Our liaison. One summer long. It ends when I break the building. I meant it to impress her. And cool her, in the heat. Grievously I’ll never know if it does. Because she disappears, washes away, gone. Vapor.
Meeting: She’s with a traveling group of acrobats and trapeze flyers and flexibles that bend their bodies in extraordinary and unnatural ways. This is because of their childhoods. They did gym when they were kids. They stretched and lifted weights. Held themselves suspended between rings on chains. Spent their whole youths hurling their small tight bodies off vaults, through air, spinning.
She is the strongest and most delicate-looking woman I have ever seen. Her torso: compact, muscles like cables wrapped in skin. Her hands: smooth and pale and straight fingered. Glimpsing them, I wish I had a fever. She would press her hands to my forehead and my temple. Her face: soft cheeks over strong bones. Blue eyes — deeply blue, like paint-tube colors. They are cerulean. But they sometimes change — azure, cobalt, ultramarine. Long black eyelashes she flaps open and closed, a little slowly. On purpose she does this, maybe. Blinks slowly with her lashes like that. Because it makes me feel like in my body, in the space of my torso, is a large empty bottle. Its belly in the place of my belly. Its neck in the place of my neck. And my head is gone. She blinks her eyelashes and wind howls across the bottlemouth.
We meet on the beach. Men with big trucks chug into the parking lot, unfold equipment, stab stakes deep into the sand, click and drill, stretch tarp taut. The troupe follows and arrives in a sleek black tour bus. The doors fiss open and out they tumble, onto the sand. They spot one another for twists and flips in the sky. I am sunbathing. I sit up and watch. Her troupe mates run at her, leap into her interlaced fingers braced across her flexed thigh and bent knee. She ejects them backwards and high into the sky. Up there they roll and turn and look like swimmers in the yellow sunlight. I notice her forearms. On the pale inside part where the blue vein scrawls close to the surface, she has tattoos. One per forearm. From my towel I can make them out. They are sailor tattoos. Vintage looking women in heels, hose that stop with garters at the thigh, panties. They are topless. They stand on her wrists, on toe, backs arched. Flirty and sexy posture. I stare at her arms. I esteem: tattoos are permanent. There till death.
I stare at her whole self. From her steady feet on up to where the sun winks from sprigs that shoot from her short and wavy hair. I stare her up and down and admire how she launches the tumblers. In my chest opens and swells the space that longs. I stare.
She notices me and looks away and then looks back and then away and then back and smiles and dusts sand off her thighs and looks at the ocean and looks at the tent being pupped and looks at her mates and looks back at me. I still stare, but feel safe because they are putting on a show even if they are only practicing, and it is my job to look. But I am looking at her and she notices and waves me over. I put on my shorts and tuck my wallet and keys under my towel and walk over. My face is hot. She asks me if I want to try and I imagine myself in the air and then snap-necked upside down in the sand.
“No thanks,” I say.
She says, “You should.”
I say, “No thanks, I’ll die. I’m afraid I’ll die.”
She says, “Seriously, you won’t die.” And then she blinks kind of slowly.
I believe her. So I back up in the sand and run at her. She heaves me high into the air and I know what it’s like to do a somersault, so I do one in the air, backwards. She catches me, easily. I don’t know how. I am short of breath and my heart is beating. I feel it thud hard in my hips and in my throat and against the top of my head. My hands are locked around the back of her neck. My butt is slung between the flexed muscles in her arms. She sets me down and says, “Go again?’
I say, “Yes.” My face flushes and there is the smell of the ocean in my nose, the salty damp of it in my lungs. I back up and run at her again.
She tosses me higher and the other beach goers look to see and go blind watching me up there, back-lit by the sun. And here I am again, my hands around her neck, my body braced by the two sexy girls on her forearms.
We do this all afternoon. The rest of the acrobats get bored and leave for the hotel. The sun goes down and streaks the sky violet and carmine and butter. Seagulls gather on the wet sand. Thin layers of ocean and froth rush and suck their pronged feet. They squawk. She comes home with me.
We sit on the couch.
“Can I kiss you?’ she asks from over there, her pretty face cushioned in enormous pillows.
I say, “Yes, uh-huh,” or maybe just nod while my heart charges at my ribs. I think it will knock clear into her while we kiss. Thump against her chest. Make her mistake its beat for her own.
We kiss long. Hours. They pass quickly. Then we are dizzy and wobbly and blissed out. She stays.
