On evenings she couldn’t sleep, she walked up the carpeted stairs and knocked on my door. Under the down comforter, my bony hips squeezed between her thighs, we listened to her husband’s snoring. Emily was richly layered and comfortable and her neck smelled of dark spices.
When she was in a hurry, she knelt in front of me, unzipping my pants, murmuring words I couldn’t make out but which my cock understood. When she had time, she said all the silly things I wanted to hear. “Fuck me hard,” she urged me on. “Come inside me, fill me with your come,” she whispered, and I worked ferociously and was thanked for my efforts with tender kisses before she had to leave.
At thirty-seven, I was a student again. As good as a student anyway, living in a neighborhood populated by students and fresh-out-of-college young professionals. I painted the kitchen of my new apartment in green and yellow, put cheap posters I had bought at the gas station on the bedroom walls. I hung a ducky curtain in the shower, and the only furniture in my living room was a desk, a chair, a hand-made couch from a yard sale, and my computer. A mirror I did not buy.
Emily and I met through the parcels she signed for when I wasn’t home. Coming back from work, I’d find her note on my door and hurry downstairs. Her husband Walter was a fifth-year senior at the university, majoring in biology, and when Emily was out, he gave me my parcels. “J. Crew,” he said, handing me a large brown box with a grin. He was a head shorter than I was, and built like a bear. He’d been a wrestler he told me on one occasion, and was still in shape. To prove it, he jumped into the air and landed on the hallway’s carpet in a split. “Now you,” he laughed, knowing that I would tear a ligament or two if I tried. “l can hear your every step at night,” he said. “You don’t get enough sleep. You need to eat more, too. I can see the moon shining through your ribs.” He was twenty-three.
One day on which I had not found a note, Emily stood in my door holding a parcel. “Can I have a look?” she said, without letting go of the box. I asked her in. My rooms were in disarray, a desk as large as a mattress strewn with half-written articles, notes for poems, and drafts of abandoned stories.
Emily was full-figured, heavy even, but she walked like a much smaller person, with an easy grace. “You have a lot of books,” she said, moving a strong finger over the backs of secondhand paperbacks. Her face was sweet and young, with a tiny, freckled nose and green eyes. She didn’t wear socks or stockings, and only a short, gray dress. Her legs and feet looked obscenely bare. “Are you a writer?”
“An editor.” I had left my sensible teaching job at a local high school, and started work at the Crunch, a monthly magazine for this Midwest college town. After eight years of marriage, of student conferences, parents, of dinner parties and shared friends, I had wanted life to be simple again, and I had gotten my wish. I wasn’t paid enough to continue payments, and so I had sold the Audi and bought an ’85 Crown Victoria for five hundred dollars, exactly what I paid in rent. I reveled in my newfound poverty, and my kitchen cabinets were stacked with pasta and generic sauce.
At night I sat on the fire escape and smoked weed or cigarettes, while listening to Walter and Emily clattering about their kitchen. A few steps down and I could have watched them wash the dishes or prepare some tofu. I was alone most nights, but even my loneliness I cherished.
“You mind?” Emily asked and walked through the tiny kitchen to take a peek at the bedroom. “It’s kind of nice here,” she announced, putting a strand of brown hair behind her right ear. “A bit empty, not like someone … how old are you?”
“Old,” I said.
“But you get a lot of sun up here.” With that she sat down on my mattress.
“Would you like some coffee?” I said.
“I’d love some. That’s a nice comforter,” she said. “Smells nice too.”
In the kitchen, my hands shook, coffee landed on the floor and stuck to my feet. It was April, and we’d had a week of gentle days and I had stopped heating the apartment for the first time in five months. Pouring water into the coffeemaker, I tried to make conversation from one room to the next. “How long have you been living here?” I shouted, only to turn around and find Emily right next to me. “I like my coffee weak,” she said. “Like tea. You made it weak.”
“Good. That’s good,” I said. Her face was inches away from mine. “Are you a student?”
“I was. I might go back next year. Right now, I’m working in a toy store downtown. We need the money. Walter’s the genius, not me. Do you smoke?” I bent down and gave her a kiss, instantly retreating a few steps, as if expecting a beating.
“What was that?” she said.
“A kiss,” I answered stupidly.
“What for?”
“Because I wanted to.”
“Huh,” she said and nodded and went back into the sunny bedroom.
I waited in the kitchen for the coffee to get ready, not daring to speak, praying that Emily would open the bedroom’s door to the fire escape and leave. My lips were still burning, as if I had kissed a cactus, and my bare feet froze to ice while my face and chest were so hot I could feel how red they were.
She was still there when I returned with two hastily cleaned and filled mugs. “I have no sugar,” I said as brusquely as I could. “No milk either.”
“Who’s that in the picture?” she asked, pointing at a black and white print above my bed.
