a sweet young girl dancing for the pleasure of giving him the pleasure, a sweet young girl who doesn't know much about what she's doing saying to herself, “I can give him that — he wants that, and I can do it, and so here it is.” No, not quite the naive and innocent scene of the bud becoming the flower or the filly becoming the mare. Faunia can do it, all right, but without the budding maturity is how she does it, without the youthful, misty idealization of herself and him and everyone living and dead. He says, “Come on, dance for me,” and, with her easy laugh, she says, “Why not? I'm generous that way,” and she starts moving, smoothing her skin as though it's a rumpled dress, seeing to it that everything is where it should be, taut, bony, or rounded as it should be, a whiff of herself, the evocative vegetal smell coming familiarly off her fingers as she slides them up from her neck and across her warm ears and slowly from there over her cheeks to her lips, and her hair, her graying yellow hair that is damp and straggly from exertion, she plays with like seaweed, pretends to herself that it's seaweed, that it's always been seaweed, a great trickling sweep of seaweed saturated with brine, and what's it cost her, anyway? What's the big deal? Plunge in. Pour forth. If this is what he wants, abduct the man, ensnare him. Wouldn't be the first one.
She's aware when it starts happening: that thing, that connection. She moves, from the floor that is now her stage at the foot of the bed she moves, alluringly tousled and a little greasy from the hours before, smeared and anointed from the preceding performance, fair-haired, white-skinned where she isn't tanned from the farm, scarred in half a dozen places, one kneecap abraded like a child's from when she slipped in the barn, very fine threadlike cuts half healed on both her arms and legs from the pasture fencing, her hands roughened, reddened, sore from the fiberglass splinters picked up while rotating the fence, from pulling out and putting in those stakes every week, a petal-shaped, rouge-colored bruise either from the milking parlor or from him precisely at the joining of her throat and torso, another bruise, blue-black at the turn of her unmuscled thigh, spots where she's been bitten and stung, a hair of his, an ampersand of his hair like a dainty grayish mole adhering to her cheek, her mouth open just wide enough to reveal the curve of her teeth, and in no hurry at all to go anywhere because it's the getting there that's the fun. She moves, and now he's seeing her, seeing this elongated body rhythmically moving, this slender body that is so much stronger than it looks and surprisingly so heavy-breasted dipping, dipping, dipping, on the long, straight handles of her legs stooping toward him like a dipper filled to the limit with his liquid. Unresisting, he's stretched across the wavelets of bedsheets, a sinuous swirl of pillows balled together to support his head, his head resting level with the span of her hips, with her belly, with her moving belly, and he's seeing her, every particle, he's seeing her and she knows that he's seeing her. They're connected. She knows he wants her to claim something. He wants me to stand here and move, she thinks, and to claim what is mine. Which is? Him. Him. He's offering me him. Okey-dokey, this is high-voltage stuff but here we go. And so, giving him her downturned look with the subtlety in it, she moves, she moves, and the formal transfer of power begins. And it's very nice for her, moving like this to that music and the power passing over, knowing that at her slightest command, with the flick of the finger that summons a waiter, he would crawl out of that bed to lick her feet. So soon in the dance, and already she could peel him and eat him like a piece of fruit. It's not all about being beat up and being the janitor and I'm at the college cleaning up other people's shit and I'm at the post office cleaning up other people's shit, and there's a terrible toughness that comes with that, with cleaning up everybody else's waste; if you want to know the truth, it sucks, and don't tell me there aren't better jobs, but I've got it, it's what I do, three jobs, because this car's got about six days left, I've got to buy a cheap car that runs, so three jobs is what I'm doing, and not for the first time, and by the way, the dairy farm is a lot of fucking work, to you it sounds great and to you it looks great, Faunia and the cows, but coming on top of everything else it breaks my fucking hump ... But now I'm naked in a room with a man, seeing him lying there with his dick and that navy tattoo, and it's calm and he's calm, even getting a charge out of seeing me dance he's so very calm, and he's just had the shit kicked out of