The Laboratory of Love, page 26
When you begin to sleep in this room at the back of the house, I’m unconcerned. There have been occasions during our long union when one or the other of us has felt the need to sleep alone for a time. A night, a week; at most, a month. Such nocturnal separations are never the result of disharmony. Since there’s no question of rejection or of withdrawal, the matter requires no explanation and can pass without comment: we are assured it will have a positive result. From a state of intimacy that to outside eyes might appear suffocating, we move apart in order to come back even more closely together. We learn to miss and to want and to need each other again. To tremble anew at a touch that was perhaps becoming overly familiar. To find fresh pleasure in the sensation of your body against mine, in the weight of my head upon your chest.
In simultaneous orgasms, syncopated sighs, osmotic dreams.
Our reconnection can possess the excitement of the first encounter, only heightened and enriched by a wealth of erotic knowledge gained from thousands of subsequent encounters.
But this time you do not return to our communal bed after a night, a week, a month.
I have no way of knowing that you will never share it with me again.
No understanding of what has ended, of what has begun.
During this time, I happen to be working while you are not. There’s nothing unusual in that. We often alternate holding jobs. Our life of love has always been more important than the level of our income. One of us frees the other to assume the main burden of cooking and cleaning, and to tackle repairs and other projects around the house. More of our time together becomes available for the act of love. (In more than just a sense, though, each of our shared activities—putting up the storm windows in autumn, reseeding the lawn in spring—is an erotic exchange.)
The system has worked well for us.
Until now.
Because I sleep poorly without you beside me, I come home from work tired after the first night you spend in the back room. I don’t have the energy to wonder why you haven’t prepared supper. (This is precisely when you are apt to fix my favourite meal as reassurance, however unnecessary, of your unfaltering love.) Why you remain in the spare room instead of sharing the meal I end up making. Why you don’t feel like going to the cinema, the café, the gym. You have already eaten, I think. You wish to spend a quiet evening at home, alone. When we don’t join together physically, we often remain apart in other ways as well. I find myself listening for hints of your nearby presence, and shrug at the uninterrupted silence that leaks beneath the door you’re behind. You are reading or resting or writing a letter. The spare room is closed each time I pass down the hallway. When I step into the backyard to turn the sprinkler off at ten o’clock, I notice your window is dark.
Mentally, I shrug again.
We’ve always respected each other’s privacy.
As we grow closer, it becomes more important and necessary to avoid intruding upon our individual secrets.
The unknown is erotic. Darkness is an aphrodisiac.
The gap between what I don’t know about your interior and all I know of your exterior can make me swoon.
Several days later, I suspect you rarely leave the spare room while I’m at work. The rest of the house lacks evidence of your presence. No crumbs litter the kitchen counter. No CD rests in the audio system. No damp towel drapes in the bathroom.
You continue to decline to share the meals I make, as you still don’t wish to cook or clean or shop for groceries. While I’m at home, you remain behind the spare room door. You barely respond when I open it to say a few words at morning, after work, before bed.
Yes, you smile, when I ask if you’re okay.
We have always told each other the truth.
Checking the odometer, I learn that your Jeep’s mileage doesn’t change from one day to the next.
Of course you aren’t leaving the house if you aren’t leaving the spare room.
The other room, as I begin to think of it.
As that room assumes greater importance, grows equal in significance to our room.
Or what was our room.
On the fifth or sixth day after we begin to sleep apart, I return from work to find the house filled with what seems like a new kind of silence and emptiness. It feels as though all traces of human presence have drained away through the walls. Immediately my heart relaxes; just as suddenly, I realize how tightly it has been clenched. Even without the reassurance of your Jeep in the driveway, I wouldn’t be worried that you might have left me. I’m far from ready to conceive of the impossible. You are only strolling beside the river, or climbing the sweep of hill to where perfumed pines stir and moan in breeze. You have looked increasingly pale—I know it’s as difficult for you as for me to sleep alone—and this June is especially fair. (The last June, I will later think, as though June has never come again, as though all months, including current ones, exist only as memories.) When I knock on the door of the other room, you don’t answer. I open the door. You’re sitting on the floor beside the bed, which looks as neat as if it hasn’t been slept in for several nights. Your face is turned toward me. I suspect your eyes have been watching for the appearance of mine since I left for work ten hours ago. All day you have done nothing but wait for me.
For my touch.
