Supine

The fluorescents disclose the silver in James’ slick hair. When they flicker out, we’re left in the bluish light of evening.

“So, do you like college?” He chops a red bell pepper.

I take a sip of my coffee and nod, my hands molded around the white ceramic. I don’t know how he knows I’ve answered.

“Good. What are you studying?” The tiles are cold on my unsocked feet. I hoist myself onto the counter, drawing my feet out of contact with the floor. James still doesn’t look up. His hand slows incrementally as he slices down.

“Music,” I finally say, running my hand over the counter’s inky surface. It comes away with a layer of salt. The corner of his mouth twitches up.

“That’s great. You know, I used to –”

“James, are you and my mother having sex?”

The knife slips, grazing flesh. He curses, banging his other hand on the counter.

The look he throws me is feral but somehow not threatening. I take the first aid kit down from its place behind the breadbasket. He offers up his hand without complaint, but I can feel the tension in his wrist, the crane of his neck as he stares down at me while I act as doctor. He’s obviously not going to answer my question, but he doesn’t demand to know just what the hell I’m talking about either. That surprises me.

What a shame that he’s fucking her.

I hear a key turning in the lock, so I slink back to my corner of the kitchen. Go back to sipping my coffee as she totters in, tote bag over one arm, purse over the other. The tote bag is full of wine, and the bottles clink together like the windchimes that used to hang on the knob of our back door.

“Hey,” James says, and his face fills with color. Usually it’s bone, hard and fragile. But when he sees her, it’s light flashing through the blinds, a cotton sundress.

I turn to go, not bothering to pretend I’ll stay.

“Mar?”

James is slipping the bottles out one at a time, their slick bodies catching the light. She’s leaning against the counter, leaning close to him, but not close enough that they’re touching. He doesn’t seem aware of it. She pretends not to be. She hooks a thumb over the edge of her jacket pocket and smiles at him as he studies the label of one bottle intently. Why do I hate it that she’s so goddamn happy?

“You’re going to have dinner with us, right?”

James glances over his shoulder at me. I expect him to look panicked, to practically beg me with his eyes not to stay. But he looks worried.

“Actually, I was going to get something with Sadie. That okay?”

She smiles weakly. She won’t push it.

“Of course.”

I haven’t hung out with Sadie in years. I didn’t bother to tell Mom that the friendship dissolved. It would have upset her more than it did me, and I’ve learned to pick my melodramas. Besides, even the friendships I kept are weaker now. Maybe not everybody loses their hometown connection when they go off to college, but I did. It helps for it to be tenuous to begin with.

Sometimes I start to think that Mom knows I’m lying about going to meet Sadie. But I still don’t tell her because guilt, more than lenience, helps me slip away.

When I’m supposed to be getting pizza or coffee or drinks with Sadie, I walk down to the hill behind our house. It slopes down sharply, a green wave tapering down until it meets the tree line. I lie down on the hill’s face. I only do this at night, with the dark collapsing about me, its few sources of light a luxury.          One of those sources breathes out onto the grass from the living room window.

So you see, I could find out for sure if they were fucking, if I wanted to. But I always lie just far enough away that strains of conversation are impossible. I have never made the simplest move: standing up, walking a few feet, and peering in the window.

James wasn’t around when I was a kid. I vaguely remember my dad mentioning him a few times. There was never a sense of placement, of relationship. “That’s what James used to do” or “I guess James was still living there then?” My mother never offered much in response, just a gentle nod or a placid smile. I don’t remember thinking that much about it. If I did, only that perhaps my mom didn’t care for this James person. I remember him coming to dinner once and only once when I was in high school. She laughed at his jokes like she thought they were genuinely funny, but there was some pain in the sound of it. She only nodded along as Dad discussed current events that I knew he had no feelings about. When my dad was in the kitchen or distracted by something on the TV in the den, she talked to James. At that point, I understood more. Understood that my mother actually liked James better than my dad did. I even thought she probably had a little crush on him, the way I saw all the moms have on some random unknown after about the fifteen-year mark. But again, I don’t recall thinking about it any more than that. At the time, he wore a tie and had a bad habit of clearing his throat. I’m sure he must have talked about his job, but I don’t remember what it was. He doesn’t do the same thing anymore. Now he wears T-shirts under his blazers. He’s had to start wearing glasses, and his hair is more shot through with gray. He doesn’t talk about work or a job now. He wears a nice leather messenger bag and doesn’t go to an office.

The wet grass prickles my back where my shirt rises up, and I close my eyes. My mind tries to supply an image of what he looks like on top of her, but I only see him slipping away, falling down into a gauzy, deep blue darkness.

I wait hours. I see his silhouette slip out, like an imprint of the night itself. I close my eyes again. I don’t expect to hear his shoes squelch the grass beside my ear. A corduroy voice saying, “Marissa?”

