She was sitting on the floor reading a book. On a small bookshelf in the Chinatown apartment she kept seven books, some famous works—by Juan Rulfo, Elsa Morante, and Anna Akhmatova—others less lofty, Green Eggs and Ham, Twilight, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Hunt for Red October. It was Akhmatova she had chosen to read.
You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the color of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.
“When I’m done with a book,” she said, “it is also done with me and moves on. I leave it on a bench in Columbus Park. Maybe the Chinese people playing cards or Go won’t want my book, the nostalgic Chinese bowing mournfully at the statue of Sun Yat-sen, but there are the couples coming out of City Hall with their wedding licenses and stars in their eyes, wandering for a minute among the cyclists and the kids, smiling with the knowledge of their newly licensed love, and I imagine they might like to discover the book, as a gift from the city to mark their special day, or the book may like to discover them. In the beginning I was just giving books away. I got a new book, I gave away an old one. I always keep just seven. But then I began to find that others were leaving books where I had left mine and I thought, these are for me. So now I replenish my library with the random gifts of unknown strangers and I never know what I will read next, I wait for the homeless books to call out: you, reader, you are for me. I do not choose what I read anymore. I am wandering through the discarded stories of the city.”
He stood in the doorway, contrite, awkward. She spoke without looking up from the page. He sat down beside her, his back against the wall. She leaned toward him, just a little, so that their shoulders touched. Her arms were crossed, her hands hugging her shoulders. She stretched out one finger and touched his arm.
“If you smoked cigarettes,” she said, “we would have something in common.”
Cut.
“The following day,” he says. It is the following day, a day in the present tense. “Here we are on the following day,” he says. “Tomorrow, one of the two impossible days. Here we are and it is tomorrow.”
“I am a free spirit,” she says, twisting her mouth dismissively, nothing special, her mouth says. “But you are everywhere in chains. You have inner voices to which you don’t listen, emotions boiling up in you which you suppress, and disturbing dreams you ignore.”
“I never dream,” he says, “except sometimes in another language, in Technicolor, but they are always peaceful dreams. The rolling sea, the grandeur of the Himalayas, my mother smiling down at me, and green-eyed tigers.”
“I hear you,” she says. “When you are not snoring, often you howl, but it is more like an owl than a wolf. Who…who…who…that’s how you are. This is the question you can’t answer.”
They are walking on the Bowery and the pavement and sidewalk around them are ripped apart by construction work. A jackhammer starts pounding and it is impossible to hear anyone speak. He turns to her and mouths silently, really not saying anything, just opening and shutting his face. The jackhammer stops for a minute.
“That’s my answer,” he says.
Cut.
They are making love. It is still tomorrow, still the afternoon, but they are both in the mood and see no reason to wait until dark. However, they both close their eyes. Sex has many solitary aspects even when there is another person present, whom you love and wish to please. And seeing the other is no longer required once the lovers are well practiced in their favorite ways. Their bodies by now are educated in each other, each learning to move in ways that accommodate the other’s natural movement. Their mouths know how to find each other. Their hands know what to do. There are no rough edges; their lovemaking has been smoothed.
There is a way it most often goes, a difficulty that usually presents itself. He has a problem achieving and maintaining an erection. He finds her immensely attractive, he protests as much at the moment of each failure, each softening, and she accepts it and embraces him. Sometimes he does succeed for a moment and attempts to enter her but then at the moment of penetration softens again and his flaccid sex squashes up against hers. It does not matter because they have found many other ways to succeed. Her attraction to him is so great that at his first touch she approaches climax and so by touching and kissing, by the use of the secondary organs (hands, lips, tongue), he brings her to orgasm until she is laughing in spent delight. Her pleasure becomes his and often it isn’t even necessary for him to ejaculate. He is satisfied by satisfying her. They become more adventurous with each other as things progress, a little rougher, and this too is very pleasurable to them both. She thinks, but does not say, that the usual difficulty with young men is that they become hard at once and repeatedly but, lacking patience, self-control, or courtesy, they are done two minutes later. These long hours of lovemaking are infinitely more pleasurable. What she says is, and she has thought a long time before saying it: It’s as if we are two women. It feels so safe, so abandoned, both. The second because of the first.
There. She has said it. It’s out in the open. He is lying on his back staring at the ceiling. For a long moment he does not reply. Then:
Yeah, he says.
Another long silence.
Yeah what, she asks quietly, her hand on his chest, her fingers caressing him.
Yeah, he said. I think about that. I think about it a lot.