Rockaway (21 page)

“I really get all of that now.”

“Maybe you should take a bath,” he says.

She looks down at herself again, at all the colors. Well, no, she realizes. She's smeared herself to mud, really, the final, neutral gray of overmixed colors, valueless and turbid as dirt. “A bath?”

He enters his bathroom and turns on the bathtub's gold, fluted spigots. A cloud of water blasts out. “You need a bath. You need to clean up. Go on.” He nods, smiles gently at her, again, and leaves.

SHE FINDS THE vodka in the freezer, among bags of frozen chopped spinach and green beans, a cardboard box of Arm & Hammer Baking Soda, and three packages of Tabatchnick Cabbage Soup. His kitchenware is split in two sections, labeled with masking tape:
fleischig
in cabinets and drawers on the left,
milchig
on the right. She selects a big milchig tumbler, and pours. She drinks the glass down halfway. Why bother with the schnapps, she thinks, it's so pretty this way, so clean and clear and cold. So pure. She pours again to the top, and replaces the vodka in the freezer. She leaves oily gray smudges.

Upstairs, she tips a glass bowl of scallop-shaped soaps into the filling tub. She adds the contents of a bottle or two of bath gel from the wire basket, and presses on the Jacuzzi
jets. The water churns madly. She takes off her clothes and steps into the foaming tub; she sits down cross-legged in the bubbles, drinking from her tumbler of vodka and rubbing at her arms. This won't do it, she thinks. I need turpentine, naphtha. She plucks a washcloth from a folded pile on the tub's marble ledge and scrubs away at her gray-smeared skin. She swallows more vodka. A pumice stone, something to strip away a layer. She spots a loofah in the wire basket and scours her arms. Maybe if I soak longer. Maybe I need something more. She swallows more vodka, gets out of the tub and inspects the cabinet beneath the marble sink. Isopropyl alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, a cylindrical can of Ajax, good, maybe that will help. She dusts the bathwater heavily with it, splatting the bubbles flat, and gets back in to soak. Maybe if the water's hotter. She turns off the cold spigot, lets the hot water flow. She imagines Marty coming back from shul and finding her still in the tub, gleaming and purified. The fumes from the blistering steam sting her nose, but the icy vodka is so cool in her throat. She leans back, closes her eyes, sips. Her
milchig
tumbler, milk, that's how the vodka tastes, like cold cold milk on a hot summer day, drinking milk and being eight years old, being breastless, clean-fleshed, with lemon-bright hair falling to her knees. She imagines Marty coming home and finding her like that, back at the beginning, getting in the tub with her, bathing her. She sees them curled up together in his
creamy, black-veined marble tub, floating together in an albescent clamshell at the top of a cloudy, uncrashed wave. He straps them in so they'll be safe, he tells her, they're taking a whimsical Playland ride, a spinning Ferris wheel, Hold on, hold on, and she wants to reassure him, No, this is safe for real, being together, being here with you. She drinks more milk and raises her arms to take off Marty's black cap, and he lets her, tipping his head into her neck. The cap slides off to reveal a space of pure, fluid light, no skin, no skull, no hair. The entry to his soul, open and radiant and welcoming, tinted to pearl by angels, just for her. The light pours from him to cover them both, a liquid, beautiful light. It fills the clamshell with blessing, with warmth, lulls her to a shade of home.

“HEY,” SHE DIMLY hears him say.

She rubs her eyes. It's evening air in the room, air that's been breathed in and exhaled, heated all day but just starting to cool. She's on the bed, sprawled out naked under the top sheet.

“What time is it?” she asks.

“I don't know. Maybe seven, eight. After shul we went back to Itzak's. We had Havdalah.” He's still wearing his
velvet and gold pillbox yarmulke. The candles downstairs must have burnt out by now, she thinks. She watches him take off his suit jacket, unbuckle his belt.

“You said you'd come back,” she says.

“I didn't know you'd still be here,” he says.

“But you told me to stay here. You said I could stay.”

“Yeah, but I didn't
know
.”

“So, you stayed there in case I wasn't here?” This makes no sense to her. He sits on the edge of the bed to take off his black leather shoes. He smells like onion, like wax burnt off to smoke, like other men in black suits. When I am fifty-four he will be seventy-eight, she thinks, he will be decrepit, riddled with disease, and I will have to devote myself to taking care of him. She cannot decide if she feels panic at this, or relief.

“I was sleeping.”

“Good.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No. Hold on.” He goes into his bathroom, and she hears his footsteps stop. “What'd you do in here? What happened?”

“You told me to take a bath.”

“Wow.”

She hears the sink tap running, the toilet flush, the gurgle of liquid deep in a throat. He reenters the bedroom in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, and now a little black knit cap. He gets under the sheet next to her, wafting mint and baby powder, tugging at her arm. “Come here.”

She rolls over obediently, tucks herself against him. He pulls her arm to lie across his chest like a rib. “Shabbes is over,” she says.

