He stands at the doorway looking at her. He has been staring at her sleeping. He thinks, I am a corpse fascinated with this beautiful thing that is sleeping. She is naked underneath the sheets and he sees this also because he is the one that undressed her, even though the beige bed sheet covers the lower half of her back. For the first half hour after he awoke, he remembered the night with her, the things they had done, now he is simply studying the curve of her shoulders, the way the wrinkles of the sheet wrap around the rise of her bottom. His eyes often linger at her mouth; the lips open on the pillow, the bangs of her black hair fall over her eyes and jaw. Both of her arms are underneath the pillow, holding it tenderly, as if she was still clinging onto his face, as she done so the night before.
He thinks, I am a corps-
The alarm clock goes off and he springs from the doorway, dropping to the floor, his shoulder grazing the dresser on his left, stabbing into the room. On his knees he clicks the off button, less than a foot away from her. He does not move. The suddenness of his actions and the shriek of the alarm have not disturbed her. His heart is racing and he does not know why, it is not because he rushed to the alarm. A part of him answers: it was your rushing to her, and that is something he is quelling before it has a chance to mangle the peaceful moment he has with her, while she sleeps. Even this rationale disturbs him and he cannot move away, not even his eyes. Not even once does he wonder if he deserves anything, any of this, and he feels guilty for being aware of the fact that he does not question the appropriateness of her in his bed. He merely remains kneeling alongside the bed, breathing, trying to settle it, create some sort of rhythm that will get him on his feet, out of the room, away from her.
Slowly, he reaches out and gently places his fingers on the fold of her arm. A sad strength fills him at the touch of her, he pulls his hand away and he pushes himself up off the floor, turning his back on her as he has done countless of times before.
______
When she awakes, she rubs her eyes and stretches. She pauses, he is not with her in bed, he is not even in the room. She turns and sits up, looking around the room slowly, straining to hear something, anything, that will tell her she is not alone. After a minute, she works her way out of the bed, touching the floor with her feet lightly, bracing herself for the crisp cold of the wood, then gets up. She picks up his robe up from the floor and covers herself in it, not slipping her arms into the sleeves, careful of the dark brown dresser near the side of the bed. It is then that she notices the index card taped onto the mirror atop the same dresser, centered. She reaches out and touches it, her fingers pressed on the edges. On it he has written that be has gone out ‘strolling’ and that he will be back soon.
Pulling the robe tighter around herself, the room is not cold enough for her to do that, she walks out into the carpeted hallway. Just as she passes the bathroom, she smells something. She cautiously moves through the length of the hallway, crouching somewhat head first, her hand palm open along the wall, mapping ahead of her. Before she enters the living room, she peers into it first, on her right, empty, blue blinds closed, then glances left, into the kitchen.
It is eleven in the morning but the curtains are drawn. He is just setting two plates of omelettes, his cigarette burning in an ashtray by the sink. Like a child just caught in the act, he looks up at her, smiles.
“good morning”, he puts the dishes down.
She loosens her grip on the robe. “yes” she says, “yes, it is.”
_______
After he takes her home, he drives. He drives aimlessly onto one parkway then another, not quite understanding his direction. He needs this, this emptying out, this wandering at high speeds, it is something that he has does often enough for him to keep doing and slide into comfortably. Surprisingly, he does not think that he thinks too much when he is driving. Words drift through his head as does the scenery; approaching, arriving, fleeting, gone without regret or feeling, objects on the roadside merely to be seen while passing through. He winds in out of counties, east then west, turning south, then westward again, until he finds himself back where he started, not too far from her home. This is familiar territory despite her, or rather, before her, it is old haunting ground for him. The idea that he might wander here again and to have to be scorched by the memory of her,-her having left him at some point in time (some time soon, he thinks)- hurts him more than whatever scars she will leave on him. Nowhere provides him with enough comfort, but knowing streets, particular alleyways, bars, having a sense of place, is the closest any one place can provide for him, and to have the scent, of her, mingle with street lights, or a certain curve in the road, would be adding salt to a wound. Not only would his mind constantly remind him of failure, but structures outside of it, cement, tar, glass, and doors, as well.
He turns onto a main roadway, westward, and decides to go into the city. There isn’t much traffic on the bridge except for the end of it, where it opens onto Second Avenue. He snakes through taxis and trucks, shifting from second to third gear, then down to second, ebb and flow, heading downtown. Although it is cold, the sun is bright. When he reaches the part of the city called the Village, he looks for parking, finding a space with a broken meter. Not too far from 8th and 3rd, he walks into a bodega and picks up a pack of cigarettes, salsa playing from behind the bulletproof glass. The bodega smells of roach spray, and like many other ‘one-stop’ stores, its shelves are packed with many, many things, crowded.
