This Body (34 page)

Then I envy her. If I were to die, there's nowhere else on earth I'd rather be.

“Thiz, whaddam I gonna to do?” He took a small swallow from his glass, and she watched the muscles in his neck constrict.
He stood up, the chair almost upending, and looked at her desperately.

She went over and hugged him, her face in the hollow of his throat. He smelled warm and smoky, and she drank him in. It was
better than wine.

She stroked his back. She could feel how tense he was, how the muscles across his shoulders were ropy and strained. She kneaded
them blindly with her fingertips, using the muscles' feel and dimension to guide her, and slowly, ever so slowly, they softened,
and he began to feel like a man again instead of a cyborg encased in thin epidermis.

“I-I don't feel so good,” she heard him groan through his throat. She stepped back, and his face had a satin finish.

“Come on.” She put her arm around his waist and led him into the bedroom.

She sat him down on the bed, pried the whiskey glass out of his hand, and put it on the nightstand. He fumbled with the belt
of his khaki shorts. She helped him undo the buckle and slide off the shorts. He curled up on the bed in his boxer shorts.
She started to leave, but he stopped her. “Don't go.”

She closed the bedroom door, and the room was in total darkness.

“Don't go,” he called louder.

“I'm here.”

She heard him settle back down.

She sat on the bed. He wiggled more into the middle, and she lay down beside him. She continued to shiver.

“You smell good,” he said.

She had gone out and bought some of Katharine's perfume before her dinner with Philip, thinking it would trigger some sort
of response in him, but Philip's nostrils never even quivered.

He pressed closer to her and seemed to fall asleep for a while.

She could feel his hand like a hot iron on her shoulder blade, and she started to cry.

Propped up on one elbow, she held the whiskey glass under her nose, the fumes whirling her brain. The wine she had drunk had
taken the edge off for a bit, but now it was back. She imagined the whiskey in the glass, like amber syrup, smooth and medicinal.
She tipped the glass back and took a sip. He stirred, and she replaced the glass on the stand.

“Thisby?” he said drowsily.

“No,” she whispered. “Katharine.”

“Katharine?”

“Yes.”

“I know you?”

“Yes.”

She slowly leaned forward and with lips still stinging with alcohol anointed his eyelids with kisses. His mouth opened, and
his breath, smooth as the smell of softened caramel candies, fogged over her. She lowered her mouth and reached into him with
her tongue and her soul, and like Queen Titania with her ass-headed lover, she sang his anxieties to sleep.

She sat on a chair next to the bed and watched him sleep. She wanted to be smoking. It would have felt so right. She had even
gone unsuccessfully through his dresser drawers to find a cigarette. So she sat there, legs crossed, leaning one elbow on
the topmost knee, the closed fist holding up her head, watching him and wishing for a cigarette. He was so beautiful, lying
on his stomach, his head turned toward her. His features were smooth, almost porcelain, his morning beard barely noticeable.
His hair was tufted around his ears and curled over his forehead. The sheet barely reached his waist, and she had gently pulled
down a corner to reveal the fairy kiss. In the gray, it looked like a mere smudge. A flexed knee struck out from under the
covers toward her. She wanted to touch that knee. It had fit in her palm so well before. His right arm was relaxed and gently
curved, almost groping for something. For her? She could touch it if she just reached out. How she wanted to reach out. He
wasn't snoring now, but he had been before; she had nudged him under the shoulder blade to turn him over, and then she had
begun to cry.

It was the morning after. The sun was up, and even though she had opened the curtains to let in the light, the rays hadn't
yet reached the level of the rear window. She was glad. She didn't want him to wake up just yet. She wanted to watch him.
One of his pillows was at her feet. They had knocked it off last night. She rocked it back and forth with her dangling toes
and then flipped it over, rotisserie-style. Over and over again.

She remembered everything. This time.
One potato, two potato
. It was just that she didn't want to think about it.
Three potato, four
. But she didn't want it to be like a Harlequin romance.
Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more
. They kissed and then it was afterward …

Katharine had kissed him. It was true; she had started it. But she hadn't come to his apartment to do that. She hadn't. She
wasn't quite sure what she had come for — she just wanted a little kindness, a little sympathy, a little closeness.

And when he lay in her arms in the dark, so warm and alive and needing, she wanted to be closer. She wanted to lay bare her
soul, open up to him. Thisby was only skin deep, and Katharine was right there.

I'm not the person you think I am. If you could just see me out of this body
.

And he seemed to sense it. He was truly seeing her for the first time.

He kissed her back, didn't he?

Their lovemaking hadn't been elegant. The skirt of her dress was already around her waist, and he worked off their underwear
with fumbling hands. He pulled her buttocks toward him and then turned heavily over into her.

He murmured into her hair, but she didn't understand what he was saying, and she didn't want to know. She was fighting her
own battles. They were all in her head, all yammering at her.

Thisby's own flesh and blood. Even she wouldn't do something like this
.

Disgusting. You could be his mother
.

Such dexterity to incestuous sheets. Have you no shame?

Come on. Come on
.

Shut up! Shut up! All of you. This has nothing to do with Thisby. I'm Katharine. And I … and I … and I love him
.

