Everyone but You (22 page)

What a pickup line, I told him.

Afterward, he said it would probably be better if I remained single.

I never quoted from Rilke because Bash thought all poets possessed feeble minds. I told him that of all the poets, Rilke was the hardest to pin down, born in Prague, raised in a German-speaking neighborhood, offended to be called a German and an Austrian, both in equal parts. I spoke of his soldier-father, the destruction of his homeland in war, his time in Paris with Rodin. Rilke, I said, never felt himself a native anywhere; he was his own country—body, mind, and heart. In his
Duino Elegies
, I said, Rilke spoke intimately with his readers, as if in a whispery confession, and tried to overcome distance.

Bash asked me why anyone would ever do that.

I wrote him a poem but never sent it.

Once after we’d taken a shower Bash wrapped his arms around my waist and asked what I wanted from life, but there was too much, then, to say. We stood in front of a foggy mirror,
his chest hairs wet against my back, steam everywhere. He bit my neck. With my pinkie, I penned on the mirror what I wanted (not sex but love), and when he pulled away from me, I told him I was only joking. I tried to laugh but felt unearthly and foolish.

Sometimes when I see the moon and it’s low and full of itself in quiet ways, I still think of him.

S
PEAKING OF THE MOON
, a word here about our alien natures. It is a widely regarded belief that mathematics, and not words, is the universal language. Do you know what desire translates to, in math? Would Rilke know?

When I married my husband, he plotted our spending habits on charts, month by month, line by line, until a grid became full. He said he wanted to see what we were worth. When I laughed, he didn’t understand what I thought was funny.

I’m not exactly telling you the truth about him because my husband was not technically a mathematician. Actually, he counted time lines on five-hundred-million-year-old fossils—
Olenellus
—in Cambrian rock. He entered all these numbers in a database and performed statistical calculations about extinction rates.

When I first met him in a library and he told me all this, it made me horny. I said I didn’t believe anything could last that long and asked him to bed. We had sex among fossils because he worked in the Collections and had a key.

My husband wore boxers with symbols of πr
²
on them that glowed in the dark. He bought the boxers from The Gap. The Gap has a sense of humor about things.

He was so sweet when he smiled I knew I would devour him like chocolate, bite by bite.

My husband’s naked body did not look like rock and did not look old. His cheekbones stood in high relief, his flesh contoured like a cherub’s. Most of his skin was smooth and white, though he had fine brown hair all over his chest that I would not have expected. I called him My Angel. I wanted to carry his skin on mine as a soldier carries a flag, announcing himself to others.

Once during a rainy night he said he would give me anything I wanted, but at that time I couldn’t think of a thing I could actually keep.

He said, Let’s stay together until we die.

I quoted to him and said,
Every angel is terrifying
. I read him all of Rilke’s
Elegies
in bed, before we slept at night. I said,
Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
.

He said, Poetry sounds beautiful, but I just don’t understand it.

I told him I didn’t understand how to calculate time and the earth’s history on a one-dimensional line, from beginning to end.

We washed dishes together, cooked meals. With him I became so full I gained weight. He read articles while I graded papers on Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du mal
. We turned off the lights at the same time each and every night.

After ten years things became so quiet I developed a predilection for the future. When we gazed at rocks and mountains, I could hear the smallest cracking and knew that neither the mountain nor I could do anything about this fact.

I didn’t know how to describe the sound of erosion in a way that my husband believed, but I still marveled over fossils. For a long time, that was all we could talk about. Finally, I said, Are we any less subject to time than rock?

He said he didn’t understand the question. People aren’t mountains, he said.

When I left, my husband said that he was better at loving, though when he said this, it didn’t sound childish; it only sounded like a statement of fact.

Last I heard, he had married an actuary. She computes insurance risks and premiums. I can only hope they are happy. Sometimes I wonder what she thinks when she sees his boxers from The Gap. I am sure he hasn’t gotten rid of them. He never gets rids of anything, even things that are old.

