other than the vanes of firelight tripping erratically and the rising temperature of my skin. It was as if I were becoming the fire and the fire were becoming me. Rourke returned wearing a frayed blue sweater and a pair of jeans that were soft with holes. He was tall until he came down, sitting alongside me on the floor, looking at the fire too. He seemed less complicated than usual, his masculinity more authentic. I thought maybe I was seeing not what he chose to show but what he chose not to conceal, which was different. Though physically we were opposites, emotionally I felt strangely similar; I felt almost as I’d felt with the fire, as though being with him was like being with me.
I heard him take a breath. He asked if I felt like staying. He went no further, but I knew what he meant. He meant the whole summer, week to month, night to day—he was asking me to suffer the transformations in his arms. Yes, I said. I would stay.
30
The anonymous green-and-white cottage sat at the crest of a hill overlooking the bay on a street called Fleming Road. The reminder of Jack was unfortunate, but the connection ended with the name. The house was unlike any other I’d been in. The constant currents of light and air it received made it seem invulnerable to misfortune; and yet, it was modest, like a tent or teepee. Each day there was a new day, with nothing carrying over from the previous one—when morning came through the window, it came as if by surprise. The sun would advance upon my skin, reminding me to be grateful, and his arms would take me tighter.
It was there that I met myself, there that I discovered my soul’s invention, the feminine genius of me. I often thought about life beyond the summer, acknowledging that an end was imminent, that I needed to prepare. The world sloped against our door like a barren belly—I could feel it. Had I been sentenced to death, I could not have interpreted time with a fiercer consciousness—every twilight seemed to be the last, every rain the final rain, every kiss the conclusive aroma of a rose, gliding just once past your lips.
If he loved me, love wrought no change in him. He did not speak of such things, and neither did I, because words and promises are false, resolving nothing. I was an American girl; I possessed what our culture valued most—independence and blind courage. From the beginning he had been attracted to the savagery in me that matched the savagery in him, and yet, what bound us was the prospect of that soundness unraveled. I began to unlearn things I’d been taught. Often I was afraid, but my fear was a natural fear, a living fear, a fear of the unknown. I would not have exchanged it for a wasteland of security. It kept me vigilant through the night.
No matter what was to happen between us in the end, he would not be to blame. If I were to be wounded, it would not be because he wanted to wound me. His battles lay elsewhere, with things of which I was reluctant to conceive—time and obligations, ambition and money. I wished it didn’t have to be that way. I wished there were no place in life to go. I wished for his sake that I were older, stronger, better, that I might have sheltered him.
Sometimes when I lay in the cradle of his arms, he would draw me closer, squeezing as if to concede something. Sometimes when his exhausted weight landed against my breasts, and his hair invaded my parted lips, and all I could hear was silence, a palisade so sullen and arid that nothing could possibly breach it, I would say, “Rourke.”
The days were simple, numb, and narrow. My impressions collected in layers like generations of rock beneath earth, impacted to form a single idea—that I was happy. I didn’t write; I didn’t draw; I kept no record of conversations or clothes, places passed or inhabited. Each moment that expired was a butterfly escaping, imperial in hue and contour, membranous and sheer, fluttering magically, slipping off to the gaping enormity of liberty and oblivion. Like whispers through grasslands or heath entwined with dew, in my mind and in my memory, what remains of that summer is an overriding sense of completeness.
Though my body’s demands for nature were met by days spent outdoors