I pretend to be asleep, letting my chest rise and fall with more devastation than I would when awake. The grass squelches again, but the noise doesn’t recede. The brace of an arm slides beneath my knees, the other around my shoulders, and I discover that I have more restraint than I ought to by not reacting.

Keys jangle and the lock crunches its turn – he has a key? I open my eyes just long enough to see my mother’s little form on the couch before I get dizzy and close them again.

When my skin touches the cool warmth of my sheets, I let my eyes drop open like a baby doll turned supine. James stares down at me.

“Hi, James.”

I can’t tell if he still believes I was asleep.

“Goodnight, Marissa.” He places a kiss against my temple, lips unflowered.

I would like to say that I’ve never thought about James kissing me. There would be no truth in it, and I may lie to my mother, but I’m making a conscious effort not to tell myself stories about who I am anymore. I’ll fail, surely. I mean, what am I doing now? But I’m starting with one truth:

I’ve thought about James kissing me ever since he showed up to the funeral.

He was smoking on our back porch in a black jacket. I first thought he looked like Gene Kelly, but as his body moved from outline to filled-in, I realized he was a lot taller, and the face really wasn’t similar at all. Still, to this day, that’s the way my mind frames him. I didn’t know who he was, and that made him something I could handle.

He turned, hearing me close the screen door. “Oh, hello.” He didn’t make haste to get rid of the cigarette, just quietly stubbed it out.

“Hi.” I sat down in one of the black, wrought-iron chairs as if that was my plan. As if I wasn’t sneaking down to the hill.

“You’re Josephine’s daughter.”
I hadn’t heard anyone call my mother by her whole name for my entire life. Sometimes I would forget there was anything more than Josie. I liked the way his tongue sliced through the s and the ph.

“Yes.” I knew I was supposed to be saying my name, but I didn’t. I was letting everyone chalk a lack of manners up to grief those days. I didn’t feel like hearing my voice any more than was necessary.

“Marissa.”

“James.”

He cocked his head. “You remember me?”

I nodded.

He lit another cigarette, his hands betraying a subtle shake as he took a drag. “Great.”

When I’m in the mood to pretend I’m an optimist, I like to look back on that moment and imagine he was jarred by my maturity, by the prospect of a slightly womanized former girl knowing a version of himself from a past life. But I know he was shaking because he could see her through the screen door behind me. I could hear her voice, its melancholic pleasantry skipping into a greeting or a goodbye, I couldn’t tell which. I looked into his eyes, and I knew he hadn’t spoken to her yet. That’s why he was standing out on the porch, smoking to calm his nerves like a clumsy college boy.

But he wasn’t a college boy, and that was one of my favorite things about him. I’d left a boy with green shoelaces and a chewed-up pen cap falling from his mouth in a Starbucks back in a university town. I’d never had sex with him, and I never wanted to. Everyone had said college would be so full of temptation, but I hadn’t experienced divine testing until I was standing on the back porch with James looking over my shoulder.

When I wake, it’s too early to get up, but I can’t stop myself. When I pass my mother’s blanket-smoothed, sleeping shape, the sleeve of James’ jacket peeks out from under her stomach, ground against the couch’s upholstery. I tug it out from under, twining it around my fist twice to create enough grip. I know she won’t wake when I do this, and there’s something disappointing about her rolling over and proving me right. I drape it over a chair at the dining room table on my way outside.

I don’t know when Mom moved the piano into Dad’s workshop. She must have done it when I was away. I can’t imagine why she did it. Nothing has moved into the space it used to occupy inside. I hate having to come out here to play, hate the smell of dry two by fours and the square break in the floor’s layer of dust where his toolbox used to be.

When I sit down, I feel sure for a moment that I’m just going to practice some piece from last semester. What I end up playing is what I always do. A question I haven’t figured out how to ask, even though I’ve been asking it every morning at this unnecessary hour since I got back. Music has never been nebulous. I’ve come to the realization that I’ll never understand a person, but a piece of music shouldn’t be this obscured. People? Warm blood and internal organs slick with life. But sixteen pieces of music I’ve composed, and every one of them was crystal cold in my veins.

Now it’s different. Now I’m hot. I hate the summer.

The first time I ever saw my mom slow dance with anyone was with James. They didn’t know I was home, out on the hill like almost always. They danced on the back porch, the floorboards creaking. I was so close I knew they could turn their heads too far and see me. I flattened my shoulder blades so hard I imagined them puncturing the soil like the tops of skeletal wings.

There was no music when they danced, and that clawed at me. I can’t go a whole day without that image invading me, filling my blood with summer heat. They dance and dance, and last week I bruised my finger on the piano keys and had to tell my mother that I slammed a cabinet door on it.

A hand, the imprint of a wedding band, on my shoulder sends a shiver across my skin, but I don’t jump. Her hand is warm.

“You want some coffee?” She moves her palm to the space between my cheek and my jawline, the way she did when I was small.

