Burn the Body

Gabriella Fee

[burnthebody]

[burnthebody]

[burnthebody]

[burnthebody]

[burnthebody]

XIX.

She’s on the couch, her long legs tucked up beside her, watching Wheel of Fortune and eating noodles from a take-out container. She watches Wheel of Fortune to get to Jeopardy, at which she is almost prodigiously skilled. Alex Trebek reminds her of her father – arch and unfunny. But now she’s trying to solve a four-word puzzle. The clue is “before & after,” and the board says, “_hat_ th_ t_m_ ma_h_n_.” You come in with groceries and watch from the doorway as Linda from Fargo spins the wheel. You’ve always loved the click of the pointer as the spokes travel through it. You love the way the sound moves up your spine.

“What’s the time machine,” she says flatly, without turning around.

[burnthebody]

XVIII.

She replaces the kitchen window. The one you haven’t been able to close since August. You hover and worry and she slices her head open on a pane of glass. When the bandage comes off, she has a long scar that curls like a “C” around her temple and above her left eyebrow. In the months that follow, she checks it in the mirror every few hours; ritualistically, almost obsessively. You say, “It’s fading, it’s going to be gone soon,” and it is. Once you’ve lost her, you turn this over in your head with a ritualism that matches hers. You realize she wasn’t anxious that the scar would remain, but that it would disappear completely. She wore her beauty wearily, like something heavy she was scouting around for a place to put down.  

[burnthebody]

XVII.

Everything is ringing. Alarm at six-thirty, bright jackhammers on the way to work, phones going off with unusual vigor. It’s tenuous, earliest spring. The world melts into itself and reveals the city, the secrets of a winter spent. Needles and booze bottles and trash ripening in alleys.  Under all of it, new, exalted and shocking enough to sustain you - The fact of your attraction. There is no question of doing anything to bring it to fruition. Your desire is a closed circuit. It demands no gestalt. From the window all day you watch the steady run-off, snow and ice repurposed in the gutter. You are transfixed by it, by the shimmering quality of your own life upended, heart excavated, propped on stilts and brushed clean. What kind of archeologist is this woman? How much truth can she reveal through the sole act of turning away?

[burnthebody]

XVI.

And then there is her smile like a taut bow, drawn for the shot. 

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XV.

You stay in the mountains until her hair fades three shades to gold and her mouth is stained with fat berries. She is your only source of light and heat, chopping wood in the whorl of the evening and trailing clods of dirt across the carpet. The cabin is tucked between great dunes of moss, waves of fungus and gnarled root that thrust up through the floor of the forest.

“Primordial,” you say, out of breath on your first approach, and she swings chuckling up to the door. There is a meadow a half mile west from which you can see the sun rise through a film of gnats and ascending pollen, and beyond that, a lake so large you can just make out a row of summer homes on the opposite bank. You spin stories about the lives of the rich, give them unfaithful husbands and beautiful, scheming au pairs. Some of them have children who leap like starfish from the dock into the still, green water.

You never talk about what you want, about whether or not you will be back some day, yourselves with money and children. You never break the seal of the thing. You keep your own stories private, and then walk back when the bugs come out, silent except for the snap of twigs underfoot. She might not be dreaming at all, just watching the light fall or thinking about the city going on without her.

[burnthebody]

XIV.

“More than anything? More than slam poetry or people who think their cats love them?” She takes a sip of her Manhattan and grimaces. Her ginger tabby leaps lithely from the bookshelf to the back of the couch. “More than anything, I hate the Platonic equation of beauty and virtue.” You try to roll your eyes, but you’ve never gotten the hang of taking her less than seriously. “No really. As a foundational ideology, it’s criminal. Eugenics, misogyny, the media’s total erasure of difference…It all goes back to Plato and his dumbfuck idea that the beautiful is the good and the good is the beautiful.”

“Why? Because beauty is subjective?”

“Well yeah, but even with that aside, even if beauty were this quantifiable thing, the idea that because it’s pleasing to the eye it must be good! What a terrible, dehumanizing concept. It disqualifies most of us, not to mention our art, from engaging in the pursuit of virtue. It’s an abject failure of the imagination.” She squints into the distance as if there’s someone else, some skeptic in the room; as if she’s turning the best angle of her face toward a camera. “I mean, I’d go so far as to argue the opposite, to argue that the good becomes good through labor, through being practically eviscerated by struggle and made ugly by the world. The hideous is the good and the good is the hideous.”

“And you want to be good.”

I’d rather be virtuous than beautiful.”

“And your art? You’d rather your art be virtuous than beautiful?”

