The Sea of Light (58 page)

“Ah,” I tease, “but is that what Coach just
says
? Or really believes?”

“Yes, that’s what
Coach
believes.” She smiles. There are tears in her eyes—from the laughter, or from something else, I’m not quite sure. “As for me—I don’t know. Maybe. Although only partly. I mean, in the sense that maybe there
is
something—you know, like an energy force, or an electrical current, or some such phenomenon, that inhabits a form—a human form, an animal form, or plant—who knows? and when the form dies, it becomes no longer viable for conducting the energy, and so the energy, or whatever, travels on and occupies some other, living form. Maybe there’s something like that. I couldn’t begin to say that I definitely
believe
it, in the sense of having any kind of absolute faith in it, you know. Anyway, where’s the proof? Okay, yes, these thoughts have crossed my mind—while Kay was sick, and of course afterwards, and probably once in a while before I even met her. But do
I
believe in reincarnation the way I think this kid meant—that is, in the sense that the same person with the same memories, or whatever, gets reborn again and again? No. Absolutely not. I think—I mean, I have this gut sense about it—that whatever might live on has got nothing to do with personality. You. Me. Kay. As
you,
as
me,
we’re here just once. Whatever else continues, after our bodies die, it’s a lot more impersonal than you, or me. The individual, distinguishable characters that we are, right now, in this life—this is our one and only shot. Maybe some energy survives. But the thoughts and the memories? Talents, failings? All the love and hate that a single person has? I doubt it, Chick. I doubt it.” She pauses, a little uncertain now, shy somehow. “Which is why it’s important—”

“To work hard and make the most of it, right?”

“Well, yes. Just like that.”

Oh, I say, I believe in that too.

Then I lean across a cooling pizza box on my hands and knees, through the dark clean shadow of unused fireplace, just like that, and kiss her.

*

Some things we remember in detail; others, in metaphor. Maybe that’s why, later, it will come back to me as a blur: the long, long time that the kiss went on, became not a kiss any more but an exploration of skin; the beginning of how we touched hair, lips, cheeks, breasts and thighs through cloth; the moment she started to take off my clothes, there on the floor in front of cold pizza and a snoring dog, and I let her do all the work—sensing somehow that seizing the physical initiative was what she needed. There had been something vaguely frightening and unfamiliar about my saying where and when. Her power to control and to please was linked inextricably to her passion; and if I wanted her passion, and mine, I would have to give up a measure of my own control—not something I ever did lightly. But I realized, through a cloud of anxiety and desire, that the control was a much-overrated thing I could do without. And, anyway, we must all give it up in the end.

For Bren, I know, the physical look and feel would be remembered with a great deal of clarity. We are different that way. Bodies are ultimately more important to her than they have ever been to me. I can live quite happily in my head; it’s the way I am, I really can’t help it.

Still, there is this part of me that yearns to know all the ways of my body. And a part of her that yearns to express all the ways of her mind. If, in early middle age, I finally began to know and appreciate the physical channels of being—the electrical currents she had described as being potentially immortal, the dendrites and axons and synapses that conduct the mortal impulses, cause tissue and organ to secrete hormones, process oxygen in blood, make the raw muscle of the heart pick up pace, eyes drip tears, cunt excitement, and tendons attaching raw muscle to bone, the ache and tickle and longing and vulnerability of the flesh—which, she said, was the body’s largest organ,
derma,
an entirety into and of itself—I
owe the pleasure and the terror of discovery to her. Or rather, to her and to myself; because it was in the combination of us together that the discovery happened. What I began to see was that a part of me that felt necessary to full human existence came alive in her hands. It bloomed in the measure of control I handed over to her. She evoked it; but, after all, it was I who’d made all this happen, and neither of us forgot that.

Talk, you, I demanded, when she stretched naked over me. Stay here, stay. No. Don’t shut your eyes, Bren—I want you to see.

See what? she breathed.

Me, I insisted. This. And yourself.

She opened her eyes to look then, broke into sweat.

“God, you’re pretty. I’m so afraid.”

But she reached to touch me, anyway, where I was softly hot and wet. The fear didn’t stop her. Electricity tingled through.

“Tell me how, Chick. I’m out of practice.”

Slower, I told her. Like that, yes. Nice and strong and slow.

In the blur of what was, certain things would come back to me later, the odd detail here and there: that she pressed down and took each nipple into her mouth in turn, sucking with a raw infantile need, as if real milk was about to flow, and her life depended on it. But every once in a while catching herself, pausing to nibble and tease, smiling, when I moaned, with a triumphant sort of slyness; and her hands slid everywhere, fingers slowly, firmly caressing, tortured my belly and thighs and then boldly went inside without an invitation, twisting around, exploring, filling me more and more until I could feel myself swell closer around her, hungry for the intrusion. That’s when I got afraid, and had to pause for a while. I told her. So we both were still. She leaned on an elbow and one hand played with my hair while the other stayed motionless inside me, looked down at my face with a pleased and fearless look, and a warm, old kind of wisdom in her eyes. I understood that she wanted to take me to some place that was different in fullness, more truly textured with pleasure than all the lands of perfunctory spasm I’d visited before and called love, and I wanted very badly to be taken; but then wanted to take her, too, and wasn’t sure that I could, or that she’d let me. Looming over me like this, handsome and beautiful and nearly all-powerful, she seemed much more than I’d bargained for, and her strength began to scare me.

But on the other hand she was just Bren, after all. My friend of so many years and—who knew? that kid on the team might be right—perhaps of many lifetimes.

The fear dissipated. I could smile.

“Don’t stop. Not really.”

Oh, she said, I couldn’t stop now.

