Fragile (15 page)

“Not so fast.” She knows exactly what her next move will be, and so does he. She tears and uncrinkles the silver foil wrapper of the condom and subjects him to the indignity of rolling it on, her hands tugging expertly at the rolled rubber end. This is another one of her new proclamations, the condom, after years of lovely unrestricted sex courtesy of the pill, she has declared that she will no longer soak her body in unhealthy, unnatural chemicals for him—she claims that she very well may have given herself some kind of cancer, just so he can have an extra measure of feeling. So, despite her dwindling post-menopausal body, she has insisted that he use “protection.” Protection from what? He couldn't get her pregnant if he tried. Maybe she suspects him of being unfaithful, all those long lonely nights on the road. It's a valid concern. But he has come to believe that it is more a matter of her staking a claim to her body, delineating a territory that he no longer owns. This is mine once again—once and for all. You can visit me here, but only on my terms.

He can hardly blame her for this. He has scorned her for considering this act to be merely one more chore on her list, but it is, indeed, work. When she first surprised him by bringing home the big box of condoms with the shadowy forms of two lovers silhouetted on the flat golden lid, he marveled that she had the guts to even carry such a thing to the checkout lane of the drugstore, and he noted that this particular brand advertised in large clinical lettering that the condoms are R
IBBED
, F
OR
H
ER
P
LEASURE
. As she tugs the rubber tight, he can discern the tiny notched bumps that constitute the “ribs,” and he doubts they give her any pleasure at all. Finishing, her eyes momentarily flash up at him. For an instant, he sees her there, a person inside those two dark holes; a person who must eat and sleep and dream each day just as he does, the person who all those many years ago cast her lot with him and has had to endure his many faults and shortcomings. For a moment, he sees the person there, behind those tawny eyes, who clings to hopes and cringes in fear of imagined catastrophes, who goes about each day with her own familiar will to live and carry on, and he cannot help but love her, as he always has, for being the one whom he somehow convinced to join him and never leave his side of the room is nearly empty, a lot of the people over towards the bar now that the band has been playing a while, only the die-hard dancers still out there, the rest of them standing in twos and threes with drinks in their hands, talking, waving tumblers of whisky or gin or rum in the air. Tris would be taller than most, his head towering over the others, easy to spot. His high forehead,
cropped dark hair. I think of him as he was and not as he might be or must be now. I think of him as that young boy really in the hammock with me, or the one who dashed across the lobby, eyes lit up with laughter, always laughing about some joke he just heard, always making up something to smile about. But maybe there wouldn't even be any hair any more, maybe glasses or some other change I wouldn't even recognize, somebody altogether new. An arm, a hand brushes against my sleeve. Is it him? Turning, expecting to see him there, his dark hair and eyes like gimlet shimmers of blue. He must be, but no, this is someone I never have met before, touching my sleeve.

“Would you care to dance?” The voice dry and cracking, breaking away at the soft last sound of the word, but the hand stays there still, fingertips pressed through the fabric, pressing against my skin. How long has it been since any man touched me? There is no answer, no sound I can make. Now his hand takes my hand and holds it, leading me to the center of the floor like Elmer leading me across the street against the danger of traffic, or me leading that girl, and now his arms, his arms around me, his hand touching, testing the small of my back, guiding me. The people, their faces hanging suspended, floating this way and that, turning aside and swishing.

“I bet you don't remember me.” Sound of the trumpets flaring against the cry of the hollow clarinets.

“No, I must say I'm sorry, I don't.”

He smiles and the cheeks tipped with red rise up.

“I knew you wouldn't. We hardly knew each other then, but here we are fifty years on. Jimmy Boyle,” he says, letting me
drift farther apart, releasing me, maybe to get a better look. “I used to do the paper route on Dearborn Street, all around St Monica's.” And his face transposes into another, into a boy with a short-billed cap sprinting across the two-tiered stubby lawns of the street, flipping the rolled-up paper onto the porch with a slap. Sometimes Father would curse him for hitting the milk box or missing the porch entirely.

“I do remember you. You used to be so shy with your black leather collection book, especially when Louise came to the door. I remember once you tripped on the milkbox and nearly broke your neck down those stairs, backing away and staring at her.” Should I tell him I still live in the very same place? Probably the only one in this building who still lives in the house they grew up in.

