Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

Sometimes I got tired of it. I'd trudge downstairs and watch television and let it build again, return to him and feel us, as we made love in that strobe-lit place, descending through room after room.

I’m telling you I was in deep, we both were, it was a honeymoon, that whirligig of crashing nuances and dismal reconciliations, vistas of hope redeemed, endless milliseconds free of natural law. We spent a night away from each other in separate rooms — I had nightmares of losing him and I found myself sitting on the edge of my bed at four a.m. Did you think I was going to say anything but a.m.? Do you want to talk about darkness? I loved him! Everything about him was candy. The vulnerability of his skin seized up my throat; sometimes I felt I couldn’t live anymore. And so on. .

“You're handsome.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No, I'm lying. .”

He was faceless. But he had a beautiful ass. His bottom was like an upside-down heart filled with the blood of martyrs. Would you think that about anyone you didn't truly love? I loved him! In my heart, my belly, in my bones, my teeth, I loved him!

He was in love with me too. In the morning I'd kiss him in bed while the light came under the vented eaves. I’d feel his mouth around my tongue and the light slicing through my back, turning my lungs to gold; he liked to have me breathe into his mouth and out of his mouth. At a time like that there was only one of us.

But then I might get out of bed to go to the toilet, and suddenly we were two people without hope of ever understanding each other.

“I'm frightened of you. You make me afraid.” We were so in love that he was tender and happy, even as he said these things. “You want me to think you’re so terribly hard and cynical. But I know — you like to be touched, don’t you.”

“Maybe . . By you. .”

“You never smile.” We kissed. “But your eyes are more kind than any I’ve ever seen.”

I was glad I scared him. It made me feel less afraid.

Sometimes when I closed my eyes I saw a kind of shrunken, demonic but still beautiful if very white rendering of his face. Waking in the morning, I was launched into the universe where he was. Going to sleep, I passed into the dreamland he inhabited. The beginning and the end was in every word he spoke. I would look into his eyes sometimes and see my mother and father making love.

I don’t know, I don’t know. .

“You have beautiful breasts.”

“They’re small.”

“Your breasts are perfect, beautiful, perfect.”

“No, they’re too small.”

“I refuse to believe that. To me they're perfect.”

“But to everyone else, you mean, they’re too small.”

“Whatever size they are, I love them.”

“You mean you think they’re too small!” And I broke down weeping . .

I can’t remember what we promised one another during that long, fitful evening interrupted by a handful of daytimes; I can’t remember what we said, what we dreamed, what we witnessed, who we thought we were . . But I remember with what passionate conviction I cherished the belief that I would never forget. .

"You’re a romantic. Are you a romantic?”

“Maybe. I surprise myself.”

“You have a wife.”

Now why did I say that?

“And two children,” he said.

THE PART for the car didn’t come and didn’t come. Nearly a week went by. We didn’t mind.

One day as we were done making love, the sheet held a rusty stain in the shape of a tulip.

I dragged the sheet from the bed and ran cold water over the spot. He had to stand in the corner of the room as if he’d done something bad. “No, lie down,” I told him. “We don’t need a sheet every minute, do we?”

He lay back down on the bare mattress on which one more stain wouldn’t be noticed. “Does that mean we’re over for a while,” he asked.

“What for? I don’t care, as long as we don’t send them down a lot of bloody bedding — that would be a little embarrassing, I guess.”

“You really don’t mind.”

“I don’t know. Should I mind?”

I wet the towel and left the sheet there in the sink while I went to the bed and wiped him off.

“You’re gentle.” And we kissed.

He was thinking about something and looking at the bloody towel.

“My wife . .”

“Oh, no. Don’t start,” I pleaded with him.

“No,” he insisted, “it’s nothing, it’s just that my wife, I was thinking, won’t ever make love to me during her time. It isn’t her way. That’s all. I find it very — well,” he decided, “I’m glad you let me, it's delightful.”

“Good. Good.”

He was different. He was quiet. He was thinking about his wife.

“SHE'S HALF German. She works for a solicitor’s on High Holbom — a scrawny little suite of offices, everybody there appears very sad, if you ask me. She translates for them. I really don't know what she gets out of it. Her colleagues seem to. . It’s not as if we need the money she makes. Or actually I suppose the case is we need a great deal more than that. I honestly don’t understand why she puts herself to the trouble. I’m afraid she's having an affair. And the children, you see, being raised by one sort of —retarded Scandinavian governess after another, teenaged. Or Irish, I remember we had one of those. Three years ago — or four, four years ago now, in fact — she had an affair with one of the men she worked with in a publicist’s firm. We very nearly. . But I believe, I believe that we've . .

“The children,” he said, “are five and eight. .”

THEN IN the occasional fluorescent light one day I suddenly took sick. The toilet bowl became the center of my world.

I’d had it more than once up north in Matagalpa, the leftist nation equivalent of turista, called I suppose engagista. But it was a little different every time you got it, and who knew? Maybe this time it was really something speedy and fatal. .

Naturally while the symptoms multiplied and elaborated on themselves, I was scared to death. There were intestinal things with the equatorial intensity of piranha-fish and killer bees, I might have one of those. I'd heard of a disease called leishmaniasis that I did not want to get. . The diarrhea might have been that of snail fever, the stuffy head resembled meningitis. . This enumeraton was cut short by complete delirium: Nothing was purple anymore. . The walls turned a deep green-yellow. . Everything was furry, in each object I looked at I detected a lurking metamorphosis. I was reduced to a passage, a tunnel, nothing else — we’re always turning up at weddings and seminars, looking in the papers for a better job, forgetting entirely how like a hollow rope, an elementary worm, is our basic physical design. . That worm tried to turn itself inside out, and then I was treated to what an irrelevant and unnoticed lot of tits on a boar the rest of me can become, all the attachments that seem more real than the simple devouring and emitting thing I really am. The horrible smell —the Englishman disappeared into his own region of the building; had I strength to waste I’d have felt embarrassed.

I reassured him whenever he came around to comfort me. By the time he went looking for help I was feeling the episode pass. As I say, I lived in the bathroom, where everything seemed to be gelatinously quivering, by now because of my exhaustion and not from delirium. I looked up in the flickering light and thought I made out the silhouette of my landlord standing in the doorway with the Englishman.

“I need a doctor,” I said.

“Ha! Ha!”—meaning we’d already covered that one.

“Can’t you help her?” the Brit asked. “She needs a doctor.”

Coughing and clearing his throat at the same time, the landlord answered unintelligibly.