I was raised to believe if you think a thing, you are as guilty as if you’ve done it.
I’ve been thinking: if I tempted him enough, he just might touch me. I don’t believe he really would, but the thing about knowing someone since he was young is you think you can reach all of those vulnerable spots he has since learned to cover over. I’d lie to him and tell him, If I could do it all over again, everything would be different. I’d say he deserves the happiness only we could bring each other. That he has been giving and giving of himself, being good when other men would have been bad, for so long, he has earned this indiscretion. But this tactic doesn’t need a special knowledge; it would work on many people, quick to believe themselves noble victims. We want to see in ourselves a special forbearance of a special burden. There is no room in this fantasy for evidence that feeling good doesn’t require others to feel bad.
Earlier this summer, while visiting the sparkling-eyed boy and his wife with my father, they mentioned that she had taken their baby to visit her parents for a week earlier that summer. He had been alone for a week. I slowly turn his time “alone” into “lonely.” I imagine we have done something with our bodies and I imagine that it needed to be done.
I imagine it begins up north, of course, midsummer in his house by the edge of the woods. And this is how my fiction of our affair goes:
I convince myself before I park my car behind the barn, out of sight of the road, that I will just pop in and say hi, that this is our chance to catch up, listen with sympathy to each other’s complaints. I laugh too much—I do this when I’m nervous. He talks animatedly in his frayed voice, perhaps testing the corners of his brain for his potential for adultery. I tell him a story, haltingly, about how I have these dreams about him—no, no (blush), not those kinds of dreams. Nice dreams, in which we walk together through the forest. We catch each other’s eyes the moment we both are thinking: we did not plan this. We stand and walk to the stairs, and he stops on the landing, turns, and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, a maternal gesture, as if to say, simultaneously, Take comfort and Be ready. Then he turns again, his feet rising before me with each step in clean white tube socks.
The intimate talk of lovers we balance on each other’s limbs, fragile as real English teacups. He is slow to lean into me. But one cannot step back in such moments. We have a template for most things: rising action, climax, denouement. For all stories we know well, there is no retreat—war, crop, conception, drug, affair. It is written: we must press closer before we part.
He stands at the window, looking out at the purple-dark woods. In order to breathe into the moment peaceably, there are many things we must edit from our consciousness—drawers full of her clothes, the scent of apple room spray, the widening fissures of betrayal. Is he regretting what we have already done this first night? Is he listening to the sift of wind through the cedar and poplar? One could drift on that, buoyed by coyote and insect. Our room is dark, and so his form is thrown into relief (what a beautiful phrase, “thrown into relief,” “catapulted into succor”) by the light of the stars. His naked back is turned to me, his arm resting above his head against the sill. It looks as though he is being filled through his raised arm with molten body pooling and pressing at the edges of his long, work-formed shell. See? His lower half—legs and buttocks—have cooled already to a stark white; his upper half is still thick with churning liquid glowing brown under the surface. I understand, suddenly, the painter in love with his model, taking something, imparting something with his glance. Touch seems weak in comparison.
Here, in this bedroom, we do not fit into any representations of time: calendar, clock, television shows that switch on the hour or half hour, sundials, wheels of light and dark. But then time itself is only a quaint effort to make sense of living, as we, with our creased brows and careless sheets, are an effort to understand the nature of love. Love is, for the moment, an animal between us, breathing poorly as if from a wound.
This would be the great pleasure of an affair like this—the timelessness that purifies all things in its simplicity. In the imagined moment we two are so simple. Nothing will come of this, we would tell ourselves, no burdens of construction, of “we could be doing this wrong and the future will punish us.”
And this is the great sadness—that without a future we are essentially without a present, for we can give someone only so much now, and the rest is a promise of benefits to come. This, too, is a great sadness—that we will never be able to argue for our own goodness again.
Here is one remaining wish: I hope that someone will pull a pin so that we fall into sleep like hair tumbling from a bun.
I think he grows impatient with my laborious fingers. (Even in my imagination I am plodding in the moment.) They are nothing like his silvery digits. Surely he can do this better himself. Nothing about me is as quick as he is. Not my hands, not my skin, not my smile, my confidence, my eyes, and certainly not my tongue. I have always admired quick people because we value what we are not. I have lovingly watched the mouths and hands of the witty and agile, because these people control the present. I merely stand close, hoping to be implicated in the wit and movement by my mute presence.
