Rain

Lying under the skylight, half-asleep in early morning, she thought of Rafael. It had been raining all night and she slept and woke and slept again in that ocean-like feeling of motion in which she was contained but not grounded.

Now in early light, the impacts the drops made were visible to her, exploding and sliding a ballet of dancing circles and rings drifting toward the roof edge.

It would be raining on Rafael’s house, too, the crepitations over his head the same as over hers, a cellophane of rainfall that wrapped them in a tight chamber of sound.

She had never been in the same chamber with him, at least, not alone. But she knew in the sudden way that truth sometimes reveals itself, unexplained, that he loved her. Loves me, she almost said out loud. Then silent: Loves me... then added... though he may not know it yet.

Maybe the rain would wash away the opaque dust of schedules and rituals and lap-tops and palm-pilots, clarifying slowly, as, in the same deliberate manner it moved the two small oak leaves on the surface of her skylight, patiently, persistently toward destination. Small increments, luxuriously slow, inevitable.

He would be waking now, rolling over to stretch the sleep out of his arms and legs. Then perhaps, closing his eyes again to listen to the music of the rain. She imagined his lips swollen with sleep, his eyes puffy from the force of dreams, his hair matted over his forehead like a confusion of time and place.

Maybe he would think, just for a moment, he was in her bed, pleasantly surprised to awaken from loneliness into the embrace of her body. He would remember vaguely how he got there, the party, the conversation about how difficult it is to be a screenwriter in a town where everyone is a screenwriter, waiting to be discovered by some famous agent who would apologize for not discovering him sooner. How, through this rare tennebroso of understanding, he could talk to her without restraint, could voice his complaint, his passion.

He would find it hard to leave her, even for the moment it takes to get a drink or respond to other conversations passing the edge of their illumination. Increasingly, he would narrow the circle of perception around them, like turning down the wick of a lamp, until they stood alone in its light.

He would leave with her and driven in by the rain, seek shelter in her apartment.

Next morning she would wonder at which moment his spirit entered her, before or after her body opened. And what would the body feel? - a tight closure on his risky intrusion? A permanent awakening? A taking in to her darkness, his darkness and his light? What would she keep of him, never giving back, never the same afterwards?

The large branch of the live oak over her skylight was stretching out of the hillside reaching for a filtered brightness. She marveled how its curved spine could withstand the weight and watched as rain fell into it, some of the drops slipping through the interstices between leaves and branches, pocking the skylight with their small rings, that, measured by the volume of the droplet, grew corpuscles and dimes. The larger drops gathered themselves first on wavering surfaces then fell, visible as they fell, but unpredictable, entering her vision from all sides as objects might bend over the eye of a fish. They made rings as large as oranges and it was they that, when the impact was perfect, propelled the two leaves, jumping in small bips and blops down the incline of the glass.

She saw the trail of folded water below each leaf, extending down the skylight, the wake behind a stationary boat in a moving ocean.

She felt that way sometimes, standing still in a current of men rushing by her, in place, against the indifference of their motions, as if waiting for the perfect collision. You have to kiss a lot of frogs... her mother told her. She understood. She could have gone to bed with frogs many times. But had not. She was a virgin. Shock of shocks. Who would believe it? Others might be embarrassed. She knew it was because she was particular and because she had seen no angel like Rafael.

Her girlfriends told her that a single girl in Los Angeles was a sitting duck. Virgins should just decide to get fucked one night and be done with it, accept a date with the guy she knew would do it, then leave him the next day. Spring training before the season opens.

The idea fascinated her, but she couldn’t abide that... well, okay, she was a romantic. There had to be some kind of connection, didn’t there? Around here, everyone was so anonymous.

Maybe it was Rafael’s background, maybe it was because his parents came from Spain. Or maybe his religious sensibility that even now, diluted by the rituals of a corporate life, marked him with a quality she recognized without recognizing what exactly it was.

She was in a volatile situation and she knew it - all this fantasy and obsession. She would probably turn him off with her saucer eyes. She may as well start looking for that mindless fuck-engine to undo her.

The rain was falling harder now. Larger drops. And more numerous. The wind with greater force swirled the lighter drops, glanced them against the glass in commas and pollywogs. She was entered by sound: The plick, plick of small drops, glop, glop of medium sized ones, ping and clack and scoosh - a symphony of bent notes fiercely unpredictable and precise.

She concentrated on distortion. Tree branches like kelp under tide waters. Light refracted into angular spicules through the kaleidoscope over her. A showering of sound and light.

She felt herself merging with the wetness around her. She was inside the rain now, part of its folded spaces, its elegant allegiance to the downward motion, not minding the wetting of her, not minding its dissolving her down to her molecules. She spread herself like pigment, her waters now sister to the rainwaters and the great continuity of rivers.

She placed her arms around herself, imagining the pressure of light falling on her skin in articulate chains of luminance. She stroked herself in the manner of affection, hands touching with the reverence of prayer. She reached for herself where she, squeezing a pillow between her legs, 11 years old, found a greedy accident of delight.

She knew what to do. She would touch herself for Rafael. Through this telephone grid of raindrops he would sense what she was doing. He would travel through the wet branches to watch her, standing over her skylight, his rain-soaked body over her rain-soaked body, seeing her naked in river-bottom light.

The thought of his eyes on her, her eyes not on him, sent her into a chill in which her skin, now heightened, lifted into her touching. Rafael would be on fire watching her. Rafael would want to extinguish himself in her.

Her rapture would excite him. She sank into the affection of his gaze. Light danced beyond her eyelids like faint recordings of a world outside as when one is half-aware, half-sleeping, of voices down the hall.

She imagined her most beautiful self, face up in ecstasy, aroused, voluptuous, in that unselfconscious way that is most arresting to men in which the woman cannot restrain herself, unaware her breasts are rising between the tightening V of her arms, her eyes closed in submission, her body released from protection. To think of Rafael, enchanted, spellbound by her helplessness.

He would not be able to stop watching her, to see her moving in response to pleasure. This was her risk in the extreme. To do it for him.

And Rafael became an image of himself, a recollection of a reflection, locked, as she was, in the lift and chill and crepitation, riding the undersurface of reflections, her body in the pull of wind and tide, wave under wave, surge under surge.

And there came that sudden diminuendo in which everything around her falls away. Light, the sound of raindrops, the music... all falls, not from a diminuendo in the music itself but in the pushing through the pushing away that forms around her like the halo that floats the ovum into the crush of womb water, as when, driving late at night, tugged into the instant before sleep, the road noise drops away, then rushes back, then falls again...

... pressure and chill and blue quality...

... and mouth with breath in it...

and then that coiling... and chill...

... that tight coiling, and rising, and hovering until the silence is covered in seamlessness...

and the tremble begins... in air... like the crackle on the leading edge of lightning... and spreads into yards and yards of luminous lace...

And after a moment that could have been an hour, she falls back to earth. And lies half-sleeping. Oak leaves like hands of an unwatched clock moving down the glass.

She wakes herself by the saying of it, saying: I must get up. I must straighten the house, do a little shopping. I must be ready. Rafael will be here soon.

She was sure of it.

She had made love to him.