The Lovers

Prose 5 of chapter three

Jul 25, 2024

“So here’s how the story goes,” she said to Isaac.

“There’s this guy and he gets to this place where nobody’s who they seem, and he wants to forget his past, live for the moment, as they say.”

“You think that’s what I’m trying to do.”

“He’s wishing,” she said. “It’s all about love at first sight if you believe in that. But then it’s a comedy.”

“So the guy gets the girl and everybody goes home happy.” He touched her lower lip. “Here’s a fact: In seventy years, a heart beats two and a half billion times—in my case, more.”

“And, in threescore and ten?”

He laughed, “Are we keeping score?”

***

My heart beats fifty-eight times in a minute, steady, slow. I keep score.

***

She laid her head against his legs, against his crotch, her arms around him. He circled the crown of her head with his hands. This way they comforted one another. They didn’t kiss.

For her the moment of union was the kiss. It must have alarmed her. She wouldn’t have thought of their lovemaking as fucking though they did it, wanted it, needed it. And then the rest: When? How? If? “We must.”

Could she go for months with only the kiss though the kiss quickened the fire? Did this urgency frighten her?

The kiss. What could it mean? That moment when their lips grazed, barely touched, as each took a breath. And then the kiss itself. How could desire become this particular, how could this concrete act of touching mouths be so different from anything else she’d known?—so extraordinary in the reaches of feeling, the sudden rush to the groin, the awareness of the heart beating. Did she feel silly, romantic, sentimental, over the top, like a kid?

They’d both recently turned fifty.

Lena didn’t tell her age to anyone anymore. She would often say, “I know this is trite, straight out of the movies, but I like to say I’m a woman of a certain age.” She liked to say this because she was uncertain about most everything in her life that seemed to matter. And this phrase was a way of expressing that uncertainty, its double meaning, the word certain to say uncertain.

He’d say this sort of thing, “I could close my eyes or turn off the lights and light a candle.”

She’d laugh. “Gimme a break. Romance-novel talk.”

But he knew when she was alone or with me, her husband, that when she was without him, she would replay these words in her head and long for him even when she considered discarding him, when she considered living a sane and good life. She wanted ever so much to be good, though, being of a certain age, she could no longer define that word good.

He said, “You’re really giving me a hard time today. I give up. Here’s what you want to hear. We’re on the brink of disaster.”