Dog Tags by Stephen Becker

another lifetime,” he said. “Don’t,” she said, “don’t,” and he knew that she was thinking, or trying not to, of Fred. Fred was her fiancé and she loved him. In Arizona. Fred Wilcox. Really Alfred. Exotic, like an early English king. She loved him. They shared ecstasies, an accent, geography, mathematics (she was a graduate student in statistics). But for now it scarcely mattered. But. Therefore. Consequently. Nevertheless. “We all do so much damn explaining,” she said. “I suppose it’s the Bible, all those stories when I was nine. Now I have a big black Hebrew of my own. Next thing to a beautiful Negro.” Benny was shocked but recovered quickly. His experience of master races was not encouraging. He pictured himself with a black girl. She was a housemaid. Conscientiously he gave her other occupations but to his shame his mind pressed her continually back into servitude. He saw her dusting, raised her skirt. Dismayed by this infidelity, he nibbled at Nan. His succulent pink pig, his Arizona ham.
    Nan feared the irrevocable word and never said that she loved Benny. She said everything else: want, adore, need, assorted drivel. Benny too refrained from oratory but it broke out: “God! I love!” And their sadness never lingered. Twenty-five; twenty-two; what else mattered? What else should matter? Romp and hurrah and the world their oyster!
    And the acrobatics! In the center ring Beniamino sways, twirls, swings from hoop to hoop in loops and twists and gyres and gainers, grinning like a seal, barking and snuffling likewise, peering through blond canyons, chasms and coppices at a sternum, a collarbone, a smile, a row of vertebrae caravanning single file over a tawny desert toward a tawny nape. And Nan, scaling the flanks of Ben Beer, blushed. Morals? Mere exertion? Blushed here, blushed there, checkered and patched pink and white—“It’s your beard,” she said, and he ran to shave. Sometimes he was Benny the Navigator, dauntlessly ranging the hemispheres, pitching and rolling and yawing, beating and reaching and running, pausing in astonishment to check his position (celestial! stem to stern!) as if he were the first that ever burst into that silent she; then the laughter died; and waves rose to meet the black sky. Once he was Benny Agonized (he: ruined for life! she: the first fine careless rupture!) but recovered. That frightened him. He had heard from an earnest colleague that each man had in him precisely three thousand fucks; should he save one or two for his old age? Nah! Onward and upward with der Arzt!
    Children. And yet they attempted respectability, as if desperately needing confirmation of an external, objective world. They talked. They talked of God and politics and sport, of books and movies. They talked of her family and his, her body and his, her first piece (Ford) and his (basement). They ate sandwiches and drank milk. Once they visited a restaurant. Benny was charmed and horrified by this outlander who doused eggs with ketchup, who guzzled coffee and spurned tea. They tried a movie and found public life unbearable. “Movies!” he groaned. “There’s no time. I’m only superhuman, not omnipotent.”
    â€œI wonder,” she murmured, and that killed another hour and took a few years off Benny’s life. “Painters would die for you,” he said. “Sculptors would kill for you.” “Two boys beat each other up for me,” she said. “We were sixteen. I loved it.” He told her about his scars, about 57359. Fred had served in the Navy and soon she told him about that, and about Fred’s brilliance in Boolean algebras and such, and the coming Ph.D.
    She moved with a heavy, touching (because one day it would desert her) grace, the breasts he loved swinging gently, the large rosy nipples almost winking as he watched in delight; otherwise she was firm and did not bobble. He loved