“My ex-wife.”
“She’s pretty. Very thin.”
“Yeah.” In the photo, Cathy sat on the hood of the rusty Ford I had bought shortly after we started dating. She wore tiny, leopard-flecked glasses, her hair as short and wiry as a brush, a tough-cookie smile directed at me. She was so slender, I wanted to grab her by the waist and carry her out of the picture and out of Emily’s sight.
“I’m not thin, not so much,” Emily said.
“Oh,” I said, smiling and taking a sip of my coffee so I didn’t have to speak.
She smiled too and said, “Do you want to see me naked?”
It was that B-movie cheesiness that tore me from my quandary. She delivered her line without a trace of irony, as though she weren’t aware of what she was saying. Or maybe she was reciting an old erotic novel, a confessional story from a woman’s magazine. Yet she was deeply serious about what she offered. After she had put dress, bra, and flowered undies on a chair, she straddled me, her pale breasts quivering, her nipples as rough as tree bark on my tongue.
My greed—it had been months since my last fling—saved me from embarrassment. “You are well-endowed,” Emily said like a butcher praising a choice cut of meat. “Very well-endowed. Do you have protection?”
“No,” I said, afraid she would get up and dress again.
“You don’t have AIDS, right?”
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. I’d had sex with a colleague shortly after leaving Cathy and I hadn’t bothered with condoms.
“Oh God,” Emily sighed, then reached for my hard-on and slipped it inside her.
It was rocky at best. Our bodies played to different tunes, and my eyes had yet to grow accustomed to Emily’s wealth. When we were done, l felt as if I had wolfed down a fabulous meal, and grinned sheepishly up at her face.
After five years of marriage, sex hadn’t come quickly to me and Cathy anymore. I still admired her beauty, and I was certain she still liked my body, but the touches, the answers to these touches that suddenly started a fire, we didn’t know them anymore. They were the vocabulary of a language we had once learned in high school and college, but now had no opportunity and country to speak. Or maybe our fluency had robbed this language of its charms. Maybe clumsiness was of the essence.
Before Emily left that afternoon, she said, “I’m still shaken. You were a nine on the Richter scale.”
“Only a nine?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“The scale only goes to eight.”
“To twelve,” I corrected her.
She giggled, embarrassed and happy. “Then you’re a thirteen.”
Cathy’s picture I put in a drawer that night, covering it gently with an old shirt of hers, the white one she’d worn when I first met her.
Walter, Emily’s husband, pointed to the last ambulance switching off its lights and leaving our neighbor’s lot, across the street; he’d just returned from his morning run—he hated the word “jog”—and proudly showed off his sweaty hair and Lycra pants. “She’s dead, old Mrs. Grott. Eighty pounds of dog food. Fell onto her when she tried to get it off the shelf, squeezed her to death. She might have been knocked unconscious first, I don’t know. The electricity guy noticed; she must have lain there for days.” And the smell, Walter said, the smell had made him want to puke. “You should have seen the mess on the floor,” he said, proud that he had before police sealed off the entrance. “Three dogs and a corpse.” He’d just left the house when they opened a window to get in.
Walter basked in the glow of disaster striking close to home. “You’re just as spindly as she was,” he teased. “You should get in shape if you want to survive. Eat, work out. Or else a bag might kill you too one day.”
I had slept through the commotion, disappointed and glad not to have witnessed the old lady lying on the floor surrounded by her dogs. And I was in a generous mood. After all, Walter’s wife was my nightly visitor, I could stand to be laughed at. I agreed to run with him the next day.
I followed him through our neighborhood, up Liberty, then turning right and into the interconnected small parks that brought us to Miller. We ran past the orchestra shell and the ballpark, turned toward downtown and ran all the way to the main campus of the university. By then my mouth stood wide open, snot smeared across my chin. But I didn’t want to give in to Walter’s smile as he watched me suffer. He ran with ease, but awkwardly, on tiptoes really, as if he were afraid to touch the ground. And I followed him until, after eighty minutes, we were finally back at our house. “I’m sorry,” he said, quickly. “I would go longer, but I have to be in class.”
I stood on the porch by myself, panting, hoping that Emily was still asleep and couldn’t see my misery.
Cathy still lived in the townhouse we’d shared for three years on the other side of town, behind a strip mall with a grocery store, a coffee shop, and a Blockbuster. We met at Panera’s, sitting across from each other on bar stools, as though we were in a hurry and wanted to be ready to jump up and run at any moment. Hazelnut coffee filled both our cups, one of these strange bonds, one of these strange things that make you feel at home.
She wore a black sweater I had given her for her last birthday, made from angora, a material she had later confessed she hated. Her fingers were playing with a silver bracelet. She looked very thin in that sweater.
