Heaven's Rending Ch. 02

"Do you enjoy it?" he asked.

"No, not at all," she said, surprise on her face. It was a humorless revelation.

"What? Really? I mean . . ." he stuttered to a halt, suddenly concerned about the dark clouds that raced across her face. Finally: "But why?"

"Habit," she said. "Just a habit, dear man."

"Habit? What do you mean?" He looked at her, his concern growing as he watched a tear form in the corner of her right eye. "I mean, it's really none of my business, but if you want to talk about it, I'm . . . I'd be happy to listen."

"It's a long story, Alan. And probably not one I'm ready to tell right now. Understand?" she said quietly, sweetly.

His eyes were locked on hers, he felt a huge reservoir of pain dammed up behind those tears she fought to control, but he didn't want to push her away. He watched her look away, hide from his eyes and the questions that remained there waiting to be asked.

"Are you angry with me?" she finally asked. She looked up at him longingly.

"No," he said. "Not at all." He looked down at the table then brought his hand up and took her hand in his.

She didn't pull away from him, neither did she look away.

Her skin felt cool, dry . . . her hands like polished ivory under a late afternoon sun. "I've wanted to touch you all evening, touch your skin, feel you . . ." he said.

"Who do you want to touch, Alan? Me? Or that other image? Do you think we're one and the same?" She almost sounded hurt, wounded.

He looked up at her face again. There were a million questions racing across the wounds that consumed her.

"I just don't want to get involved with someone who wants the fantasy, you know? Not in my personal life. That's not what I . . ." She looked at him, saw the torment there, and she knew. Knew he had come for the fantasy her life provided, the leather, the pain. Another man who wanted to lose control, to be controlled for just and hour or an evening, and she felt despair, a despair born of bone-crushing loneliness. 'Oh, well,' she thought, 'another day, another dollar.'

"What do you want, Diane?" he asked.

"I don't know anymore, Alan. Do you want to go back to my place?"

He looked at her, wondered at her ability to shift gears so suddenly, wondered what had happened behind that veil of tears. A veil of tears, that he knew now, he knew that more surely than anything he had ever known. "I think," he started, haltingly, "I think I want to hold you. I know I want to kiss you. I know I want to look into your eyes every chance I can for the rest of my life."

"Wow, Alan, that's quite a line. Is that yours?"

"And I don't want you to hurt me, Diane. I don't need hurt, I've had enough hurt in my life to last a million years." He looked down at her hand in his. He raised her hand to his face, and he kissed it. "I just want to know you, know what we can be."

'Sure you do, little boy,' she thought even as she struggled through suffocating veneers of cynicism and dread. She just smiled at him, doubting not for one moment man's ability to delude himself into all manner of deceit and treachery. She had seen it all, heard it all, lived the horrid consequences of it all - for all of her life. "And I'd like to know you too, Alan."

____________

He was walking her back up the sidewalk to her house. The night had grown cooler, and he felt that other chill all around him again. Something had come over her, some fire he had left unkindled, and he felt dry inside, quiet, defeated. He didn't know what to expect.

"Would you like to come in?" she asked as she slipped the key into the lock. She was direct, almost challenging.

He stood there, dissolving in her mists again. "I - I've got to be in at seven thirty in the morning. I'd better call it a night. But thanks."

"Alan, come in for a minute, OK?" She was growing more calm, as if she had reached some decision.

"Yeah, OK."

They walked inside, to a house that seemed somehow so familiar to him, and so violated to her. She walked into the kitchen, pulled a couple of snifters from a cabinet and filled them with ice cubes.

"What would you like?" she asked.

"How about a Drambuie?" he said as he looked at the bottles arrayed in the cabinet

"Alright." She reached into the cabinet and pulled out the bottle, and filled both glasses with the Scottish liqueur. She walked pensively into the living room and handed Alan his glass, then sat down on an eggplant colored leather sofa. She motioned for him to sit, and he came to her on the sofa. He sat down, took her hand in his again and without pausing he kissed the top of it, then kissed her fingers. With her other hand she ran her fingers through his hair for a moment, then she broke free of his grasp and took his face in her hands and brought him closer, and she kissed him full on the mouth. She slipped her tongue past his lips for a moment and lightly ran it over the inside of his lips, grazing his tongue, teasing him.

