them

  Nadine embraced him. She moved her mouth against his as if she were talking to him, desperately; she had no words. Lost inside his love for her, helpless beneath his body, she lay straining for the pleasure that he had won so easily. She began to breathe in sharp, ragged breaths. Jules’s face was contorted. If only now, only now…if she would only be drawn up with him, like this, like him, and like him released from this struggle. But he could feel her rising and falling. He could feel the tension in her rising to hysteria, then falling, as if her body had not the strength to sustain it. In a kind of delirium Jules made love to her for many minutes, desperate in his desire to help her, but suddenly the desperation faded, he could not remember or could not care, and everything in him was driven in a rush toward emptying itself into her. His nerves were caressed to a pitch of madness. The core of his being, the Jules of his body, was frantic to be released and could not be held back, though Nadine writhed in his arms and said, “Don’t leave me, please, Jules,” and clung to him with her feverish hands, gripping his back, his thighs, his shoulders. Jules slipped from her. He felt as if he were falling through her, evading her. Their skulls, through their flushed skin, rubbed hard and mute together.

  She began to sob. She was feverish in his arms, close to hysteria. Jules said, “I’m sorry.” He kissed her forehead and brushed her hair back from her face. His failure was queer, set so vividly beside the airiness of his body. He knew that he had failed her, but his own body, pressed against hers, felt only victory; this lingering, ebbing passion, the acute memory of passion, did not allow him to believe that he had really failed her. Yet she wept. He hunched himself over her and moved his mouth against her body. She was wet, silky. She shivered beneath him, and he could feel her rejecting him before she gripped his hair and said sharply, “Don’t.”

  Jules stopped. He pressed his face against her stomach. “Let me. Let me kiss you,” he said. But she began to sob in long, shuddering gasps. “Don’t, please,” she said. He was afraid of disgusting her—he was afraid of her, her passion, he could not understand. They clung together blindly. Jules caressed her thighs and opened his mouth against her flesh, but again she drew away, she rejected him. “It’s inside me, it’s deep inside me, where I need you,” she said faintly. She urged him away. He lay carefully beside her, strange and uncanny, still airy, weightless, dazzled. Fear touched him, that he had failed this woman so utterly, and yet she lay perfectly docile in his arms, light-boned, delicate, a part of his own body. She would not look at him. “I’m sorry,” Jules said, covering her hand with his, “I love you so much.”

  “I love you,” Nadine said.

  They were silent. This intimacy was magical to Jules—he could not believe there was such distance between himself and Nadine as her misery indicated. He felt that she had become part of him. The memory of her body, the experience of her body, was silky to him, mysterious, warm. There were no complications. Yet there were complications he could not understand. The very urgency and power of what he had felt frightened him, for coming to her, loving her, did not satisfy him but stirred him to wanting her again, locking her to him in his imagination….The way out of such tension was release from it, but the violence of this release was intoxicating. He could not shake his mind loose of it. It was as if his brain were infected with the fever that had seared his body, to purify his body.

  She was exhausted. He felt a heavy silence between them and was relieved when she fell asleep, her head on his shoulder. She slept uneasily. But it was a relief to be free of her consciousness. Jules looked around the room, holding her. Because it was so bare the room held no threat. It was a room that had no past and belonged only to the future; it would be fulfilled in the future. Now, in the present, it was blank and unreal. Anything might happen in it. The weight of Nadine’s feverish body against his seemed unreal. He kept seeing her at a distance, his vision swooping up to take in her face, her eyes, the delicate line of her body—this body, so close to his, was a puzzle to him. Everything was locked inside it. He had not the words to release her, to wake her from this uneasy sleep. Her breath was labored. He was keenly aware of the subtlety of her bones beneath her wet skin, the slimness of her neck, even the fine lines of her face. But her hair was wild. Even in her exhaustion and sweat she seemed to him elegant, a mystery. Her long, smooth body was a challenge. He felt himself turning slowly blind, drawn inward by the hot silky challenge of Nadine’s body.

