“This mildness will kill us,” he says. “November,” he says, shaking his head. He lights a cigarette. The smoke does not rise. “Someone has broken your heart.”
“It’s a long story,” I sigh.
“No,” he says. The word is meant to punctuate, to put a full stop to my story. “I don’t mean for you to tell me.” He puts one finger to my lips. “Never tell me,” he says, pressing his finger harder to my mouth.
With his first touch I begin my descent into a deep, deep valley I half hope I w ill not be able to rise from.
“You are one of the saddest people I have ever seen.” His voice seems to waver. It has been so long since I have talked to another human being.
He speaks slowly, gently, knowing to be careful. “You are blurry with sadness,” he whispers, “so passive. This face.” He touches my cheek, moves slowly to my mouth where he lingers, then my chin. Softly: “Your features are lost in sorrow. You have given in and it has gladly taken you to its drowsy side.”
I want him to touch me everywhere. I want his tongue to speak inside me.
His words begin to slow. His tongue grows thicker. His hands are sweating. He steps closer. He too has begun to fall. He feels this falling and allows it, following me downward into some deep sexual pit at the center of our living where there is only breathing, only blood, only sighs.
“I could love you right—”
“Please,” I say.
“I’ve been waiting a long time for you,” he says. “Come with me.”
The sounds of the station have subsided. The lights seem to have dimmed. We bump into things.
“Come with me,” he says.
I wait in the lobby of a hotel for him. I sit in something soft and feel the softness against my body.
“OK,” he says, holding a shiny key.
Slowly we rise. In the small mirrored elevator I can feel him everywhere. The ride is seconds, hours. We step off. The hall is long and dark. The key goes into the lock. “We will make ourselves over,” he says. The door opens.
The hotel room was warm. I felt dizzy, a little giddy.
“I’m going to faint,” I said.
“No, no, you’re not,” he said, and I felt somewhat revived with his words. “Just sit down.”
I sat on the bed and took off my coat and he sat in the one chair of the room, several feet away, and looked at me.
“You’re trembling,” I said.
“Am I? I’ve been waiting for you a long time,” he said. He spoke very softly. “And now here you are, right within arm’s reach. It’s like a miracle.”
I unbuttoned my shirt slowly. My breasts bloomed in front of him in the hot room. “I’m so hot,” I whispered.
He closed his eyes and put his face in his hands. Finally, after what seemed a long time, he looked up slowly, careful not to move too quickly or say anything too loudly, as if I was on the verge of disappearing and this, his first look, would also be his last. If I was an apparition, then he must do nothing to dispel it from his psyche. If I was some wild animal, caught in this room, any sudden movement might frighten me. He spoke very cautiously, as if he might bruise me with his words if he were not careful. He spoke gently so that the image might hold.
“You are the anonymous woman I have seen for years.” He did not take his eyes from me.
“Don’t move,” he said slowly. “Please don’t move.” He looked at my breasts as if he had not imagined that this woman would have a physical shape at all when he finally saw her — and a voice — words. “I never expected to see you,” he said.
My face was flushed. The long, slow burning that had started deep within had now begun spreading from the inside out. The tips of my fingers were bright red. My eyes I knew were turning dark, dark blue.
“Please don’t move,” he said as he took off his shirt and his pants. He never stopped looking at me.
I shuddered to see this enormous man naked in front of me. Undressed, he seemed even larger, as if he had been in some way contained by his clothing.
“Don’t be afraid,” I whispered. “Don’t be afraid of me.”
He laughed softly.
I reached for his hand and pulled him slowly toward me.
“I’ve never seen a woman like you before,” he said, his voice barely controlled. “I never thought—”
I guided his huge hand onto my breasts. A moan that had been stored for centuries in the darkest part of my body finally came into my throat. He looked more animal now than man as he scratched at my pants, trying to tear them from my body as if they were some second skin. “Let me—” I could not talk. He was sucking softly on my neck.
He got up and stood high over me and stared. I kicked off my pants and in one moment, as I closed my eyes to avoid his brutal stare, he plunged deep, far, hard into my body. He had fallen on me as if into a fire, howling and in terror. If he rose again he would not be the same, as one is not who has been badly burned or hurt. He would be changed forever. And I, who was the fire, grew larger and larger as he fed himself to me. I was enveloping him, his fingers, his mouth, his whole body. There was fire in his mouth, fire in his hair, the flames licking him everywhere — blue flames, orange, white — everywhere. It grew and grew. It burned all night.
The fire did not die in sleep, which came finally to us around five that morning. Now that it had been started there would be no stopping it. No long night, no water, no dream could extinguish it. There are fires like that, I am told, in California or Africa, that never end, that burn year after year, destroying everything. They burn for tens of years, every day; they never go out.
He was asleep. His glowing red hand rested on my small flame of hair. I began to move. Having throw n himself into the furnace of my body, he too was fire now. I pressed his fingers of fire into me.
“I’m burning up,” he said, sweat running down his face.
I had begun to bleed during the night. He pushed his way through the thick flames of red, growing larger and larger by our union. I felt his tongue in m\ mouth, his lips against my lips in an exploding red kiss. We grew larger. I sighed. There was no controlling this. I le reached for me through flames, feeding himself once again into the open center of the excruciating heat, and the fire spread.
“Next Friday,” he said. “Meet me here — in this room,” and he looked at me as if he were looking at me for the first time.
I was sweating in my black coat out in the street. “Don’t leave me here alone,” I said.
“Next Friday,” he said. “Don’t forget.” He stepped away, afraid to catch onto me again and begin all over out there on the street. “Next Friday, here,” I said. As he walked away, the fire continued, burning on, slower but steadily, in this ungodly, unseasonable November.
“For this is wrong,” Rilke writes, “if anything is wrong:
not to enlarge the freedom of a love
with all the inner freedom one can summon.
We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting each other go. For holding on
comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
My mother never listened to the weather report and consequently was almost always dressed unsuitably for the ever-changing whims of the Connecticut climate. I can see her shivering in a thin navy-blue cloth jacket in November or sweating in April in her lined raincoat, her whole face flushed.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she’d ask, shedding layers of sweaters, or, hunched over in another season, her arms clutching a manuscript against her chest in an attempt to ward off wind and cold, “Why?”