by Rafi Zabor
"More brown rice?"
"Please."
The perimeter of a lightning flash reached them as he served her. Then a roll of thunder laid itself down across the floor of heaven. "A definite Elvin Jones influence," the Bear observed. "The sky's been listening to Coltrane records."
"If I opened another beer would you spHt it with me?" Iris asked.
First it was a hint in the air. Now the smell of rain and the forest took possession of the house.
"Do you think you'll like it here?" Iris asked him.
"At least it's a respite. We'll see. The arrangements are funny."
"But practical."
"You think so? I don't even need a house, me. I could live out there. Why not?"
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Iris laughed politely. "Sure," she said.
"I mean, what am I doing here? What do I need this for?"
The rent still shocked him—he had parted with three thousand dollars, cash, in one smooth motion—and there was that photographer using the basement installation downstairs who would do shopping and such, but the Bear hadn't met him yet. It all seemed expensive and overhasty. It felt pretty much as if he were being dumped. By Jones, by Iris, by anyone within range.
"I wish I'd met the photographer," he said.
"But he was called away on—what did Stanlynn call it?—an architectural shoot."
"Money talks and I get to wake up tomorrow morning wondering if there's any coffee in the house."
"Aww."
The rain redoubled.
"It was a dark and stormy night," the Bear said again.
"Please," said Iris, and rose from the table. She walked around the obstreperous chimneypiece and out the living-room door. The Bear heard her footsteps sound as she crossed the porch, then the screen door cranging open on its rusty mortal coil. The Bear remained in place at the dining table and helped himself to another mound of garUcked eggplant. Not entirely bad. More tofu perhaps? Was there not another shrimp in yonder carton?
The return of Iris. He saw three drops of rain arrayed on her brow, and diamonds of it in her hair. "The rain is torrential," she said.
"Biblical," the Bear agreed.
"Perhaps I should stay the night and get an early start in the morning."
"There you go," said the Bear. "Now you're talkin'."
He lay in the under the circumstances preposterous brass bed in the master bedroom offset two steps down off one side of the living room and wondered. He had listened to her preparations for bed upstairs, the workings of her feet on the floorboards, their occasional transfers to carpet, the rustle of cloth, running water, toilet's flush. Iris was heavier on her feet than one would have thought. The rain had stopped, but an enveloping damp had hushed down upon the house. He had heard nothing from her in ten minutes or perhaps half an hour. She had turned over once or twice in bed, if the report of mere springs could be trusted from this distance. His whole hfe seemed to lie here gathered with him, bunched and waiting in tonight's particular degree of indigo. Should I go up there? Should I go up there? Does it all come down to this?
He Hked his bedroom. It was large and amorphous in the dark, although
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he could make out an edge of Tiffany lamp and a bit of mirror over a dresser in the middle distance.
Maybe she was nothing to him at all in the long run—a would-be shudder in the loins, a misdirected longing that shook the matrix of his genetic code and no more. Maybe it was wisdom to let the figment go, no matter how charmingly it danced through the rooms of his imagination. Could love sum up a life, as it always tried to convince us it could? Could its motions through hght and shade really assemble itself into an alphabet to spell out ultimate hopes and meanings, or speak the handful of sentences that might finally make us real? It seemed unlikely to the Bear. On the other paw, wasn't love the last sacred habitat in the portioned-down world, or had that range been shrinking too? And wasn't sex the most rampant, greedy and unregarding of our powers?
How could he go up there with just his immense longing, which might only be a hunger, to justify him? It would take a movement of the Law itself. He had made love to other women, but they had been bought for the night. There had never been any question of penetrating the soul as well as the body, the spirit as well as the soul.
The house, which he was renting for a sum that still shocked him, seemed both larger and smaller than Iris' apartment—it was much larger, of course. In any case it was a wholly different sort of space, not hers, nor yet his either, surrounded by sentinel trees whose language, quiet now in the windless damp and likely fog, spoke words which he neither knew nor understood. What time was it? What could happen in a space like this? What could not? The world had composed itself into unfamiliar music. It was not the city out there. It was forest and clearing, and a mountain grading upslope behind the house. He could smell the sweet and bitter earth of the world as given, dark and loamy after the rain, the scented air amplified by friendly ions. Complex, satisfying, factual, mysterious. I am an ignoramus. Will I lie awake till dawn? Should I go up there now? Wait another half hour? Let the moment pass and do nothing?
He had not heard her come down the stairs, for so much thinking and dreaming, but she seemed to be standing in his bedroom doorway outlined by soft Hght from the room behind her, wearing what looked to be a sheet wrapped about her down to the ankles, her arms holding it to her body and leaving her squared-off shoulders bare above. "I couldn't sleep," she said from where she stood.
"Oh baby," was what he managed to say, and then she was walking with quick small steps across the room and around the foot of the bed to stand to the left of where he lay, near phantasmal in the relative dark.
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"Turn on a little lamp," he said, and she found one somewhere, a little lamp with a leaded jade-green glass five-sided shade and a bit of patterned orange silk laid across it. He saw her clearly in its silksoftened Ught.
