Rich Seeber
Departure
Their lovemaking ended without dissatisfaction. Eyes closed, Tilda
listened to him catch his breath, felt his weight shift on the
mattress. Limbs untangled, air filled the space between them.
Drifting through the open window came fragments of conversation from
the bus stop below; their sweat, cooling in the sheets, registered on
her skin and sent gooseflesh crawling across her back. Euphoria
dissipated, became relief that their first time had been good: He
hadn't been unnecessarily rough, hadn't fucked with condescension
or
handled her like a china doll. Their month of chaste dates seemed
distant, as if lived by someone else.
When she opened her eyes he was closer than she'd imagined.
"Can I get you anything?" Ricky asked. "Water?"
The features of his face below his forehead were geometrically
precise, the distance from the bridge to the tip of his nose as short
as his nostrils were wide. The whites of his eyes were enormous.
"That would be nice," she said.
Ricky swung his legs over the bed and sat up. The dimples of his
sacrum winked and flattened. As he stood an airy gust slipped from
between his legs. "Oh!" he said. "Sorry!" The back of his
neck
flushed red.
"Just a fart," Tilda giggled, and forced her own, a short blast on
a
toy bassoon. As their laughter dispersed, she silently bid farewell
to the misinterpreted signals and second-guessed gestures of
courtship. She felt like she could tell him anything.
When he returned with the glass, she searched his face for the
conflicting doubts previous lovers had presented after sex, but found
him tranquil. With darting eyes she pieced together his body:
nipples like stray pebbles on fine sand, patches of dark hair that
shaded his thigh above each knee. His penis, exhausted, scrunched
against the fleshy mound behind his wiry bush; the end tapered into a
crinkle of skin like a chocolate canolli. She hadn't noticed the
skin earlier. She squinted in the cottony light.
"What is it?" Ricky asked.
"You have foreskin," Tilda said.
"Had," said Ricky. "There's not much left. Does it bother
you?" He
looked down and wiggled his hips. His penis jiggled back and forth.
"Not at all," she said. "I hadn't noticed." She drank,
swallowed,
set the glass on the bed stand. "I mean, before. While we
were..."
"I'm a hybrid," he said, and laughed.
"What does that mean?" she asked. "A hybrid?"
"That I'm not completely circumcised," he said. "They didn't
get it
all."
"I don't understand," she said. "How could they not get all of
it?"
"It got hard during the procedure," he said. He reached for the
glass.
Now it was her turn to laugh. "Who told you that?"
"Duh," he said. He made a silly face. "I was there..."
"And you were, what? A week old?" His comfort in talking about
his
body reassured her, even if she didn't know whether to believe him.
"I was twelve," he said, then swished a chug of water around in his
mouth. Gulp. "That's when we do it on the island."
"Twelve?"
"It's a right of passage. Kind of like getting your ear
pierced."
"I think, by twelve," Tilda said, "you have a more intimate
relationship with your penis than you do with your ear."
"It doesn't hurt," Ricky said, and withdrew a step from the bed.
"They pull up the skin and cut it, then you jump in the ocean." He
seemed to shiver at the memory. "Except for the needle," he added.
"They deaden it first. That hurts."
"I would think that would deter the hard-on," Tilda said. A breeze
rustled the blinds. The smoke from someone's cigarette tickled her
nose and threatened to force a sneeze.
"Anyway," Ricky said, drawing the skin back with a thumb and finger, "it looks circumcised when it's hard and uncircumcised when it's
not."
It, it, it!, Tilda thought. Half an hour ago it had pressed against
her thigh through his trousers. It had shown the courage to request
what neither of them had had the courage to approach with words.
"I'm sorry," he'd said when her hand brushed his lap. She'd
pulled
back in surprise. "I didn't mean..." He'd pulled back too,
panicked.
"Don't be," she'd replied, "it's ok, it's...good to
know..." She'd
wrapped her arm around his waist and drawn him firmly against her. A
kiss signaled her willingness to continue. Their first time lasted a
quarter of an hour, which she took as a sign of compatibility:
Endurance tempered by the excitement of a new body.
And now he spoke as if his penis were an object, unattached, its own
pronoun. Tilda thought, I'd never refer to my vagina as "it,"
then
recalled her mother after the double mastectomy, referring to her
lopped-off breasts as "them." But wasn't that acceptable? After
all, they'd threatened her life. Best to distance yourself from such
poisons.
"We could do it again," Ricky said hopefully. He moved in close,
stroked her hair. It was already coming back to life.
Tilda drew the sheet across her body. Outside, a bus pulled up to
the curb and opened its doors with a hydraulic woosh. It, she
thought, meaning the bus, will pick up passengers and accept their
fair. It will close its doors and accelerate up the street.
The minute changed on the digital clock beside his bed. Tilda
recalled the transit schedule and calculated the time until the next
bus departed.
©2008 by Rich Seeber
