American Spirit: A Novel (11 page)

“I don’t know.”

“You can… I mean, seriously… it’s okay, you can admit it to me. I mean, you don’t even know me, I’m just some woman you met once. You can say you’re afraid. A man can be afraid. It doesn’t mean you’re weak or something. Women like it, we like to know you’re human.” Tatiana smiles warmly.

“I mean… yeah, I guess I am scared.”

“Pussy.”

And with this comes mutual explosion, snot and tears, spasms, laugh-and-jerk for two. And after the heads are done jerking about and laughing, the silence comes hard, gigantic this time, a roar of comfortable quiet that lulls. Shadows have gone as long as they’re going to except a few where dim orange light falls on furniture while twilight dies for night, in ten minutes that could’ve been a lifetime.

“Here, you should have a bite of lemon, it kind of makes the tea happen.”

Matthew takes a moment to absorb this, the idea that tea could happen, and why is Tatiana saying how to make it happen, and what does this have to do with a lemon? There are all kinds of questions to ponder and wonder and all kinds of half-assed answers to deduce, but right now maybe the most important thing on the list is to figure out where someone buys an apartment that vibrates so gently like this. And where does one find a lamp like that; one that breathes, barely noticeable, the little inhales and exhales of a baby sleeping or a big peaceful python in some sort of hibernation? How is it that the rich can build with wooden beams that have tiny patterns of atomic activity buzzing about on them so transparently; a living pattern that looks like ten thousand tiny drops of oil blooming in little water puddles on a slide of acetate that is being projected onto them? These are all good questions. The head quickly whips around 180 degrees and looks for the high-tech gadget responsible for this. Nothing. No light beaming from the walls that could be
projecting this. The hands, completely independent of the brain finally, make a lazy journey up the mouth to feel the lips; they’re amazing to feel, full and alive, and the hands are vexed as to why they’ve never made the small trip up to the face to find this organ in Matthew’s forty-five born years; this godly and obscene pout and gape is amazing to the touch! Matthew leans back a bit, continues feeling his own face, and through one of the loft apartment’s tall windows, sees an airplane high above the city coming or going from JFK or LaGuardia. This brings another revelation, and this one he shares aloud.

“Airplanes are rooms full of people. But in the sky.”

He immediately notes that some revelations are far less earth-shattering when spoken aloud instead of left in the head. But Tatiana looks over after another sip and seems to deeply understand Matthew’s very brief thesis on commercial aviation. She also seems to understand what Matthew was thinking earlier about his lips and the way the lamp is breathing. Tatiana seems to follow all of it, and mostly telepathically, which is very convenient and makes for a great and silent conversation. She’s no longer looking on in odd fascination of Matthew—finally, Jesus, it’s almost unbearable when she is. Now she looks at him calmly and kindly as if to say,
I’m so glad someone has finally noticed how our mouths are at once innocent and obscene, and has also noticed the sentient breathing materials I was able to renovate this apartment with.
She pats the couch next to her. Matthew thinks that she must simply be feeling it, because around
here everything is wonderful to feel, it really is, in a top-notch apartment like this one can’t get enough of the textures against their skin. Matthew replies by patting and feeling the chair he’s sitting in, a gesture meant to concur that everything here feels fabulous.

“The chair is as nice as the couch,” he says, continuing patting it.

“No, I mean, come sit.”

“Oh. I know. Okay.”

The brain has no say in this. The body is up and out of the chair, Tatiana is up and back to the kitchen, so maybe it was a cruel joke anyway: Come sit on the couch next to me and when you try to, I will leave and my lamps will inhale you and you’ll finally disappear. But she’s back in a fast minute with two little bottles of cold, clear, amazingly flavorful, very sensual water. And sip after tiny sip, side by side on the couch, staring straight ahead at the giant rock fireplace that is held together with a fine blue lace of electrical current arcing in tiny storms of acetylene light over the little canyons of mortar between the rocks while a fire crackles inside and burns away any late-spring chill Manhattan has dished up. The mouth can’t believe it has never really noticed water. The brain is gone finally and all hands are free to do as they wish apparently, because one of hers has moved over onto one of his.

