by Becca Tierney
(02/22/06)
Sleep
Saturday, the first night they will ever sleep in the same bed, and one of only four or five such nights for the next three years. November outside, a light rain. A dialogue of shadows on the darkened wall.
He sleeps with his lips together in a faint smile. She sleeps with her mouth agape and her arm up, her breast stretched taut and flush to her torso.
One thing she dislikes about him is his inclination toward the jazz station in the car. When she's with him she wants to be surrounded by her favorite songs, none of which he knows.
One thing he dislikes about her is her lack of poker face, and her inability to strategize. She is terrible at chess, and this says so much.
He will manage to keep his marriage, through a series of elaborate intrigues. Some of these involve masks, some involve wild stories off the cuff, some of these need her participation in order to work, and for this reason he teaches her the art of throwing her voice, becoming invisible, imitating bird calls as signals.
She uses the skill to project her voice from the space in his breast pocket, wanting to sing to the world by resonating through his bones. She does not learn well.
She will lose two lovers because of him. She will choose work that allows her to steal time with him.
While they sleep, the ghost of the deer he shot last week forages among her strewn underwear and pantyhose. It was a merciful kill. Some idiot had already shot it in the side and left it to run and bleed to death, trailing its innards like a red flag. He has tried to explain the intimacy between an animal and the person who kills it, but when she nods he remains unsure she understands.
After killing the deer he will gut it and drink a Jack and Coke in a town she doesn't know exists. The same night she will drink a Jack and Coke in a bar he hasn't been in for twenty years, hearing a song he does not know is a song about them.
The world is full of these coincidences, many of which they will never consciously know of, but they will feel them, vague presages and hunches, a sense that they were meant to happen to one another, a sense of the world compelling them to meet.
He would call it wonderful if you were to ask his opinion. She would call it tragic. To her, tragedy is not a wholly tragic thing and to him, wonderful is not a wholly wonderful thing.
Wine
Red in winter, white in summer. White only till Labor Day. White for her just isn't the same without the salted air of the Atlantic close by, just as wearing linen in the middle of the woods doesn't seem as purposeful as wearing it by the water. Her mother always discouraged her from linen, because it crumples during a commute, and then you look crumpled all day at work. Her goal is to never worry about this kind of thing again.
She likes the deep, woody, unfolding tastes, the oldest scotches, the caskiest reds, the bourbon that lasts like a mouthful of earth. At the Nicollet Island Inn, they share an Italian Red that seems all wrong, pungent, dark, deep. It is, in fact, completely right. This taste is the backdrop of their seduction, as she slides her fingers over the freckled back of his hand, causing him to stir in his October linen trousers, as they decide to forge ahead in this terrible idea, their kisses tasting like loam.
The wintergreen mints they eat in the car do nothing against it. A headlight pierces the windshield and causes them both to jump, as he works his tongue into the cavernous warmth of her mouth. They taste this wine, still, tree roots, rain, peat fires, plum, cigarette smoke. Nothing will cover it up.
Sin
She is painting in acrylic on wooden panels on the floor of her apartment, and listening to an author being interviewed on public radio.
The author is appalled at a popular novel in which people commit what she calls a "no-fault" adultery, one which goes unpunished in the story, and this is a serious lapse, both literary and moral, in her opinion.
She chuckles aloud, brush raised and dripping. The only lapse, she thinks to herself, is that everyone knows the book sucked.
Skin
His is covered in a halo of the finest hairs. In the bathtub they sway like certain kinds of seaweed on a reef stone, a rippled shimmer.
He shaves without a mirror, haphazardly hacking away with a cheap disposable razor, yet he won't let her run the tip of her pocket knife along his neck when she ties him to her bed. "Funny," she thinks. He does more damage than she ever would to his neck.
He will let her tie him down though, and his blue eyes get a certain milky, misty quality, the pupils enlarged somewhat when she mounts him and tells him to fuck like he's giving for once in his life and not taking. His back arches, and his cries are more muffled, more muted, more surprised than she's ever heard them. He gives. How he gives. He feels himself flung outward in pieces when he comes, and she smiles in recognition of what she just did.
If she touched the tip of her knife to his neck, she might keep him forever, even more so. No wonder he won't let her.
Her skin has rough patches that she is self conscious about. Sure her belly and her breasts are soft, and the insides of her forearms, but she has rough patches on her shoulders and upper arms, and for some reason, at the bottom of her buttocks, right where they meet her thighs. She has trouble forgetting about them when he grasps and kneads her ass, or runs his fingers over her upper arm.
Her scars are limited to a few isolated dots on her legs and two on her hands. One is from a fence at first grade recess, a scrape she never told anyone about, her own personal and private scar. Another is from nearly taking off a fingertip in art school.
He has a cyst on his back, one small calcified lump between his shoulders. He has a scar on his abdomen, in the fold of his belly, from an appendectomy. There are others, but she doesn't get to know.
Blood
Of all the somewhat esoteric things she has done, the temporary piercings excite her the most. The tip of the needle sinking into her flesh, burrowing under for a little, and emerging out the other side. Her skin is merely an envelope, a dusky, olive, smooth envelope. The pinpoint of pain sends her reeling, powerfully.
She likes to do it to others even more. He lets her pierce him once, but more as a favor than as something to relish. She puts the needle on the strong rise of his breast, the tough moraine of flesh over his heart. It's as close as she will ever come to eating another person alive, sinking teeth into the layers of dermis and bloody meat to the bone. The intimacy of an animal and the one who kills it. She wants him to lick his own blood from her fingertips.
He used to make knives. She has no idea what that entails, but he told her that to test their sharpness he would often cut his legs, casually slicing through his jeans till blood would spread on his thighs.
She hears the story, and in her mind's eye smells the visceral heat of blood. She immediately unzips him, strokes him until he shudders and spurts in her hand. It can't be avoided; it can't be helped.
