Only Desire

Her hair is brown, like chocolate.

“Where does the expression ‘Mickey Finn’ come from?” she asked him at breakfast as she spread margarine on her toast.

He tried to ignore the scrape of her knife against the bread’s charred surface. He didn’t even lower the newspaper to look at her when he answered.

“Why would I know?”

“So you don’t know?” The scrape of her knife stopped. Not, he realised, out of shock at his supposed revelation, but because she had finished distributing the poor substitute for butter around the anguished bread.

“Nope.”

“I’ll have to look it up on the internet when I get to work, then.”

“You do that.”

There was a pause as she took a bite from her toast and munched noisily through the lull in conversation. Then, mouth still partially filled with masticated bread and margarine, “Don’t you want to know why I’m interested?”

“Not particularly. I’m trying to read the paper.”

She had stopped speaking, then, and gone back to reading her book.

He thought of how death was the end of all desire. Everything you wish for and covet, that is structured to disappoint and disillusion; the flesh you long for; the hair that shines with reds and golds within that chocolate brown lustre. Death is the end of all that. Your body returned to dust, your mind snuffed out.

He understood that we, people, only long for the things we see and know. Having once seen them, their disappearance doesn’t reduce desire or blot it out. Only death, a person’s own death, his own death, could do that.

He thought about all those things as he sat hidden behind his newspaper. Her hair was brown like chocolate, and he desired it. He desired the cool depths of her eyes. He coveted the way those eyes looked at someone else, the way her hands touched another man’s body. He wanted to be the one seen, the one touched. Desire is structured to disappoint and disillusion.

“He was a bar tender in Chicago,” he said, still not moving the newspaper.

“Who was?” she asked, not looking up from her book, his indifference to her presence deflating her.

“Mickey Finn. He ran a bar in Chicago and would spike his customers’ drinks, then rob them.”

She smiled triumphantly, although nobody saw her do it. “I knew you would know,” she said, mostly to herself. Then, under her breath, entirely to herself, “I knew he would know.”

He lowered his paper at last and drank his coffee, ate his toast. “What book are you reading anyway?” he asked.

“A not very good one,” she said, looking at him shyly, pleased he was at last taking an interest.

She trusted him; loved him, even. It made him sick to his stomach to see the way she looked at him. So guileless in her desire to please and be pleased. She didn’t deserve the way he was treating her. It was worse, somehow, because she didn’t even know how he was treating her. She only had the barest concept.

She put it down to those weeks stretching into months that he had been in the hospital. The accident had been a bad one. The doctors all considered him lucky to have survived.

She knew there was something different about him; that something hadn’t survived. That was the thing about cheating death. It made you realise how short life was, and how futile. Everything that he had lived so far in his thirty eight years was no more and no less than a three year old child or a three hundred year old man might have lived. Time stretched to infinity on either side of everything. Death was the individual end.

You were born, and then you died, and when everyone who knew you had also finally died, you weren’t even remembered in passing. Everything after death was forgetting.

That night, the bedclothes were cold against their skin as they crawled into bed. Huddled together for warmth, he pressed himself close to her, enfolding her in his arms. She responded so gently to his presence, and in his head she was someone else. Her hair was chocolate brown and lustrous. He could smell it, the scent of her shampoo. She turned in his arms, wrapped her legs around him, feeling him stir. She moved so gently against him, this one who was not the other, only ever the other inside his head. She drew him into her and he submitted gratefully to her willingness. The tension of living needed release.

In the darkness, while she slept, he heard the rain lashing the window. Lashing was the wrong word, though. There was no whip crack, just the repeated sound of small stones rattling, being trickled down the window’s surface. His desire knew no end. He lay, flat and still, with her curved and breathing form beside him, a million or more miles from him.

She had been visiting someone else. She had stopped beside his bed, thinking he was asleep, or comatose, or some other kind of oblivious. She had whispered something like, “Poor thing” and he had opened his eyes and told her, without speaking, that he was far from impoverished by the state he was in.

That had been the start.

There would be no end now, until death.