Our sexual life has always been important. It’s the principal reason we have remained together for the past twelve years. (Only those few—in my experience, they aren’t many—who are willing to search through all five senses in the company of another human being, and who possess the particular talent for such exploration, are in any position to understand what a complete reason for sustained unity that journey can be.) Two strong, flexible bodies; swollen muscles and sleek skin; a pair of large penises: this forms the raw material for our unending expedition into each other. To preserve the instruments by which we make our exchange in perfect condition, and to keep our appetite for their use sharply honed, we take scrupulous care regarding diet, spend several hours in the gym each day, forsake smoke and drink and other drugs. What I wish to tell you about who I am, how I feel, what you mean to me: all this is said through the detailed language of touch. Your penis and then mine speaks now slowly and now quickly; the anus answers eagerly; mouths elaborate the point, and fingers stroke further meaning from it. Extended sentences of semen spill. Moans modulate into a dozen subtly different phrases. The few people to enter our life and observe us together invariably comment on the degree of silence between us. I doubt words could say more precisely or clearly what your hand conveys resting on the back of my neck as we drive into the mountains in search of the first or last snow of the ski season; what my multilingual lips say as they explore various countries of your skin. In private sign language, your caressing fingers spell endearments upon my back. Intricate concepts, complex emotions: this idiom of the senses is not simple.
Before finding each other, we both experienced lovers who did not wholly understand the speech of sex, the tongue of touch.
That early lack has allowed us to enjoy each other with special appreciation.
Now my first touch in five or six days tells you: I want you, I need you, I’ll never leave you.
More, you say soundlessly, unsmilingly.
(But that was long ago. Sometimes now, when the rooms around me are most silent, and the clock ticks loudest, I can believe I inhabit this house alone. There’s no sign of a second presence, except for the scarcely distinguishable yet permeating scent of rot that travels from the room in the back. I almost forget that in your ultimate, invisible form you remain with me here. Where you want to be. Need to be. Must be. Why? Love will forever remain the final puzzle of the world, the unsolved riddle of the Sphinx, our galaxy’s last secret. I’ve had years now to muse upon the question of what became of us. Like reaching out to grab darkness and ending up with empty hands, the answer still eludes me.)
The tone of your touch has changed since five or six days ago. It speaks with new force about hunger and need. After our initial, urgent dialogue is complete, you turn from me and curl into a ball on the hard floor where we’ve come together. You want me to leave; before, our tactile conversation would continue long after the first explosion of white words.
Unlike me, the single bed remains undisturbed.
Leaving the room, I fail to realize the full significance of the bed’s unrumpled state.
Or of your silence before, during, and after our act of love.
I come home the next day to find you’ve fastened heavy black cloth over the window of the other room in such a way that not even a crack of light enters. The following day marks my discovery that you have removed the bulb from the light socket in the ceiling. Two days after that, the room has been rid of its furniture, the walls of their prints, the closet of its cardboard boxes. You begin to use a bucket for your wastes. You no longer dress. When I enter the room, your naked body shrinks into the farthest corner from the light that falls in from the hall. Your eyes close until the door has shut and complete darkness returned. Only your body and the bucket prevent the space from being a void; there is nothing else that dilutes the vacant darkness. No clothes interfere with my touch. No objects separate us. No light distracts our eyes with unnecessary images. Now we see only each other. See through touch, through taste, through smell. To a lesser degree (quickened breath, contrapuntal groans), through sound.
But you have ceased speaking in words.
My voiced speech makes you cringe, as if it were fists.
The darkness is pure, your fingers spell upon my back.
The darkness is holy, they insist.
Would I have acted differently if I had known that I would never hear your voice again?
That you would never leave the dark room to appear before me in light again?
The heartbreak of hindsight.
Your touch soon informs me that it isn’t necessary to bring the balanced meals I carefully prepare for you twice a day. You’ll eat only a crust of bread, drink only a half cup of water. Nor is it important that I empty the bucket of waste regularly. All you want from me is my touch. As if this touch contains all light, all nourishment, all comfort you desire.
What do I desire?
The same thing as always: your happiness.
I give you what you want, what I can, what I have.
More, your touch demands.
Harder, it urges.
Don’t stop.
Driving home, I fear what new development will await me. I park next to your Jeep and contemplate our shared home. From the outside, it appears more or less the same as the others on this quiet street. Innocent, innocuous. The old woman next door, whose sidewalk we shovel in winter and lawn we mow in summer, waves until I lift my arm in response. (We’ve taken pains to ingratiate ourselves with our neighbours in order to forestall unease they might otherwise feel from our presence, as in a foreign country one is careful to soothe potentially hostile natives.) A small boy pedals his tricycle up and down the sidewalk, rings its tinny bell repeatedly. A sprinkler pirouettes with perfect grace on green grass. Blue smoke from barbecues slants through the golden air of six o’clock. The scent of burning charcoal and cooking meat mixes with that of freshly cut lawns to produce the bouquet of suburbia.
The small boy’s name is Billy. Often when you have worked in the yard, he has tagged at your heels, tugged at your sleeve, asked question after question. Changing the oil in your Jeep, you patiently explained each step, allowed him to hand you tools. He would stand beside you, scarcely reaching half-way up your long legs. His face tilts to find your eyes above. Your hand rests lightly upon his tawny head.
From what I understand, Billy has no father. My source of information, the old woman next door, shakes her head when speaking of the boy: plainly, she could say more.
I have seen the way you look at the son you’ll never have.
It makes the strings of my heart knot, tangle, twist.
