THE SUMMER IN THE CITY

The summer in the city was unconscionably warm, but never hot like the deserts and valleys to which I was accustomed, never scorching, just sinuating itself into my pores. After stepping out of the shower I immediately felt like taking another shower. If I could have lifted the shower wholesale and wrapped it around myself as I went out into the night then I would have done so. I wished the city were an amusement park, with floating nozzles spraying a cooling mist onto my face wherever I went. It would have been tolerable. As it were there was nothing for it but to drink heavily and so we drank in preface to further drinking.

We walked and were transported by taxicabs to our places, places we possessed by virtue of our presence until we were gone and then they belonged to other people. How many of us were there? Five one night, six another; I lost count, or I never had the figures in the first place. I was a visitor and so enjoyed the vast generosity of mannequins on the periphery. In turns they came to life out of movies from the 80′s.

In an Anglican pub I led with my elbow to secure a place at the bar. The left half of my field of vision was obscured by someone’s shoulder which loomed, which loamed. Projecting my voice through the cotton of a Lacoste polo, I ordered two Duvels, then pushed forward until the Lacoste polo could no longer ignore my presence and adjusted accordingly. Chemical chain reactions echoed down the bar until everyone had a little less space. The din ebbed like distant whale calls from nature documentaries and I said to someone, “How do you feel about the conflict between environmentalists and Japanese whalers in the Pacific?” And this someone replied, “I’ve always wondered what whale would taste like.”

Someone else quoted a stand-up comedian to raucous laughter and applause. I called out the next line over my shoulder and lifted the two Duvels into the air and I handed one of them to her. Through call-and-response, the broken mimicking of jokes we could not entirely recall, we wiled the next hour or hour-and-a-half or some other period of time which could not be measured except by the declining in our glasses, like the depletion of the glaciers.

Then bodies pressed against us, forcing us to press against each other, and French DJs spun imported electro through speakers boosted to unnatural volumes. These were songs we had never heard of or songs we knew too well, and was that “The Sweetest Perfection”? It was. Was that “Face to Face” seven songs later? It was. As she pulled me closer I wondered why she maneuvered in this way; had I asked for this? It must have been the humidity. Anything was better than to be aware of the sweat filming over my skin.

We were walking down the concrete and people peeled off from the mass and what was once a murder was now a murmuration of two. Inside there was an embalming quiet. We lost the thread of predation. She offered a drink and there was nothing for it but to accept. For lack of knowing what else to do I leaned forward and kissed her in the quiet. With my tongue I placed a gold coin over her tongue for passage to another place. She told me to stop because she was tired. I was tired too. I preferred gazelles to starlings but I was willing to make an exception just this once.

It was impossible to sleep under the unriveted heat, low and steady like a bank of warming lamps over bains-marie. She laid her arm over my chest and rested her head upon my arm and I was uncomfortable. I remained prone for an hour, maybe two, and then she roused herself, was aroused, kissed me until I acquiesced, and I did not question the reversal, allowed her to be a hunter. I imagined myself in another place and with another girl and that made it all right. I wanted to be in an igloo, wrapped in polar bear furs, but we couldn’t always have what we wanted.

Afterward I still could not sleep. Outside the city was building new parts of itself and the resultant cacophonies reverberated in my head and I was sweating again but not from exertion. I disentangled myself as dolphins in fishing nets could not do. I had a headache. I used her shower. As I scrubbed my hair dry with her towel I considered escaping through the window and down the fire escape. It was only the second story, and if I fell the falling would be a cooling relief.