An Instant She Was So Alive
“I’m not high-maintenance,” she said, which, as you know, was really not true.
She had noticed him, of course ~~ how could she not? He had an extraordinary body, lean and of perhaps among the most chiseled musculatures she’d ever seen, certainly one that distinguished itself here at the Baths, which overflowed with office-bound slaves to money and ambition, and unathletic Hasidim or aging Russian men whose bellies preceded their physical presence as if making way for them in space.
Bernard the Haitian thug worked in construction along with another regular, Marcus, a tall and tattooed faux jerk whose gait said he was slightly above it all, even if he always pretended (and turned out) to be very nice. The undertones of this association, which Audrey had managed to extract in bits and pieces from Marcus over the course of several weeks, kept her from angling for Bernard.
Nevertheless, they contrived to look at each other often. And then one time he inadvertently knocked over her water bottle as she was stretching on a plank of rotted wood on the floor in the Russian Room, a low-lit dungeon with the built-in furnace that she imagined never would have passed city inspections if it had not been grandfathered in from a century ago.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized, which is when she made the comment about not being high-maintenance.
Her response was not completely untrue, either. She was high-maintenance overall, for sure, but not about little things like this incident ~~ and especially not when someone so attractive was to blame, or not really blame, even, since it was an accident. Other guys had knocked over her water bottle over the years, and it always agitated her to have to pick it up, along with the hand towel that she folded on top to keep it dry. She was almost grateful when Bernard did it; he was so fucking hot.
They spoke for the first time ~~ we’re not counting that initial brief exchange ~~ one or two visits later. He was heading out of the showers, and she, emerging from the murky cold plunge pool toward the Russian Room, nearly bumped into him.
“Would you like to have dinner sometime?” he blurted out, hedging, either before or after the invitation, that she probably already had a boyfriend.
Several months had elapsed since the most recent debacle in Mexico with Aureliano; and he had yet to show up in New York.
“I’d love to,” she said, gleaming.
Bernard chose an Italian place on First Avenue between 1st and 2nd, but he neglected to make a reservation, and the bar teemed with hordes of 20-somethings one-upping each other at the top of their lungs. Glossing over the blunder, she proposed an Indian restaurant a few blocks north, around the corner from Mitali East.
He ordered a cocktail, and then another. At one point he spoke to the couple at the adjacent table and kept the conversation going several sentences too long.
She is not sure when he told her that he was an ex-felon ~~ it may have been that first date, or later on ~~ but, whenever it was, she thought she would be a hypocrite if she didn’t accept him for who he was trying and working so hard to be ~~ she represented people with pasts like his, after all, and more so she had a past herself, and asked others to imagine beyond it, too.
All of which is why, at Life Café a couple weeks later, just feet from the booth where she’d sat with Aureliano, when Bernard pushed aside his plate of fried chicken and stood up from his bar stool and said that how she was born didn’t matter, she softened up to him for good.
It is true that she judged him based on reasons that she could marshal against going to bed together. She was torn between, on the one hand, her physical desire for him coupled with the intellectual desire to move on from Aureliano, and, on the other hand, the sanctity of love.
Since her judgment of Bernard, which she would have described, if pressed, as pleasant, comprised an interest in what might happen between them, sensation excited a lust for more encounters, of the kind she had already had, skating on the surface, yet deeper.
Consequently, her satisfaction presupposed not only the mere judgment she was exercising, but also the relation of its existence to her state of being.
So he was not merely pleasant; his presence promised to gratify her.
She gave this flourish no assent, but still her inclinations were aroused, and, when it came to what was most exciting about him, she resorted to an absence of judgment upon anything other than his character ~~ for she had come to learn that enjoyment would fain dispense with judgment altogether.
He respected her desire to move slowly, and, over the next couple weeks, they got to know each other.
She ran into him at the Baths from time to time. One evening in particular her heart skipped when she saw him standing in the doorway beneath the rain: she walked up to him and stood very close, as if to kiss him, whereupon he extended his enormous veined hands which, cupped together, appeared to have been molded by genetics from a Rodin sculpture.
Those glorious hands unfolded, and there, in his palms, wrapped with a little cone of brown wax paper, and glistening in the water that fell in droplets from the sky, was a pink rosebud that had just begun to blossom.
Another time she encountered him a few buildings away, swaggering down the street in the masculine fashion he cobbled together, that ever-so-sinister but heartwarming glint sparkling in his eye. They met in space, and he withdrew an earbud from his ear and placed it in hers, as an aria from Puccini’s Madam Butterfly lit up her face.
He invited her to the restaurant he was working on renovating, and also the Pilates studio, and one night he took her to the apartment where he lived in East New York to show her his room. She wigged out at the last minute, saying she didn’t want to be cooped in somewhere he smoked, and now she wishes she had gotten over herself and gone up.
A few months later, over dinner at Mama’s, a now-gone home cookin’ joint where she took him for the fried chicken, which he indeed devoured, she explained that she liked him very, very much, only she couldn’t be around all the drinking ~~ he’d shown up at her apartment with a flask more than once by now ~~ because she’d had bad experiences with alcohol and men.
“Oh Bernard,” she said, caught mid-breath as he wiped away the tears streaming down his face with those enormous hands.
Making the decision to sleep with him agonized her for weeks.
She hesitated because she knew that setting herself free into sex with anyone else would change things between her and Aureliano forever, and she was vacillating. But then came that one Friday night a month ago, when she sat cross-legged on the futon couch with the gnawed arm awaiting his arrival, all dolled up and wearing the jean miniskirt he loved, and it turned out that he hadn’t gotten on the plane and even lied about getting tickets to begin with.
Of course, Aureliano’s antennae detected what was happening. He texted her within minutes after she had called Bernard and stowed a condom and lube within reach under the gnawed arm of the futon couch.
A half-hour later, from within the embrace of those dizzying arms, she asked if they could stay down here rather than climb up to her loft because she knew that he might sweat and she didn’t want nicotine and the smell of smoke to seep into the bed sheets. (She needed a few months yet before she’d let that neurosis go and ask him to sleep over, and he would ~~ just sleep and nothing more ~~ so that she could feel a man next to her, and he, a woman.)
She looked up at him as he propped himself over her, and marveled yet again at his shoulders and biceps, all covered in tattoos.
It was the first time she came with a guy on top. Usually she had to be in control, with her eyes closed, exercising illusions of dominion.
Afterward he lumbered back from the bathroom, touched her with one of those hands of his, and asked why she was crying.
She shook her head a little, smiling kind of, and looked out the window at the spot across the street where Aureliano used to park the old tan Volvo station wagon two winters ago.
And there is the moment: because in that instant, when her heart had broken open and she felt the swirl of agony and hope that arose from having gone where she had been so afraid to trespass, she knew, without question, that she was alive.
*
This piece is excerpted from my book To Whom I Could Have Been: A True Love Story ~~ with subsequent installments to follow.