We did it when you bled. Not from perversion. You just bled a lot and always when I was there. You said, tearfully, that it was stress because we met so little. No one likes a whingy lover, but a well-timed cry, once, ever, twice at most, is useful for a good woman. And this was after a whole year you were good. I knew because the days were growing long again.
By good I mean I said when we’d meet and you had me over. I’d bring my dog, a shaggy little old white thing that slept in twitching jerks heating the heat of our knit legs. If we went out it was for things you sensed I didn’t do in my day life. We’d have chi-chi Ethiopian food and I’d pay for it, hands oiling the receipt clear. Or we’d yawn at chamber music in a big dark hall, picking dog hair and each other’s crust off our laps. Mostly we ordered in pizza and put on slow music that looped and stayed on your rug until our pleasures panged together. You said you couldn’t afford to wash the sheets that often. I think you just liked how animal it made a man and woman, tussling on a dirty floor.
The dog would hobble over and lick us at lewd times. When we pushed it across the room it scampered back and licked more fervently as if, no, if we’d understood, we wouldn’t have refused it. Once, we pushed the dog so hard it threw up all over your rug. While we knelt in the wool with rags and bottles of white vinegar, we dabbed at the blood under the vomit too. This was worse than doing nothing. I mean washing the mess that left my dog’s body and the mess that left yours. I mean washing both as the dirty inconvenience they were. We should have done nothing.
I was open about my day life and that I did not want you in it. You were not open. You made like you had someone else in the world I loved as I did, like you knew how to please me once we got off the rug. I don’t think you even had a friend, at least not one good enough to ever blow me off for. But I never asked. Maybe it was enough that it was new to you, a man, a friend, pushing in and out until pleasure flooded. But that’s the rarest thing, when that’s all it takes no matter how many times you do it. The last time my wife and I were like that I’m not even sure we had the dog. With you I just liked that we left no room to answer to any of it. When I think of paradise I think of unhesitating dirty life that never has to wash up later.
We did it when you bled. We’d sleep after. We’d wake up to the dog cleaning us off. Hot drooly sandpaper lapping. Two clowns dozing on the floor with red mouths and bellies. You said the nicest thing I ever heard one of those times. “I’d pay to chug your sweat.” That’s love. There’s trying to love your neighbor then there’s that. That’s why you were good that year. But you started getting tearful. Anyone with a man mashing the deepest part of them a whole year would start getting tearful. To live inside each other, you put it. To want anything else was deluded. Or at least to go away somewhere. You even said let’s bring the dog.
But it was vomiting all over the house, my wife said tersely over the phone while you and I were on the rug. She had errands. She couldn’t stay and clean it. To go somewhere. I drove you to my house. You said it was the kind of house you pass wondering how anyone you’d ever know could live in it. More rooms than two people deserved. Light walls and wood floors. Airy. The dog met us at the door, hocking at our shins.
We spent the afternoon scooping up wet fern-green clumps and pouring vinegar. For lunch we ate my wife’s cookies in bed. Then I laid down a towel. But that dog kept leaping up and pulling it and right when we were panting cresting heaven it started hurling everywhere and between that and the crumby chocolate smears and dark red pools and bright red streaks we gave up on all of it, we gave up on washing any of it.
We shouldn’t have fallen asleep. She had to be on her way back. I threw the dog off, threw you off the bed, then threw the sheets off. You said it would come out in the wash, but you didn’t mean that. What you meant was that filth is only a problem for whoever cares about it. Then you left me holding those filthy sheets. It’s perverse, but I felt proud of you. When my wife came home, the dog kept hurling everywhere. We got that dog when things grew empty between us. Like it didn’t matter if we ever touched each other again. We wanted something else to clean up after. We should have done nothing. We could have done anything with that emptiness.
