Silence and the Word (22 page)

the bones beneath that skin

will be light bird-bones

they will want to go up

want to fly sunward

they will glow through

the skin, at night, when we lie

beneath the covers

it is too warm here

you will cry

I am burning up

I will coax you to stay

I will lick sweat from your pale neck

and blow on that shivering skin

I will lick my way down

(I have done this so many

many times already)

I will lick circles on your sunken chest

I will lick all the way down, and take
you

entirely inside my mouth

until you lose yourself

until you are no longer bound

by earth and skin and bone

(I have done this, and will

a thousand thousand times…)

afterwards

I fall asleep

my head resting on your stomach

one fragile arm flung over

your thin thigh, and hip

(it is not much to hold you down)

you will lie there in the dark

hand buried in my silvered hair

listening to the wind

flying

through the trees

1.

In the spring of my freshman year, I had sex
with a woman. Once. I had been dumped by my boyfriend a few months
previously, and she had just been dumped by her fiancé, so we had a
certain sympathy for each other. She invited me to dinner and
cooked pasta with eggplant. I hated eggplant, but I didn’t have the
nerve to tell her. She deep-fried it and simmered it in a tomato
sauce and in the end, it wasn’t anything like what I had expected.
It was the first time I’d had eggplant that wasn’t awful; it was
really not bad at all—though I didn’t expect to be eating eggplant
again anytime soon. In the morning, we held hands as we walked to
campus, and I was glad that people might be staring at us. I think
she could tell. We were just friends after that. Over Christmas of
my junior year, I met Karina. She was visiting from Australia, and
we knew each other from the net, and I offered her a place to stay
in Chicago. She seemed pretty, but I didn’t find hers particularly
attractive; I didn’t notice women often, though I did call myself
bisexual, after that first woman. I wore a turquoise silk shirt and
blue jeans when we met; Karina told me much later that she had
found me attractive from the first moment she saw me. After a few
days of her regard, I found her quite attractive as well.

2.

There are so many ways that I know her that
you will never be able to see, no matter how long or hard you look.
We were together for three years—but not really together all of
that time. She came for the winters (her summer vacations) and
lived with me. Three months of intensity, followed by nine months
of invisibility. We were both poor. When she left, there would be a
few phone calls, followed by a few long e-mails, and then mostly
silence, until winter came again. Karina hated the heat. I hated
the cold, though I wasn’t particularly fond of heat either. When
she came to Chicago, she would take such pleasure in the snow; she
looked like a little girl, a child with her head tipped back,
tongue out to catch the snowflakes falling down. And then back in
the apartment, nothing like a child at all. She came easily. She
spoiled me for other women. I can close my eyes and remember the
sounds she made, the quick rising tones on in-drawn breaths. She
loved snow, and flowers, and animals, but what I noticed most in
those days was how much she loved sex, more than anyone else I
knew. And when you had sex with her, you couldn’t help but love it
too, couldn’t help but love her. When you saw her head tipped back,
her back arched—then your own body shivered in response at the pure
shining sex of her. You— I—couldn’t help but lay a body down
against hers, feel that skin dissolving into skin until the
barriers were gone. Or if not gone, then so permeable that we
slipped back and forth, so that at times my heart lived inside her
chest. She often kept her eyes open; I always closed mine. I would
sometimes try to keep them open, but I failed, over and over again.
I couldn’t keep looking at her, not if I wanted to see her
properly. And when I look at photos of her now, I don’t see the
photos, the frozen moment. I see the living woman inside the photo;
I close my eyes and feel her skin against mine, her eyes looking
back at me, her heart beating in my chest.

came home tired from working all day but the
snow was falling heavy and thick and beautiful so I opened my door
and called up the stairs to her to come down and she came down and
I put down my bag and she put on her coat and I rewrapped my scarf
and she put on the green beret that she gave me once on a sunny day
in San Francisco because I had seen it in a shop and loved it
beyond all reason and we went out into the night closing the door
quietly behind us and the almost-silence of the snowfall and the
crunch-squish of the thick snow over the pavement under our shoes
as we walked up one block over one down one and back over and home
again and just chatting about the day with him and the day at
school and saying goodbye and trying to stay awake in class and how
marvelous the crunch-squish was and what fools were the homeowners
who had shovelled with their pavements now only thinly covered and
their sounds all erased and the dry vines smothered in snow that a
few months ago had carried heavy wine grapes all blue-purple
delectable and she wanted to know what they tasted like and I
couldn’t come up with a way to describe the taste that is grapely
but also more than grapely until finally I told her they were like
plums which is at least a little true but they are really also like
wine and like grapes and like fresh and heavy snow.

3.

Kevin and I started dating the spring of my
junior year, about seven months before we met Karina. I fell in
love by August; it took him until September to admit he loved me
too. I had broken up with him by then, but like all the break-ups
that followed, we got back together within a few weeks. After the
fourth or fifth break-up, I stopped bothering. It was during the
second break-up that I met Karina; it was during the second reunion
that he started dating her too. When I say that I dated her for
three years, it would be more accurate to say that we dated her.
Kevin still does, somewhat. Those three years were some of the most
intense of my life; I was in love with them both—sometimes I felt
that I was nothing but love. When he looked at her with tenderness,
I was doubly pierced; by a quick pang of fear, and by a surge of
joy. I don’t know if she felt the same, in reverse. He didn’t
suffer the fears. Sometimes I wonder—given that she was the first
woman I ever really fell in love with (and perhaps the only
one)—how much of that love was because of Kevin? Is it possible
that my feelings for her were, in part, reflected glory? Can love,
and lust, be created out of a vision of the person in your
beloved’s eyes? And then what happens, when that vision shifts and
changes? There were always difficulties; three months living
together followed by nine months apart are not conducive to
building and maintaining relationships. And Kevin and I were still
living together, while she was away at school in Australia; our
relationship with each other grew and changed; our relationships
with her stayed static over the long quietness. So when she
arrived, pleasure and joy would be quickly mixed with
awkwardnesses, irritations, arguments all around. Eventually, love
seemed an insufficient reason, and I broke things off with her. She
was relieved. They were having difficulties as well, and I have to
wonder now how much of my inability to see what I had once loved in
her was because of what was between them. How much of my love for
her was mediated by him, required his eyes as translation?

