Robert Goolrick - A Reliable Wife

He would kiss her very lightly, and her nipples would graze his shirtfront, and her lips would graze his lips, which hadn’t been kissed in so many years he couldn’t count them. His tongue would touch her tongue. He would hold her face steady with both his hands as he softly kissed her.

How could he have spent his life without this? How could his youth have passed, his body have aged untouched, unadmired, unloved? His body was starting to leave him and it would not come back. In ten years he would be old.

He wanted everything. He did nothing.

One evening, a week after he had told her the story of his life, he said to her at dinner, “I thought we would marry on Thanksgiving Day. If that’s all right. If it would suit.”

“That would be fine. Who would come?”

“Should people come?”

“I don’t know. People do. Usually. You must have friends. People you know. I haven’t seen anybody.”

“It seemed inappropriate, for you to go to town. People talk enough. And the weather…”

“There must be people.”

“A few.”

“So we’ll have people here? There will be food, a supper maybe. A wedding.”

The woman he wanted to undress, to see naked, was a stranger. Her conversation, her requests, were strange to him. Nobody had asked anything of him for so long.

“I’m not… I’m not pure. You should know.”

He watched her in silence.

“I was a child. A friend of my father’s, a fellow missionary in Africa. He came to me one night and… I’m not pure. Not without the sin of fornication. My father killed him. You should know.”

Mercy touched at his heart. He held her hand, just for a moment, for the first time.

“That life is past. It was a long time ago. It was not your fault. Don’t think about it anymore.”

She looked so far away.

“It doesn’t matter to me. Nobody’s pure. My daughter, my Francesca was pure, but nobody else.”

He passed her in the hall, they sat at dinner, and she was beautiful and unknowable. He wanted to lead her to his bed, his father’s huge cherry bed with the massive carved headboard and the finely laid, perfectly crisp sheets. He wanted to pull back the coverlet and lay her gently against the cool and antiseptic white of the linen sheets, the sheets the machines in his mills wove all day long every day. He wanted with all his heart to stand in front of her as he pulled back his braces, undid in seconds the buttons and belts of his own clothes. He would lay his father’s heavy silver watch on the nightstand. He would lie down beside her in his one-piece underwear, washed by Mrs. Larsen, changed every day, always clean, the buttons buttoned from crotch to neck.

Every piece of his clothing was always clean. He bathed every day before it was light, the water scalding, and the air in the room like a Turkish bath, thick with fragrant steam. He would stand in front of her and not think about how strong and solid his body had once been. He would not think about how he had thrown himself away on whores.

They would gasp, the whores, when they saw him naked. At the strength and grace of his body, a strength and grace even he could see, looking at himself naked in a long mirror. They would giggle with joy, and say things in Italian he could barely understand. That was a long time ago.

He looked at Catherine. He imagined her in bed. In his bed.

He wanted to hold her face until she finally raised her eyes to look at him. He wanted to look in her eyes and know who she was, who she was in her hidden soul. He wanted to kiss her with his hands on her cheeks. He wanted her to answer his kiss with an eager tongue. He wanted to feel the moment her hand moved beneath the cotton of his shirt and touched, for the very first time, the hair of his chest, the skin of his body. He wanted her to want all this and he wanted her to fear it, but he wanted her to submit.

Sometimes his loneliness was like a fire beneath his skin. Sometimes he had thought of taking his razor and slicing his own flesh, peeling back the skin that would not stop burning.

But he knew it would not happen, not happen to him, not ever.

“There’s something I would like.” She stared into the fire. It was the first, the only wish she had expressed.

“Of course.”

“I want a wedding dress. I want to send to Chicago for some material and make a wedding dress. It’s something girls dream of. I want a ring. Nothing large or fancy. My father told me I would never have one, and for that reason I want it. Not to spite him, but to say to myself that sometimes your little dreams come true, no matter what people tell you.”

“I’ll get whatever you want. I told you.”

“You needn’t worry. I don’t expect much. Ours is an arrangement, yes? Not a childish passion. We both have reasons.” And she smiled at him, the first time he had seen her smile. Her smile aroused in him a longing for something, the past perhaps, that brought him almost to tears.

“Gray, I thought. Silk, if… I could wear it again. After the wedding. Or I could give it to my daughter one day, if we were to have children.”

“Order whatever you want. Write it down, and I’ll telegraph for it tomorrow.”

He thought of her standing in this house in a wedding dress she had made with her own hands. He thought of the mortal sins that raced through his bloodstream. He thought his desire had putrefied. He thought his desires would kill her. He thought, yes, they would have a child, and it would emerge, another monster.

He did not think of wanting the woman whose photograph lay in his drawer, along with the letter which Catherine may or may not have written. He wanted the woman he passed every day in the hallway, who sat across from him at dinner, who ate her food with such delicacy and charm, her small teeth sparkling, who never failed to ask Mrs. Larsen about some sauce or some ingredient he hadn’t even tasted.

He wanted her teeth to bite him. To leave marks on his back, his legs. He wanted her hair to strangle him. He wanted her to tell him that his touch would not kill her.

He wanted to slice her open and lie inside the warm blood of her body.

He didn’t touch alcohol. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t go to Chicago, as many would have, to have sex with women he didn’t know. Not for a long time. None of it mattered. None of it did any good.

He wanted the moment at which he finally lay naked against her, chest to chest, her hands fluttering above his shoulders like white birds in the chill night, her frantic fingers threading invisible needles. He wanted to know that his desire was life, pure and clean and unformed and unbroken. Life as good as anybody else’s. As clean as any ever known. Perfectly healthy.

In the end, such a simple thing.

In his fantasy, morning never came; they never woke to look at one another with shy eyes or bitter eyes in the blinding light. There was no tomorrow. There was only this moment, her hand sliding for the first time between his undershirt and his skin, his body sliding into the most private and untouchable parts, not just of her body but of her life, so that they were bonded together not just by the desire itself but by the burning, the ineradicable memory of the actual taste and smell of the flesh.

He remembered every woman he had ever touched. He had thought that he would forget, the way he forgot people’s names or the grades he made at university or the faces of men he had gotten drunk with and told his secrets to. But the scenes of his sexual life came back to him more and more as his years in exile endured, so that he could recall their names, he could see their silken dresses and the diamonds hanging from their ears. He could remember the names of the jewelers from whom he bought these baubles for his little sweethearts.