Proof: We fall in love. In these ways:
- olfaction
- protraction
- bath tub
1. The smell in the air — the breeze blown through our bedroom window. We make bedroom curtains ourselves. Gauzy soft silk, white but sheer, we buy it in the fabric district downtown where the buildings are tall and the homeless are everywhere. We take the silk home. Hang it in our bedroom window in my apartment where we live together — my first time living with a lover, her fourth she tells me, but I won’t think too hard about that.
This window catches the sunlight and the hot draft off the street. Amber and sooty. Plus the smell of jasmine from the hills, exhaust from cars, and dirt from all over. Mixed together, the waft is very romantic. It charges the air in the bedroom so the skin on our faces and our bodies hums with an awareness of something. Like when you’re a teenager and you dream about how your life might be, and you sense, somewhere deep, mostly in your groin, that your life just might turn out that way — the way you’d like it.
In the mornings in the bed, with the breeze and the light like this, we listen to slow music rich with ladies’ voices and cello. We lie on top of the covers, no clothes. And the nice wind waltz from behind the curtains pushes on the hairs on our arms. Blows her smell across my face. She smells like bay leaves and mist. The sunlight rolls out from behind the curtains, tumbles, fades. Rolls out again.
We feel things rising in our chests. Breathing each other like this and looking over into the face of the other coaxes and fluffs this rising thing. Puffs it large so it presses out against our ribs and up into our throats, and while people don’t often feel the same things at the same times, I think we do. We smile and sniff and laugh a little at what starts to look like crying but doesn’t feel like crying. Her eyes are ultramarine. I hold out my arms and stretch out my hands and fingers to touch her face and it’s like these arms and hands are not my own because I can’t feel them because the feeling swelling in my chest has cut the circulation to my arms, and they are heavy and almost numb. and there is her skin beneath the pads of my fingertips. I breathe deep, and the feeling is better than holding a sleepy baby in your arms and sniffing the sweet smell from the top of its head.
2. Some days she teaches me how to stretch. I’m on my back, on the floor. She takes my ankles and places them on her shoulders. My calves against her chest, my butt between her hipbones. She leans her whole body into the backs of my legs. It hurts and my legs don’t bend back far. But we do this often and in two weeks I get good. She folds me in half. My nose touches my knees. Then this thing: nose to my knees, and I grab my ankles with my hands and stiffen all over. She lifts me at my waist and by my legs and picks me up. I stay firm, a folded person like a bundle of firewood in her arms. She is so strong. Sometimes she tucks my rear into the crook of her right arm and scoops my legs and head and arms in her left arm and she pretends I am a giant machine gun. She takes me onto the balcony and makes shooting noises.
“Deadly fire from the bottoms of your feet!” she shouts. She picks off planes in the sky. We shoot down so many planes.
“Imagine the sad families,” she says, “So many dead relatives.”
The stretching lengthens my spine. I’ve grown three quarters of an inch.
“Only in my torso, though, not in my legs,” I tell her.
“Torso’s more important,” she says, “It’s where everything important is. Good to give it more room. Legs just keep you up,” she lies. She has very long muscular legs. They do a lot.
3. She props her ankle on my shoulder and shaves her legs. She shakes the razor under the water in the tub. Dark specks float from it to the surface.
“I was going to be a synchronized swimmer,” she tells me.
“When?” I ask watching her body in the bath water.
She says, “When I was a kid. Before I took gymnastics I was on the synchronized swimming team for toddlers.” She takes her leg off my shoulder and places her other ankle on my other shoulder. Squeezes liquid soap in a line along her shin. She smears and lathers it.
“I liked it,” she says, “Then I found I like falling through the air and into nets better.” She drags the razor over her calf. “Faster movement over greater distance,” she says and looks hard down the skin road she shaved into her soaped leg.
“I could work in your show,” I say. “I could lie on the ground beneath the trapeze,” I tell her. “Naked,” I say. She laughs and looks up and her eyes are azure. “Instead of a net it will be me,” I tell her. “I won’t catch anyone. I’ll just get crushed, naked. By acrobats who fall.”
She shakes her head, smiles, blinks slowly. Her eyes, cobalt. In my chest and stomach, howling. She swishes the blade in the water. Then drops the razor in the tub. Cloomp. She starts to reach for it, but instead scoops up a handful of water and splashes it up my arm, across my forehead, over my chest.
“Feels good, huh,” she says. She pushes a handful of water through her hair. She stands. The water level drops. Naked, dripping, looking very tall in front of me. I grab her thigh, squeeze it all the way around with both hands. My thumbs meet, tucked high up near her crotch. She is warm.
