John believed in sensation and agreement. Agreement led him to farmers markets and dog races, to parties where everyone said hello and started jumping halfway to the dance floor. Sensation led him to alcohol and bodies. He thought if drink didn’t bloat him it would have been a wonderful invention—perhaps the only one—of Mother Nature. He slept with women who looked like Margery, ruddy and small: that was the form his vow of chastity had taken. He couldn’t come till he cried I love you in his mind. He’d lie still, blackness passing upwards, feet jiggling as though he were being hanged.

They ate in a tavern fumy with dry sherry and wine. Margery stuck out in her white mantle. She described marrying Jesus in a voice that was too bright. John sagged against her; he looked sick; he finally understood they would not be together. His face broke open. His wide mouth gaped, the muscles stood rigid on his neck, and his big forehead sank onto her shoulder—the huge doleful head of a steer. He cried strongly, imagining himself curled in a ball. Sobs jerked his body. Margery stroked his thick hair; she was also sad.

Margery considered the mahogany hair that swept down his forearms. She was forty-one and John was over fifty. “John, why do you love me?” It was a thoughtless question, cruel.

John’s hand brushed hers; warmth rippled from forefinger to elbow. She had been unhappy so long she wondered what part of themselves happy lovers give up. John replied hopefully, “You are beautiful, and your little teeth, and intelligent, your nipples, and you have a great sense of—” Margery cut him off. She knew the list. It didn’t touch her terror or the Margery who needed proof that she would not be abandoned.

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In Lynn she noted who was still alive; she fell ill and lay immobile, profoundly inside her body, painfully apart from it. Her skin prickled down her front from scalp to toes: it was a form of anticipation. Each minute she thought, This might be it.

34

Instead of moving upwards as it recedes, the ground rushes straight into me. Now there’s a racket like an uproar of birds from some mechanism in the rear. Then a second high whine. I haven’t developed an aesthetic of patience the way others do as they age. Lights come on, all dark outside, our heads erect against our upright seats. The blue lights of the landing strip and the distant, radiant terminal. The forward momentum of my longing becomes a form of velocity, membranes and aspirations surging towards a foreign airport, its degraded earth empty of meaning except direction towards a hotel room where I erotically dismantle him. Heaven is the total presence at once of my self and my body. It’s my own skin I travel towards—its entire arousal a homecoming, effortless freedom.

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