We began to move again, very subtly, a mere simultaneous quivering at first. It took a long, erratic and doubtful time, almost stopped being graceful once and I cried out in a frustration that was tangible—at myself, at my mind that would not shut down no matter what, at this mingling of bodies we’d committed to which was somehow so familiar, yet at the same time near-foreign. I was more frightened than I knew. But in the end what she willed and what I gave over to her will were stronger than the fear. We moved farther and rougher, more extravagantly, she was on me and inside me, moving with me, against me, until there was nowhere else to move into, and I heard myself yell in a bubble of silence, electricity flicker my eyelids, and I breathed faster until, for a moment, breath ceased. Then gave myself up to the surge that washed me against her thighs and breasts and fingers like a wave, jolting me so hard that the wave broke with impact, shattered into successively smaller, sweating currents, then ripples, trickling back now, back, into damp and ragged calm.

Something blocked my throat. More tears. They dripped down my face with the sweat, and her lips smudged them, tasted them. The pain oozed, eased. I breathed quietly, began to feel shy, turned away and she held me with wet arms and hands.

I love you, I said. But the words came out throttled, so
that only the middle one sounded, and only its first letter echoed. What? she whispered. I didn’t respond. They’d rung pallid and insignificant, clattering in my skull like a bad cliché. Early middle age, and I realized it wasn’t exactly
love I
wanted, but love and something more. Truth be told, my own standards were coldly austere in their way, as high as any of Bren’s; I wanted nothing less than a magnificently heart-wise fellow traveler in my life to visit new places with in body and in mind, mingle electricity with, abolish unnecessary borders with, see.

I wondered if she’d be all that for me. Wondered what she had in mind herself—was it me she wanted now after all the years, me with all of my chatter, demands, failings, gifts, excessive hidden dreams of my own in which I, too, won what had once been unattainable? Or did she want a stand-in for Kay? an old comfortable and available friend to step into this recently opened slot in her life the way some new recruit might occupy full scholarship position on her team, fill the vacancy left by an especially favored, just-graduated All-American?

And if she wanted none of the above, or all of the above, or some complex combination thereof—which was most likely—what then? If the result was loss of something I’d never had before, and only now just tasted, could I live with that?

If the result was winning what I’d never had before, and only now just tasted, could I live with
that?

And what if I failed her standards? Or what if she failed mine, was not and would not or could not be this idealized companion of my fantasy cosmos? and offered just herself, with all of her moody silences, rigid demands, failings, gifts, dreams of triumph? Offered mere, faulty love—nothing more? Or less?

“Chick?” Her palm stroked a shoulder, smelled like me, like my own insides. “What are you thinking?”

“That I think too much.”

“Mmmm. I could have told you that.”

We chuckled. The floor was too hard, hurting my hip and ribs. I turned back to face her.

“What about you?”

She blushed. “I’m fine. I mean, I don’t need—this is good with me, right now—”

“Okay, toughie, but that’s not what I meant.”

Toughie.

She was. We laughed.

“Maybe, Chick. But it’s what
I
meant.”

“Listen, then, let’s just forget about it for now. Take the pressure off—”

‘Thanks.”

“Off, off, off.” And I snapped my fingers, blew something invisible away. I was disappointed, but also relieved somehow; and the look that flooded her face—relaxation, affection—made it all okay. “Talk to me, Bren.”

She blinked, confused, “I was thinking about Kay.”

“Do you want to talk about her? You can, you know.”

She did, in halts and starts. Kay was older by a dozen years, wiser, well-traveled. Beautiful dresser, knew exactly how to wear makeup, when to have her hair done—very femme. With something foreign about her. Maybe the Jewishness. Like something dark, and secret, that no one outside her could ever comprehend; so that, even though she was talkative, ebullient, full of a kind of sunshine—and not just publicly, but between the two of them as well—there was this unspeakably private part of her that had never been trespassed, never would be: by Bren, or by anyone. She hadn’t exactly understood Kay, maybe; just given herself up to the feel of things between them, and loved her. Not a perfect relationship. There were plenty of things she did, things that were important to her, that Kay had never understood either, had never bothered to understand. The wordless, deep-rooted thing that made her physical, for instance, that made what she spent her life doing—coaching, training, weights, running around—an indispensable part of who she was, who she’d always be, had never interested Kay. On the other hand, Bren herself had never been much turned on by Melville, or Hawthorne, or Dickens either. Although Kay
had
made her read
David Copperfield.
Once or twice, too, Bren had forced Kay to come to a swimming meet. Aside from that, their love had been one of acceptance of difference; not an abolition of it.

There were these roles they’d been in, kind of. Bren blushed again. Around sex, for instance. She’d always been the initiator. Always. It was the way things had happened between them, the way things had stayed. Seemed to make them both happy. And she understood how things could be different with other women; that it was all dependent on relationship, anyway, and on how you needed to be yourself—because, in the end, being on top and being more aggressive was never the same thing as being truly dominant. But for her, for Kay, it had worked. And since then, there’d been no one.

“So I’m a little nervous.”

“Yes.”

“I won’t always be.”

Take your time, I told her. I smoothed her forehead, gently twisted a lock of hair. Take your sweet, sweet time.

She kissed my nose. Irish, she said. Yes, I told her, that’s what I am. Rough around the edges. Not always attractive, or even polite. But real, at least. Sweaty from the guts on out. More than a little warlike. Big fan of mixing it up. Yelling loudly for truth, beauty, attention—and mostly, for justice. Part of my heritage. Though not all of it.

“What’s the rest of it, Chick?”

“Of what?”

“Your heritage.”

“Oh. Being gay, I guess.”

“You really think so?”

“I do. I really think so. Without that, I just wouldn’t be the same person—I’d have a completely different point of view about almost everything—I’d have a completely different life. Some of which would be easier, I guess. But some of it would be much, much harder.”