Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

He stepped forward into her body and offered himself up to her embrace. She hesitated at first, stiffened as if there were something wrong with his skin, as if she had found something repulsive in the feel of him, but then she whispered “Oh, sweetie…” with a heavy exhalation, as if a hope had at last been realized, and wrapped her arms around him, her legs and hips seeming to stretch, as if she would envelope him completely if she could.

Jefferson held fast to her, at first in a familiar desperation, using her to anchor himself to the remaining tatters of his sense of reality. Then he increased the firmness of this embrace as he felt more and more in control of himself and of his situation. This young woman said she believed in touching, had in fact made hugging a credo, an entire belief system. But he sincerely doubted she understood touching at all. He believed a true touch between human beings to be impossible. But it was that impossibility which made it seem so essential. In fact, his embrace became so strong that the surface area of his arms and hands seemed to increase dramatically, impossibly, so that his grip covered every inch of her flesh, every square inch of her life, so that he could feel her increasingly harsh breathing beneath his touch, her pores opening in panic beneath his touch, releasing the oils and toxins all lives give off as they are winding down, as he squeezed and squeezed in an attempt to touch the life within her, to know that life at the level of his fingertips.

When at last he felt the spasms beneath his hands, the last swift jerks of her body, he looked down at her steady gaze, her lips sheened with a red froth as they dropped back as if to take his mouth in a final kiss, and he wondered at what he had done.

Jefferson would think of Anita many times after that. She became more to him than merely a first love, more like his first encounter with the sweet pulse which drove life itself. She was his first bride, and although even then he knew there would be many others, surely there could never be another to surpass the feel or the taste of his sweet Anita.

She became the standard by which he judged other women, by which he imagined them. And during the months which followed he would imagine many women in his arms.

Marie was someone he followed for weeks before finally arranging their “accidental” meeting. She cleaned several of the larger houses in the neighborhood, arriving at the corner by bus each morning around nine, and normally departing the same way about two PM. She was short, slight, brunette; some might have called her “ethereal.” It was easy for him to imagine her dissolving completely under the persistent press of his arms.

She ate lunch every day at the Blue Ribbon Diner. After several days of watching her, Jefferson adopted the same habit, choosing a table to the side, only a few feet away.

She ate a great deal for such a small person. He wondered where she put it all.

He dreamed of squeezing the food back out of her, years of it unused and simply waiting for him to empty her with his embrace. All that untapped energy, all that unused life.

Once or twice she glanced in his direction and smiled. He felt his arm muscles tense, his chest suddenly swelling with an emptiness.

At last came a day he chose to come late, after the lunch rush was well under way. As always, there was the empty chair at her table.

“May I?” He smiled widely, and he could feel a strain in his empty belly.

“Sure… I don’t mind,” she said, as if it mattered. “I see you here all the time.”

“You always make the food taste better,” he said. He made himself say it without blushing. Anita had given him just that kind of confidence.

She looked at him with a slightly startled expression, then laughed out loud, presumably at the audacity of his compliment. But she still smiled at him. She nodded and hid her eyes. Obviously he had pleased her.

Over the next few weeks Jefferson was careful when and where and how he touched her. He was courting her embrace, in fact, and had to make his moves cautiously, despite his sometimes overwhelming desire to bury her under his hands. She seemed anxious for more as well, and now and then he had to stop her from moving his hand to where he was not yet ready to be.

“Kiss me,” she whispered late one afternoon, long after her regular bus had left. She had led him to a quiet corner of the park, surrounded by broad shrubbery. “Please… don’t be shy.” Her breath was full and warm against his face. His fingers itched to enter her lips and meet that breath at its source.

“Not now. Patience…” he whispered back at her. Her back stiffened under his hand. He wanted badly to press into these hardened muscles—how firm she had become through her labors, so wonderfully fit that he could have written testimonials to the physical efficacy of housework for the modern woman’s figure—but he had to pull his hand away instead.

“Just… forget it!” She stood up and started away.

He was afraid he had waited too long. He leaped up and ran behind her, grabbing her around the waist and turning her, and holding on with eyes squeezed shut as his lips suddenly opened and he said, in a voice that sounded so much like Anita, whom he had squeezed into the empty spaces inside himself that long ago night, “You look like you need a hug.”

He was surprised to find that the tighter he squeezed her, the tighter she squeezed back.

“Hold me,” she whispered with ragged breath. “Hold me tight.”

And he did. He held her because she wanted him to hold her—that was always the best way. Like everyone else in the world she needed to be held. The flesh of the human body clung all too tightly to its solitary bones. The mixing of flesh, the joining of individual bodies, was illusory, and always promised far more than was delivered. Make love for hours with even remarkable talent and passion and you still finished the evening spent and alone within your own sweat-slicked, shivering hide, your own thoughts hidden and untouchable from the other beside you in your bed. All you could do was hold, and squeeze, and imagine a bonding of skin to skin which could not happen no matter how desperately you squeezed.

“Too tight, honey. Too tight,” she said between clenched teeth trying to resemble a smile. But Jefferson could see the fear and confusion in her eyes. He moved his hands to her neck and her face and squeezed some more, and was amazed at the relaxation forced into her muscles, the redness and then the pallor that came to her cheeks, and as he squeezed he imagined her moving into the too-rigid outlines of his body, and he could almost hear the endless conversations they might have inside himself.

Blue shaded her eyes as in his mind his body opened lengthwise, like a huge vertical mouth, and took her in, and swallowed her up, and used her to assuage its loneliness.

Carol came into his life with a small child, Jenny, who was as beautiful as Carol herself, perhaps more so. At first Jefferson thought that the existence of this child must necessarily preclude his having any sort of relationship with Carol. For children frightened him. They always had. In part, he knew, this was because of the great delicacy of their bodies. It was hard for Jefferson to accept that such delicate bodies could survive. You couldn’t help loving small children, certainly—their physical vulnerability made it inevitable. But that just made them all the more threatening, actually. They looked up at you with eyes filled with trust, and a mock-intelligence which suggested that they knew how you felt, that they were human beings as well, but their freakish vulnerability made that a lie. Their dwarfed, frail bodies were a joke, a hideous satire of the solitary death we each must face.