Other: When she is not practicing with the troupe, we walk around. We wander the cheap shopping street near the apartment looking for a French bakery I remember being there. We can’t find it. We walk with coffees in white paper cups. She brings the coffee to her lips, sips from it. I spy the lady on her arm. Mid sip my acrobat glances at me from the corner of her eye, winks slowly. There’s the howling. I feel light. I sink my cheek into her shoulder.
These times with her. I have loved them.
When the weather turns too hot, she complains. “It’s killing me,” she says.
* * *
After the preceding three, but before the end, there is Preparation:
It is early. She’s out. Practicing with her troupe. Sun’s just risen and already it’s hot. Has been hot for days. Sticky, wet heat. I work in the bedroom. The walls are painted aquamarine, oceanic blue. We painted them this color directly after our first make out session, the night she moved in.
She said, “Cool blue makes me limber.” She asked, “Can we paint the walls blue?”
“Sure,” I said. So we did.
Today, a big tub of shower putty by my foot, a steel spatula in my hand, I focus on the line in the angle where the wall and floor meet. With my fingers I scoop rubber putty from the tub and smudge it between the baseboard running the perimeter of the walls and the hardwood floor. It gives like dough, but is stickier. Gluey. I press the steel spatula into the clump and drag it along the line. Dirt and grit from the floor roll under the blade and mix with the putty. The steel spatula scrapes the surface along the drag and makes small ding sounds at the end of each stroke. I scoop more, push it in there, white out the dark crack between the wall and floor. All four around, pushing putty, smoothing it with the spatula. The thin cracks alongside the window where the frame meets the plaster wall, I fill them. Around the window parts, the gaps between the panes of glass, designed to be separate so they slide open and closed — I seal them solid. Shut and airtight. Crouching over the floor, I fill the pencil lines between the slats in the wood. Fill three small gouges — two from furniture and one from when I dropped a hammer.
Working around the bed and the desk and the bookshelf and the dresser, I streak the dark floor with white putty, sealing it clean. The sun shines through the small skylight in the ceiling. I’m sweating beneath my shirt. I putty the space between the door and its frame. Fill in all around the hinges. I heave handfuls at the gap between the door and the floor, glopping out the space. Then up, where the ceiling meets the walls. I climb on the dresser and fill the line between the crown molding and ceiling. Then I climb onto the bookshelf, then onto the desk, then the bed, reaching above my head, stuffing all cracks high up. Steel spatula, chalky plaster walls, gooey putty. Nail holes and nicks are plugged. The entire bedroom is pasted shut. I stand and look at the aquamarine walls, now streaked and splotched with shiny white putty rubber. I stack a few hardcover books on the desk, climb on top of them. Reach the ceiling. Unlatch the skylight. Flip it back on its hinges. Out of the skylight I climb into the white sun. Stumble onto the roof, blind. I walk the length of the apartment, but on top of it, squinting. Soft tar sticks to my sandals. I trip on the garden hose coiled neatly near the ladder leading down to a fire escape. I climb down the ladder, drop onto the fire escape, return to the hot kitchen through the window.
* * *
She is gone long, practicing through the night. Rehearsing in the dark to beat the heat. This is what she tells me. I believe her. I sleep alone. Just before dawn I climb back to the roof, drop into the bedroom to test. The putty is dry. Up, out and into the heat again I find the hose. Unwind it and insert it into the room through the skylight. Twist the knob all the way strong. Crawl back in to the kitchen through the fire escape.
Later, she returns. Shiny, breathing hard. Two acrobats passed out during practice. The news says old people and children are dying. We make love in the living room, in front of the fan, on a sheet on the rug, sweating so much we leave stains in the shapes of whole bodies.
* * *
Presentation: “Follow me,” I say. I go to the kitchen, exit out the window, onto the fire escape. She squints hard, shades her eyes, climbs up after me. On the roof the tar paper blisters. We step slowly across the top of our apartment. Our sandals rustle and crunch the fine gravel littered across the roof. I lead her to the skylight.
“I smell water,” she says. We stop at the skylight. Stand over it. The burbling is loud.
“What’s this?” she asks smiling. Her long lashes are wet and sparkling with sweat. She smudges her forehead with the back of her arm.
I grin at her, hold out my hand. She takes it. I drop head first through the skylight into the bedroom. She follows.
The room is filled with water, floor to ceiling. Our bodies slippery, salty sweat washed over in cold water. We float still for a moment, suspended, in the middle of the room. Arms out, legs apart, like skydivers. We feel the cool. Her hair is like dark anemone, swaying.
