“I’ve got the Mandarin Orange,” he called to a customer, just as though he were unscarred. And maybe he was. He had managed to be the reverse of most people. In his case he showed the deep, dark riddle; inside, he might be as clear and pure as water.
I went home and waited for the end of the day. My stomach was jumpy. I couldn’t eat supper. Renny’s project was still in my kitchen. He phoned to check in and I swore we would finish the temple on Sunday; the due date of the project was Monday and without the temple Renny would surely fail. Well, failure was something I knew about. So I promised him, my one and only friend. I assured him we had time. It was Friday now. I had all night. All day tomorrow. Plenty of time to prove my doubts right or wrong.
The sky was even darker than usual, cloudy, no moon in sight. I drove out, my foot heavy on the gas pedal. Florida whirred past me, a dizzying globe. Heat and darkness, beetles hitting against the windshield. I used to walk home from the library in New Jersey feeling lost even though I knew my way. Now I felt found. I passed exits with names I didn’t know, towns I’d never been to, but I knew exactly where I was going. Gold and green and black, like a bat drawn to clapping hands in the darkness, against all logic, a love song it was impossible to understand.
He was waiting for me. That surprised me. I couldn’t imagine myself mattering to anyone. There was something suspicious in his desire for me. I saw him when I got out of my car, slammed the door shut, smelled oranges. There were moths in the night along with the beetles, and little gnats and mosquitoes. Something bit me and it hurt. I ran to the porch. I wanted to get this over with.
“Hey, you.” He rose from the old wooden bench left on the porch for fifty years or more. He was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, jeans, old boots. I saw him shining there, like a star.
“Hey, you,” I said back.
“You’re late. I was going to make you some dinner.”
Just like normal people. He seemed to want that.
I went to him, reached my arms around him, stood on my toes, started to burn.
He backed away from me, looked into my face. It was just me. I leaned up and kissed him. Once, twice, then I had to stop.
“I missed you,” he said.
He kissed me again, hard.
Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Everyone had teeth and claws.
“Baby,” I said. I called him that. He was so beautiful, his hands, his ashy eyes, his throat, his everything.
“I could still make soup.” He’d opened the screen door for me. I thought I would probably always remember how it sounded. It was the opening into the after. It sounded like wind on a quiet night.
“I’m not hungry,” I said, the way a starving woman might, so as not to give herself away.
Into the dark hallway, past the coatrack, the jackets, the rain boots, all of it belonging to Seth Jones, whoever he was; Lazarus stopped, ran his hands over me, let me feel how he’d been missing me. It was all so strong, the way the before always is. The ice click-clacking on the plastic porch roof. The way your feet hurt after you stomp them and you’re barefoot.
“You know what I want,” I said. Said it to his face. He had no idea, of course, but he thought he did. Hoped he did. Kissed me to prove it. “I need a minute first,” I told him.
I went into the bathroom. My breathing was off. The huff and the puff of all liars, even those in search of the truth.
I ran the cold water in the tub and took off my clothes. I was standing there, looking in the mirror. My pixie hair had grown in. My skin was pale. I turned off the lights, turned off the tap. I didn’t want anything to scare him off, not a wash of light under the door, not any empty tub. I had the marks of the heart monitor on my skin. My heart skipped a beat, but the cardiologist had told me that was now its normal rhythm, abnormal.
I called, “Come in.” I said it the way I usually did, like I wanted him, no matter who he was or what he was hiding. By now we had sex perfected, at least for us. Hot but not burning, or burning just enough. I knew to put vinegar on my fever blisters, knew how cold the water had to be for me to take him in my mouth without a scalding, knew him in the dark, the pieces that fit together, the whole man who’d walked with death and had come back to me, for me, with all his secrets.
This is what I knew about him: the cage of his ribs, the rope of his veins, the hardness of his stomach, the hardness of him inside me, the way our mouths fit together, the burning, the heat of the words he said, the rhythm of the sex we had, watery, overflowing, don’t ever stop, it’s not enough and then it’s everything. Was there more to know? I faltered for a moment. I thought of all those women who had sex with monsters in the dark. Men without names who were bears or ogres, men who were enchanted or enslaved. Men covered with sealskin or deerskin, men with claws, men who could not tell a lie, men who could tell nothing but the truth, though it might damn them. Angels disguised, angels exposed; men who had been dead and came back forever changed, forever altered, hiding what they knew. Who they were. The deep inside. The ever of the after.