Slide - Kyle Beachy [14]
During these I found words and made sure to believe them before I spoke: “Places on my body I didn't realize were linked to emotions. My elbow, I think of you and my elbow hurts.”
“I like this.” Audrey's voice warm through the cool plastic of phone. “Keep going.”
“There is a paradox here. Because the only way to offset the pain of missing you is to think of you even more. Your image is the only thing capable of easing the pain of your image. I think of the breakfast we had at that little airport diner after you kept me up all night. Your hair up in a bandanna, only one earring.”
“Your fault up all night. Your fault only one earring. How could I sleep after that? How could I let you sleep after doing that with me?”
“We are in a state of total sexual exhaustion. You are sitting at the table stirring your coffee. The planes are to my left. You lift the coffee with both hands to blow across its surface, I see the two rings on your right hand, and your lips pinch into a shape like an animal home or cave opening. And I watch closely while you watch me, and you blow out, and I imagine crawling in and exploring. Then you do the wink and I nearly die.”
“Potter, tell me again you love me.”
“I love you,” I said.
“You don't have to say it every time I ask.”
“I know that,” I said.
“Tell me again,” she said, and I did.
But look. There I am on the couch of Stuart's pool house, and here is the admittedly not beautiful blond girl in the red tank. She has the shoulders and neck and body of all women. She is another woman. People are going home and she is leaning, pressing a hand into the leather cushion and saying:
“You probably shouldn't sleep on this couch.”
“My skin,” I explained. “It sticks every time I roll over.”
“What you should probably do is drive me home. I'm staying in my parents’ basement. You should see it. My mom just had it redone like an apartment down there.”
I parked two driveways down from her house. We ducked through a basement door into a room dark as punctuation, with the dank smell of sustained moisture, and all I could think was BE QUIET, like as long as we didn't make a sound everything would be just fine. We stumbled onto her bed and went straight for the middles, no respect for nicety. On my way back to the car I stopped, curled, and puked violently into the hedge, which I suppose lent a taste of realism.
Having completed one loop around my parents’ neighborhood, I began a second. I was going to walk until I'd barely make it up the steps to my room, drag my sorry frame up there, and fall immediately asleep. Squirrels or no, eventually insomnia had to yield to exhaustion. I walked faster.
A month later we were back at school, together in Audrey's room. The internship was over and people in Spokane continued to have cancer. How hard would it be to pretend nothing had changed?
“Tell me something,” she said, threading arms through a shirt.
I ran a hand up her thigh and spoke truthfully. “I missed you so much there was a texture to it. I could palpate and feel myself missing you.” I reached up and lifted her shirt.
Little pieces of my running shoes reflected the streetlamps, and this, for some reason, made me walk even faster.
I had never known true guilt, never known even a diluted version to hold up to what I felt once I was back at school. And the experience of guilt was more worrisome than the fear of the guilt's origin coming to light, was worse for its utter complexity and richness of feeling and certain sort of beauty. This would become occasion for great internal turmoil, that the guilt felt richer even than what I called love. But of course if not for the love the guilt wouldn't be guilt, it would be only a sense of achievement, however minor.
But the real poetry of it all was housed in the fact that Audrey, too, had cheated that summer. With a man named Jim. She allowed Jim to stick his dirty hippie penis into her precious and private vagina. Jim who continued to exist