Years in the future, you bathe him at the end of the day, your legs molded around his, the parts of your body he finds mysterious, always mysterious, pressed around the small of his back. You squeeze water over his white thighs (they are almost translucent, like skim milk, not cream), ascend the peak of his knee with your sponge.
There is the love that speaks and then the love that washes. There is also, of course, the love that makes love. But at night, when it’s over, there is no further you can go—you are just two skins facing each other, or curling, or touching back to back—two skins filled to the top. Not enough room inside for the entirety of another. What should you call intimacy, then? Can you get it with the lights on? Must you know the other’s favorite song? Must both agree on the definition? Can you be alone? Must you see the other on the toilet? Must it include the worst thing that you feel inside or else you’re lying? Is there any other way but the sharing of food? Must you see every season of the year together, put on your T-shirts, your sweaters, your overcoats, together? Can you have it once you know the scent of the other, which drifts unbidden from his or her skin and hair despite the salves we dab and sprinkle on? Could it be pushing your butterscotch into his mouth when he leans in for a kiss? Does it mean knowing more facts than anyone else: “I know that when you were twelve, you had a khaki parka that was mannish and ugly and made you cry on the inside but you wore it every day to school with a stiff, unglossed upper lip”? Must it require the damp nearness of time and space? If you imagine it’s real, is it real?
Through your cheek and the corner of your mouth you can feel the heat of his back. Every day at the construction site the sun dements his cells, eggs them on to greater feats of darkness and spots. Above the waist he is deeply brown, and you are embracing a dying animal. Imagining the speed of malignant cell growth literally takes your breath away. At work he pounds, climbs, carries, measures, and burns, sometimes with a slight frown, sometimes with a grimace of nails, always unconcerned.
Just this morning you tried again with the sunblock. Your new tactic is a noble, puzzled, genuine indignation that he could love himself so little as to risk his own life. How could that be? you wonder aloud with a tilted head and moist, widening eyes. But he left without it, bare to the waist, driving away in his vulnerable, blameless skin. There is nothing between him and the sun.
If his freckles are lethal, though, you will take them on. There is room enough on your skin. What a stark canvas! And when that is full, they can cover the skin of your esophagus, your duodenum, that wettest, palest, cavity-dwelling skin. Your palms, the soles of your feet—wasted space! You have been careful enough with the sunblock for the both of you.
Is this intimacy?
It is not nobility or goodness. It is not love, precisely, this suggestion of biblical sacrifice and salvation.
You have stayed in the bath long enough for your skin to take on the wrinkled bloat of the drowned, and the bedroom is filled already with the stillness of his sleep. There is no one to tell you that you have had enough, it’s time to get out. The water is cloudy, thicker on the surface. This must be intimacy, submersion in his sloughed cells, the dirt of his day.
There is the love that marries and the love that stays, your inevitable deaths the scaffolding around which you arrange your lives. You will watch his slow decay over the years, unable to do a thing. He will watch yours, inert. Surely this is intimacy, wearing the burden of two doomed bodies starting now.