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Slowly, and with Care Someone told me that the boys who had lived in the house before me were now in prison. It hadn’t actually been their house; their mother and stepfather had owned it and remained for years after the law had carted off their sons, but the boys themselves had spent a lot of their lives under my roof. Formative years, probably, I couldn’t help but think. Years during which their soft little minds, once gray and squashy, had hardened into the firm ones of criminals. The woman who told me that they were in prison worked upstairs in the children’s room at the library. Her name was Gale, inexplicably “like the wind, not the name,” she told me, and she was very sweet if slightly sticky. She had a kind of glistening quality to her: her hair was shellacked but her skin and her lips were unnaturally moist, and I figured that she cultivated the look, perhaps mistakenly supposing that it made her seem fresh and young. I found it hard to understand, though, why someone would court that kind of wetness since in the house of the long-gone criminals I spent most of my time trying to stay dry. It was hot, and I didn’t like the processed taste of air conditioning so I wiped sweat off of my skin every few minutes and changed my clothes only a little less frequently. When John was away in the city I drew the blinds and walked around naked, or wearing only underwear, stopping in front of mirrors and weighing my breasts in two hands, gauging the positions of my nipples relative to one another or parting my lips to assess the symmetry of my front teeth. Naked it was easy to get lost in the reflection: there was so much to look at and I knew and owned all of it. I was responsible for it, unlike the clothes that I happened to fall into. When John came on the train and stayed I did not walk around naked. I wasn’t ashamed, but it didn’t feel as sexy. His body would be present, too, either clothed or unclothed, and my own smoothness, absorbing to me with its small imperfections, would be marred by his invasion of the familiar landscape of my house. I wore sundresses when he was around, mostly without anything underneath. I hoped this would result in lively sex on the sofa or at the kitchen table, but mostly it just meant that he would say, smiling, when I sat cross-legged: “I can see your snatch.” “Twat,” I would suggest. “I can still see it.” “Oh, well,” I would say. “Nothing you haven’t seen before, I guess.” “I guess.” He stayed four nights a week at least, often more. He was working in the city editing textbooks and hoping to do something more interesting soon, which set us apart from the beginning since I had tidily acquired some useful skills and a stable job, and had nothing more in mind than the present. For some reason he had nowhere to live in the city—just a friend with a futon—and since I had a house not too far away and smooth enough skin and symmetrical enough features, it made sense for him to come home to me and kiss my features and run his hands across my skin. He hadn’t known me well when he got the job, but we had many friends in common, and when we ran into one another at a bar (he had come with the friend who owned the futon on which he slept), he had explained to me, and to some other people, his homelessness. I had said helpfully and drunkenly that I owned a whole house forty minutes away in which he could live if he bought wine sometimes and took out the trash. “I would have to pay you rent,” he’d said, kindly, and I had told him not to be silly. He was improbably good-looking: curly-haired with dark eyes and pale skin. His was the kind of face that always has stubble, and the effect of it was at once delicate and rugged and altogether appealing and I couldn’t have asked him for rent. He took the train out the next day and walked the six blocks from the station to my house with two small, youthful suitcases and spent the afternoon writing or editing while I was at work in the fluorescent cool of the library. When I came home there was a salad and some pork waiting, and it wasn’t nearly enough, although he seemed to have imagined that it would be and, even more strange, seemed full when he had eaten his portion, even leaving a few scraps. I cleaned everything off my plate very carefully and still felt faint in that way that you do when you haven’t eaten anything in ages and ages, but I didn’t see how I could make toast or pasta or even eat some ice cream sandwiches without appearing rude or at least gluttonous, so I just sat and concluded that we would probably wind up sleeping together, which we did, but not until the next night.
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