What Lies Between Us (17 page)

We talk for hours into the night; we show up to work bedraggled but shiny-eyed, like religious converts or victims of starvation. Friends are forgotten, work is a hindrance. I cannot remember the last time I went into the dahlia garden, but then what is blossoming in my life is so much more imperative.

*   *   *

In bed, he answers my questions, sharing a long snaking ribbon of women starting with junior high crushes, high school sweethearts, art school fuck buddies, long-term girlfriends. He first kissed a girl when he was twelve. He lost his virginity at fifteen in the basement room of a girlfriend, her mother watching TV in the room above, loud enough for them to hear the muted sounds of the show. Sex has been easy for him, a natural part of his life. I picture these women. Each one brings a quick stab of acid to my mouth. I want to know their names, their ages, which ones he still keeps in contact with. I keep smiling as he reveals everything. It's clear that he has never been taught shame.

Then he turns those blue eyes my way, nestles his head against my bare shoulder, sucks the skin in a kiss, and asks, “What about you?” I throw an arm over my face, say, “There isn't a lot to tell. I lost it at twenty-two. In college. A guy.”

“What guy?”

I sigh. “I don't know. I don't remember his name. He was the brother of a friend. He was spending the night in the house we were in. It isn't important.”

He rolls over me, pulls the arm away from my face. “It
is
important. It's important to me.” I look everywhere but into his eyes. But he holds my head carefully in his hands and won't let me look away even when the tears well up in the corners of my eyes. His gaze feels like knives carving away layers of my skin.

I push away from him, sit up with my arms around my knees, and say the easiest thing. “It's fine for you. You grew up in America, where virginity is no big deal. But where I'm from, it's the biggest deal. It's a matter of life and death. It's what mothers look for when they choose a bride for their sons. When the couple comes back from their honeymoon they have to bring the sheet with them to prove she was a virgin. Otherwise the family can decide she's spoiled goods and discard her and then no one will marry her. And an unmarried woman … she's nothing back there. That's what I was brought up with. That's why I didn't lose my virginity until I was twenty-two. Are you happy now?”

He pulls me gently back into his arms, kisses my face, whispers, “I'm sorry, baby. I'm so sorry.” I sigh into his shoulder. I have misled him. But this is what he expects to hear; this is the narrative people expect from me. Is it so bad to give it to them?

Later in the fogged bathroom, the heated water pulsing against my flesh, I wonder, when
did
I lose my virginity? Was it at twenty-two when that boy entered me? Or was it much, much earlier? Was it when I was a little girl with a spot of blood upon the curve of my foot? Was it in the months and years after that, when every footfall felt like a threat? And
what
was it that entered me? Who? I try to think about it clearly, but a white fog rises, makes me sleepy until the question itself loses meaning.

*   *   *

At first I say I can't spend the night. I say I can't sleep in a bed that isn't my own. But a few months into our relationship, I get up to leave and he tugs me back and I fall asleep cradled by his body.

The nightmares come. Sharp objects. Skin tearing slowly. A child crying in a hidden place. Water crashing over my head. I gasp awake, gulp air. Daniel's hands are trying to soothe me. He whispers, “Shh, shh. It's all right.”

I regain myself quickly, my thudding heart reclaiming its pace. He says, “Jesus, what were you dreaming about? What happened? You were fighting me off. I've never seen anything like that. What was it?”

“Nothing, just bad dreams.” I grab my thrown-off shirt, wipe off my torso. He says, “Maybe you should see someone, see what they have to say. Seems serious.”

“Everyone has bad dreams.”

He says, “Not like yours. What was it?”

A corner of the room flares alit. Samson's eyes. He is here, water falling from the surfaces of his face. He is alive, watching. I am filled with the certainty that, as was true in my childhood, there is nowhere to hide.

I say, “There's nothing. I don't remember. They're just bad dreams.” I lie back.

He picks up a long curl of my hair, kisses it, says, “You can tell me, you know. It's okay. You can tell me anything.”