  He lay half asleep. It was night. Nadine’s arm was flung back on her other side, in a child’s gesture of abandonment. Her breathing was now quiet. Jules tried to get his thoughts clear. Everything was damp. The sheets were twisted. He could not think, lying here. A strange fear came to him: might he be forever bound to this woman, the two of them locked together in passion that could come to no end? Had he the strength to perform a miracle after all? Sodden, satiated with the miracles of his own body, he felt lacerated with having lived through so much. His eyes burned with the experience of miracles like the eyes of a Biblical prophet, a bearded, wild-eyed prophet of some nameless desert, wandering through a hot eternity of deserts, flaming bushes, apocalyptic cracking skies, rearing white waters, the purposeful flights of imaginary fabulous birds…He was slowly losing his strength, his soul.

  He woke to her touch.

  “Jules?” she said. “Are you dreaming?”

  “I don’t know…”

  He opened his eyes, confused. She leaned over him. The air of their bed was stale and sweet. He felt her hair on his chest, her presence above him milky and sweet. In a rush all his love for her returned; he felt almost faint. “I love you so much,” Nadine said, but her words were girlish and unthreatening; when she kissed him it was without anguish. Jules put his arms around her head, pressing her face against him. It was curious and exciting to him, his bare forearm against the back of her head, bunching her hair up against her neck.

  “Talk to me and tell me about yourself,” she said.

  “There’s nothing.”

  “Jules…”

  “No,” he said shakily, “nothing, I don’t remember my life. How long are you going to be able to stay with me like this?”

  She hesitated. “Why can’t I stay forever?”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “Yes, I mean that. Forever. I’ll stay forever.” She pressed the length of her body against his. Settled, warm, she lay as if thinking over her own words, precisely. “I’ve always been lost inside the love people had for me. My husband—I would say his name, a particular name, and I thought I loved him. I told him that. But I was just saying the name of that, the name love. I was saying it against everything in the world that wasn’t him, that didn’t know me, where nobody would give a damn what I was or how much I suffered, trying to love somebody. I was setting his name against that. I’ve always been terrified of that.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of everything, of going over the edge.”

  “Nadine, you? Do you really mean that?”

  “You have to take me seriously, Jules.”

  “I want to take you seriously but I can’t believe it. What has ever happened in your life to frighten you?”

  She was silent.

  “I mean it,” Jules said gently. “Tell me.”

  Her silence was hostile. He caressed her face, as if trying to read her expression.

  “What’s wrong?” said Jules.

  “You seem so distant to me.”

  “That isn’t true. What do you mean?”

  “You love me but you don’t listen to me. You draw back from me. All your life you’ll take refuge in having been poor, having been kicked around, to make you superior to people like me. You don’t want to think that we’re real.”

  “That isn’t true!”

  “I remember being alone with my father, on a train. He started vomiting. He vomited blood and there were things in the blood—bits of flesh. I remember that—”

&n
bsp; “My God, I’m sorry. Don’t think about it.”

  “I want to think about it. I know what the edge is, just as you do. I might know it better. But you don’t believe in me, you don’t believe that I’m real. I’m something you made up, even my body is something you made up.”

  Her very voice excited him. There was truth in what she said—he had made her up, imagined her. But she was also real. “Don’t talk like that,” he said.

  “Because it sounds as if I’m crazy? But that’s the edge I mean most of all, going over the edge…”

  He heard their voices and their words but his brain did not quite take them in. He wanted only to embrace her but he feared her drawing back. Slowly, gently, he ran his hands over her body as they talked, as if these caresses were not important, were only a part of their conversation. She was saying, “I imagine you out on the street, walking somewhere. Hitchhiking. These men walk along the edge of the road, sometimes walking backward, watching for cars. They seem very wise, very nasty. They put their thumbs out and wave for a ride, watching everything, mocking. They’re very dangerous, I think. Or maybe they aren’t dangerous, maybe they’re tender, how do I know? I don’t pick up hitchhikers. But you came right into my father’s house. I couldn’t say no. For years since then I’ve had the nightmare of you breaking into my house again, climbing into my window…”

  Jules was so nervous he could do nothing but laugh.

