UNTIL THEY SHINE
They denied sharing sweet laughter. Romance wasn’t the point. After one thirty in the morning, she took him inside, down a shotgun hallway, into the living room, and left him there. In a way he was an enemy loved. This oil rig welder who’d been all over the world stood half turning back to see where she’d gone and half looking around to see where he was in this needs-some-more-wall-art silence. It was the beginning of the one hour before he found his way into her smile.
She did not know him, though.
There are those long-faithful loves properly absent in the world, old minefield loves, where two safe souls waltz around each other in the well-patrolled confines of a security setting—picking conversations to have about logistics, relying on favorites, looking at comfort food photos on 4x6 cards, giving annual gifts meaning nothing to the rest of the world. But there are also extreme momentary loves, ready to be smashed and forgotten, or, more often, intimately eaten alive.
She didn’t really invite him. And he didn’t exactly say he’d come. But there he was at her place without the music that probably should have been playing. Not long. The girl he found under a night-lit skylight came back with ginger vodka drinks, an unnecessary seduction. And so these two were socially imperative like that for an hour before the start-gate release of their mutual moving on. One of them giggled. The other, respectfully, pretended it hadn’t just happened. She straddled him, leaned forward, kissed him, kissed his neck. He lifted her up, turned her around, pulled her back down onto his lap and pressed his hand into everything he didn’t think was exactly perfect.
An hour and forty-five minutes ago the bartender’s finger hovered over the button that controlled the totalizer system. She’d accidentally—well, so what if it were staged?—elbowed the oil rig man in the ribs. But hard enough to force a conversation at an Irish pub when she got bored with the practiced words of student lawyers. God. She tired of those lofty boys’ aspirations, their talk of how it all should be—how it would all have to be—and so she turned on their convictions, gravitated toward this other man in jeans and an undisclosed smile.
This guy wasn’t so sure of how things should be—would all have to be—or at least he didn’t say. He just reached one hand out to her hip, put his fingers down into her waistband, bent his arm so she stepped forward between his knees while he put his other hand around her back, pulled her in even closer and said, “Hi.” She said, “Not really.” So he didn’t ask any more questions. He’d been practicing his story and told her he tied oil rigs to the ocean floor with heat enough to weld what’s desired to what’s real. She didn’t understand. It was his job to dive over oil under the sea and join steel to steel two hundred feet down in the black.
He made promises easily like a man who never took physics in high school. But not to her. There was no point. She didn’t want or expect any of that. So he didn’t bother. He just laughed for the girl he found in the bar, broad telling of his eight weeks with the winter ocean’s twenty-five-foot swells, how those furious, feminine seas could very likely scour him off with their daily washing. “You get pretty knocked around. Gotta be tethered or you’re gone.”
She pretended not to notice or care.
He showed her, demonstrated the harness that held him and mimed the length that tied him to the rig. He told her about being sealed skin to soul by that North Sea’s frigid wanting. A man of faith—two hundred feet down in the black. Just a man, a steel-making man, on the water all winter, robbing the layered sea floor. So what? Why should she be impressed? That woman—young woman—was not the North Sea, not the water, not anything to tether himself to. She was the way he used to be: quiet, nostalgic, and true. But now he’s less easily baited. He’s heavenly-ride-the-rode-down-bluebell and Honduras blends whiskey, too.
New Orleans, a port city, still rocks and sways with him as he shows her the ashes of the Irish owner behind the bar, asks about her travels, her school, her under-the-water-pressured lubrication, asks—with final kindness—if she’d like a beer. Laughing hard, with his hands on this small out-of-town girl (refusing to be scoured off) she says yes. It is the only answer. Two hundred feet of foregone conclusion wrap him desultorily without words and yet, she drifts free—when anyone knows oil is best suited for floating. Like you, she’s been told that babies will wake her in the morning part of the night. Funny how people will pay to let you borrow their children for a while. But there is nothing to babysit underneath the sea. That man lives in relief, opposite, pressured from all sides by our foundations: oil, steel, the ocean floor. So she knows in the morning she will wake up and ask him to leave. Sometimes—never when she waits—her mind reels hapless in possibility.
