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PARTISAN REVIEW
And then she said, "Sometimes you only do what you really want
until the very end. You know what I mean."
We were naked like a river and water. With everything that was, is,
and would be, the way a person sets the animal inside himself free or
tames it; the animal that always comes back to him, that makes his heart
expand or become smaller. How his heart is bigger than he is himself.
"There is nothing left that either one of us has to do," she said.
"What do you mean?"
"That burning feeling and lack of satisfaction," she answered. "Pain
and painlessness . A day that is longer than a year and a second longer
than eternity."
I knew what she was talking about right then: about a madness that
is either under or out of control; about the time when we all go mad.
"Desire and tenderness. A touch of selfishness. Maybe that's really
the sense of it all," she said. Then she added, "One time, a friend of
yours taught me that not even the best or the most beautiful body is
enough for a woman to be a man's lover. You probably know what I'm
trying to say." Then: "Colors come over me every time and then I know
it's for real. Dark red, purple, orange. Dark blue. They shoot through
the border between my heart and brain into every little part of my body.
And then I start sweating all along my back and over my breasts. I can't
help but scream, I'm sorry. It's like the dark coming into color, where
everything shines before I go out again."
After it was over she said, "You can do.. .everything...and so can 1."
She exhaled . "A person will do anything when there's nobody watching."
I touched her with my mouth. She touched me with hers. Within, she
was bare and rosy. She was everything she had been before she'd been
born, before her mother conceived her and before her father betrayed
them in the last camp. She was everything for as far back in the past as
she would be in the future, like the fresh leaves of trees, fruit, rosy
petals. The scent of her body and sin mixed with the clean bed she had
slept in last. She told me that a man smells like the boy of the woman
who last held him in her arms and from the chest down he smells like
fallen apples and mild vinegar or weak wine that a few drops of sea
water has been added to, or like the rusty water a woman drinks from
an iron mug. I thought about how a woman smells like a man's hands,
his chest, and his groin. Like the scent of children. Like strong wine.
And how a woman's lap and breasts smell just like her mouth.
She no longer had to hide the things in her that were superior under
a mask that didn't suit her or anybody else either. We were better off
without the pretty hypocrisies that got passed off as sincerity. She was