“Me too,” she said despite the sweater. “l called because if you want the stuff, you should get it. Otherwise I’ll … she didn’t finish her sentence. “l think I won’t meet you again,” she said, her smile getting stuck in her face. “It’s silly to cry every time.”
“Yes,” I said.
Cathy was very pale, her already angular face seemed sharper than I remembered. A bit slacker, too. Her fingers very long and very bony.
“How’s your work?” she said.
“Good. Real good. Not much pay …” I didn’t want to sound too proud. As a computer programmer she had always made twice as much as me.
“You still happy?” she said with a hint of a smile.
“I think,” I said. “Yes.” She belonged to a life that I had chosen not to live anymore, but at our tall table in the coffee shop, hazelnut coffee between us, it was hard to remember why I had chosen to leave. It seemed that I had walked out of our house and forgotten about Cathy, like an amnesiac. And now this life reappeared with all its nuances, smells, and comfortable habits. My life seemed coarse and silly in Cathy’s presence, a bad anecdote from the big book of midlife crises, a prank.
It took all of my composure to let her get up and walk out into the parking lot. She waved when she passed my window and our two coffees, then covered her mouth and hurried to the car.
Emily never accompanied Walter and I on our morning runs. The mornings were maybe the only time between being a student and a husband that he had for being Walter, a guy with sweaty hair, with two lives that could wait just a little longer. As soon as I had enough wind to be able to talk, Walter was ready to ask me about work, girls, some politics, and football.
“A virgin,” he said one day. “You’ve got to get yourself a virgin.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why, he says,” he said. “I’ll tell you why. You’re the only man for her, her first. I got myself a virgin. Nothing like it.”
“I don’t care much for virgins,” I said, trying to play the age card. How many virgins could I still expect to date? I had never deflowered any girl.
“Don’t care for them? Boy, it’s the sweetest pussy you’ll ever get. Has a different smell to it. If you’ve never touched a virgin, you don’t know what pussy is. What you see around here, on campus, those girls look great, don’t get me wrong, but they’re whores. You can see it in their hard eyes and around their mouths, and you can smell it.” He shook his head, then smiled as though he could breathe in his wife’s smell.
“But those … those whores know what to do with a dick.”
“I don’t want them to know. There’s nothing they can do for me that I can’t do myself with them. Let her be dumb. I prefer them dumb. If they’re too smart, man, you know how many they had before. No, I gave my life for getting a virgin.”
We were running past the tennis courts near Huron Street, where a teenager with long, wild hair was practicing his serve. I took Walter’s last remark for a figure of speech, a comment on his marriage, and answered with something like ‘until death do us part,’ to let him know I had understood.
Yet he stopped immediately, putting his hands on his knees, then raising them over his head and exhaling deeply. A sly smile grew wider, and he stared at me, as if to check that I could be trusted. “No, man, I gave my life. For real.”
My breath rattled; I had a hard time getting enough air as I waited for him to continue.
“You know, before I slept with Em, I was immortal.” He waited, eyes wandering over to the hard-serving and grunting teenager.
I thought he was playing with me, and smiled, but something in his demeanor made me keep in the laugh that gurgled up my throat.
“As in ‘living forever’?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know. I felt it. I could feel how strong and whole I was, and how I would never die if I kept myself pure. But Em is the love of my life, and giving up my life was worth it.” He said this with great solemnity, and a smirk that I was sure was only there for my sake.
“Walter,” I said, playing along with his smirk. “You’re full of shit.”
“You enjoy sex,” Emily said. “It doesn’t matter who’s moaning beneath you.” In a few years, her body would start to sag, her butt become dimpled, but youth still kept her skin taut, stretched without relenting.
“You still sleep with your husband,” I scolded her.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “He’s my husband, he’s a good husband. But you are my lover. One man to keep, and one for the good times. You are my fun man.”
I wondered if her smell had changed through marriage. Or if Walter could smell a difference now that I was sleeping with her. If it was true that Emily had been a virgin. It would have been easy to ask her, but I didn’t. What Walter had said seemed ridiculous, monstrous even, but I began to doubt that I was getting the good stuff. Maybe he’d taken it a long time ago, and what I had with Emily was not stealing from him, but only gathering the leftovers.
“I’m all sore,” she said when it was time to go. “You weren’t nice to me.” She said it without accusation, more like a simple statement.
“Don’t you like it that way?” I watched her dry herself with her underwear. What had she looked like when she was seventeen, eighteen, whenever Walter had deflowered her? He undoubtedly carried that image around with him, saw it whenever he looked at his wife.
“Are you angry at me?”
“No.” I got up from the bed, grabbed her hair and pulled her down on the floor. I took her, knowing her knees would chafe on the wood. With each thrust I tried to hurt her and make her mine, but there’s no power in the world to make you believe you can possess a woman by fucking her. Instead, I broke the laws of our secret encounter and dug my nails in her back, scratching it badly down to her butt.
