by Scott Andrew Smith
(06/25/08)

"...and my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me -- not even God."
                                  --Anne Sexton, from "Divorce"

You find the cemetery on a road like her. A two-lane, unlined road made longer by the way boundary fences urge the asphalt into a narrow meander, a pothole shortcut overlooked in the summer's repaving, a road with wounds even the best spot-work cannot keep from scarring. This is not the freeway, not a straight, clearly marked path drawing together the state's lower and upper halves with cruise-control ease, but a road of blind corners and no shoulder, tight curves and uneven surface. This is a road that demands attention, invites your gaze and tempts you to leave the straight and smoothly paved and roll the dice. This is a road you have to keep your eye on.

She sees the road up ahead, on the right, the two of you returning from your first trip to the city. She sees it coming, spots the barely visible sign among untrimmed tree limbs. She leans forward, points, and tells you to turn off. You explain that though you grew up around here, had been to the city as a kid with your father, you'd never taken that road, never even seen it.

She pleads, teases, explains that she never likes to return the way she came. She tells you that as a girl she used to sprint into the woods at breakneck speed, eyes half closed, and then come out a different way each time.

You aren't sure. It is late, you explain, you don't want to be lost. She asks you again, this time reaching one hand to the wheel and nudging the tires toward the shoulder, smiling. You turn, unable to help yourself from giving her what she wants. It comes easily this early, just two months into falling in love. She squirms in her seat, giggling at getting you to do something you didn't want to, like having sex on the floor of your boyhood bedroom before coming downstairs for her first Christmas dinner with the family. She squirmed like that then, shifting ever so slightly in the finely upholstered chair at the dining room table, your cum oozing into the red panties she'd bought for the occasion.

You stare straight ahead at the pavement, which looks to you more like the surface of the moon than a road. You steal an incautious glance at her knees, which angle toward the door and part just enough to tempt your right hand, which had nervously joined your left on the wheel since turning off, from steering. And, then, in an instant, just as the road has finally settled into a brief patch of straight and you can relish a moment of calm and move your hand toward that welcoming angle of thighs, she jumps in her seat, turns her head suddenly to the side of the road and tells you to turn around, to turn around, that you have to turn around.

You are certain you have hit something. You ask what is wrong.

She turns to you, the car now pulled to a stop and you anxiously checking the rearview mirror, and says that you have to turn back, that there's a cemetery back there.

You do, executing the panicked back-and-forth maneuver of a man on a road of blind turns he's never fingered. You think that perhaps seeing the cemetery will mean you can head back in that direction, back to the main road, the one you know. You're willing to take longer to get home, just for that.

She points to the left. You see it, pull into a small gravel road that, within just a few feet, is grown over with grass. She tells you to stop, to leave the lights on, and before you can say an objecting word she is out the door. You never leave the car, stay put behind the wheel, shaking your head no as she stands in the headlights and mouths first an invitation, then a dare. She gives up trying, turns into the darkness and walks toward a few haphazard rows of tombstones. You watch her go, her body coiled inside taut blue jeans and a snug tank top. Her rings glitter in the light. This is the first time you have seen her from behind and your heart races, your fear of being shotgun-chased away by a farmer, roused by the headlights, turning into a subtle foreboding and then, as she squats before one of the markers, into a desire that thickens you. Later you will tell her to turn around as she is astride you, your hips clawing at the ground of her ass, the backs of her thighs, her sex, dewing.

She comes back to the car and says, okay, we can go home. You don't back up though you couldn't wait to get out of there, instead leaving the car in park and kissing her and turning off the lights and killing the ignition, pulling her onto your lap and easing the seat back in one motion, both of you fucking through denim.

On the drive home you talk of cemeteries. You tell her that you used to wander the gravestones in the city cemetery when you were sixteen, that you'd take the car and head out in the afternoon on Saturdays, telling your parents you were going to the library or a friend's and walk, head down, among the markers. That sometimes you would sit down against a tree and stare at mourners in the distance. That your senior year of college, home for winter break, you used to put on two jackets and a scarf and sit next to your grandfather's grave, the grandfather who'd died when you were seven, and roll cigarettes in the last, cold hour of light.

