Heart-Breaker

by Claudia Dey

  It was rare to see anyone on that section of the highway—the hunters tended to go east toward the founders’ bus and south toward the perimeter, never west because of the sinkholes, and never north because of the reservoir and the people’s water phobia—but you were hyperaware, listening for an approach, devising scenarios and excuses in your head should you be caught talking in this remote part of the territory. Though the rule is not written down, you both knew a woman should never be seen alone with a man aside from her husband or father or brother. The boy did not waste his movements. Off the highway, there was an abandoned logging road, mostly grown over. The running was better there, he said. The boy led you to it. I was happy to see he ran alone. He did not bring his dog. His dog was an idiot.

  You followed the boy’s steps. What am I doing? As if that were the question.

  You wore your DAY OFF sweatshirt with a pair of tan pantyhose. You did not have a lot of choice; there was very little in the way of dressing for sport in the territory. You could not wear your indoor or outdoor tracksuits. The women had outlined their uses very clearly to you. If you had added the belt, the gold eyeshadow, if you had let your hair down, you would be trying too hard. It would appear as if you were meeting someone. As if you were up to something. You had been running for a month, since your conversation with the boy in the back of his father’s truck. A few days before we finally encountered him, you keeled forward, put your hands on your knees, and told yourself to stop. Stop this pursuit. Pursuit of what? A boy? An eighteen-year-old boy? What are you doing? “What am I doing?” you asked me in the middle of the highway. “Supes loves to run at dawn, right when the sun comes up,” you overheard Debra Marie later that day, in the produce section at Value Smoke and Grocer. You also loved first light.

  The boy told you about a diver, a Russian woman who swam out into the ocean, to the places where the water was deepest. One of these places was called the Blue Hole, and there, the Russian woman declared, she would set a record of four hundred feet. No other woman had gone down that deep before, and she would be the first. She would be the deepest swimmer. She would be the deepest woman.

  Before she went under, the Russian woman lay motionless on her back and sipped at the air; it was almost imperceptible. She did this so carbon dioxide would not interfere with her dive. You see, she knew when her body gasped, as it would after a minute or so, it was a trick; she could hold her breath for nine minutes, just over nine minutes. A body floated above a depth of fifty feet. Below that, it became neutral, and at one hundred feet, it grew heavy and began to sink. This was because of our lungs. “I will get to the part about our lungs at the end,” the boy said to you; he was in charge.

  I found it amusing that he spoke about a woman who could hold her breath for nine minutes when you were both still winded from the run. I found it amusing because I am a bitch.

  Above a limestone pit off the shores of Egypt, in the Red Sea (the boy went on) the Russian woman arched her body back and followed a line down through the water. It got colder. It got blacker. Hand over hand, she descended. She did her dive with an iron weight around her neck. She did not wear goggles. Never wore goggles. Always wanted to feel the water against her face, and described the water as thick above and below her body. She barely used her feet to kick. So calm, she appeared almost unfeeling. Here is the part about the lungs. As the Russian woman descended, her lungs halved themselves, and by the time she reached her lowest point, they halved themselves again. They were the size of—here, the boy looked around—this pinecone or, like, this rock. “The body,” the boy said, “the body can do remarkable things.”

  I don’t know that a young man can love the way you love, Billie Jean, I cautioned. Young love may disappoint you. Young love may leave you stranded. Young love is about consumption more than anything else. You know only adult love.

  “Do I?”

  You were fifteen with a thick envelope of money and a long car, you told me. I’m like a gangster, you told yourself. No one there to hear you. On the envelope, your father had written your name in his careful, formal letters. When you know and love someone, your hand relaxes as you write their name. It does not tense. Your father called you twice, and then as the days went on, once a week. Sometimes your mother got on the call and asked the questions a doctor would. About your meals, your sleep, your overall health. Then to say only they were extending their stay. Your father’s work demanded it.

  Your parents told you the new date they would be home. You circled it on the calendar. You would be sixteen by then. Had they forgotten? Looking out at the car parked in the driveway. They had never taught you how to drive. Thinking of all the things your parents had never taught you, all the things you had had to teach yourself, possessed you. You would learn how to drive. You would practice at night. There was a mall down the street from your house, and at night, the parking lot was empty. Under the dim streetlamps, you would execute your maneuvers. You would do this for hours at a time. You saw driving as a discipline composed of parts, and you would master the parts. The immediate challenge was to get the long, cream-colored car out of the driveway without hitting another car. Done on the first try. You grew cocky.

  We started to run every day. Along the empty band of gravel and then off the highway and onto the abandoned logging road, the tracks of which you could barely see. With the boy, we ran in the woods. One morning, the boy stopped you. It was the first time he touched you. He took you by the shoulders. “Lyrics are completely different when they are spoken aloud.” And then, “Sweet dreams are made of this.”

  Other than eardrums bursting and lungs squeezing, what happened most was the diver blacked out. This could occur at the bottom of her dive—the point at which a person is most alone in the world, and will remain so, her contracted lungs, her falling body pulled by the currents—or, more commonly, a few feet from the surface where spectators lay flat on a barge. The spectators wore goggles and put their faces in the water, lifting them periodically to take a breath, waiting to make out her shape, wondering how the diver could possibly reappear.

