Crush

Chapter Twenty California

Twenty

California

Twenty minutes before landing, I felt that my heart might shoot out of my chest and onto the tarmac, and I worried that I’d given myself food poisoning with the airport wrap I’d had to make myself eat. I couldn’t believe I was actually about to get what I wanted. I wondered what it would be like.

David and I would have our own rooms. We had no plans for our two days together. I thought we might be so shell-shocked that we would just stare at each other for forty-eight hours. When my plane landed, I texted him to let him know. He said he thought that he might faint.

We’d been talking every day and had exchanged more than four hundred thousand words. When he expressed his love for me on the page, he’d said, “These are words I’ve never spoken and they are words you’ve never heard, trust me.” I felt it to be true.

Frances McDormand said once in an interview that the way to ensure a long relationship was to wait for everything to build up so you couldn’t stand it anymore: “Keep it across the room for as long as you can.” Given how consumed we were, my thinking was we should not keep it across the room a second longer .

Later that day, I opened the door to my room and David stepped inside. I froze. He was a real person. I couldn’t quite believe it. He seemed completely foreign to me and also like my twin. For all we’d written, in each other’s presence we were speechless.

We hugged tightly. And then, my right hand, independent of any direction from my brain, reached up and gently took hold of the left collar of his shirt. As I pulled him toward me I was met with the same resistance you’d get from ripe fruit coming off the branch. I felt that we were doing what we were put on earth to do. I put his strong hand on my hip, and he held it there. I could feel his fingers grabbing and releasing through my skirt. I wanted to live inside that kiss, to kiss him every second for the rest of my life.

Then, without a word or any conscious thought, we were naked. His body was so sturdy; his arms and his back and his calves—every inch was a delightful surprise. We fit together like a key in a lock. For the first time in my life I understood what it meant to become one flesh.

He looked into my eyes, and I looked back into his, an infinity symbol of regard. With each touch, he made me feel safe and held. What are we doing? I thought. The answer came back: We are loving each other. That was the feeling I had: of loving and being loved. I’d never experienced sex quite like that before. No one had ever done that to me or asked that of me. It felt like deliverance.

We stayed in that bed as the light changed outside and we could see the moon. Eventually, astonished, we began talking.

“Who are you?” he said finally, breaking the silence. “I can’t believe you’re here. I can’t believe you’re real.”

We wondered if we should go out and get dinner. Then we stayed in bed. We talked about our lives and books. I pulled him onto me again and admired how our bodies looked, together at last.

“When it comes to your next project, I really think you should consider Petrarch,” he said, pausing on top of me. “Petrarch didn’t write for his contemporaries; he wrote for future generations. What book would you write if you took ten years to write it? If you weren’t lending out your talent for other people’s books?”

I looked back into his eyes. His brow was slightly furrowed. He was so sincere and so sweet, so determined. I thought of the notes I’d seen about him on a professor-rating website, and I agreed with all the students who’d described him as one of those teachers who really cares . He somehow made me feel perfect while revealing ways in which I could become better.

David patiently waited for me to reply, as if he’d asked me for the answer to a question that he’d been preparing me to answer all semester.

“Consider Petrarch ?” I said. “Are you giving me an assignment while you’re inside me ?”

“Yes, sorry,” he said and laughed. “But I mean it. In Letters to Posterity he—”

I kissed him so he’d stop talking. I pulled him deeper into me. We didn’t have to read anymore or write anymore. Now we were the poem.

I’d been having sex for decades by that point. I thought I was good at it. I would have said before that moment that I’d had plenty of good sex. And yet on that day, it felt as though I were doing everything for the first time. Except for short forays out for coffee or food we stayed in bed for two days straight. The entire time I felt drunk even though we hadn’t had any alcohol.

As I rested with my head on his chest, he kept talking to me quietly as my eyes closed in spite of my trying to keep them open. I startled awake a few minutes later. “Wait!” I cried, lifting myself up in bed. “I fell asleep. What did I miss?”

“Just the Ecce Homo table of contents,” he said. “Why you are so wise, why you are so clever, why you are a destiny…”

The next morning, we woke up before dawn. He grabbed a book from the bedside table and read me Whitman until I distracted him. He threw the book on the floor. Once we’d made love a final time, he went back to reading. As he reached Section 50 of the poem, I felt like I’d been placed at the top of a cliff and given a nudge.

Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,

To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.

Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.

Do you see O my brothers and sisters?

It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is

Happiness.

The cool air coming through the window lifts the drapes in the rhythm to a song I can suddenly hear. Every sound and smell is telling the same story, and my body is reading it out loud while writing it. Every hair on my body stands up, straining to hear the next line.

My breath, his breath, the fan all breathe in and out together, rising and falling. The bed is made of moss, the sheets giant green leaves, as alive as we are. The ceiling is a dark blue sky turning pink and purple. His body and mine are performing a ritual. We’re sliding along slippery rocks in a cool river, dipping under the surface.

Memories pass through me like a current, of nursing, climbing the park jungle gym as a little girl, passing notes in class, holding a friend while she cried. I’m praying; no, I am the prayer.

David is here and I’m alone, everyone who ever lived and no one. Outside, I hear women walking to work, heels against the sidewalk; angry drivers backing up trucks; serious birds chirping. They’re out there, not knowing that inside this room the world is coming to its conclusion. David and I, buried in one grave, born into the world, giving birth to it.

My grandmother never had this , I think—I don’t think; I know. Because here she is with me, telling me it’s true; she never had a man kiss her like this, read her poetry while the sun came up, look into her soul in a bedroom’s half-light.

When whatever happened stopped happening, I looked at David.

“Did you feel that?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. He looked as dazed as I felt.

I got up. In the bathroom mirror I was surprised to find myself still there. Had that moment lasted minutes or days? The streetlights outside the window had gone out; the sun was coming up. My eyes were dilated. I could have died that day.