The Ancestry of Objects Read online

  Our mouth to his, his hands pull down our underwear, pull our hair, unfasten his belt, and his fingers slide inside of us. We are overwhelmed by the many places he occupies at once, stunned by this omnipresence. David unbuttons our dress deftly to suck our breasts like a child, his head cupped in our hands. His tongue circles a nipple slowly and in our stillness we feel the shame of his infidelity coupled with gratification in our own abetment. Our hands move over David’s body in fear, in longing, in confusion at the new absence of loneliness. We take his cock in our hand and meet the litany of silent objections hiding in the walls in an even rhythm with his hips. He pulls away and returns, pulls, thrusts, pulls until just out of reach, he returns, he slides between our legs, and we freeze with fear we haven’t felt long enough to identify. We say condoms, he doesn’t have one (why would he?), he’s been married for fifteen years, he says, what are we worried about? We don’t say: everything. We can not, he offers, his cock still sliding along the lips of us, his tongue pressing into our mouth. The instant is prolonged as if forever. It is the infinite moment just before we pull the razor across the skin and know we could stop but won’t. We open our mouth to say Wait, but then the cock slides into the wet and we are quiet/surprised/embarrassed and David does not notice. He is inside of us, and there is no escape or better version. There is just this. There is just David inside of us as we stare at the blue designs painted on the wooden hutch behind him. We swallow the terrifying aftertaste of the self-destructive tendency. Our hips roll in quiet motions of desire, as if pretending it isn’t happening, as we had always done it, alone, unthinking, waiting for it to start and finish, as if it could happen without our knowing, rubbing swollen clit through our own swamp against him.

  He braces himself against the counter, and he breathes down onto us like fog. We consider that pleasure could be a noble pursuit. We consider that we asked for it. We consider that we want it.

  We do not want to own him, we do not want to take him from Lara, we do not want to owe him forever for leaving his wife, we do not believe that he will. We choose to believe in the moment’s want, the bursting emptiness between everything to fill with David’s shape, because it gives the impression of agency. The emptiness grows and holds its breath like drowning; it washes us in a rhythm we meet in even pulses until Lara’s flesh grows hot between us, her body so learned in his body that the guilt makes our/her cunt desperate to commit the sin more completely. We pull him deeper into us; he bends to lick the sweat from the wells made of our clavicles.

  He moves rapidly, one arm around us to grip the counter, the other wrapped around our shoulder—pulling us/her down onto him. We wonder with terror if he is allowed to be there, as if there is someone outside of ourself we could ask for permission, and our fear makes us come, and the guilt is deafening. Our pleasure springs from the disapproval raining from generations of Good Christian Women and from Lara, and from David. I’m going to come, he says, as if realizing the possibility for the first time.

  He shudders into us and hangs limply on our body. Even as he grows soft and slides out of us, he leans into us as if he cannot stand on his own. Then, as if remembering (Lara), he straightens and pulls away, his pants still embarrassingly at his ankles. A trail of white crawling down our thigh leads to the dark of our insides and reflects soft light filtering through dark, dense air. David bends to pull up his pants; he fastens them and leans toward us, kisses our cheek. I guess I got carried away, he says. I hope that was alright?

  I’m fine, we say, disoriented, filled with alarm without direction. There is only the sharp contraction of our heart that means we are wrong. Bad. Dirty. Wrong. And what would be the benefit of saying that he took more than we were prepared to give? We fit our arms back into the holes in our dress, buttoning it and smoothing it down over our thighs. We suffer sin without believing in sin. The weight of disappointment grows as we rehearse the lineage of our wrongdoing until we unfeel David’s guilt pooling beside us, his own torment a question mark hanging from his neck.

  In the vacant air, David reaches for whatever he is reaching for. The thing that will quiet his own nameless longing. He picks up his glass and taps it against the counter. He asks, Are your grandparents still living? He is looking anywhere but at us, and he will talk about anything but the thing he has done with us.

