VI
One More Cup of Coffee
The sky beyond the window now holds the final stages of this good afternoon light ahead of imminent dusk, and every layer of the past feels right there, a touch away, the old life, and this one in its countless repetitions, today a compilation of a thousand ghosts. Michael has no yearning to move. His limbs are heavy, and the covering blankets give him a sense of being buried alive. His place beneath is a cocoon of warmth against the sting of the room’s air. He draws a long deep breath of that cold, tasting the refreshment, and spends it slowly. Beside him, Caitlin smiles. Her eyes are closed and she is flirting with the notion of sleep. The smile could be for anything but he knows that it is in acknowledgement of him. She is reading the sigh, from experience, as a draught of satisfaction. Her own breath comes steady and small, unnoticed except by comparison.
A little after three o’clock. Still early, but already the day feels drained of its juices.
He settles back on the pillow and allows his muscles to slacken. After a minute or two, Caitlin stirs from her own rut and eases against him, turning her body into his. He draws the blanket up around her shoulders to protect them both from the cold.
‘Like old times,’ she whispers.
‘Not that old,’ he says, just to tease.
But talking is a mistake. Words only get in the way. Spells are brittle things; difficult to cast but easily shattered, and now that he has track of the time, sleep is no longer a viable solution. He sighs again and closes his eyes, but the darkness he finds waiting has a suffocating heft. Against him, some thought causes her smile to widen, and he feels the tiny pinch of her teeth digging in through his undershirt’s cotton just above his right nipple. It’s not a bite and it doesn’t quite hurt, but it hints at the potential for more, and in response his hand moves, in the laziest way imaginable, down her body, over her hip bone’s curve and the smooth stretch of her thigh and then slowly back up again across the corrugating jut of her ribcage. She hums playfully.
‘More?’ she asks, teasing.
He grunts. ‘You wish.’
The place could benefit from a fresh coat of paint but, as with most pit-stop hotels, a premium is put only on the essentials. Yet the egg-white walls and ceiling, faded and rubbed as they are by the creep of time, fit well within the day. The light dictates terms here; darkness gets by in more suggestive, insinuating ways. And it is easy on the mind, something to look at and think about without having to actually care. Streaks of a shortcutting brush are clearly visible across the ceiling, especially where the daylight catches. Such things don’t matter much, but details fill pictures, and Michael toys with the implication, relating this shoddiness to other things – to what he and Caitlin have together, to life with Barbara, and to himself, all facets of himself. He lets his mind run until sadness hits, then pushes such thoughts away.
Lying against his chest, Caitlin can again feel the dull drumbeat of his heart. The sensation soothes at first but then all at once begins to trouble her. She thinks of a trapped bird careening over and over into the bars of its cage. When she can bear it no longer, she pulls away and slides out into her own space in the bed. Her breathing comes in stabs as the new cold hits her, but she waits it out. The tendons of her back and limbs tighten, and when she opens her legs beneath the blanket she can feel the void that Michael has left her with. A trickle of warmth weeps from her and her pelvis shifts in some sort of impulsive retrospective gesture, but instead of recapturing the fullness of her memory it merely emphasises the sense of solitude. She shuts her eyes, keeps them closed for some time and tries as best she can to regulate the intake and the expending of her lungs. She is weary, and sleep now would be a magnificent end to things. But sleep will not come because she can’t let it.
The bed sheets cling to her feet, thighs and low stomach. Her skin is still clammy and her nipples, puckered to smallness, have become hard as nutshells. Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, and with the bulk of an hour still left to them, they’d be resting to recuperate for round two, and in their minds and together running the kind of calculations that would allow them yet another shot at the title. But time changes so many things. She makes do now with stretching her limbs to their fullest extent, pleasuring in the hymn of resistance that her body sings. Even the soles of her feet ache. Ever so slowly, she is turning to stone.
‘You okay?’
For a second, Michael’s voice seems alien. Then it reattaches itself, or the sense of it does. He has the blankets pulled up to beneath his armpits. She knows every inch of him, by kiss and by compassion, but even after all that has been shared, he still feels embarrassed to be seen by her. She smiles, keeping as much of it as possible beneath her surface. But he fails to notice. And then she stops smiling.
‘I’m just thinking,’ she says.
‘Thinking.’
‘About us.’
‘What about us?’
‘I like the sound of it. The word, I mean. Us. You and me equals us.’
He laughs. It is a small, deep-set sound, utterly inoffensive, that rattles like rocks in a can. ‘I like it, too,’ he says. ‘After all these years, finally being raised to the status of a mathematical equation. Who wouldn’t like that?’
‘Smart-ass. No, I’m just weighing up.’
‘And here we go with the fat jokes.’
She smirks, despite her best efforts not to. ‘Fine. I get it. Vaudeville awaits. Now, you done?’
‘Yes, ma’am. Sorry.’
‘I wasn’t going to mention this yet, especially since the day up until now has been so nice, but there’s something we’ll need to talk about.’
‘Sounds serious.’
