The Oasis
Borschewski tugs at the bedspread and pillows until they lie just so. Not that he gives a shit about pillows, really, or that Nina does. The street is empty under an iron sky. What, or who, is keeping her? The last time she was in his apartment, he’d caught the scent of his shampoo in her hair, damp from a hasty shower and cool against his cheek. Her words were warm in his ear: “See you in two weeks.”
While her husband was back in town, labor kept his grinding loneliness at bay. He scrubbed the bathroom grout and the coffee maker and the kitchen floor. He even touched up the bedroom walls, springing for the low-VOC latex. Nina might not notice the fresh paint, bland and smooth as a practiced lie, but at least there’s no acrid tang in the air to offend her.
What will she notice? New towels, white sheets; if not that faultless paint, maybe the watery April light bouncing off it. And there’s the play she left behind. Borschewski flips through it, looking again for the aristocrat Nina will portray; he’s too jittery to read anything, much less a script written over a century ago. On its cover, a faded canary escapes from a heavy cage. Its feathers, Borschewski notices, are the same color as the fresh paint on his walls. He smiles, as if he’s found evidence that Nina is the one for him. If she isn’t, who is? The question, implacable as the weather, is wearying to ponder. He places the book, carefully, on what he’s come to think of as her bedside table.
A few months before, the Mohawk River was covered in ice two feet thick. But then the temperatures spiked. Snowdrifts throughout the Stockade slumped and shrank, sending snowmelt into the riverbed. The ice snapped with sounds like gunfire. Huge shards floated downstream, piled up against the piers of the Gateway Bridge, and forced the river into the narrow streets. While Borschewski’s building stayed dry, the Thalia Community Playhouse was not so lucky. Water punched through brittle glass to flood the theater’s dressing rooms, saturate racks of costumes, and dissolve armor made, ages ago, of papier-mâché.
The Mohawk shorted out the fuse box, too; Borschewski was hired to replace it. He entered a building he’d walked by dozens of times. There he met a woman whose flashlight sliced through heavy darkness, and who wore a smudge of mud on her cheek like rouge: Nina. She led him through the “house” of crushed velvet seats and into the basement, proud of the work she’d already done. “Before the water receded, it was ghastly down here.” She described backdrops waving like seaweed in dark water, and tailors’ dummies floating facedown. “Like victims of a massacre,” she said. Even in the dim basement, he could see the mischief in her eyes.
At last he hears Nina’s footsteps rising in the stairwell. He runs to the door to greet her. He is struck, again, by her beauty, lean and spare as a knife. He kisses her, but she pushes him away: “It’s like kissing a saguaro.” When he doesn’t say anything, she seems to suppress a smile. “It’s a kind of cactus,” she says, and sends him down the hall to shave.
Borschewski gazes resentfully at his crummy razor and gets to work. If he contracts hepatitis, it will be Nina he curses on his deathbed. But then he studies his naked, foolish face in the mirror and laughs (saguaro!) and feels his spirits, low for so long, rise once more.
She’s already reclining in those white sheets, her arms open. She strokes his smooth cheeks and smiles. He’s ashamed and proud to think of all he’s done for her, for Nina, for this lovely, elusive, other man’s wife. She kisses him, hard, and laughs, and kisses him again. She runs her fingers through his hair, not to caress him, or not only that, but to guide him, to ease him from her neck to her collarbone and then to her breasts, each inviting the patient, curatorial attention of a collector admiring some prize, or of a blind man besotted with pages in braille.
He moves down her torso, tracing with his lips and hands her ribs, her navel, that little, perfect mole riding the ridge of one hip. “Oh,” she says, and reaches out. The bedside lamp wobbles. Her script falls to the carpet.
That day at the ruined theater, she demonstrated an actor’s vocal warmup for him: the tip of the tongue, the lips, the teeth; the tip of the tongue, the lips, the teeth. Now that refrain, absurd and mechanical, echoes in his mind. He looks at Nina and grins. “What?” she says, the word not so much a question as a goad: get back to work! When he feels her hand urge him onward, he slides off the bed to kneel before her. Tongue, lips, teeth: surely he can put these all to better use than any actor can.
He strokes the insides of her thighs, gently spreads her legs, and looks up: okay? Blood suffuses her cheeks, her eyes are bright. She nods, then whispers, or gasps: “Yes.” He rises, leans over her for one more loving kiss, then once more moves down her torso, quickly now, feeling her, lean and taut, move beneath him. He kneels again and closes his eyes, eager to nuzzle, lick, nip, taste. Is he a simp? Some dumb animal, content to graze? No: he’s an explorer who’s discovered, in an expanse of shifting white sand, an oasis, some soft and tender place where he lingers in delight, and where, as some unseen bird breaks the silence with her song, he’s fool enough to think the earth has given up all her secrets.
~
Sasha + Mario
In the little cabin, we’re arguing again, sharpening our tongues on the whetstones of our weaknesses. Poser! Glutton! Cocktease! Slob! The potshots we take ricochet off the walls. We snarl, we rage, and then, spent, fall silent.
I step closer. Sasha holds up his hand. I don’t stop until I feel his palm resting warm on my chest. “I come in peace.”