She held him in her talons, and he didn't resist.

She pulled back from him for a moment, looked at his eyes - they were quiet eyes, calming - then she ran her tongue ever-so-lightly over his eye lashes, and she watched him react, felt his trembling through her mouth, and she smiled inside. All her doubts, all the suffocating loneliness of the past week melted away as she felt her control return, as she felt Alan responding to her will. Through force of habit, she bit his upper hip, then pushed him down on the sofa - her manner toward him changed in the briefest flash of time - and soon she was dominating him carefully, controlling him, playing with him as she had so many others for so many years.

It hit fast and hard. She felt sad, alone, and empty even as she felt Alan responding to her, and just as suddenly she collapsed into his arms in sudden defeat. She thought of her father - so weak, so vulnerable - so human, and how they had failed each other. Her mother, so manipulative and cruel, and how they had all conspired to fail each other. All of the men who crawled to her, all the housewives who trailed behind their tormented men - hoping to learn something, anything - that might keep some divine spark alive in their decaying relationships.

She felt disjointed from the reality of her world - it hit her so suddenly and so powerfully it nearly knocked her to the floor - and she felt more than understood that she was crying, that she was gasping for breath between overwhelming sobs. She looked up at Alan and saw confusion, yet she also felt him reaching for her, not rejecting her, and she clung to that, held on to that simple truth.

Alan had felt the gathering explosion long before it surfaced; it was like a volcano that rumbled slowly to life and reached it's climactic moments only after tremors and flows had seeped to the surface. He had felt her reach out to control him, and he had responded to her - she was a force of nature who could not, he felt, be denied - but something hadn't felt true. It felt like rote behavior, rehearsed - an act - and he had felt almost silly, like a kid playing spin-the-bottle behind the garage after school. It was an act, he realized, we each played a role in her little drama. But it's not real, he said to himself.

'Maybe I wanted that dream,' he thought as he held her, waiting for calm to return. But he knew as he felt her shaking in his arms that something life-altering was happening to him, and, perhaps, to her as well. He knew he wanted to hold this woman in his arms for the rest of his life, wanted to protect her in ways he had never felt with his first wife. Everything he felt was new - and ancient. He was responding to her in the here and now - yet he felt as if he was responding to forces that had been released in another time - another universe - and these spaces were in collision. This woman was the keystone, he thought, to all that was his life. Without her, he couldn't stand, time couldn't stand. Without him, she would collapse before his eyes. They would perish.

She pulled back from him, some force or realization compelled her now, and he watched her as she took off her blazer. She handed it to him, then slowly unbuttoned her blouse, and this too she handed him. She reached behind with both hands and unfastened her brassiere, and he watched it fall away to the floor. She reached out and took his left hand and brought it to her right breast; he watched her lower lip trembling, saw her eyes grow dewy with a sorrow that possessed her completely. His hand fell to the skin of her breast and she laid his hand there with both of hers, forcing his hand into the yielding softness.

It was obvious. He felt it immediately. Like a spongy-hard golf ball - the mass was instantly recognizable as out-of-place and full of malevolent purpose. He felt himself looking at the breast, then up at her face; she was crying quietly now, her eyes closed, her soul bared, and it looked to him as if she was ashamed of her body, that it had failed her - and him - in some crucial way.

She was waiting for him.

Waiting for the polite goodbyes.

But she felt him bending to her breast, and he kissed her there. Gently. And again.

'I'm so scared,' she thought. She felt him there, felt his lips caressing her with such knowing tenderness. Quiet waves of fear washed over her, building, threatening to consume her if she stood in this silence - alone - too long.

