on the city’s arteries.
Erika and I start working on supper, while Molly stacks blocks and then crashes her little towers with a toy car. Erika and I scrub and peel, slice, chop, and dice meat and vegetables. I whisk a sauce, and she fries the meat. Molly whines and fusses, so I give her a little cup of raisins to snack on until supper is ready. Supper sizzles and simmers, bubbles and boils.
Just when it’s ready and we are about to sit down to eat, the phone rings. “Sorry,” Erika says without answering it, “it’s suppertime here.” Molly eats almost everything we feed her and throws the rest on the floor, laughing and doing her best to hold our attention throughout the meal. The phone rings again; we ignore it. Molly throws her cup on the floor and squeals when I give her a bowl of grapes for dessert. She complains when I clean her fingers and face. We clean up the dishes, put the leftovers in the fridge. Erika transfers a load of wet laundry to the dryer. Molly giggles when I tickle her and wrestle with her on the bed, whines when I change her diaper, fusses when I put her into her pyjamas, and asks me to sing to her when I brush her teeth. In the bathroom, I can overhear the owner of the house, talking in a high, squeaky baby voice to her dog. Downstairs, Erika starts the washing machine.
Molly gives us goodnight kisses, and we put her down in her playpen. I call my brother on the phone, and we talk about books, kids, movies, our marriages, our parents. He tells me that the squealing metal of the trains in the train yard near his house is starting to make him feel like he’s going crazy. “The sound of it,” he says, “I hear it in the middle of the night. It keeps me awake. It makes me so angry. Maybe we’ll just have to move, I don’t know.” I tell him how we used to live right next to one of the busiest streets in the city, and how I had to sleep with earplugs because the incessant noise of the vehicles kept me awake. “That’s part of the reason we moved to this place,” I tell him, “the noise and all.”
Erika and I pick up Molly’s toys and get ready for bed. Everything is tidied up for tomorrow. We get into bed and talk for a bit about the day, the joys and struggles, the big dreams of our life. We tell each other how in love we are with Molly, plan our schedule for the next day, and can hardly keep our eyes open. She switches off the lamp and kisses me goodnight.
And tonight happens to be one of those rare nights when she falls asleep before I do. I listen to her slow, deep breaths, the faint whistling from her nose, the sound of her life. I fall asleep to the rhythm of her breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out. Breathing.
touch
At the bus stop this morning, there’s a giant picture of an anonymous woman’s bra-clad torso. The lighting and computer-enhanced color tints make everything look too good to be true, which, of course, it is. Like a lot of men, even though I can offer sound moral and philosophical arguments for why a bus stop advertisement featuring a lacy bra on a faceless torso should be offensive, more than anything, I want to stare. I think of the lines from one of Wendell Berry’s poems:
How hard it is for me, who live
in the excitement of women
and have the desire for them
in my mouth like salt.[1]
When the bus pulls up, the ad on the side portrays a man and woman, both half-dressed, the two of them a tangle of limbs. They both look tired or drunk, and both of them are sweaty. Just before the bus doors open, I notice that the ad is actually for shoes, or rather a shoe company.
On the bus there are ads for hair and skin products, for natural cures with miraculous before-and-after photos, and clothing stores. There’s a confusing “safe sex” poster that seems like attempted damage control, conspicuously out of place, I muse, like a bandaid over a bullet wound, or a 1-800 gambling addiction hotline number printed on the seats at a casino.
And on the inside roof, like the advertiser’s centrepiece, is a photo of another anonymous woman from the waist up, who is looking down at the cell phone-shaped opening in her shirt that shows off a section of her bra and an ample amount of cleavage. I have seen this ad before, and I try not to stare, but the whole point of it is that I do stare, and that hopefully the curve of her breasts will entice me into buying a cell phone. When I get off the bus, I see a billboard advertising the “Naughty But Nice” sex tradeshow—no doubt a gratuitous carnival of images, fantasies, desires, and obsessions. But the allure is powerful and real. I can’t pretend I am not drawn to the images, so carefully created and displayed, and my mind starts to wander. I walk home, feeling like there’s something wrong with me.
That night, Erika and I make love.
I know her body. I know the lines and veins, the scar on her foot, the one under her chin, the one on her shin from a cut with a clamshell, the stretch-marked skin around her hips. I know the different tints and lines in her hair, the smooth curve of her neck, her soft earlobes, the pale, smooth skin on her shoulders and stomach and back. I know her teeth—some straight, some crooked—and her nose, narrow like that of a Russian princess, her pointy chin, the creases that frame her mouth, her green eyes, different from when we first fell in love—traced by deeper lines and wrinkles, signs that she is being transformed by sorrow and joy.
I’ve covered every inch of her with my eyes and fingers, thousands of times now, over and over, and still she is new, every time, new. I look for some easier way to apprehend her, some way to make her more mine, but there is nothing simple about her body. Touching her is a mystery of flesh and bone. The real presence of her body resists the smallness of my eyes, my mind, all the words I use to describe her. She is.
[1]. Berry, “Marriage,” 70.
2
Tacit Knowledge
and the Miraculous
Double Ristretto
I didn’t really develop a serious appetite for books until midway through my second year of college. I remember sitting on the stools between the library shelves in Bible school, discovering Nietzsche—who got me all worked up—and Thomas Merton—who helped calm me down—and thinking that books like these were so explosive I could hardly believe they were legal. Reading has become so much a part of my life that nowadays I panic if I’m on the bus or in the waiting room at the doctor’s office and discover that I’ve forgotten to bring along at least one of the half-dozen or so books I currently have on the go. In fact, I enjoy reading so much I can even think of a few reasons why it might be better than sex: the pleasures of reading might not be as intense as the pleasures of sex, but regardless of how good a lover you might be, chances are pretty good that a good book is going to last a whole lot longer than even the best sex; it’s easy to talk to your kids about books; you can read in pretty much any public place without having to worry about getting arrested.
Not long ago I was reading from Bodies in Motion and at Rest by Thomas Lynch, a lifelong undertaker who also writes poetry and essays. The essay I was reading was about the author and his son fishing together. After only a few paragraphs, it was obvious just how much the two of them love fishing—not just catching fish, which would seem to be the obvious goal of anyone who goes fishing, but the entire experience of fishing, the sheer physicality of it all. Writing about his son, Lynch says, “It was here the topography of the riverbed began to make sense to him. He could close his eyes and see the bottom, its undulant waterscape of runs and pools and holes and flats, the pockets of curling water, the structure of tree stumps and rock forms, the gravel beds where fish would hold, the shaded and the sunlit waters.”[1]
“He could close his eyes and see the
