Falling Idols

He began soothing her testiness, smooth palm along her hip beneath the sheets. “I’m only trying to remember the last time I went to work in the morning feeling sore down there.” Warm hand sliding down to cup her pubis. “I missed it and didn’t even know.”

She sighed agreement. That was a good feeling. Wanton.

“That ache right over the bone? I’ll feel it throb and then I’m not even where I really am. I can be looking someone in the face and they don’t have a clue most of me’s right back here.”

      It was sweet and carnal and dopey romantic, and she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d first heard it from another woman, before her. That made it easier to admit the totality of tonight’s failure. Some people you simply couldn’t screw out of your system.

“Like magic,” she murmured.

“Oui.” She felt him nod into her shoulder. “Like magic.”

Philippe slipped off to sleep before she did — why tamper with custom? His breathing grew slow and deep, and soon began to catch in his throat, soft palate zigging when it should’ve been zagging. He began to click with wet glottal snorts.

How quickly feelings could change once the brains were all banged out. Willing to die for him one minute, twenty more later ready to do the killing instead. Nothing messy, nothing sadistic. A soft pillow over the face. His was a face made for just such a murder, with a weak chin and a narrow forehead from which his hair was backing away. It would welcome the pillow, and the pressure.

He touched her thigh in his sleep and it quieted him, then guilt drove her from the bed, the room. She stopped when she found herself standing nude before the living room window, tips of her breasts flattening against the glass. Maybe someone was watching, somewhere on the street or from another apartment; she hoped so.

She raised a hand to her throat, experimenting with its fit, recalling another night’s suffocation. No pillows, just Austin’s hands. He had fingers suited for a pianist or a surgeon. He’d known how hard and how long to squeeze. No anger in it, only the lust for experience. She’d not really wanted him to but hadn’t forbade it either. The way it had amplified the orgasm she’d been on the verge of was terrifying, nearly turning what the French called la petit morte — the little death — from metaphor into reality. She’d enjoyed it so much that she knew she could never experience it again. Knew she could never do it to Austin because regardless of when she lifted her hands from his neck, he’d still believe she could’ve held on two or three seconds longer.

Did you see anything? he’d asked.

Stars, she’d told him.

Gabrielle looked for them now, in the sky. Couldn’t find a single one. In Manhattan night came in name only, the darkness as unnatural as the light that stole away the stars. Empty sky above, empty streets below, the West Sixties.

West. The Hudson River was west of here. So was New Jersey, the Newark airport. And then Utah. Go figure.

Back in the bedroom, Philippe’s fitful breath had graduated to an all-out snore. As she recalled, Austin slept like the dead, but she’d always assumed that was because he envied them what they now knew.

*

Let me tell you about God.

The kabbalists have a fundamental doctrine of belief that God is not a static being, but dynamic becoming. Process, as opposed to personage. I can accept this. It explains why so many prayers seem to come back marked Return to sender.

Sorry — God’s closed for renovation. Please try again next lifetime.

*

She had a window seat and a seatmate zoned on tranquilizers, thus all the privacy she wanted. Forsaking books and magazines in favor of memories and the patterns in the land 39,000 feet below. Farmland gridded in a dozen shades of green, the rich browns of fallow fields. Summer in the heartland. Easy to forget she’d been born somewhere down there between the oceans, enough years in New York by now to be entitled to the disdain of a native of either coast: flyover country, the interior … all state fairs, incest, and militias. A few more hours and she’d be wearing snobbery like a birthmark, outnumbered. People would point and snicker.

She was really doing this. Clearing it with the magazine had been the easy part. Austin had told her to think of it as career-related so that was the tack she’d taken. Gabrielle’s editor-in-chief had heard her out with furrowed brow. The town of Miracle, Utah? Last year’s news. And maybe next month’s, she’d hinted. He signed the travel voucher. Do her good to shake out the carcinogens of the office, get in the trenches again, even if the best she came back with was a profile in mass hysteria and the desperate need to believe.

After a glass or three of wine she could usually laugh at the contradiction of her day life: born-again agnostic masquerading as Religion Editor of Disclose. Oxymoronic, but no more so than the actual magazine — a less self-important monthly counterpart of the news weeklies, covering people, issues, and trends for those who doubted everything they read, but read it anyway if its layout was eye-grabbing enough. Media credibility had taken its hike long ago, so might as well flaunt it. Or as one wag had memoed, When it comes to respectability, we’re just dis close.

And she was really doing this.

Family aside, Austin was the only relic from her past with any guarantee of success at uprooting her, reeling her in from across the country like this. True, he was the only one who could infiltrate her mind and trick her eyes, but it was more than that. In her life, there had always been an Austin McCoy, and perhaps always would be. Pretending otherwise wasn’t going to cut it.

Sweet friends as children, benignly indifferent strangers as adolescents, lovers as young adults, and finally a more malignant indifference for the past decade. Austin had always sought the inherent cycles in things. She wondered if he didn’t regard the last eleven years as the gestation preceding some new rebirth between them. Another rung up the evolution of their weird drama. Friends, lovers — what comes next? Nothing so mundane as exchanged vows, she was sure. He was hardly the marrying kind, and she was already there. Although he might enjoy the idea of making a bigamist of her. Been trying to damn himself for years. Maybe ritual adultery was something he hadn’t tried yet, but in that case he really must be creatively bankrupt by now.

Thirty-nine thousand feet below, the docile green quilt of farmland gave way to less tameable ground. Forested hillsides and snow-capped peaks buckled out of the earth, rising toward the belly of the plane. Stone echoes of ancient cataclysm, continents in collision wreathed in clouds and scoured by winds.