The sparkling-eyed boy is agile and his skin is smooth just where it should be. Why has he allowed me here, spilled across his sheets, a collection of limbs and pregnant pauses? Maybe he likes my freckles; maybe he likes the scars on my knee; maybe he thinks I have something to give him. But it won’t be words, I’m afraid. At least not yet. I have only the spaces between events and thoughts, between thoughts and the words that almost never come. You see, I have to go away, write words down and then bring them back. I’m waiting for someone to stick around and love me for that.
I imagine saying, “Bring your breath to my ear. I am sick of talking.” He moves silently to where I sit on a maple dresser, my legs crossed in front of me. I watch where his leg attaches to his hip. It had seemed to me impossible that something so perfectly functional could still exist among humans. And yet here it is gliding toward me: a hip I love, a hip I want to either smash or deify, a hip that now bears bruises from my teeth. “Like this?” He covers my left ear with his mouth and slowly lets his warm air seep into me until I uncross my legs and circle them around those rolling hips. He can be dark when he wants to be. He looks around for the most uncomfortable spot in the room. There is a short flight of stairs by the door. We can take turns laying our backs across it, bruising in strips. He plucks me off the dresser and I cling to his upright body, trying to kiss him rather desperately with the whole of my mouth at once—tongue, teeth, gums. We are frantic against the wooden steps; we feel as if we’re being cut to bits. He rolls me on top of him and I feel dirt sticking to my damp shoulders. I try to sit up but he holds my face close to his with two handfuls of hair. He is just breathing, but if he could he might say, “The rest of the world is gone, isn’t it? Do you feel it anywhere?”
I saw a movie once in which a geisha and her lover become sexually obsessed with each other. They push and push each other into more and more dangerous territory, until, at the climax of both the movie and their relationship, she cinches a silk cord around his neck too tightly and strangles him. There is something of a Protestant ethic in this story: anything that’s worth doing is worth doing right. That is, if you have not killed each other with your passion, it wasn’t truly passion.
Even in my fiction, though, our passion ages:
I hold my arms around his rib cage, which expands and contracts as if it were something that could be broken open and set free from his spine, rhythmic like moth wings. I push my lips against his shoulder until the shudder of violence has passed through me and my fingernails, the heel of my hand, the sharp ends of my teeth, again can be trusted with his skin. We are dulled enough to be safe with each other after all.
I still dream of him regularly. But, since the birth of his daughter, the dreams have changed dramatically. Instead of both of us dropping effortlessly from the lives we’ve built into something earlier and seemingly elemental between us, the new dreams are guilt-hemmed. In them there is no question of his leaving his family, and so we are furtive, meeting for a quick exchange of words, sometimes a kiss. Often we are caught by someone—our faces in casts they wouldn’t be if everything inside us were innocent. There’s a softness to our expressions, an openness to our bodies turned slightly toward each other that gives us away. Then we usually scramble for propriety or excuses.
There are other stories in this fiction of our affair: he wants to know more about these dreams, the nice ones—he asks how often, what kinds. I can tell he thinks I’m obsessed with him, and a smile he can’t help seeps across his face. I indulge him with as many distinct dreams as I can remember, demonstrating the at-long-last kiss repeatedly: You stand there and I stand here and then we lean toward each other, my cheek just brushing yours.
I would rather not recall a dream I actually had recently: There is a small crowd gathered for a football game he’s playing in. I am down by the sidelines with him, as if I’m his girlfriend. I look up into the splintered bleachers and see his wife watching us, and, rather than slink away, I join her in the stands and commiserate about her husband’s faults. Neither of us wants him at the end of our conversation.
A leaf limps across the gravel driveway, and I think at first it is a small animal. Can I help it? Everything is animal. Even the air smells furred and sinewed. It hangs, full of vesseled intent. A half an hour ago, I thought the fringe of my eyelashes was a bat flying across the room in search of a voluptuous fig. These mistakes are not problems of perception; they are gifts. Let us see animals wherever we look and let us read in them intention and passion and failure. Let us not believe that we are alone in this room, one species, sad and isolated, feeling that which crumbles in a moment and blows away—nothing out of something. No, the ceiling is thick with bats. I feel the pulsing of their hungry throats.
