by Jessica Blau
(5/23/01)
Married and older, the gray-haired man takes her to the inn nestled between the mountains and the large, black sea. She is quite younger than him -- she is nearly seventeen, in her last year of high school. She has been waiting for something to happen, something to help her find love and desire. And then he comes along, older and more refined than the boys she knows. In the evenings, he lays her down with her back bright and full beneath him. He arches his chest over her, presses his body into hers hard enough so she can feel his nipples rise up, against, and into her back. He's told her he is married, has a wife and three children. A daughter just her age. Two sons, just two years younger. Twins, he says, how they love their mother. Don't they love you the same way? she asks, and he says, No, not in the same way. Never in the same way as the mother.
Married and older, the gray-haired man is lonely. So lonely that in the night she can hear him crying, softly into his pillow, with her sleeping body lying next to his, tired and weak from their loving.
When she says yes to him, and then says yes again, he takes her, with no solid argument, up the coast of California, to an inn facing the sea. It's lovely, she says.
The first time, she walks alone. She spends her days by the ocean. He watches her sitting in the sun. She is so young and so vividly plain, though he loves her, he thinks, because she made the choice to come with him, to love him for this short time. It is only in the evening hours, or during the breaking of dawn, that she gives herself back to him; fully, completely, with no words other than a here, a yes, a please. He needs her, and he needs her to need him.
He is the sort of ordinary man you would see on the street. The sort of man who would be in the bar or on the bus coming home from a long day's work. The everyday man with an everyday family. A loving wife. Devoted children. A happy home with the usual dysfunctions. The kind of man, when you imagine running your hand down his spine, you would think he'd turn away, or become uncomfortable. He is a handsome man, graying at the temples, fit and healthy-bodied, yet empty. He yearns for the love of a child. For the love of a child that is another's, if not his. At the inn by the sea, he is free in his loving of her. She goes with him because she knows this is what she has been waiting for. A movement, a sign, something to move her life forward. She needs purpose. Her purpose becomes his need for attention.
That first night when evening comes, he approaches her body gently, as if he would frighten her away if he approaches her any more quickly. Slow and undaunting, he comes to her side and raises her tiny arm. She is thin and frail. Her hair hangs down in thick curls around her face, dulled and mousy brown. He asks if she will lie on the bed for him, would you lie back on the bed for me? She asks why, why, and he says he wants to see her body sleeping, I want to see your body sleeping, resting, still-breathing, he says, resting, still-breathing, he continues. He wants to study her, the lines of her body, the soft hairs over her skin. Her youngness. He asks her to lie still, legs close together but not pressed together. He wants her open. He wants to see her. He tells her he wants her quiet, eyes open so he can see them and how the iris moves, opening and closing in the light. Its blackness. Its wide open space. She asks if he will speak to her, and he says, maybe, yes, I might. She says she wants to hear him, wants to hear his happiness. He says, he can't, he has none.
That first night while she sleeps, he watches the sheets curl between her legs. Her adolescent thighs, her calves, smooth and white. She is small and smells of bath soap. He wishes he could bathe her. He wishes she would let him wash her skin. She doesn't talk while she is sleeping, she barely stirs.
The third night she moves along his thighs. Her body is restless and chanting and inside the room of the inn, the sea wind rushes over the bed and onto the floorboards and into their hearts. She feeds him her breast in the late afternoon and he cries into her heart, you are as young as my daughter, and she strokes his hair as if he is injured. She shuts her eyes, opens them wide and says, what loneliness you feel. He asks what she means by this, and she says she cannot speak. Her fingers press flatly on his lips, press into the skin of his lips, press straight through into his mouth, her finger lies on his tongue.
Later he lets her sleep, curled into his thigh with her arms wrapped around his leg, fingers resting gently in his groin of frightened white skin.
In the moist air she stands while he sleeps. Her body circles in exploration and when he wakes his voracity is strong and willful. He takes her in his hands and she says nothing, though her lips are open and wet. Their bodies sink to the floor, she sitting on his lap, the soles of her feet pressed together behind the lonely man's back. She rocks with him inside her. His arms crush around her ribs. She is nearly one-half of his body, and in the silence he can hear the soft murmur of her body opening and closing around him. She breathes.
When she sleeps she makes no sound. Her breathing pulls long and hard from her throat, her body is still and resting. He wants to know what it's like to be inside of the girl. Physically he knows; she is warm and full of softness. He knows she cries sometimes, after they fuck, in the evening, because he thinks she knows how sad he is inside.
Sometimes he lies soft in her mouth. His body limp and aching. He says, it's been years, and she strokes the angular jaw of his face and buries her breasts in his chest. His arms cave around her. She inches her way between his legs, his wiry hair brushing the soft parts of her chin. His loneliness falls straight into the palms of her hands, flies by her like white shadows, and she licks him like a dying, starved animal. She lets the whiteness rest in her hands. Rolls it between her fingers. Touches it to the crest of her lips. Lets him lick it from her chin.
The fourth night he rests between her legs. His hands on either thigh so he can open her, smell her small soaped-up body even though he has yet to wash her. He asks if he can bathe her, wash her with warm water, she tells him he cannot, he asks, but why, and she says nothing.
Day after day she walks around his body. He lies on the floor and she walks over him, on top of him, her light feet pressing into his circular nipples. She lies over him, puts her chest on his, she sits atop his body, her pelvis into his. Night after night he weeps at her stomach. Either lying or kneeling down he weeps to her, says he aches to feel her body, she says, I am here, you have felt me, don't worry, don't worry.
She rests with his head on her stomach, the growth of his beard too hard for her to bear. She pushes his head away, pushes it down into the center of her body. There his beard does not hurt her. He licks her lips while she rests. Her eyes close and open with the cadence of his tongue. With one arm he supports her. Lifts her up with his arm under and around her, palm into the swell of her back where her ribs bend out. Her legs are weak, and while up on her toes he can see her thin shins tense and waver. Inside her there are oceans of hardness. That is why she has come. That is why she can bear to not have him inside her. She tells him to move away. He pleads and asks her why. She says she can't catch the ugliness, the loneliness. His voice, barely audible, escapes through the fine straight hairs on her body, whimpering, cajoling.
The water wakes her in the morning. She is there alone and tired. Her body comes unraveled, and in the light she opens her legs and her hair shines silver on her skin; curls, like flying gulls, cover her body's opening. He has left the room, left her to herself and to sleep and rest. He knows she is most safe in this place, her body in its white thinness without him.
She sleeps still when he returns and he bends to stroke her. His hand over and beyond her breasts, to her shoulders. He lifts her against his body and pets the length of her torso. Her skin is cool and salty. His fingers run to and from her sleeping nipples. They rise and fall into his palm and under his fingers. She says nothing, does not move her eyes, and the way her hand instinctively comes up and into his causes him to weep and shudder.
