She felt tired and overrun and, reaching over in her woolen blanket she held me first, in the girth of her hollow hand, under the heaps of fabric. It is a funny thing how easy it is to hold a whole man, in your hand, if you are a woman. I turned in open view to kiss her on the cheek.
And as I did so, in the open and the cold we seemed caught already. Just like me, to get caught. Jack frost seemed to announce it. I might as well have been caught with my pants down in his icy blast. What had happened could not be erased from public vision. It was that kiss on the couch. That was how it happened in the church. The little minnow of a boy, Circus Charlie saw us in act - half Chinese and half American little squirt- he said to me straight afterwards. "You kissed her on the cheek" just after I'd tried to talk myself out of the story but it was nonetheless clear and present somehow.
Signed and sealed were her divorce and my impending obfuscade, and our love was in its infancy, almost as a kind of judgment. She told me in the tent that she wanted to complete the act, but now we were poor. The tent was full of longing and brokenness and all I could do was announce my undying love to her. Life is tragic. "But I have to run along the momentum of your frenzy" I thought.
We went to far away China as we'd learned to do in our dreams. As if spirited away. No plane ride in memory. So far I had not been there.
But it was familiar somehow; the squalor and her lack of heart to anything good. The tawdry air of hollywoodesque pleasures. Hollywood without even the tiny soul of Hollywood.
She'd reverted, now. Now she was in my arms. No longer a fat-cheeked convent woman. She wanted the rugged life of an outcast.
It was raw and it was rife. They were in the miasma of the dance-halls, of the neon lights,- her and her friend that she had just newly found from long ago. And hour by hour she was turning more pink, more European. When we came back to make love, the exoticism had faded, and the place had exploded and the Owner was there feeling that he was owed an explanation or at least lots of money. These odd Chinese candles, apparently, weren't meant to be left burning. Flat and combustion-ridden as they were.
That was when I put on my act. Started off in a smart little way. Started explaining that I studied Postmodernism, and not what he thought I had - which was some nonsense subject like the mathematics of combustion.
That changed him. The pink wax on the curtains didn't seem to matter anymore. He was done with us, and went off to his quarters. We would do it there in the glare of a burned out hollow.
Then I turned to my new lover, but expectations cast in the light of doom, and of embarrassment are easy to decipher. She saw through my act.
Frustration registered. Womanly, jilted, unpleasant: She just wanted to eat now. It was pizza for dinner on the tiny wooden stand of a table.
That was our first night together. I could leave at any time, I realized.
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