But this time she will not let it.
Even under the North Sea’s mighty pressured weight, he’ll disrespect her repression, override her compression. He’ll steel-make and can rise up—with a flame down deep—drilling oil for freighters to drink. So neither of the two of them takes bars and beer for granted. They say nothing and let their eyes work. In her mind she explores his deep sea diving welds and lets him come up through it all covered in oil. And for him she goes down into everything, into the sea changed, thinking of him there, two hundred feet down in the black.
“We can walk to my place from here.” She will never admit to being a power-monger, a tyrant, but his telling her no is unacceptable.
They’re at her front door again—right before she held his hand and led him down that shotgun hallway to begin their awkward-fondling preliminary hour of what would be their fifteen-minute forever. And they both see it on the porch: everything that will happen in an hour. There’s no power of attorney. A simple consent is all that’s necessary for his body, riding an eddy current and sloshing over some forgotten bank, to be never so golden-gilt or at all, so easy does the wick go free.
They’re inside the apartment. Her eyes flick quickly, realizing what a mess she’s about to bring him into but he sees nothing. She knows everything that’s not good enough. Not him. Not the door. Not the scented amber candle on the speaker, the one she’s about to ask if he’d like for her to light. Not the belts and bras hanging from their hooks in her bathroom that she should have put away. Not the dracaena growing tall in the window. Not the catcher’s mitt on the floor. Not the rumpled clothes burying a red rocking chair. Not the TV stand where the pepper grinder’s left forgotten. Not the unopened stack of mail shifting, losing its balance on the desk. Not the beach hats rarely worn or her grandmother’s heirloom painting where a tugboat forever pulls a man on a barge over silk-rippling waters. Her eyes flick on, wishful-cleaning as they go.
They have to get through this hour to get to the well of not wanting more. Neither of them is dutiful. They just wait it out. Hoping one will go for the other as soon as possible. His gaze is upon her and then—because she seems so nervous—he takes it off her again and plants both eyes upon the man in the painting who is standing on the barge with his back to the painter. He doesn’t admit a knowledge of art but wonders what it is to feel a ruddy perennially burning sun through that sweaty, dingy oil-canvas t-shirt and half-dry pair of pants. What kind of forever would it be to stand on the stillness of a moving barge that’s being towed by a tugboat through a painting? Why paint a person backwards like that with one arm up, untired, waving to someone else hidden in the trees on the far side of the river? He doesn’t care and his eyes are upon her again.
Somehow the hour passes. Twenty minutes in, she takes the vodka and ginger glasses to the sink and finds three cans of beer in her crisper. She shouts a question from the kitchen. He says not to worry about it. He’s got a condom.
Forty minutes in she’s less nervous and notices him looking at the painting again, says, “Do you think he’s leaving or just arrived? Waving like that?”
Fifty minutes in, he smiles to her and, again, for the last time, it’s already happened right there before everything. With nine minutes left he puts his hand on her thigh. At five he takes her to the floor. He is a
river between them with that eddying-dentist’s-drill way of going on carving away the soft easy places to rush through. And finally he falls on her, kissing on and on without malice.
She didn’t ever ask what music he likes. Didn’t figure she’d want to listen to it for that hour, sitting together, quiet on a blue corduroy couch with two threadbare cushions and a pristine third. She didn’t even bother to turn on the TV.
For those dredged minutes of putting off passion, she stared at all her electronics and was igneous. Stillness left of heat and motion. Her silent mouth echoed with gunshots and doom in that cavity fortified by a perimeter of teeth. But they didn’t need to talk. If some hinged midnight swung open and crashed complex over the minds of any willing listeners begotten of forgotten mothers, could there have been a resurrection? No. The hour goes by and the clothes get lost with everything else that’s not good enough. They’re finally sweating naked without having to get through undoing anything. His nature, with one foot on the floor, two hands against the wall and his common ground inside her own, seems all the more damned. As if fright and courage were not twins, as if breath were