You think I linger too long on this. Let me tell you something you might not know. In the absence of love you find things that approximate, and what beside gleaming tomatoes on arugula spears and the pearly flesh of a scotch egg with watercress and chutney, and the particular brown of meat roasted in honey, and the flamingo pink new moon of a shrimp in a little crystal glass, what besides these beautiful jeweled foods could ever feel precious enough? We order more drinks.
“How old are you anyway?” I ask him.
He’s thirty-six.
“My favorite age!” I say. “My favorite number.”
“Is it really? Why?”
“It’s the best number, just mathematically.”
“Square,” he says.
“Yes, and just all the numbers that go into it. It can absorb so much numerically!”
Our knees touch under the table. “Two,” he says, enthusiastically. “Three, four, six.”
“Twelve.”
“Eighteen.”
“God, I loved eighteen.”
“Me too,” he says.
“You know how you meet people, some people, and you connect instantly?”
“Pheromones?” he says.
“They disproved pheromones.” I touch his arm for emphasis, just below the elbow where his rolled-up sleeve shows bare skin, a few freckles clustered close to the wrist. “There’s no such thing.”
“That can’t be true.”
“But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about pheromones. I have a different theory. I think we all get stuck at different ages. Just kind of... snagged for a bit. Like on a thorn? Like we’re walking through the woods, just, you know, aging at a good clip, and then we get snagged for a moment on a thorn bush. And that’s a certain age, and we’re stuck there for a while.”
“Or forever.”
“But what I’m saying is that sometimes when we connect with people instantly, it’s because we’re stuck at the same age. We’re both in our thirties, but we’re also both eighteen.”
“How old are you in real life?” he asks.
I tell him.
“Your favorite age is behind you? That’s sad.”
“All my favorite ages are behind me,” I say.
“And what age are you snagged on in the thorn forest?”
That’s the first moment I feel like something’s… wrong. I don’t even know why—it’s like the wind catching the car on the highway, a rest, a pause, demi-pause. Sudden silence for the smallest of beats, and in that silence I get the sense, a strong sense, a physical feeling that things are not as they seem. Think about being snagged on a thorn as you’re walking through the forest. Maybe that causes you to stop walking, to look up, and the branches are rubbing together above you, little leaves unfurling, tiny, embryonic buds, ice-green, and nothing looks familiar, not above you, or ahead of you, or to either side where the forest is darkest. Perhaps you’re lost. This isn’t the right path. This isn’t the right forest! And behind you, the path you’ve traveled doesn’t look familiar either.
The food we haven’t eaten lies in heaps and mounds and streaks on the plates in front of us. For a moment I can’t make sense of it.
“What are you thinking about?” he asks, watching me.
“Kissing,” I say.
The thing that happens is: he puts his hands on my hips when we kiss—I feel each finger—and our mouths warm, and he says oh-my-god, quietly, and the path opens up in the forest, the branches part, and I can see it all before me, as if the future is as plain as the past, what will happen later, to the two of us, in his room.
“Can we,” he says. “Go back,” he says. “To the hotel,” he says. “Right now.”
He’s breathing the way men do when they realize you’re going to fuck them later. And I’m breathing that way, too, the thought of later slicing through me, sharp, shiny.
While we wait for the check, I touch his hand. Fingers. Ring finger. He was married, he tells me, even though I’m not asking. She died. He doesn’t like to talk about it. Cancer.
This explains his edginess when I joked earlier about avoiding his wife. I feel a kind of dread, a kind of awful tenderness. I don’t even want dessert now, and they had a kind of special tiramisu on the menu I was considering ordering to go.
“You’ve never been married?” he asks.
“No.”
“Nearly?”
“No.”
“I don’t mean,” he says, “I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with not being married. It’s just a surprise, because you’re—you seem really amazing. I mean if it’s your choice—”
“Oh, it’s not my choice,” I say. “I’d like to get married. Or be in love at least.”
“Just haven’t met the right person,” he guesses.
“There is no right person, and there can never be. I’m not married because I’m not—allowed to feel that way.”
He looks puzzled, swimmy, turned on, and also drunk.
“I’m cursed,” I say.
He laughs. His laugh surprises me. Bitter, grudging even. In every other way he seems sweet, almost innocent, young even, but his laugh is old. It makes me curious. It makes me angry. And the combination of the two—curiosity and anger—does what it always does: makes me horny. A kind of furious sudden horniness, like a charley horse. So fierce, but so simple. For all the rightwing hullabaloo around sex, there’s something truly innocent about it when you really think. Your body wants another body. Your heart wants that heart, for a time. You’re hungry, that’s all. The hunger of the mind plus a hunger of the spirit. And it becomes complicated because there are other hungers involved: a hunger of the past, a hunger of the ancestors reaching out through time. And there’s the hunger of your race, and the hunger of your gender. And the hunger left over from childhood. And the hunger of your hard-to-see future.
