Jen opens the door, though her stomach is squirming. The worn metal taps on her biking boots clack against the ceramic tile. The air seems deathly still, no rustling, no water running, no music wafting from the clock radio. His shoes are gone. Fuck. He either hasn’t hauled himself off the riverbank yet or he’s called a cab and gone to work anyway. Jen wanders through the house, just to be sure, then stretches out on the lounge in the sunroom to nurse a coffee and let the shafts of light bathe her in relief. What can she say, what’s the point now anyway? They’ve crossed some kind of line and even if they could get back to the other side, the sane side, she’s not sure that’s where she wants to be. This other life is numbing, a sort of cool comfort. It feels kind of good to be detached, nothing can touch her here. But she feels a tug of sorts, that maudlin shit that filled her childhood head with Disney love and happy endings.
See, they’d thought it was love at first sight. It just feels right was all she had to say to stunned friends and family. It’s a gut-thing. And it was right—the way a jigsaw piece fits. She just doesn’t like the picture anymore. Because from up here, in this cool tower of hers, it looks like a sprawled tangle of neurotic need bound by fear. It’s ugly, and she painted it. She didn’t know that when she started, because she was in the thick of it, splashing some color around. The naked dancing, the German wine, the ‘what the hell we were going to have children someday anyway’. The moves, always boxing and unboxing, excited when she’d sell another piece, get another commission. They were going somewhere, the good life.
It was herself she was fighting before he came. She’d spent so long wrestling with it, when she looked up there he was with his beautiful blue eyes and his simplicity, his willingness to hold her and make her think for a moment or two that the good life was meant for her too. That she could bury her cynicism and buy it. That she could take off all her clothes and dance all night across that cold concrete floor of his basement apartment. They would be like that. They wouldn’t fall into the traps that snared others in domestic boredom. They would laugh at people who bowled, made love on Wednesdays and went to parent-teacher night. And there was no reason on earth she couldn’t sculpt. He believed in her. Love wouldn’t change her.
Deep down, Jen always knew what that comfort would cost her, how she would bury that instinct, that open tentacle that clasped the world to feed the clay monster. She knew it would cost her everything in the end. Now he plans to make her pay, but her pockets are empty. Pete must have called here; she doesn’t know how else he could know. It figures he’d find out about it after the fact, after it was done with. The side door rattles and she’s frozen with sick terror.
“Jen, I’m sorry.” Jace kneels, wedged in between the screen door and its frame, tear-streaked and muddied. He found his underwear, but that’s all. Water has dripped down his leg and smeared the mud, leaving a black swirl on the tile. Jen looks at him for an eternal moment, can’t get her jaw to move. He is so pathetic, and she feels so unreal.
“Jen, what’s happening, Jen, you gotta talk to me. I can’t take it, can’t live like this. Please …”
He crawls toward her, either for effect or because she kicked him harder than she thought. Maybe both; he has a flair for melodrama. He lays his wet, muddy head in her lap and her hand automatically sweeps the hair off his forehead. She notices how silky his forehead feels under the grit. How soft the hair is in the few spots not caked with mud. His head feels heavy, large, like a pumpkin without the ridges. It feels strange on her lap, awkward. This is a play, she thinks. Nothing real here. He’s just scared.
“Please forgive me. Please, Jen.”
“Takes two Jace. I started it,” she says, meaning it.
He looks up, surprised. That wasn’t her line, she guesses. An alarm is going off in her head: this might get real.
“But I hurt you … God, 1 didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Deep down, you’d like to have killed me, Jace. Stop bullshitting or I won’t talk,” she says, convinced it’s time to get real.
He pushes himself off her lap and sits holding his knees together.
“If I meant to kill you, I would have killed you,” he says, voice deep and controlled again. “I knew what I was doing. I had to stop you. You lost control,” he adds.
“Yeah, I did. So now what,” Jen says calmly, unwilling to abandon her decision to play this one straight.
“Aren’t you sorry?”
“I see. You crawl up here all apologetic so you can extract apology from me, then we kiss, make up, pretend it never happened, right? Then the neighbors won’t talk nasty about us and you won’t have to hang your head around town, or worse yet, even admit that egad you’re human too and you have a temper,” she says. She can tell by his tightening jaw that she’s pissing him off. Part of her doesn’t want to piss him off, but another part is fighting to fling off the bullshit and emerge somehow equipped to move forward. She will drown in the bullshit if she keeps living this way, of this she is certain. Jace rises to his feet, unaware of the pathetic figure he cuts in the clarity of Jen’s mind.