“You were not allowed to,” she said after looking at the damage in my bathroom mirror.
She seemed bewildered by my behavior, but her reproach was still playful. “What are you going to do about it?” My voice was cold, challenging her. What’s Walter going to say?”
“Oh,” she answered with a smile. “I’ll take care of that. He’ll never know it wasn’t him who did it.
For most of the evening I lay in my bedroom, mortified, ashamed of what I’d done, scolding myself for having listened to the rotten talk of a twenty-three-year-old biologist. I knew better, I sure knew better than to pay heed talk about virgins and immortality. I had grown this old only to fuck a young wife and run with her crazy husband?
When it grew dark, I got into my old junker and drove to my wife’s house. I had no plan, just wanted to watch her windows, maybe catch a glimpse of her slender figure in the kitchen. Maybe I hoped she would see the car and come out to talk. Maybe I hoped I would go up to her door and ring. By one o’clock in the morning, all her lights were out, and I was still sitting in the car, the windows rolled down, an empty pack of cigarettes on the seat next to me, and a headache advancing like a storm front.
Emily had flowers in her arm when I told her I wouldn’t see her anymore. They were expensive flowers, large, yellow lilies and red roses, a large bunch of them. She put down the bouquet very carefully on the floor, her eyes fixed on the stems, and said, “They need to be cut before you put them into water.” She wore a green dress with a long zipper in the back, and I knew she wore it to get quickly out of it. The door fell shut softly behind her, and I heard her rushing down the stairs.
“Haven’t seen you in ages,” Walter greeted me on the porch. The weather had turned so warm that he didn’t wear a shirt for his daily run anymore. Maybe he shaved his chest, it was absolutely hairless. Hairless and broad.
“I have a girlfriend,” I lied.
“No, you don’t,” he said.
“What do you mean, I don’t?” My pulse quickened. Was he challenging me? Had Emily told him about us?
“I never see her car here. I can hear your every step, but there’s only your steps, and your steps alone.”
“Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself,” I said.
He looked awfully pleased with himself. “You should come over for dinner. Bring your new girlfriend,” he said and snickered. “Em and I, we’re moving to Madison, Wisconsin, in the fall. I got accepted to grad school. We’re going to sublease this place and live with my parents for the summer. Saves us some money.”
And without any good reason, other than knowing he was on his way out and I would still live in my tiny apartment, and maybe because that particular morning I didn’t care for his opinion; maybe I finally felt superior to him because I had stopped sleeping with his wife; whatever the reason, the next thing I said was, “You should keep an eye on Em, big shot. You really should. I can hear her every step.” And before he could ask or comment I strutted past him onto the sidewalk, and toward work.
It didn’t take me more than a minute to regret my blunder, but nothing happened. When I came home from work, nobody tore open the door to punch me, no letter had been put under my door threatening me with torture and death. After all, what proof did Walter have? He couldn’t have taken me seriously.
“I’m sorry,” I said the next day. “About what I said. It was just talk. It was stupid, I just wanted …”
“I know,” he said, smiling. “I know bullshit when I hear it.”
I thought that was the end of it, my hard swallow, swallowing the renewed insult. Let him have his satisfaction, I thought. Yet two days before a big, yellow moving truck took all of Walter and Emily’s belongings away, she was found lying under the refrigerator, by him, after returning from running errands. She had been dead since morning. She had tried to move the refrigerator in order to clean behind it—they had wanted to save on the cleaning fee—and she had lost her balance. Emily had been knocked unconscious when her head hit the floor, and the refrigerator, losing balance with her, had squeezed all life out of her.
Walter must be in Wisconsin now. Cathy is still living on the edge of town, but not alone anymore. He’s a professor of anthropology, she is his third wife. I’m still living alone, but I have moved to a downtown loft. It’s too expensive, and I had to get rid of my car. At night I wonder if one day I will wake up and find myself lying next to Cathy. She smiles grouchily at me, her hair tousled, her mind still steeped in dreams, eyes large and naked without their glasses. I doubt it will happen, but the thought is tempting and lingers.
When I think of Emily, I think of my last talk with Walter, and wonder why I said what I said, and if she couldn’t have died by accident, as everyone agreed she did. I am convinced that he is living on his own now, still running every morning before attending classes or teaching freshmen. And in moments when my mind reaches the first chambers of sleep, I walk up to him and ask if by squeezing the love of his life to death, he regained his immortality.
Stefan Kiesbye is the author of eight books of fiction, including Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone, The Staked Plains, and But I Don’t Know You. German newspaper Die Welt commented that, “Kiesbye is the inventor of the modern German Gothic novel.” His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. Kiesbye teaches creative writing and literature at Sonoma State University. You can find him at stefankiesbye.com.
Image: pnd5.com
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Heavy Feather Review 