"I'm so scared!" she cried out loudly, losing herself in the undulating terrain of remorse and fear that dominated this new landscape. She was holding onto him with relentless tension pressing in from every direction; this new - and unfamiliar - feeling was infantile in it's capacity to invoke an infinite regression toward longing for a father's pure love. Life, death, an endless circle of life and death; that's what she felt - she longed to love her father as she never had, simply, purely, innocently - and here was this man, so simple, so pure, so innocent. Emotions cascaded down on this new landscape, and through the thundering mists of her tears she felt him attached to her body as if it was her soul.

This man so simple, pure, and innocent. This circle of life.

She held his head with furious possessiveness etched over the features of her body, and she thought as she felt her muscles tremble that she was as an aspen leaf on a summer breeze. There is life in the time of an aspen's leaves, she thought, the universe allows for even the tiniest miracle of life to dance under the afternoon sun. She dropped her nose to his hair and drew in his scent, and she thought it smelled honest, and somehow decent, almost holy. Like life, she thought, honest, somehow decent if that was what you made of it.

Or darkness, if that was your choice.

__________

She awoke sometime in the very early morning; she heard him on the telephone saying he wouldn't be into work that morning, that he was taking personal time off to be with a friend, and she thought that sounded like a miracle in and of itself. A friend. She could barely see him in the faint light of her bedroom - only a little nightlight in the bathroom was seeping into the room - but she could make out that his clothes were off. She felt more than saw that she was completely naked under the sheets, and she remembered him carrying her to bed after her meltdown, and she felt echoes of him holding her, stroking her head. He had run his fingers through her hair so gently, letting her feelings have free reign, and she had cried as she kissed him, as she had felt him responding to her as a man should respond to a woman. She had taken him in her mouth and taken his need and it had all felt so innocent. She hadn't done that with a man in years, had always thought it debased her, but with him it had felt natural. He hadn't pushed her or demanded anything of her; he had simply enjoyed what she had given him and then held her as she fell asleep - her head nestled by his.

And now he was beside her, making sweet noises about hoping he wouldn't wake her but having to call in, of wanting to cook her breakfast, of needing to talk with her and hold her and kiss her. She nuzzled into him, smelling him, wrapping herself around him, and her mouth found his. His hands roamed her body unashamedly, and he explored the terrain around her neck and shoulders with his mouth, licking here and nibbling there until he felt her trembling again, and then he was down between her thighs, kissing the milky-soft flesh inside her nether lips, giving slight pressure to the hooded flesh when he felt her back arching. He kept at it, probing, caressing, until she was lost in the wonder of life, craving the miracle of release.

And then he was inside her, his weight easy to bare as he slipped up on her, and he had made love so gently, so tenderly, that as they came together she had cried again at the simple beauty of the moment, and he had lowered his face to hers and kissed away her tears, holding her face while he told her how wonderful she was. As they came back to earth she held him again, held his head in the cradle of her neck, and she whispered sweet things in his ear as his breathing grew slower and deeper.

She drifted between memories of her father and the breath that warmed the side of her neck, and she struggled to perform the calculus that would reconcile these two men. What had happened, she thought, to her father. What had driven him to surrender his soul to the woman he had called his wife, only to seek it's restitution in the arms of his daughter. They had never had sex, he had never been so craven, but his longing for her was a given, though an unspoken lust for his wife was never far removed, and Joan had hated him for the duplicity. She had hated both her parents for their mendacity, for their shallow understanding of the pain they visited on their house, and the coarse, grating words that passed for love.

And this man laying beside her, she thought. What did she know of him? He talked sparingly of his life, his past, but he listened to her. Really listened to her. He noticed things; his eyes had roamed all night long, taking in everything. She had looked at those eyes and instantly trusted them, knew she could depend on them to tell the truth, but slowly she had perceived something terribly unsettling in those eyes. His eyes saw past lies, past deceit, and wounded her when they recognized insincerity. His eyes smiled when they came across a simple truth, or a cherished memory, and she basked in the radiant glow they reflected. But she was wary of them, for she feared her past above all else in this world.

