I Burn For You

Every Wednesday night the couple meets at the old barn at the edge of our property. It’s been going on all summer. Every Wednesday night I’m there, watching, and I don’t mean in just a casual, passive kind of way. I mean I watch them. I get there well before the sun goes down, I hide, and I watch. I don’t even change out of my scrubs first.

When I watch them together, I am returned to my own body. She rolls out a wool blanket for the two of them, and I can feel the scratch of it on my naked back. He sets out lanterns and their orange glow warms my skin, even as I’m wrapped in darkness above them in the hay loft. His hands in her hair, my scalp comes alive. Her nails down his back, my muscles ripple in response.

Wednesday used to be book club night. It still is, as far as I know, for all the same women, minus me. The group text chain had gone dark on me three weeks ago, when it— what’s a polite way to put this?—became evident that the cookies I brought were indeed not actually gluten free. But who wears a white silk pantsuit to a book club anyway, Linda? That’s tempting fate even for people with optimal bowel control.

So, on the first Wednesday of my book club exile, I drove five miles under the speed limit all the way home from the dentist’s office where I worked as a hygienist. I let the song that was playing on the radio finish, then the next. I got out of the car and wandered around the property behind our house looking for the pregnant raccoon who’d been living under our back porch, even though I didn’t have a flashlight and the last dregs of the sun were slipping through the tree branches down the hill. My husband’s Tacoma was in the driveway and I wasn’t ready to go inside yet, didn’t want to tell him that I’d had a falling out with yet another group of women friends.

It wasn't that I was afraid he'd be disappointed or unsupportive. The opposite, really. He'd probably suggest we start our own book club, just him and me and our cat Templeton. He'd make us cucumber sandwiches and wine spritzers and he'd tell me Linda's pantsuits always gave her major camel-toe anyway. He'd do the mobster voice we made up for Templeton and have him critique inane details of the story, like how the main character orders a salad, or any excessive use of adverbs. But under it all, I'd feel that he was hurting for me, and that's something I couldn't tolerate. I liked to keep my pain inside, where I could control it.

My rambling, half-hearted search for the raccoon was fruitless but when I saw a faint light flickering in the windows of the old barn, my feet started carrying me there automatically. There was a clearing by the creek about half a mile down the hill where kids liked to go to light fires, smoke, drink, fish, fuck. So was it the routine concern of a liable homeowner that pulled me to investigate? Concern about the rusty nails, the rotting beams, the potential lawsuit? Maybe.

Or maybe I was drawn out by the atmosphere, inhaled by the night like the tide before a tsunami, gathered up into a fierce and fearsome thing, larger than anyone can look at and take in all at once. Maybe still my book club frenemies are right. Maybe I’ve finally lost it this time.

But there’s no denying the magic of these two together, Stacy and Dusty. Like the first bite of a sweet nectarine from a cooler on a white sandy beach, like the goosebumps on your skin when a crystalline soprano unfurls on a darkened stage, before the lights come up at the opera. A windfall, a rainbow, a warm mug between two cold hands. That’s what they are.

Stacy of the creamy curves, the cornsilk hair, the Rubenesque hands, the plump flesh of her palm where it meets the base of her thumb. But the cherry on the top is that tiny crooked lateral incisor, like an apostrophe beside the perfect white squares of her front two teeth.

And Dusty.

Dusty of the warm eyes and strong hands. Dusty who deserves more than the frigid wife I turned out to be.

High school sweethearts, we were. Best friends since the eighth grade, when he nailed me in the face during dodgeball and then walked me to the nurse, telling me jokes so funny I sprayed blood from my broken nose all over the hallways.

One night, not long after our honeymoon, we’d just made love in our freshly painted second bedroom, a delivery pizza growing cold in its box on the floor, I told him if I ever stopped having sex with him, I’d forgive him if he cheated. How long are we talking? He’d grinned down at me. Because you know… I could go again right now… There was pale pink paint stuck in a curl of hair on his chest and I put my hand over it. Ballet Slipper. That’s what that paint color was called.

A year. That’s what I’d said, thinking never could we ever go that long. We couldn’t even stay at his parents’ house in Charlotte without sneaking out to the garage to have sex on the chest freezer full of Lean Cuisines.

But that was before the second bedroom stood empty for one year, two, then ten. It’s the office now, though Dusty never asks why I prefer to work at the kitchen table. Even the sounds of typing, of the printer queuing up, ring wrong in my ears coming from that room. It’s a shell of a room. I’m a shell of a wife.

I’ve heard people say your body isn’t your own anymore, once you have a child. But I’d say consider the opposite. Consider a body that stands stubbornly empty. I started to see myself as decidedly unsupple, unyielding. My body was something to be tolerated, best forgotten. Being touched called me back to my body, and being called back to my body was like waking up from a nice dream to find myself in a prison cell.

I wasn’t expecting what happened to me, to my body as I watched my husband come alive in the arms of the girl who scooped our ice cream downtown after the Sunday afternoon matinee, at the place that made the whole block smell like waffle cones.