I nod, but I know that there are some things you
cannot
tell. If I tell, he will know what I am, he will see through to the corrupt core of me. He nestles against my back and falls asleep, and I lie wide awake, jaw clenched through another half spin of the planet.

*   *   *

I expand into love. This man named Daniel is mine. I own him; I love him. From his tumbled brown-blond hair to his long, stretching limbs to the arching span of his belly to the uplift of his cock that grows against my fingers or my lips. The smooth, flat expanses of his skin are like cream to my kitten tongue. I can't stop touching him. Suddenly I understand all the pop songs with their terrible love lyrics. I don't want to slow down this slide and tumble. I am high on brain chemicals, oxytocin flooding my system.

He is slow and careful with me. He lets me want him. I have never wanted a man before. Now with him my body is at ease enough to hunger. A bud closed tight since childhood explodes into full blossom. All through me surges a rush of chemicals attuned to his scent, his lean long frame, his skin. My whole self glowing, growling, ready—it wants such things. It accepts the adulation of his mouth and fingers and skin and desires more.

He pulls me astride him so that he is below, perfectly still, and I start to move. The bounce of my body, a specific friction, a mounting of heat and flush. As if our two bodies are kindling, this friction causes a fire to catch and spread all through me. He watches my face rapturously, waiting for that telltale shudder. A bursting open as if he has reached in and clasped my soul and thrown it outside my boundaries so that I am flying free, rising outward into the boundless dark. I gasp and fall upon him. As I fall asleep he runs his fingers along my skin, and it is as if his fingers and not his mouth have said, “Beautiful.”

*   *   *

Later I'm sitting sedate on the bus on my way to work and am overcome with the memory of his breath on the pulse of my throat. My blood jumps and I am wet and throbbing and tumescent from the thought. I have to squeeze my thighs together, shift in my seat, try to look respectable, responsible. I hunch over my hospital notes, scribble tiny lines covered by my other hand. I don't think I'll have the courage to give him this scrap, but it reads: “You make me cream my undies; your tongue makes me insane; the memory of your body on mine bucking like a wild horse drives me to distraction; I want to ride you for hours; I want my nipple between your teeth; I want to bite you and scratch you; I want your blood in my mouth; I want you.”

Who am I? Someone I barely recognize. Someone driven by lust, bold and brazen. A stranger to the way I used to be. He has split me apart and released the fibers of my being so thoroughly that they reach into him and pull us skin to skin. At my apartment that night, I cover my face with a napkin and hand him the torn scrap of paper. I watch from behind the cloth as he squints to take in the tiny writing, his lips moving. When he is done he looks at me with a shine in his eyes, an admission of the hugeness of this thing between us. He reaches for me, pulls me onto his lap, and covers my mouth with his.

All through the days I carry the smell of him. On the weekend, I shower, am ready to head out to a shift, scrubbed clean and dressed, but he pulls me back into bed, groans, “Don't go, stay here with me. Fuck me all day long.” And I do, and afterward there is no time to shower again; soon I realize how glorious this is. At work I catch just the tease of a scent, a cobweb wisp floating in the air to my grasping nostrils. If I open my legs a little wider, sniff the air, the scent of us mixed together—a potion, a seduction, an obsession—carries up to me.

I wonder if he carries me around in the same way. On his skin. Perhaps for a while. But it's not the same, is it? It's not this tiny scent parceled out bit by bit all day. I have a secret, a heady pleasure that makes my head spin when I go to piss and drop my head between my knees, inhale the soft silk of my panties.

Can other people—my fellow nurses, my patients, the doctors—smell it? The subtlest hint of our mingled sex? I don't care. I had always felt cold in this foggy city, my circulation slow. But now the very temperature of my body seems to be raised, my skin alight like a match has been struck from the inside.

*   *   *

He moves in after three months. It makes more sense, since I own this apartment while he has always rented. I make more money than he does. We both know this and I don't mind it. He's supremely talented. It's only a matter of time before other people see this. I am convinced of it. I have never accumulated much, so it's easy to nestle his books among my own, to hang his clothes in half the closet, install his canvases and paints and turpentine in the back room, put up his paintings everywhere. I introduce him to Godzilla, who stands on a rock and waves his antennae in a friendly seeming way, making us laugh and hug. This is what it means to be happy, like letting the river take me effortlessly into its broad, warm embrace.