‘Well, it could be. I keep telling myself that we have time, but no one ever really knows. We’ll leave here and you could be hit by a car, or I could. That’s how it happens, you know. An accident, a heart attack, a bolt of lightning. The world is turning at a thousand miles an hour. Sooner or later, we all get spun loose. No one avoids it for ever, and nobody is ever prepared. And once it happens, all that remains are the things left unsaid, and the promises that can’t be kept.’
Gales of wind beat at the glass but feel kept at bay for now, and in this bed, warm and safe on the edge of sleep, the stillness holds. The notion of love remains a distant but dominant focal point, hanging like Jupiter above Coney Island, a golden chink of light after several million miles’ worth of emptiness and dark. Knowing that, and believing in it, is what sustains her during their time apart, particularly during those interminable nights when the borderlines of the apartment contract and the tedium turns crushing. A glint, just to capture her imagination, to lead her on and, hopefully, get her through.
Nights for her are always the worst, lying there while Thomas slumbers, cut intentionally adrift to the outermost margins of her side of the bed, not just to get away but to bask in feeling condemned, and staring, in a kind of mute rage at first but with the slog of hours in an increasingly lumpen and hypnotic stupor, at the familiar shapes of the room furniture reduced to looming silhouette and at the dead-black, inch-wide crack of the wardrobe door hanging ajar and hinting at a special kind of netherworldly doom beyond.
The memory of Michael then is always within reach, his face familiar down to its planes and hollows, the slight cleft of his chin’s dimple, the creases that rake his brow and nest along the corners of his steady, occasionally hawkish eyes. She likes to imagine being married to him, and wonders often about the sort of life they might live, so bound to one another. Would it still be love, would it all come apart once there was no longer the exciting shade of danger to smear the details, or would their intimacy somehow develop into something even greater? Love might be a fusion of the indecipherable and the familiar, but could the delicate balance still hold if one element were to so out-muscle the other? Such questions are a torment, especially during the small, desperate hours of night, but sometimes, isolated beneath the sheets and sweating into the pillow, she’ll p
leasure in this pain and even make efforts to heighten it, urging herself along with a knowing touch, into a battleground of pure feel, rubbing until the spark ignites to let her know the bristle of herself and then soon or soon enough the soft, meaty fire. She hates herself during these moments, and especially in their cooling aftermath, a hatred that is ridiculous in and of itself and yet genuine and genetically earned, the chastising haunt of good old Catholic guilt, seemingly dug out a clear couple of generations back, treated into apparent oblivion by questions and by logic, but there still like turned air along the extreme edges of life, designed to mark the divide between absolutes of bad and good and, always, to inhibit. Yet she can’t stop. Sin – if that is what this is – fuels her, helps her to endure. And alongside her, blissful in his rut, Thomas sleeps the damned, dead-weight sleep of a man who has long ago found contentment in settling, and she likes to look at him in the darkness even as her body strains towards the shock of a higher state, because seeing him there, so near and so close to sharing in her deception, adds to her sense of despair, and her loneliness. Her touch quickens and sometimes she has to bite down on the edge of the quilt to keep from crying out, and all the while, even as her eyes absorb her husband’s shape and character, shut-out, muscle-slumped, slightly nasal in his dreaming, her head teems with thoughts of Michael, with sense-recollections of his hands on her, his fingers, his weight against her, the bloated pounding of his body and the whistle that edges his breath as the frenzy nears for him and then explodes.
This thinking and doing represents an intense kind of cheating, not merely the fireworks and streamers of an affair but one brought right into her deceiving half of the marriage bed. And it is such a better step removed from those nights, blessedly occasional these past few years, when Thomas can’t take to sleep so quickly and after twenty minutes spent boring into the latest Louis L’Amour Book of the Month Club instalment, Under the Sweetwater Rim, Trouble Shooter, Ride the Dark Trail, something like that, stirs and reaches out for her, his voice and words half begging, half insistent.
She bears his advances by turning away. It doesn’t stop or inhibit him, but it at least spares her the ordeal of having to participate and frees her up for the running of her mind games. She lets him help her out of her underwear then, telling him to kiss only her neck and collarbone, if he must kiss her at all, and not to speak, or to do so only in whispers. And from there it is minutes more to an end, time made flesh with him wrestling against her from behind, the stubble-ridden scrub of his mouth and face furrowing into the crook of her neck, hissing muddy sounds against her ear. The reality is true enough, at least on a nerve level, but the darkness loosens facts, and in this position, stretched out on her side and facing the wall and the doorway, she can close her eyes and disconnect, so that Thomas quickly loses one identity and takes on another. There is always music playing low, soft summertime country, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson or Tom T. Hall, and even when her husband starts to speak of love, whispering it as a boiling wetness against her skin, the night has already begun to ease and turn calm, so that his words count for nothing. Caught in that clinch, with his forearm and cupping hand tucked beneath her armpit and curled around her chest, holding her against him, her loneliness feels immense. And even when her body cries out, or even if, as tends to be more likely, it doesn’t, she understands completely that, without Michael, she is alone. Not lost, exactly, because she knows where and who she is – but lonesome. The way half the world probably feels, the half who have stepped wrong and lost out on a soul connection, the half whose marriages have already sprung and are now in the sluggish, painful process of winding down. The way a god might feel, if there is indeed just one of them and not an entire Greek or Celtic plethora and if the heavens really do gape with otherwise utter emptiness. And after Thomas has finished and fallen back into the sleep of the contented and the ignorant, she is left alone to toss and turn and finally, inevitably, to ponder. The heart asks so many questions and offers such a multitude of consequences. She has sweated and shivered away countless thousands of hours chasing its promises and trying to understand their meaning and intent, she has held them in her mouth, tasting their shape and feel, and has let them run her body and soul into the sky and into the ground. And now, short of anything definitive, she has settled into a state of denial.
