Trust Exercise(3)
David took her thumb in his mouth, tongued it gently, did not slobber it, kissed it back so it lay once again on his lips. The thumb traced the cleft of his lips as if taking their measure.
Mr. Kingsley’s voice must have continued, unraveling guidance, but they no longer heard him.
David had never in this way deferred a kiss. He felt skewered by lust and as if he could hang there, afloat on the pain. Up floated his hands, in tandem, and closed over her breasts. She shuddered and pressed against him and he lifted his hands just a fraction away, so his palms only grazed her nipples where they strained the thin weave of her cotton T-shirt. If she was wearing a bra it was a soft wisp of one, a silk rag encircling her ribs. Her nipples rained down in his mind in the form of hard glittering gems, diamonds and quartzes and those faceted clumps of rock crystal one grew in a jar on a string. Her breasts were ideally small, precisely the size of the cup of his hand. He weighed them and measured them, marveling, brushing them, with his palms or the tips of his fingers, the same way again and again. With his now-cast-off girlfriend from his previous school he’d evolved the Formula and had then become imprisoned by it: first Kissing with Tongue for the fixed interval, then Tits for the fixed interval, then Fingering Her for the fixed interval before, culminatingly, Fucking. Never a step neglected nor a change to the order. A sex recipe. Now with a shock he realized that it needn’t be thus.
They knelt, knees to knees, his palms cradling her breasts, her hands clutching his skull either side of his face, her face pushed into his shoulder so that a patch of the cloth of his polo shirt grew hotly wet from her breath. He turned his face into the weight of her hair, basking in her aroma, exulting in it. How he’d found her. No word to describe it except recognition. Some chemical made her for him, him for her; they were not yet too fucked up by life that they wouldn’t realize it.
“Make your way to a space on the wall and sit against it. Hands relaxed by your sides. Eyes closed, please. I’ll be bringing the lights back in stages, to smooth the transition.”
Well before Mr. Kingsley completed his speech Sarah broke away, crawled as if fleeing a fire until she hit a wall. Pulled her knees to her chest, crushed her face to her knees.
David was scorch-mouthed, felt strangled by his underpants. His hands, so exquisitely sensitive moments before, were as clumsy as if stuffed inside boxing gloves. He palmed and palmed his hair, which was short and unvarying, off his forehead.
As the lights came on each stared steadily forward into the room’s empty center.
The crucial first year of their learning continued. In classes with tables, they sat at separate tables. In classes with chairs set in rows, they sat in separate rows. Hanging around in the halls, in the lunch-room, on the benches for smoking, they adhered to separate nodes of conversation, sometimes standing just inches apart, turned away from each other. But in moments of transition, of general movement, David’s gaze burned a hole through the air, Sarah’s glance darted out, then away, like a whip. Unbeknownst to themselves they were as noticeable as lighthouses. In repose, even when they both stared straight ahead, the wire ran between them, and their peers changed their paths to avoid tripping on it.
They needed distance to give them fresh darkness. At the end of the year, one knee restlessly bouncing, eyes sweeping the room’s farthest corners, knuckles manically popping, David paused next to Sarah and asked, thickly, for her address. His family was going to England. He’d send her a postcard. She wrote the address briskly, handed it to him, he turned on his heel.
The postcards began a week later. On their fronts, nothing special: London Bridge, the humorless guardsmen at Buckingham Palace, a picturesque punk with a three-foot-high Mohawk. Unlike David, whose family regularly traveled to places like Australia, Mexico, Paris, Sarah had never been out of the country, but even she recognized the postcards as generic, pulled at random from the souvenir-shop carousel. The backs were something else, densely written edge to edge, her address and the stamp barely squeezed between lines. She felt grateful the mailman kept bringing them; he must be squinting at them, as she did, but with different emotions. At least one postcard a day, sometimes several, that she fished out as soon as the mailman had come, leaving the bills and coupons for her mother to find when she got home from work. David’s handwriting was effusive, almost feminine, with tall loops and wide flourishes and yet great regularity, all the letters at just the same angle, all the t’s and l’s just the same height. The content was much like the form: exuberant with observation, and yet deftly measured. Each card made a little vignette. And in the lower right corners, squeezed next to her zip code, one or another of the tentative endearments that wrung the air from her lungs.
The vast southern city they lived in was rich in land, poor in everything else—no bodies of water, no drainage, no hills, no topographical variety of any sort, no public transportation or even the awareness of the lack of such a thing. The city, like vines with no trellis, sprawled out thinly and nonsensically, its lack of organization its sole unifying aspect. Gracious neighborhoods of live oak and chunky brick mansions, such as the neighborhood where David lived, lay cheek by jowl with wastes of gravel, or US Postal Service facilities resembling US Army bases, or Coca-Cola bottling plants resembling wastewater treatment facilities. And chintzy, labyrinthine apartment complexes of many hundreds of two-story brick boxes, strewn about scores of algae-stained in-ground swimming pools, such as the complex in which Sarah lived, might exhaust themselves at their easternmost edge on the wide boulevard, lined with tattered palm trees, which on its opposite side washed the gates of the city’s most prestigious club for Jews. David’s mother, on the family’s return from London, was pleasantly surprised to find him interested in racquetball and swimming at the Jewish Community Center, for which, since enrolling at CAPA, he’d shown only contempt. “Have you even still got a racquet?” she asked.