From the driveway’s perspective and distance, it would be easy to summon terms such as “breakdown” and “psychosis” and “illness” to describe what is occurring inside our house. It seems obvious that intervention and assistance are required for you, of me. In the end, I will be asked why I didn’t save you. That failure will be called a crime, given another name, turned into an act that demands punishment.
I won’t try to explain that to drag you from the other room and call an ambulance would have meant failure to our eyes.
We have never lived for the world’s eyes.
We have always lived for love alone.
Perhaps all lovers must believe they embark upon a unique adventure, undertake a brave new experiment, engage in unprecedented experience. You are daring me to follow you deep into the darkness. To search for the source of love, as elusive as that of the Nile, which lies far beyond practical procreation and sanctified desire and convenient passion; only there at its origin, before becoming contaminated by time and space, is love pure. Long ago, I suspect, you began preparing for this journey we’re taking now. You waited patiently until you were able to bring it about; you always kept the larger picture in mind. An unremarkable house on a quiet street in a drowsy suburb far from the sleek centre of a city: this particular setting is important to the success of your meticulously conceived design—as the room at the back of the house, the old woman next door and the small boy half-way down the block form further crucial pieces of the puzzle you hold whole in your head. And you selected me specifically to participate in your experiment because you believed I would not fail its challenges, however difficult they might be. Several dozen images of you closely considering me form a montage. You are wondering if I am strong enough, brave enough, man enough to love.
The tricycle bell fades in the distance. I continue to feel you waiting within the house for me. For several days, I realize, I have come home hoping to find you gone. For one moment, I am tempted to turn the ignition key and restart the still-warm engine; to drive away and not return.
This is my last chance to leave you.
From here there is no going back.
Slowly I approach then enter our house.
Honey, I hysterically think of calling, I’m home.
Gradually I stop thinking of the space you occupy as “the other room.”
It is simply “the room.”
The original room, the only room.
As if no other room has ever existed.
Sometimes your silence taunts me.
Sometimes it shrilly screams.
Seduces, begs, insinuates, cajoles.
Increasingly, interpretation is all that remains for me.
Or rather: understanding that, in love, interpretation is all we ever have.
The adoring expression in his eyes, the tender tone of his voice: our own emotion, fatally subjective, elects the adjectives it requires to survive.
The air enclosed within the room becomes thick and heavy with the odour of your unbathed body, with the stench from the bucket of waste. It grows difficult to respond to your silent summons. I must remind myself that this aroma is produced by and is part of the being I love; therefore, I must love it also.
In love there can be no selective throwing out of chaff to keep the grain.
Take me as I am.
All or nothing.
In sickness and in health.
Till death do us part.
Threadbare clichés echo tinnily inside my head.
The darkness around you assumes the properties of solid matter. I stroke its skin; I squeeze its entrails. Rub darkness between my fingers, feel its texture. Touch it, learn it, know it.
Love it.
It requires increasing effort to touch you with the force you desire. I grow nostalgic for the days when the lightest pressure of my fingertips could make you quiver, cry out, come. In the Braille darkness, I read a historical romance that features your clean hair’s scent, the gaze of two green eyes, the precise pitch of a laugh. More and more, I feel I’m making love with the past.
Or committing adultery with your ghost.
I wonder if our emphasis on touch as profound communication was misguided all along. As your silence lasts, I’m perversely compelled to speak to you in words, must fight to stifle that urge. When your birthday arrives, and then our anniversary, I feel helpless to convey the significance of these days. Especially since, exactly when subtlety is most needed, my touch becomes reduced to blunt blows.
Still harder, you mutely beg.
It’s painful to realize that your powerful body is losing mass, your muscles their firm tone. In the second the door lies open, as I enter or leave the room, a glimpse reveals how pale you’ve become. Gaudy sores and cuts and bruises decorate your skin like the haphazard work of some tattoo artist suffering from a deficiency in concentration. Like the nails of your toes and fingers, your matted hair grows long. But in the darkness, your eyes shine more brightly than ever. Your touch tells me over and over that this is how you wish to live. Your previous experience was compromise.
Now you are completely satisfied.
Perfectly happy.
Summer passes slowly. I go to work each weekday. I visit you each evening. I mow the lawn and wave to neighbours and watch Billy pedal his blue tricycle back and forth in front of our house. He is hoping the sound of his bell will draw you to him. That you will play catch with him. Tell him about when you were a boy his age. Promise him that one day he’ll grow to be as tall and strong as you. As loved as you.
When I return the emptied waste bucket to the room, you tend to shift it one or two feet from where I have placed it. After a moment, the metal’s glint shows you have moved it half-way back to where it was. In my mind gleams a host of occasions from the time before the room, when you seemed to meditate on the position of some unimportant object, consult a blueprint in your head, then adjust the arrangement of the landscape to match. The blueprint is of the past; what seems unprecedented to me is in fact repetition: this has happened before. I slowly understand how crucial it is that your room is at the back, not the front of the house. That the woman next door is old rather than young. That, for purposes of replication, Billy’s hair is tawny instead of dark.
