Why the Tree Loves the Axe. Jim Lewis

a ways and come down in his arms. I took his feverish head against my stomach and put my mouth on the bitter-tasting crown of his hair; and as I held him he reached up my back for the zipper on my dress and slowly tugged it down. I do think that I was with him only because I wanted to watch him take the thing off of me; nevertheless, I was sorry to see it go. It hit the floor with a slow emerald splash, but I was the only thing that got wet.

      Without his suit he had no job, he was just muscle and skin and bone; I tipped him back and put my hand on the slab of his chest, he narrowed his eyes; I took his tiny nipple in my mouth, without waiting I reached down and gently weighed his balls with my fingers, and then dragged up across his bobbing erection and through his pubic hair to his belly. I bit his chest and he drew a short breath. Kiss, on the mouth, is that better? Baby? It was a trick I made up on the spot. I was having a good time.

      I was on my back on the bed, his hands were around my ankles, tugging my legs apart. He leaned slowly over me and dragged his lips down my abdomen; they passed across my skin without catching on anything, until his head sank between my thighs and settled there, face to face with my wet sex. He put his hands under my ass, I reached down and touched his head as he began to kiss me, outside and then inside; his wise mouth and my glutted lips, reflecting each other’s damp and shining purpose back and forth and back again, kissing until it was impossible to tell which was the original and which the double, while between them a tiny bright red bud grew, half mine and half his tongue; it was so young and tender that I wanted to weep; and then a fresh shoot burst from its tip and I began to tremble.

      He was over me, his mouth glistening and swollen; there was no resistance—and with one exorbitant motion he slid inside me, gently swore, and began to fuck me. Some moments the sensation was so keen that I thought I was going to faint; some moments I could hardly feel a thing. I opened my eyes and saw his face above me, his own eyes tightly closed; just as he opened his, I shut mine again. A few seconds later he abruptly pulled out of me, and I wondered if I’d offended him. There was the soft sound of sex escaping from me as I lay there, borne up by nothing but the bed. I looked down the length of my body at him; he was kneeling between my legs, gazing up at me insistently.

      Turn over, he said. Turn over.

      If he’d said it again I would have refused, but he just watched me; so I rolled over as if it was a game called Sacrifice. I could smell myself on the sheets, the scent was a welcome thing, impolite. He took my calves in his hands and started to draw me back toward him, until I was up on my knees in the dark like a three-legged stool, my hands clasped behind my neck, my forehead pressed against the mattress. I breathed shallowly to calm a sudden flush of embarrassment that threatened to drive me off of the bed and out of the room; bold, big, I felt a breeze on the back of my thighs; for a moment I thought he was going to spank me, I wondered if he did that to every woman he managed to get naked beside him, I tensed and put my senses behind me. Instead, he gripped my upper thighs: then he took his finger and gently, delicately split me with it: I jerked forward involuntarily, but I didn’t get far: he followed with his hips, at first hesitantly and then smoothly, and all of a sudden, there he was, really, in me all the way—and he stopped. I could hear him breathing heavily, his hand pressing gently on my back, as if he was trying to decide whether to push me down. He didn’t move, so I didn’t move … I was following his lead … balanced like that, but then he left and I began to chase him, to chase myself backward, bang bang bang. I would have done it all night, but I couldn’t get away, and sooner than I expected my whole body gave up, my voice came out, and that great strong gushing thing broke all through me.

      I’ll tell you it’s strange and it makes me wonder, how sometimes in that occult forest, when no one is looking, the ax loves the tree: and it’s stranger still that the tree should love the ax.

      

      I woke up the next day in bed with a dead man; he was just lying there on his stomach, sighing deeply, his brain shut down. Bright eleven o’clock: out the window the sun was shining, and I was young and purblind from the pall of my unfamiliar past; it was the first thing I thought about, there like some perfume I’d spilled on the bedclothes the night before. So the sleeping man wasn’t my ex-husband, but he had seen him and spoken to him, and that was close enough to make me wobble on the dull point of my sad remembrance. All that time had passed and still the impression my marriage had made was deep and clear. I got up and put on my dirty dress while Charlie mumbled in his sleep. Well, he was sweet and sexy, but I never should have slept with him. And these rumors; was time, too, going to steal from me? For four years I’d had a reliable Roy fixed in my past, but the memories had become ailing leaves, and when I touched them they fell away, revealing a spray of grotesque and unfamiliar flowers. Had he grown so strangely in the intervening years? Then what was I? Another woman. He had fallen in love with another woman, I couldn’t begin to imagine why. Still, I thought I knew what she looked like: she had brown shoulder-length hair and perfect skin; she wore blue jeans, men’s shirts, and black bras; I couldn’t see her face very clearly, but she was smiling, and she had a mean smile. Charlie didn’t know what he’d done to me; he was still sleeping.

      I was just about to slip out the door when he stirred and woke without taking his head from the pillow. Wait, he said sideways. I want to … And then he stopped, too exhausted to continue.

      I went to the edge of the bed and stood above him, gazing down on his sprawled frame. I have to go to work, I said softly. A lie, but it would have been impossible for me to stay more than a minute longer.

      He was trying to come up with something to say, but I couldn’t help him; I hadn’t been with him in his slumber. I was beginning to think he had fallen asleep again, when he spoke. Sugartown … he murmured. What time is it? My plane leaves at … Stay.

      I think it’s around eleven, I said. I have to be at work by twelve. I have to go. He suddenly seemed very dangerous to me and I wanted to distance myself from him as quickly as possible.

      … I had a dream about Roy Harrison, he said with a puzzled look. Because you … made me dream about it.

      And there I was, cornered by my curiosity all over again. Tell me.

      I don’t know, it was nothing. He rolled over onto his back and then slowly raised himself up until he was sitting against the headboard. You’re really going to go. O.K. Will you leave me your number?

      I found a sheet of hotel stationery and a pen in the desk drawer and scribbled some numbers on it, not mine; then I crossed the room to kiss him, glanced at him briefly, and started to leave. Good-bye, Caroline, he said tenderly as I was opening the door.—Oh. I turned, with the door open and the hallway behind me. But I remembered, he said. About Roy …

      This is your dream?

      This is the real … I heard he had a kid with this woman, the one I was telling you about, and they were all set to get married. Then she walked out, just took the baby with her and disappeared. That was the last part of the story. I don’t know. That was the end.

      And I stood there for a moment, shocked and nodding stupidly, while something in me sang in pain … Be gone, you devils, you’ve got me, you’ve skinned me … Thank you, I said at last, and then I quickly crossed the threshold and walked away down the silent hall.

      It was Sunday morning and I felt dizzy, a column of thick, turning smoke, turning through the lobby of a hotel in which I wasn’t registered. Outside the revolving door the new sun was shining brightly and the walk across the front lawn was lonely, a tour through a sketchy garden suffused with air shot through with exhaust fumes from the road. By the time I reached the sidewalk any pretense of a better realm had ended. The bus stop was a half mile up the street, past the candy store, past the corporate center, past the strip mall. Already the sky was hot as a griddle. I waited on the bench with a newspaper I’d bought on the corner, tasted the yeast on my tongue, and suffered in the sun.

      It was a fault of mine always to remember the past, and a twist in my vice to be most nostalgic and sentimental about those times when I’d been most unhappy, to want this season of misery or that month of boredom more sharply by far than any fond moment. God, how unhappy I was then, I’ll say to myself: I wish I was there now.—And that was how it was that day. My marriage had