I pushed her to start again, to tell it once more, all that she hadn’t told me that
night when we were in the car and it had been raining…
We had been on our way to Atlantic City when she had decided to tell me the truth. She had been lying for a number of months now, but it was plenty of time for her to have been naked on my couch in the blue living room where we had each other the most because she didn’t believe in bedrooms.
“They’re too idealistic,” she had said over and over. And it was so hard to convince her otherwise, but she had moved only as close as the shower. “And not a step more.”
But I still believed in her, in the turning of her back, it had an honest quality, and vulnerable. For most of my life there was a fear of anyone turning their back on me.
And it had been raining that night when I could barely see ahead of me, and she
had revealed much that I didn’t want to know, in the middle of nowhere, black and bumpy tarmac. Her words bouncing in my head and I couldn’t hold onto the wheel, the car kept sliding with each syllable. “Why are you telling me this? Why the fuck are you telling me this now?”
She had replied, “Oh, all right, I won’t say anything more. I just thought you had to know about it.”
Which left me to build pictures one atop the other, a carousal of positions.
Once we had gotten there, I had stared at her in the casino as if she had not one
reason left to be with me and I excused myself from the blackjack table and found the restroom, gurgling when I hit the stall. She waited for me outside and probably thought I had too much to drink but she didn’t leave it alone: “So, does this change anything?”
From that day I shied away from casinos and cloudy days and long rides. I wanted a tranquility in our affair, something domestic, it was still the routine of it: the sex and nagging, the arguments and foreplay, the friends and dinners. We had kept appearances even when apparently we still had sex, and her, with others also. But it had been quiet, between cracks.
…I had not brought it about again, her telling, until now. It might have been a twist in her neck, an inch of skin at a particular angle, just then, I don’t know. I grabbed hold of her from behind as she was washing dishes, “Tell me all of it, tell me all of it right now.”
And she laughed but she knew what I was talking about. When I came close enough to the point where she realized that I was about to break myself through the window, she spun around and faced me, a face so twisted with spit. “I haven’t told you anything in years and you want me to start this shit now?”
She had me right between stations, like a track, like rails across my teeth with her fingertip stabbed in my chest and I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t say anything. I had been pulling and for me to keep doing so when it was to her too fanciful an idea. As if there was a scab beneath the hem of what I was saying. Like it might have been a beautiful thing to see at one time.