  “But why are you laughing? It terrified me.”

  “There’s no reason to be afraid. Don’t talk like that.”

  “I love you, I want you so badly, so bitterly, I don’t think I can stand it,” Nadine said suddenly. “If we were on a boat I would break it in two, I’d sink it under us. We’d drown. I can’t control my feelings for you and so we would drown. If we were in a car, driving fast, I’d take the wheel away from you and make us crash.”

  “Why are you saying those things?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She was breathing quickly. Jules ran his hands along her shoulders and back, frightened of her, unable to stop. He could not understand her. The slightest wedge between them opened at once to a great gusty distance, and he had the idea that, at a distance, she hated him. Because he did not believe in her? in her terror? Because, like his sister Maureen, she was a woman who had to lie down to terror, submit to it, not having enough strength to escape?

  She said, “Once a dog went after me, a German Shepherd. It went crazy, biting me, on the ankles, the legs, on my arms. It went crazy, and I screamed and screamed, trying to get away, but the dog kept lunging at me and knocking me down. It was in a fury. It was like something whirling out of control, flying at me. I didn’t think I was going to die, I didn’t have time to think of that. I was too terrified. The dog just kept throwing itself at me and saliva flew all over, from its ugly mouth. I can still see that mouth—the black lips, the tongue, the teeth—it was in such a crazy rage over nothing, wanting to tear me to pieces. For months after that I wasn’t able to sleep without dreaming about that dog. Sometimes, even when I was awake, I could feel it taking shape in the air beside me—a dog getting solid out of the air, a very tense, heavy, awful shape in the air. My arms and legs were all bloody. I still have some scars. But it wasn’t the biting that frightened me afterward. It was all that power. It was power getting shaped out of the air right beside me, a terrible danger. I thought it might pass over into me and I might do something awful, I’d kill somebody or myself…”

  Jules held her. “Jesus, that must have been awful,” he said.

  “The shape of the dog was awful. I thought I would go crazy.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t think about it now.”

  “I don’t know why I even mentioned it. To impress you with the danger I’ve lived through? But you yourself are my worst danger—what can I do about loving you?”

  “What can we do?”

  “Other people have loved me and I knew what that was, exactly. But you love me like somebody calling out my name in a crowd—knowing me, coming right up to me. I can’t escape. I want only to lie in your arms like this, I want you to make love to me, I’m driven out of my mind with wanting you.” She spoke quickly, with a faint, desperate urgency. She might have been confessing something too ugly to be spoken aloud.

  He felt her calling up the excitement in him, her nervous, warm body moving against his, as if challenging him. He ran his hands hard down the length of her body, as if assessing her, fixing her. He felt himself taking shape beside her, the power of his lust giving shape to his entire body, outlining him in the dark. There was a strange clarity to his sensations. His mind flashed to him an image of himself and Nadine, entwined together, a woman’s long, pale arms lashed about his body, and Jules’s strong back arched over her, in a grip of death. Hadn’t he always put his faith in such bizarre images? Jules risking this, Jules leaping to that, Jules plunging in? He was the hero of countless stories. The conclusion of one story faded into the beginning of another, all of it imagined. That had been his life. But through these endless chapters he had been pursuing a woman who turned out to be this woman, a woman under an enchantment like his own, fated to wrap herself about him and give everything up to him.

  When the poor get rich, Jules thought, they fall into a stupor of luxury and their eyes are filmed over with miracles—so Jules, impoverished for life but now sodden with the luxury of love, could not quite shake himself free of a sense of unreality. The clarity of his lust pinpointed all that was unreal. Nadine, his beloved, his mistress, a woman who had somehow married another man, drew him to her and put an end to all his questions, but not to the wonder behind them. “I love you, I’m crazy about you,” he said in anguish, entering her, losing the shape of his words. He was afraid of what he felt, inside her. He felt as if his soul might be lost, drawn out by her love, her hunger. I can’t stop it, I can’t control it, he thought.

