I Live With You (13 page)

And it
is
the middle of the night, though so far I’ve not understood anything. I’m bedded down in an alcove, covered with half a dozen old army blankets, listening to the old man snore. This is probably where he sleeps but he’s on the floor across the room by the dry sink.

He only has this one room and it’s full of art—if you can call this art. I don’t know what art is any more than I know who I and we are, but the room is full of complicated things with curlicues and convolutions, twists and whorls. You can hardly tell where one begins and another ends. Or maybe they are all just one sculpture. There’s hardly room to walk around. It’s not like your art at all. It’s stormy looking and lumpy…. There’s a hint of wings. (Hermes was one of us, wings on his feet where they ought to be.)

The old man told me this is how he spends the time when it storms. I asked him, but how did he happen to be out so as to rescue me?

“I fear my dog has met with coyotes and either been killed by them or run off with them. Most likely killed. I was looking for him.”

He has a funny accent. I can’t place it. He actually rolls his r’s and he asked me if I’d “et.” You don’t suppose…. Could it be that that’s from speaking our old lost language?

I wish I knew more about what our art used to be like. Who would dare carve things like this but way out in the woods? (Hack out is a better way to say it.) There’s nothing shocking to it as to sex, but it looks shocking anyway. Maybe there is sexuality to it and I just don’t know enough to see it. Or maybe it’s the power of it that shocks me. Or maybe just that it’s so different.

Nothing is worse than different. We’re all taught that first thing. All of you are also taught that, too. And nothing is more the same than ballet. Full of rules of how it used to be done so we can do it exactly that way now. Even our bows are choreographed according to how they used to do it. It’s said, “Good ballet is never blunted by verisimilitude.” There’s no verisimilitude to blunt this man’s art either.

But I don’t want to think about it. I turn away and try to sleep though all these sculptured things looming over me are scary.

And I
do
have a midnight revelation. I wake up suddenly when I finally realize that that fireman probably isn’t in search of me at all, but of
us!
All of us, maybe including this old man? Maybe he’s been sent out by the government? I can’t let him hear this old man’s accent. I can’t let him see this… art.

Even so
, perhaps when he winked, it really
was
for me.

In the morning I look out the door first thing—at the sun and the shiny snow—and see somebody wearing camouflage. A broad man, looking at the shack through field glasses.

I start to coo again. I can’t help it. The old man gives me a look I can’t read. Well, we hardly ever talk about being us unless we’re at one of our retreats and even then we don’t talk much about it. We just give each other raised eyebrows and such. I stop my cooing right away and switch to an entrechat starting from fifth position. I
have
to do something. If he’s us he’ll know I’m us, too, and if he’s not us, he’ll think I’m crazy.

Then I see the dog, limping up to that camouflaged man. You can’t fool a dog no matter how much you look like a tree in fall foliage. Besides, it’s a little late for all this brown and yellow. The dog has a bloody stump where his tail used to be. No doubt coyotes, like the old man said. The bald man squats down and pets him, examines his wound. Now
isn’t
that a nice thing for a big bald man with a broken nose to do!

He sees me, there by the door. He pulls off his hat by one of its earmuffs, letting the sun shine out on his bald head which makes him even more lovable. So not only dark and dangerous, but more polite than need be under the circumstances. He could have just waved.

I don’t want him meeting this old man and seeing his odd art, but here he comes, crunch, crunching across the snow. I give another coo. The old man humphs a humph as if: I knew she was us, or, on the other hand: I knew she was crazy.

(Come on in. Rescue me. Take me back with you. I’ll keep my voice on an even keel. I’ll not singsong. I’ll not smile too much. I’ll never coo in public. I’ll pull my long limp hair back tight and weave it into a bun so it doesn’t fly around by itself. I’ll not screech when I laugh.)

“Coo…. I mean come. Come on in.”

“You shouldn’t be up here. There’s another storm on the way. There isn’t much time.”

I do love how his voice rattles out from someplace way down deep in his chest.

I lift. I actually lift out of pure joy. I stoop to greet the dog at the same time as I lift in order to hide it. It must have looked kind of funny, down and up at the same time.

