Pairings

THAT NIGHT I make a pass at Stephen, just for the sadness of it, and because he has started to smell like someone I might know. He has cut his finger nails and left the bits in the ashtray by the bed. I count them, because there is something about nail-parings that makes you check they are all there. And as I count, nine in all, I find that my problem is how to tell him that I love him.

I could tell him to put my body in a boat when I am dead and burn it on the water.

I touch his face in the dark and listen to his breathing tighten and lose its beat. I touch his chest and my hand seems changed by it. I float my palm along the air that clings to his thigh, afraid to touch, and the hairs on his skin rise to meet me.

Slowly, he lifts the duvet and slowly finds the floor with his foot. He swings around and sits up on the edge of the bed.

He bends down to the floor and comes back up looking at the ends of his fingers. He has found the last nail-paring and now he drops it in the ashtray. I don’t know now which disturb me more, the bits he cut off, or the bits still left on his fingers. His nails are thick, white and clean, the kind you see in films, when you know someone is going to do something unpleasant with his hands.

He looks down at the floor again, pushes himself away from the bed and walks in the dark to a chair in the corner of the room. He starts to talk.

He talks to me about his wife, about how little he understood. He says when he came home one day there were some playing cards in the snow of the yard and britches frozen so hard on the line, they near snapped in his hand.

He expected her to be gone, but she was there when he walked in through the door. He expected her to be gone and when he found her sitting there he knew that she was pregnant instead.

‘It is a difficult thing for a man to understand,’ he says.

The snow kept her warm. Like a drunk, the snow kept her white skin glowing even whiter as she grew, and the veins in her breasts and the veins in her belly spread like blue flames, licking her inside. She grew all winter, so white, and the hair between her legs grew in the spring, like corn. But it was the winter that frightened him, the white heat in the bed beside him, her belly drifting against the swell of her breasts like snow against a wall. Her blood sang in the bed beside him and the child, because it was a child, made her blood hot. The child was a stove in her belly keeping her warm and all he could do was put his hands there, before he shrivelled with the cold, as her blood hissed in and out of the child, that wasn’t a child but a fire.

‘That is what is frightening,’ he says, ‘not that the body dies, but that it grows.’

He came home one day, because he was always coming home, her body a sun he circled, always trying to see the other side. And he lifted her dress and put his hands on her because he thought his hands were not his own, they were so cold. The shock of his hands made the child jump.

The child kicked, he says, like a stone hitting a pond. He saw his own face in the whiteness of her belly then the child kicked and the whiteness of her body melted, like snow melts and he saw what was inside. He saw things lost, he saw things strewn in the ditches, he saw new grass and things that would rot in the rain.

But for a moment he saw his own face there, or some face. He thought that if he could paint he would paint on her belly, stroke by stroke and colour by colour, that face. He would paint a picture of what was inside, a rope in a ditch. He would paint a picture of his own face which was, just then, the face of an angel.

‘It is a difficult thing,’ he says, ‘for a man to understand.’

How do you explain condoms to an angel? Or money, to a dead man? Or sex, to anyone?

‘I don’t think we would have a child,’ I say. ‘You being sort of conceptual, in your way.’ He looks at me like I’ve lost my reason. He looks at me like he could make me pregnant just by looking at me. Like he could make me pregnant through my ear hole and no-one the wiser.

He tells me of the Angel Amezyarak who, with two hundred followers, copulated with the daughters of men. Children were conceived.

‘And?’

‘The angels are flogged every day in the third circle of Paradise.’

‘So you do have circles in Paradise?’ I ask, in the way that one might enquire about patio doors.

‘It depends on who is looking,’ said Stephen. Well silly me.

I ask about the children.

That night, Stephen sits on the chair by my door. If I could sing, I would sing to him. If I were a man I would rape him. I could cut my nails and burn them with his. I could cut my nails and plant them. I could walk across the room and touch him.

I lose my nerve and fall asleep, while all two hundred copulating angels slide down from the attic on to the foot of my bed and Amezyarak looks down through the hole in my ceiling and laughs, with his four wings and forty eyes.

Stephen has to run my bath in the morning, to get me out of the bed and the water seems sweeter than the sleep I just had.

‘Bath. Sheba,’ he says. He tells me that the Queen of Sheba was said to have a donkey’s foot; that Solomon flooded the forecourt of the Temple so she would have to lift her skirts as she approached the throne; that when her foot touched the water it was made human again.

‘Stephen,’ I say. ‘It is half past eight in the fucking morning.’