“We all stared at her. My God, she was a knockout.”

“Yes, she was, wasn't she?” And she knew it, and made sure everyone else did too. He lets me drift a bit farther away, as if to get a better look at me, appraising. No one has looked at me like this in forty years.

“Well, none of us are knockouts any more.” He draws me in closer, pressing his beery breath against my cheek. “Even Louise must be old and gray I imagine.”

Yes, I want to say. Yes, she is. She lives in an old farmhouse, dingy and dark and just as alone as I am. I may have had a lonely life, but mine was never as sad and tangled up in tears as hers. All of her husbands and children, what a mess she made of it. Her good looks nothing more than a beacon calling shipwrecks towards her.

“She's doing very well, a writer living near Bremerton. A lovely little place she has out in the woods near the state park.” He brings me closer, still pressing the hard starched collar of his shirt against my chin. His mouth, his lips are close, close, maybe he thinks I'm her. Or maybe just pressing himself against a relation of hers is enough for him, his arms clasping him to her, he feels himself open up into pure sensation again, his self falling away, floating upwards into nothingness, a big open hole ripped from the fabric of the sky, her arms pulling him down into a pit that never ends, a space as loamy and wide as the earth itself, smooth and distended, plunging to the horizon and beyond. But she has shielded herself from touching him, he can feel himself in her but cannot feel her, it is the same as having her watch him draw, she will not let him feel his hands but not just his hands, his fingertips touching me, and not just touching me, caressing me, exploring my back. I shrink down, I close myself. When Louise told Father that we were to meet under the clock that day, when she told him that we were together in that way, she ripped you apart from me forever, she did the cruelest thing a person ever could. Her jealousy of me and of you came full circle after years of hating us and what we had together. She could have had anyone she wanted, yet she could not stand the thought of us together. When she told him that we were together so young, too young, she ripped you apart from me forever. But we were not really, that's what I told Father that evening when I arrived home after you didn't show, and Father
screamed, my God, he never raised his voice to us but that night he screamed and scared Mother so she drove him from the house. And then he used that word, he said it to Mother when it never really was that. We never did that together, but he said it, screamed it for all the house to hear, and from that moment on I folded into myself, I renounced you and any other, folded into myself to keep it from ever happening. When he screamed that word and Mother shoved him out the back door screaming, I said to myself at that moment never, never again will I let someone touch him there, she does this sometimes to tweak him, to get an extra rise out of him, one of her tricks, but the thought has entered his head that she will not let him feel and thinking this thought or any thought for that matter other than pure loose and otherworldly feeling has sent him back into his head, his self and her self, separate and apart and vexed by the acrimony of earlier this evening so he must think of another woman; he can feel himself failing. The woman from the television news darts into his head, her lips moving slowly, mechanically, pronouncing her words of doom. She is perfect, too perfect, her face and hair an abstraction, she talks, and the crazy nonsense letters scroll across the screen beneath her, and the child trapped pinned beneath the rubble, she is too perfect, she is death. He keeps going but has to shift positions, move his arm a bit to get the blood moving; it was starting to tingle. He twists his head across her shoulder beneath him and opens his eyes again and sees the yellow wall gleaming beyond the edge of
the bed, the yellow wall that she once painted of the house they will be leaving soon.