That bald man has to lean over to get through the door, and there’s hardly room inside for somebody as big as he is. Even so he wanders back and forth, peering at the “art” close up, touching things. The old man stays in a corner and mutters to himself. He had just asked me if I wanted breakfast but now it’s clear he’s not going serve either of us anything.

After looking around the bald man takes out his first aid kit and treats the dog’s wounds.

After that, the man and I start back down, first through trees, but then the mountain opens out to wide views, all sky with nothing in the way of it. We like the “big sky.” Hard to explain but I like this man for exactly the same reason.

I want the storm to catch us. I want us holed up behind a rock or under a tree so he’ll get to know me. I lag behind and he keeps saying, “For Christ’s sake hurry up. Look at the clouds rolling in.” To slow us down even more, I turn and look and right behind me there’s two perfect stones next to each other, and just room enough for a foot between them. I do it. I step in and twist.

It hurts more than I expected. I did a good job of it, my pants are ripped and my boot is all scratched up, but then I get to have his big warm hands all over my leg and foot. He has everything he needs in his first aid kit. He tapes up my ankle in a sort of figure eight, and as stiff as a cast so it hardly hurts at all. (Luckily we never get the misshapen feet all ballet dancers have.) After that I get to have his big warm arms around me as he carries me to a better place than on this slippery snowy slope.

That’s what he
says
he’s doing, but he’s got ideas, too, just as much as I have. We don’t make it off the slope. As he carries me, he slips. On purpose. I
think
on purpose. We slide down a long snowy bank and would have gone over the edge of the cliff if I hadn’t stopped us with a hard lift. He’s so heavy. I don’t know how I had the strength for it, but here we are, stopped right at the edge.

He says, “You’re one of those others.”

“What others?”

“Don’t try to fool me.”

So he does know. I say, “I saved you,” to distract him.

He twists my arm, but not too hard. Just a little warning. He could have broken it with no trouble at all. For sure he likes me.

We ought to move back. I’m too used up to lift again for a while and we might go all the way over and
then
what? I try to squinch myself back, but he holds me. I love his hug, but I’m scared.

“I’m scared.”

“Tell me who you and that old man are and what you’re up to way out here in the middle of nowhere? What’s he making? What’s all that stuff?”

Nobody ever tells me anything. They never did. From an early age… as soon as they told me I wasn’t them but us, I wanted to understand us and (especially) me. Nobody would answer anything I asked.

Maybe those things all over the place in there aren’t art after all.

“I don’t know who we are. They told me we were us, but they never said what being us was. They’ve kept us secret even from ourselves. All I know is there’s this one thing—this lift. And besides, I can’t do it again until I rest up. We have to move back.”

Finally
he lets us. It’s so steep and slippery I have to crawl. He does too. He pulls me along. At the top we crawl sideways to get over on safer ground, completely away from the slope. I have the thought to push him over the cliff. That’s what I should do, knowing that he knows, but I don’t do it.

Safe … a little bit safer, we catch our breath and I get to have his arms around me again. I’m glad I didn’t push him over.

We’re both shaky. We hug and tremble. With me the trembling isn’t from having just escaped and having just used up all my lift, it’s that my face is pushed (I pushed it there on purpose) right into his thick neck. His neck comes straight down from his jaw to beyond his collarbone. He looks like the kind of man who’d say, “Try to choke me,” or, “Hit me in the stomach.” He’d say, “I’ll bet you a hundred dollars you can’t hurt me.”
I’d
bet him a hundred dollars he’s said both those more than once.

There’s a sudden darkening as if already dusk. There’s wind and snow. Just like that, the storm starts. He carries me yet farther back, and pulls me under a tree whose branches come to the ground on all sides. We sit, hugging. I’m still breathing into his neck. He’s as shaky as I am. Now why would a man who loves storms and all sorts of dangerous things be trembling so?

Now his hand is on my breast. He’s taken off his gloves and reached inside my parka. His hands are large and shapely. I noticed that before. I’ve always liked good hands. And now those very hands are all over me.

“Actually you’re not so different from everybody else.”

I’m worried because our breasts are smaller. I say, “But I am different.” I’m thinking mostly of my breasts.