Sometimes I think the emotions of an affair would be no more real than this fantasy—sooner or later something true and ugly would blast the film from the adulterer’s eyes, after which passion, or even good humor, would take a monumental self-deception. I want to get this fiction right. What is the moment that would make the glamour of deceit or invention blister? I imagine that I, too, could be blasted by a scene like this:
Ten minutes ago, I couldn’t imagine her. She wasn’t real to me. Then I picked up the hairbrush lying on the dresser and saw several of her hairs wound around the bristles. They are longer than mine and a rich brown. I pull out a few and slide my fingertip up to the little white nodules at their base. I think about the tiny void in the follicles from which these hairs were tugged. I picture her sliding these bristles across her scalp, the private pleasure that must ripple outward down her neck, across her face. One small daily ritual. A piece of her body here in my hand. What else brings her pleasure? Cracking eggs over a stainless steel bowl. The first chilly September night she needs the comforter. Fresh socks on her feet and her baby’s earlobe between her fingers.
When one takes somebody’s husband, somebody’s wife, all one thinks about is oneself. That’s it. If I’d had an affair with the sparkling-eyed boy, I might have said that the worst part of an affair has nothing to do with vows or propriety, that the worst part is what you let yourself become, what you will be unable to cease being. Unrepentantly monstrous in your selfishness. But, I would have been wrong. There’s something worse, and this conclusion would merely be further evidence of my self-obsession. I would have called my actions many other things—human, necessary, a historical arch completed. I would have done anything not to see my ugliness. Look. See it. See her.
He has almost never been the leaving one. I hope, if he ever left this place, he’d feel as if he’d left his skin behind, dangling from branch and rock and hanging in coils from his back like the bark of a failing birch.
Affairs, by definition, end. And, so, I must imagine an end to this one:
Before I go I tell him the one thing I’ve learned: When you leave what has been your one and only place, you forever leave places. You must concede an interchangeable sameness. When there is no longer only one place, there are millions of dishearteningly similar places. And, when there is no longer only one person, there are millions of dishearteningly similar people. The floodgates of disillusionment open. The way I see it, he has struck a bargain. To stay here he has had to forsake all of the other features of the world—and what he has, perhaps by default, loved deeply was not enough to keep me here long ago.
We don’t talk about it, but he must love her. They stay together, make things together, like a baby, like the visceral comfort of this house. Like promises. They must give each other moments of deepest relaxation when there is nothing else they need and no one else they’d like to be. If he loves me at all, it’s because I leave.
An affair (even this imagined one) is an aquarium of human experience, a controlled experiment with loving. The constant bubbles rising and breaking, neon castles, a bit of real kelp. When I finally leave the house, I lose not only love but the progress narrative that overlies our unions. We think: our actions must build to something. But he and I take nothing with us except a clutch of memories that will die when we die or probably sooner. We have been gasping at our own little bubbler, occasionally staring at our reflections in the glass. We are safe, but, dear fellow swimmer, this is a far cry from the ocean.
What does one do when one cannot go forward? When, in fact, there is no such thing as forward or backward or any other direction? Does one write another page and another until there is a neat stack that can be numbered one to ninety-three so that one may literally add up to something? Or does one remain a point forever rather than becoming a vector? I wish I could stop compulsively imagining myself with him. I wish I could sum up once and for all what I’m missing. I wish I could cull from myself that part of me that would never want to leave the sparkling-eyed boy, that could breathe sameness like air and never suffocate, that could love without doubting, and laugh without wounding, that would never, ever even think, “What the hell do you know? You’ve never even been to college!” This part of me would recline on this bed and gesture him toward me. It seems sometimes love is a hand held in the air for a moment, lightly moving. “Me? Do you mean me?” Yes, my darling, come over here. He would come and press his chest to my back, matching me length for length and spilling over at the head and feet like liquid.
I have done this thing. With my mind.
I know there is a difference between the body and the mind. The body takes as its province the present, space, accountability. And crime. But I am more afraid, at times, of the province of the mind. Our thoughts alone can alienate us from our powers of self-defense. And what about you, in your many-storied lives? Would people guess that you only ask them what’s wrong to get your turn to speak? Does your boyfriend know you imagine someone else as you slide your hand down his spine? This week is something I carry around in my mind, dangerous as powdered glass.