There, grasping for his attention, is a scuff mark on the wall, a smeared green streak that he never thinks of but knows quite well; he has seen it a thousand times through the course of his daily existence here, a mark left by a ball the children must have been throwing when they used to jump on the bed, a scuff mark from one of his racquetballs the kids used to steal and heedlessly carom around the house. He feels himself dwindling, the barrier between himself and her is as much of a distraction as this green mark. He must keep going, he must think of someone else. He envisions the woman in the hotel elevator who offered herself to him, who made that remark—what was it, what did she say?—he cannot remember now, something about being trapped in the elevator with him, and this is also no good, a vision of the two of them on the dirty hard floor of the elevator, so he goes back to her, to that impalpable remnant of earliest and purest experience, her warm presence next to him under the blankets, her breath upon his ear exciting him, the presence of a girl in the bed with him enough to make him hard to tell where his hand ends, where it stops it blends into my back, into me, and that is why I fold myself up. His hand pressing firm against the small of my back is too low, pressing me, leading me this way and that. Never again, I said, never again will I let someone touch me, entwine their life into mine. I have made myself inviolate and pure, so now this man must not, must never do what you must have wanted to do, though Father never
never believed me. He did know that you must have wanted to and I must have wanted to, so I closed myself off forever so he would know that what he thought about me was not true. I have folded myself up forever, and though his hand is cool and easy to let go, I have closed myself off waiting for you. I have done this thing that is no thing for years upon years, have denied and maintained and kept a completeness whole without any other unto myself, so not even you or any other will defile me, not even you nor any other, that was the thing, he has latched onto it now, having a separate other person next to him who was of the other sex or not so much sex but just different really. He didn't even know what sex was at that age but just different, a girl in the bed with him bouncing around. They were supposed to be taking a nap so the neighbor woman who was watching them along with Elmer and Louise, the whole wrecking crew, as the parents used to call them, over at Irene's for the afternoon, and after she had had enough of their running around and screaming, tearing through the house, she simply sent them all upstairs to take a nap, though they must have been at least seven or eight years old, with no direction as to which rooms or beds they were to sleep in, just a weary solemn command to go upstairs, the lot of you, and settle down and take a nap. And Elmer tried to first organize them into some game, hide and seek or Indians, but Louise, haughty Louise, who loved to torment him by sabotaging his plans, refused to go along.

Louise retreated to the mysterious room in the back of the house where a single narrow bed was kept but no one ever
slept, and Elmer in the middle room where the sewing machine and all of Irene's colorful ranks of bobbins whirred, and that left him with her at first just bouncing and jumping on the big queen bed; but then, both of them under the covers, telling stories, talking about who knows what. Laughing—always laughing. And then a hand maybe her hand first, touching. That was it, just a touch, but enough to send him now forward into fullness driving into her swept along by crystal pure revelation of another—any other—and the other in the bed beneath him whom he is touching has become not just anyone but has become me, that is all I have left, only me, because he will not come now, he will never touch me again, and perhaps he never did love me. This beery old man with his hand on my back is not him, and he never will be. There is only one thing to wait for now that you have not come. I pull my head away from his hard crisp collar, from the warm torrent of his breath in my ear. He will never touch me any more than this, and not even Tris will touch me, only one more thing to wait for this one thought has opened him up and engulfed him enough that there is no more thought remaining, only a parallel track of sensation spreading wide beneath him dredged up from the depths of a bed, a hammock, a tumble on the ground, and her bending over to pick something up off the gritty summer sidewalk of the plaza outside the theater.

She bent over and he saw for a quick tender moment the dark gap of blackness between her breasts, the lowcut summer
dress revealing a furrow that brings him into the pull of great nothing spread wide beneath him, ever wider the opening goes, in the hammock curled against him her warm summer form of a girl, knees knocking together as they swung, a hand just resting there in the space between the darkness coming, only the full ripe darkness coming to meet me now, not you nor anyone else, not even the gentle slue of the hammock in summer, the giant branches of the pinoak and the moon swinging high against the dusk, not even that can stop the darkness, though in darkness and in light I am even yet becoming more and more a blankness and always finally letting go and finding there is everything and nothing more to do than let these big husky men in their pale blue surgical scrubs wheel her down the waxed corridors of the hospital towards exactly what she does not know. As the lights sail by above her in a kind of rhythm, Holly imagines a melody the glaring fluorescent tubes could produce, a steady procession of tones so monotonous only a machine could generate it; when she hums it in her head, there's not enough variation for the tones to have been struck by a human hand. They carefully edge around a corner, then two bumps as the wheels trundle over a threshold and into a quieter ward than before. Fewer people walking here, it feels as if she has truly entered the depths of the building, the place where the serious work of the hospital is accomplished. One of the orderlies
stares at her breasts through the flimsy hospital johnnie. He can probably see the shadowy outlines of her nipples protruding. Go ahead and get a good look. Won't be the first, won't be the last.