“Of course it’s crazy. Everything is crazy. The whole world is crazy. Didn’t you know that, Heather? Didn’t you know everyone is an imposter and there are no real adults in the next room?”
“I’m very competitive, Jack. You need to know that about me. You need to know that if you want to sword fight with me, I will take no prisoners.”
“Fence,” he corrected me. “Now go into the ladies’ locker room and suit up. There’s a key, so you lock up your clothes in a cubby. Prepare to meet your untimely death at the end of my sword.”
I looked him straight in the eye.
“Very Freudian, this whole fencing thing,” I said. “Very penis-centered.”
“Exactly.”
“This could be your last moment on earth, Jack. Enjoy it.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Zorro laughed. He had been watching our exchange.
“Americans,” he said and shook his head.
“Fuck, yeah,” I said, turning to him, then lifting the uniform off the counter.
*
You learn several things when you stand in front of a man you are drawn to while wearing a fencing costume and carrying an épée in your hand. You learn, pretty quickly, that it is impossible to look anything less than chubby in a fencing costume. You also learn, if you are lucky, that the man you are drawn to looks kind of amazing standing directly in your path, his body turned to provide the most difficult angle for potential punctures, his grin solid and amused. Annoyingly, you also notice that your discomfort somehow fuels his pleasure, so that when he tilts up his visor and smiles at you, suggests a small rearrangement of your elbow while lunging, you want to kiss him and kill him and, above all, land a solid stab to his chest so that you might exalt for an instant in the way he has exalted for the better part of an hour while turning you into a pincushion.
“You are really, really, a mad dog,” Jack said after our twentieth, fiftieth, hundredth exchange. “Who knew? I had no idea. The real Heather is part sociopath.”
“En garde,” I said, mostly because I just liked saying it.
“Let me put my visor down.”
I felt my arm shaking. I felt my body shaking. Whatever Weltschmerz I had felt before was gone. Jack was right about that. Now I felt my blood stirring, my competitive juices bubbling, while Jack slowly, slowly lowered his visor. He smiled, and the visor covered the smile.
Then I attacked.
Walking through the door of the fencing studio, if someone had told me that I would turn into a bloodthirsty savage with a foil in my hand, I would have called that person crazy. But I was a savage. Crazy savage. And I loved the feeling of a sword in my hand, the danger I embodied. This was one-on-one sport, the best kind. My body felt exhausted, but I couldn’t resist attacking.
As soon as I lunged, Jack swatted my foil to one side, slid his blade down the length of my épée, and softly pecked my chest with the tip of his weapon.
“Touch,” he said.
“Touch,” I agreed.
But I kept coming at him. We stood in the en garde position. Whatever instruction Jack had given me was difficult to keep in mind. I wanted blood. I wanted to get him. I wanted to feel the pleasure of sneaking my blade inside his and landing a hit, a very palpable hit, as Hamlet’s fencing supervisor once said in the final death scene. I even imagined being willing to be stabbed if only I could stab him in return. Insane.
But it didn’t matter. I didn’t make much progress. Jack slapped away my feeble thrusts and pivoted to one side. He quartered me for an instant, and before I could do a thing, he had tapped me again with the tip of his foil.
“Damn!” I shouted.
“It takes time.”
“Knitting takes time. I want blood.”
“Talk about a Freudian she-devil.”
“You asked for it, Jack. You opened up this can of worms. I warned you.”
“Okay, let’s finish up, though. I only reserved the room for an hour.”
“I can’t believe how this feels.”
“Feels good, huh?”
I nodded. Then I assumed a position to indicate I was ready. Jack nodded and said, “En garde.” I charged forward.
But this time, before he could turn my charge aside, I pulled back voluntarily. I flicked my wrist over quickly and slapped his épée down. He was too strong for my parry to give me much of an opening, but I slid my blade quickly forward and caught the inside of his forearm. It was not a true hit, but it was as close as I had come in an hour of trying. Jack stepped back and pushed his visor up.
“I think that was a hit,” he said.
I pushed my own visor up. We stood looking, breathing, panting, and I had never felt more alive and sexed up in my life. I shoved the helmet off my head altogether and ran at him and jumped into his arms and kissed him as hard as I had ever kissed anyone. He dropped his épée to one side, and his body swelled to take my weight, and then, in two steps, he had me against the padded wall of our tiny studio, his lips on my mine, the feeling of sweat and blood and anger and heat mixed together in a glorious, painful way.
We didn’t speak. We had no need. He kept kissing me deeper and deeper, and I suddenly felt our bodies click, move to a second gear, a millionth gear, the ancient gear, and then the violence became gentleness, and he stopped and held me and looked in my eyes.
“This is a different Heather,” he whispered.
“Same Heather,” I said, finding it hard to catch my breath.
“You’re spectacular.”
“Shut up.”
He kissed me again. This time he kissed me so hard that I felt my back and ribs flex against the wall. He was strong. Incredibly strong. I kept my legs wrapped around his waist and, yes, it was sex play, it was surely sex play, but it was something else, too, something beyond Weltschmerz, something that annihilated any false thoughts or cheap emotions. I wanted his body, all of it, but I also wanted something deeper, something that had to do with the light in the Vermeer painting, in the soft haze of a morning and the color of a bowl as if filled from the maid’s hand, and I wanted his sweat and swagger and his sword thrusts. Of course it was insanely Freudian, that was obvious, but who cared? If he had pushed me through the wall, if we had created an ebony silhouette like a cartoon character blasting through the side of a mountain, I would have kept kissing him. It was only when someone began knocking, someone far away, and Jack turned slowly, peeling his lips from mine, that we saw Zorro standing in the doorway, looking sheepish, his right hand carrying a clipboard.
“Your time is up,” he said, blushing. “Sorry.”
Jack nodded, and I swung down from his body. Whatever blood remained in my body had turned to copper, and I had to put a hand out on the wall to keep from staggering. For a long time, we remained standing next to each other, both of us aware a touch from either of us could start everything again in a flash.
18
“Raef asked me to go with him to Spain. It’s near the end of our trip,” Constance said. “There’s a jazz festival in Málaga, and he wants me to go with him.”