Cheating Death

    "How do you feel?" she said. Then, "Sorry. Didn’t mean that."

    They’d agreed three years ago never to ask each other how they felt.

    "Very alive," Nathan said.

    "Do you want to know anything?" Cheryl asked. "How we did it? What it was like?’

    He considered for a moment. She wasn’t goading. The question was genuine. It was clear from her tone there had been no surprises. Cheryl’s (correct) assumption was that Nathan had imagined Adrian fucking her in the past; therefore did he want the facts to compare it with? A succession of tableaux passed through Nathan’s mind, Cheryl and Adrian in various positions. In each, Adrian’s eyes were closed. Cheryl’s were open, revealing only that her mind was elsewhere — which was why Adrian’s were closed. Nathan had experienced it himself over the last three years. Cheryl’s body was a machine furiously gathering data and sending it far, far away to wherever her mind had gone. Worse, however, had been those times when she’d brought her mind back during sex, when, armed with everything that had happened to them, she’d looked at him.

    "Do you think we should separate?" Nathan said.

    Cheryl looked at the bed, then out the windows, then at him. "Anyone watching would think so," she said. "It depends who we’re living for."

    It occurred to Nathan that she did these things because they forced them together. Most of the time it was as if they were both floating separately in a huge, empty room, the only company for each other but incapable of contact or communication.

     Taking the cigarette and ashtray Cheryl got up and crossed the room — strong white thighs sun-striped for a second — to the bed. She lay down on her back.

    "Why now?" Nathan said.

    "Who knows? It’s been building up."

    He felt sad for her, but also as if she’d closed a new door against him. He went over and lay down next to her. An anachronistic version of himself protested, demanding things, jealousy, anger, but it was a tinny racket, miles

away. On the other hand he couldn’t see a way forward. He moved down the bed and laid his head just above her pubis. At one time she would have begun playing with his hair. He put his hand over her cunt, cupping it. Softness and heat, the way the kids’ faces felt running a temperature. He didn’t know what he was doing, forgiving her, he supposed, but with a feeling of redundancy. Her limbs remained still. He could feel coming off her how much was left of her curiosity about life. Not much, the faintest electrical charge. She was tired of carrying her flesh and blood around. She’d gone heavy with the boredom of it. He had no idea where she was going or what would be involved. He wanted to come close to her, just once before they disappeared from each other completely.

     He and Cheryl lay in silence for what seemed a long time. Then, feeling her beginning to want to move out from under him, he lifted his head and looked at her. Her eyes were open. She looked back at him. She hadn’t, he could see, expected him to react like this, and the surprise had woken a flicker of her interest. Only things that confounded her expectations pricked her interest.

    Suddenly, it became painful to look at each other. Their shared past rose up, shocking both of them. It was as if both their former selves, imprisoned and forgotten for so long, had broken out and screamed at them to recognise each other. They both looked away. Cheryl made a slight movement —
the beginning of getting off the bed — but Nathan put his head on her midriff again and his hand back between her legs. Nathan dreaded that out of sheer panic Cheryl would say something ugly: I swallowed his come, stuck my tongue up his arse. He could feel panic driving her to it. Their former selves had commanded them to remember how good they’d been together at their best, which made the ensuing silence raw. Both of them were thinking they shouldn’t have let themselves get close like this, lying in a familiar position. Any second, Nathan thought, she’ll have to say something, shove something in the way of it.

    But they understood it and lay motionless, not knowing what to think. With a minimum of movement Cheryl stubbed the cigarette out and transferred the ashtray to the bedside table. Nathan kept his head and hand where they were, feeling her stomach muscles moving under their wrap of fat. (The kids had loosened her body, given it accents of pathos from which his sexual self stepped aside to make room for love.)