There was, after all, so little she could hold in her heart as truth. The truths of her life had scorched and burned her, and she recoiled from these truths as easily as she breathed. She hid from them, massaged them, and, she thought, buried them with never as much as a prayer and with so little effort that she in fact never thought of her past anymore, never thought of who she was, what she had become. I am a liar, the voice inside said. I am a chameleon. A sycophant.

When she felt good, when she had a good day, she was an actress.

'Am I acting now?' she thought.

"What was that?" she heard him say.

"Hum? Did I say something?"

"You asked, 'Am I acting now?' I'd offer a penny for your thoughts . . ."

"I was thinking about you, Alan, and of what kind of life I've led. I was feeling so wonderful, you know . . ." and she felt herself drifting into that landscape of tears and betrayal she called her life, and she felt herself falling . . . falling . . .

He leaned into the gales of her despair and held her, kissed her. He gave her what comfort he could, but he could take no measure of her life's torment, he could only guess what betrayals had brought her to this precipice. All he could do was rely on experience, feel his way past her pain to her side.

He felt the anger and anguish that visited him daily on the streets, always the emotions overwhelmed him, always he struggled to build a wall around the violence and pain that lived on the streets of this life. It was easy to put that pain into a little compartment and lock it away at the end of the day, but he knew in the end those walls had killed his marriage just as surely as any infidelity would have. It was a simple matter of control.

But you don't control love.

He could not have her, he knew, if the walls remained. His walls would doom them both to the false judgements of silence, the verdicts rendered would be as hollow as the truths they sought to contain. He felt his way through the realization that, by generalizing human experience - labeling and categorizing human misery to make it's wounding impulses seem more understandable - he had doomed himself to never really understand the misery he dealt with day by day on the streets. He was a bystander, a not-so-innocent bystander. He wondered how many lives he had touched so inadequately, how much torment lay smoldering outside the battlements of his walls. Why was it so hard to let it in, he thought. Why was another soul's wounded misery so hard to accept as a burden, no, he thought, stunned by the realization. No, not a burden. It was a gift. It was a privilege to help another soul find peace. Worth any sacrifice, he thought.

He pulled her deeper into his embrace, and held her there.

___________

He was washing dishes, actually, scrubbing an omelet pan as he whistled, looking out the window over the kitchen sink and listening to her as she made small talk. She was walking around the kitchen, chattering away about Eggs Benedict and which champagne was her favorite, then she came to him, put her arms around him and sunk into his back, her head on his shoulder. She ran her hand under his shirt, twirled her fingers through the hair on his belly while she nibbled at his back through the thin material of his undershirt.

He flipped off the water and turned to face her, and she smiled up at him, then ran her fingernails up his belly. He twisted under the assault, but she held firm, digging her nails in ever-so-gently until he got the message and relaxed. She kissed him, tenderly, slowly, and she felt his hands take her face and he pulled back and looked at her eyes, suddenly very serious.

"Would it be silly to say that I think I'm falling in love with you, Ma'am?"

She leaned into him and kissed him, then pulled back and said, "Not at all, Officer." She thought of all the fears that loomed ahead of her as she looked at him, and she felt somehow - safe.

He watched as shadows crossed her face, saw the happiness in her eyes and the fear he knew that lay under everything. "On the fridge, the card says you have an appointment today at 1:30. Want some company?"

She was suddenly caught between two rather contradictory impulses; first the fear she felt when she thought of the procedure they would do this afternoon made her want to run in panic as if from an advancing storm; second, she felt the need to hold on to this man who offered a refuge from the storms that battered her, gales whose winds threatened to overwhelm her. She felt lonely when she thought of the road ahead, but she no longer felt alone. What a difference that was, she thought. She held on to the feeling, savored it.

"They're going to do a needle biopsy, then schedule surgery, I mean I assume they'll schedule surgery . . ."

"What have they told you so far?"

"Not much, probably a full radical mastectomy." She looked down at the floor as she talked.

"Is that as bad as it sounds?" he asked gently.

She continued to look around the room, wondering when this world was all going to disappear. She shuddered in the silence that held her . . .

"Anything you need to do before we head down?"

"Hum? No. I just . . . maybe take a shower. How about you? You need to run home and change?"