  We say no, but could mean yes. They both died in the last few years, we say. He apologizes for their deaths, with Sorrys empty for his inability to have changed anything. And when he says his parents are still living in For-i-da, we see them suffering in a black, open future matching day for day their past while our own parents will drive forever in the phantom history of a car accident, a memory out of context, as if it belongs to someone else. As if it were true.

  It sounds as real when we say it to David as when our grandparents told the lie to us. A car crash, statistically probable, but so is the grandparents’ decision that the parents were unfit. No funeral, no grave, no urn, no black armband. And the grandmother said, at her own end in the shocking cold white of the hospital room, some clarification before it could not be given: They are dead now, by the way. And then: You were better off.

  And so we accepted a new mourning, but for what? For parents already dead to us. And were we dead to them? And the questions (Did they come for us? Did they care? Did they want us? Why were we taken away?) seemed unspeakably obvious when the only person who could answer them was dying herself, and might have said anything.

  The quiet shifting from one life to another felt even to our child self like a miscalculation. And yet we can’t remember a home before this one, not now. Now, now.

  All I know, we say, is my mother’s name was Ruth. We do not say we learned this by way of threats—Don’t do that; you’ll end up just like Ruth. Ruth, less a person and more a symbol of evil, of failure. Like us, we think. Like us now, we think. Dirty like us, bad like us now. Now, now, now—

  It is easier for David to believe a nothing-car moving as a star through space, displacing matter and glass, and we tell it as it has been imagined to us, without our curiosity disrupting the bright noise of collision. A story we rub into the fabric of brittle dresses hanging in the closets, without the will to find a different answer and without anybody to ask.

  David accepts responsibility in I’m sorrys for our whole past, entombed and disintegrating in the shape of tatted doilies on end tables.

  Sweat crawls slowly down our back, but the hair on our arms stands on end. In the cover of dark and gooseflesh, we ask, and: No, David sighs. I don’t have kids. He’s quiet and the question is wrong, too soon, and it hangs in the unreal place between us where we unknow ourself in relation to this new man and exhaustion and uncertainty. He says after a moment, It’s probably too late now.

  The house takes in these new unnamed faults, filling the cracks between poorly fitted pieces of counter and narrow passageways behind furniture that cannot be pressed flush against the wall, the voices of our grandparents behind closed doors, whispering to each other while we choke our breath in the deep, soft mattress of our mother’s old room. We make an island in the sea of tiles and listen for their holy guidance in the emptiness we’ve always moved through: Nothing is right for a young woman to do/say/think/be.

  And what would Lara think?

  Are you worried? we ask, though the question feels false and strange, like wearing our grandfather’s slippers to the mailbox. And perhaps in the same way, we expect only the eventual changing color of bills or the necessary relocation to a new existence. We turn to look at him. We notice his body in a new way and wish to see the body, its ridges and nooks and uninterrupted landscape like dunes in moonlight. We wish to be comfortable.

  He smiles/shrugs. Are you? he almost laughs, and maybe things could be easy/fine. We are in disbelief at our own presence in this moment.

  I don’t know you very well, we say finally. I want to understand, we say, why you are not with your wife now.

  Exhausted, David exhales a long,
damp breath to join the moist air around us, to be taken back to the sky and made rain in another city, as if from dust to dust, ocean to ocean. Lara’s mother is in the hospital in Denver, he says. She went to be with her, and I had to stay for work.

  How rude, we think, for the mother to wait so long. Until Lara is an adult and must confront fully the impending absence. You do not worry that everyone you know and love will die when everyone you know is dead.

  David says into the wet air, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I wanted to see you. I meant it when I said I wanted to be friends. You seem—he looks for the word—intriguing. He adds quickly, seriously—But I didn’t expect this.

  What did you expect? We try to see ourself through his eyes again, try to see the sum of us, a girl at the bar, the house, a body. Perhaps to him we are something outside of life—a mirage, the glinting of semen and wine and rain, all figments, all fool’s gold under a quick cold stream of old laminate.

