A Woman

In another story the lovers are edacious in their rediscovery, the hoary parts masked beneath cryptic, voltaic shadows, moonlit whips easily sculpting younger, softer, unattached versions, so their other selves may watch, unimpeded, from their separate, torrential corners. 

In the woman’s story, there is no reprieve.  There is only an oversized bed with two people not touching.  The man, dark-skinned and pocked, is sleeping uneasily, his breath halting for periods longer than the woman, in her thin, cotton bed shirt, is comfortable with.  In intervals, he lashes out, his arms shooting, then falling at her chest.  She kicks him when he does this, but many times it only aggravates his sleeping self and his fingers clench onto her, nails digging.

The woman, not yet forty-eight, is acutely aware of her body against the cotton.  She makes it a point to wear only soft fabrics now.  Sometimes she goes without a bra.  She doesn’t do these things to entice the man – because he had never seen beyond his own appetite, and so their lovemaking had been flat.  She does it because the fragile, buttery veiling at her skin evokes a sense of vigor.  Then, other times, a stroke of silk on her breast, or a cool spillage into the curve of her back, brings, to her, a feeling of delicacy – something she had always enjoyed submitting to, and hadn’t done so since her twenties.

Age hadn’t been kind.  The woman’s toasty eyes, once an asset – wide and inquisitive – had long surrendered to the creased, sagging skin above them – and to her indifference.  Her nose, thin and sharp, regally comparative, had begun to take on a hooked appearance, overly dominating, especially for her frame.

She was short and lean.  In youth, it suited her – small, upturned breasts, concave belly, blouses that concealed very little.  Now, she appeared similar to a shriveled old man: rectangular and skinny.  Anything she wore enveloped her.  Anything tighter made her frail.  Her hair was shapeless, brown.  But that was her own fault.  She’d let herself go.  Or, rather, she continued to ignore her appearance.

She had never been beautiful, and so she’d never been attentive to herself in that way.  She was used to long stretches between haircuts; dry, prickled legs; bare, chewed nails and then the raw skin around the nails.  With youth on her side, these oversights might have been viewed as protest, as a rising up against the objectification of women.  Now, they just made her seem lazy. 

Certainly, the woman possessed other things.  She was interesting – and wasn’t that better?  She listened well.  She gave to beggars.  She had a sense of humor, and she shared it - offering laughter, even to common jokes – and perhaps this was a façade of sorts, but she was taught to be polite – or maybe she just hated the idea of someone left hanging.

There’d been a boy once.  And a schoolteacher named June.  The boy had been a boy because the woman was only a girl then.  He was polite, soft-featured and mildly ambitious.   He had a tendency to reach for her hand without awareness.  He freckled in the sun.  She remembered these things, but not other things, such as what his room looked like, or what color his eyes were.  She sometimes told herself he was the one who got away – that she’d been shortsighted when it came to anything too quiet.  He might have grown into the type of man who watched her when she wasn’t looking, who stepped into her discomfort whenever she was asked about children.  And, so, wasn’t she to blame – for leaving before he was ripe?

The teacher, June, was different.  There was life at her heels – having been, then, the age of the woman now.  There was a friendship.  They shared wine and candid stories, the woman’s confessions overflowing and June happy to catch them.  Eventually, there’d been no hesitation.  June’s neck was long and waxen, her fingers rough.  They undressed without hindrance, and June held the woman, gave to her things the man wouldn’t.  In the morning, June bathed the woman, washed her hair with vinegar.  June said to the woman: Keep this.  And the woman left repaired.  But the woman had lost her friend.  For, how could friendship follow that?

The woman and the man never married.  They insisted, in their second year, that marriage was a handicap.  Now, the woman can’t recall whose idea it really was.  And she thinks a legal arrangement, vows and a bible, might have been less constricting, for it seems somewhat bearable - to sign away a past and split time with children, amidst the exhaustion of years with only her own private knowledge of them. Was it naïve to think standing, with illusions, in front of a closed door more appealing than walking, easily, through an open one, nothing in front, nothing behind?

The woman wanted to believe it hadn’t always been this way, that there’d been a slow, disputed extinguishing.  But even on the day she met the man, not accidentally, but on purpose – set up by a friend of a friend, someone neither of them knew anymore – there’d been, not attraction between them, but resignation.  The man had been unlucky – bitter, even - over a failing career and the dating, which had never amounted to anything.  He was tortured with expensive taste and a penchant for people far out of his league, and he knew this.  The woman, a respiratory therapist, was not out of his league.  The woman worked often – wouldn’t be a nuisance, demanding too much of his time.  And the woman thought the man was nice enough, a talker, which was good, because she was quiet.  Perhaps she hadn’t realized how much he talked without listening; how his pauses weren’t moments of absorption, but moments of impatience to talk again.  The woman had been, at the time of the meeting, too isolated, thirsting for companionship.  If she hadn’t met the man, she might have considered a pet.  So, she agreed to see the man again, even though he’d smoked over dinner and couldn’t meet her eyes.  She planned, even, to stay with him for many years, imagining things would grow.  Isn’t that the way it was with arranged marriages? She’d seen Fiddler on the Roof, held to the words of the song, the question between Tevye and Golde: Do you love me? She’d still, even at that mature age, believed life might mimic the movies.

After she became intimate with the man, not because it couldn’t be helped, but because it was the natural progression, the woman thought of the boy often, more than she did when the boy was around.  She struggled to reanimate him, hoping a fiery past might spark a fiery present.  But there’d never been a fire.  Only embers embellished, never caught.  And then, much later, after the man had taken another lover – one who quickly tired of the man’s reflection – the woman found June.  But even June couldn’t come alive in the woman’s mind.  Oh, how she’d wanted that!

The woman thinks about all of this with the man still beside her.  His presence could always be counted on. Didn't that amount to something? Flesh and blood? It was an endless argument, the difference between being present and being present.

By the time the man’s eyes open, the woman's eyes have relented, and her thoughts are changing, moving into a yard with overgrown grass and a pavement stage with hanging sheets.  She is wearing her mother’s altered wedding dress – sliced, really, because a quick costume was needed, and because its debut had been met with desertion – and she is dancing for a small crowd of people, the neighbors and the kids from school, not yet aware of herself enough to be shy, and she is rigorous with her performance, oblivious to the fact that the audience is eager, not for her, but for intermission, because her mother’s tequeños are waiting.  A thought, then, occurs as the man rises without the woman knowing: Has her performance ever ended?

The man stops at the doorway because the woman has asked the question out loud. He doesn't turn and go to her as another might. He doesn't even answer the question. Instead, he remains motionless at the door, the darkness gathering around him, nothing in front, nothing behind, and he thinks about another person's story.