This Is Between Us (6 page)

You held your hand in front of your face, as if to see what fingers really looked like. Your eyes squinted and then you looked back to me. Instead of smirking or letting out a laugh, you exhaled audibly through your nose.

“He sort of nodded down at it,” you continued. “And I watched her bend down and kiss it right on the head. He put his own hand on it then and it grew bigger.
His fingers around the finger
, I thought, and that kept scrolling through my mind. Fingers around the finger . . . a six-fingered hand . . . Krystal watched it and looked worried. He would stop and nod and she bent down and kissed it but I could tell that he wasn’t satisfied. He pushed her awkwardly to one knee. Then she looked around and got on both knees. I decided I wanted Susan to save her then, to come bursting through the door. I could have thrown something through the window but I didn’t want to get caught. He put one of his fingers in her mouth and then another, and then he grabbed her hand and put her fingers in his own mouth, like he was showing her. Like he was sharing something.”

I was relieved that it wasn’t you that this happened to, but I still tasted a sick kind of sour rise into my throat. My mind made this story into a movie and you were the director. That window was the camera that you hid behind. But your memory is the film still looped inside you.

…

One night while drinking, we pretended that we had forgotten how to kiss. We pushed and slid our slack, unpuckered lips on each other’s faces, our mouths like half-dead people in a vast desert. In a way, it was exciting and new. In a way, it was almost innocent. It was almost funny. We almost started laughing.

…

Our friend James has some kind of muscular dystrophy and has to use a wheelchair when it’s really bad. It started to affect him when he was in his twenties. He was always shy around girls even though he’s a decent-looking guy. When he first met you, he had a hard time talking to you too. But recently, it seems like he has a new girlfriend every other month, and they’re each more beautiful than the last. We wonder how he does it but we don’t say anything to him because we can’t figure out how to phrase the question.

I’m trying to figure out how much of it is sympathy and how much of it is something else.

“It’s a nursing fantasy,” you told me once. “Some women like to take care of someone who needs help. It gives them a sense of purpose.”

“Do you have a nursing fantasy?” I asked you. It felt weird to say
nursing
, like I was talking about breast-feeding.

“Not yet,” you said. “We’ll see how your health stands up though.”

“Would you like it if I were a male nurse?” I asked you.

You laughed but didn’t say anything. I imagined you in a wheelchair and me in some male nurse-type clothes. A light-blue V-neck shirt and paper-thin pants.

I wanted to tell you about a cute girl in a wheelchair I’d seen at the grocery store the other day. She was being pushed around by a guy and I was sort of envious of him. Her hands looked pretty and still in her lap. I decided not to mention this girl.

We saw James a few days after this conversation and he was with a high-heeled Puerto Rican who looked like Miss Universe. We were at a restaurant, and when he had to use the bathroom, she went with him and I became almost outraged with jealousy. I realized that he must have figured something out about women, maybe tapped into some psychological perspective that helped his confidence.

After dinner, we all left the restaurant and I asked James and his new woman if they wanted to catch a cab with us, but they said they were only going a few blocks and it was downhill. She started to push his wheelchair but he stopped her and said, “Let me give you a ride.” She smiled and then sat sweetly in his lap. He pushed his wheels forward and they began gliding like magic.

I looked at you and said the same words: “Let me give
you
a ride.” You jumped on my back and off we went.

…

We had two lists of dreams written out. We hung them in the bathroom for laughs. There were age-appropriate dreams and infinite dreams.

On the age-appropriate list were things like: start a band together and call it Year of Slacks, go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, get and maintain a flat stomach, and win a dance contest.

On the list of infinite dreams: write some poems together, go to Paris, buy a nice watch, and make enough money so we can learn to play golf.

Our friends asked us about the lists sometimes. They wanted to know why they were in the bathroom. That’s the room where most of the aging happens, we said.

…

I sometimes wonder if you’ve ever thought about hiring a seductress to test me. Maybe a friend of yours I haven’t met before, or a stranger.

Would she come to my work and start hitting on me? Slip me her phone number with a wink? I would get suspicious if that happened.

Or maybe when I go to the grocery store, you call the secret seducer and tell her what store I’m going to. What happens next—does she dress up sexy and find me in the cat food aisle? Does she ask my opinion on the organic beef and make a bad joke about how much she loves meat?

That might actually work.

Is there a website where you can find people who test the will of your husband, wife, or lover? I imagine a logo with an apple, a snake, and naked cartoon bodies trying to hide their guilt.

You once said, “There’s no such thing as entrapment when loved ones are involved.” At least I think I’ve heard you say that before.

Sometimes, late at night, we find ourselves watching a reality
TV
show in which unfaithful people are secretly followed and filmed. They are seen with their lovers eating at places like Olive Garden or some bar in the next town over. We hear them talking on their bugged cell phones, telling their waiting loved ones that they have too much work to do or will be out late with “friends.” They drive to cheap hotels and then we watch the minutes lapse away on the corner of the screen. When they are done, they come back outside and then the host of the show exits his surveillance van and jogs with a cameraman and the betrayed lover across a parking lot. We watch through the eyes of the shaky handheld camera as it readies its attack. There is a stunned pause and then an ugly confrontation.

I sometimes imagine that it’s us on the screen because I know you fantasize about this too.

…

I found a couple of journals of yours and they were full of peppy inspirational sayings right alongside depressing entries about how you see yourself. It didn’t seem like you at all but I knew it was you because of the handwriting. If I had found the journals somewhere, like on a bus, and they were written by someone else, I would have shown them to you and we’d likely make fun of them.