“My art? I don’t know. I’d rather my self be virtuous than beautiful.”

“It takes a beauty to say that.”

She winks at you, sleazy and sultry, not entirely for your benefit though you’re the only one here.  

“An intentional obfuscation of my point.”

[burnthebody]

XIII.

But back to the beginning. Back to the pear orchard in New Jersey. One of the trees runs horizontal to the ground, as if it has dropped all its fruit and then bent at the waist to retrieve it. You straddle the trunk of this tree and whisper to it and comb back its leaves. You are a girl disguised as a boy disguised as a knight riding reckless into a war you started. Chickens run like rain across the lawn. You give them the names of biblical women, brave names like Rebecca, and they swear fealty. If your little brother comes stumbling out of the house, fat and cheerful with his stick, you’ll make him a foot soldier until supper.

Every night at this time, you adjust your saddle and look out across the hill, past the trees and the little white house and the road so narrow that one car has to pull over while the other passes. There is a pond on the horizon of your vision, surrounded by pussy willows. Eight winters ago, just before you were born, the Fosters’ boy fell through the ice and was half-saved. Every night at this time, you watch the pond and the sun sliding toward it. Every night, a mourning dove sings “or, or,” and something swells in your ribs and in your kneecaps – gladness and sorrow all at once at the meeting of your bones. The pear trees catch their breath as the wind changes direction and then the sun hits the pond full in the face and it hemorrhages gold.

You close your eyes as tight as you can, but the round light of the water is still in them. You open. The world softens and blues. And then the moon, all at once, like a magician’s dove.

[burnthebody]

XII.

Breakfast at a diner in midtown. Eggs, bacon, hash browns, orange juice, coffee. It’s brisk and chilly. Seven o’clock in late March. You wear boots with a heel and something silk in the shade of blue that makes spilled milk of your neck and shoulders. 

After breakfast, you walk her to the office. You stand outside for a moment, facing each other. With her hands in her pockets, she opens the wings of her jacket. You move into her, warm, and she closes the jacket around you. You hook your fingers into her belt, pull her hips into yours. She smells of leather and the living city. You kiss her. Black coffee. She doesn’t seem to care that you’re in plain sight. You pull away and tip back slightly. She catches you, a hand on your lower back.

“Can I see you tonight?” She asks huskily. Her pupils are huge. You bite your lip. You cannot even pretend to be coy because of what your own eyes are doing. 

She takes a few lazy steps backward, still looking at you. Finally, she turns. She hops up the concrete steps with her hands stuffed in her pockets, turning again at the door before flashing a foolish grin and ducking inside. You pivot on your heels. It takes a moment for time to unwrinkle, for the city to begin sounding again. Your belly is warm and full. The air is fresh and smells of fried dough from the vender across the street. He warms his ovens. Steam rises from the grates. For a brief moment you love this hard city indiscriminately. You feel a thrill and then a twinge of guilt at that thrill, at the fact that this chaos around you is now abstract fodder for eclipsing joy.  

[burnthebody]

XI.

Happiness hovers, shimmers, like the moment between impact and pain. No one can have been here before you, can have loved something so impossibly tenuous as a human being. But dogs do this, elephants and flies, all soft creatures in the noon of love bare their bellies to the knife.

[burnthebody]

X.

“You smell nice,” you tell her once, in the back of a taxi. 

“What do I smell like?” She looks slightly alarmed.

You chuckle, lean into her neck. “You smell like sandalwood.” You drop your head onto her shoulder and yawn. “And sometimes cigarettes.” The city lights swim. They pass you by like a reel of film. 

[burnthebody]

IX.

You say stupid things to keep her swinging along beside you, the basket between you stuffed with cheese rinds and empty bottles of wine. Cumulous clouds gather in the sea-glass side of a skyscraper. It’s cooler now – cool on your sunburnt skin, your fever heart. She moves for home like a horse moves for home, instinctively quicker, but there’s nothing ahead or behind. The goal of your life is to find the most beautiful thing about love and fold it into her ear one night while she is sleeping.

[burnthebody]

VIII.

Sex is apotheosis, but there are infinite moments more shockingly new - fine-boned feet in sheer black stockings, the small sounds of sleep, dusk-pink fingernails in the cold.

[burnthebody]

VII.

The whole of your life is a drawn out chord. She gets up from bed in her underwear and follows you into the bathroom. She looks over your shoulder into the mirror, into her own eyes, and makes a face. You’re brushing your teeth or you’d kiss her. You watch while she tames her hair. She isn’t doing anything useful, just standing there to be close to you. You grin around the handle of your toothbrush.