Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Why do we always have to rank everything? Biggest? Best? Most? Boys: you'll really have to explain the concept to me one of these days.

You feel the flash of anger, the so familiar one, the rage that you can't voice without confirming her. Don't need you to rank them. Just want to know the name of one that moved you. One that you loved.

You asked me to tell you my favorite. My absolute fave rave. The one that vanquishes all the other comers. No secrets, now. Come on, name names.

Forget it. I'm sorry I brought it up.

Oh. My little Tai-Jan's feelings are hurt. Bad girlfriend. Her right hand administers a slap to her left. Nasty, aggressive girlfriend. Does not work and play well with others.

Yes, it so often crossed your mind to say. Yes. What you just said.

You don't say that. You say something different. This time, as always. Look. It seemed legitimate to try to share in something that delighted you.

Why can't you just let delight come up in its own good time? Why do you have to engineer everything all the time? Control the whole exchange?

And in the next breath, in her hemp-induced fog, she suggests that she straddle you while you sit on the reclining chair in the front window, lights out — her favorite position, a secret vantage from which she can look out on all the cars and pedestrians, none of whom can imagine what takes place inside the darkened warren that they pass by.

How desired and desolate she always made you feel — ever, ever— each of those gifts wrapped in the other's predicate. She stands, in your mind, like some Hindu statuette, one set of hands crooked and beckoning, the other set, palms out in front of her in the international body language for Stop.

The posture threw you off from the day you met her, in that florist on Highland, August of 78. You, ordering a dozen prosaic roses to throw into a stillborn cause, one already lost even as you tried to fix it with blooms. She, assembling a wild assortment of pastel exotics to send to someone she forever afterward refused to identify. The moment she looks up and sees you enter the shop, she smiles such a grin of vast recognition that you have to smile back, bluffing, wondering how you could possibly have forgotten so friendly and welcoming a face.

You fall to talking almost without thought, hoping her name will come to you after a couple of clues. But the clues all prove that you don't know this woman from Eve. Four traded sentences and you want to. She makes you want to. Open, uncomplicated invitation — like a neighborhood buddy knocking on the door of a Saturday morning, with a baseball and two mitts.

How do you like my creation? she coaxes, displaying it for you. It wants to be a bouquet when it grows up.

You make the sound of appreciation, out of the depths of your throat's greater helplessness. What about my needs? Should I go with the red, the yellow, or the white?

Depends. Is it a kiss-off or a suck-up?

Good question. You do a fair imitation of total paralysis. I haven't figured that out yet.

Definitely the ivory, then. Ivory is totally ambiguous. You can always claim misunderstanding later.

You can, and do. There follows the obligatory couple of dead heats of answering-machine tag. Would you? Love to. Say when. You, then.

The two of you cook a meal together, at her place. Vegetable lasagna, whose 3.5 grams of fat per serving would strike your mother as a disgrace to human dignity. You wash and slice and pulverize, feeling, despite yourself, as if you're preparing the buffet from which you'll sup the rest of your life. She looks on, smiling at your handiwork. The last time she ever lets you near the food prep.

Her running gag: Who said you could go near sharp implements? Does your mother know you're trying to drive a standard transmission? Someone has cruelly and senselessly led you to believe that joke is funny? Uh, friend: about this so-called wardrobe of yours…? The feel of something invisible being forever contested in the flow of wit.

You share five or six more outings, for form's sake, moseying up to the inevitable test of desire. Bird-watching, stargazing: each an adventure, but never the same adventure twice. You feel some pleasure in the agonizing postponement, but she is more patient than you. Always she meets you under the gun, the taxi meter running, half a dozen plates up in the air, Post-it notes stuck all over her jumpsuit, appointments with strangers written in Bic on her palms that she has to consult before she can tell you when she'll be available next.

But always her eyes say soon. And when you part, with your ubiquitous and meaningless See ya, always she reins you in with a smiled "I believe you will."

Her random reinforcement schedule keeps you massively addicted. Her trick is to pick the moment, that precise evening when the concession seems real and all the wait leading up to it no more than a fluke she is keen to repudiate. She chooses the time and place, a sweet surrender of sovereignty for which she is careful to palm the claim stub.

There comes a moment in the night's right ascension when the lead-up tease, the slow, hinted rope tug disappears into the bin of all childish things. Then she spreads; then she solidifies. And all that night, your bodies exchange sightings, come within touching distance of a place that you will spend the next eight years trying to recover.

At the moment that she fixes her limbs to you, her commitment is unthinking: as utter as that between any two speechless animals. But she is absent as well, somewhere far away, deep in a formulating image. Who knows whose? Off in a place that is anything but yours.

Your two souths merge. You move your face to hers, sealing the ring. You will tell her that you love her, prematurely, helplessly, something she already knows, something she will snort dismissal at, glandular, cliched, but the only thing that might help a little against all that life still has in store for the two of you. You lower your length, fulcrumed along hers, a shadow curling toward the foot of its wall as the sun wanders over day, your mouth seeking out her ear. But she speaks first. You can do anything you want to me.

This is what you hear. Or at the most generous, the most rehabilitated, factoring in all faults of sound and audition, the tricks of the brain when showered in chemical joy at sight of the land it has succeeded in reaching. You can do anything you want with me.

For years, she will not remember. She will deny having said anything of the kind.

She rises from intimacy to wash off the drops of your body. Clean again, she wraps herself in flannel pajamas — yes, even in this heat-before she'll come back to bed. She accepts you against the ladle of her back. She permits you to commit, smiles at the stories you spin out into her ear, but does not return or extend them.

She's up before you, doing her sit-ups to progressive radio rock when you finally drag yourself out of her long-suffering bed. Breakfast? you ask, over the throb of the synth bass.

Not for me.

You commandeer a banana and wait for the routine to abate. It doesn't. Finally, you must get on with your life. The crucial skill here seems to be to ask for nothing, to wait with no expectations, to see what might settle on your sill of its own free accord. See you soon? you say, hoping that the hope in your voice feels in no way coercive.

Yes, she says, pausing in mid-step-aerobic long enough to kiss you goodbye. I believe you probably will.

Now you have only your own workout, your own daily routine to blunt the brutal memory working your gut. Only your daily thirty minutes off the chain, to tranquillize, to bring your eager grief low. Back on the leash, you match her sit-up for sit-up, exercise serving some awful, unshakable end, the stupid insistence on surviving. You fight against the steady atrophy of your muscles, work to crush the furtive hope that, should you by some accident ever be freed, and in the uproar of freedom come by chance across her, you will not look repulsive. You wonder how she likes beards, this wiry pelt that cups, petlike, into your hands. Groundless desire: the last thing we outlive, outlove.