I tried to pay for dinner at the café, but I stopped when I saw how it was wounding him. That happened with William too.
He’s young and likes to talk, which suits me. He tells me he wants to go back to school, study music for real. But first he’s leaving for Spain to learn Spanish guitar. He describes the people he’ll be staying with—he knows many people. That’s one of the treasures a nomadic life gives you.
We drink until we fall back. Billie Holiday sings, “That man, that man.” I know what will happen before he reaches for me. Isn’t that why I am here? Isn’t this where we have been headed all along?
Despite everything, the body remembers. It has an agenda all its own.
His skin is surprisingly supple, brown along his arms and circling his neck. Like another set of clothing, he’s pale white where his clothes would be. It makes him look more than naked. Hidden.
He’s kissing me and asking, “Is everything all right? Is this all right?”
I tell us that it is. Yes, yes, it is.
There are such things as mouths and hands and thighs and feet that can feel so differently. You forget how differently they can feel. Rene’s touch is familiar and foreign. He’s got calluses that leave tracks on my skin that can be felt but not seen. Still, there is no movement of freckles on his back.
At first, I want to resist it—the pleasure, the insistent presence of another, but Rene won’t let me. “Let go,” he says. “Let everything go. Everything’s going to be all right.”
“I feel like a fool,” I say.
“Shut up,” he says. He traces a finger around the perimeter of my face, over my eyes, down my nose, across my mouth. “You must have been beautiful,” he says.
For a moment, I want to laugh. That is just the kind of thing I would have brought home to William. Guess what a boy said to me today.
Longing fills me up inside like a balloon.
“Hello?” Rene says to my ear with his mouth. “Anybody home?”
As I say, by the end of the trip we were tired. William was especially tired. Then we came home and found out he had leukemia. For two days he lay in bed and didn’t want anybody around. Then he came out and said he would fight. He would try everything—positive thinking, healthy eating, any kind of rational treatment. He did. And won.
Six months ago, it came back. William was angrier, being pursued in this way by his body, and he was less willing to fight.
It was slippery that night and there were numerous accidents.
It is dark now, the kind that has a weight and solidity to it, a presence of its own. It feels delicious.
Rene’s breathing is deep and calm. I am sure he is sleeping. I’m thinking of gathering my clothes, sneaking out the way I used to when I was young and before I met William, when I feel Rene stirring.
Softly, hesitantly, he begins to sing:
I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh and just like the river
I’ve been running ever since
It’s been a long, a long time coming
Near the end of summer, Claude, Rebecca’s lover, returns. Nadia has released him. She finds him overbearing, old-fashioned, uptight. This is what Rebecca tells me. Claude tells me Nadia left him for someone better looking. He is a fierce believer in truth.
“Isn’t he ugly?” Rebecca asks me happily. “Aren’t I betraying myself?”
“Absolutely,” I tell her.
He is smaller than I imagined, hairier, more defeated looking. Rebecca is glowing with satisfaction as she moves around him, already making changes like the new occupant of a house. Where did you get that awful shirt? Why is your hair so long? What is this cream for?
Claude tells her he is not immune to vanity.
I hear them through my closed door. Tomorrow I leave Paris. My suitcase is open on the floor, half filled. I am sitting with a book of music in my hands. Rebecca knocks on my door, says it’s my last night, we need to drink more wine.
I say, “Wait, I’ll be right out.”
The book is old, thin, the pages gone brittle with age. If you bent a corner, it would break off in your hands. The title is Blues from the South; Rene found it for me in the famed bookstore near the Left Bank. I know why he bought it for me. At the bottom of each page is written Begin Again.
When I go to the living room, Rebecca and Claude are dancing, though there is no music. There is just their feet sliding across the floor and the sound of their occasional breathing. I lean against the wall to watch.
I know, I know. One day all these things shall pass and I will regret it.
Therapy Robot
December 25:
Big day. Glad it’s almost over. Kids in bed, probably playing with their new toys—Wes with his new tablet (unfortunately not the iPad he wanted) and Maren with her new headphones. Great. Another way to tune us out. Poor Kevin is exhausted, in bed watching It’s a Wonderful Life by himself. We used to watch it together as a family every year. But Wes is eleven now, Maren fourteen. They’re changing so much. Moving away from us. Promised to join Kevin later to finish watching the movie with him. After I try out the TheraP150™. Kevin is excited by that. He was so excited to give me the TheraP150™, he even wrapped up the big box in expensive gold foil paper and a giant red bow. Saved the paper and bow for next year. Need to save wherever we can. Kevin’s hearing rumors of layoffs coming in the new year. But Kevin is also eternally optimistic, thinks he’ll be spared. After all, he has worked there five years already. A lifetime!
Normally the TheraP150™
