She told him: “I am completely naked.”
These were the first words she spoke and they tumbled from her mouth, beautifully shaped, smoothed by an accent which sounded French, but was from farther east, Moscow, so that what he heard was: Ah im compledly neggid. Her voice rose slightly, placed emphasis on the third word, as if her nakedness were a gift meant entirely for him, presented without forethought, without the least awareness of the rougher ends to which such declarations can be put.
They were on a thin, hissing phone line. She might have been speaking from fifty years ago. He closed his eyes. And as he did, she slipped into a new kind of nakedness, a nakedness untainted by the body’s awful math, restored to classical grace. He saw white breasts, plucked from the white of her chest, her high bottom, the soft furrows of her rib cage. He saw her on tiptoe. He saw her lips make the words in wide, red bands.
He understood that what she said was not intended as titillation, even coy provocation. It was merely a happy coincidence. The phone rang and, in her urgent hope that it be him, she picked the receiver up, forgetting to cover herself, forgetting that she stood, in her apartment, in Moscow, without a stitch of clothing. It was an act of forgetting, then. And her statement to him, an act of delighted remembrance.
He desired in her this wondrous capacity, no hint of which she had shown him previously, that she would someday grow so accustomed to him, so unembarrassed by her own physicality, that she would forget, and then remember, her own nakedness, that just such a cycle might mark their days together. Hearing her words, he felt transported above shame, above lust and privation. If the moment could be clung to, sustained like a perfect note. Perhaps Moscow was such a place. Perhaps there, such possibilities existed.
He had never visited, had only seen photos: grim, towering statues, wide streets, open squares, and, on the horizon, church spires of the oddest shape, like clumps of wet chocolate drawn to a point. Perhaps Moscow was banked in snow, and perhaps the heat of her pale body, standing beside a window, caused the pane to fog.
But even as this image formed, a second image took shape, of him below her window, outside, staring up. And here, from this vantage point, she grew blurry, obscured not by some trick of condensation, or light or distance, but his own insistent longing.
Hardly any time had passed since she spoke, but now he could not see her at all, not as she had existed before. He felt the hard knock of need, stiffened against himself. He might have reached out, tried to explain to her what was happening, but he didn’t understand himself. A singular vision of love was perfecting itself in the singular shape of her. And yet that shape, by its very recognition, was now receding, dissolving, and reemerging as something else, a myth of his own illusive want, a creature with a thatch of glistening pubic hair, a crude mouth, nipples the color of bruises.
Years later he toured the factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was late and he was the only visitor, and the guide—a young woman in a severe suit—walked him briskly through each cavernous room. Workers in surgical scrubs scurried to and fro. Steel machines hissed and banged and choked. He watched one dip down and release through invisible apertures a thousand coins of chocolate, then pull away so violently as to bring these to a sharp, liquid point. The process was repeated time and again, a mass production of the inimitable, which seemed to him, in that moment, terribly wrong.
He hadn’t loved her in the beginning. He was sure of that. He may never have loved her for more than that one, long-ago moment.
But now, as he watched the spires of Moscow reproduced in miniature, as the guide hustled him along toward a bin with free chocolates, urging him to select one-just-one-now-is-the-moment-sir-please, coldly appraising his dazed expression; now, as he staggered toward the bin and obediently removed a piece, as he exited into the frigid parking lot, as he tore at the foil, as the chocolate fell into his mouth through a puff of steamy breath and began at once to seep away; now he recognized that he would never rid himself of the moment. It was insoluble.
He had suffered, without a doubt, one perfect memory which, though misplaced, had never been forgotten. It lived inside him and would continue to do so for the rest of his life, to be reawakened again and again. And so he got into his car and drove on the turn-pike and exited and turned into a field and stopped the car and stepped outside and removed each piece of his clothing and lay down in the banked snow and waited for Moscow—the cold lips of that distant city—to brush his skin.