He came quickly, and she had been glad of it. She had excited him to a point where he had no control; he was swept along;
she had pulled him out of himself. Then she had held him in her arms, stroking his head as it lay on her shoulder. His arm
and hand rested lightly around her stomach, his ankle hooked around hers. He quickly quieted and seemed to sink alongside
her. She held him up long after her arm began to numb. He then rolled away, and with it came the voodoo stabs of returning
circulation. She would have held him all night if he had let her.

Now she was sitting there, watching him. She felt like Oberon's mischievous henchman, Robin Goodfellow — having latched the
wrong lover's eyes with the Cupid juice — now forced to undo the spell to see what remains.

With eyes open and in the light of day
.

She took another sip of the whiskey on the nightstand. It made her shudder. With moist lips, she streaked his proffered eyelid.
It fluttered.

Will he wake up and be thought he was enamoured of an ass? Will his eye loathe this visage now?

Act 4, Scene 6

Life is a thief.

— K
ATHARINE
H
EPBURN
,
Suddenly Last Summer
(1959)

She stood in the hallway, the morning sun hot on her back, and through the slit between the bedroom door and the jamb, she
watched him slowly come to consciousness. She had all her belongings in her arms, the key to her car between her thumb and
forefinger.

Whom had she been kidding? She couldn't face him. This wasn't some damn play, where everything comes out all right after the
exchange of a few simple lines. She couldn't stand to see the realization explode across his face: he had just made love to
his sister.

She watched him open his eyes, grimace, and shut them again, covering his forehead with a hand to block out the light. “Too
bright,” he moaned, but slowly like a contortionist bunched himself into a sitting position. He held his head in his hands,
his elbows propped up on his knees. “Have I laid my brain in the sun and dried it?”

He sat there and seemed to deliberately reconnect his various body parts. He finally looked around him, and she saw him take
in the disarray of the bedclothes, his semi-erect penis. He took a handful of the sheet, brought it to his nose, and smelled
it.

The skin on her shoulders was on fire, and she thought she might throw up.

He turned his torso toward the bedroom door, but didn't get up. “Kath — ? Katharine?” he called softly.

She didn't move. Her skin blackened, and hairline cracks webbed across the surface.

He frowned. “Thisby?”

Flames licked up the length of her body. The hard casing around her, impervious to so many elements, finally succumbed to
the intense heat and split apart, falling away to be left among the cinders.

She pulled back, and her movement caused the bedroom door to sway. She ran.

As she closed the front door behind her, she heard him call from the bedroom, “Wait …”

Act 5, Scene 1

Believe me, if a man doesn't know death, he doesn't know life.

— L
IONEL
B
ARRYMORE
,
Grand Hotel
(1932)

Katharine snaked another glass of champagne off the waiter's tray, spilling some on the marbled floor.
Shit
. She was getting a tad unsteady and thought perhaps the tequila poppers she had slammed down before going to Thisby's reception
hadn't been such a good idea. She had felt increasingly frantic as the afternoon wore on, and the tequila had calmed her down
— as she knew it would — but now she felt herself rushing too fast toward the oblivion she sought each night.

It was a late Indian summer evening with the promise of cool just a few blocks away. The elephant doors in the back of the
Zelig-Ziegfeld Gallerie were open, and inside the skylights were jacked open. A breeze was sneaking in and rippling the flower
arrangements that Anne had made for the two long trestle tables now covered with platters of manicured food.

Katharine stood a little way from the front door, but within the sight line of the entering guests. She felt like a bride
but with no groom beside her — hers was the only hand to shake in the reception line. Max had positioned her there, and since
this was also in the flight pattern of the waiters with their full glasses of champagne, she didn't protest.

She watched Puck as he took his right hand and molded it against Vivian's right hip, his fingers almost cupping her buttock.
They had come straight from the airport, having flown down from San Francisco where Puck had gone to live in September to
see if things could work out between them. Their backs were to Katharine, but she thought she could see their studied but
mannered concentration as they took in the exhibit.

Puck had called Katharine a couple of times after the night they were together. That Night — that's how she thought of it.
Like a movie title. It Happened That Night. Both times he was so hesitant and confused, she almost felt sorry for him. He
seemed to be trying to dismiss it — That Night, That Woman, Thisby, Katharine, whoever, whatever — as a dream, a figment of
his drunken imagination. He was trying to act normal, but the uncertainty was a breach between them. He didn't ask her anything,
and, although half of her wanted to confront him — make him writhe in shame and remorse — the other half swallowed their joint
culpability and guilt and was mute.

The last time he called had been to tell her that he was moving up to San Francisco, that she, his sister, had been right,
he had held himself hostage with his job; that he wasn't satisfied or fulfilled in it; that it was time to strike out on his
own, away from his family, to begin anew, to commit to Vivian, if she would have him; and that he owed this realization all
to Thisby. She had steered him toward it. He was beholden to her for everything.

She found it almost funny; in all her mother-life, one of the things she had always wanted was for someone to confide in her
— choose her to be their confidante, draw on her years of experience and well of wisdom. Someone did and then took her advice,
but it wasn't even necessarily right.
Or true. It was really the fear, the uncertainty, of what actually happened That Night that forced him to act. I'm sure it
was
.