“I don’t care.”

Maybe breasts don’t matter that much. Maybe he really doesn’t care.

Green pine boughs surround us and beyond them snow comes down. A real white-out. The whole world has turned my favorite color. We’re cozy in here under the branches. His knees are threaded in with mine. Our feet, in our big boots, are clumped up together. I take off my gloves and put my hand on the sweaty back of his neck, under his scarf. He’s damp… radiating….

We kiss. How warm his lips are even now in this snow storm. How soft… soft generous lips. (I noticed them before, too.) You wouldn’t think they’d be so soft with such a hard muscled man.

He needs a shave, but I don’t mind getting scratched up. And I only have a few twinges from my ankle.

“Coo,” I say, a long low, “Coooooooo.”

The storm is making a racket, branches scratch against each other, the wind whistles, but I couldn’t be warmer. I couldn’t be more enfolded, engulfed, enclosed…. While I coo and squeak, he grunts and growls and bellows.

Now how did this happen?

We sleep. His fuzzy chest is still bare and my ear is still right on top of his heartbeat. It sounds out louder than the wind whistling around us.

At first he’s nicely relaxed, but pretty soon he snores and snorts and jerks. The storm does the opposite, it quiets and soon a full moon shines out. It’s even fairly bright in here under our branches. I can even see how long his eyelashes are. I noticed them before. I noticed everything before.

I should be thinking about how to get rid of somebody who knows for sure about us, but how can you do that to a person when you’ve heard his heart beating under your ear all night long?

We can’t marry one of you. That’s unthinkable though I’ve thought of nothing else. There have been times when I pretended I’m one of you—what I’ve wished for since I met this man. When I thought of being you, I flitted down the sidewalk, skipping myself over chewing gum and spit, in a way that could only be us. But we’re a dying breed. If we don’t take care we might be gone altogether.

Those who aren’t careful (those who risk, loving the wrong person) meet with an accident. I mean from our own kind. There’s one of us in charge of that. We don’t know who. Maybe it’s the old man who rescued me. But out here I suppose I’m the one in charge. I should get rid of this man before that old man comes along and kills us both. Or one of us, depending on whether he’s us or you.

We wake at first light. We lie in each other’s arms, listening to snow melting sounds. That is, I do, but he’s been thinking. “What about….” he says, and grunts. I’m hoping he’s going to say, What about the two of us? but he says, “What about all that… stuff? I could tell the pieces will fit together into something huge. Could be a weapon or a whole bunch of them.”

“It’s art.”

(Isn’t it? Does it really fit together into one big dangerous thing? And even if it does, why isn’t that art? Art is more important than some device or other for the end of your kind… or my kind.)

“It’s
art!”

But he’s not convinced.

“If you care for me at all, you’ll take my word for it. It’s art.”

“It’s not even beautiful.”

“Nowadays nobody is so….” (I almost say, unsophisticated, but I stop myself in time. He already feels unartistic compared to me.) “Nowadays nobody thinks art has to be beautiful. It’s to make us think. Besides, beauty is learned.”

“Maybe.”

But I want to make him feel good.

“Rescuing is more important than any art could be, though art takes just as much courage.”

“I’d like to see what those things look like put together.”

“Even if it all fits together why can’t it still be art?”

I
want
it to be art. Your kind or our kind, I don’t care which. We need more art and fewer weapons. Though, on the other hand, maybe we have too much art. It’s hard to keep track of. Hard to sort through. I’d prefer less. But I would never say that in front of him.

He kisses me. A long wet kiss. For no reason at all.

I say, “Marry me.”

He looks at me—those glittery black eyes—just looks. He could at least have said, Maybe.

We come out from under our tree into a world of shine… white, with blue sky above. I’m
so
happy. (Except that he didn’t say, Maybe.)

The man looks all around and then looks all around again with his field glasses. He drops on one knee, ducks partly behind our tree, hands the field glasses to me and points. There, behind us, is the old man. He’s sitting on a boulder, looking all around with
his
field glasses. He has a rifle across his knees. And here comes his dog, right to us. Wagging what’s left of his bandaged tail.