“It’s made.”

“Oh.” She draws her hand away. “Great. Thank you.”

I lean back, hoping to feel the firm slopes of her waist against my temple, but she’s moved.

“Why is James’ jacket on the chair?”

“Guess he left it.”

“I thought – huh.”
I don’t ask what she thought, and she doesn’t try again.

“You want some breakfast?”

“I already ate.” If I say yes, she’ll make pancakes again, and pancakes are not an acceptable substitute for being left alone.

I go on playing until I hear the sound of her feet thudding down the steps and across the yard.

What’s the name for regretting your actions without wishing you could take them back?

James always shows up before she does at night. I don’t think he does it intentionally, but by now I’m used to leaving the door unlocked after five. I’m not disturbed by the doorknob’s turn, or by the plush rap of dress shoes on the kitchen tile. He used to hum old standards under his breath, before he realized I was always here. I miss that.

I unlock it today, even though I know he has a key. I wonder when she gave it to him, how long he’s refrained from telling me I didn’t have to unlock it. We never speak until he starts making dinner, so I try not to hold it against him. But I’m not an optimist, and I know he didn’t forget.

There’s a knock on the door, so slight that it could go unnoticed. Above me, a swath of my popcorned bedroom ceiling. I’m lying on the floor, the brittle old carpet teething on my shoulder blades and calves.

“Yes?” The hand I have slipped past the waistband of my pants stills, causing numbness to set into my forearm from the elastic, but I don’t remove it.

“Hey, it’s James.”

No shit.

I drag my hand out and stand to go for the door, but I stop.

“What do you need?”

“Oh.” The flooring squeaks, and I picture him shifting his weight. “I don’t need anything, I just wanted to talk to you for a second.”

I flip the lock horizontally and swipe the door open.

His irises flicker. “Follow me into the kitchen?”

He’s tilting the skillet, a totally different motion from the descending chop of the knife, but I feel like we’re right back where we were a week ago. Is he finally going to say something about it? I’ve been expecting a conversation about my question this whole time, but it’s those lips, their coolness, their shape, that I’m bursting with the disastrous impulse to speak on.

I am not the person who supplies sensual verbiage. I can’t even imagine talking during sex, let alone any number of meaningless nothings spent in the effort of some lost Petrarchan urge.

I watch the stainless curvature of the skillet turn one way and then the other, distorting the kitchen lights. What did he just say? I can’t concentrate, can’t look above his hands.

“Um, what?”

“Sorry, I’m not trying to pry into your life or anything. I just . . . you’ve seemed a little morose as of late.”

“Is this about what I said the other night?” I still can’t look up, I don’t know why. It’s reversion to a bad habit from childhood. I recollect my mother saying, “It’s not polite to look at the ground when you’re talking to someone.” I wonder if she looks at him when they’re in the middle of it. I can imagine her holding his gaze until it’s over, and I hate it. But I can’t see him no matter how I try. The blue darkness is too big, he becomes another universe that my mother is absorbed by.

He shakes his head. “No.”

“It’s okay if you’re pissed about it. I’m just really into being a bitch these days.”

“Don’t say that. I’m not mad.”

“Then what?”

He groans, dropping the now emptied skillet into the sink. “I’m trying not to sound fatherly here, but. . .”

I want to run. I want to run down to the hill and lie down and never get back up. He doesn’t get it. “Then don’t.”

He holds up his hands. “Not trying to be Mark. That’s not what’s happening here.”

I don’t even remember if James has kids. I’m pretty sure he used to be married, but I can’t seem to recall any outline of a family portrait. I wonder if any of them are my age. I fear what he thinks is happening here.

“Then what’s happening?” I make eye contact with him for the first time, and he has no history. No experience prior to this day. For the first time, I see something disoriented in his expression.

The distance between us has become smaller, and I don’t know how, but I’m the one who’s closer. Not him. Only the length of my hand could fit between us.

“Is fatherly. . .” My throat threatens to close up. I still have time to choose the hill. “How you feel?”

He closes his eyes, exhales. Shakes his head.

My hand hovers above his breast pocket, pulsing like a moth. “Can I . . .?”

He doesn’t open his eyes, but he nods.

My palms absorb the energy in his chest. It’s a healing ritual. He doesn’t make any movements of his own, as if he’s been still enough for a butterfly to alight on his shoulder and fears moving will send it wheeling off.

But I’m solid and not likely to leave. There’s an unearthed temple beneath my palms.

I can hear the gravel of the driveway crunch. I know the subtleties of her car’s sound.

“Will you kiss me?”
His eyes are open. “This can’t –”

“You don’t want to?”

His blue irises are full of fissures.

I let him do what I didn’t know how to start. I thought he’d taste like cigarettes, which would have been fine with me, but he tastes like something dark and tangy. He tastes like deep blue.

The doorknob turns. It is unlocked, after all.