Out on the street, He crosses Third Avenue, against the light, dodging traffic. At Broadway, he stops into a coffee shop, finds a both, sits and takes out a pen, a journal, and one of the books he is currently reading.
The waiter approaches the table, young, fat and familiar.
He smiles and the waiter is struck by some vague memory of the face seated before him. The waiter holds the checkbook to his forehead in disbelief and says, “oh shit.”
The two talk about what has happened in the six years since they last saw one another. It turns out that the waiter also works as an electrician, owns a stand on the boardwalk in the Hamptons, and is waiting for the summer to sell it, so that he can open another in Rockaway.
“So what have you been up to?” the waiter asks, leaning on the plastic divider between booths and the table, nearly over him. He doesn’t have much too say, “work and writing”, and he leaves it at that. He is not prone to tell anyone anything, especially someone who he does not believe is doing all the things that the waiter is supposedly doing, the waiter not being older than twenty three. The waiter’s story doesn’t sit well in his head, but he forgives him, he understand the stories that need to be told in order to make sense of out whatever situation one finds themselves in. He himself has said things, finding himself telling lies actually, more than once, almost against his will, but at the same time, eased by what came out of his mouth, that what he was saying was possible, maybe, a ‘one day’ wishful thinking, a placing of goals ahead of him so that he just might reach for by this telling.
The waiter notices he has other tables and asks what would his old friend like.
“just coffee, and keep it filled, eh?” he replies and winks, feeling stupid doing so, but the waiter nods his head, perhaps pleased that someone from his past finally believes him, turns away, bringing a steaming cup a minute later.
He opens first the book, then the journal, pen ready in one hand. Whenever he reads, he quotes passages, sentences, anything that strikes him as interesting, true, a gem of a line. After he is done with either reading the book or filling up the journal, he will reread what he has written in the journal, what caught his eye. He can’t ever quite get over what he has copied, all of the passages would be priceless in his eyes, each dances with wonder in his mind, what brilliance to be able to capture this in words. He has few dreams, but each is intense, sharp hopes, and this is one of them, to be able to speak like those he has quoted in his journals, to pierce and open with letters and phonetic sound. He reads and, at times, writes, entranced with what rests dead on a page before his eyes.
_______
On his way home, coasting over the bridge, a song comes over the radio, there is little traffic. He finds himself staring at some point in the distance, not that particular thing, somewhere else, so it doesn’t matter. He hears the lyrics and his eyes become watery as he whispers them,
“..and I won’t be raped, I won’t be scarred like that..”
,feeling just the edge of it inside, chill on the surface of his skin, but he doesn’t get where he needs to go, pushing to it, pulling away from it, he remains just close to it, but not there, not close enough. The song ends and he wipes his eyes just before he downshifts into a tight turn, the buildings frozen, bright, and sharp, at the end of the bridge.
_______
At home, he makes a number of phone calls, none of them to her, even though he craves her voice, her skin more so. He doesn’t want to simply talk to her, he wants her here with him, not to have sex, to just lie with her, feel her beside him, to believe in her, but it’s too soon for that. It’s too soon to believe that there is anything beyond the night and morning that they spent together. He lifts the receiver of his phone, flipping through his phone book, dialing.
One friend, from the moment she answers, the sound her voice, alarms him. He asks “what’s wrong?”, urgent.
She replies, half-convincingly, caught off guard, “..Nothing..what do you mean?”
He insists, there is a rough quality to her voice, too weary and exhausted, vulnerable, brittle, which is unlike her. His friend is one who speaks and laughs earnestly and brazenly and is not afraid of being heard. “tell me what happened”, he says blindly, not knowing at all if anything has indeed gone wrong, just going on a difference in treble or pitch which may or may not be there.
Her voice drops to a whisper, hesitant.
“tell me.”, slowly, softly, he did not want her to hang up.
She begins.
What he hears does not make him uneasy, he is only listening. When she says, “I can’t believe I’m telling you any of this..”, he prompts her with “go on.” She feels torn between her commitment to her mother, who is an invalid, and her brother who is repeatedly breaking in to the home, turning all the closets upside down, looking for hidden stashes of money. “I swear to God, he looks like a madman when you tell him to get out..You know what he did last night? Motherfucker put a gun to my mother’s head, his own mother!”
Her older sister has moved to South Carolina and refuses to take their mother there, “..she says that she just doesn’t have the space for her..” Her younger sister went away to college and did not plan on ever coming back.
After all this, she pauses, he can hear her gasp, frightened by something that just crossed her mind.
He asks, “what was it?”
