L.

[3.] Forgive Me For How I Love Him

Thinking about D, here in my apartment. 

"What have you been doing?" he asks, on the phone. "You sound like you've been asleep."

"I've been sleeping," I say.

"Oh." He is chastened by the softness in my voice. He likes me again. He thinks that I am sweet. You know how sometimes he is willing to think of me as sweet? Not like you, you devilish fellow, with your yellow hair and little purring voice that goes, "Not today. Stop calling here." Me? Sweet in your eyes? No. You have no mercy in your heart at all. Really you are so hard. Dasius is stubborn, but he is not hard like you. No.

"I'm tired," I say, cradling the receiver to my ear against the pillow. Of course the entire telephone is white enamel with gold gilding. Because Dasius bought it. Gauche! He is the tackiest man alive. I love him. Do you hear what my heart says today? That I love him.

"Oh. What have you been doing?" A little cheekiness comes to his voice. He is touching his pen to his mouth. I know he is! He is smiling at me in America. He is winking at the air! He is so cute.

See, lover. You are not the only one who flirts. You are not the only one who shakes his peacock's tail. Dasius has a very good tail, though its many eyes are shut.

"I have been thinking about your fat little bottom," I tell him.

"Stop this phone call immediately," he says, his feathers lying flat again.

"What are you doing?"

"Your taxes."

"I've not touched money," I say. "I've not touched a single coin."

"I touched them on your behalf."

"I'll tell you what to touch."

"You called me to tease me? You're bored?"

We have had, since the invention of the telephone, endless phone calls like this. It is better than teasing him in person, because he possesses a strange power to silence me, to stun me with his dark beauty, and make me say, "Oh God, forgive me for how I love him. Oh, save me," and to make me melancholy. He touches me the best when I am low. Oh that is the truth. It is his hands that I want when I cannot drag myself from the floor. His cheek to press upon my shoulder, and his eyes to watch over me while I sleep. 

Yes, it is good that there is the telephone instead. I hear the soft, wet sound of lips parting from across the sea. I return the receiver to its cradle before he can say my name so softly that I will make him promises that I cannot keep.

Later I try to touch my skin gently. I try to touch my skin in a loving way, as if afraid to break myself, the way that he does. I roll around on the floor with my eyes shut.

He wonders what I do when he is not here. 

I know that when you miss me you write me little letters, full of birds and news of you. I know that you shred these letters and throw them away. I know about it because your son has seen you write them, and he tells me.

D is not as anguished as you are. When he misses me, he only looks at the sun until he cannot stand it.

In my heart today there is you, your son, and my Dasius. You are last. 

*

In childhood, I sat on the ground with a large, round basket while an older boy cleaned anchovies. He stripped them of their large scales and tossed the clean fish in. He was so good and quick at it.

He had told me his name the previous night, but I had not retained it. Instead, I sat and looked at him, and wondered what his name could be. A grasshopper was crawling against my leg. Occasionally, when the boy looked up, he winked at me because I was looking at him.