Chapter 25 — One More Time.147 #3
We were not quiet. That was its own small revelation, that we were allowed to be loud, that there was no cohort behind a curtain and no app in the corner and no morning circle waiting to make us describe our flow.
She made the sounds I had only ever heard her swallow before, in the dark, on the far side of a wall of plausible deniability, and there was no wall now, so she let them go, into the room and into my hair.
She got back on top and I watched her over me in the bad lamplight, no light found, no chin tipped a practiced half inch, no good angle worked for anybody, just my mother with her head back and her hair stuck to her face, using me at last for something that would never once be content, and it was the most beautiful thing I have ever been let to see.
It went on the way a thing goes on when you have been refused it for three weeks and told the refusing was love.
We wore each other down and got our wind back and started in again, slower the second time and worse for it and better for it, and somewhere in all of it the last difference between the woman I grew up calling my mother and the woman taking me apart on a cheap mattress collapsed into one single impossible person, and I stopped trying to hold them separate, because holding them separate had been the last wall standing, and it went the way of every other wall those three weeks.
At the very end, with both of us right there, she got her mouth to my ear and stopped holding back even the last sliver of herself.
“Take it,” I said into her hair. “Take my cock. Take all of it.”
“Yes.” She moaned it into my shoulder, loud and past holding anything back. “Give it to me. Give it to me hard. Your cock is perfect, oh my God, give me all of it, I’m right there.”
And that was the thing that took me right to the edge, her voice and her nails in my back and the filth of it and the truth of it landing in the same instant, and right there at the top of it, I said the word.
Not a slip this time. Not in the dark, not loosened out of me by a rite, not anything I could take back in the morning. I said it on purpose, looking right at her, the only name I have ever had for her in my whole life.
“Mom.”
“Oh, fuck.” Her whole body seized around me. “Oh fuck, Sean.”
“Mom. Mom. Mom.”
“Uh-huh, I’ve got you.” Her thumb was on my cheekbone and her eyes stayed open the whole time. “Don’t stop, sweetheart. Don’t you dare stop now.”
She did not flinch from it and she did not laugh it off and she did not file it away for the morning.
She took it, the entire impossible weight of that one word, holding my face in both her hands, saying my name back like the answer to a question, and that, more than any of the rest of it, was the thing the two of us could never take back.
“I’m about to,” I muttered, which was all I could manage.
She nodded, fast, her eyes locked on mine. “Oh yes. Don’t pull out. Don’t you dare pull out.”
I finished inside her, and she came with me, the two of us going over together at the very end with nothing left between us.
She had told me to, and I could not have done otherwise if the building had been on fire, and it was at once the purest thing my body has ever felt and the most frightening, with no daylight between the two.
The relief of it went all the way down to the floor of me.
And underneath the relief, arriving in the very same instant, came the rest of it, the part with no clean name.
That I had just done the one thing there is truly no taking back, inside the one person I was never meant to, on purpose, while calling her the only thing I have ever called her.
Whatever the two of us were now, we were it for good.
No morning was ever going to file this one away.
And I was not sorry, and not being sorry was its own slow kind of falling, and I held onto her and let it come down.
After, we lay tangled in the wreck of the ugly spread with the air conditioner roaring and the lot light coming around the curtain, and nobody counted anything, and nobody called the tide to recede, and nobody got up to rebuild a single thing.
A long while later I reached over her for my phone, the one I’d filmed the whole meltdown on a few hours before, and I held it up and took a picture of her.
She opened one eye. Then she looked at the phone.
Then she did the thing she has done my whole life, the thing fifteen years of practice does to a person, which is tip her chin half an inch and gentle her eyes and find the light from a dead motel lamp by pure animal instinct, so that what came out of a man in bed with his phone at three in the morning was a photograph you could have sent to four million strangers.
A woman at rest. Nothing showing. Tasteful as a candle commercial.
Both of our hats still on, even now, even here, even after that.
“Delete the first one,” she said. “My eyes were shut.”
“You looked happy.”
“I looked unconscious. There is a difference and it matters.” She put her head back down on my chest. “Send me the good one.”
I sent her the good one. It went nowhere. It sat in her phone like the first thing she had ever shot and not sold, and neither of us said that, because saying it would have made it a thing.
The traffic went by outside doing its real nothing. The cat was probably still asleep on the laminate two doors down.
“Thanks,” she said, eventually. Quiet. Into my chest, where she did not have to look at me to say it.
“For what?”
“Saving me.” Before I could turn it into a joke she kept going, which is how I knew she meant it all the way down.
“They were going to have all of me by spring. You know that? Every last piece, filed and folded and sold back to me by the jar, and I would have thanked them, and I would have called you to come film it. They were going to take me apart and use me for parts. The island was going to make me into something. You’re the only one in years who came for the actual me.
The one nobody’s been interested in since I was about thirty-five. ”
I thought about a lot of things I could say. Most of them were the big dumb word and its relatives, and none of them would have survived contact with the room, so I did not reach for them.
“To be fair,” I said, “so did I.”
“Did what?”
“Made you into something. Took you apart, used you for parts.” I felt her go still in the good way, the listening way. “The island was going to pervert you into a Diver. I just perverted you into this. Mine took a different form, is all.”
She laughed, the real one, because it was true and it was awful and it was the most honest thing either of us had managed in a year, and it shook both of us where we were pressed together.
“That’s the worst thing anyone’s ever said to me,” she said.
“It’s the truest thing I’ve ever said to anyone.”
“I know.” She found my hand under the spread and laced her fingers into it and did not make a production of it. “I know it is.”
And that was the closest the two of us came that night, or maybe ever, to saying the other thing, the enormous obvious thing, and neither of us said it, and neither of us had to, and for the first time in the whole long history of us, neither of us got up afterward and quietly put the wall back.
“I’ve got the Quattlebaums at two on Saturday,” I said, a while later, almost asleep.
“The who?”
“A wedding. I shoot weddings, when there are any to shoot. It’s the one steady thing I’ve got, and I am going to need it more than ever now that my biggest client set fire to her whole income on a global livestream.”
“Your biggest client sounds like a real problem.”
“She’s a nightmare. Come with me. You can hold a light.” I felt her go still against my chest in the good way. “It is going to be the most normal wedding you have ever seen in your life. A hotel ballroom. A chocolate fountain. A man doing the worm.”
“You’re going to cry at it,” she said. “Watch.”
I lay there in the roar of the air conditioner and turned it over, the Quattlebaums at two, the chocolate fountain, the worm, the absolute ordinary surface-world nothing of it, the rest of our actual lives waiting on the far side of one night in a seventy-nine dollar room.
“Are we actually doing this,” I said. It did not come out as a question.
“The wedding? Yes, Sean. Keep up.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know it’s not what you meant.” She did not open her eyes. Her hand stayed in mine. “Ask me again at the wedding. Ask me again at a hundred boring things. We’ve got a whole pile of boring things to get wrong about it now.”
The good photo sat on my phone, face down on the nightstand, posted nowhere, the first picture I ever took of her that was not for anybody but me. The second bed stayed empty and ugly and perfect the whole night long.