With much struggle to get the words out, stopping, shocked by the very words she’s choosing, she asks him, her voice rushing because of the audacity of it, “..is it normal to dream of killing him over and over?”
He tells her slowly, “..yes”, and for her to get out of where she lives now, to put her mother into a nursing home, until she too, can move. He explains to her that in the position she is in now, she can’t do anything, and that he understands why she will not involve the police, no matter what, family is always family. “..there’s a fine line between dreaming and doing,” he says, but she has been sleeping less and less.
She interrupts herself, while replying, “..believe me, I’m not the type of person who talks about..”, and he knows why she feels that way, he knows that she doesn’t consider him the most stable of people. This fact does not bother him -he agrees with her- but her current situation concerns him more. He knows the rage she feels is one that will not end up in homicide, it is self consuming. He is very afraid that six months from now, she might try to kill herself. “..I want so desperately to go to sleep, I don’t know why, I just want to go sleep..!” After a moment, she says she will think about he has said, then thanks him, apologizing, not as on edge, and he tells her that it’s alright, it’s okay, anytime, then hangs up.
Other people that he calls either no longer have the same number, or are not home. Many of those people are people who he has not seen in months, even years; people that he will not see again. He is not calling to see them, even if he misses them desperately, without reason. The reason why he calls them is to hear their voices again, just their voices, which he has not heard for quite some time. He doesn’t want to talk, he wants to listen. When he has gotten in touch with an ex-lover, he also reminisces; he can the feel the echoes of their touch again, their way of laughing, speaking, the shape of their hair. At those times he wants to ask them why they no longer remember him in the same way that he does, he wants to ask if they miss him at all. The distance of time beguiles him, he never quite understands it, but he never asks those questions, no matter what their answers might or might not be. He might not understand time, but he understands that something, that thing that once pushed their lips onto his, is gone, and they do not think of it as missing. The burden of memory is not one he is willing to share with people that have gotten on with their lives. He still longs to reach them, to touch the part of them that drew him, to cradle it for himself, knowing how selfish that wish is, calling them from time to time.
Still agitated from the conversation with his friend, he feels restless, and probably so because he has fed off of her, tuned in on her restlessness, her desire to leave and turn away from those that bind her. He wants to tear into the streets and run fast enough to rip the muscles from underneath his skin and become someone else, to run into someone else, into another life, to break this one. This is, and isn’t, his despair. This time, however, he has been pulled to it through his friend. He has, at one time, on his own, gone so far as to introduce himself as someone other than himself. Stalking through his apartment, into the kitchen and out, swinging by the living room, into the hallway, stopping at his room, half entering the bathroom, swivel out, circling back, nervous, angry, knowing better than to step out the door.
The phone rings and he is immediately cut off from the drive that pushes him around the apartment, almost against the walls. Calls are surprises, welcomed uninvited guests no matter their occasion, good or bad. Every phone call is a Christmas gift wrapped in bells, and whether the present inside is either a size too small or a flat out disappointment, it is the unwrapping, the lifting of the receiver, the discovery of a mystery solely meant for him, that pulls him to answer before the second ring.
“hello?”
“hi…”
He cannot explain the sudden urge to be with her, no matter what, ravenous, hungry, an explosion of need.
“hello…” he says again, raw.
“I felt you wanted me to call..”, gentle, knowing.
“what are you doing?”
“talking to you.” she points out, playful.
“that isn’t enough.” quick, almost harsh.
“so what are you waiting for?”
“half hour-”
“twenty minutes.”
He hangs up, quickened by the sound of her.
_______
She hangs up the phone, her living room dark, lamp lowered to half light. Her hand remains on the receiver for a moment, her eyes lingering, distant. Uncurling herself up from the white couch, she walks to the French doors of her apartment, wide and clean, where she could see all three bridges leading out of the city and a majority of its skyscrapers. The night is clear and deep dark blue, pinpoints of yellow and red lights, still and moving, tremendous faraway block shaped castles, checkerboard-like windows off and lit. She turns away from the window and paces around the room slowly, folding her arms across her chest, head bent, thoughtful. She takes five steps before brightening, reanimated, biting her bottom lip, she spins and makes her way toward the wet bar. Behind it, she kneels before one of the lower cabinets, opening it, sticking one hand while the other holds the door, shifting through wrapped plastic cups and forks, crinkling, ducking to get a better view in the dim light, excited, her brows furrowed, squinting.
When she gets a hold of what she was looking for, she feels ridiculous, like a little girl sneaking a kiss to the boy next door behind her parent?s backs.
He finds parking about a block away from her apartment. Hastily, he crosses the street, snaking his way between traffic. When he gets to her apartment…