T
HIS IS GETTING OLD
, you say now. We are in bed together, and I can’t tell if you are angry or joking, though I have seen you naked and felt you pressing between my legs, so I feel as though I should know. If you’re going to talk like this every time I ask you what you want, you say, I may have to reconsider sleeping with you again. Then you add, I was really just asking you what you wanted to eat. I always get hungry after sex.

You are a good lover with strong, nimble fingers, and it’s true, I suppose, that you are still hungry. You rub your belly, lie back, adjust the pillow. You stare at the ceiling fan, which swirls above us. Rain hits the window. I have seen the sky tonight, a shattered, pearl gray.

I want to say you are a sweet man even though you are hard, emotionally balled-up like a fist. I want to say you have the most lovely milky-brown eyes, and your skin is warm and heavy.

I sit up, lean over and kiss your stomach instead. It’s true, I tell you. I said too much. Should we fix a snack?

Not now, you say. Now you’ve ruined it. Now I’m only tired.

It is tiring, I agree, all this history and desire.

I could die while listening to you, you say. I’ve aged twenty years since you’ve started. I’m really glad you didn’t start from the beginning, or go on about all the men you’ve slept with.

That’s true, I say. There’s a lot I left out.

I want to tell you that, as with the foreign man, we are still strangers, and, as with my Lebanese man, I have no way to know if I reach you, and unlike my ex-husband’s charts, there is no good way to measure the distance between us. Instead I ask, Why did you let me talk for so long?

I dozed off, you confess. I remember the French guy, and war, and also something about the Marquis de Sade.

Oh, good, I say, leaning back on my pillow. Those were all the best parts.

Maybe I can listen when you can say what you want in one sentence or less, you tell me. Really, you need to make things simpler.

I pull up the blanket and turn to face you. I cover your leg with my leg. Truthfully, my wants are so large that I can’t fit the words around them. I want to tell you I feel lonely. I want to ask if, on rainy nights, you are ever moved to speak the language of the poets. But mostly, I want to feel proximity of body, mind, and heart. I want, like Rilke, to cover the terrible nakedness in you and in me, to cast the emptiness out of us and into the open spaces.

Perhaps Rilke was wrong. I cannot ask you this. You teach history and speak frequently of soldiers, countries, and war.

Do soldiers, away from their homeland, carry flags? I ask instead.

You scoff at this and shift under the covers. Only if they’re insane, you say. Only if they want to get shot.

It’s frustrating, to be without a home and country.

Not really, you say, as you strip off the covers and get up to make a snack. There are always borders and opposition. Sometimes, you tell me, it’s easier to remain quiet and say nothing.

H
unk, he calls as he pulls my sister close and loops his thick arm around her—flesh and bone, his mottled elbow, her pale neck and shoulders. She’s a pretty girl—too pretty, I think—tall and lean; dark eyes; a Gypsy forehead that, when it furrows, makes her seem older than almost-sixteen.

Hunk, Hunk, Hunk. Hunkie, the people of Eastern Europe. Or Hunk, a slab of meat. He musses her hair, then pretends to bite into her until she screeches and laughs, leaning into him, leaning in and not away. Raspberry gloss coats her lips; her smile tightens. I love my sister’s laughter. It’s as deep as a secret she hides inside, and, as it runs through her, her entire body shakes. Her head bobs forward, a mass of long chocolate curls. Her head bobs back, gently, like a buoy.

Here in the kitchen, the light shines brightly through the worn curtains, exposing fine particles of dust in the air; here the
day is beaming and beaming more, the hot, sticky August sun promising never to go down. The air pushes so insistently through the screen doors. My sister laughs when he whispers something in her ear. Beyond her, the house remains almost quiet; a fan hums, pulsing on and on and on. There are fans all around the house, in hallways, in bedrooms, set up in strategic places to circulate and cool the air.

Who’s my favorite? What does the favorite get?

I am the baby of my family. Eleven years younger than my sister, I am an accident, the grand failure of a breaking condom. Life pushes forward, I joke to people, years later. I am happy to be alive, I say, and I mean it.

