don’t know what the characters meant. A man who sold lamp parts at the flea market had it among his wares; he couldn’t say where it came from, but he swore it was the color of luck. The forked letters were beautiful. The sunlight that strained through them dyed my bedroom a golden yellow; I felt I was moving through flames. In the heat and light we made love like the last two animals on earth. We struck at each other with our tongues like cobras. We twisted around one another and vowed never to let go. The fear that he would one day leave me jetted through my arteries. Fear was my yoga—it loosened my limbs and elongated my breath. It opened my third eye to the myriad possibilities of misshapen mattresses on nineteenth-century floorboards.
The silence of the golden room with its blue walls and white door frames was astonishing. At most, we whispered to one another. To try to keep the room cool, we kept the door leadingoutside open. A sarong from Bali, the color of apricot skin and just as thin, hung over the screen; it was all that separated us from the din of tourists. Keeping quiet, we read the braille of one another’s bodies. Keeping quiet, he moved on top of me, found his way in. Afterwards, he whispered, I love you. I love you, I said. I remember how those words moved up and down my thighs, how, over time, they evoked not happiness but a thrill. You see, after a certain point nothing resembling peace filled me in that room except perhaps, for the smoky, gold light. No, it was all a thrill, exactly as one might feel after parachuting from a plane, joy dependent upon fear. José Luis’s body unclenched, he kissed my eyelids, my nose. He would have been happy, I’m sure, to rest. But I roused myself, roused him, and we had at it again. To this day, I’m not sure what aroused me more, sex itself or sex the symbol—emblem of a bond all the more magnificent because it would be torn asunder. I prayed he would stay but assumed he would not,assumed he would leave me for his war or for another woman. My mother’s cells had fought one another, a civil war that took her from me. When I was three, a woman lured my father from home. This story is not about them, but it would be dishonest to disregard the role their ghosts played in my life, maybe still are playing; I had to make something beautiful out of abandonment. Long before José Luis left me, I was using sex to weld our bodies together into a bronze statue so magnificent I knew even if it shattered, each remnant could stand alone.
I remember how the room used to spin after we made love. It was always the same—to staunch the strange feelings of panic I got up, got dressed, turned on the classical station, and then took down the cloth with the Farsi words. What might have been a pleasant ritual turned into a series of regimented acts. I took down that beautiful cloth and folded it like a flag. I guess it was a way to make the room stop spinning, although I never would have admitted to myself thatmaking love with José Luis was churning up something like chaos in me. Chaos that creates or destroys worlds, whichever comes first.
You see, real love is quiet as snow, without chaos, hard to write about. Perhaps that is why I haven’t mentioned the man I have been seeing for a year, or maybe our love is just too new to have accrued meanings beyond pleasure. Our idea of a good time is a bed and breakfast in Northern New Mexico where he works for the state weatherproofing houses of the low-income and elderly. When he visits here every other weekend our time together is joyful, blessedly nondescript. His parents were survivors of the Holocaust. He loves life in a way peculiar to those free of reverence for authority, who can see through its claims, its need to order and crush life. When he comes over he tells stories of how he defies the state bureaucracy, weatherproofing in ways beyond those detailed in the code book, using whatever materials are at hand. In their Zen
The silence of the golden room with its blue walls and white door frames was astonishing. At most, we whispered to one another. To try to keep the room cool, we kept the door leadingoutside open. A sarong from Bali, the color of apricot skin and just as thin, hung over the screen; it was all that separated us from the din of tourists. Keeping quiet, we read the braille of one another’s bodies. Keeping quiet, he moved on top of me, found his way in. Afterwards, he whispered, I love you. I love you, I said. I remember how those words moved up and down my thighs, how, over time, they evoked not happiness but a thrill. You see, after a certain point nothing resembling peace filled me in that room except perhaps, for the smoky, gold light. No, it was all a thrill, exactly as one might feel after parachuting from a plane, joy dependent upon fear. José Luis’s body unclenched, he kissed my eyelids, my nose. He would have been happy, I’m sure, to rest. But I roused myself, roused him, and we had at it again. To this day, I’m not sure what aroused me more, sex itself or sex the symbol—emblem of a bond all the more magnificent because it would be torn asunder. I prayed he would stay but assumed he would not,assumed he would leave me for his war or for another woman. My mother’s cells had fought one another, a civil war that took her from me. When I was three, a woman lured my father from home. This story is not about them, but it would be dishonest to disregard the role their ghosts played in my life, maybe still are playing; I had to make something beautiful out of abandonment. Long before José Luis left me, I was using sex to weld our bodies together into a bronze statue so magnificent I knew even if it shattered, each remnant could stand alone.
I remember how the room used to spin after we made love. It was always the same—to staunch the strange feelings of panic I got up, got dressed, turned on the classical station, and then took down the cloth with the Farsi words. What might have been a pleasant ritual turned into a series of regimented acts. I took down that beautiful cloth and folded it like a flag. I guess it was a way to make the room stop spinning, although I never would have admitted to myself thatmaking love with José Luis was churning up something like chaos in me. Chaos that creates or destroys worlds, whichever comes first.
You see, real love is quiet as snow, without chaos, hard to write about. Perhaps that is why I haven’t mentioned the man I have been seeing for a year, or maybe our love is just too new to have accrued meanings beyond pleasure. Our idea of a good time is a bed and breakfast in Northern New Mexico where he works for the state weatherproofing houses of the low-income and elderly. When he visits here every other weekend our time together is joyful, blessedly nondescript. His parents were survivors of the Holocaust. He loves life in a way peculiar to those free of reverence for authority, who can see through its claims, its need to order and crush life. When he comes over he tells stories of how he defies the state bureaucracy, weatherproofing in ways beyond those detailed in the code book, using whatever materials are at hand. In their Zen
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