“Yeah.” He looks down at her; the skin of arm, her shoulders and chest is still flaked with stubborn gray paint, but raw-looking, inflamed. “What is this? What did you do to yourself?”

“I tried to get it all off,” she says. “But I'm clean, really. Good as new. I swear.” She presses against him, stretches up, whispers into his ear. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No.” He holds her tighter, and she angles her head toward him. When he kisses her, his mouth is soft, too casual. She wishes he would grip her harder, try to draw something out of her. She wishes he felt more urgency, need. She reaches down between them, slides her hand into his boxer shorts, feels he is already hard, good, and she wants him harder, affected. She wants him stricken with her. His hand slides down over her hips, but before his fingers can reach her, she knows she's still dry, she scrambles on top of him, pushing him on his back. She draws his shorts down, and takes him in her mouth. The best smell of him is there, the savory ripe leather of him; she works her tongue over him, her fingers gripping him slickly at his base, trying to inhale, absorb, whatever she can. But his hands in her hair are keeping her just enough back, off of him. She wants to make him come this way. His hands are over her ears, but she hears his jolted
breathing, good, she wants him to come in her mouth, she'll draw him in that way, swallow all the light.

But he doesn't want that, she feels him pull away from her mouth. Her throat closes up without him there, and she wants to cry. He moves her gently onto her back; she just misses getting a clutch of his shirt as he sits up, rises from the bed.

“Wait a minute,” he says. “I gotta get something.”

“No, that's okay.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, no, it's really okay,” she says. “It doesn't matter. Just come back.”

“What do you mean, it doesn't matter?”

She can't possibly explain to him why it doesn't matter. She shakes her head.

“Just hold on,” he says, walking to the bathroom.

“Fine, okay. Whatever.”

He comes back, rolling on a condom. He climbs on top of her, prodding her legs open with his knees. She knows she's still dry, that his entering her will hurt, draw blood, but she wants that, suddenly, wants to feel pierced, opened up, made raw. She winces at the first drive of his hips, at the rasp, and reaches down to touch the thin rubber lip of the condom as it sinks flush against her. She holds him there a moment, inside, but he draws back a sudden, abrading inch or two. It feels he's taking her skin with him. He pushes
in again, and it eases. He pushes in, and the piercing goes sweet. He kisses her, and she sees them creeping forward together in the dark and he is holding a white candle out before them to shed light. Each thrust, each step, casts the light deeper into the darkness, illuminating it, brings the light deeper inside of her, and she wants it deeper inside of her, she wraps her legs around him to help, get it deeper, the light thrust fully inside. She moves her hips harder, wanting that burst between them, and feels a slip, something loosen. She tightens herself around him, squeezing.

“Hold on a minute,” he says. He closes his face up tight, turns away from her.

“What?”

“Just . . . wait,” he says. His breathing comes hard, then slows. The loosening expands, and her insides sag as she feels him slip out of her. “Man,” he says.

“What happened?” she asks. “What did I do?”

“I don't know.” He raises himself on an elbow, gropes between them a moment. “Lemme get this thing off.” She hears the snap of rubber, and he flings the condom off the side of the bed. “I don't know,” he repeats. He drops down on top of her again, his face still turned away.

“I'm sorry,” she says. She reaches for him. “Maybe—”

“No, don't do that,” he says, pushing her hand away.

She feels found out. She feels like treyf, like unholy meat. Like a leprous soul. No, she realizes. She doesn't have
a soul. Because if she did have a soul, she would be precious to him. She would be a blessing, a thing to treasure and keep safe forever. He would open to her and shower her with light. But he's looked into her, and seen nothing, and now he knows and now she knows, understands at last. She's just been a body. A shell on the beach, a pile of compost. An illusion of depth. A plastic mermaid, left hanging on the rim of a dirty glass. No, falling, falling to the floor. No wonder she can't hold on to anything, her plastic arms have been snapped off and she is a cheap fake thing, emptied out and wholly without grace.

She waits until she hears him breathe in sleep, then gets up, gets dressed, and leaves.

THERE'S A MOON. There's a jumble of footprints. There are Drumstick and Baby Ruth wrappers, abandoned Fudgsicle sticks, a squeezed-out tube of Bain de Soleil. Crushed paper cups, their seams stained dark. Cigarette butts, sunflower seed shells, a broken plastic shovel, a tight ball of aluminum foil, a gnawed apple core. A pair of sunglasses missing one lens, an RC cola can, bent at the waist. Everything achromatic, a range of grays. The beach was so clean when she first arrived. She remembers her ritual of walking
here, the breadth of warm, slipping sand, the tougher strip stiff with drying seawater, the wettest sand licked over and over by waves. Only seaweed and driftwood and feathers and shells when she arrived, and the endless hopeful sand. Now there's the messy trash of it, and the dead strewn jellyfish, and there's her. She remembers thinking the ocean looked different here, richer. Promising. She remembers wondering if women's cut-up bodies ever washed ashore here, how you know when that begins.