Some time

SOME TIME

Sometimes I wonder what he sees in me.

This is not true. I wonder what it is he sees in me, often. Always. Whenever he is not there. The only time I do not wonder is when we are making love, having sex...whatever it is consenting adults do to and with each other when they are no longer twenty-one.

Then it is easier to ignore his fear, to lose sight of it in the tenderness of his touch.

He seems to enjoy my body; seems unperturbed by its flaws,

its blatant lack of youthfulness.

In those stilled moments it is less difficult for me to believe in his reasons, to understand them.

To believe in him.

He calls me classy. A class act. Cultured, he says of me; intelligent, resourceful. Always well presented, personable, nicely dressed. These are the words he uses to describe me. They sound like the right words, the right things to say, but they are not.

I can see through all of that,

that superficiality, both displayed and observed, even if he cannot.

I know better. I know it for what it really is.

A veneer. A disguise. Another false truth I put upon myself daily. A denial of what I am.

The tender damage of two child-births, two nurturings; the erosions of a half-century of time. The silent history of betrayal, written on my face.

My truth. My body. My honesty.

He knows it too really. He just doesn't want to admit it.

To me.

Or to himself.

I don't know why he told me really. To lay some troublesome ghost to rest?

He had been twenty-four, twenty-five, he said; she had been about the age I am now; considerably older than him. She was an actress - had been an actress, once, when both her mind and her body were sounder than they had become. He said she had a drink problem, but that he may have added to deflect me, my possible objections, or for effect.

Why did he go with her? This I ask myself often.

Curiosity, he said. A sense of bravado.

Curiosity about what?

In the street, she had asked him if he had wanted to strangle her, and had laughed when he had said: No, not her, he had said.

Who then? That remains the unanswered question.

And upstairs, in her room, she had said he didn't like cats, but he did. An old man had been lying on the floor, wrapped in an over-coat and blankets, complaining he could not sleep.

Her brother, she had said, and had tapped the side of her head knowingly.

How far will a man's courage, a man's curiosity lead him, before he senses the wisdom, the necessity of turning back? Of retracting the things he has said and done? The unsafe places he has put himself in?

She had told him he was attractive, just as I sometimes do, when I am trying to make him feel good about himself. Frightfully attractive, he said, mimicking her affectations, the gestures she had made, trying to seduce him, stroking the side of her face with the back of her hand.

He had laughed, and she had tried to kiss him - first his hand, then his lips - the damp smells of tobacco and alcohol staining her breath.

He had ran away then, his courage, his curiosity failing.

How much of him runs away when I try to kiss him now? He boasts his control of the situation like a uniform, though he pretends it is only a show.

For who is he pretending?

Does he know this himself?

It was the photographs, he said. The photographs of her, on the mantelpiece. When she was an actress. When she was beautiful, and young. When he would have given anything to have been in a room alone with her. When he would have been eager to kiss her.

I don't think I will show him my photographs.

Of when I was young. And beautiful. Of myself, when I was not an actress.

Of when my beauty was less superficial than the one he professes to see in me now.

I have to ask myself what he was doing there. I ask myself this repeatedly, without discovering a viable answer. I have to ask myself what he is doing here now, with me.

Another experiment?

Another excess of curiosity?

Trying to examine himself, to test his reactions, his responses, to the things in himself that frighten him the most?

It's not as though he's a boy himself. Not even a young man, not anymore.

His face and body also bear the pressing imprints of gravity and time.

I know, and see this in him, and accept it. It is not significant. It is a part of what he is.

In another five years he will be bald, his belly, more or less still taut and flat now, swelling in imitation of motherhood.

We bear their children. We bear their scars. Perhaps too, we bear their guilt, their denial of honesty. Our bodies, our souls; their receptacles. For none of these are we thanked.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I wonder what it is I see in him.