100 Proof

She asked him to take her to Bar Adagio. She didn’t know anything about it, but it sounded like the right place to have a languorous cocktail, to wind their fingers around each other’s and talk low. But it turned out to be just like any bar, and when she went to freshen up in the bathroom, he ordered her a glass of wine instead of a martini. Later, her eyelids heavy with disappointment, she called herself a cab and left, her only wish that the driver would take the corners faster, the straightaways more aggressively.

Down a long driveway, she sat, legs tucked under herself, brushing burrs from her hair as if they’d been decorations.

“I just want to touch you,” he said. “It’s as if you fell from the trees. It’s as if you rolled from the bushes.”

She gave him a sidelong look, but did not speak. Branches crashed against each other somewhere. Wind shook the leaves.

She came at him like a faith healer, her hand hard against his forehead, her smile big as the light he expected to walk into one day. When he was with her, he felt better than he ever had before, but she was as impossible to understand as if she spoke in tongues.

“Don’t you get it?” she asked. “We’re meant to be together. That’s all it means.”

He didn’t get it, but he liked the way she showed him the path with her hands and mouth. All her conviction might make a believer out of him after all.

His whispers slithered through the receiver, delivering the usual venom: He was only human, he loved her more than all the rest of them, he didn’t know why he couldn’t keep it all in check. He was smoother than ever, and she wanted to let her head go all fuzzy in the presence of so much poison, to let herself slip off into a profound coma. He always managed to slip out of old skin and emerge unscathed. I miss you, baby, she said, the same way she always did. Of course you can come over.

She awoke from dreams of the heat generated by grooved wheels on rails. It had been seven days since he’d left, and she lay very still, her palms pressed to the mattress at either side of her body. She had once been the kind of woman who leapt from bed and got on with her day, but lately, she felt as if the day dragged her along behind it like something caught on its undercarriage, her skin burned by friction, bruised by impact.

The plane carved through the marine layer, diving through to open sky and approaching earth. Gravity pulled unmistakeably, and her limbs felt heavier the closer she got to home.

She had heard landing a plane is easier than taking off, but on this night, she begged to differ. Tonight, she felt as if the plane were weighted with cement, dragging her under, dragging her to a place where it would be impossible for even the strongest to breathe.

She had learned to rest between steps, to make way in such a paced manner that she was never as exhausted as she had once been.

“I used to dance,” she told him under a heavy, clouded sky. “But after that night, I decided it was easier to move more slowly.”

“But you’re not the person I want to know anymore,” he said. “The dancer’s the only one I loved.”

It was the first time he’d said such a thing the whole time she’d known him. It was the first time he’d made her cry.