He didn't get up when she stood beside his bed again, modestly composed in her sheet and looking down at him. He didn't move at all. He had never before felt his heart beat so hard for exit from his body or from the world of time entirely.
"Can you make room for me in there?" she asked.
"I'll do my best," he said, shd to the right-hand half of the bed and raised a corner of the comforter for her to enter. She came in smoothly but kept the windings of her sheet still close about her body. "Are you sure?" he asked.
Her eyes looked at him without blinking, and perhaps her bare shoulders, very square for all the deHcacy of her build, made the beginnings of a shrug. Then she nodded, or almost nodded, yes.
Your move.
As he came toward her across the sheets he could feel time and categories of being rumple and fold between them like the bedding, or like waves of air anticipating the breakage of the sound or some other barrier: there was a buildup, a ridge of tension being crossed, and when he did cross it the Bear was startled to obsenx that he had no clear idea what lay on the other side for real.
She lay there looking up at him, oddly immobile until finally she raised her arms to take him in, turning partway onto her side so that the corner of the sheet she was wrapped in fell undone, although this motion still left her covered. Noticing this corner fall, however, she took it in her hand and, after a modest lowering and raising of her eyelids, lifted her body and pulled the sheet off in one motion and there she was.
The Bear paused in his movement and involuntarily gasped at the beauty^ of her. It seemed to him he had never seen anyone quite so naked, or so finely made, or so revealed. He was shocked to realize how arid his life had been for so long. "There are a few things to say first," he told her with some difficulty.
"How could there be?" Iris asked him, unblinking.
"No, for safety's sake. If you do the wrong things you could injure yourself on me. You're not just dealing with erectile tissue here, there's an actual bone that sHdes, that is just now sliding into place, and unt
il you know my length and your depth you could rupture your cervix against me. So let me lead you until you know how things are for sure."
"Oh," she said, and that got a long slow blink out of her. Her body seemed to retract slightly, though whether away from him or only into itself he could not say. But just look at her, he thought. How can there be this
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much treasure all in one place, and the world still here? "Perhaps you should have given me a manual to read," she said.
"There isn't one, I mean I didn't know this was gonna happen."
"Of course you did," she said.
"I didn't," he insisted.
"You weren't born yesterday. Bear."
"Iris, looking at you like this I feel so full of... I feel as if I haven't been bom yet, but that I might just be about to be."
He had said this awkwardly and spontaneously, but it had an effect on her that no amount of calculation could have done: her physical rigidity, which he realized was fear, seemed to melt, and the Bear saw a blush suffuse first her face and then her upper body. In a moment they were in each other's arms, the Bear was being mindful of his claws and Iris was trying to work out how to give and receive their first real kiss. The Bear had to show her. "You have to cope with my whole mouth," he said, and he opened his jaws and canted his head to one side to show her how it could be done.
"Oh my God," said Iris, not ecstatically, as she looked into his white-and-purple maw. The Bear felt her spine tremble and the effect of it passing into her hmbs, but she let his head come down to her.
"Be careful with my tongue," he said, pulling back at the last moment. "It's rough enough to hurt you if you're not careful. You remember the old Turkish story. I told you that one, right?"
She didn't answer, except for arcing her body upward and pulling him down to her and he was on top of her, they were together, he was losing the sense of where he and where she ... It was happening much more quickly than he had anticipated: she reached between his legs and found his cock emerging ready for her, she was taking it in her hand, she felt it leap in response, and guided it to where her legs were spreading and he could see, could smell, deficious, that she was already thickly wet for him, and before he knew it he was inside her for the first time.
Iris' gasp as he entered was a shuddering intake of breath as if perhaps she had begun to die, and his was one of simpler amazement. Their outbreaths were sighs of release? relief? reception? and then, just as he began to move inside her for the first time, the Bear got the big surprise the night had been holding ready.
What?
He found himself somewhere else entirely, not a trace of as-if about it. Instead of lying in a Shady bed with Iris, he was sitting upright, stage center of a roughly circular cosmological array, in the half-lotus position, which he had never before employed in his Hfe either for sex or meditation, and of
214 Rafi Zabor
which he was no doubt physically incapable. Iris was legspread around his lap, her upper body and breasts pressed against him, her face turned sideways and tongue extended in a ritualized expression of ecstatic reception. He was thrust inside her and they were outside of any time and space he knew about. He noticed, to his increasing surprise, that along with a windmilling multiplicity of arms, he possessed ten or a couple dozen heads stacked and ranked in tiers facing all conceivable directions wearing an impHcit infinity of expressions, from lust and rage through compassion and beatitude and every response your average garden-variety deity might turn upon the universes manifesting around him in a ring. As he and Iris made love in this strange configuration— this isn 't my imagery at all, he told himself, although it sure is easy to see what all those Tibetan tankas are about—their coupling seemed to be engendering the universes—^what?—which he saw arrayed around them in ordered spheres.
Is this really happening? Is this what's always happening, only now we're an instance of it? Well it certainly is different, thought the Bear.