  “Life is to appear and then to disappear,” you said just before we got the lock for the door. You lay down on the bed, Pony secretly under it, recording you and then rewinding the tape. Pony did not want to think about that statement. It brought Lana Barbara Sr. to her mind. Doing the dinner dishes. Watching her show. Dressing for her suicide. Appearing and then disappearing. Lana Barbara Jr. in her bedroom. Lana Barbara Jr.’s father out at Drink-Mart. Lana Barbara Jr. wanting to fall asleep, but not hearing her mother in the house. Feeling scared. Ashamed by that. Calling angrily for her mother. Stalking around the house. Opening the lid to the tanning bed. The sweep of blue light. Why did they shape them like coffins? And then an overwhelming feeling, a voltage through her body, and getting her feet inside her boots, pushing through the snow to the toolshed, where her mother was sitting on the ground, leaning against the wall, only a few minutes dead. “She looked so good,” Lana told Pony. “Here’s the thing: She looked so good. So relieved. It was like, I don’t know” (Lana had the nervous habit of laughing when she cried) “like I got to see her true face for a second.”

  Just before you die, memories that have thinned and vanished over time come back to you. They shimmer, and then whole reels of activity play across your mind. The deep diver talked about blacking out in this way. She said it was not unpleasant. When she blacked out, she saw women holding out loaves of bread. The ends of their pant legs were wet. There was a river. Children running its shore. And in the woods, men dragging trees behind them to plane into skis. When she blacked out, the diver retrieved the lost parts of her childhood. She was given new information.

  Your open mouth went up against the boy’s open mouth. It was not even kissing. You could not take off your clothes; by then, it was early fall and too cold to expose your skin. For weeks, it was about how your faces met. And then it was your tong
ues, and then it was holding each other. Everyone thinks they have to do something with their hands. To use their hands in an exploratory way. To communicate ambition. For your body, I have ambitious feelings. My hands may be here, but soon they will be in an even more windfall position. You and the boy did the opposite. All you wanted was the weight and firmness of his hands. His hands to hold you in place.

  “Does your dog always stare like that?” the boy asked.

  Looking down at me, standing guard, you said, “She knows things.”

  All I know is loyalty.

  Whenever we lay together on the couch in the living room to watch a late-night movie, the stars of the movie would talk for most of the movie before they got to each other’s bodies. They walked. They fought. They ate dinner. They rode on elevators. They sat on benches. And throughout it all, they talked. When it finally happened, the sex was boring. The talking had ruined the sex. We agreed we would have to find other movies. Movies where the talking was significant only as it related to the sex. Watching you with the boy, I felt you had the correct sequence. First, bodies. Then, talking.

  “Am I good or am I bad?” you would ask me.

  Both. I tried to calm you. Make you feel part of something larger. Humans think they are alone with their actions. If only they would look outward.

  “How can I be doing this, doing what I am doing?” The question an animal would never ask.

  You did it with your hands. You were used to your parents returning home from Europe in the middle of the night. That was when those international flights landed. “Strange hours,” your mother would say, commenting on the travel, summing up her life. It was the night of your sixteenth birthday. You thought your parents had come home early to surprise you. You pictured a candle, some kind of jewelry box. Your father at the piano, your parents singing “Happy Birthday.” Such a sad song, your father would say, the saddest song. All of you breaking into laughter. Not bothering with the lights. Pouring you a small glass of sweet wine. Toasting their girl. That’s what they called you. Their girl. “How’s our girl?” they would ask. When you heard the noise downstairs and went toward it, you did not think to prepare your body for one long fight.

  In the tree, you had read about the hunter who killed deer in water using a rope. You had read it a thousand times. The hunter hid his boat in the reeds, and when the deer crossed the narrow channel, he lassoed the animal and pulled it to his boat, wound the slack around the deer’s neck, and drowned the deer before hauling it to shore. You did not have a rope within reach, but you thought about the hunter as you sat on the intruder’s chest and worked persistently with your hands. That grip. Breathtaking.

  You didn’t hear any glass shatter. You must have forgotten to lock the back door when you got home from your shift at the pool. You heard the heavy door close. That was the sound that tugged you from sleep. Like a pressure change. You could smell the chlorine on your skin, in the tangle of your hair. You hadn’t bothered showering. You tiptoed along the hallway, down the carpeted stairwell, hand gliding against the rail, your eyes adjusting to the pitch dark. All that was familiar to you coming sluggishly into focus. In the kitchen, a far off streetlamp made a ghost light. He stood between the table and the counter, his arms at his sides. Where was your father’s suitcase? Where was your mother? He took a step toward you. Then he said your name. Not your father’s voice. Not your father.

  “When you are a small woman, it takes a long time to strangle a large man,” you confided in me first, before confiding in the boy, and then, overwhelmed by the admission, lost your sense of order. “A python is a marvel. How far can I go? The first explorers asked this question and it strikes me as the right one. How far can I go? You do not know yourself until you have had to resort to violence. Violence resets proportions. The assumption is size conquers. Wrong. The one who conquers is the one who can outlast––”

  You have always been interested in the limits of your endurance, I interrupted you, trying to lead you back to yourself.

