Breavman and Tamara were cruel to each other. They used infidelity as a weapon for pain and an incentive for passion. And they kept returning to the bed on Stanley Street and the strange light which seemed to repair the innocence of their bodies. There they would lie for hours, unable to touch or speak. Sometimes he would be able to comfort her and sometimes she him. They used their bodies but that became more and more difficult. They were living off each other, had tubes to each other’s guts. The reasons were too deep and original for him to discover.
He remembers terrible silences and crying he couldn’t come close to. There was nothing he could do, least of all get dressed and leave. He hated himself for hurting her and he hated her for smothering him.
He should have kept running that bright morning.
She made him helpless. They made each other helpless.
Breavman let Tamara see some notes of a long story he was writing. The characters in it were named Tamara and Lawrence and it took place in a room.
“How ardent you are!” Tamara said theatrically. “Tonight you are my ardent lover. Tonight we are sentry and animals, birds and lizards, slime and marble. Tonight we are glorious and degraded, knighted and crushed, beautiful and disgusting. Sweat is perfume. Gasps are bells. I wouldn’t trade this for the ravages of the loveliest swan. This is why I must have come to you in the first place. This is why I must have left the others, the hundreds who tried to stay my ankle with crippled hands as I sped to you.”
“Horseshit,” I said.
She eased herself out of my arms’ clasp and stood on the bed. I thought of the thighs of stone colossi but I didn’t say anything.
She stretched out her arms shoulder high.
“Christ of the Andes,” she proclaimed.
I kneeled below her and nuzzled her delta.
“Heal me, heal me.” I mimicked a prayer.
“Heal me yourself.” She laughed and collapsed over me, her face finally resting on my belly.
When we were quiet I said, “Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.”
She swung her legs on to the floor, danced over to the table and lit the candle in my tin Mexican candelabra. Holding the light over her head like a religious banner she danced back to the bedside and took my hand.
“Come with me, my beast, my swan,” she canted. “The mirror, eunuchs, the mirror!”
We stood before the mirror.
“Who shall say we are not beautiful?” she challenged.
“Yeah.”
For a minute or two we inspected our bodies. She put the candelabra down. We embraced.
“Life has not passed us by,” she said with imitation nostalgia.
“Ah. Alas. Sorrow. Moon. Love.”
I tried to be funny. I hoped that our sentimental hoaxing would not lead her to reflect in earnest. That was a process I couldn’t take.
I sat on a chair in front of the window and she sat on my lap.
“We are lovers,” she began, as if she were stating geometry axioms before attempting the proposition. “If one of those people down there were to look up, someone with very good eyes, he would see a naked woman held by a naked man. That person would be immediately aroused, wouldn’t he? The way we become aroused when we read a provoking sexual description in a novel.”
I winced at the word sexual. There is no word more inappropriate to lovers.
“And that is the way,” she went on, “most lovers try to look at one another, even after they have been intimate for a long time.”
Intimate. That was another of those words.
“It’s a great mistake,” she said. “The thrill of the forbidden, the thrill of the naughty is quickly expended and lovers are soon bored with one another. Their sexual identities become more and more vague until they are lost altogether.”
“What’s the alternative?” She was beginning to get me.
“It’s to make that which is permitted, thrilling. The lover must totally familiarize himself with his beloved. He must know her every movement: the motion of her buttocks when she walks, the direction of every tiny earthquake when she heaves her chest, the way her thighs spread like lava when she sits down. He must know the sudden coil her stomach makes just before the brink of climax, each orchard of hair, blonde and black, the path of pores on the nose, the chart of vessels in her eyes. He must know her so completely that she becomes, in effect, his own creation. He has moulded the shape of her limbs, distilled her smell. This is the only successful kind of sexual love: the love of the creator for his creation. In other words, the love of the creator for himself. This love can never change.”
Her voice became more and more charged as she spoke. She delivered the last words in a kind of frenzy. I had ceased to caress her. Her clinical terms nearly sickened me.
“What is the matter?” she said. “Why have you stopped holding me?”
“Why must you always do this? I’ve just made love to you. Isn’t that enough? Do you have to begin an operation, an autopsy? Sexual, intimate, distil – Jesus Christ! I don’t want to memorize everything. I want to be surprised every once in a while. Where are you going?”
She stood before me. The candlelight sketched her mouth hardened with anger.
“Surprised! You’re a fool. Like a dozen other men I’ve had. Who wanted to make love in the dark, in silence, eyes bound, ears stuffed. Men who tired of me and I of them. And you fly off because I want something different for us. You don’t know the difference between creation
