Claire Watkins - Battleborn

On the way back through the courtyard, we passed a sculpture I’d never seen before. It seemed to be made from a hundred arcing pieces of soft gray driftwood, all delicately fitted together and balanced in the perfect form of a horse. It looked as though I could push it over. I loved this about it. “Touch it,” said Carly. I did, and immediately realized that it wasn’t made of wood, but of bronze patinaed to look like wood. The branches I’d thought were carefully interlocked were welded together. Just then, Carly called across the courtyard.

Liam was good-looking in a way that indeed suggested Connecticut. He was lean and jaunty, though he’d obviously made some effort to coax his hair into a state of semi-unruliness. Carly introduced us, then said, “Well,” and retreated swiftly inside.

Liam smiled and removed his hands from his pockets as if just remembering some childhood reprimand about having them there. I struck the sculpture with the heel of my hand, and the blow made the hollow sound of a bottomless well.

“Carly says you have an art degree,” Liam ventured.

“I thought this was wood.”

“It was,” he said, in a consoling tone that brought to my attention the fact that I had arrived at a state of needing consolation. He went on hurriedly. “Or, she molded the wood, anyway. Molded the wood and then burnt it out.” He gestured sheepishly to a placard set into a boulder nearby, by way of citation perhaps.

“That’s terrible,” I said, suddenly feeling nauseous. “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.” Liam started to speak again, nobly, but I interrupted him. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to go.”

Liam, maintaining his East Coast dignity, said only, “Right.”

On the walk home, I stopped occasionally to brace myself against the bigtooth maples lining the street. I pressed my hands to my breasts where they’d begun to bloom up from my bra, and longed for a museum that didn’t feel like a museum. I preferred the preserved homes of historic figures. I liked a quill ready to be dipped in a pot of ink, a bonnet tossed onto a rocker, firewood half stacked by a stove. A house waiting for people who would never come. This made sense to me.

Outside my front door sat a pair of tennis shoes, the heels trampled down, the canvas cracking in the sun. A plaque mounted on the brick above them might have read:

The End (1 of 3). The day was warm for fall. They had their feet in the Truckee River. They’d been drinking wine since lunch. She was drunk and he was getting there. She was telling him where the phrase Indian summer came from. He didn’t believe her. They were laughing about this when all at once he stopped laughing and said, “A part of me wants this. More than anything.” He was always saying this. She had long since begun to wonder how many parts he had. She knew she’d fallen for a puzzle of a man, all parts and pieces and fractions, but was only now seeing how few of those would ever be hers.

He took her hand. “I want you seventy percent of the time,” he said. “No. Seventy-five.”

Fucker , she thought, wanting badly to bite him in all sorts of places, all sorts of contexts. On the apple of his cheek. Through a cutlet of skin gathered from the back of his hand. There was nothing to say. In the silence it occurred to her that they were within walking distance of her apartment, and that they had been all day. She saw the route home the way a bird would.

He said, “I’m sorry. I hate that I said that.”

“Then stop,” she said.

“I can’t.”

She was brave from wine and unseasonable sunshine and the newfound closeness of home. She told him he was making things too hard on her. She told him she was afraid she’d let him do this forever. The saying of these things had been a long time coming—these and many others—and as she walked home, her feet riverwet inside these tennis shoes, she knew they meant the end of them.

A second placard, buffed shiny and mounted at chest height just inside the front door:

The End (2 of 3). Two days later a storm rolled in from the west and Ezra came, for the first time, to the front door. When she opened it he said, “Hey,” and took her by the jaw and kissed her. She tried to find some sign in the way he worked his mouth against hers. But it was his same kiss—as brutal, as consuming. It did to her what it always had. He turned her around and pushed her up against the cool wall of this hallway. He put one hand in her hair roughly and kissed her neck, more teeth than tongue. He worked his other hand up then down her, shucking her clothes to the floor. The front door was still open, a wet autumn smell slipping inside. He pinned his knees into hers and spread her legs apart. She made uncontrollable gasping sounds, muffled by her mouth pressed to the plaster. He pushed harder against her and she tilted her hips into him. Then, as if he felt the fight go out of her, he turned her around so she faced him. He bent and kissed her once on the bridge of her nose. She managed to say, “We need to talk.”

“Okay,” he said. “Talk.”

“Why are you here? What do you want?”

He smiled and kissed her fondly on the mouth and through the kiss he is to have said, “I want you to be quiet and let me fuck you.”

And she was grateful, so she did. He slipped both his hands under her ass and lifted her, mounting her bare back against this very spot. Her legs bowed around him. She braced herself against his thick shoulders and he rocked into her. She let herself believe that this could be a beginning rather than an end. That this was them. Then she stopped thinking altogether. When he came he made the same quick half breaths he always did. He slackened and they slid slowly down the wall, their limbs loosely threaded together. They were unmoving and sweat-slick, his head resting on her chest. A car drove by, its tires sluicing cleanly through the rainwater. By then it felt natural not to say the thing that needed saying.

A third, positioned unobtrusively near the unmade bed:

The End (3 of 3). Afterward, he carried her to bed. Before they slept, she got up and nodded toward the fire escape. “I think I’ll have a cigarette,” she said. Without looking at her he said, “I quit, actually.”

Just before dawn she woke to the sound of Ezra gathering his clothes from the hallway. Already she could feel two sore spots like crab apples above her ass where he’d worked her hips against the wall. (See placard two.)

She said nothing. Once he was dressed he sat on the edge of the bed beside her. “I know you’re awake,” he said. She did not move. He rubbed the soft place behind her ear with his thumb. “I love you,” he said, and though she knew it was true she kept her eyes closed and said, “Don’t say that.” She did not want to allow that love could be so fearful and meager and misshapen. He left, and she did not try to stop him. She was through trying to stop him. She had been trying to stop him since the day they met.

That afternoon—after I’d abandoned poor Liam—Carly called me four times. I ignored her. I walked around my apartment, lightly touching the artifacts Ezra left behind in the year we were together. They were pathetic and few: a bag of white tea gone stale, a screwdriver we meant to use to fix a window screen but never did, some books, a toothbrush I bought him. I decided I would preserve these just as he’d left them, convert my apartment into the Museum of Love Lost. I envisioned other exhibits. An installation of all the clever, evasive text messages he ever sent me, a replica of the bar where we met, handmade dioramas of our finest outings. That night I woke to the sensation of the bedsheets against my nipples. In the dark I saw our happiest moments in miniature.