“I gathered,” she said, husky but measured. “I need her covered first.”
“You must want some, too, right?”
“Oh, Neil,” she said. “I can’t—”
But I hardly heard the rest, because my mouth had reached her earlobe. I felt against my lips the cool shape of the old gold hoops. “I like them on you,” I said.
“They’re familiar,” she whispered back, and then I was upon her, and her lips were at first surprisingly clumsy, but endearingly, flatteringly so—was she nervous?
The last time I had been so close to her body, there had been someone else in the room. I waited for Shruti’s voice （Aren’t you two, like . . . ?）， waited for her to wander in and blink at us intently, as though at her dissected frog on the biology lab table. But—nothing. We were alone. My hands were heavy when I pushed them into her hair, a little roughly. I felt, with enormous joy, the little puff of air her mouth expelled at that display of control. I tugged again, my hand on her neck, the years of want that I had worried were weakening me now becoming something like strength. There was a flesh and flop to her breasts as they bounced against her compact body—more than I expected. Jigsawed flashes of all the girls I’d ever fucked—not that many, never a brown girl—swished by me and then were lost. Her darkness was new. The black hair, the blanket of peach fuzz on her belly. I imagined Adah Eckman’s eyes on Isaac Snider, the Snider I’d dreamt up, those eyes erasing the difference between him and the rest of his homeland. Him, disappearing into her. And me, in the present, not disappearing into Anita but becoming more of a person as the friction grew. Me, my uncut foreskin that had made me nervous around anybody new in bed, but Anita was not anybody, hers not any body. She shuddered at my teeth on her neck, her thigh. Her voice lifted, turning vaporous at my tongue, my fingers. “That, yeah, that, unh,” I heard her say, like we were swapping promises, her yeah meeting my yeah.
9.
A miracle: here, within groping distance, was the body kept secret for so long. I discovered Anita’s dramatic particularity. Things both attractive and mundane. That her mouth smelled like pungent yogurt in the mornings. That sharpness of her pelvis, that feel of her elfish little hands digging into my lats. What had once been a brick wall between her sexual self and her life-self now became a permeable membrane, and I could and did reach through whenever I liked, to nip the edge of her ear with my teeth as she wrote a grocery list, to cup her breasts in the kitchen as she poured wine, to press myself into her hips while she talked on the phone.
After just a few nights, she left me a key. “We have to do some planning as soon as I get home,” she said sheepishly. “So you don’t need to drive back to Berkeley, and waste all that time.” She’d return to find that I’d been lying on her floor most of the day, reading, working. （Yes, working! For something about her presence had revived my commitment to the discipline of history. I saw how people did jobs. I could look upon my sample chapters with a kind of aloof pragmatism, because Anita would be home in a few hours, and we had something that needed us, which meant we needed each other.）
There we were: me, shaking myself off when she opened the door at six p.m., going on a run around the sterile Palo Alto streets. Me, permitted to be myself with dangerous ease in her company. Me, there must be something badly wrong with her if she could tolerate me, like this. Me, you know what’s wrong with her, it’s cousin to what’s wrong with you. Her, in bed, where she was surprisingly muted and mousy, that girlish tongue stealing out adorably between her teeth, that tightening concentration of her features before she undid my pants.
The revelations came like this: a week or so in—we were in bed. She had her back to me. I pushed my fingers against the nape of her neck and considered my thumb impression. There I was, briefly settled into her skin, and then I was gone.
“That feels nice,” she said, though I hadn’t entirely meant it to. “My mother used to rub her nails up and down my back when I was a kid.”
“This way?”
“Softer,” she said.
I tried again. Through her west-facing windows, the sun was lowering, darkening her. I had the impression that the years had accumulated on her skin and I was pulling them off, slight scratch by gentle scratch.
Wendi was the only person I’d ever really dated, and with her there had been a similar sense of having been vetted on some prior occasion, so that when things accelerated, it seemed the jolt had come from somewhere, from before, and there were no mundane introductions. After Wendi, I always wished I could walk into something having been seen in all the necessary ways, so bodies could be bodies and history lighter.