“Just tell me something, Jen. Tell me this. Are we going to sit here and talk about my black-white problem all day? About how just because I’m not fucked up and indecisive all the time, because I live by my convictions, that I’m somehow inferior and, let’s see, not as spiritually developed as you? Cause if we are, I want to know now so I can get the hell out of here,” he says, flushing, puffed up. Jen can almost see his face swelling.
“We can talk about anything you like, Jace. We can talk about the fucking weather for all I care. Fact is there’s nothing worth saying. You said it all. I’m a slut, I’m a cunt, and as usual, I’m fucked up. It’s ME who’s fucked up, right? Isn’t that the point? What does the naked man lying drunk on the riverbank say? What does he think about who’s fucked up around here? Or do you even know who that was, wresting his little demon in the muck,” Jen spits.
Jace shakes his head and looks at his toes. Stalling tactic.
“1 don’t believe you. I came to you to tell you I’m sorry, to try to work this out, and this is what I get,” Jace glares.
“You get what you put out there, Jace. I haven’t listened to my gut for a long time, but it’s coming back because I’m far enough away from you now to hear it. And it tells me this is just another play for pity or sympathy or, god forbid, love so that you can feel good about yourself instead of facing yourself. You want me to say it’s all okay. It’s not. End of subject.”
Jace is tense like an animal about to leap forward on his prey. For a moment Jen feels fear again, eyes darting for a letter-opener, a large ashtray. Then she sees he’s composed himself, he’ll be constrained by his need to prove he’s not violent.
“That’s it? End of subject?” He hunches over her, directing the venomous words into her face. “You little bitch, you’ll get yours.” His face is red, huge, far too close but she can make it go away. She can control it.
“I got mine, sweetie. It’s hissing in my face. It thinks it can nag and bully me away till all that’s left is the parts it wants. Let me help it understand something: That’s not going to happen. Because if it does, there won’t be anything left to love it with. Not that that matters now.”
He wants to slap her, Jen can tell, but he won’t. He’s too proud to let her win what to him is a point. He puts both hands on her shoulders and shoves her back against the lounge. Then he whispers, shaking.
“I used to love you, Jen. You’ve killed us. How can I ever make you see.” Then he kisses her forehead, and before she realizes what is happening they’re a tangle of sobs and limbs and comfort.
The body is a funny thing, she thinks, a homing pigeon that never reads its message. It drives on to the place it’s supposed to go, bringing life, death, reprieves, no matter. It knows only its conditioning. Which is why affairs aren’t fruitful, aren’t realty worth the time. When it comes right down to it, Pete never had a chance. Being with Jace now feels final enough to be new, but better than new. Jen is amazed, but wondering the whole time if that’s how fear and habit work. We can’t get our brains in sync, let’s try the body-thing.
When Jen left MacDonald in her freshman year of college, that body imprint nearly changed her mind. He’d thrown her house keys at her, and hit her in the eye. She felt nothing for him anymore, she knew it was final, but that didn’t stop them that night. Lying with her head on his chest, feeling alien, she marveled at how easy it was to be inside the internal logic of love at one moment, then out. It made her sad because she couldn’t remember ever wanting him and now knows she never did. She’d just sold herself, bought it, paid, laid it to waste. She understands his hatred now. She used him up, rather, let him spoil. It’s why he too put his hands around her neck. Only unlike Jace, he wasn’t going to stop. Luckily, her college don had called the cops, and a 6’4” testament to bro science pried him off and cuffed him. Jen had blue bruises where his fingers had been for two weeks. But the mark that never healed was the knowledge of what a person could be driven to when starved of love.
Jen wonders if that’s what she’s done to Jace too, but it’s not as final, and when their flesh meets she remembers all the things she loves about him. The ugly shit melts away, and she wants to say everything’s okay. She wants everything to be okay. Then moments later, it’s not, and that tiny white-jelly underside, her vulnerability, slips through their fingers and he’s left with the shell. Today, they are frightened, and she senses change in the pit of her stomach. A thin, fragile wish to believe snakes through her, and for a moment while they take a bath together, and once while drying each other’s hair, she thinks maybe they can make it if they can just learn to be kind.