‘Love,’ she says now, considering the white hotel room around her and the dead white Coney Island sky beyond the window, ‘is the story we make up to justify all the rotten things we do.’
‘So cynical. And you a writer.’
‘That was true, once upon a time. Or nearly true.’
She looks at Michael’s profile, then looks away. Her voice, when it comes again, has fallen a notch.
‘Thomas is in line for a promotion. Assistant Regional Manager for the Midwestern district.’
Michael opens his eyes, but doesn’t move.
‘Sounds like a big deal.’
‘He thinks so. Lately, he’s taken to speaking in capitals.’
‘When will you know for sure?’
‘A couple of weeks. A month maybe. I don’t know. But he’ll have to fly out for some interviews between now and then, so I’ll have free days. And nights. If you’re interested, I mean.’
‘Is there a chance he won’t get it?’
‘There’s a chance, but it’s his turn. And it feels wrong to go wishing against him, because this is what he wants, what he’s been working towards, all these years. It’s just that everything is happening so fast. I’d settled, you know. In my mind. I’d really begun to believe that where I am now is where I’d always be. And I don’t just mean New York, I mean my life. I made myself into the person I am. It wasn’t all by choice, and I lost things along the way, but that’s how it worked out. I settled. And now, Peoria. Christ, I can’t even picture the place in my mind. I’ve seen photos, of course. When he first mentioned it, I went and looked it up. But a photo doesn’t make it real for me.’
For a while, she is resolute in keeping her eyes shut. It is a trick, but her mind equates darkness with the altered perception of reality. In the shapelessness of dreams, time has no limits. Whole lives can pass in half a heartbeat and a perfect moment can somehow stretch towards for ever.
The room’s stillness holds and soothes. The bed sheets are nice where she has warmed them but bitter cold even at the merest inch’s remove. The material, coarse from starching, feels surprisingly good now against her skin, and she thinks about the number of lovers, both honourable and illicit and in varied combinations of age and gender, who must have come together to share this same space, these same sheets, to sweat and breathe and spill in an effort to sate their essential appetites. She imagines them, slightly repulsed by the idea of their strange bodies and slightly thrilled too, but stops short of thinking of them as people with lives as real as hers, with feelings and needs in any way the equal of her own.
When she opens up to the world again, everything has changed. The afternoon’s glare has stiffened into a sullen dusk. Wanting more than anything to stay here for ever, she sits up in the bed and runs the fingers of both hands back through her unkempt mess of hair. The hour has the feel of midnight, with nowhere near that depth of dark but with the same sense of lateness, and the caution that forbids or inhibits loud talk. She discovers that she is tired and, despite everything, happy. These late afternoons are a box of contentment, worlds and lifetimes removed from her regular existence. Partly in demonstration, partly in thanks, she turns and leans on top of Michael, setting her weight both-handed against his upper chest, and kisses his mouth. Almost asleep, he is taken by surprise and for a second his breath seems to stick inside of him, but then he lifts himself to the challenge and she feels his teeth part and his tongue gently daub the flat of her own tongue. She smiles, which causes him to smile, too.
‘A taste,’ she says, pulling away and climbing down the mattress on her hands and knees towards the foot of the bed. ‘Not a meal.’ The sound of him follows her,
his dozing, half-hearted protests that seem childlike because she does not get to see his face in conjunction with the voice.
Finally, the thermostat is beginning to do right by them. She can bear the room’s air, if just about, and elects to dally in her nakedness, conscious of Michael’s stare but pretending not to be. His attention is no longer about hunger. These days, one fall counts as a clear knockout. But she likes that he still desires to look. She eases her hair back from her shoulders and lets it spill to a midway point of her back, and the simple gesture of raising her arms achieves the effect of moulding her body in the way a sculptor might, shaping everything just right, tucking and stretching, emphasising the curves and undulations. She raises her head with a kind of knowing pride, stiffens her chin, and moves to the window.
The magic of earlier, the rusted, rotten splendour of rides peeled down to skeleton husks, has been absorbed by the twilight and there is little now to be seen apart from suggested shapes. She can identify details only because she knows they are there. The world is altered by the day’s dying, even though, in physical terms, nothing has actually changed. Still, she stares, past the ghost of herself growing ever more definitive in the glass, while the wind beats out the last gleam of the twilight and the minutes pass, and night comes down. And when she can see nothing more beyond her own reflection, she draws the curtains, turns and switches on the room lamp.
My Coney Island Baby Page 15