  I mean, he explains to the flecked counter, and then deflates against the edge of it, defeated: I don’t know. Maybe I thought I had more willpower, or that I didn’t really need something else even though I feel all day—we see him moving from office to document to home to table to bed—that I need something else. That meeting you and seeing you again would be nothing. That it could keep happening by accident.

  He reaches out, and we rest our head in the hollow place between the shoulder and chest of the man. He half wraps us in his arm, fingers making a light trail of touch on our back. The rain falling slowly, suspended in a veil outside the window, we stand separately together, silently filling and emptying each other with our selves and needs and impressions.

  He says with importance, Yesterday was our anniversary.

  This means nothing to us, but he asks, Do you feel guilty?

  It hangs like an apple, a test, and we feel him lift his head to look down at us. Our heart swells and hardens in our chest, full of the electricity of our shame. If we feel guilty, we are weak, and if we don’t, we are cold.

  No, we say simply, because the date is not what makes us guilty. Lara is so much a part of what we have fucked that even when we build her into a woman easy to hate, she is still watching, feeling, analyzing the way we touch and move against his body, and we feel the inherent child’s guilt of theft. We make the happy wife/woman; the educated, responsible woman; the tolerant or thoughtful wife; the easy or melancholy woman; the hungry wife/woman who perhaps wants to be swollen with this man like a nesting doll, a flesh full of seed to become flesh full of seed—we make her a fool.

  David’s chest rises and falls with the cooling air in the kitchen. Lost in his own guilt, his breaths all What have I dones and Who is this womans, he’s not sure if he should extract himself in quick movements, running from the house always when in his mind he comes to the house to stand this close, to fuck, to be new in something, to remind himself that he is alive by notdying in the still, perfect air of these rooms. But maybe also he thinks it is just as right, the same to never go back/to collect his things/to leave a note. To stay, to move away, to learn someone else, to be a monk or crazy or a whore is the same thing when he stands in this notreal space—though it is for the moment the real space, and that other, with the wife, faraway and illusory like a dream of floating and waiting, always waiting with reluctant trust to be caught, but expecting to fall through.

  David leaves and we are choked with the fear—not that we cannot live without the man, but that the man cannot live without us. That he will die on his way home, that at the end of the story all men die, and as quickly as the fear comes it goes because no one will tell us if he is dead. He is limited to the walls of our memory. He lives and dies with us.

  There is a melancholy exhaustion in the walls when we wake up alone. We touch between our legs, feeling at once satisfied, like a mother watching a child sleep, and sick on the choking knob of grief growing inside us. We run a finger around the hole still covered in sex, and the guilt comes back a comforting blanket.

  Our body mourns David, we want to see him both never and immediately, for the sharp hairs on his face to rub raw the skin around our mouth, the rhythm/weight of a body on and filling ours; that body waking up next to his wife and us plagued with our own litany of condemnation: We are hurting someone. And maybe: We are hurt.

  As we go about enduring our day, we discover there is no way to sit that does not remind us of David, the house creaks and swells with the moisture in the air. We recite the dispassionate voice of the woman’s dictation comma and recall watching as other women’s misfortune would grow in our typed words period Through the impassive veil of the woman’s voice, we hear the tick of the clock. The refrigerator hum. The moan of the wooden boards. Rain continues to fall grayly, streaking the windows in trails lit up in silver streams from the inside by dusty lamps.

  The next day: Remembering broken ankles and the tiny bones of children’s hands is interrupted by his knock at the door. He stands empty-handed in the cloudy noon colors. Our body stirs into riots of anger and lust in a thin film of manicured indifference, but we smile involuntarily before it’s too late and he laughs: I would have called, but I still don’t have your number.

  We shrug. Don’t you have to be at work? And he is hurt so easily we say: I’m just surprised to see you—do you want to come in?

  I don’t have to; you’re probably busy, he’s been trained to say, and we: I have a moment.

