I cannot see these imperfections she lists, and the little things I have counted are more endearing than a total flawlessness would be. In one of the inventories of love, sometimes I count each one of the ten flaws with my lips, in solemn order, kissing each one, and then going backward through the list to end at the crooked tooth.
Her skin is so fine that the blue veins show through it at wrists, temples, the inside of the elbows, backs of the knees, ankles, undercurve of breasts — the veins of the left more visible than those of the right one. And these blue veins are another inventory to make, exactly as the first one is made, though sometimes incomplete because she becomes too greedy to wait for all of it, to wait through the slow ceremony of it, insists that we couple and begin the heavy rocking rhythmic ride toward the place where the world goes blind and loud.
So now she has put the comb aside and has picked up her hairbrush. There is a burring, whisking sound as she makes each long stroke, holding her head tilted sidelong, dipping it into the beginning of each stroke. It gleams under the brush strokes, a healthy glossiness of healthy female creature. Then she picks up a spray can, and with quick little pressures on the valve — hish hish hish — moving the can to and fro, she sprays her hair. The next spray, for under her arms, makes a longer hisssssh, one for each armpit, changing the can from hand to hand, the free hand high, with graceful tilt of wrist.
She leans closer to the lighted mirror, pats at her hair, pulls her lips away from her teeth in a grimace of inspection. She stands up, gives her hair another little shake, and smiles toward me, but it is an absentminded smile, turning at once to a small thoughtful frown, and I know she is wondering what to wear. When she turns in profile to go over to the chest of drawers, the mirror lights shine through her hair, turning it from pale blond to silver. And below the slope of her belly the same light shines through the springy little tuffet of pubic hair of a coppery-tan color. She walks at a slight angle away from me toward the chest of drawers, and I watch the complex working of the interwebbed fatty muscles of her small buttocks, the right side clenching as the hips swing to the right and the right leg takes her weight, the left softening as the slender leg swings into the next padding step. She pulls a drawer open and with her tongue she makes the little tick-tick sound of her annoyance.
She lives in a welter of small confusions, of a careless disorder. She lives amid coffee cups, cigarette bums, forgotten laundry, food drying on the dishes, clothing tossed onto chairs and tables and onto the floor, shoes heaped in a closet pile so that when she finds the one she wants she has to kneel and dig through the heap for the other one, the mouth making that tick-tick sound of frustration.
She finds the panty hose she wants to wear, tucks them between her knees, and holds them there while she paws through the drawer and finds a yellow bra. She goes back to the bench and puts the panty hose on the bench while she puts her arms through the bra straps and bends forward from the waist to hammock her breasts into the delicate fabric, her pale hair swinging forward. She straightens and cranes her arms back to fasten the bra snaps, one hand reaching down from above, one up from below. Then she rolls and works her shoulders like a boxer to settle the feel of the bra upon her. She sits on the bench, shakes out the panty hose, turns it in the right direction, and bends over and works her feet into the stocking feet. She pulls each leg up carefully, and when both stretch legs are smooth and taut to above her knees, she stands up and pulls it up the rest of the way, doing a little swing and grind of her hips, snapping it at the waist, smoothing it with her hands.
She sits on her heels at the closet door and makes ticking sounds until she has both matching shoes, a pair of tall yellow shoes. She slips them on there and takes a shift from the hanger and comes walking back toward her dressing table. Her heels make a solid clacking sound on the worn boards of the floor, a muffled sound on the dusty rug. She puts the shift on, careful about the way she gets her head through. It is a fine-knit weave, a yellow more pale than her shoes but darker than her hair. It has a white shawl collar in a coarser weave. She works her shoulders again, pats at herself, thumbs the heavy spill of her hair back. She sits again on the bench and looks at herself in the mirror. With the spray can she fixes a place at her temple.
She bends forward, and using the fingertips of both hands, she rubs a cream of some kind into her face, rubbing so strenuously she pulls the flesh of her face this way and that, like the funny faces a child makes. She wipes the residue of the cream off with tissue. She paints her mouth silver pink, using a little brush and two shades of lipstick. She opens a little flat tin and, using her fingertip, rubs a faint blue green smudge onto her upper lids. With a little brush and careful strokes she thickens and darkens her lashes. With a special pencil she darkens her brows and makes little up-slanted marks at the outside comers of her eyes. She touches herself then with the stopper from the perfume I bought her. Socket of her throat, behind her ears, insides of her wrists and her elbows, between her breasts, the backs of her knees.
She backs away and looks at herself intently, turning her head this way and that. She makes a social smile. She turns and looks back over her shoulder at herself, smoothing the back of the short shift down over her hips with the backs of her hands.
“Will I pass, Mar-tinn?”
“Beautiful. Lovely. Gorgeous. Fantastic. Pick any word, honey. Take them all.”
“You know what you are? Easy to please, huh?”
She bends over me and holds her cheek against mine. She does not want to kiss and spoil her lipstick. She makes a little humming, purring sound in her throat and, in mischief, walks her fingers down my chest and belly, slips her hand under the corner of the sheet.
“Hmmm. You better save that one for me, mister.”
She moves back out of my reach. Looks at her watch. “Late already. Hey, try the door to make sure. Sometimes it sounds like it locks when it doesn’t.”
So she is gone, but the scents and tastes of her are still in the apartment. All the things she touches and uses. Dear things, because they are hers. I get up after a little while and pick up the things she dropped and forgot, her woolly old slippers, one of them so far back under the bed I had to kneel and look under to find it. The little pink robe she was wearing when she let me in. I pick up other things, put them away, tug the rug straight, turn out the lights around the mirror.
I go in and take a shower, sudsing away the small acids and oils and pungencies of lovemaking, rinsing away the distinctive and personal odor of her. The shower curtain is yellow, her favorite color. It is plastic, with drawings of big wide-eyed green fish on it. There is a rip in the shower curtain, mended with tape that has begun to peel off. I use her oval bar of pale blue soap, finding a single hair, long and thin and fine, imbedded in it. I use her damp bath towel, watching myself in her steamy mirror, and when I am dry I hang it neatly on the towel bar, squaring the comers, making the ends come out even.
Soon I have my clothes on. It is time to leave. Time to pick up the thick scuffed dispatch case with the weight of the adding machine in it and go turn in my accounts. But I sit for a little while on the bench in front of the dressing table mirror. I do not turn the mirror lights back on. I have the feeling that I am not there, that the bench is empty, that I can see right through where my body should be and see the wall over there. It would be like this if you came back from death to visit a certain place.