Life Before Man

He feels his body sagging on his spine, the flesh drooping like warm taffy on a sucker stick.

She wears a black coat. She’s hard, a dense core, that dark point around which other colors swirl.

He’s making a gift of himself, handing himself over to her, mutely. Here I am. You may be able to do something with me.

She had that power and she’d let him see it and touch it. She let him see he was deficient and she promised, what? A transformation, a touch on the shoulder, knighthood. Then she’d stepped back, showing him that he was after all only a vacation, a beautiful picture on a brochure, a man in a loincloth whacking the head off some nondescript coconut. A dime a dozen. Leaving him naked.

She thinks: I treated him the way men treat women. A lot of men, a lot of women; but never me, not on your goddamned life.

She trusted him like a sidewalk, she trusted him to be what he seemed to be, and she will never be able to do that with anyone again.

He stroked her back; she could imagine him looking at his watch to see if he’d done it for the required length of time.

For instance: she does not appear, for the moment, to be interested in men. She still tries, examining strangers in the subway, picturing various members of the Museum staff in exotic postures, but nothing flickers. She’s stopped accepting invitations to dinner: she’s no longer willing to be that bored simply to eat.

“ ‘How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow. And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning.’’ ”

True, there’s a chance she’s done a stupid thing. Several, many. Or she may have done a wise thing for a stupid reason.