She tells you that she used to run through the local cemetery at midnight as a kid, racing the others in her neighborhood to see who was brave -- and fast -- enough to reach the other side first. How she'd traveled the country in search of them, from desert graveyards of the West to ancient boneyards in Massachusetts and Virginia, photographing the headstones, rubbing the names and dates into newsprint with thick sticks of charcoal.

You will come back three more times that first autumn. She will do the rubbings after lunch, kneeling before the markers, her right hand rubbing the chalk furiously into paper that she holds with her left against the stone. From this angle she looks as she does when straddling your thighs, working your cock in slick-fisted hands. She lays the rubbings on the grass, rocks on each corner, sprays them with Final Net and lets them dry in the sun as the two of you tire into a nap, your bodies fixed together in the shade.

You talk all winter about the graveyard, anxious for spring and the snow's last melting, ragged grass sprouting up among tombstones that slant in all directions like the mouthful of crooked teeth owned by the crazy man down the street, the one no one has ever seen but all can describe down to the long hair of his eyebrows.

You will spend your first anniversary here, kissing under a tree, sipping champagne -- you were nervous she brought it -- and talking about what each of you would want on your tombstones. It is autumn, still warm, and though the sex has already begun to lessen, you are content.

By the first snowfall of your second year together you begin to harden to one another, the house warming as if the very walls are trying to resuscitate what is growing cold and dying. You begin to track love in months rather than days, stalking it like some elusive beast more threatening than it appears in the cross-hairs of a far-off anniversary.

You find yourself touching her less, wanting to touch her less. The thing that both of you thought would never happen, the thing you never think will, does: the sex becomes routine and regimented. You retrace your bodies into one another in familiar ways, following a patterned touch and timed-out bliss. You begin to mark love rather than make it like she did the bread whose soft scent once filled the house on Sundays and whose middle, which you'd thumb your way into too greedy for the loaf's cooling, reminded you of her cunt.

Her body becomes a sort of obstacle, a hazard to be avoided. Where once the accidental brush of shoulders at the sink would lead to fucking against the kitchen cabinets, the hunger too impatient for the second or two it would take to get to the floor, now the most innocent of contact leads to tension, to questions about the rarity of such a thing.

It is the time when troubled conversations last longer than the torrid lovemaking used to, when the relationship is more a series of skirmishes than a long, lazy walk through a field that has yet to even imagine the weight of cannons and wounded, strewn across its grass like a grim, heavy surprise.

The bed starts to feel like an island, like a morning will come when the tide turns and one of you will be unable to make it back, drifting into silence mile by deep, blue mile.

The furniture begins to remember its intention. Chairs reacquaint themselves with the weight of one body rather than two, her legs once slung over the arms and spread wide like the book she holds in her lonely lap, turning the pages on a story just distracting enough to keep her from the one you've been writing together. The couch now becomes the ground for tense hours before the television rather than long minutes with the two of you twisting like cables, crackling against one another with a current long-since misplaced. The dining room table recalls the dishes not the depression of your body pressed down by hers, your cock never full enough. The blinds close not to hide your first-floor, upright lovemaking but to dam up the light, the outside world that tempts you both with leaving.

You make it through winter. You trim the tree and dance on Christmas Eve. You open the gifts tagged for the both of you, the "and" between your names looking menacingly like the dash between the years carved in granite above a body rotting six feet down. You exchange uneasy, "who will get this?" glances.

She gives you an antique money clip. You'd commented on this in the store around the corner from that bed-and-breakfast where you'd fucked for hours in a four-poster bed, said that one day you'd like to be out to dinner with her and pay for the bill with cash drawn from a silver clip like that. You'd imagined that the clip might sparkle, that you might catch your own reflection as you gaze down at the money, your eyes anxious to get back to hers.

When you open it you fake a response worthy of your aunt's high-neck sweaters. You fight back tears, your imagination turning, in an instant, to what it will be like to unclip money and pay for take-out on another night alone. In a few weeks you will put the clip around tens and fives and a few ones and try to remember the last time you took her out for anything but a movie rental and a drink that never leads to sex.