4.

It was only after we broke up that I started
writing her love poems. Love had changed to distress, and then to
friendship—now we are closer than we ever were as lovers. We
haven’t had sex in years, not just us. She has mostly lost interest
in women, which distresses her. I was rarely interested in women
other than her. Now I look at her, and I feel no piercing of
desire. My heart does not race; my body does not grow tight in
anticipation, the way it does for certain men. It is only on
occasion, when we are sharing a bed, that I wake to find myself
curled around her. And even then, only one time out of ten, or
twenty, will my body notice hers, my skin begin to crave contact
with hers. I lie still then, trying not to wake her, and with eyes
closed remember what it is to have my fingers inside her, to have
her breast in my mouth. How much of that rare desire is her actual
presence, and how much is the memory of desire, the lingering scent
of a lost year? Did it ever really exist at all? So I look at
Karina and feel not desire, but pain that tightens my throat, that
slows my heart to heavy beats. I look at her, and wonder what I
have lost, what was, or might have been. I write to her, for her,
and construct with the words an image of what could be, or could
have been. In nine years with Kevin, I have learned at least a few
things about loving. If I had known them when I met her… .

5.

We are generally easy with each other these
days; we curl into each other while watching television; we can
still share a bed. Karina has visited every year but one—though not
for quite as long as she once did. She was here for three weeks
this time, and despite minor irritations, I did not want her to
leave. I took photo after photo of her this visit; last time, too.
She doesn’t like most of them—she does not think that she looks
beautiful enough in them. Aesthetics have always been important to
her. Her favorite is overexposed and stark. I can see the appeal,
but it is perhaps my least favorite. The woman in the photo is
lovely, but when I look at it, I do not see the face, the body,
that I love. All the details are erased, the specifics. What she
sees as flaws, imperfections of skin or lips or flesh, I find
unbearably attractive. I want to photograph her every day; now that
she is untouchable, she seems perhaps more beautiful than ever. Now
that she is separate from me, always at one remove, I want to
engulf her. The urge to touch her consumes me; yet I can look at
her and see nothing. Or everything. Her physical presence is
laminated over with the idea of what could be, the memory of once
was. Not long ago, in bed, I accidentally brushed my hand across
her breast. She said, “Hey—you don’t get to do that anymore.” She
was teasing. I started to cry. And as she pulled me close,
apologizing, I tried to explain that it was not that I desired her,
but that I couldn’t stand to be cut off from her, divided once more
into two separate beings, never really touching again. She nestled
my head against her chest; she stroked my hair. She told me again
that she loved me. I held my breath and closed my eyes and listened
to her heart beating in her chest. I felt the warm skin of her
against my wet cheek. It was better than it had been in many years.
It was almost enough.

and see—it’s growing dark. the west

has lost its shining sun; the stars

are thickly clouded, dim at best.

the cities burn, the dispossessed

give up their will, and all their hope

rests in the hands of those obsessed.

we are so small, and each attest

what cannot be denied: our loves

surpass the others’ loves, when pressed.

and all I ask are quiet nights of rest,

my arms around your solid body,

my head against your breathing chest.

You open the door and she’s standing there
with ghosts in her eyes. Ghosts and tear tracks; her arms wrapped
tight around her, fingers digging into the flesh of her upper arms.
Standing there in her short skirt, with dirt on her long legs and
muddy bare feet. She looks like someone who has forgotten how to
speak.

You stand there, with the words swallowed
down so deep. He pulls you in, gently. Asks you questions. You
don’t answer; you can’t. Finally, he pulls you into a hug—a long
embrace, with arms protecting, cradling. His palms flat against
your back, your head tilted into the hollow of shoulder. Shaking
again, and he’s murmuring reassuring words. The taste of mint in
your mouth. Dry, dusty mint. Tilt your head up, just a little, and
he’s looking down at you, concern in dark eyes.

She’s shaking, and you hold her tight in the
circle of your arms, trying to protect her from whatever has hurt
her so badly, trying too late. You know what it must be. A mugger,
a rapist, all the bad things, bad men that your mom warned your
sister about. This woman’s head is buried in your shoulder, her
face pressed hard against your chest. You give up on the questions,
murmur soft, useless phrases.

He moved into the spare room a few months
ago, and you don’t know him and he doesn’t know you, but he knows
that you’re not the type of woman to come home this late with dirt
on your legs, with an inability to speak. You’re not that kind of
girl. You’re not.

His name returns to you. Michael.

She looks up. She looks up for a long moment,
and then she stretches up on her toes and kisses you. You have
never been kissed before. Twenty-three and never been kissed.
Another time, it would be almost funny.

You kiss him, hard. His lips taste like
nothing, a relief. He pulls away.

“Shefali?” Startled, unsure. She kisses you
again, her mouth open, her tongue pressing against your lips. You
open your lips, just a little, and her tongue slips inside. Your
breath catches; you can feel the blood running through your body,
running out. You are leaning against her now; you are holding each
other up. Her hands are clinging tight to your shirt, her nails
digging into your skin.