GUILT

IT WAS LATE IN THE NIGHT AND THE MOON WAS BLOATED from heat. No matter how much water it drank, it could not shed itself. This fleshy orb, this predatory heat—it had infected Abraham’s dreams, and in them he was big and white as the moon, suffocating from his own unbearable skin, which he wore like woolens and could not escape, no matter how many layers he peeled away. When one layer was discarded, another one grew, until he began to wonder if he would soon disappear into his excess self.

When he woke—not thin, not fat—that blown-up moon threw its light around, right through the open window where a white sheet glowed beside him, where the empty space churned like cream, and Eva was not sleeping; she wasn’t in the room.

Earlier this evening he had bedded not one but two whores: one before his drinking and one before his game. He wondered if his wife could smell the specific scents of the others but even as he wondered, he imagined how, if she were to ask, he’d sniff his own nightshirt for Eva’s benefit, proclaiming with irritation how his sweat was nothing other than the stuff of a long day’s work. He also wondered, with uncharacteristic detachment, if he might be able to change his ways. Then he thought of something his brother had said years ago, soon after Abraham arrived in town. What had they been discussing? He didn’t remember. He only remembered drinking whiskey late into the night and how Meyer had seemed to crave his company. Change? Meyer had said, sucking on a stale cigar. We change only when we die.

He opened his eyes to the familiar low ceiling, the bold outlines of wood beams in the darkness. Once he’d seen a spider hanging by its slight thread, impossibly constructing a web by the silvery light of the moon. Once a vagrant by the small window (a real vagrant, not one of his own dismal invention) shamelessly looked inside, even when Abraham sat up and looked him in the eye. As if spurred on by the memory, he reached for his wife as if to protect her, even as he realized she hadn’t come back to bed.

He rose, and with his mind and limbs gummy with sleep, found himself seated at Eva’s vanity. Though the room was too dark to see into the mirror, he sat before it—staring—as if, despite the darkness, his reflection might appear. He felt for a small bottle and inhaled its concentrated scent, but it wasn’t what he was looking for; he was used to something more diffuse—made soft by her delicate skin—and, unsatisfied, he put down the perfume and picked up a powder box, fingering the puff until his hands were covered with powder, which felt like flour, and there he was—a boy—suddenly there in his family’s kitchen with the air sharp like lemons; he was a young boy helping his beloved cook. He realized how he’d forgotten it all: the mixing bowls aligned mysteriously on a countertop, clouds of flour dissolving on the air, and the yeasty smell of bread rising while female skin perspired. It came back in an instant, but even still, he could not conjure the cook’s face or name. How fickle, he thought, with real disappointment, what a goddamn fickle mind.

Abraham did not go in search of his wife but instead pulled strands of hair from her hairbrush, until there was no trace of the springy dark curls woven between the bristles. Instead of releasing the soft nest of hair through the window, he closed his fist around it, as a conjurer might do with a seed, accompanied by a promise that when he opened his fist, the seed would be something different. Perhaps thousands of freshly minted goddamn dollar bills.

And what then? Would he stop going to Cuca’s then?

Eva was not in the washroom, nor seated at the piano striking silent chords. She was not in the kitchen nor under the bed, and, if only because there was nowhere else to look, he opened the back door. There, under an ornate sky, accompanied by an uncanny lack of wind, was his bride. There she was, white as bone, glorious and indecent. There she was, in the open air, soaking in the bathtub that had been so neglected, left to hold only leaves and insects and cloudy puddles of rain. In New York she had desperately pleaded for that bathtub, and yet she’d never mentioned using it once they’d arrived in Santa Fe. He allowed that she might have been waiting for him to do something—to at least suggest moving it inside near the fire—but she had said nothing about it. And so, whenever he’d looked out his back door and took in the generally substandard view—the withering roses, the piles of rocks, the dusty mountainous horizon—he’d learned to see the bathtub without really seeing it. If he thought of it at all, it was like an old dead tree, too heavy and bothersome to uproot. What he saw was something useless with delusions of grandeur. No other object could have more perfectly represented her chronic discontent.

Look, he thought, look here; she has been here all along.

He watched her now, moonlit, as she floated to the surface and sank down low, over and over again. He wondered if the first time she’d done this was tonight or if she had previously stolen outside and undressed without care like a whore or a child, if this had become no less than routine. But the sight of her distracted him from too much further speculation. Her hair was wet, her eyes were closed, and her lips pursed impishly. It was as if the derelict bathtub and the strange late hour put her not in the mind of something shoddy and uncomfortable, but instead, it was as if—with the floating and sinking, the rise and the fall—what she felt was some kind of relief. And for that moment it was all he wanted: to join her, to feel the jolt of water too, water that—no matter how dirty—still contained her.

Before he could stop himself, he was kneeling beside her, pleading for her skin. Instead of being shocked to see him, or ashamed to be outside, she silently watched him undress and ushered him into the water. She looked so forgiving and he was excited by this forgiveness. She climbed on top and they fit there together, breathing until something had to be spoken. He wanted to say I’m sorry, but all he said was, “Don’t move.”

“What do you promise me?” She seemed so tired, so young with her wet skin and hair.

“A home.” And he meant it. He did. “Just look how far I’ve already come.”

She nodded but it was an absent nod, as if suddenly the house didn’t actually matter, as if all along it was only a symbol of something, a test; maybe she was even in a dream state, perhaps with someone else. His hands were greedy, ahead of himself, pinching and biting her pink and red; she was right there on top of him in the small, wet space, moving with him gently, in time. They were violent and considerate, quiet under the sky they shared with the rest of the world. They were stealing something from each other, taking their sweet time.