Seattle for a few days. Saul had originally planned to come as well, but had gotten caught up in a painting and changed his mind. Sarah had come alone into a house full of children and grandchildren, a house full of laughter. Ruth had cooked a feast, with her daughters and sons helping. The grandkids had made macaroons, and each one of them had begged a story from Auntie Sarah. Sarah had left their house a little envious; Ruth had built exactly the kind of home that she’d dreamed of. And while it wasn’t the kind of home Sarah herself had ever wanted—still, it was lovely. It wasn’t until the following March that the cancer had been diagnosed. Sarah had always meant to go up and see Daniel again—but she hadn’t, in the end.

  She stepped forward, raised a hand to Ruth. There was the blink of recognition, the momentary brightening of eyes. Ruth looked lovely despite puffed eyes, slender and fair in her button-down dress, a raincoat over one arm. Her hair had gone entirely to silver, a sleek and shining cap—like rain in moonlight. Ruth came down through the thinning crowd, paused a few steps away. Then Sarah held out her arms, and Ruth walked into them, her eyes filling with tears again. Sarah held her close, sheltering her in the fragile privacy of her arms, until the crowd had entirely dissolved away.

  Saul met them at the door. He’d changed out of his paint-stained clothes. Ruth dropped her raincoat, letting it fall in a wet puddle on the floor, and threw herself forward, into his strong arms. She had calmed down in the car, had been able to talk about the last week with Daniel. He’d gotten much weaker towards the end; in the last few days, he hadn’t really spoken. Sarah’s chest had ached a little, with various regrets. Ruth hadn’t cried for most of the ride, but now she was sobbing, great gasping sobs, catching the air in her throat and letting it out again. Saul held her, looking helplessly at Sarah over Ruth’s head. Sarah shrugged, put down Ruth’s bag, and bent to pick the raincoat up off the wood floor. She turned and hung it neatly on the rack, while Saul gently led Ruth into the living room. Sarah waited in the hall, listening to them walking across the room, sitting down on the sofa. Slowly, Ruth’s sobs quieted again. When it was silent, Sarah walked into the room. Ruth was nestled in Saul’s arms, her eyes closed. His eyes were fixed on the doorway, and met Sarah’s as she entered. She hadn’t expected that, that he would be looking for her. She should have known better.

  “Do you want some coffee, Ruth?” Sarah asked.

  Ruth shook her head, not opening her eyes. “It would just keep me awake. I haven’t been sleeping much this last week. I’m so tired… .”

  “Dinner? Saul made pot roast for lunch—there’s plenty left.”

  “No, I’m okay. Just bed, if that’s all right?”

  “That’s fine, dear. Come on—I’ll get you settled.”

  Ruth hugged Saul once more, and then got up from the sofa. Sarah led her into the guest bedroom, turned down the sheets, closed the drapes while Ruth pulled off her clothes and slid into bed. She had always slept nude; Sarah remembered. Sarah came back to the bed, and stood over it, hesitating. Ruth looked exhausted, with a tinge of grey to her skin.

  “Do you want me to sit with you a bit? Just until you fall asleep?”

  “No, no—I’ll be okay.” Ruth reached out, taking Sarah’s hand in hers and squeezing, gently. “Thank you.”

  Sarah leaned over and kissed her gently twice—once on the cheek, once, briefly, on her lips. “It’s nothing, love. Sleep. Sleep well.” She stood up then, turned out the light, and slipped out the door, closing it behind her.

  They sat at the kitchen table, cups of coffee nestled in their hands, not talking. Just being together. Sarah remembered the day when she realized that she would rather be silent with Saul, than be talking with anyone else. They hadn’t met Ruth yet, or Daniel; they’d only known each other a few weeks. They’d just finished making love on a hot July night and were lying side by side on the bed, not touching. It was really too hot to cuddle, too hot for sex. They had both ended up exhausted, lying on the bed with waves of heat rolling off their bodies. Saul was quiet, just breathing, and Sarah lay there listening to his breaths, counting them, trying to synchronize them with her own. She couldn’t quite manage it, not for long. Her heart beat faster, her breath puffed in and out of her. But being there with him, breathing was a little slower and sweeter than it would normally be. Being with him, not even touching, she was happier than she’d ever been.

  Sarah finished her coffee. “I’m going to go to bed,” she said. “Coming?”

  “I’ll be there in a minute. I’ll just finish the dishes.”

  Sarah nodded and rose from the table, leaving her coffee cup for him to clear. She straightened a few books in the living room as she walked through it, gathered his sketches from the little tables and from the floor, piling them in a neat stack. She walked into the hall, and then paused. To her right was the hall leading to their bedroom. Straight ahead was the hall leading to the library, to the studio, and then to the guest room. She almost turned right, almost went straight to bed. But then she walked forward down the long hall, and at the end of it, heard her. Ruth was crying again. Sarah stood there a while, listening.