  She strained against him. It was a terrible tension, the tension of her legs and arms. A power like the power of lightning rested in her graceful bones and was drawing them to the breaking point, but still they would not break, nothing broke, nothing released her. Jules kissed her. They struggled together, grappled together. In her desperation she began to claw at his back. The divinity in him, so violently aroused, was distant to her, and she could do nothing but claw at him, wanting it, in a hellish agony. “I love you, I love you,” she moaned, but her body seemed to fight him and held no love for him, only a kind of baffled dread. Jules stayed with her, holding her. The moment was so strange that he was able to draw back from it, on the brink of climax and yet guiding this woman, able to direct them both in spite of the heavy, quick pulsation of his lust, which she now sensed and wanted. She seemed to sense in him a rich, violent power that should have been hers, since it came from her body, but somehow was not hers—it was denied her, mysteriously. She drew her teeth hard against the side of his face.

  “Jules, don’t leave me!”

  “It’s all right.”

  Her cries were high, terrified, like the cries of ocean birds. He felt her turning into a wild, cruel bird. He felt her sinking and rising and sinking again in the frenzy of her own mind, unable to draw herself up, weighed down to insensibility. He wanted to turn his face away from her. But he kissed her instead, hungrily and wildly himself, in imitation of her passion and out of courtesy, to hide it from them both. If she were able to smile, Jules thought, a thin, sinister smile would illuminate her face—how she wanted him, how she needed every part of his body! What he had thought elegant in her was only her distance from him, a female distance. Really they were trapped together, struggling together. They were enemies. He imagined her body lacerated with deep red gashes, the frantic maniacal slashes of a dog, and the idea of her blood, the sight of her blood, excited him. He knew he was hurting her, though she could not feel any pain. He knew that her face and body were already rubbed raw by him, but he hadn’t the strength for this, fo
r this cruelty. He was sorry for her. He did not really want to hurt her, though she wanted him to hurt her, she wanted her blood spilled by him, but Jules could not keep it up, he did not want to be shaped out of the air by her violent imagination. She said, pleading, “Jules…” and it was already too late, he buried himself in her with a cry of pleasure and defeat.

  “Oh, don’t leave me! How can you leave me?” She wept.

  He felt as if she had struck him with these words. He had failed her again. Exhausted, almost insensible himself, he could say nothing, he could not think at all. His body was fading from him. He could not imagine himself or Nadine. Her frustration, the desire she felt for him, was now beyond his imagination. He felt that he was near to dying while Nadine, miserable with life, still clung to him and pressed her damp, contorted face against his, accusing him.

  “You don’t love me, you don’t care about me!”

  She grew quiet. Jules did not speak. As consciousness came back to him he realized the depth of his failure, he felt ashamed, he really could not understand it. He was ashamed and baffled. He would have liked to say, “Of course I love you. What does this prove? So what? We’ll have twenty or thirty years together, give me time to love you.” But he said nothing. The idea of twenty or thirty years, the marriage of Jules and Nadine, struck him now as unlikely. He was afraid he had misunderstood her. And now, thinking him distant from her, unloving, she was prepared to reject him. He could not understand how he had failed her. Her own body had failed her, but her body was in his keeping, in his trust. He was her lover and yet could not make love to her, not truly, for everything was secret in her, tense and hidden. He could not understand. Every part of her, every cell of her brain, was infatuated with him and had given itself up to him; he could have sucked the very essence of her sweet blood, everything had been so open to him, and yet there was failure between them. Her body took on a kind of sinister radiance to him. It opened and closed upon him, driving him to an excess of lust, almost of madness, but still he had failed. It numbed him. He was exhausted, heavy. Even the faint light from the street hurt his skin.