The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (35 page)

“You’ll have all your neighbors coming over to get warm,” he said to me, either believing the observation a comfort to me or a threat.

I filled the dog’s water bowl about half the way full. I set it back on the porch. I could use a larger bowl, but I would rather the dog see me fill it many times in a day, see me think of her needs and move to meet those needs oh so many times each day.

Sleepy from the night before, I watched the kid from the next town mow my lawn in half the time it took me the times I did it. He charged very little. I would see him being careful out back where he would circle the maple tree not to nick the metal grave marker with the German name of a woman and the date of her birth and the date of her death. Ashes, I had guessed, but forgot to ask the owner.

That night in bed in the bed downtown, I said, “I know you don’t know anything about ashes or lakes, but is it legal—can you put someone’s ashes anywhere you want to?”

“There is no lake,” he said, the words slurred against my neck. “There are only the two domains: this bed, and the bed of memory. Get rid of the lake,” he said. “Two people can go anywhere they want to go right here.”

I was never late.

By eight o’clock, he would already have ordered dinner for us. The sushi would be delivered in an hour, and left by the door.

Some nights we did not make it past the entryway before dinner arrived. Some nights he would close the door and then press me against it, or against a wall, and hold me there until we dropped to the polished wood floor together—we would not have said anything to each other. And we would stay there until we heard the brush of the delivery man outside.

When we finished dinner, he would put on music for us, something he had looped to play over and over again, a piece he had chosen or something he knew I liked, something we both liked to hear behind us.

Then he would be inside me again so quickly I was, each time, surprised.

Kissing my eyes, he said, “Did Phillip start like this?”

And that night the husband would be Phillip.

The first time I went to see him at the loft, I found something he didn’t drink in the kitchen. I didn’t like it either, and on subsequent visits I checked to see if the level of juice in the bottle was lower, if the juice-drinker had been to see him. This changed the night I told him about the twelve times. He asked me to come back the next night, and the next. Each time I looked, I saw that the level of juice was the same. That is when the place became a sanctuary for me, and which of us does not need sanctuary all the time?

I tried to remember what I had told him the time before. That Katherine—I was calling the wife “Katherine”—took me home after taking me to lunch at a grimy place in China Basin, a fishermen’s supply shop that sold bait next to the coffee and doughnuts you could take out onto a dock and eat while oil tankers got overhauled.

“Did she want you to undress? Or did she want to undress you herself?” he wanted to know. He was twisting my hair as he spoke. He could not braid it with only one hand, so he twirled it around his fingers and let it spring loose again.

“Show me how she kissed you,” he said.

I kissed him in a way I imagined Katherine might have done.

He said, “When you kiss me like that, my heart is so stolen.”

Back at the apartment, he patted himself down.

“It must have slipped out of my pocket in the theater,” he said, “when I reached over to button your coat.”

I said, “Why don’t you call the theater and ask them to check our row.”

The book was a rare one. He had underlined parts throughout.

He returned to the kitchen to make the call, and—“Oh! Oh, look! I must have taken it out without thinking,” he said of the book there beside the stove.

And when the phone rang, he said, “That must be the theater calling, to tell us the book has been found.”

It was midnight when we removed the clear covers from the containers of densely packed sushi. He could not stand the green plastic fences that separated one kind from another, so I removed them and removed the ginger as well. I mixed soy sauce with the wasabi. I would have eaten from the containers, but he arranged the pieces in a pattern on good china.

We watched the late news while we ate the tuna and salmon. When he had cleared the plates and turned off the television, he asked me to put my black dress back on. He led me to the leather club chair near the bed. He sat down first, and brought me to him so that I faced him. He pushed the black dress up to my waist and pulled me somewhat roughly onto his lap.

“Did Phillip feel left out?” he asked, moving slowly inside me.

I told him that after a couple of weeks of going out with just Katherine, the three of us went to a party. I told him we drank and drank and then went to their house late. “Phillip got out his camera,” I said, “and attached a different lens. He said, ‘Show me what the two of you have learned about each other.’ ”

“Those pictures,” my lover said, gripping my shoulders. “Where are they now? You have to get me those pictures.

“Ask Phillip for those pictures,” he said, out of breath.

When he had me: the word “slown.”

It was a thing between us—
slown.
One night I heard him say on the phone, “We were stoned, or I was stoned, and she said, ‘You hear what you said?—you just said
slown.
’ That was nice. It was nice, the way she heard me say it wrong and then went ahead and made it a thing between us—the word
slown.
‘Time has slown down.’ It was like this woman was getting just as slown down as I was, even though she never touched the stuff. It was honor, it was allegiance. It had an effect on us—the word.”

I listened to him talk to his friend, and, happy, went into his kitchen. I got silver polish and a rag from under the sink, and contentedly polished a pair of candlesticks.

Cast-iron bookends with embossed baskets of flowers on them—these are a morning’s find on Main Street. The shops sell mirrors with milk-painted frames; I’ve bought several of them for gifts, but not for him. I am not allowed to bring him anything but myself. He has returned gifts to me the times I disobeyed (“We do not quite forgive a giver”), and I gave those things away.