I bend and dive into the mattress and kick across the room. The sheets on the bed float and tangle. We swim from wall to wall, knocking into the floating alarm clock and hat rack. Pens and pencils drift in front of our eyes. Our clothes are blousey and stretched and billow after us. Wall to wall, kicking off then gliding across, bodies buoyant and turning in space.
We stand on the chest of drawers, press our noses to the ceiling, suck breaths of air. Dive down again. She pulls books off the bookshelf. We watch them roll, spill open. The pages flutter. Flying fish.
She swims to the floor, graceful like a seal. She looks up at me, smiles, waves in slow motion. I swim over her, my hair out, seaweeding slowly around my head, into and out of my face. I can feel the sun through the skylight illuminating the surface of the water behind me.
The room swells. It bulges fat, ripe with water. The water begins to cloud murky, muddy. First closest to the walls, creeping toward the center. The putty holds strong, but the plaster is dissolving. The window creaks. The glass spiderwebs. Sharp snapping sounds echo through the water. We swim toward the floor and try to stand upright by flapping our arms, pushing the water above our heads to get our feet on the floor. Her right foot touches down and the floorboards give beneath her sandal. Her foot slips down into the soft split in the boards while chords of silver bubbles stream toward the ceiling from her nose. Water whips into a small cyclone in the hole in the floor. It pulls her leg deeper into the hole. She is half calf into the floorboards, but yanks her leg up and flaps at the water hard, with her arms. Her calf and foot reappear. Her sandal is missing. Flushed down the hole.
The glass in the window bursts out with a sound like choot! Milky blue tinted water gushes from the window frame. I imagine shards of wet glass crackling in the sunlight as they tumble and fall to the walk down below. Shatter into bits with the crash of the wave.
The walls give. Chunks of plaster and dry wall in the shapes of states blast from our bedroom, pushed by the surge to the street outside. The floorboards give. So much water. More than I thought could fill this room. More water.
It takes us. Our floor caves into the apartment below. We fall with the water and follow its sweep. Sloshing from our blue room, into our downstairs neighbor’s bedroom. His stuff is ruined. I glimpse his eyes; they’re huge. His yelling alternates loud then sputters drowned and muffled. We flood his hallway. Feet and more feet deep of water. Me on my seat, she on her back, we ride the tide through his hall, out his back door propped open in the heat, down stairs, and into the street. The heave carrying our soppy bodies splits at the trunk of a tree growing from the apron of grass in the sidewalk. The rush of water slipping me along tapers thin and I slow to a stop on the asphalt. Her current is strong. So much water. It carries her across the street. Her sleek black tour bus is idling at the corner. It shines bright and oily in the sun. I watch her wash across the street, her knees tucked close to her chest. Her sally subsides. The door on the bus hushes open. She spins slowly on her back as she comes to a stop. She steps gracefully up from the spin, and in one smooth movement lifts herself from her back to her feet and onto the step entrance of the bus. She shakes her body. Drops of water whip from her hair and her fingertips, diamonding in the daylight. She ducks into the bus. The door hisses and vacuums shut. I watch it pull away and lumber down the avenue. Sun blazing. The bus shrinks small and miragey. She is gone.
Sense: Every day gallons, pounds, miles of water evaporate from seas, lakes, rivers, pools. Different volumes of water evaporate off different bodies at different rates, depending. What determines what body of water evaporates at what rate, at what time? Hydrologics. The water cycle. There’s solar radiation, so water turns to vapor. Under conditions of extreme heat, there’s sublimation. Poof! — from ice to gas, solid to beyond — just like that. Molecules disappear into the sky, serve time as clouds, and return in various forms. Snow, sleet, frost, rain, fog. The wispiest of mists is called virga.
The human body is composed of 80 percent water. I weigh 109 pounds. That is 87.2 pounds of water. My acrobat weighs 124 pounds. That is 99.2 pounds of water. More water than me, but she is taller and stronger. Her water stretches from her feet on the ground up toward the sky.
The average unit of time a water molecule will spend in the atmosphere before precipitating back to ground is nine days. It might return as dew or downpour. I could wait nine days. But the likelihood of those molecules homecoming to that same location of evaporation is too slim. Consider jet streams, the rotation of the earth. Virga reevaporates before it even touches ground. And when the hydrogens and the oxygens clump and hit heavy, slicking the streets and eroding the hills, there is always runoff.
* * *
These thoughts I think, they do not help. In my heart, an aneurysm. A fluid-filled sac, soused milky blue, cerulean. The walls of my arteries go runny.