Stacy. Her skin was the color of peach soft-serve. Dusty. His smile was so big my own cheeks hurt, just watching.

I saw them through the window that first night. Shock ran through me so strong I thought I’d been struck by the lightning of a silent, rainless storm. Immediately, I bent and threw up on a section of crumbling foundation. My mind filtered through a flurry of directives to GO!—to the car (drive away!), the house (lock him out!) the ground (fetal position). But at the core of me, I felt….warm. Warm and still. I pulled myself up by the splintered window frame and I watched, watched until they were spent. Then I raced home and dove into bed.

I may have imagined the scent of waffle cones on Dusty’s skin, under his cedarwood body wash, but I didn’t imagine the way my own breath felt gentler, cleaner, as it flowed into and out of my lungs, refreshing as the air after a good, hard rain.

The next Wednesday, I went to the old barn early, snuck up to the hay loft. I could just hear those book club bitches, what they’d say if they knew what I was doing. You’re torturing yourself! They’d say, and maybe they’d be right. You’re touching yourself?! They’d gasp. And they’d be right again.

Two years. It had been two years since we’d stopped trying to have a baby, and two years since I’d had an orgasm. I never thought my first bi-annual climax would be in the cobwebbed hayloft of a half-falling down barn while my husband and the ice cream shop girl moaned in ecstasy beneath me. But my bones know it can’t be wrong… something that feels so much like coming home.

It wasn’t just me who changed. The sum of those summer Wednesdays, they were propping Dusty up, propelling him forward. He finally threw his hat in for a promotion at the water treatment facility. He started jogging again, humming in the kitchen afterward as he threw bananas into the blender.

I even went with him on one of those runs, and joined him the shower afterward. His eyes, when I pulled back the curtain, the heat they beamed onto my skin, and the goosebumps that raised up under the path of his eyes, all my senses awakened by this reminder of what it means to be seen.

Of course I knew it couldn’t last forever. Stacy was just home from college for the summer, but there were school breaks, holidays. Sure, she’d grow up and get married and have a family of her own (because hers was a body of which inhospitable could never be said). But I thought I had time to revel a little longer.

Obstacles arose occasionally. The last Wednesday in June, I got welts all over from straw itch mites and had to go around wearing turtlenecks for a week, claiming a summer cold.

The third Wednesday in July, I heard Dusty on the phone in the office so I took off my shoes, crept up the stairs and pressed my ear to the door.

“You have to work tonight?” Dusty was saying. So I popped on down to the gas station and promised a high school kid a six-pack if he phoned a bomb threat in to the ice cream shop.

But what I didn’t expect was what happened to Dusty on the second to last Wednesday in August. Or maybe I should say… what didn’t happen to Dusty.

Maybe it was the fact that Dusty and I had started to rekindle our own sex life. Maybe the guilt was finally catching up to him (for this reason, I knew, eventually, we’d both have to come clean… but not yet! Give me my summer fling-by-proxy, dammit! Give me my release! If you can’t give me a baby, universe, at least don’t deny me my deviant, voyeuristic orgasms!)….but Stacy Was. Not. Happy.

“It’s her isn’t it?” she pouted.

Luckily Dusty barked an involuntary cough/laugh at the exact moment I did, disguising my own errant snort-from-above.

“And by her you mean…”

“Your wife!”

Whatever answer Stacy was looking for then, it wasn’t whatever Dusty did or said after that. I couldn’t watch because I was still flat on the moldy-hay strewn slats of the loft, hiding in case I’d given myself away by laughing. By the time I peeked my head up, Stacy was gone.

I woke up the next morning with a terrible cold, and since patients don’t take kindly to people sneezing in their mouths, mask or not, I called off work.

I took a steaming mug of tea out into the yard as the sun was coming up, and before I knew it, I was standing in the clearing before the barn, only something looked different. Were all the windows broken before, or just some? Had the side door of the barn been hanging that crookedly?

Peering inside, I saw red. Red paint splashed everywhere, all over the floors, the blanket that still lay half unfolded. And red scrawled on the barn walls, dripping down in thick rivulets, but the writing was still clear.

LIMP DICK

PEDOFILE (ok so spelling isn’t her strong suit)

DICK

DIRTY OLD MAN

I dug my emergency joint out of my bathrobe pocket and lit it. As the smoke curled up into the rafters, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I knew what I had to do.

***

I wait until after the firetrucks have left and the barn is just a smoldering heap to call Dusty. He rips the rearview mirror off his truck taking the turn into our gate too fast. He grabs me out of my seat at the kitchen table, nearly knocking the police officer next to me out of his seat as he presses me to him, so hard it's like he is trying to use his heart to jumpstart mine. The officer drops his coffee cup back onto its saucer with a startled tinkle.

“It’s okay, I'm okay,” I say into Dusty’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” I say. “We’ll rebuild.”