  When she came back to the bedroom, Saul was already in bed, waiting for her. Sarah stood in the doorway, looking at him. He lay half covered by the sheet, his head turned, looking at her. She knew what would happen if she came to bed. She could tell by looking at him, by the way he looked at her. He would pull her close, and kiss her forehead and eyes and cheeks. He would run his hands over her soft body; he would touch her until she came, shuddering in his arms.

  “Ruth’s crying.” It was h
arder than she’d expected, to say it. It had been a long time.

  His eyes widened, the way they only did when he was very surprised, or sometimes during sex, when she startled him with pleasure.

  “You should go to her.” That was easier to say. Once the problem was set, the conclusion was obvious. Obvious to her, at any rate.

  Saul swung himself slowly out of bed, pulled on a pair of pants. He didn’t bother with a shirt. “You’ll be all right?” It was a question, but also a statement. He knew her that well, knew that she wouldn’t have raised the issue if she weren’t sure. He trusted her for that. Still, it was good of him to check, one last time. It was one of the reasons she loved him so. She nodded, and collected a kiss as he went by.

  Sarah let herself out of the house, walking barefoot. It was a little cold, but not too much. The rain had stopped some time ago, and the garden was dark and green in the moonlight. She wandered through the garden—its neat paths, its carefully tended borders. Saul took care of the vegetables; she nurtured the flowers and herbs. At this time of year, little was blooming, but the foliage was deep and rich and green. Winter was a good time for plants in Oakland; it was the summer’s heat that parched them dry, left them sere and barren. She carefully did not approach the east end of the house; even through closed windows and shades, she might have heard something. She also refrained from imagination, from certain memories. If she had tried, Sarah could have reconstructed what was likely happening in that bedroom; she could have remembered Ruth’s small sounds, her open mouth, her small breasts and arching body. Saul’s face, over hers. She could have remembered, and the memory might have been sweet, or bitter, or both. But she was too old to torment herself that way. There was no need.

  Instead, she put those thoughts aside, and walked to the far west end of the garden, where the roses grew. It was the one wild patch in the garden, a garden filled with patterns, where foxglove and golden poppy and iris and daffodil, each in their season, would walk in neat rows and curves, in designs she and Saul had outlined. But the roses had been there when they bought the house, the summer after Ruth had left. Crimson and yellow, white and peach, orange and burgundy—the roses grew now in profusion against the western wall, trimmed back only when they threatened the rest of the garden. Wild and lovely. She had built a bench to face them, and Saul often sat on it, sketching the roses. Sarah liked to sit underneath them, surrounded by them, drowning in their sweet scent. She went there now, sitting down in the muddy ground, under the vines and thorns.

  There were no roses in January, but they’d come again, soon enough. She’d be waiting for them. In the meantime, it was enough to close her eyes, feel the mud under her toes, and remember Daniel. The way he laughed, bright and full. The way he would return to a comment from a conversation hours past. The way he had touched her sometimes, so lightly, as if she were a bird. The scent of him, dark and rich, like coffee in a garden, after rain.

  the bones want to fly

  when you are old

  your skin will be delicate

  fragile as tissue paper

  my breath will rustle against it

  my fingers will slip over the folds

  under the creases

  slide into the secret places

  (I am always discovering

  new secrets within you)

  the bones beneath that skin

  will be light bird-bones

  they will want to go up

  want to fly sunward

  they will glow through

  the skin, at night, when we lie

  beneath the covers

  it is too warm here

  you will cry

  I am burning up

  I will coax you to stay

  I will lick sweat from your pale neck

  and blow on that shivering skin

  I will lick my way down

  (I have done this so many

  many times already)

  I will lick circles on your sunken chest

  I will lick all the way down, and take you

  entirely inside my mouth

  until you lose yourself

  until you are no longer bound

  by earth and skin and bone

  (I have done this, and will

  a thousand thousand times…)

  afterwards

  I fall asleep

  my head resting on your stomach

  one fragile arm flung over

  your thin thigh, and hip

  (it is not much to hold you down)

  you will lie there in the dark

  hand buried in my silvered hair

  listening to the wind

  flying

  through the trees

  Exposure

  1.

