Daniel carefully places Ruby onto the bed, she is practically asleep, but somehow the touch ofthe cold pillow awakens her.Her eyes are sud-denly large, curious.
“We’re staying here all night.Right?”
“That’s right, Monkey,”he says.
She is silent.A minute passes;he imagines her asleep.But then her cold fingers come to rest on the top ofhis hand.“I love you the most of everyone,”she says.
Daniel lies next to her, and Iris cannot sleep.Her thoughts skip like stones over water.Nelson, the storm, a Japanese maple her father planted in their front yard, which she was always convinced irritated the white neighbors with its unseasonable purple leaves…Irishas never been able to fall asleep next to someone with whom she was in bed for the first time;choosing someone always meant giving up a night’s sleep.
Making love as a teenager was easier—she had to end up in her own bed, alone, and she could sink into sleep as ifit were a kind ofinnocence.
Even in college—and why why why did she allow her parents to talk her into attending Spelman, more than ninety percent black, a hundred per-cent female, a vast poaching ground for the men ofMorehouse, brother-sister schools conceived, it seemed, for conception—even at college she developed a small reputation as the girl who always had to end up in her own safe little bed, the girl who says she has to get home because her teddy bear misses her.
It’s been years since she has slept with anyone but Hampton.She has a moment ofintense pining for him as ifhe were oceans away, irretrievable, dead.She misses the ease and comfort ofbeing with a man who has seen her body week after week, year after year, and who is, as far as she can tell, blind to its small deteriorations.It has all happened gradually, and he has failed to notice.Hampton’s criticisms ofher are intellectual, spiritual, practical;he is more distressed by her forgetfulness than by her having grown older.He would rather her finish her doctorate—or junk it—than get a boob job.Even when it seems to her that Hampton holds her in con-tempt, his voraciousness for her body seldom varies.I love your body,he has said over and over, so many times and with such suddenness and dis-regard for her mood ofthe moment or what has been passing between them that she has come to find it an affront.It’s all he seems to praise, his entire celebration ofher is confined to that simple statement.He does not sayI need your adviceand he doesn’t sayYou fascinate me,he surely doesn’t ask her what is on her mind.He has little interest in her thoughts and sometimes she can barely blame him.But ifher life is a little dull, then she sees no reason why that must be held against her, this life and her role in it is, after all, something they both made, it’s a joint project.And when she has the emotional energy to refuse to be silenced, to speak up no matter what, she can see himpretendingto pay attention, while it is heart-freezingly, face-slappingly clear that his thoughts are elsewhere.
And after so disrespecting her, for him to look up and say how beautiful she is, how fucking hot she makes him:he may as well be saying,Too bad you’re not operating on my level.Too bad you’re an idiot.
Daniel seems to want to know everything about her.It’s his nature, there is nothing he can do about it.He will want to know ifshe has ever been unfaithful to Hampton before, and ifshe tells him she has, then it’s her guess that he will eventually want to know with whom, when, where, the reasons, and the results, and even ifshe says no, he will ask why not.
He will ask her what she dreams, how the day was spent, what she had for lunch, where she buys her clothes, the names ofher relatives, the route she takes from her house to school.He will devour her with love bites, he will lick the surface ofher as ifshe were a scoop ofice cream until she gets smaller and smaller, until she disappears.
Iris reaches over Daniel’s sprawled body, with its deep sonorous buzz and smell ofsleep, and she gropes for the flashlight on the night table.But it’s been knocked over in the commotion, it has tumbled onto the carpet, rolled onto the bare floor.She finally finds it, halfway under the bed.She hurries back to the nest ofquilts and blankets, willing to awaken Daniel with the bounce ofthe mattress, but he sleeps through it all.
She switches on the flashlight.She puts her hand over its broad face to cut down on the silvery glare, and she points the beam oflight at Daniel to inspect what she can see ofhis naked body.
The most puzzling thing is that he is naked at all.She wonders at the thermodynamics ofthis, how such white skin, which she imagines to be porous, diaphanous, and through which would pass all heat and light, how such pigmentless tissue could conceivably hold enough heat to al-low him to sleep.
She moves the beam closer to him.A circle oflight illuminates his chest.A sleek dark wave ofhair rushes between his pectoral muscles.
That ivory-white skin and that dark body hair.She stares at it, struck at how barbaric it looks.It makes her think ofthe stooped figures in school-books, emigrating across ancient tundra two steps ahead ofthe glaciers.
How strange that whites ever compared black folk with apes, when it’s the whites who are covered in hair.Once, in college, Iris had entertained the idea of becoming a doctor;the notion—like so many ofher inspired plans—had a short life span:byApril she was bored with it, and by the end ofthe semester she could barely pass her finals.Still, she remembers:the der-mis, the epidermis, subcutaneous tissue, dermal papilla, adipose tissue, the subpapillary network, and good old Meissner’s corpuscle, the name ofwhich she could never forget and the function ofwhich she could never learn.Back then, she thought ofall the components ofhuman skin that are absolutely identical forAfricans, Japanese, Europeans, and how we are all so similar beneath those topmost layers.But now, in bed with a Caucasian for the first time in her life, what strikes her is the differ-ence, stranger and more unsettling than she would have expected.She rubs her fingertip across an inch or two ofDaniel’s skin, along the shoul-der where the skin is bare, and cool to the touch, with little bumps, a kind ofcottony grit.Without entirely meaning to, she slips a finger un-der his arm, feels the long silky hair, startling in its angora softness.A film ofperspiration is on her fingertip now, she rubs it against her thumb, brings it to her nose, finds Daniel’s smell within the bitterness of failed deodorant like the meat ofa pecan surrounded by its broken shell.
She places her hand over the face ofthe flashlight more tightly so only a faint light escapes as she points it toward his face.His bushy brows, his long, somehow unsturdy-looking nose, his thin lips, the dark growth of whiskers on his chin, as ifsomeone had rubbed iron filings onto his jaw.
His hair rises in clumps in different directions.He looks slightly mad, pleasantly ruined.
She had been thinking about him in this way for months.How had it begun?What first drew her? She cannot remember.The quality ofhis at-tention as he listened to her?The gentle seriousness, the way an angel would hear you, not necessarily able to grant your wishes but able to know exactly why you’ve made them.Talking to him was like running a handful ofriverbed stones through one ofthose tumblers, the kind that turn pebbles into shining things, almost jewels.
Her first time in bed with a white man.How the sweat poured offhim, how he whimpered, how the breath broke in his throat like something frozen that’s been stepped on, the copious, almost surreal amounts ofsemen that came out ofhim, the tireless frenzy ofhis fucks, his eyes staring at her, memorizing her, conquering her and surrendering at the same time.
Iris lifts the blanket and shines the flashlight further down Daniel’s body.Am I really going to do this?But she doesn’t stop herself, lets the light settle on his penis.Who was it who referred to every white man’s penis as Pete Rose?Was that her father? No, impossible that something so naughty would come out ofhis pursed, prim mouth, a man who said sug-arplums instead ofshit.Her brothers? But they were so courtly around her—more dedicated than her parents to the exhausting, irritating proj-ect ofkeeping her the baby ofthe family.Yet someone had said it, and whenever she sees a picture ofPete Rose, with his schoolboy haircut and theWho Me? expression on his face, she invariably thinks:dick.Yet here, at last, is an actual white man’s penis and she stares at it, flaccid and pink, looking so unprotected, vulnerable, raw, and unsheathed, like something that belongs inside the body, its own body, that is, something you are not meant to see.Like the real Pete Rose, this particular member does not seem as ifhe’s going to make it into the Hall ofFame.