He puts his arm around my shoulder and lets his fingers trail along my collar bone, into the hollow of my throat.
“Do you want any more of this?” I ask, pushing the plates toward him.
“No,” he says. “I lose my appetite when I’m turned on.”
“That’s funny,” I say.
“Why is that funny?”
“I get hungrier.”
• • • •
Outside: the snow the people the light the street tilted sloshy damp. We walk to the hotel through small cold drifts piling on the sidewalk, car lights turning the air yellow and orange, and the light of stars and streetlamps ricocheting from molecule to molecule in the humid air, cartwheeling off the points of ice crystals.
I wasn’t being glib when I told him I was cursed. In high school, I made out with my brother’s friend Rich in a tent in our backyard one night, and it turned out that Rich had a girlfriend. She confronted me at school the next day in a stairwell. I remember the light coming through the grimy window, how dismal and ancient it was, how it reminded me of old stone churches fallen into disrepair and nuns, in equal disrepair.
“I didn’t know he had a girlfriend,” I told her. “He should have known better.”
“It takes two to tango,” she said. She spit on the floor. I wondered if she was planning to fight me.
“I mean, I won’t do it again!” I said, beginning to feel afraid, and also mortified. “Now that I know!”
“Too little too late,” she said.
“Then where does that leave us?”
“It leaves us right here,” she said.
And then she cursed me. I don’t know how to explain this to you, and I didn’t know how to explain it to him that night in the city in the snow. It defies explanation. It was something I felt—a physical thing, the curse moving through me, taking up its position inside. A curse has no mass, but I knew it was there. I felt inhabited.
I’ve lived with it ever since, and I expect to live with it forever. And I’m ok, in case you think this is a bid for sympathy. I’m doing fine. I’ve figured out how to live this way. Life is full of pleasures.
But it is lonely.
Anyway, that’s why nights like these are necessary. To be inhabited by something else for a time, and I don’t mean just the desire to fuck. What I like is the way time is manipulated by desire—time slows, speeds, stands still. We’re suspended in time, a raft cut loose in an ocean—all that space, the depth, the terror, the not knowing what’s beneath the surface.
What’s coming next, though, is the best part. The introduction, part by part, to a naked body. The texture of skin. Surprise appearance of scars. The intimacy of hair. The beauty of all that. Maybe everyone is beautiful in an elevator going up to a hotel room, but I don’t think so. Not all mouths are this warm.
His room is on the top floor, and there’s a balcony. And from the balcony I can see the city and its shining buildings, everything blurry with snow. Across town a light show decorates the tops of the buildings with bright words, too far away for me to read. And then projected images, giant photographs of old-fashioned people in bonnets and long gowns, like newspaper clippings from the past. Elaborate braids. Stiff backs on stiff couches.
“Look at these people!” I say.
“Mmm,” he says, behind me, his face in my hair.
And this, this is my favorite moment. Not the sex itself, but this moment, before, when I’m entirely muscle and breath, an electric knot pulling inward toward some explosive untangling. His hands are under my dress. Knots coming untied, everything impossibly beautiful, snow and buildings and car lights and building lights and the stars hidden behind the clouds and the strange light show half a city away.
“Is this ok?” he asks, pulling my dress above my hips. Yes, yes. It is.
“This?” He inches my tights down.
“Oh my god,” he says (with pleasure). I try to stop time for a beat, just one long pause. My skin exposed to the snowy air feels all at once chilled and fiery hot.
“Wait right there,” he says. “Don’t move.”
He’s gone—to get a condom I’m guessing. When he comes back he’ll fuck me (gently) against the railing overlooking the city and the snow, and I can’t wait. The photographs of bonneted women still slide one after another on the tower halfway across the city. How gigantic those women must be up close. And the amazing thing? They’re nothing more than particles of light, a trick of the eye. Where I see them, that pale flesh, angled jaws, tense hands, where I see hair and throats and lifted chins, there is nothing substantial, nothing real, only light. I shiver.
A minute passes, and then more time. An embarrassingly long time. I’m cold, my feet mostly, the draft up my dress.
I turn toward the room, so I can see him through the sliding door of the balcony. He’s standing in the pale light, so still, so quiet I feel shy when I open the door.
“Are you ok?” I ask.
“Hi. No. Don’t come in.”