Although he experienced this moment with odd objectivity and calm, it would be useless to deny that it also bewildered him extremely. He heard a sharpened intake of breath from Iris, the imagery shook, and when he looked down at her again, it was with one head only and they were making love in Julius and Stanlynn's old house in Shady, New York, and she was more beautiful than he would have believed possible. He was an earthly, idiotically bearshaped being and he loved her with a fire that consumed every possible difference between them.
She had the disconcerting tic, however, of thrusting her face into his armpit, and when he pulled her out of there for the second time, he saw her head go back and her eyes close and he knew that she was going away from him, sailing out from her body much as he had seen her do in sleep. "No no no," he said, "please please please stay here with me." At this her eyes popped open and looked back at him startled from inscrutable distances of swoon. Then they clarified and she was back with him and they more or less devoured each other for the next ten seconds flat. This was well beyond being just in love. Whatever that meant.
All was not joy in the Mudville of this world, however. If the tantric experience, if that's what it was, had demonstrated that their lovemaking was a window opening onto objectively infinite vistas, back here in the Catskill Mountains there still were bodies to negotiate, souls to align, rhynhms to coordinate, and, restored to themselves out of the annihilating blur of ecstasy, they experienced a mutual clumsiness that had somehow not obstructed them earlier. It was hard to know how she could accommodate his
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hips, difficuh for him to tell where he should rest his body so as not to crush her, although—and this was some help after all—he hadn't gained back all the weight he'd lost in prison. Why, he probably weighed no more than 350 pounds tops, and that made things safer than they might have been. Beneath him, she was so finely made, so naked, so small.
Following this physically difficult phase, they seemed to lose subtler touch with each other, and where, in the beginning, they had sometimes seemed astonishingly at one, now they tugged and shifted, sought better harbor, firmer purchase, quicker release, or reached ahead for some voluptuous piece of finit not available on this particular moment's silver tray, but which might lie gleaming on the next, when they might be striving for something else. Huh, what a way to run a world, thought the Bear not for the first time that day, what poor coordination, considering what's already passed between us. Then he thought of a good question: what has passed between us exactly?
They made eye contact, lost it momentarily in the near-shame of their momentary disarray. Anxiety and disappointment were on the verge of putting in a definitive appearance when Iris and the Bear rediscovered some portion of their earlier intimacy and began to ride it as far as it would take them home. A certain insecurity travelled with them to vex their journey, but when their climaxes came, about thirty seconds apart—hers first, then his pouring into its aftermath before a sufficient gap could insinuate itself between them—trouble as such was gone from their conjunction, even if it quahfied their ending with traces of its having been with them awhile. Still, they broke against each other with cries in whose reaches there might have floated some note of common protest against the limitations of flesh and its perceptions, but the night was annihilated around them anyway and that was it for now.
They wanted to exchange vows of love in the afterpause, but each of them decided separately that it was the wrong moment in which to do so—since, one, it didn't need to be said, and two, were it said now it would be suspect as a possible figment of passionate imagination, the wishful, conceivably corrupt bodying forth of a questionable dream.
"Wait a minute," the Bear said finally, although he did not want to say anything. "That bone I told you about is starting to pull back up into me and I have to get out of you."
"Oh thafs what it is. I felt this movement and . . ."
"I don't want to leave you, but ..."
"I understand," Iris s
aid, and the Bear rose out of her before there was any chance of her being injured by the involuntary retraction of his heterotopic baculum.
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He was determined that such intimacy as they had achieved should not be interrupted, and he took her back into his arms and looked into her eyes. "Are you all right?" he asked with what upon reflection sounded like perfect stupidity.
"Are you kidding? I'm fantastic," she said.
"You are," he said, meaning several things. "You're ..." he began, but she placed a finger against the front of his snout and softly went Ssshhh. The Bear subsided like a wave withdrawing from the would-be shores of speech, and watched her in such silence as the night afforded. She had closed her eyes and laid her head on the pillow.
He marvelled again at the beauty of her throat and the lovely thrust of her underjaw—for the moment sufficient emblem of the essential poignant beauty of all manifest existence—watched her eyes moving behind her eyelids and her pulses marking time athwart the channel of her breath. You're a seabird who has fetched up on my shore, he told her silently with a lyricism even he deplored, tired and beating from your long voyage. You're safe, I swear it. When she opened her eyes and looked at him, he understood that she was still awake. No dumbbell he.
"One thing," he said, although she had closed her eyes again. "I didn't wear a condom but you didn't seem worried about catching any kind of disease like the clap or even AIDS from me."
She opened her eyes and blinked once slowly.
"You sly boots you." He grinned as it dawned on him. "That blood sample you took when I got out of jail to look for traces of drugs!"
She said nothing, but did not look away from him either.
"You worked it up in the lab! You checked me out!"
"I did a fall blood workup," Iris maintained, "which as a matter of fact included a routine test for AIDS. As a bear you ought to be immune to HIV, even if, with your anomalous genetics, I couldn't be entirely sure: for instance you might have proved a carrier. So yes, I made the test. I enumerated the drugs in your system. I determined that you were dangerously anemic and variously infected. I illegally lifted a number of medications for you and fuzzed the bookkeeping so that I wouldn't be found out. Do you want to lodge a complaint?"
