by Joan Connor

     When he first saw her, before he knew what to do with desire, how to approach a woman, what curiosities to arouse, what questions to ask, he used to sit in the front row imagining himself lashed inn the black licorice whips of her hair. He imagined her face growing larger, lowering until he could see only her green eyes and the desire in them. He sank into the softness of her lips which parted giving way to the hard white nips of his teeth.

     "Did you bring it?" she asked him. She opened the folder, propping the apex of its spine on her waist. And he realized that she wanted something from him: his term paper on the green world in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He stammered and knocked his backpack to the floor in his search through his books. Desire unmanned him then.

     He graduated to eleventh grade. He claimed his first woman in a stick-figured tussle on the lino floor of the family room. At school, he joked in the senior lounge with other seniors about whose desire would triumph finally, would wedge its knee between the pretty teacher's legs and die there on her thighs.

     She married. She moved away. He went to art school. He bedded many women, but he did not entirely forget her. For many years, in the dark, descending into the latest murmur on the pillow, he felt the tug of the long black ropes of her hair pulling him into the green light of her desire.

     The next time he saw her, they were co-fellows at an art colony. He did not recognize her. He thought, "What an attractive woman for her age."

     She revealed herself first. She approached him at the wine and cheese party which celebrated the opening of his show in the gallery. "You look familiar to me. Perhaps you were one of my students." She named her maiden name.

     He startled at it as if he'd glimpsed the face of his ex-wife unexpectedly in some quotidian place—the fotomat, the dry cleaners. Now that he k new what to do with desire, how to approach her, which curiosities to arouse, which questions to ask, she looked different to him, older: her hair as white as sit had been black, much shorter, the eyes still green but outlined with her mirths, her disappointments. He had not expected her to age. He stared at her, rearranging her features, his memory, until, her hair dyed and face air-brushed, he looked again at her with a semblance of desire.

     "Have the years been kind to you?" he asked.

     "No." She laughed too loudly, lifting white strands of her hair above her head like horns. "As you can see."

     She no longer taught. She was a writer now. She had a husband. She had a child. Her appearance embarrassed him. She was ten years older than he, a distance wilder than he could overleap. He felt sorry for her. She no longer attracted him. But somehow, after desiring her for ten years, after remembering her black hair snapping, the chalk dusting her cheek, the green eyes glinting, the hands describing literary visions in the air, he could not break the habit of desire. They agreed to meet later in her room for a glass of wine.

     When she met him at the door, her lips stained with burgundy, her eyelashes spiky with mascara, her eyes smeary with liner, she looked bruised, bleary as if a thumb had smudged her face while the ink was fresh and wet. He accepted a tumbler of wine. She apologized for the lack of proper wine glasses. Her formality sounded nervous, drunken, askew.

     He lifted a double frame from her bureau. Black-haired and laughing, she tipped her face up at a small boy in the photo.

     "It was taken four years ago," she said. "I was still dying my hair then."

     Staring at the photo he slid into his desk seat once m ore, watching his teacher's top button as she leaned forward to jab a pencil at this dangling modifier. "Here," she said, "see how it qualifies the wrong object?" as his eyes slipped between the small swells of her breasts. She stood up and walked back to her desk unaware that he clung to her, to her breasts, her hips like the pale green swish of her dress.

     Sitting with the white-haired woman, examining the photo of a younger her, of her son's obvious delight in her, he felt the stir of desire. He slid his hand up and down the cool surface of his glass.

     "Would you like to spend the night?" she asked.

     "Yes," he said.

     She turned out the light but raised the slatted blinds. He undressed her slowly by moonlight, unbuttoning the small pearl buttons of her blouse, sliding it from her shoulders. Her skin was whiter than he had imagined. Her nipples were berried, red. A mother’s breasts. She kicked off her shoes. He slipped her skirt off over her hips, snapped thee elastic of her half-slip and pulled it over her head. When his forefinger slipped under the elastic of her underpants, she placed her hand on his.

     "Could I keep them on?" she asked. "At least at first. It's been a along time since I've done this."

     He was relieved. Her white hair reflected the moon, fiercely beautiful. She stood, pearled in moonlight. But her flesh hung slightly loose on her like a body bought off the rack one size too large by her mother, as "something to grow into."  He felt desire drain from him. She stepped neatly from the crumpled ring of her skirt.

     "Shall we get into bed?" she asked.

     They filled the narrow bed, a student's Spartan single bed, with elbows, knees, pendulous flesh. Her toes, far away at the bed's end, curled small and white. He wanted to kiss them one by one. He wanted to cry. He tried to warm his hands, his desire on her, sliding his palms randomly, learning her flesh, the flesh he had studied beneath changing layers of clothes, the shapes of breast, hip, thigh he'd pored over for a school year.

     She sighed. By the dusty, snowy light, he saw her eyes glisten and felt her sadness reaching for him. Her voice caught him unaware, deep and low, webby. Entangling him, the sentences drew him in.

     "My husband stopped making love to me the year I turned thirty," she said. "I do not know if he stopped loving me. I do not know why; I think he just stopped desiring me. It hurt for a while.

     When the hurt went away, it left a hole. This yearning. This ache. A dangerous emptiness, it even sucks up light. Consumes itself."

     The words, low and rhythmic, rocked him. His hips pumped very lightly.

     "The place at the center is very still," she said. She stood up suddenly as if she could not tolerate the stillness. Shadowy, she crossed to the window. Her right nipple touched the pane of glass, hardened in the cold. She did not shiver. His eyes slid down the small of her back, the curve of her hip. When she spoke again, her breath fogged the glass.

     "I can accustom myself to being sexually lonely," she said. "But what aches is not being desired."

     His whole body tensed as she spoke. He arose from the bed.

     "I tried once," she said, as his arms drew her from the window. "I buttered myself with oil. I rubbed my body until it shone like sandalwood. I drank champagne, poured some into the well o f my stomach. I nibbled his lips, rubbed strawberries into his cheeks, his chin. I arched against him, rubbing myself up and down his thigh, trying to rub my desire into him. His hair abraded my skin, my breasts, rubbed me to newness. All hunger and motion, I opened to him, tore my skin to exposes this need. And he was dead. Dead to me."

     He dropped to his knees, holding his calves, his tongue inventing taste, the salty skin of her thighs.

     "I tried. I will not try again. Humiliating." She ran her fingers through her white hair. "I gave up." She laughed at herself, a mean, short laugh. "Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I’m talking about?"

     "Yes," he said. "Desire."

     He lifted her. He rested her on the bed.

     "Never, never again," she said.

     He hushed her with his mouth. He slid off her pants. Sliding onto her, he felt as if he were skimming water. Then he dropped down. Diving. Knowing that he would never find himself again, seined in her hair, swimming in the green light of her eyes, he pushed down through desire, found the still center, the pearl of her sadness. He dove deeper. His lungs ballooned, trying to tug him back up to the surface. But still he dove down. When he broke through the awful and inarticulate desire, he found her cradled in his arms and at his center, a great aching, a great emptiness, and in it as small as a grain of sand, the beginning of tenderness.

Reprinted with permission of the author.