Nothing Lasts Forever by Robert Steiner

Author:Robert Steiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619023550
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

NEGATIVE SPACE

In the hour before sunrise, I lie beside the woman I love, studying her face in the darkness, as if I have studied it in a dream, just as I used to awaken in the night, covering her body with mine because in a dream my body covered hers. I know she is unfaithful to me because I dream of it, so in the darkness I see in her sleeping face the need to be elsewhere, to be someone else elsewhere, with someone who is not me. I observe the face of her infidelity, resting my head beside hers, my eyes watching hers in case they open. I slip from our bed to an armchair while my wife wrestles the dawn — ash yellow, or ash gray, now and again red as a peach. While my wife is unfaithful to me, she is faithful to her new needs, among which her lover is the most urgent. During the hour before sunrise, in the torpor of my wife’s infidelity, I smoke in an armchair of the bedroom because everything has changed, and nothing will be the same, and what I have believed between nothing and everything is no longer what it was, whatever it was. I begin to discern day from night, then true from untrue, then her torpor from my despair, then I think I am, our shortest sentence, the simplest observation to thwart death.

For those who have found debasement through love, reminding them that they will die alone and ruined, the voice of infidelity is the most erotic they will hear. A familiar voice recites an impossible story of sexual betrayal, an intimate voice suddenly as distant as the thousands of years of confessions that have destroyed hundreds of millions of lives. This is as close to meaning as life gets, I thought, when the voice of the woman I love, whose body I know inch upon inch, admitted she had kissed the lips and genitals of a sexual stranger, exchanging intimacy with me for intimacy with him, who now knows my wife’s body inch upon inch. She whispered to me because the air was silent at the end of siesta, the warmest hour of our day, but her confession was no less bold for being unspeakable. She whispered in curves, in waves and troughs, of the imperfection of human beings, of humans imperfectly in love, to which I replied, at any opportunity, that love was not perfect the way her breasts were perfect, or the wine perfect, or sunset over the sea, and not perfect like the caramel volutes of her exposed labia. As the woman I love confessed on our terrace overlooking an olive grove three hundred years old, we watched the sun swoon. There was a bottle of Beaune Margaux, and a hard Camargues cheese on our terrace during the confession, as there would be a box of filterless Gitanes, wood matches as long as bird legs snapping in the dark, olives from the olive grove, bats against the sky.

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