*   *   *

He says, “I want to tell you something.” He looks intent, serious. I know that he has seen through the disguise to what I truly am. He is going to leave me. Why would he stay? Why would anyone stay? I am shattering inside when he says, “I love you.”

I burrow against his skin. He needs me; I am special; I am chosen. I feel him move into my body, our blood mingled. The paths of our lives uprooted from their previously separate soils and replanted entwined.

*   *   *

Yet here is another and important part of our story. Daniel is white. Creamy skin that tans in botchy spots if he has too much sun, blue eyes, blond hair, a little more than six feet of white man. Here in America, for someone like me, to love someone like him, what ignoring of history do I have to do?

But in love, history can be ignored. Indeed, perhaps, in a love like ours, history
must
be ignored. What do plantations and shadows hanging from beautiful trees have to do with my lover and me? What does a history of colonialization and enslavement have to do with us? What does a queen's pounding of her children's heads in a mortar have to do with us? After all, my past is hidden behind the thick curtains of a different country. I will choose not to part these particular draperies.

Even more truthfully, perhaps, I am secretly thrilled at being noticed and chosen by
one of them
. As if he makes up for all those white boys in high school who had looked past me. To be desired like this feels like being lifted into the very bosom of America.

We put our arms, one dark, one pale, next to each other and exclaim at the difference. Next to him, I am irrefutably, undeniably dark brown. Such a malleable concept, one's body. It exists only in contrast to the bodies around it.

*   *   *

Then too, we live in a time and place where it isn't particularly remarkable to be interracial. There are couples like us everywhere in the city, mixed in every variation possible.

But there are also the battle stories. A black nurse who does shifts with me tells me of driving at night with her white husband, their car pulled over at a DUI stop. They had not worried because the husband had been the designated driver and had not drunk at the party. But the officer had shone the light in her eyes and wanted to know what her relationship to the driver was. He had asked questions until they realized he thought she was a prostitute out with her white john. It was only the proof of their shared name, their matched rings, that convinced him and freed them to go. Always between this couple, the way the officer's eyes had misread love for commerce.

Once Daniel and I drive across wide stretches of land, and in Utah we stop at a motel. I stay in the car looking at a map and he goes inside. After a while, bored, I wander into the lobby and go up to the counter, where the woman behind the desk is talking to him. I enter their conversation and it takes me a while to realize that she is talking to him, but not to me. She is looking at him, but not at me, and nothing I say, no ferocity with which I stare at her face, will make her turn and look at me and admit that I am here with some claim on this man who in her opinion should not belong to me. I am invisible, kicked in the chest by her refusal to see me. When she slides the room key across the counter, it is toward him. It is a gesture marked by an unmistakable ignoring of my outstretched palm. I storm out, and later in the room he says, “Shh, who cares? She's just a stupid, racist woman. Don't worry about it.” And I nod and let him comfort me.

*   *   *

In the summer he takes me to visit his parents, who are good people living in a good place, a small town an hour out of Charleston. On the drive to their house, I open the window, and it is humid in a way that reminds me of the island. My skin opens up as if I am coming home, the biology in me tricked by the weight and temperature of the air, by the myriad shades of green rushing past.

I say, half joking, “It feels like home. We should move here.”

He grips my knee and smiles, says, “Give it a minute.” We pass a small church with a sign outside that reads, “Jesus, stripped, abused, assaulted, violated for you.” I raise my eyebrows at him. He says, “Yah see? Not exactly home.”

His mother is silver haired and soft shouldered, his father taller but stooped now. They hug me and are sweet. But they are not prepared for their son's choice of someone like me. Someone from such a faraway place, a place they have never heard of before. They have not been abroad. They were born into this place, this life, and have never left or even felt the need to. Their ancestors had come here fleeing terrors, and once they had been planted in this soft and welcoming earth, there had been no need to ever leave again.