Not lewd, not urbane, not leering or concupiscent, but
devotional.
That is how I felt about Katherine and Phillip, and about the man I offered them up to. He looked for jolting carnality, for physical imperatives. “Didn’t more rules appear with a certain periodicity?” he wanted to know.

We were awake in the night, in the early morning, really. I had been lying still, rubbing a finger on the mended spot on the sheet where hydrogen peroxide had made a hole when he rubbed at a spot of blood—not mine. He got out of bed to turn off the air conditioner, and wrapped himself around me when he returned. With no need of a segue from my hurried-off clothes on the floor, I said, “I can’t remember—does the week in Acapulco count as one time?”

“I want
each
time in Acapulco,” he said, as I knew he would.

I gave him a familiar travelogue just to see how long until he’d interrupt with “Cut to the chase—the beach, the waves, sunset, dinner, you’re back in the house in bed.”

I pushed him off me so that he could come back even closer.

“We chose a room with a skylight above the bed. It was smaller than the other bedrooms in the rented house, but we wanted to see the stars. Phillip would not be joining us for another day or two, so the mood was hen party, sorority house.”

He moved steadily inside me, so wonderfully inside me as I spoke. When he asked me a question, he spoke into my mouth. I had to turn my head and tell him to repeat it in my ear.

He smoothed his hand down my silk camisole and asked me if I needed to be coaxed. “Did you reach for Katherine first?”

“Not then, maybe not ever,” I said. “It was not a lack of desire,” I told him. “I took an active part by setting desire in motion. To be in a condition of readiness is to participate fully,” I said. “As I am now.”

“Show me what she did to make you come that night,” he said.

In showing him, I took him to the other side of himself.

A short time later, he pulled me down to the thick carpet in front of the tall oval mirror. He put a pillow beneath my head, and another under my hips. He said, “When Phillip arrived, did the three of you spend that night in the room with the skylight?”

In fact, I remembered pleading exhaustion that night, and sleeping by myself downstairs. But there was nothing for him in that. I gave him instead a scene from a live act I watched through a one-way mirror in a South-of-Market theater. Phillip had taken me there on a night when prohibitions turned into permissions. Neither of us had told Katherine.

I dressed for him on the night that made it a month since I had started meeting him at the loft downtown where he waited for me “all pins-and-needle-y,” he said.

I had had to go to a dinner first, a benefit for something worth giving money to. The transition was too quick, the way it is when you fly to a place that you need train time to adjust to. On the way to the loft, I had felt tired by what went on there, by the bottomless pit of it, the ever-ratcheted-up attempts to hold his attention on me.

In the bedroom there was a movie playing. I recognized it as one of the red-boxed collection in his bedroom closet. We had watched this one before, the one in which the male star auditions Polish girls for his next film. Were they really in Poland in the film? Who could tell? What mattered was that these were girls who would do anything, anywhere.

I arrived during the scene where the two girls, maybe nineteen years old, are lying naked beside each other in a hotel room. The star opens one girl’s legs, and then the other’s, for the camera. Both of the girls have shaved, or have been shaved. Then the star pulls the first girl, the blonde, into a sitting position on the edge of the bed and, standing in front of her, forces his cock into her mouth. It is possible that the scene is, to some extent, unacted—the size of his cock forces tears into the girl’s eyes.

When the actor is finished with her, he turns to the second girl, who has been watching him with the first. He turns her over so that he can fit himself into her from behind; at the same time, another man (he had been lounging in a chair earlier, naked) pulls her on top of him and enters her from the front. While this is going on, the first girl wipes her eyes and breathes with her mouth open as she watches the girl beside her on the bed. After a while, the second girl cries out in Polish.

“The thing about these films,” he said, “is that this really happened. We’re seeing something that really happened.”

I tried to rally to the feel of his hand on my leg. But a part of me was still at the dinner, greeting guests in black tie.

“You know why I want to see you with another lover?” he said, watching the screen. “I want to see a secret you—I would trade possession of you for it.”

He had offered to bring in women who modeled for him, and I had declined. I knew there was no one he would rather see me with than Katherine.

I thought of the photographs he had taken of me. He felt the results were not worthy, did not resemble the nature of what was. He said, “They do not convey the trance you occupy during those times, the trance both of us inhabit, one with the other, one on account of the other, during those times.”

“So what is seen is not what is felt?” I asked.

He said, “No instrument carried from a prior place could be expected to capture the feelings effected there.”

I had already found the photographs he’d taken of others in a portfolio in another part of the loft.

The moment I wished he would turn off the movie, he muted the sound and turned his attention to me. This quality of attention righted things between us.

Then we were all flesh, and all feeling in that flesh. We abided in it, joined and rejoined, distance collapsed.

“Harmony,” he whispered.

I said the word back to him.

Harmony sought, harmony required, “No life lost to us,” he said.