“Do you?” His face is flushed, his eyes wary.
Now I place my hand on his chest, and we stand like that, mirroring one another. My breath slows, falls in step with his. Don’t some stupid actors do this—sync their breaths before the curtain rises? As if a performance, or love, were something you build together, and not a pretext for indulging your ego or selfish appetite.
But how beautiful Sasha is; everyone knows it. I stroke his cheekbone. He doesn’t bat my hand away, not this time. Instead, he sighs and leans in, his forehead nearly touching mine. His voice is soft: “I thought I could feel your heart.”
“Oh, it’s in there somewhere.”
He pauses. “It’s hard to tell sometimes.”
“ ‘Hard to tell’?” I keep the edge out of my voice. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
Sasha isn’t having it. He breaks away and grabs that goddamned notebook of his. “Get dressed, Oliver. We’ve got work to do.”
*
Just a few weeks ago, we had our first meeting with Ricky, a marriage counselor with dimpled cheeks and an oily baritone. He said we were brave, called us pioneers. Sasha and I traded glances. Was he ignorant, or just laboring to ingratiate himself?
“We got married only two years ago,” Sasha said. “When those ‘pioneers’ were getting hitched in Vermont, Oliver and I were in middle school.”
Ricky was undeterred. “Then think about those days two years ago. Think about what brought you together in the first place. The opportunity for a fresh start is rooted in the past.”
He handed us a notebook, had us list things we said and did when we were punch-drunk in love. We made our list, laughing together: Sasha, lithe and fluid on the dance floor, lending some of his grace to me. Languid Sundays sharing the New York Times, the real thing that blackened our fingertips with ink. And the day Sasha dragged me to the farmers’ market. Spinach, chard, leeks: all of it organic, virtuous, and dull, every bit a tacit rebuke of my diet. Then Sasha grabbed a chocolate-chip cookie the size of a dinner plate and laughed at my surprise. “What? Everyone needs a cheat day.” He broke off a piece for me, and shards of Belgian bittersweet melted on my tongue.
All those shining moments: gone.
But Ricky had a plan. Do those things again. Revive the in-jokes, the pet names, the private rituals. “A relationship is a performance,” he said. “Play those parts you wrote for one another. With discipline and persistence, transform imitation love into the real thing.”
“So, like, method acting.”
Ricky beamed, deaf to Sasha’s irony. “ ‘Fake it til you make it,’ am I right?”
“Did Stanislavski say that?” I asked.
Sasha snickered.
Ricky (unfazed, or pretending to be) said Sasha’s laughter revealed his “stubborn affection” for me. Sasha looked at me and nodded. Without a word we’d decided to give Ricky, and ourselves, another try.
When we returned a week later, Sasha walked in, all smiles: “I did my homework!” Ricky turned to me; I just shrugged. Sasha told him that he’d reserved a cabin at Smuggler’s Notch. “We went skiing there ages ago; it was our first real trip together.”
“And why should we go back now? It’s April! There’s no snow.”
Ricky’s bright idea? Get ice cream there instead.
I snorted. But Sasha opened the composition book and scribbled away at our list of assignments:
swing dance
ski in Vermont
sundaes???
Then he said, “We”—meaning this marriage—“can’t risk waiting until winter.” His eyes lit upon my paunch. “And you do love your sugar, don’t you?”
*
An hour before we have to check out and drive home, we head for Smuggler’s Scoop Shack, cosplaying as those happy pioneers, defiantly celebrating their anniversary.
It’s cold; the sun hasn’t yet torched the morning fog. “They won’t be open this early.”
“Trust me, Oliver,” Sasha says. “Besides—”
“Yeah, I know: it’s in the book.”
He just scowls and shakes his head.
I remember the Shack’s goofy sign: a penguin ogling his waffle cone. I remember the sliding window. I don’t remember the owner, curly-haired and swole, at the counter behind it.
Somehow Sasha does.
As he places our orders, I sit at a swaybacked picnic table and idly trace the graffiti carved into the cedar:
I Love Sooz
Ben & Jerry suck!
Tim + Toni 4evah
Sasha comes back with two cups of ice cream. “On the house.” In a coquettish tone I instantly loathe, he calls out, “Thanks, Mario!”
At the window, Mario responds with a little salute. I decide I hate him, too.
“Lemon-lavender for me, habañero chocolate for you.” Sasha arches an eyebrow. “Très outré.” His French is awful, but for now I let it ride; he’s a personal trainer, not a linguist.
Mario locks up and cycles off, calves bulging. I watch Sasha watching him go. His ice cream slumps, neglected, in its paper cup. Does Sasha think, if he concentrates hard enough, he can bring Mario back? If he wants Mario, wants anyone, then what am I doing here playacting in the middle of nowhere? Maybe I have my answer.
I smack the table, hard, and find myself staring into the eyes of a stranger. “Happy fucking cheat day,” I say to him, a little louder than necessary, and take a bite. At first, habañero chocolate is deceptively sweet, but then a million Scoville units dance on my palate. I open my mouth to speak, eager to blaze a trail to a brighter tomorrow.
~
Peter Beynon lives in Albany, New York.