What He's Poised to Do

Joe was definitely asleep. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t laughed. She gave him the benefit of the doubt. Joe slept so soundly that he liked to call himself the decedent. He laughed at his own joke whenever he said that. Sophie could not sleep. She had a job that required her to lay awake for long hours retracing her steps, and nothing seemed to help. Sex did not put her to sleep but rather put her in a state of heightened awareness. While she was having sex with Joe, she found herself looking up into his face as he chugged along and wondering how it had come to this. His was the face of a child, shot through with a tragic lack of understanding of its own mortality. It was not the face of a man. Not really. She reached up and brushed his cheek and he mistook her touch for tenderness.

With Joe asleep, she found herself thinking of sex. What was it, exactly? What was pleasure? Had she felt it? Something had seemed to widen in the space behind her nose, to enlarge her, but was that pleasure? How would she know, exactly? Joe had put a finger inside her. What was he pointing at? What was that rivulet of fluid growing cold on her thigh? Was it her blood? And what was the point of Joe’s weight on her, exactly? Was he making a point about his bulk? Was he trying to remind her of his physical power? It was unlikely. He was not aggressive. Sex kept her up, thinking.

Her bed, too, kept her up. It was not comfortable. Something in the sheets gave her cause to itch. A bed should not be like that. If it was not a place of peace, then where was peace? She listened to the blood beat in her ears. Who else was awake? Her mother, probably. Her mother had never slept easily either. She was too often lonely, or afraid, or angry. Maybe sleep, or the lack of sleep, passed like knowledge or sadness from mother to daughter. Maybe all of this was her mother’s fault. She watched the time on the clock creep along and cursed her mother, her bed, her life. She cursed Joe. She cursed sex. She looked out the window and cursed the night sky. “If I never see you again,” she said to the moon, “it’ll be too soon.” She closed her eyes and thought of ways of changing things for the better. She must have fallen asleep eventually, because she remembered dreaming, though she did not remember any details of the dream. She called her mother in the morning to arrange a visit. “I love you,” she said to her mother.

“Will you bring Joe?” her mother said.

“Yes,” Sophie said.

“Well, it’s up to you,” her mother said. No one’s tone was convincing.

JOE LOVED HER MOTHER. He had an easy way with her. He told her jokes and she laughed. He got her drinks and she said thank you. Sophie resented this, not because she wanted there to be tension between them but because she knew that Joe was not touching her mother’s core. That core was a hot thing—hot and cold both, to be precise—and when it was touched in any way the result was discomfort for everyone. Joe kept her mother comfortable and he was comfortable in return. He smiled at everything she said, even when what she said was sharp or uneasy. He ate whatever she put in front of him, even though Sophie knew that later on in bed he would turn from his back to his side and sigh in a way that let her know he was worrying about his weight. If asked, he would say nothing bad about her mother. “I like going over there,” he’d say. “It’s a nice place.” And just like that, she was left to stay awake in the bed, where the corners of the mattress rose up slightly, where the equatorial bar bruised her back and shoulders.

That’s where she’s going this afternoon: to see her mother and then buy a new bed. She told Joe that she was going to the drugstore. This struck her as an acceptable lie. She didn’t want to get into a discussion with him about the bed, and whether it should be replaced, and what implications that would have for their relationship and the future of the planet. She just wanted to sleep. Joe seems to be sleeping more than ever. For more than a week he has been slack, like a clothesline strung indifferently between two buildings. The preoccupation with his weight is only part of it. He has been listless. He has started to drink too much again. He has complained that he does not know what he wants from life, that he cannot imagine going forward while he is in the grip of this inertia. “But inertia is what makes you go forward,” she says. They were both right, but she was more right.