I read bits of the journals when I found them mixed into a box of old fashion magazines. I felt a little uncomfortable, so I put them back. That night I asked you slyly about how long you’d been keeping journals and you said that you’d started when you were a junior in high school. You told me that there were possibly twenty or thirty journals stored away in a box somewhere, but you never looked at them. “It’s like when people want to be frozen and brought back to life later,” you said. “I’ve frozen parts of my youth.”

I didn’t tell you about the ones I’d found. One was pretty recent, from when we first started dating. There were a lot of entries about your job at the library. Wonderfully fantastic daydreams mixed with complaints about coworkers. Many of the entries were more neurotic and adult, as opposed to the trivial and childish thoughts of a teenage diary.

“Do you want those years of your youth brought back to life?” I asked you.

“I should burn them,” you said with a laugh.

The rest of that week, I found myself drawn to that more recent journal. I tried to keep it in a secret place in the bedroom, where I could get it out and read it whenever I had time. There were a few parts where you expressed uncertainty about me. You wrote a couple of things about me that weren’t totally accurate, and I wanted to cross them out and correct them. Or maybe just smudge them a little so you couldn’t read them. One of the things you wrote was that I am too eager a lover. A couple of weeks after that, you wrote that I seemed nervous around Maxine and I might not be the best father figure for her.

My questions at dinner probably seemed strange that week. “Do you think I’ve become a better lover than I was at the beginning?”

You answered this question as I had hoped. “Yes, of course. I think you used to be kind of eager, but it’s very beautiful and natural now. We’ve learned each other’s bodies.” Your answer was sweet and reassuring, but the word
eager
jumped out at me most of all. It was like some secret hunchback who lived in the basement, who had always wanted to meet me and pat my back in a condescending manner. “Congratulations,” it might slobber. “You are not eager anymore.”

“Do you think I’m becoming a good father figure for Maxine?” I asked the next night.

“Maxine looks up to you,” you said. “She knows you more now and she trusts you. She loves you because she knows I love you.”

A couple of days after that, the journal seemed to disappear. But I was glad to be free of it. I felt like my questions were getting annoying for you anyway, especially the desperate way I asked them, like a man trying to erase your memory of his past behavior. I was bringing my eager and nervous self back to life. I had thawed it out until it was finally ready to burn.

…

We were lying on the bed naked and you apologized about your pubic hair. “I keep forgetting to trim it,” you said. And then you handed me a pair of scissors.

I scooted down and started running my fingers through it. “I like it this way,” I said, and formed a Mohawk shape.

“Feel free to do whatever,” you said.

I started trimming it down a little. I blew the tiny blonde specks of hair onto your belly. I made a face with them and then a circle. Then I slowly ushered them into your belly button like I was filling a hole.

…

You told me I was talking in my sleep and I wasn’t sure I believed you.

“Most of it was just random shouting,” you said. “And then you just laughed this really fucked-up laugh.”

“You don’t remember what I was shouting?”

“You said, ‘Don’t touch that. Keep it over there!’ And I asked you what not to touch and you just grumbled.”

I thought about this for a while and started to remember the dream. I was supposed to be guarding a giant sex toy. Some man had brought it into a McDonald’s and then asked me to watch it while he went to the bathroom. I was sitting at the table next to his eating an endless box of Chicken McNuggets. I told the man, who was old and hunched, that I would watch his toy. It looked like a dildo but there was something else attached to it. A circle of feathers and a metal thing that looked like a fingernail clipper. The man was in the bathroom for a long time and people kept walking over to look at the thing, so I kept telling people to get away. In the dream, I was using very colorful language. Riffing wildly like a stand-up comedian. The man finally came out and walked over to his table and said
thanks
. Then he picked up his hamburger and walked out without his sex toy. I didn’t stop him or call out to him. And then I thought I could make a lot of money on the sex toy, so I grabbed it off the table and ran out of there with it. A couple of people started chasing me but they were really small, like kids, and it was easy for me to break their tackles. I was like Barry Sanders or Adrian Peterson, knocking people over, juking them out of their shoes, or stiff-arming them. I knew the sex toy was mine and as soon as I got it to a pawn shop, I’d be rolling in the dough. That’s why I was laughing.

But for some reason, I was a little disturbed by the sex toy, so instead I told you it was a golden box full of diamonds and heroin.

“Your subconscious must be pretty active,” you said. “I hope you got some good money for it.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I actually made it to the pawn shop,” I said.

“That’s what you get for eating Chicken McNuggets,” you said.

…

You told me about the time you broke your hymen when you were thirteen. You were on a camping trip with your family and you were all on a horseback tour around some mountain in the Ozarks. It was you, your mom and dad, your brother, and a guide who called himself “Shoe.” He pointed at the horse and said, “Horse.” And then he pointed at himself and said, “Shoe.” It was the only funny thing that he said. The rest of the time, you said, he talked about this plant and that trail and Lewis and Clark and stuff you didn’t care about.

It was your first time on a horse and his name was Thunder. He was the color of cotton balls and his back was just a couple of inches taller than your head. You were so excited about this day and had thought about it ever since school had gotten out for the summer.

Toward the end of the tour, Shoe was leading your family along a stream when his horse suddenly reared up and backed into your dad’s. Then your dad’s horse backed into your mom’s and hers backed up into yours. It was a big rattlesnake that had spooked them. Thunder darted away from the pack and you lunged forward, holding on to the rope but also to the horse’s mane. The saddle slipped and you felt the hard leather horn push between your legs. Shoe steered his horse over to you and settled Thunder down. You were crying and felt paralyzed by fear. You didn’t want to look down. You remembered your mom said, “Oh, my baby.” Your brother tried not to laugh but his mouth shaped into a smirk.