Each day that she visited her husband (he learned from her very quickly that her husband was seriously ill, not expected to make a recovery – and she had pitied him for his temporarily broken body!), she stopped by his bed for a few minutes. Five at first, growing longer, until it became half an hour. As he regained his speech, they would talk. He coveted her dark glossy hair. He luxuriated in the coolness of her gaze. He felt it take the heat from his wounds, because it didn’t contain pity or sympathy.

She came at strange times of the day. Never at night. Never in the evening. He was glad. He didn’t want to have to explain her presence to his wife. He had claimed her as his own, and didn’t want to share her with anyone.

When he began to take his first steps again, she would walk with him, along corridors, to the hospital shop, sometimes outside to where the ambulances came to a halt and spewed out the bodies of the sick and dying for repair or death. They were present at a number of final moments. They witnessed the howling grief of wives, parents, boyfriends, lovers. Through it all, she was cool and distant.

“I don’t love my husband,” she told him, one day as they watched another person relinquish desire and cease to be.

“Oh, really?” he said.

“Really,” she replied, and walked back inside.

They kissed in the privacy of her dying husband’s room. He knew that he was still alive, then, because he felt something ache deep within his groin. He felt life stirring, the same life that filled his blood cells, that replaced the hairs that fell from his head, that tasted like metal in his mouth.

“We shouldn’t,” he had said.

“Why not?” she had answered.

And so they had. Or rather, she had, because he didn’t have the energy. So she took him in her mouth and swallowed the life that came out of him. And then she drank the orange juice that had been sitting at the side of her husband’s bed, looking at him coolly the whole time.

He had been moved from his private room out onto one of the wards, now that he could walk and talk and wasn’t a wrecked shell any more. He spent more time with her in her husband’s room, while her husband lay connected to drips and machines and the thinnest edge of life. As her husband lay there, considering whether desire was worth the effort, they would fuck.

She wasn’t soft, which made him desire her more. She was bones, and angles, and ice so cold that it burned him.

He lay there in the darkness as his wife slept on beside him and remembered all this. Death would be the only way to start forgetting.

Once he left the hospital and returned to his life, with pieces of him missing, he had no way of finding her again without returning to the hospital.

So he did.

One lunchtime, he left work and drove out to the hospital. He paid the parking fee and walked back into the place that had poured life and desire back into him. She was standing outside the shop, drinking coffee from a plastic cup.

“Hello,” she said.

“I need to see you,” he told her.

Her husband was improving, she told him. They had changed the drugs and he seemed to be responding. It would give him a few more months, maybe a year, they thought. She would be taking him home at the end of the week.

“I work in town. Near the Malmaison. We could meet.”

She smiled at the suggestion. He handed her his phone. She smiled again, taking it, entering her number, handing it back to him. Smiling all the time, that smile that bore no warmth.

It continued.

He had met her that day, after the breakfast conversation about Mickey Finn. They were working through a set of variations. Every third time, she let him take control. The other variations were hers. He was the one who brought tenderness, if only because he insisted that they kiss and it have meaning. She laughed at him for it, but the laughter had a warmth to it, was almost girlish.

Every third time, he explored her body, took his time, caressed her and kissed her in secret places. He learned the map of her sensuality. He knew where to touch, how to reduce her to softness. As the weeks went on, he learned to turn her into liquid, so that the cool of her eyes became a languid, latent heat. At times, he almost thought that she desired him.

And in between times, she would be cold and hard and fuck him with a mixture of hatred and contempt; her eyes open all the time, staring down into his, challenging him. Angry. If he tried to look away, she wouldn’t let him; would slap his face back to face her.

He liked it.

And back at home, the screwing of his wife continued, drilling down into her, hoping one day to hit oil, rediscover what it was that she had meant to him once. Tender, and trusting, and full of love for him, he despised her.

This would not end until there was no alternative.

“Why are you still awake?”

The sudden loudness of her voice surprised him.

“I thought you were asleep,” he said.

“I was. You weren’t, though.” She didn’t move, but lay there with her back to him, curled away from him. Her usual post-coital pose.

“I’m just thinking,” he said.

“What about?”

“Oh, nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

Nothing mattered. Only desire.

© J R Hargreaves September 2006