Here in the corner of the kitchen, I sit at a rickety table with legs that always wobble, my own legs never touching the ground. I lop up too-sweet cereal with a spoon, lick what runs down my chin. At five I am all yellow curls, all sweet chunky cheeks. Jealous little thing, I want to be the favorite. She is mine, I want to say. I watch the intricate weave of bodies, the play of skin on skin, like wrestlers, or like dancers twisting in both graceful and violent maneuvers.

She is mine and mine and all mine. I have woven my hands into that mass of hair, nuzzled against each curl, threaded my fingers through her fingers, pressed my lips to her lips, a goodnight kiss, a good-morning kiss, a glad-to-see-you, to-be-alive kiss. She is my sister. I have breathed her and felt her and been her, and she is all mine, right down to the bones and blood.

My sister, still in a stranglehold, looks over at me, winks in assurance, and says, Hey, Goldilocks, what does Goldilocks do? And I know then I am to hunt for bears—my sister has made me fierce, telling me exactly how I must be: I am to be the hunter and not the hunted, which is what she tells me when she doesn’t want me to be afraid. It also means I am to go to my room and stay there and be quiet and wait for the sound of closing and opening doors again. It means I am to look under the bed, search through the closets, poke around the dusty corners for things that might devour me.

Okay, my sister says, to something my father whispers. She looks down to the floor, at the forget-me-nots springing from woven baskets, and she laughs. She looks out the back door, to the yard and trees, to my brothers, who are outside in the sun, enjoying the day, and she laughs.

I do not know what her laughter means.

Yes, there are boys. They are tough-and-tumbling brothers who wrestle at night, who give each other bloody noses over yard work. Outside, on this particular day, they rake crunchy leaves that have fallen down early—a drought in August—and then throw the leaves up in the air, out of their arms. The boys spend all day outside. The boys
are
the outside, wild, unkempt down to the last hair. They smell of warm breezes and sunshine. They wear the wind on their backs, have tree limbs for arms.

Later, after they finish their work, they will dangle themselves from branches, falling backwards without concern for the
smallest injury. They will burn insects—ants and katydids and cicadas in this summer when the cicadas awaken. They will burn them all with magnifying glasses, just to see.

The brothers aren’t exactly hunks, though they are lean and muscular—almost, but not quite, fleshy. They do often hunker around, though, practicing Travolta moves in the driveway—a little hip, a little lip—a routine from
Grease
. Their smiles widen when girls in the neighborhood ride by the backyard on bikes, all curvy, shiny knees and floppy sandals.

Years have passed since I’ve seen my sister. I am thirty-two now, and, mostly, I am alone. There are several reasons for this. I like to be alone; I am used to it. And I am difficult to know. Impervious, deliberately so, I push most people away.

There is a woman I know who wants to be my friend. She is a beautiful woman; she has thick hair like my sister’s. She keeps her hair cut squarely, bluntly, just as everything about her is blunt—her forehead, her smile, her manner of speaking. My friend loves the truth. She’s as relentless with it as a sewing needle, threading and threading bits of truth into something substantial. She tells me not to hunt for bears, but to chase down the words instead.

We exchange stories, hers always truth, mine always lies. Because I prefer the idealism inherent in lies. I tell her I don’t see the point in truth, and I mean it. It’s never served me well. I bring her stories about unending road trips and warring roommates and people who want rather absurd, funny things—things they have no hope of getting—like pet cows and love that
will never leave them. I write all this so I don’t have to write about my sister. My friend reads my stories, finds in them the one or two slivers of something that sounds like me. She finds something else, and suddenly there is a pattern. She is stitching me together, putting me on the mend, which I suppose is an act of friendship.

Many times I’ve thought of writing about my sister, because I often miss her. But I don’t know what I would write about, or how I could keep her from becoming just another fiction, just another character I invent to pass lonely days, to have someone to talk to who understands without all that saying. It’s been twenty-six years since I’ve seen her. The amount of time that I’ve known her has been eclipsed by the amount of time I have not.