Infidelities
©1993, 2005 Matt Duncan

              Ethan walks in sun, denim-legged, eyes shaded, short sleeves, boots black. Sky blue above him, he kicks pebbles, scuffed fresh-seeded grass with toes, already ripping shoe from sole— get whatcha pay for traces his lips. Work waits blocks away, post office visit intervenes.
              Lobby yawns, tan and stale, mailbox-lined, cooled by conditioning, and he enters, key in hand. Key-teeth clench lock mechanism, grate then turn. Cubicle stuffed, bulging envelopes, ads. He skims the stack, casually sorting business, letters, trash. Finally, he pulls her letter free from coupons.
              Official looking, thin, folded and sealed, a single page: he carefully peels the sides away, unfolds the aerogramme. Joy writes without loops or indentations, tiny hiccups in thin black lines giving the only indications of letters in her script. Her penmanship recalls her voice. He pauses.
              The accent echoes around him in the corridor. She whispers through the open mail slot. Her phrasings, the roll of her tongue across words he once condemned "mundane," all trickle from the walls, wet his neck and throat. The sculpture of her speech solidifies as he reads, imagines her eyes, liquid brown like tea, widening to stress a syllable, sees her fingers, thin and strong and long as his, brush dust from a cliché.
              The single sheet refolded, secreted away, once more boots shuffle over street, trek to work resumed. Day slides by, oozes even, sludge scraped from dishes he sprays and stacks on shelves. Four hours stretch like taffy on a warm day, clock hands gummed like teeth, slow to turn.
              At day's end, steam rises as the shower sprays over his head, trickles through stubble at his neck. Eyes tight to the water, steam becomes her arms wound around his fatigue, lips licking his neck. Towel at his shoulders, dripping hair blurs ink to grey spots as he rereads the note from Italy.


              The first time, she was Candace—lips soft, hair red, older. She lived next to his grandmother, asked him over for badminton and cards. The kiss was wet, like watermelon, gelatin soft. Three times they locked, arms circling waist and shoulders, each lasting longer. She tasted like mustard, a dusty, tangy breath. He crept from the house, wrote about it later, when her parents returned. Letters then, as now, bridged their gap—fourteen-years-old makes thirty miles seem a continent, an ocean.
             Distance won, through winter and spring, and interest waned. But at summer, without school's intervention, her looks and words asked another chance, restoked the fading embers. Lips hungry, gripping, pulling him toward her body, in shorts and t-shirt. His hand found her waist, traveled. Three times she said no, the fourth she consented, and his fingers found flesh, hardened nipple at his palm. Eventually her fingers found his zipper. Even though they made no sticky mess, no fluids were exchanged, years later he wonders, "No"—does that mean…?


              Bass like a broken washing machine vibrates the floor, lights flashing green-gold, purple, red. Feet still stiff, as if with tar, Ethan sways off time, not listening. Women flash in strobes, short red hair in one corner, long thin legs across the floor, skirt tight to hips against the bar. Leaning near a mirror, he relives the two exchanges—one long, significant and hopeless in his solitude, her relationship; the other short, a daring, spurting call me—both in this blacklit bar, sober, unrefined.
               When he walks to work, he sees her, hates the short-haired woman who looks enough like Joy to make him stop, choke back her name. Ethan fears her six-week trip might be enough to gel a lukewarm aversion to art into a bitter chunk of hate. Italian men, she writes, are pigs, and he is glad his skin is pale, though his surname is Scots for "dark-skinned warrior."


              Janet twisted him like red-black lipstick, split him like the seams of her miniskirt, wore him at her wrist like cheap green-gold jewelry. New to college, he spread himself wide, eyes more green than blue, unripened. She watched him, painted nonchalant, cigarette singing smoke.
              In a parking lot, she grabbed him, squeezed him to her thighs, fixed her faded purple grin around his mouth and pressed her tongue through flacid lips. She smiled at his words, read in crowded coffee shops, crossed her legs, exhaled smoke. Smiles or tears always followed his attempts to prove. Cigarettes and beer always followed both.


              He shuffles a small stack like a refugee might worry the corners of a family photo—a postcard, a letter, two grey photos of her paintings, half a photo-booth strip (her face averted, his eyes like a headlight-blinded deer's). The television washes the darkened room in blue, sound turned down, and Ethan switches on the light, tucks his stack in the later pages of the novel he pretends to read. Clothes that stink of smoke pollute the corner, and the fan hums a tepid breeze through the room.


              The final failure—Hannah; she smiled with her eyes, quick to laugh, slow at thought. Delicate, but large—not wide or big, but tall—face all cheeks and forehead, framed in honey shoulder-sweeping hair pulled into a constant tail, breasts big enough to stretch nipples past pink to blend with flesh, hands strong, with callused fingertips. Her lips tingled, tongue tiny and cold, feeling more than looking pink. She rippled at his touch, shivered in his arms.
              Cello as her constant beau, she embraced it more than him. His words too harsh to sing, she wouldn't listen, couldn't hear the harmony he wove beneath the images, the metaphors. She wanted to case him, like a Stradivarius, keep him free from dust, used only at the philharmonic. Ethan stretched himself like catgut, tuned his every dissonance to her perfect pitch, varnished his imperfections until, wooden, he cracked, split, strings snapped and curled. 


              No book can hold his eyes. Words race across the page only when he writes of her, to her. The house yawns, empty, he alone, like a bead in a broken rattle. Last time he had the house alone, she came. Late, the two sat, cut like cardboard, talking through the hours, trading secrets, sharing lies. In the tension, thick and humid, tickles nearly burst his shy façade into a kiss. Her eyes hunted his until dawn, quick to laugh. But his silence, his attention made her shy, young and clean, broke her glance like twigs between impatient fingers. As the two sat, rocking on the porchswing, anticipating sunrise, he praised and traced the tree across the way, caught her eyes peripherally, expectant and eager, hunting his again. Owning that knowledge, then, confident in mutuality, his gaze lingered on the trees. The kiss was sweet and awkward, made her laugh and say so.
              Joy is the only thing.
              Ethan is a ball-bearing in the housing of the sheets, she the sweat that greases him, turns him, sleepless summer nights. She is the hand he sees, pulling his intestines tight, dragging them up through his throat, to be choked back down as he is wrenched from sleep. The face he frames with words, on white, is hers.