Laurie Stone

 

Brief Tango with Wildlife

May liked being held, liked a show of force, liked her skin growing rosy, liked penetration to have consequences, liked to squeeze herself into uncomfortable positions. She was vague about the right amount of anything. If Sammy pressed her hard enough, then his embrace felt too light. When she got the better of an argument, it sometimes felt that was all she was getting. She stayed awake and had too many feathers. They caught on Sammy's fur.

He swept them from the floor after she left. He counted on her to wait. Her responsiveness brushed him like the wrong kind of kiss. He liked watching her do back dives. He didn't have that kind of trust. He was patient with her flesh, the way he would be with an animal or something endangered.

She knew where to buy the whip. Everybody did but him. His aim was keener than his desire. She was after the best deal. He preferred sex as a sex kit. It wasn't going to change. He told her about the times he felt frightened and small, like when he was fat and peed his pants at school. She said that everyone was either too fat or too thin, or too fucked up in some other way.

She wondered why he didn't know that. He once shed a tear in bed. A drop of water brimmed and leaked from his left eye. She asked if his contact lens was hurting. He said he was touched by something, and she laughed.

He told her to spread her legs, as he draped her over his thigh. He liked the way her legs looked in that position. In that position, he made her see how her mind worked, because what she made of him and what he was were never the same. She remembered an essay about the women in Saul Bellow's life, how he chose one after the next without needing to know them, yet extracting what was essential: A story about love that scarred, an opportunity to pour himself into words.

In Alaska one summer Sammy cared for a baby seal. The animal's name was Tony. Spilled oil had poisoned his liver and slowed his reflexes. It wasn't likely he'd learn to fish or fend for himself in the wild. Sammy fed him ground-up tuna and worked with him in a rehab center. He loved the fur on Tony's forehead, a tuft that dried in the shape of a marigold. Sammy held his father inside him the way he'd carried Tony. Something about his father wasn't level, as if one foot was asleep. In photographs with his son, he was handsome with a sensual mouth, the lips curving without forming a smile. When he was dying of lymphoma, he grew impossibly thin and had the worn-out look of someone seesawing between suffering and hope. It rose off him like orange light, and he was uncomplaining.

May felt current around Sammy, a buzzing, as if he expected people to touch him. When he saw affection on May's face, he was embarrassed for her. He thought she could move from solid, to liquid, to vapor--an image that wasn't human, she pointed out. She gazed out the window of his apartment. Across the street, atop a row of Federal houses, bloomed a rooftop garden. The flowers were brilliant magentas and oranges, festive and gaudy. The scene evoked foreign landscapes, remote from civilization. She saw herself and Sammy on a dessert. Lizards slithered by, darting their tongues in salute. Their tongues were pointed and sharp, good for boring into holes. Sammy said the scene was romantic, a form he couldn't stand. She made no brief for it, herself, but it had come unbidden. She laughed at herself, and the laughter was sincere and cleansing, like filtered water. And everything seemed still for a moment. The way she loved him made her seem inhuman, she understood, and there was no getting around that.

 

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