You give her a silver-handled hairbrush, thick and heavy. She'd joked one night, running late and still combing out her hair, that she might need paddling for being so tardy. You'd told her to kneel over the lid-down toilet and took the cheap, plastic brush from her, turning the bristles toward you, tracing a line down her spine and hitting her softly and then harder, hard enough to break the brush in two, hard enough to lead you to forget the reservation and mount her there, the two of you on your knees on a tile floor still moist with the humid air of long showers.

She smiles, sad, and you're sure you've lost the tenderness that once tethered two people tightly enough to allow such bruising.

When spring comes the tombstones return to your life together like a desperate habit, like something you'd quit for months but light up again, the comfort all gone but the burn easy and familiar, something to hold onto. You plan weekends away around them, choose restaurants in neighboring towns based on whether a graveyard is nearby. You go to D.C., to Arlington. You'd come to see tombstones bearing the names of soldiers lined back into ranks after thousands of last breaths taken alone, taken miles from a mother or wife or the girl they'd fucked in the backseat after the prom. You walk the columns without saying a word, go back to the hotel and do not make love.

When the pictures are developed they show countless slabs of snow-white alabaster, the only shot of you a photo, taken by a stranger on the street, your bodies stone-still next to one another, faint, foolish hope etched into your faces.

There is not one couple buried in the St. Paul's Church cemetery, the cemetery you found on a road like her. Not one couple. The occasional stone says something about a beloved wife or a child taken too soon to God, but the ground is filled with people uncoupled and unattached -- children's bodies named but orphaned, beloved wives or devoted husbands buried next to strangers they may never have known. You'd failed to notice it before but now it occurs to you. You comment on the fact and she notices, too, but lets this pass, lets this settle into the untended space between you.

It is April. She has brought along a lunch packed without asking, as she usually does, what you want. Perhaps she's tired of conversation, perhaps she knows you will only say you don't care, that anything is fine. Perhaps she revels in the silent knowing of what you'd like, maybe she holds onto it because it is one of the last things she can. Perhaps she wants to remember the preferences and tics, the habits and inclinations because the familiarity of flesh has been all but forgotten, except for rare moments when the weather between you breaks and desire rushes from your bodies like unmittened children grabbing at the sun.

You find a spot under a tree you didn't carve your names into, lay out the "horse" blanket and eat, barely looking each other in the eyes. There are sandwiches and pretzels, grapes and orange slices that you eat like kids, the rinds smiling when you cannot.

You nap, side by side, without touching, backs turned. When your body turns your sleep to her, your hand finds the path running under her arm to her ribs and before you know it you are hardening, pressing into her hips, which respond with a just awakened push that could be born of dreams or remembered longing.

She stares toward the tombstones as you push your hand down the bones caging her heart, fingering the crevices, pulling her harder into your cock, which now stiffens into the blue-jeaned groove of her ass. She feels this, returns the movement, such easy sliding even with all that is between you.

She reaches a hand back, around your waist, urging you harder into her body, your hands now playing at the hem of her T-shirt, pulling it up not so as to linger on her stomach but get to the snap button and zipper of her jeans, which you lead down, teeth cool to the touch. She takes her hand from your waist, works the jeans down to her thighs, you doing the same, and without moving from your side, without turning her to you, you pull softly, politely at her cunt, opening it and sliding your cock into warmth that surprises you after all this time.

She bucks, works her hips into yours, the two of you anxious and urgent and almost angry. Your right arm slides beneath her and your left comes to greet it, her hands now grabbing yours, your fingers locketing in front of her heart. You fuck her with a sort of unsteady feel, your arms and hers holding not the earth but each other, your cock and her cunt the only ground worth the footing, the two of you seizing each other like survivors with miles of ocean beneath you and the ship still visible but sinking.

She moans into the air and you are silent, gritting your teeth against the catch, the hook that propels you further into her, her body writhing, shivering as if in fear, your eyes, hers, straight ahead to the tombstones, and her back still turned.

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