Music falls like a cocktail of thick, warm honey and Novocain from speakers hidden somewhere in the big wooden beams above them—or maybe the living, breathing beams
are actually making the music, it’s hard to tell—and it is music that offers no cautionary lyric, no E Minor Seventh Story of Losing. Forget those songs forever while there’s still some room in the heart. Her head has moved over near his, all bodies now free to do as they wish, the best situation ever, all brains laid off, made redundant, sacked, canned, cut, and given their gray envelopes from Human Resources. She takes a sip, her mouth now hovering right at his, almost not separated from his, she rests three fingers on his lower front teeth, pulls down so the mouth opens, she spits into it, ignition Matthew has never imagined, instant smash and writhe, and the eighth or sixteenth inch between the mouths disappears in an instant. Lips mash like one more last chance nobody thought of getting, teeth hit like an adolescent bike accident, here it comes all at once like you never thought it ever might again, the rush, shock, luck, and curse of it.

To the heart and head this makes such perfect sense; after all, Matthew’s hand had just moments ago been feeling his own lips for three or four consecutive minutes, so there’s really nothing strange about the other lips wanting to come over and press and push against the only other set in the room like this. Her kiss tastes like cool, clean water and eventually warms the longer it lasts, she stops to take another sip, stares down, holds it, shoves her mouth back to his for the warm and cool crash, and pushes half her bite down into stubble and chin; feeds him feeling as fast as he can swallow it. She pours water from the bottle into his mouth, rolls off of him and pulls him on top; opens her mouth, says
one word, “Spit,” and everything is the fast, wet hard mash again. In bad pop songs and movies, kisses are never said to taste of water. In song, people only sing of them tasting like stupid wine or something, so now one suddenly worries and wonders about this languid and leggy bicoastal alchemist, but that’s the brain racing back to work again. The brain is reminded that it has been dismissed; it should not be desperate and come around trying to get its job back.

The bodies have pushed for new position, have gone horizontal in their expansion across the land of the couch, hers on top of his, her straight black hair falls on him like the end of these days; the hands discovering everything now; face, tits—real, too, not the sacks of shredded tires or whatever Los Angeles sticks in chests, and behind them and below that, the waist, small of the back, ass. Clothing—from this new station, suddenly simpleton artifice stitched from shame and fear—is gone in a flash, and life has never made so much sense. Every single stupid, aimless day might have been leading to this; two grinding and even laughing sometimes, and then silent, and then accelerating against each other; the blood screams sex and the heart laughs at the blood, the heart having already left the body more than once during this to hover above the city, and edges of continents and oceans and earth and love and death. God, why have the hands never realized that skin, like furniture, can be felt and regarded for hours like this?

There must be a different name for sex somewhere here on the planet, but whatever name one decides on, it is happening
right here and right now and all that matters forever is that the beautiful woman who answered the door is no longer someone on the other side of that chasm that separates all of us for most of our days. Her body is no longer admired by proxy; it is on Matthew, it is all over him, it is wrapped around and taking him in. Her body, at once innocent and full of broken rules, virginal and experienced, quiet as an idea and wet, noisy, nasty as sin; at fevered peak until both bodies wilt into each other and lie in a silence so peaceful it doesn’t come around again until the August of life comes in slowly and finally, ready to take us all back into the ether we came from. After the peaking and wilting, neither body has the brain to ruin it, so Matthew lies there smoking the cigarettes bearing the icon of American Indians, deathly quiet until the two of them are talking, then laughing about something, then it starts all over again at a different pace, in yet another position, both bodies wired to get as much of this as possible before it ends, because who knows when it will come again. The clock is somewhere around here, vibrating gently or breathing calmly like the ceiling and the lamps; inhaling at six, exhaling at ten, at eleven, at midnight or one, and then the brain starts to wake again and starts to realize that there are only so many hours left in the night; only so many left in this life.

