There was a picture I always thought of when I was with her. The picture was not of us –no, we shied away from anything so permanent, believing that our moments, our seconds, of bliss were only so because they would soon be past. No, the picture was of an anonymous woman’s thighs, cleaved together in a shaft of sunlight, with a man’s hand lightly resting in between them. Maybe it was the intimacy, the sexuality, that first held me. I imagined the man’s touch was post-coital, a gesture both casual and fraught with suspended urges. Or maybe it was its implied sadness, its frozen rendering of a deep disconnect. I began to imagine what the picture did not show, what it couldn’t capture. From her position, with her calves tucked under her, she must be looking down on him, on his hand, on his body, thinking…what? How have I just slept with him? Can I continue to love him? And he, his head encased in pillows with eyes closed, thinking nothing at all.
I found myself enacting the picture whenever I could. When she kneeled at my feet, toying with her raven mane, while I lay naked among mountainous covers, I would place my hand on her. I brushed lightly against her cool skin, a result of her notoriously poor circulation, and I tensed my shoulder, never allowing the full weight of my arm to press against her. She looked at me then, her feline eyes brimming with moisture for a single instant, before looking away.
I suppose it was fated to end badly. A coupling born of repetition, of plagiarized gesture and utterance, is far more tenuous then a sloppy and incoherent love affair. Acts of affection, both the impassioned grasps and the butterfly touches, become especially cynical when lifted from unnamed sources. I began quoting movie lines as if they were my own; she created snaking and rhythmic acronyms to obscure her meaning. It was as if we lived in a collage of our own arbitrary design: fragments of Auden, Yeats, and Rich clotted our speech; Godard, our caresses. And despite our desperate effort to combine the jagged edges of our experience, cracks still remained, fissures that would inevitably explode.
