The Body of This

Their Bodies, Their Selves (sample story)

Their Bodies, Their Selves was originally published in The Missouri Review, issue 29.2, Spring 2006

They had lived a clothed life.  An accident had changed that.  But what was an accident?  It was just a word.  There was no reason at all that what had happened shouldn’t have happened.  So many different things that happened were terrible or debilitating or life-ending, but who was to say that they should never happen?  There were certain laws of physics that couldn’t be flouted just because the consequences were terrible.  That was the world.  And speaking of physics, here the two of them sat, Drayton and Sarah Maguire, naked, wilted.

From his side he saw flesh; and from hers, she did, too.  It was how they felt about it that was different, but she was coming around.  She was the one who had started it, actually, though that had been unintentional.  And with a swing of his head—the only action he was still capable of—it was now a daily ritual, his imploring her, and himself, to their natural state.  

It had begun six months prior, on a Saturday, just after four-thirty in the afternoon, the time each day when Dray would disappear to the bathroom for fifteen minutes of flushing solitude, when out came the noise.  The noise.  In this life—and, especially, in the daily consciousness of the old—there is the tremendous and unmistakable Smack! of the human skull on porcelain.  There it was; and Sarah dropped her knitting.  

Okay, how to continue?  Let’s continue with where they were.  They were at their little beach cottage forty-five miles up the Maine coast from Portland.  It was an unassuming little house in an area where development was forbidden.  To get there you’d take the same road you took to get to the state park not far away.  On that road there were just two opportunities to turn, the park, and the Maguire’s little dirt road.  Travel up that dirt road through a forest so thick with pine it was nearly dark even at the height of day, and at the end of it, in the clearing, was their cottage among all the dunes.  A lifetime of memories, but so remote, their son had forbidden them from going there.  

If you took the building just for what it was—one level, three rooms—and ignored the dunes and the puffins and the sea grass and the few small pine-treed islands just off-shore you wouldn’t have much.  The shingled sides were drying up and salting away, the roof was solid but fading.  And inside things were rudimentary.  Maybe they had been lush at one time—Drayton’s father, though Irish, had been one of the wealthiest men in the state, a bull and a ship-builder, and he’d built that salt-box as a retreat with his mistress—but now the propane stove and the pull-flush toilet were peculiar, unreliable.  The structure was lucky to be standing at all, but because it had always been standing, as far as today’s conservationists knew, it was allowed to stay, but not allowed to be worked on, which was fine with Drayton, if not so fine with his wife, his amends, perhaps, for developing up big swaths of southern Maine in pre-fab sub-divisions and run-of-the-mill golf courses that many said had changed the face of the state.  Drayton wouldn’t disagree, but his philosophy was give them what they want, and there had always been his own tiny little section of the state, the West End of Portland, to retreat to.  

But back to the accident.  If that was the word.  Or maybe it was just life’s gravity.

There were a certain few seconds between that Smack! and their discovery of each other when the immediacy of their thoughts summed things up perfectly.  Sarah—eighty-one, genteel, Yankee protestant daughter of a pulp and paper king, black sheep for marrying the Catholic though he was even wealthier than they, their children’s Episcopalianism partially redeeming her—was up quickly, but still moving slowly, and was simply hoping she wouldn’t find blood.  To her—scarred from shingles, melanoma, three ungrateful children and an undiagnosed depression—life was winding down anyway, and a quick descent she was ready for, just let it not be too messy.

And then Dray, for his part—eighty-four, still wearing a bow-tie most days, still going to mens-only dinners at the club, still with the occasional idea of what plot of land to develop and why—sensing the little pool of blood by his ear, but feeling little else, could only think about one thing: what he’d left in the toilet.  Sarah was going to see it.  In all their years together, to his knowledge, she’d never seen anything he’d left behind, because he was assiduous in all matters of the body, and he could thank his good Kerry-born mother for that.  And now Sarah was going to see that in the toilet, and she was going to see him, pants completely off, the way he’d been doing it lately so he wouldn’t get caught up when he stood.  But on came the footsteps, and the unmistakable twist of the door’s tin handle.  He closed his eyes and considered playing dead.  

Sarah came in to a breathing silence.  She maintained it, except for her little groan when she tried to lift him, as if he was a log that had rolled off one of her father’s lumber trucks three generations ago.  She was calm, as if this was just as natural as could be, and maybe it was.  And yes there was blood, but not too-too much, she would just deal with it.  And then Dray opened his eyes.  All Sarah could do was turn.

“I’ll call 9-1-1,” she said.

When she returned she hoped she’d find something different.  But no, it was just her husband’s lower nakedness pathetic and heavy and splayed on that cracking Macomber slate floor.  His eyes were closed, for her benefit, she knew.  It was a frozen moment.  Then what came next, neither of them had expected.  

“Drayton,” she said.  “Drayton.”

Drayton opened his eyes to see her undressing.  In all those years together there had never been a moment like this.  Never had there been a romantic undressing.  There had hardly been an incidental one.  They each had snapshots and captions of bits and pieces of each other, the whole amounting to a composite of things maybe real, maybe not quite, and here now all that was ending.  

Off came the sturdy black shoes, down came the gray wool skirt, the thick beige stockings, the heavy underwear, and over the head went the plain white cotton shirt.  Out came the revealing heaviness of that sagging breast, pointing south to the melting of her inner thighs as if to say, There you are, and here I am.  That is just you, and this is just me, and here is my pubic hair gone gray.  

What had been in his eyes was now something else entirely.  

When the paramedics came in, they found both of them naked.  Sarah saw the looks they gave each other.  She didn’t care what were they thinking.  She did it for her husband, she wanted to say.  Except that she hadn’t.  At least maybe not entirely.  

And now look at them.  They were back at their beach house.  It was August and it was dusk and their skin was tingly and warm in the uncharacteristic southerly Maine breeze.  Outside that dilapidated cottage were the dunes and the puffins and the sea grass, and inside were the two of them, sitting across from each other, just looking, and thinking.