He could tell she didn’t know what to do next. A part of her, a dominant part, was insisting on the absurdity of the two of them lying there like teenagers on a Saturday afternoon, and on the further absurdity of her husband’s fingers between her legs wet with another man’s come. With the slightest effort (Nathan imagined the no-nonsense voice in her head) she could reduce this to something crude, her husband’s complete emasculation, his abdication from dignity, a rising impersonation of Jesus turning the other cheek.

    Yet still neither of them said anything. Knowing that in perhaps seconds this balance would be lost, Nathan gently but unambiguously applied a gentle pressure between her legs. They’d started like this countless times. In their old life Cheryl might have said: I hope you’re not intimating a desire for any of those saucy antics, mister? He loved her for it, the way she said it. Excuse me, but that’s my secret place you’ve got your hand on if you don’t mind.

    He waited. No response — but not, he thought, definitively. He waited, then moved his middle finger against her again.

    This time Cheryl moved slightly in reply. He thought: It’s nothing, just an extension of the perversion, immediately after Adrian. Then either the thought passed or he forced himself beyond it. He moved his hand again. Response. Again. Response — by
which time he knew success would depend on both of them losing the bulk of consciousness;
if either of them stopped, if a button snagged or a telephone rang, if they were
forced by any detail to remember that they were making choices, that time was
still passing, the whole thing would collapse. Their identities would come back
and cling.

    He moved on top of her, kissed her mouth, felt her hands
working quick and dexterous at his belt and fly. Her eyes closed, which stabbed
him with memory; it used to unHooksexup him, when they were young, the look of transport
or elsewhereness on her face when she made love. He used to bring her back, to
him, to the level where they were just fucking, nothing transcendent. Her face
like that, eyes closed, a frown (as if, wherever she’d gone, she didn’t quite
understand where she was or how she’d got there) had been terrifying in its vulnerability.
It had made him feel tawdry, as if he was letting

her down by not going with her, by not being able to. (It’s all right, she’d said to him once, jokingly, afterwards. I know it’s just a good fuck. It had been meant to reassure him but it had made him feel worse. He’d felt sorry for
her, that she got so much from it. Sorry for himself, too, because he found the
look a slight turn-off.) But now, Zennishly balanced between desperation and
hope, he saw her closed eyes and faint frown and felt a rush of loyalty. He kissed
her open mouth again, feeling the air on his bare buttocks and thighs as she
shoved the waist of his jeans down.

    A navigation with no margin for error, every movement carrying the potential to reduce them to perverseness. This danger flared, at moments, his cock’s first nudge at her cunt still slick with Adrian’s come — her eyes flashed open, worried she was going to see him enjoying that, just that, wife fucked by other man, sloppy seconds. Nathan had to turn his face away, because there were moments — this was one of them — when he didn’t know what he was enjoying, when he knew he couldn’t stand her looking at him and asking.
     But then he was inside of her and overwhelmed, shocked by the feeling of newness and familiarity. So far the defences against the wrong kind of consciousness were holding. For a while it worked. Signals burgeoned in and around her — hold, there, kiss, wait — and he attended to them. The world receded. There was room, it could be done. Each touch was a light coming on in the darkness. They were doing it.

    Then all the lights were on and it had to become something else. Cheryl, legs wrapped around him, opened her eyes and looked at him. He knew what she was asking. It was what one of them always asked: Can you think of it and still go on?

    In the time it took for him to see that this was what she was thinking, she went away from him. Their bodies kept moving, him into her, her up to meet him, but she was losing the fight. Her face crumpled once — righted itself — held — crumpled — then recovered again. Time and consciousness had bullied their way back in. They were themselves.

    Cheryl turned her face to the side. Her eyes closed, but this time closing was the beginning, Nathan knew, of a contortion, an expression that would take possession for a second or two, seem to presage a screaming fit or psychic implosion, then abandon her, leaving the look of vacuity.

    He put his arms around her, pulled her close. But she’d gone. Or rather returned, full. All consciousness, all memory, all concrete details. He felt a last flicker of the hope, then it went out.

    "Get off," she said.

    He held her tighter.
 n°

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