  In the spring of my freshman year, I had sex with a woman. Once. I had been dumped by my boyfriend a few months previously, and she had just been dumped by her fiancé, so we had a certain sympathy for each other. She invited me to dinner and cooked pasta with eggplant. I hated eggplant, but I didn’t have the nerve to tell her. She deep-fried it and simmered it in a tomato sauce and in the end, it wasn’t anything like what I had expected. It was the first time I’d had eggplant that wasn’t awful; it was really not bad at all—though I didn’t expect to be eating eggplant again anytime soon. In the morning, we held hands as we walked to campus, and I was glad that people might be staring at us. I think she could tell. We were just friends after that. Over Christmas of my junior year, I met Karina. She was visiting from Australia, and we knew each other from the net, and I offered her a place to stay in Chicago. She seemed pretty, but I didn’t find hers particularly attractive; I didn’t notice women often, though I did call myself bisexual, after that first woman. I wore a turquoise silk shirt and blue jeans when we met; Karina told me much later that she had found me attractive from the first moment she saw me. After a few days of her regard, I found her quite attractive as well.

  2.

  There are so many ways that I know her that you will never be able to see, no matter how long or hard you look. We were together for three years—but not really together all of that time. She came for the winters (her summer vacations) and lived with me. Three months of intensity, followed by nine months of invisibility. We were both poor. When she left, there would be a few phone calls, followed by a few long e-mails, and then mostly silence, until winter came again. Karina hated the heat. I hated the cold, though I wasn’t particularly fond of heat either. When she came to Chicago, she would take such pleasure in the snow; she looked like a little girl, a child with her head tipped back, tongue out to catch the snowflakes falling down. And then back in the apartment, nothing like a child at all. She came easily. She spoiled me for other women. I can close my eyes and remember the sounds she made, the quick rising tones on in-drawn breaths. She loved snow, and flowers, and animals, but what I noticed most in those days was how much she loved sex, more than anyone else I knew. And when you had sex with her, you couldn’t help but love it too, couldn’t help but love her. When you saw her head tipped back, her back arched—then your own body shivered in response at the pure shining sex of her. You— I—couldn’t help but lay a body down against hers, feel that skin dissolving into skin until the barriers were gone. Or if not gone, then so permeable that we slipped back and forth, so that at times my heart lived inside her chest. She often kept her eyes open; I always closed mine. I would sometimes try to keep them open, but I failed, over and over again. I couldn’t keep looking at her, not if I wanted to see her properly. And when I look at photos of her now, I don’t see the photos, the frozen moment. I see the living woman inside the photo; I close my eyes and feel her skin against mine, her eyes looking back at me, her heart beating in my chest.

  came home tired from working all day but the snow was falling heavy and thick and beautiful so I opened my door and called up the stairs to her to come down and she came down and I put down my bag and she put on her coat and I rewrapped my scarf and she put on the green beret
that she gave me once on a sunny day in San Francisco because I had seen it in a shop and loved it beyond all reason and we went out into the night closing the door quietly behind us and the almost-silence of the snowfall and the crunch-squish of the thick snow over the pavement under our shoes as we walked up one block over one down one and back over and home again and just chatting about the day with him and the day at school and saying goodbye and trying to stay awake in class and how marvelous the crunch-squish was and what fools were the homeowners who had shovelled with their pavements now only thinly covered and their sounds all erased and the dry vines smothered in snow that a few months ago had carried heavy wine grapes all blue-purple delectable and she wanted to know what they tasted like and I couldn’t come up with a way to describe the taste that is grapely but also more than grapely until finally I told her they were like plums which is at least a little true but they are really also like wine and like grapes and like fresh and heavy snow.

  3.

  Kevin and I started dating the spring of my junior year, about seven months before we met Karina. I fell in love by August; it took him until September to admit he loved me too. I had broken up with him by then, but like all the break-ups that followed, we got back together within a few weeks. After the fourth or fifth break-up, I stopped bothering. It was during the second break-up that I met Karina; it was during the second reunion that he started dating her too. When I say that I dated her for three years, it would be more accurate to say that we dated her. Kevin still does, somewhat. Those three years were some of the most intense of my life; I was in love with them both—sometimes I felt that I was nothing but love. When he looked at her with tenderness, I was doubly pierced; by a quick pang of fear, and by a surge of joy. I don’t know if she felt the same, in reverse. He didn’t suffer the fears. Sometimes I wonder—given that she was the first woman I ever really fell in love with (and perhaps the only one)—how much of that love was because of Kevin? Is it possible that my feelings for her were, in part, reflected glory? Can love, and lust, be created out of a vision of the person in your beloved’s eyes? And then what happens, when that vision shifts and changes? There were always difficulties; three months living together followed by nine months apart are not conducive to building and maintaining relationships. And Kevin and I were still living together, while she was away at school in Australia; our relationship with each other grew and changed; our relationships with her stayed static over the long quietness. So when she arrived, pleasure and joy would be quickly mixed with awkwardnesses, irritations, arguments all around. Eventually, love seemed an insufficient reason, and I broke things off with her. She was relieved. They were having difficulties as well, and I have to wonder now how much of my inability to see what I had once loved in her was because of what was between them. How much of my love for her was mediated by him, required his eyes as translation?