him, too. He's lost his wife, he's lost his job, publicly humiliated as a racist professor, and what's a racist professor? It's not that you've just become one. The story is you've been discovered, so it's been your whole life. It's not just that you did one thing wrong once. If you're a racist, then you've always been a racist. Suddenly it's your entire life you've been a racist. That's the stigma and it's not even true, and yet now he's calm. I can do that for him. I can make him calm like this, he can make me calm like this. All I have to do is just keep moving. He says dance for me and I think, Why not? Why not, except that it's going to make him think that I'm going to go along and pretend with him that this is something else. He's going to pretend that the world is ours, and I'm going to let him, and then I'm going to do it too. Still, why not? I can dance ... but he has to remember. This is only what it is, even if I'm wearing nothing but the opal ring, nothing on me but the ring he gave me. This is standing in front of your lover naked with the lights on and moving. Okay, you're a man, and you're not in your prime, and you've got a life and I'm not part of it, but I know what's here. You come to me as a man. So I come to you. That's a lot. But that's all it is. I'm dancing in front of you naked with the lights on, and you're naked too, and all the other stuff doesn't matter. It's the simplest thing we've ever done — it's
Then she says it aloud. “You know what? I see you.”
“Do you?” he says. “Then now the hell begins.”
“You think — if you ever want to know — is there a God? You want to know why am I in this world? What is it about? It's about this. It's about, You're here, and I'll do it for you. It's about not thinking you're someone else somewhere else. You're a woman and you're in bed with your husband, and you're not fucking for fucking, you're not fucking to come, you're fucking because you're in bed with your husband and it's the right thing to do. You're a man and you're with your wife and you're fucking her, but you're thinking you want to be fucking the post office janitor. Okay — you know what? You're with the janitor.”
He says softly, with a laugh, “And that proves the existence of God.”
“If that doesn't, nothing does.”
“Keep dancing,” he says.
“When you're dead,” she asks, “what does it matter if you didn't marry the right person?”
“It doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter when you're alive. Keep dancing.”
“What is it, Coleman? What does matter?”
“This,” he said.
“That's my boy,” she replies. “Now you're learning.”
“Is that what this is — you teaching me?”
“It's about time somebody did. Yes, I'm teaching you. But don't look at me now like I'm good for something other than this. Something more than this. Don't do that. Stay here with me. Don't go. Hold on to this. Don't think about anything else. Stay here with me. I'll do whatever you want. How many times have you had a woman really tell you that and mean it? I will do anything you want. Don't lose it. Don't take it somewhere else, Coleman. This is all we're here to do. Don't think it's about tomorrow. Close all the doors, before and after. All the social ways of thinking, shut 'em down. Everything the wonderful society is asking? The way we're set up socially? ‘I should, I should, I should’? Fuck all that. What you're supposed to be, what you're supposed to do, all that, it just kills everything. I can keep dancing, if that's the deal. The secret little moment — if that's the whole deal. That slice you get. That slice out of time. It's no more than that, and I hope you know it.”
“Keep dancing.”
“This stuff is the important stuff,” she says. “If I abandoned thinking that...”
“What? Thinking what?”
“I was a whoring little cunt from early on.”
“Were you?”
“He always told himself it wasn't him, it was me.”
“The stepfather.”
“Yes. That's what he told himself. Maybe he was even right. But I had no choice at eight and nine and ten. It was the brutality that was wrong.”
“What was it like when you were ten?”
“It was like asking me to pick up the whole house and carry it on my back.”
“What was it like when the door opened at night and he came into your room?”
“It's like when you're a child in a war. You ever see those pictures in the paper of kids after they bomb their cities? It's like that. It's as big as a bomb. But no matter how many times I got blown over, I was still standing. That was my downfall: my still standing up. Then I was twelve and thirteen and starting to get tits. I was starting to bleed. Suddenly I was just a body that surrounded my pussy ... But stick to the dancing. All doors closed, before and after, Coleman. I see you, Coleman. You're not closing the doors. You still have the fantasies of love. You know