“I’ve lost my faith,” she said.
Not even the curls on his head moved. He was completely still. She wondered if he was dead. Of course, he wasn’t, but her head always went there with loved ones. If her mother didn’t bless the day with some incessant nagging or advice her head went there. When her roommates in college wouldn’t come home for the night. And so forth. But with him, especially, she always wondered if he was dead.
He sighed. The smell of the air told her so. When her parents would wake up in the morning, she would sit with them at the breakfast table and held her breath. The smell of married couples. The same pajamas, week after week; not brushing your teeth before the other woke up, maybe going half the day that way until leaving the house. Stale, overripe. His breath was clean, full of pheromones. She had read that every mouth has its’ own chemistry. You could be completely enamored with someone’s appearance, but kiss them and the attraction would be gone. With the wrong chemistry, of course.
He had refused to kiss her for days. Before they first went to dinner, he would only walk her to the edge of campus after class. Her skin itself would hurt when he’d say, “Later, tiger!” and bike away. One evening, he walked her home and she asked him in for tea. He sat on her heavy red futon and she brought him her books. The mating dance of nerds, really. She sat on the lifted floorboards, looking up at him, telling him strange stories about this author, that poem. She knew these things worked with men like him for two reasons. One, because so many men like him had proposed marriage to her already. Two, because she was convinced he was to be hers. Only some weeks and he was already the line by which she drew the world.
When he decided that it was appropriate to kiss, he did just that. She held his breath in her mouth so long, it felt as if chili peppers were being rubbed into her lungs. Later, he told her that her breath sometimes smelled bad when they had first met.
“On the metro today, I heard a man call the woman he was with ‘my love’. I cried in our closet for an hour.”
He turned his head away from her. He had a cherub’s face, young and clean. He couldn’t grow a beard. Cheeks redder than apples. When she had taken him home for the first time, her mother asked him if he was from the Ozarks. He looked like a child from fresh mountain air, she reasoned. He wasn’t, though. He was from a small town with a funny name in a state she had never been to. She hated his parents.
Her mother said she could always foretell how a man would treat her. She only needed to learn about his relationship with his mother. Before they went to bed, at his house, he and his mother would sometimes talk on the phone. They spoke often and he responded to her inquiries gently. He would end the call by saying, “Love you, too.” That part, she didn’t like. The “I” part was what mattered.
But that’s how she now knew about the hopelessness of it all. She felt like the finches in her parents’ backyard. Her mother had hung up a bird feeder one spring and, beside it, placed a cement bird bath. A diligent woman: she woke up every morning, rolled her shiny black hair in those notorious red curlers, and smoked her secret cigarette of the day in the backyard. The bird bath and feeder, then, were her excuse to be back there in the first place. And they came, the finches. Shrieking feathered thimbles with puffed chests. Her mother placed duck tape over the light switch for the back patio, because one finch had built a nest on top of the light. Every day they came.
Her mother started hating the shells left behind, scattered on the concrete patio and pasted there with finch poop. She stopped feeding them entirely, except for some days when she felt guilt or a particular variety of matronly. It didn’t matter, either way. The finches came every day, from the moment her mother hung up that bird feeder until the last time she had been back to visit. Her mother told her, in a sad voice, that sometimes the finches became so angry they would fly toward the house, breaking their beaks on the clean windows. The birds’ feelings didn’t matter, though. They came back, every day. For the moment when the maybe became a full vessel of nourishment.
“I don’t want what we have.”
He shifted, straightening his back. She reached out her fingers, ready to rub his spine, stopping just short of his skin. When they found out he had scoliosis, she went outside and cried while smoking a cigarette. He denied it, but she knew that sort of display made him uneasy. They had gotten into the shower before bed and she looked at his shoulder blades. One higher than the other. She liked tall men, because of her father’s height, so she knew that tall men held themselves awkwardly. Shoulders rounded forward, chin a bit tucked in. He was holding himself more vertically than she had ever seen and, indeed, there was a curve. Slight, but enough that he felt uncomfortable every day she had known him. He was tilting his head back, wetting his hair, mouth open to catch the stream. She stood at the end of the tub, shivering. Every few minutes she would place her hands on his chest to catch some of the warmth.
His skin seemed a paper towel, covered with grains of salt and flakes of pepper. Rough bumps everywhere, some as white as his own skin, some a furious red. She had whispered once that it was her favorite part of him. He was surprised and asked why. She responded that it made him a more visceral experience. Any lover can guess the real reason why, though.
She pressed a hand to her stomach. Nausea always battered her intestines at this hour. Breathing shallowly, she reached over to the desk for the pink bottle of bismuth. A chalky swig. She spilled a drop or two on the carpet and rubbed them out with her toe quickly, furtively glancing at him over her shoulder. Some nights she spent on her knees, hugging the stem of the toilet. It was always a shame when that happened, and perhaps not coincidentally when she was the one who made dinner. When they had gotten together, she was hungry all the time. Their dinner dates were often the first time she would eat that day. She did love her body, it wasn’t that; it was just as if her physical needs were a broken leather sole. As long as her shoes got her around.
He started feeding her every time they were together. People didn’t stop her on the street as often, telling her to eat more. She rarely stated a preference, because she had no idea what could be made at home. Anyway he was a bit of a food snob. She was fine with mayonnaise and he made his own aioli, that sort of thing. Only once did he mess up. He bought a cut of goat meat. He later told her that an old woman in the butcher shop asked what he was buying. When he answered “Goat,” she widened her eyes and started cackling. She wished him good luck and walked out, swinging her bags and shaking her head. Stubborn as always, more motivated by this (she could guess), he bought it nonetheless and prepared it that night. They had eaten the first few bites slowly, glancing up at one another shyly. She regally, gently, pronounced it shit. He gallantly threw the gamey morsels away and scooped her some ice cream for dinner.
“You’re ice. Really, you are. If a girl ever stays with you, it’s either because she doesn’t care about you or really doesn’t give a shit about herself.”
It seemed that tonight he couldn’t be bothered. She absently stared past his head, running her bony finger over her face, sometimes her cracked lips, stopping to poke at her chipped front teeth. Shivering, pulling the blanket over her legs, she continued to stare out the window. A crowd of young Spaniards walked by, her age, probably just leaving dinner. She used to stay up late, too, but he had work in the morning. The condition was that they could only sleep in the same bed if they turned in early. He exhaled, snoring a little. She turned off the light and lay down, face in pillow.