  He lingers on the stoop, glittering with moisture as dark spots form and grow around him/on his clothes as fresh rain starts. Come in, we say, swinging the door open, and he enters. In the dark hallway, he steps close to tuck a strand of hair behind our ear and kiss our head like a father. Like what we imagine a father might do. We follow him to the kitchen, so bright against the outside, and for the first time he continues. Walks past the stain he’s left on his memory of that room, and enters the dining room, separated from the kitchen only by the counter yet a different world.

  Do you work from home? he asks, as if it has only just struck him that we are always here, always available, always a part of this house. When we shake our head no, he asks, What do you do, with the detached fascination of an anthropologist, a college student at a museum. Under the curiosity, a note of suspicion.

  Medical dictation, we lie, and think only of its ending. Until recently, anyway.

  Hm, he says, and we hate that we have insinuated our failure. That we have shown him anything. That we are not easy, a nice girl at a counter, in an office, at a restaurant. Not the girl who can smile at a stranger in a bar—he does not remember meeting us. We were never there, not the woman who did not want him, did not want to be anything for him. And in his eyes and in the eyes of someone so comfortable with themselves, the house seems to hunch, seems to grow old in front of us and we know instantly each growing water stain and crack in plaster and leak to the basement; we taste a creeping desperation more bitter than guilt.

  I’m considering other options, we say. The words are empty and offhand, like a clump of dirt thrown onto a casket. His curiosity has been appeased, though, and he accepts this without question, and we are filling with disgust for our own simple inadequacy and perhaps hurt by his lack of curiosity or concern. He looks at us as if for the first time and we remember: We do not know this man.

  We wonder what made us desirable to the man? What has made the wife tiresome? Is it simply her wifeliness? For what would the man leave the prison of his own making? And would he not simply find, once he’d left, that his backwards glance is not looking into the cell he’d escaped, but through bars of yet another prison?

  He would leave her for nothing.

  Then for nothing the man is in our home, and the knowledge makes us resentful.

  But are we not more in love with the plastic covers over the dining room chairs than with this man? Who are we to judge?

  The sex is still between us and our sweat still clings to the air, the rain casts the same pallor through the house, but
we glow with the house’s sandy desert light and he moves to our body because, now familiar, it is the easiest place to hide. He wraps his arms around us and says into our hair: I couldn’t stop thinking about you.

  And though we, too, have thought only of David, of his presence or absence, we say nothing. Only imagine David in a building made of glass that reflects the sky it imposes upon, thinking through the stream of rain down walls of windows, about spilling us across his desk. As in a mirror across town, we think of David unwrapping us in the kitchen and moving through us in the bed. He is tied in the tangle of our sheets and driving up to the end of the sloping lawn in each long, lonely tick of the loud wall clock. Afraid of being taken, of our own great desperate longing, of the loss of everything around us: I want—we say into his ear without looking into the terrifying wells of his eyes, like a child asking for something she cannot have, with shame we try to say To be your whore, but cannot make those words form in our mouth, the performance of it, and say instead—to do what you want me to. It feels like the tines of rusted tools in the basement, the shape of the thing, but useless. He is flattered/aroused/scared. I want to be treated carelessly, we say, running the tip of our tongue along his neck. We make it so there is nothing he can do to us that we do not want him to do, nothing he can take that we have not given.

  We understand that we are making these concessions not because the man is strong, but because we’ve been told that we are weak. We do not want to shame him, but to shed our own shame, and so when he came back we opened the door, and when he touches us we will open our body and we will make ourself the executor of the will we’ve chosen among two poor options.

  David swallows but says nothing. His hand slides over our breast and up to rest by our mouth, the thumb following the outline of our lips, then pressing between them, our eyes on his eyes until Lara is pushed outside of us, the thumbprint rubs on the sharp edges of our teeth and the wet muscle of our tongue works against him like our sex. We lower to our knees open his pants lick the shaft as it grows, and in the heavy relief of regret, we suck, hungry to owe him nothing and take with each long pull of the mouth our debt for being wanted. In the white rush of come to throat, his hand pulling hair/our head back/our eyes on his/as the come chokes us, David is for the moment the debtor.