“I’m freezing,” I say.
“Please don’t,” he says when I step toward him.
I know exactly what’s going on. I was enjoying myself too much, that’s all, experiencing a kind of tenderness not permitted me. I stood on the balcony and imagined fucking him, but I didn’t stop there. I thought about fucking him in the morning, too. And the morning after that. I began the forbidden calculus of how many, how much, how long, how good. I imagined all the mornings. All the hotels. The cities. The car rides in between. After all this time, you’d think I’d do better. The curse isn’t stupid, or superstitious. It’s real and strong, and I should know that by now.
“Don’t!” he says as I take another step.
“Listen, this is my fault,” I say.
“You haven’t done anything. It’s me. It’s… my wife,” he says in an embarrassed tone. No, not embarrassed: resigned.
“I thought you said—”
“She died two years ago, yeah.”
I’m listening to him. But remember a moment ago I was seconds from being fucked from behind on a balcony overlooking Montreal. By a handsome man! By this particular handsome man, still grieving his dead wife. So I’m listening, but I’m also wondering what of this evening can be salvaged. I won’t think about the morning, I promise, silently. I won’t think about tomorrow, or next week, or next year. I won’t love him.
“So you’re not over her,” I say.
“No.” He looks at me oddly, like of course he’s not over her. “But also, she’s not over me.”
I believe in curses but not ghosts. Still I don’t think less of people who do believe. If you’re haunted, you’re haunted.
“I mean, maybe you’re just not ready,” I say. “Maybe you have some more grieving to do.”
“I’m not ready to get married or anything,” he says. “But I’d like to have sex. That much I know. But she won’t let me.”
“She won’t let you have sex?”
He nods, miserable.
“What,” I say, “if you just tried harder?”
To demonstrate trying harder, I do a thing I now regret. I put his hand inside my tights. Obviously in retrospect I wish I hadn’t. But at the time I thought we were talking about a more metaphorical haunting. A psychological haunting. When his finger slips inside me, we both gasp. With surprise, pleasure, god, that intake of breath, that little storm in the lungs, the wind on the highway, wind in the trees.
And then, no. It’s not like that after all. Something else now, something sudden, inside me. The curse, I think, but it’s not, it’s new, a whole weather system, a consciousness, a constellation of moods in the night sky. Someone. Not pain, but painful—expansive sorrow, a bulky balloon of sorrow, a raft, something large and adrift.
“Please stop,” I say, and he moves away, but it isn’t him I’m talking to.
“What is it?” he says, but he must already know.
Everything has changed. The air in the room. Him. Me, when I look at myself in the mirror in the bathroom. I’m not sure you would see the difference, but I do, because I know what I’m looking for. Eyes and mouth and a darkness issuing from both. A fog of breath, the little exhalations when I blink. I try to see her, but no one can see in the dark. I know her name though he never told it to me. I don’t hear it, I just know it.
“Greta,” I say quietly.
“Listen, I’m really sorry,” he says, knocking on the door. “Let’s talk about this. Let’s go down to the bar, or maybe I can walk you back to your room.”
She’s hungry, but I’m without appetite for the first time in my life, a terrible absence.
• • • •
In the night, after I’ve retrieved my bag from the front desk, the pointy-faced man replaced by a tattooed twenty-something on the graveyard shift, I’m back in my own room, restless. I can’t sleep, not because of Greta, but because the high schoolers have returned late from their prom and are laughing and talking in the hallways. I listen to their voices, try to make out their words but all is indistinct, an animal noise: whining, growling, grunting. Thinking of the eight a.m. meeting I was supposed to prepare Rafe for, I pull on pants, a sweatshirt, and I squint into the bright hall. The diamond pattern on the carpet swims a few inches above the floor. The girls are sitting side by side against the hallway wall, bright in their dresses and satin shoes. They’re tired, maybe drunk. A taffeta rainbow. Their curls are little spaghetti bowls atop their heads. The boys sit nearby in their sweaty suits and tuxes.
“Sorry, folks,” I say. “But I have to get some sleep, now. We all have to get some sleep.”
Not one of them looks up from their conversation.
“Excuse me!” I say, louder. “It’s two in the morning, and some of us have early meetings.”
“Wait,” one of the girls says, suddenly. “Do you hear that voice?”
“What voice?” her friend says.
They lean together laughing.
“Hello!” I say. “I’m really sorry, but it’s too late for all this noise.”
“That voice!” she says. “Right there. Like a lady of some kind.”
“HA-HA,” I say, sarcastically, opening the door a bit more and sticking my head all the way into the hallway.
“I hear it too!” one of her friends says.
