All That's Left to Tell(57)

“Yeah, you did.”

She thought about it. She realized she had her eyes closed. “Are you sure I told you that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anyway, my neighbor and I had our glass of wine. And that was a time I was drinking a lot. With the man I was living with. I couldn’t tell you why now. It’s not like I was trying to numb myself. Or somehow overthrowing the memories of a painful childhood. It tasted good, then. And at night, you know? It made it easier. I was only nineteen. I was still used to thinking of my body as a child’s in some way. I remember how we’d sit across from each other almost every night. At this small dining room table we’d dragged home from Goodwill. It had metal legs that someone had painted with a thick, green paint, and this Formica top that was supposed to look like wood, and two matching metal chairs. It was probably patio furniture, but that never occurred to me then. We had a bottle of whiskey on the table between us, and two shot glasses we’d found at Goodwill, too, mine with Betty Boop and his with a hunter’s hat. Who would make a shot glass with a hunter’s hat?

“Anyway, he started calling me Betty, and I started calling him Hunter, which I think he liked. His real name was Seth. He was young, too, twenty at the time, and not much more worldly than I was. So we’d sit across from each other, and our first shot glass we’d sip. We’d talk about our days, the silly details. At the time, he was working unloading trucks in the market district, and he’d tell me how he was shifting crates of lettuce when a chicken came from behind one of them, and his boss ordered him to capture it. Then he’d describe in great detail how he had to chase it around the back of the truck, and how they had to close the door behind him so he could corner it. Those silly kinds of stories. I don’t know if they were even true. I was working in an Asian market that sold sandwiches to college students, and I was in charge of making them. I don’t think my boss understood half of what I said, but he always smiled at me, and he paid me well, under the table.”

She heard something scurry near a trash bin next to the school building, and flinched.

“It’s nothing,” Genevieve said.

“I thought the guy from Salt Lake was making another appearance.”

“That’d be something, wouldn’t it?”

Claire was remembering.

“So we’d sit at that table and sip that first shot of whiskey. And for a long time, each time seemed like the first time, if you know what I mean. Like we were friends, or on a first date. We’d talk about the chicken on the loading dock, or the sweet old man who came into the market all stooped over and ordered the same sandwich every day, or how Seth saw a falcon flying above one of the city’s skyscrapers, or how sometimes I could wash the smell of onions from my hands, and sometimes I couldn’t. And we’d sit at that table each night, and he’d say, ‘Can I smell your hands?’ and if the scent of onions was there, you could see his face—and he was beautiful in the way boys that age are. He looked feminine. I mean his face did. Narrow. An almost delicate, thin nose, and a shy, sideways smile. Wet eyes. But what I mean is that when he would smell my hands, this sense of relief would pass over his face. As if he were thinking, Okay, now I know you. Because of the onions. Now you’re familiar again. And then he’d pour us another whiskey into each of our shot glasses, which we’d drink faster. Because what we were really doing was trying to get to each other’s body.”

Her skin was flushed warm with the memory, and her scalp was tingling.

“We’d have four or five drinks like that. One after the other, and somehow we’d know when it was the last one, and we’d look each other in the eyes before downing it in a single swallow. And then I’d reach across that metal table for his hand, and we’d pull each other to our feet. I’d feel the whiskey burning in my veins, in my throat and stomach, but, you know … it didn’t hurt or make me sick because I knew what was coming. I knew that meant that we were going to the bedroom. It made me excited. By the time he pulled me down onto that beat-up mattress, I was almost panting.

“At first, it was the way it always is when you’re young. I was so hungry for him. Any part of his body. I wanted my mouth on it, or I wanted it in my mouth. Of course, we were drunk. I remember once I was kissing his legs. His thighs, his thick muscles. And then I started kissing his knee. This will sound silly, but he had beautiful knees. And I guess I was trying to—see it with my lips, too, and my tongue. The way the bone was rounded and how if I opened my mouth at its widest I could almost hold it inside. I mean, it was his knee. And then the slope just below that that led to his shin. I followed that with my tongue. And the dimpled spaces on either side. And the filaments of hair there. After a while, I felt his hand on my head, and he said, ‘You okay?’ I probably had been obsessed with his knee for five minutes. But it would be his ears another time. Or the small of his back. Or his rib cage when he lay back naked with his hands behind his head.”

She heard Genevieve’s steady breathing beside her, but she knew she wasn’t asleep.

“I knew I was troubled. I mean, not because of the sex, or even the drinking. My head wasn’t right, and my mother and father and the doctor said I wasn’t right. They worried that I was depressed, that I was bipolar, that I suffered from schizophrenia. I said stuff like, ‘Look at the schizophrenic world. I’m taking its cues.’ But the thing was, I knew. I knew it. I knew how I always felt the dark half of the world was screaming at my door. And then with Seth’s body—for a while all that mattered was that. I endured the day to get to the table and sit across from him and drink, and then I endured the drinking to get to our bed.”