[47] I learned that those who undergo

The wind, the Eternal Third. A whisper beyond the horizon, a mysterious dialogue of the air. From the window, I watch them say goodbye. When Paul comes back upstairs, I’ve poured myself a last half-glass of Tokay. I’m watching the lamplight glow through it. I crack his bones with my eyes and suck out his marrow. I’m already just drunk enough. He doesn’t get a word from me. I’m an angel in red tonight. Words bounce off me at moments like this, and he knows when not to trouble with them.

All things are in movement, perpetually changing. Nature itself is a struggle between its own contradictions, and how will we survive that next? That night, that next hour, I tell myself I know what the world has brought us to. Paul looks at the place where Gus’s drawing was, then goes looking for where I’ve placed it. He finds it in our new bedroom, on our dresser, covering the mirror so that when our eyes look for ourselves tonight, that’s what we’ll see together. I’ll be floating in streams of water, sea grass dripping from me and tickling my legs as I pass with the current. Paul once tried to describe the ocean for me, the smell of it. I’ve never been to the seaside. Does the ocean feel like I do tonight? Like a place to flee where memories will never find you? I told a doctor once, ‘There’s only one way I know to forget everything.’ Paul likes to hook me up while I’m still wearing something, so tonight while he’s looking out our bedroom window I tiptoe up behind him and wrap him from behind in my open dress and bite his ear. This is Johnny’s Launch Date, don’t ask me how we both know. Perhaps the hiding stars are telling us, one of them him, promising to twinkle hello as soon as he can. We can’t see him but I know he’s there. Perhaps we both feel the tide in me. Starting out with him doing me gently from behind, which I don’t mind. I come quickest that way, so why would I? Just I come biggest when I’m riding down on him, my dress a tent for us both, his thumb on my sailor and my legs way open so he can watch himself splitting me. But then I think, we’d better get a bit more normal or something, just to make sure, and he climbs on top with me holding my toes together in my hands. He can’t get any deeper than that. He can slide his whole self right in, I try to let him. The, whole, thing, damn, it, and I tell myself I’m not going to spill a drop. Not tonight. No snail tracks tonight if I have to stand on my head till dawn. I’m your cock, I hiss like a water snake, which always makes him gasp. He says he always remembers what it feels like for him. He says I’m the one who always acts like I’ve forgotten till next time.

Then a morning a few days later – this soon? – I’m up before him, puking in the toilet and trying not to remember what I had for dinner, and thinking, I’m a woman – is this the point of me? When I come out, he lights me a cigarette. He doesn’t use them, he just lights them for me. He’d seen the same star, I know that, and there’s something wondering in his look that I don’t know how to answer. I lie down and he spoons me. We don’t know how to talk about this yet, though we’ll work it out soon enough. So much is ending this year, I can feel it, yet I also feel the beginning.

‘Johnny,’ he says. Life will be hard enough without adding a troublesome name to the mix. We don’t know that it’s bad luck to name a kid too soon. We should wait for him to show.

‘All right,’ I tell him. ‘Jenny.’

‘Okay.’ We don’t know any Jennys. This one’s going to be one of a kind, all ours. The world will never have seen the like.