My pain was like hers, from wanting her all this time, from wanting out, from being trapped, from wanting life. We made the motions of living but we were dying in a hurry. Soon I’d be gone and my kids would grow old and they’d croak, too. It was a knot, a loop, twisting and choking me off from what I needed, from life. You don’t even know, but you’re dying right now. She was quiet. I ate the pill.
Below the open window I heard people in the parking lot. Out in the bay, a lone sailboat crawled along the razor line of the horizon. I heard “Call Me Maybe” ringing in the courtyard. A moment later I felt my sinuses release. I took in huge gulps of seaborne air. I tasted life on my tongue. My lips cracked. My mouth was as dry as a chalkboard. The stitch in my back from softball, or from that crappy mattress in the Barn, or from yesterday’s nine-hour drive, which had crippled me, was gone. I’d been gritting my teeth, trying to outrun it, but hadn’t realized it. The drug came over me in surges of undulating serenity. She closed her eyes, so I took another pill and choked it down.
Light came in waves, sound came in waves. Cicadas out the window sounded like distant machinery.
“It’s numb,” she said, touching her splint. I had a similar thing going on with my face. I drifted in and out, alert but adrift, in love with mankind. The lower parts of us rhythmically dry-humped. I’d crawled into bed with her at some point. My heart beat time with nature’s green machine. I understood the language of insects. I thought this was the most beautiful little room on earth, and humped her harder, the two of us crammed in together on her twin bed. I felt a cool sensation around my mouth. It was drool. I was drooling. She broke her thumb once playing field hockey, something else happened skiing, I wasn’t listening.
It wasn’t just the ache in my back. My whole helmet was gone, the whole case of mistaken identity that had chained me to the furnace in my basement for the last five years, the whole doomed, provisional future, the sodden memories of rancorous domesticity: poof. I’d drawn a new circle where the head had been.
Out the window an Evian banner chased an airplane across the bay. “Gangnam Style” rang out in the courtyard. I felt sluggish, a little queasy, like a sick kid in heavy pajamas. I slipped my hand in, stroking and cupping her everywhere. Amy leaned back and opened her mouth and reached up with her good hand to feel my face.
“Nobody touches me except my kids. No hands on me, no skin against mine.”
“Same deal at my house,” I said.
Thoughts of Robin back home raced in and I forced them out, and told her how happy I’d been all those months, to have someone lighting up my phone night and day, thinking I mattered, like sugar in my veins. A good day meant steady updates and flirty pics or news of my appearance in her dreams and fantasies, and a bad day meant no word at all, and when we cut off communication my world went dark, so I talked to her in my head, like a lunatic, the same way she did with me. I listed my favorite photos of her, the one at a fancy lawn party in a short dress, pretending to shoot herself in the head out of boredom, the one of her on a sled with kids on her lap, and the one in pink undies. I recounted her nighttime phantom visitations, and how I could feel her actual body, hear my bed creak, feel her warm weight upon me, her knowing hands and pliant parts, her voice hissing in my ear. Either you’ve been there and know or you haven’t and think I’m nuts, but I swear, it happened. I told her how the thought of Lily’s surgery made me cry, how I’d worried about her kid until my head hurt and prayed in my own unaffiliated way for her to pull through. I felt ashamed in confessing, and Amy reached up and whacked me so hard with her splint, it folded and crunched my ear like a bag of Cheetos. But it was an accident, and only meant to be a loving caress. It didn’t hurt at all. Every gland in my body felt fine. Her teeth banged into mine as she worked my mouth with hers.
“You know,” she said, pulling back, “it’s hard to take a picture of your own butt.”
“I wondered about that.”
“You wave it over your shoulder and hope for the best.”
“You had good results.”
Her hand lay between us, the fingers turning blue. She slurped at the saliva gathering at the corners of her mouth.
“Oh God.” She’d been smiling. “Do other people do this kind of thing?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s what I keep telling myself.”
The air grazed my skin like velvet. The drug made me feel like a long-eared gnome. I decided to remove my shorts. Underage shoplifting and vandalism, passing out drunk at the wheel and totaling my father’s car, knocking up my high school girlfriend, knocking up another girlfriend in college, abortions, miscarriages, loose finances, unrealistic or laughable ambitions, wild statements in art and in life, flushing away all of our money for the thing gently rotating on a rich lady’s wrist—these were impulsive acts or the unintended consequences, nothing earth-shattering, but here was another one. I felt stupider in my underwear, and lifted the hem of her T-shirt, and yanked it over her head.
She was bigger and longer than ever. Her bra was padded, cinnamon-colored, with a wire in it. I knew she was ashamed, that she never took it off for him. I knew everything, and followed her nipples around the room until I nearly fainted. The soft arc at the bottom of her breasts described what they’d been, full, on a broad frame that matched her collarbones. Her nipples were small and cute and tasted metallic. Her skin was softer than Robin’s, although Robin’s was pretty soft. Her underwear was nude with scratchy lace, and she lifted her hips and I threw them on the floor.
“That’s it,” she breathed wildly. She wanted to be naked, wanted to be stripped. “Let’s make a bet,” she said. “And if I win, you have to come with me and my kids to Disney World.” She touched me with a silky, absentminded caress.
“And if I win, you have to dance around the room naked.”
“We’ll get Mickey ears and binge on Twizzlers.” Her index finger and thumb lazily circled my business, as if she’d read in a Vatican-approved periodical how to apply the minimum of wifely contact to satisfy the required manipulation, though it seemed that between her hand and her brain there was that characteristic disconnect I’d grown used to during intervals of our intimate engagement. Like the hand was into it, even though the head instructed the hand to chill and maintain a demure proportion of modesty.
“Or go someplace out west, with little cabins.”
“I missed you.”
“Can we talk about what happened?”
“I never should’ve gone to your house in March. That was a bad idea.”
The mention of it seemed to derail her. “When you left that day, I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to tell someone, ‘That was my boyfriend. We just broke up.’?” She must’ve meant her housekeepers. She never mentioned anyone else. They shared a bedroom in her basement: Perlita, who wiped the baby’s ass, and the Salvadoran woman who’d lost her restaurant in the economic crash and now did laundry for a living, and the nanny with scars on her face who babysat on weekends and cleaned the rest of the time.