The logistics of the affair were simple, too simple, he sometimes thought, but not often; both were free, really, all day; to confirm her absence and her distance, to make sure she was really in the city, he talked to Cindy maybe midmorning, her voice tinny and removed on her speaker phone. (Between words, during the pauses, the machine replaced her voice with static; it was either her voice or static and nothing between, which made her all the more inhuman.) It wasn’t that these calls didn’t fill him with a guilt — the guilt was there, it manifested itself strangely enough in prayer. He attended the First Congregational Church, down the river towards the city, in New Jersey — a drive up 9W that hip-hugged the river — alone because Cindy found it boring and because he did not — as they say — feel like losing his soul, which he did pray for; he did, he prayed for the filth he was in, the deep bloodsucking void that he knew he had fallen into, if that’s what you’ll believe in this day and age — as they say — but it was true; he did pray for his own soul, and he did so carefully and with a dedication to making each confession true, frank, open to whatever forces were welling up and deciding the fates of souls at the butt end of the twentieth century — pink behind eyelids and the wetness and that hollowed-out space at the end of his cock, a cave opening up beneath him for a second then closing up; it had taken a while to get to the point of undressing before each other, months really, of talking and meeting for coffee; she wore her hair back, exposing the smoothness of her forehead and the thin pruned eyebrows; there was — he prayed — a meeting of souls involved that couldn’t be avoided and that had led to their eventual disrobing, but that’s another story, the actual meeting of souls — the wind lifts again and there is over his back the cool hand and the smell of fresh-mown grass, of bindweeds, of wild bamboo down near the boatyard, some faint hint of exhaust fumes, and she’s saying softly into his ear, her lips right there, against the lobe, saying some faint phrase her own version of speaking in tongues, the cryptography of her own secret songs oh, oh, hooo,
certainly he did take advantage of her, he saw it right away — the potential for sex, for a liaison of some sort, for a meeting physically; part of it was the way she dressed on their second meeting, out of the lime-green skirt and now raggish; that day, late spring, jeans with holes in the knees and Ked’s sneakers; when they ended up seated together and she bent her legs he caught sight of the dimple in her knees and from just seeing that smoothness extrapolated the rest of her body. It is certainly possible to do so, and he did it.
The noon whistle breaks open and you can hear it spreading over the shimmer of the Hudson, the tide drawing in from the sea, the deep-cut river licking the Atlantic, the Atlantic licking up beneath the bridge now, the sound haunting along the other side, cresting over the hills that you see when you’re at the window of their room, French doors thrown open to a small tarred roof. The sound comes back and he feels the weight of the hill — still flexing, making work with his hands down there to feel himself and her around him, the slick, well-oiled mechanics of it — with that sound opening and widening; down in the depth of that river — it was a dark woody river — they’d slept at the campsite and gotten up with the sun, and after the shave driven twenty miles upstream to portage; in this he found a place to put the blame years later, in the inane act of putting the canoe on the roof of Mom and Dad’s station wagon to drive back upstream just so they could paddle down it (it was the only state-park campground in that part of the U.P. — a shitty little dust-packed patch of ground, creosoted hibachis ringed with faded Bud bottles, a pit toilet to shit in), when they were already at the river’s mouth. The river ended at Lake Superior with a sharp finality; it didn’t fan out, or widen to a delta, but sliced cleanly and neatly into the coldness of the lake. The plan had been to canoe down and then fish late in the afternoon when the fly hatch was good.
What does
this have to do
with the pink lifting white of her hips, the flat of her stomach
against his for a moment eyes opening up to each other
narrative thrust
drive towards
some resolution;
on the hill no one cared
for resolution, but down here near the river the music was
classical and folks cared
and even prayed for it,
alone
on the roadside
in heavy snowfall
praying.
Bob remembers hearing it, the shot that had killed a utility worker who committed suicide up the hill in June; they’d both heard it, lying naked—the sound of a gunshot bouncing off the palisades, off the hills of the cemetery up past the hospital; gravestone later marked, HE DIED VIOLENTLY BUT RESTS IN PEACE—in a state of coitus in his marriage bed; maybe that was it, the reason he thought of it in that technical term, because he was lying there in his marriage bed hearing some guy kill himself, just catching that faint drift of sound while on that day the sun was bringing up those fresh scents of mint weed (it had rained the night before) from down near the boatyard. Now, in July, he’s consciously working the pace, thinking how before, shedding their underwear, drawing each other’s down with their fingers, her voice had sounded particularly lonely; he was starting to see now that she was, truly, a lonely person in need of him; a customer had come in to make an exchange, returning a dark green-and-white print dress she’d recommended personally, and, well, I don’t know, she said, I mean, Bob, it was like I took it personally or something, her coming in, marching in like that, and saying it wasn’t right — I mean it wasn’t right, that’s all she said, and maybe I’m making too much out of this, I’m sure I am, but, still, am I wrong to feel this way? she said. Am I wrong, Bob? As if he’d know; as if any of us know; and there is that working feeling now he should have been lost in it, to it, just taking her for all she was worth, but he’s suddenly acutely aware of the wrinkles in the sheets — which he’ll smooth out, tuck tight, sniff and test, maybe have the cleaning lady replace (this is Wednesday, isn’t it?); there was a moment in Barcelona with Cindy when he’d felt this exact sensation — that the sheets had been slept on before — and when he went down to speak to the man at the desk he found it was true. They were in the wrong room. A used bed, perhaps made up out of some habitual neatness. His fingers are back around her, working there at the small flat of her back searching for something …