The Layout

P-R yanks off his gloves — the first with his teeth, the other with the free hand, as if to demand satisfaction on the field of honor — cups his hands to his mouth and summonses warmth from some interior fire. He alternates stomping feet. The only light in the room reveals a thin crack under the bathroom door. But he knows she is here with him, can smell her, like springtime in a meadow. There are other scents in the room, none nearly as enticing: stale mold, a throw rug doused in urine, ancient dust frying on the ticking radiator like breading on the Sunday hen, eons of cigarettes, alcohol. This is where stinks are made, P-R considers.

He feels around for a dresser, finds it, sets his hat down with delicacy. He is finicky about his attire, believes this to be a requirement of his status. His eyes are starting to adjust. He can see her forming on the bed; still a mound, not a woman yet. He pulls his fl ask from his coat, unscrews the cap, sets it on the lamp table. She has left a large sewing bag embroidered with roses on the floor: inside, perhaps, a change of clothing. The wire trashcan is nakedly stuffed with something crumpled — maybe tissue paper — from which she has unwrapped a bottle and two stemmed glasses.

“Y’all miss me?” She has the high rural voice of a Blue Ridge singer, with just a tincture of rasp from cigarettes. It is a seductive voice, just the suggestion of brash, in other circumstances within the bounds of respectability. “Is the Pope?” he says in his Magnolia scented drawl. He removes his tie, monogrammed, silk, about as wide as a standard gauge caboose, folds it with formality and sets it down with the gloves and hat, then gets to work on pearl buttons.

She had hoped for something more labored, something to build upon, and is shaken that he has invoked the Supreme Pontiff while preparing her damnation. She is Black Irish, American by virtue of a potato-loving fungus, a churchgoer. “Cuddle now. Come and warm me up,” she says. It is at once promise and tease. She is starting to rematerialize, all angles and curves under the sheets, a sinuous map of the Hallawatchee River awash in the white adrenaline of Uncas Falls. He fumbles with the buttons, less careful than before, and he is become hard with his impatience. He can see her now as she lifts the sheets, alluring, yet so expected. P-R is a man who knows his way around a woman. He knows beforehand every twitch, every drop of moisture, every cry. He knows this woman’s form better than some, perhaps, less than others. He is no novitiate. “Hurry, I don’t change my mind,” she says.

He is finally nude, still cold but warmer, and strides across the frozen floorboards and slips in beside her. Though sixty-two, he retains his collegiate urgency and the firmness to back it up, only recently beginning to take on a few pounds. She wraps the cover around them and they cling together like cave formations. Soon they are lost to that less seemly activity of men and women that goes by names both wondrous and crude, the primal junction of mammals caught in the web of attraction: they paw and thrust and take things in their hands not generally held in polite company; tongues flick like snake tongues; they claw and scratch and leave marks that may have to be lied away; they bite, they even chew, they are each other’s protein, take objects into their mouths without knowing where they’ve been; they invade each other’s secret passages, enter the types of places that others have been prosecuted for entering; and they make sounds fi t for a hog slaughter, they grunt and hiss, they snort; their breath is labored and uneven; they admonish, they encourage, they threaten, and she parades a vocabulary she was not previously aware she possessed; they scream, oh, do they scream; they are soothing and hurtful, gentle and brutal, caring and abandoned, blessed and damned. Limbs fl air, torsos gyrate, pelvises clash like tectonic plates, the earth shakes, hearts stop, celestial trumpets blare, there are tympanic rumblings and Th e Beast’s laughter and a mighty sonic disturbance drowns the juke across the road and up the grade at The Road House as a long line of reefers trundles over head. She shrieks, he growls, a Philco in a battered, Bakelite box soft shoes across the nightstand. Framed ads from magazines — Dr. Pepper, Chesterfield — rata- tat-tat on the walls, and the earth yowls like the end of days.

She is younger than him by nearly twenty years but has earned the padded hips that he clutches, the round bottom, milk shake thick, that he lays her on, the breasts assuming a certain mature elasticity. P-R likes a little blood in his meat, likes handholds and crevices to ease his climb, likes rediscovering the hidden reaches and subtle whorls, a pasture of soft hair, a dark mottled disc of areola as pedestal to thumb-firm nipples, the twitter of a nerve, the involuntary undulation of spine, the pleasurable arch of sole, the generation of heat in the meeting of thighs. Months back, when they had started in on each other, she had been hesitant, terrified even, as immutable as the Confederate general mounted in the town square. But P-R was the pedant of tongue and hand and genital, and as a gift he gave her fl ex, gave her rhythm, gave her the feral athleticism she practices now. The plaster behind them will never be the same.

Later, when all is memory, they will credit at least a portion of the chaos to the big Lima Berkshire pounding iron with a drag freight on the viaduct. But — and they have done this sort of thing before — tonight they will each leave satisfied that, as such human congress goes, this has been an event of some magnitude.

She has turned to gelatin: jiggles like a mold, feels abused, debased, broken and entered. “Again,” she says.