“That was an important kiss,” he said.
They made their shuffling way along the sidewalk, traveling a few paces more. She rested her head on his biceps and shut her eyes. A few steps later he tightened his arm around her. She had been drifting, half asleep on her feet, and stumbled.
“Hey,” he said. “No more of that. Look. We have to get you home. Get on.” He threw his leg over the saddle of the bike.
“Get on where?”
“The basket,” he said.
“We can’t. I can’t.”
“You can. You have before. I’ll ride you home.”
“It’s a mile.”
“It’s downhill the whole way. Get on.”
This was something they had done in college, goofing, her up on the basket on the front of his bike. She was a slip of a girl then and was not much more now, five foot six and 115 pounds. She looked at the basket, resting between his handlebars, then at the long hill, banking down away from the hospital and around a curve.
“You’ll kill me,” she said.
“No. Not today. Get on.”
She couldn’t resist him. There was a part of her that inclined naturally toward passivity, toward accommodation. She came around the front of the bike, put a leg over the wheel, and then scootched her butt up onto the basket.
And all at once they were off, the trees on her right beginning to glide dreamily by. The ash fell around them in enormous feathery flakes, falling in her hair and onto the brim of his baseball cap. In no time at all, they were going fast enough to be killed.
The spokes whirred. When she exhaled, the air was torn from her mouth.
People forgot that time and space were the same thing until they were moving quickly, until pine trees and telephone poles were snapping past them. Then, in the middle of all the rush, time expanded, so that the second it took to cross twenty feet lasted longer than other seconds. She felt that sense of acceleration in her temples and the pit of her stomach and she was glad for Jakob and glad to be away from the hospital and glad for speed. For a while she clutched the basket with both hands, but then, when the spokes began to hum—whirring so fast they made a kind of droning music—she let go, and held her arms out to either side, and soared, a gull sailing into the wind, while the world sped up, and sped up.
6
The night of the hospital fire, Jakob led her through the house, and she yawned over and over, like a child up past her bedtime. She felt lightly sedated, awake but thoughtless, so that she never knew what was going to happen to her next, even when what was going to happen next was entirely predictable. He walked her down to the bedroom, holding her little hand. That was all right. She was tired and the bedroom seemed like the right place to go. Then he peeled her out of her nurse greens while she stood there and let him. She had on pale pink old-lady underwear that came to her belly button. He tugged those down as well. She yawned hugely and put her hand over her mouth and he laughed because he had been leaning in to kiss her. She laughed, too. It was funny, yawning in his face that way.
The night of the hospital fire, he drew her a bath in the deep claw-footed tub that she loved so. She didn’t know when he walked away from her to do it, because it seemed he never left her side, but when he led her in there, the tub was already full. The lights were off, but there were candles. She was happy to see the bath because she smelled like smoke and sweat and the hospital, but mostly smoke, and she had ash on her, and some of that ash was probably dead bodies.
The night of the hospital fire, Jakob laved water over her back with a washcloth. He scrubbed her neck and ears, and then collected her hair on the top of her head and dunked her. She came up laughing. Then he told her to get up, and she stood in the tub while he lathered her in soap. He soaped her breasts and the small of her back and her neck and then he smacked her bum and told her to get back into the tub and she obediently sat.
The night of the hospital fire, Jakob said, “It’s so fucking cheap when people say I love you. It’s a name to stick on a surge of hormones, with a little hint of loyalty thrown in. I’ve never liked saying it. Here’s what I say: We’re together, now and until the end. You have everything I need to be happy. You make me feel right.”
He squeezed out the washcloth and hot water rained down her neck. She shut her eyes, but saw the red light of the candle flame through her eyelids.
He went on, “I don’t know how much time we have left. Could be fifty years. Could be one more week. But I do know that we’re not going to get cheated out of one second of being together. We’re going to share everything and feel everything together. And I am going to let you know, in the way I touch you, and the way I kiss you”—as he said it, he touched her, and kissed her—“that you are the best thing in my life. And I’m a selfish man, and I want every inch of you, and every minute of your life I can have. There’s no my life anymore. And no your life. Just our life, and we’re going to have it our way. I want birthday cake every day and you naked in bed every night. And when it’s time to be done, we’ll have that our way, too. We’ll open that bottle of wine we bought in France and listen to our favorite music and have some laughs and take some happy pills and go to sleep. Die pretty after the party is over, instead of going down screaming like those sad, desperate people who lined up to die in the hospital.”
It was like hearing his wedding vows all over again, just as yearning and sweet and intense. So that was all right.
Except it wasn’t, not entirely. There was something wrong about calling the people who came to the hospital sad and desperate. There was something immoral about mocking them. Renée Gilmonton had not been sad and desperate. Renée Gilmonton had organized story hour for the kids in the ward.
But Jakob had the gift of confession, could talk about how he wanted to touch her and be with her, with all the daring and athletic skill he brought to riding a unicycle or walking on a tightrope. He was small and compact and muscular, and also intellectually muscular, mentally something of an acrobat. Sometimes she felt that those intellectual acrobatics were a bit tiring; at those times she felt less as if they were feeling everything together, more as if she were simply his audience, someone to applaud his latest leap through the burning hoop of existentialism and his backflip onto the trampoline of nonconformity. But then she was opening her legs to him, because his hands knew how to do things she needed to feel. And anyway, all his talk just meant that he wanted her and she made him happy. She had to kiss him again, and she did, twisting in the bathtub and flattening her breasts against the cold porcelain, and holding the back of his head so he couldn’t get away until she had a good long taste of him. Then she broke free and yawned once more and he laughed and that was all right.