What We Lose(8)

Then one day there was a girl—a thin girl whom I’d seen studying in the visual arts library. She had papery skin and a severe brown bob that framed cheekbones like snow-capped hills. She wore vintage dresses that I never could have squeezed into and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. She looked designed to attract men like Dean, and it sunk in when I saw them together on the steps of the library that this was who he should be with, not me. It was never me.

I had no reference point for heartbreak. My insides felt emptied out, and there was no need for food, no need for sleep. At first I couldn’t work—couldn’t even focus enough to read a chapter without dissolving into tears. Later, work was all I could do to keep the swirling thoughts from coming in, the images of her in my spot on his bed, her eating oatmeal across from him at his kitchen table.



My parents grew into a very comfortable life in their middle age. After I left for college, they sold their house in the suburbs and bought a two-bedroom apartment in an upscale Philadelphia apartment complex designed by I. M. Pei in the 1960s. The three apartment towers overlook the Delaware River and decaying, bullet-ridden Camden, an aging beacon of the city’s relative wealth.

They used the rest of the money from the sale to buy a vacation home outside Johannesburg and a VW Jetta that they kept in the garage. At least once a year, we flew to Johannesburg, and for at least two weeks, we stayed in the house, a modern stucco home with terra cotta tile on the roof. My father employed domestic workers to clean the windows and sweep the driveway while we were away, and to wash our laundry and mop the floors while we were there.

The vacation house sat atop a hill full of other posh, neatly kept homes to the northwest of the city. Within a half hour we could drive to the dusty three-room house my mother grew up in, where my grandfather still lived. The vacation house’s huge picture windows looked off a cliff to the valley of Johannesburg below. From there, you could see the turquoise of the mansions that surrounded us, where my aunts and uncles lived, and, farther away, the red dirt and tin roofs of the townships clustered closely together. This was where my mother came from, and where my grandfather journeyed from to visit us, to spend a peaceful hour outside in his high socks and straw hat, sunning himself on the deck of our infinity pool.



My lover is kind. He is not quick to anger. He is measured and good-natured. Like a child, but not lacking in experience or knowledge. In the circuit of my life, he is the ground. He balances me, allows me to flow at an even rate.

He has red hair and he is not particularly broad or strong, like I had always imagined my one true love would be. My lover is definitely skinny. Try as he might to eat every carbohydrate and piece of red meat in his path, he can never put on any weight.

Yes, as much as I hate to admit it, I always imagined that I would have one true love, who in my later days would define me as much as my career or my personality. He would be a part of me, and we would come together and make another part. The picture wavered slightly over the years—at times I convinced myself that I would be okay alone, or with several partners; for some periods my husband was a wife. But it always came back to this picture: one partner, for the rest of my life.

My mother told me that a man’s shoulders should be wider than yours, that he should be able to lift you easily. She didn’t like skinny men.

Oftentimes I find myself, when we are fighting over the bills, or when he chews his food too loudly or laughs at the wrong time during a film, asking not whether I am happy, but whether my mother would approve of him.



His last name is one syllable—strong, uncomplicated. It reminds me of steel or stone. His red hair is thick in the front and downy and blond on the back of his neck. His face is smooth, like a baby’s; he doesn’t grow much facial hair, only a dusting of blond on his upper lip and a spot underneath the lower. He says it caused him a lot of shame in high school and college in combination with his lanky frame. The other boys called him Twiggy. Now he works out in the yard, lifting logs above his head, and runs for miles “to clear his head.” No one in my family, going back to Africa in both directions, has ever run for any reason except self-preservation. He laughs at things like this and doesn’t ask too many questions. He is interested in my background, in love with my skin, but not too in love. There is a casualness bred from familiarity that makes me at ease around him, that drew me to him in the first place.





When my lover and I fuck, we fuck with the fear of the world in us. We are fucking on the edge of a cliff. We are fucking death right in the ass, and death loves it. We are fucking our own deaths, and our mothers’ deaths, and the deaths of our friends and the deaths of our rights.

One day, a sunny day at that, on one of my weekend trips to Portland, Oregon, we have sex for an entire day. We ignore the sun and stay in bed, and we eat and suck each other for twelve hours, and when we’re done we order in Thai food and eat in bed. We fall asleep with dirty dishes on the floor.

At first I’m concerned about his landlady hearing us, but then I don’t care. I am doped out like the worst of the dope addicts. I want to do this every day for the rest of my life, and I don’t care if they find me ass-naked with my face in his lap when I’m dead.

I want to touch it.





I want

I’m touching it Just there don’t stop Shit

Right there Right thereRight there Right thererightthererightthere