20

One afternoon, when I knew that the house was totally empty, I went up

to his room. I opened his closet and, as this was my room when there were

no residents, pretended to be looking for something I’d left behind in one of

the bottom drawers. I’d planned to rifle through his papers, but as soon as I

opened his closet, I saw it. Hanging on a hook was this morning’s red

bathing suit which he hadn’t swum in, which was why it was hanging there

and not drying on the balcony. I picked it up, never in my life having pried

into anyone’s personal belongings before. I brought the bathing suit to my

face, then rubbed my face inside of it, as if I were trying to snuggle into it

and lose myself inside its folds—So this is what he smells like when his

body isn’t covered in suntan lotion, this is what he smells like, this is what

he smells like, I kept repeating to myself, looking inside the suit for

something more personal yet than his smell and then kissing every corner of

it, almost wishing to find hair, anything, to lick it, to put the whole bathing

suit into my mouth, and, if I could only steal it, keep it with me forever,

never ever let Mafalda wash it, turn to it in the winter months at home and,

on sniffing it, bring him back to life, as ***** as he was with me at this

very moment. On impulse, I removed my bathing suit and began to put his

on. I knew what I wanted, and I wanted it with the kind of intoxicated

rapture that makes people take risks they would never take even with plenty

of alcohol in their system. I wanted to come in his suit, and leave the

evidence for him to find there. Which was when a crazier notion possessed

me. I undid his bed, took off his suit, and cuddled it between his sheets,

*****. Let him find me—I’ll deal with it, one way or another. I recognized

the feel of the bed. My bed. But the smell of him was all around me,wholesome and forgiving, like the strange scent which had suddenly come

over my entire body when an elderly man who happened to be standing

right next to me in a temple on Yom Kippur placed his tallis over my head

till I had all but disappeared and was now united with a nation that is

forever dispersed but which, from time to time, comes together again when

one being and another wrap themselves under the same piece of cloth. I put

his pillow over my face, kissed it savagely, and, wrapping my legs around

it, told it what I lacked the courage to tell everyone else in the world. Then I

told him what I wanted. It took less than a minute.

The secret was out of my body. So what if he saw. So what if he caught

me. So what, so what, so what.

On my way from his room to mine I wondered if I’d ever be mad

enough to try the same thing again.

That evening I caught myself keeping careful tabs on where everyone

was in the house. The shameful urge was upon me sooner than I’d ever

imagined. It would have taken nothing to sneak back upstairs.

While reading in my father’s library one evening, I came upon the story

of a handsome young knight who is madly in love with a princess. She too

is in love with him, though she seems not to be entirely aware of it, and

despite the friendship that blossoms between them, or perhaps because of

that very friendship, he finds himself so humbled and speechless owing to

her forbidding candor that he is totally unable to bring up the subject of his

love. One day he asks her point-blank: “Is it better to speak or die?”

I’d never even have the courage to ask such a question.

But what I’d spoken into his pillow revealed to me that, at least for a

moment, I’d rehearsed the truth, gotten it out into the open, that I had in fact

enjoyed speaking it, and if he happened to pass by at the very moment I was

muttering things I wouldn’t have dared speak to my own face in the mirror,

I wouldn’t have cared, wouldn’t have minded—let him know, let him see,

let him pass judgment too if he wants—just don’t tell the world—even if

you’re the world for me right now, even if in your eyes stands a horrified,

scornful world. That steely look of yours, Oliver, I’d rather die than face it

once I’ve told you .

Toward the end of July things finally came to a head. It seemed clear

that after Chiara there had been a succession of cotte, crushes, mini-crushes,

one-night crushes, flings, who knows. To me all of it boiled down to one

thing only: his cock had been everywhere in B. Every girl had touched it,

that cock of his. It had been in who knows how many vaginas, how many

mouths. The image amused me. It never bothered me to think of him

between a girl’s legs as she lay facing him, his broad, tanned, glistening

shoulders moving up and down as I’d imagined him that afternoon when I

too had wrapped my legs around his pillow.

Just looking at his shoulders when he happened to be going over his

manuscript in his heaven made me wonder where they’d been last night.

How effortless and free the movement of his shoulder blades each time he

shifted, how thoughtlessly they caught the sun. Did they taste of the sea to

the woman who had lain under him last night and bitten into him? Or of his

suntan lotion? Or of the smell that had risen from his sheets when I went

into them?

to be continued

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