At the end of it, Tatiana is back into long, leggy pants, Matthew’s long legs outstretched and hardly covered at all by the weird little running shorts. The afterglow exchanges are not nearly as stiff as daylight convention would have them.
But the brain has indeed been hired back after its layoff. It races to say that too much time has passed; it eventually demands that the arms straighten the running shorts and tie the jogging shoes’ laces then quickly gather the backpack, making sure the hands have very discreetly accounted for the cash while Tatiana is out of the room for a minute. And when she comes back, still silent after everything they’ve had, she speaks only to make one rather sobering transaction.

“Here, I’m going to give you more money, because you can’t go back to Hernan’s with one sale for six hours.”

“Oh, um, okay well, let me give you more… of these… then.”

Matthew takes more blue- and yellow-stickered little baggies from the pack and hands them to her. She hands them back sweetly and says Matthew can have them; that he can take them with him. So Matthew bends down and tucks them into the running sock that hasn’t got a small telephone in it. And she’s back to looking at him with a smile again—with the detached and bemused observation from earlier in the evening—as if she’s never seen a man between jobs who is finally getting back into jogging. The brain insists that none of this is good. She kisses Matthew good-bye, smiling the whole time. The brain is back full steam to ruin a kiss, saying that only bad things can come of this. Her hand finds his and delivers a little bunch of lucre thicker than the last. The brain announces inside the head that this isn’t the way one is supposed to work as a grown man between jobs;
the head agrees with the brain, but estimates the cash to be at least five hundred and argues that maybe this is exactly how one should be working. Down the stairs, head and brain half hoping that they never land at a front door out of this building, and then downstairs the shoulder pushes into it, and outside on the streets a New York night is in full swing, probably the way it always is in those stacks of Beat paperbacks she has.

Honing One’s Craft

T
HE MORNING ROUTINE
went along on time and on cue; a precision production that hit all the marks from bed to the front door, to the car to the minimarket, to the expressway to the exit out of sight, to the side roads that double back, to a grocery store, and here again. The leased sliver of Bavaria has come to rest in the medium and fairly decent parking lot of the community center. Coming home last night went fine. Matthew made it in, Kristin was still out, and sleep came fast. And only then was the place alive with Kristin and what she thought of him. High-beam headlights hitting the bedroom window, the front door shoved open then accidentally closed loudly instead of discreetly, and laughter while this was happening. Then glassware rattling from the cupboard, ice hitting the glasses, two drinks
poured, company was over. And even in sleep the brain and heart were heavy after deducing that the guest was a man. There might have been some sort of miscommunication earlier that day; Matthew may have accidentally tried to cover his night in the city by saying he was on business to Chicago or Miami—it was hard to tell what story the malted hop fuel and jazz Tylenol 3 might have come up with to account for the time it takes to sell drugs, have sex, and buy a handgun. At any rate, God intervened with tea and leggy out-of-league sex in Apartment 4-B/C and that has left a warm, smooth salve on the heart; a salve that takes the sting out of what one ear heard during sleep.

And now, today will start swimmingly. A night like last night means the heart is free to beam even in the midst of an endless and rudderless journey on rising seas of anxiety and receding tides of currency. There is the faint memory of depositing another stream of red at the toilet before bed and that memory must be tamped down with something now and, eventually, dealt with. The way the doctor left it was that Karl Rove’s book is really pretty darn good and that Matthew would need to deliver himself to Alpha Imaging on Thirty-third Street in Manhattan for a CT scan that will spell out the truth. The brain knows the truth, that this life is coming to an end faster than the body imagined, that this is why certain gifts like guns and girls and meditation-fighting have been bestowed on it. But this is not the day to think about it, because shortly Matthew will attend the first craft class and pay what he wishes.