  The deep diver used a samurai technique to keep her body calm. If her breath became panicked, she would waste oxygen and not complete her dive; she would either hit an unsatisfactory depth or find, when at her heaviest, she was unable to propel her body back to the surface. Remember, below a hundred feet, a body does not swim. It falls. Remember, the diver had an iron weight around her neck. The technique was about seeing. The use of the eyes. Whereas the eye wants to zero in on a single point, the diver taught it to override the instinct to fixate, and instead take in all of the activity that lay at the borders of sight, all of the small things the eye would normally ignore. This would steady the breath.

  The sex was not about what you could give to each other. It was about what you could withhold. Where you would wait to go. The sex was about absence. It was the only time I had seen a species have sex properly.

  The boy talked to you about blood. Blood traveled hundreds of thousands of miles. It was the only part of your body that got to circulate through every inch of you. Participate in everything. Your blood carried all of your information. “Blood, come, plasma. The fluids. Sex is the only way I can make my interiors exterior for you,” he said factually.

  “Do all of the young men know how to have sex the way you do?”

  “No,” the boy said, still sticking to the facts.

  “I may love your body more than I love you.”

  “That will change,” the boy said.

  “ ‘The snow carried her body three thousand feet. By the time they reached her, heart massage was unsuccessful,’ ” the boy read to you. He did not want to answer questions about himself. He said everyone in the territory was always asking him questions and you, like running, gave him a break from questions. You said, “It’s not your answers that interest me as much as it’s the sound of your voice. See, I do love your body more than I love you.” And the boy responded, “ ‘When Doves Cry.’ ‘Hurts So Good.’ ” Fucking him with your coat on, you encouraged him to read his cassette tapes, his truck manual, clippings from magazines, anything within reach. “ ‘If you want something more challenging, do the workout twice.’ Side Two. ‘Hot for Teacher,’ ‘I’ll Wait,’ ‘Girl Gone Bad,’ ‘House of Pain.’ ” When he ran out of materials, he pulled your coat off you and read the content label. Your coat ceased to be a coat. As it hung on your hook by the front door, you could no longer perceive it as a coat. And when you placed your body inside it and closed its form around you, you felt the boy had taken a match to you.

  “You have taken a match to me.”

  “Night moves,” the boy spoke a lyric.

  It would be dangerous to ignore each other in town. You agreed the best way was to be like the diver’s body between a depth of fifty and one hundred feet. Neutral. When your eyes wanted to see only each other, you had to train them to examine the periphery. You started to visit the truck lot.

  Gold eyeshadow, belt, hair down.

  You brought Pony with you; it was her presence that neutralized the presence of the boy. But, the frequency of your visits was unusual. In their habit of measuring, the people of the territory started to whisper about you and Traps. In their minds, they drew straight lines between themselves and the animals, themselves and other people. When they had sex, they saw lines appear between their bodies. Between you and Traps, they saw a new line forming.

  Of course. Nothing lasted for The Heavy, thought the people. He was not a man rewarded by permanence. And to throw him to the same fate as his father. For his wife to slight him with his best friend. His only friend, the women on Rita Star’s leatherette chairs would correct each other, picturing lines, and how now, no lines led to The Heavy.

  Your runs got longer and longer, and, not one to give in to suspicions, The Heavy marveled at your body. It was starved when you arrived in the territory. Now, it was the body of an athlete. After he carried you to the Last
House, we watched as you moved with deliberate steps from the bathtub to the clean sheets of the bed. On your skin, we saw all of the marks that told us there had been one long fight.

  “You don’t seem to worry about things,” you said to the boy. “To carry them with you.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You don’t seem haunted.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I know only haunted people. I married a haunted man.”

  “I’m young.”

  About this, I do not need reminding, you thought, looking at the boy who, when he first kissed you, was just eighteen. Four years older than your daughter. What of your daughter? Where have you been? You defended yourself, “You can be young and be haunted.”

  “I would rather just be young,” said the boy, nearly twenty now.

  “I love my daughter.”

  “I see that.”

  “I live for my daughter.”

  “I’d be careful with that.”

  “She thinks I was a waitress. All she knows about me is that I was a waitress, and I was never a waitress.” You tried for statements rather than questions, but the boy was onto you, and remained closed. You turned to provocation. “I love two men at once.”

  “That’s superconfusing.”

  “I am betraying people. You are betraying no one.”

  “I have no experience with betrayal.” The boy was growing terse, you felt. Usually he pulled the pine needles from your hair. He stated, “I don’t know how to lie. I am not a liar. I never could lie.”

  You would go to the truck lot less. Make him miss you.

  But, you had no will. “Love cancels you out,” you said, lying naked with your coat open in the clearing. The boy had left you there. You were careful to exit the woods separately. When you were away from him, you were mobbed by the chatter of your thoughts. “And it is such a relief.”