I loved you when you were younger, when your skin was tight and brown on your belly, stretched
like the skin over something cooked, and smelling like you might even be good to eat. I loved you when
your eyes were shiny and clear, and when your teeth were white as the moon. When your hands were soft.
When your forearms were furrowed with striated muscle. I loved you then, and I love you now.
I remember when we were younger, practically children, still damp from being crazy. I looked
forward to looking back fondly, like I do now. I ached for the weight of years to settle into, with
you. I wished you into my bed, your smell into my linens, your fingerprints onto my palms and breasts.
Your body was my own body, only I could see you better. And you were novel and exciting, doing things
to my body which I accepted without fear even when you surprised my limits.
When we were older—not older like now, but older, yes, things were different than when we
had begun but still the world was half asleep. You could still keep a secret, if you wanted to, and I
think that was the primary difference. The world was half asleep but maybe dreaming of the future. The
one we live in now. And in that time you and I were lovers and friends and parents, and we were convivial
and charming and secretly lustful for each other in the kitchen while the guests were finishing their cocktails.
And so it was strange how it all came together for me, that old Garner brought his son Louis by
the house to meet us after the boy had graduated college. Garner had a photocopy of the transcript with
the 4.0 circled in blue ink. Louis, however, seemed to be of the opposite magnetic charge to that slip
of paper, and whenever it was wrestled out of Garner’s front pocket it sent Louis hurtling to the far
wall of the room. Seems silly, doesn’t it? But we know how it is: I carried Emma’s kindergarten picture
for too long, and you made everyone look at that curled lock of hair, from time to time.
Louis scowled, he glowered. He hated us collectively as we would have expected of his age and
intelligence and promise. No one resented him for it. We may even have become the parodies of our
middle-class selves, to help him out. It made us proud of him.
Louis asked for beer rather than Scotch. And he came back from the powder room smelling like
the carved soaps. This endeared him to me completely. We used to do that, too—rebel against whatever
was around at the time. Before we got tired, and happy.
Later I found him in the hallway by the stairs, looking at the collages and portraits on the wall
with his hands pushed into his back pockets. He had his chin up, and his head looked marvelously heavy
and securely cocked in place, staring at the wall, swallowing with curt bobs of his Adam’s apple. He
side-stepped slowly, looking from frame to frame. I watched his lashes twitch. My drink cooled my hand.
He stepped to the stairs and put his brown suede boot on the lowest step, leaning upstairs
toward the last of the pictures—those of our mothers and fathers and such, and then grandparents
and miscellany in sepia. Round brown wooden frames with beveled glass. Louis breathed through
his nose and drew his right hand up, pushed it through his hair.
“What is it you’re looking for, then?” I said supremely, with my eyebrows raised
so he could be startled by me. He jumped as if I had caught him in larceny and then scowled, of course.
“Oh! Nothing in particular, Mrs. Delgado,” he said. He had a good voice. “These
are really interesting.”
He turned back to the wall and I walked up behind him with my drink in one hand and my other
hand on my hip. He crossed his arms over his chest and I fixed on a point between his shoulder blades.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
Grandma Anita looked down at us from a haze of sepia, with her lips pursed. Her eyes were
fogged by age, as were the line of her jaw and the shadow under her nose. As sunlight faded the
photo she had gotten prettier and prettier. Softer than she was even at seventeen, at the time of
the photo.
“My Grandmother,” I said to Louis.
“She’s lovely,” he said and turned to me—and I had a premonition of him
when he would be forty or even fifty years old. His eyes would weather, his smile would crease
his cheeks—as yours have done. He would be a handsome man, like you.
“You have a very nice home,” he said politely. “And I think you are a beautiful woman.”
Of course I laughed at this because he was only a child, and he assumed beauty was only in
children. He laughed too, but I’m not sure why.
Honestly, I thought about infidelity, before we were married. I thought about it quite a
bit—and went from shuddering about it when I was a young wife, to chuckling at it as a mother, to
thinking it was inevitable, when I was older still. A man of your virility was probably going to
thirst, and thirst unconquerably at times. But when you and I made love, no one could slip a drop
of water between us. We were watertight. All other unions were false—and tolerable on occasion.
I, on the other hand, was made of more sublime stock—being a woman, and not driven and
tormented by flesh. My own flesh was of the earth and moon. I was reckoned as a tide and was as reliable.
I did not know that I would age like wine—take on the character of my container, deepen in color, blossom
in body. I did not know that my flesh would become purely flesh, when the moon’s tether on me was snipped.
Louis’ breath—I could hear it in his nose. He had a fine nose like yours—bridged high and
aristocratic, and flared at the nostril. Perfectly smooth skin. He pressed his lips together and perhaps
knew I was looking at them, if he was looking at my eyes. I’m not sure. I could smell him, smell his
breath which was warm and coming from the bottom of his lungs, through his nose, gentle on my face.
He smelled like a man.
Garner found us there, and stuck out his arm to corral Louis in chumminess—
“Har-har”ed him back into the living room. I stood there, smelling him deeply in my
nose—as though I had got a mote of him inside me.
