-Move away, Mary said to Robin, move away from the window if you’re going to do that …
As though the thing she most wanted was to be made unaware.
Why should he have been jealous? What he knew now, what he had learned, these things had cost her in the telling. She had no advice to give, least of all ‘follow the star of love’. If pressed, then only this: warn any man, warn any woman, that through the minefield of self-love the latest suitor steps, to hang his heart on the barbed wire fence, to be branded on the tongue with a trespasser’s cross-hatched broil.
It was a new arrangement, to share their adventures, making their narratives suspenseful, or funny, or wistfully romantic, answering every question the other asked with clinical honesty.
So. Who goes first?
Strange loft.
Wee hours.
Rain.
Metal loud on metal, a thump in the stairwell and then the sound of clothing being torn and they held their breath till the giggling crept up the wallpaper and they were off the hook, no longer nosy neighbors, but co-conspirators in the foolish arcade of love.
Among the tangled bedclothes of their resurrection, foregrounded by sheet-lightning in dramatic strobe across the skylight, the sound of rain dropping away in gusts to near silence then roaring back to reduce their shouting to a whisper, the glitter of pebble-heavy drops in vampire outline each time the sky sheared white.
Her words stitched and puddled in the air between them, the symmetry of his knuckles either side her pillowed head undone by the little scar that split her left eyebrow. Her birdlike cries were not the firebreak he’d hoped for, though her commendable acting brought a mist to his eyes. He counted to ten and leapt, forgiving her her trespasses as she forgave his.
An aftermath of ash and the grown-up agreement: no regrets. It was what it was, Love putting her arm around the lamppost’s waist and doffing sexy top hat, kicking off her caligari pumps and pigenoning her toes.
While she moved about the lightening room he slept, and dreamed she answered every question with a single, perfect yes.
-Move away from the window …
Sitting very still, frozen to Egyptian profile, she watched the whitehaired match beneath the bent babyfood spoon. The glaze, the melt, the liquefaction, the quick suck and then an eyeful of zero and a mouthful of blue. She bent and kissed the piano keys he’d touched last, the air a soft whirl of December gray.
Robin stares at Mary, smiling.
Both of them say:
-Nice story.
Both of them say:
-Thank you.