Because He Wouldn't Let Me Touch His Body

by Julien Ryner

The first words she e-mailed him after joining the fiction list was a critique of the first few chapters of his novel. She said she liked the following summary: "Grandma's fine. Pa is dead. Ma married a catfish farmer. They live in Mississippi."

He e-mailed back to say it was a pleasure to correspond with someone who could read, and that her praise was appreciated, however oblique. He said his stories were not all that complex and evocative like hers. "Try as I might," he said, "this pig can't fly."

He followed her series of postings with a series of observations, "This one is the best of the lot, but lordy lordy, these are not short stories. These are bits and pieces and riffs and variations over and over on the same biz. This is surely material for a novel. So packed together. Not a dime's worth of difference in the long run."

She flashed back that he was under no moral obligation to read her work in the future, and he wrote, "As brutal as I am with other folks' work, I do not have the self-assurance to be so candid about stuff that concerns me. I dance around the edges and make up stories that never happened."

She couldn't identify which single phrase seemed like he had touched her shoulder and run his finger down her arm. She thought she wouldn't write him again because it was disturbing, and her husband seemed to spend more and more time outside in the garden. He asked her to help him mulch and move bricks and mix cement, but she became distracted and failed over and over to notice his figure standing at the door of her office with a shovel.

"Your observations were so apt, they hurt," she wrote back to the stranger. "Cold-hearted narrator standing on the sidelines wringing her hands. Each story the same unsatisfying rehash. I will try again." He e-mailed back, "As I recall, I was attempting to nudge you onward and that attempt was not on my best day. My error. Do what you want when you want. I follow your work with interest."

"Anticipation is better than reality," he said in response to her suggestion that they meet. She flashed back, "Anticipation is for those who would rather savor fantasies than muck around in the real world. Reality never gives you what you expect, so is more interesting than any idea held at arm's length. Your loss, old boy."

She wrote back the next day after she'd sobered up, "Standing on tongue, again. Just be flattered." He wrote, "I am trapped in a Japanese farce. I bow, you bow, I bow lower, you bow lower. I bow lower still -- oh, my forking back!"

In the spring he wrote her about rain and fog in his garden in Washington and she wrote him about the Black Chin in her New Mexico desert. How the Red Rufus always arrives later in the summer and takes over her generous feeders. She told him how she can tell when the feeders in the back garden are empty, when the hummingbirds attack the red brake lights on her Jeep.

His continued focus on her writing became an irritation, when at first it was all she was interested in. She sent him a poem as if to insert herself between the page he was reading and his eyes. "From each distinct pain the power to take flight is distilled,"  she wrote. He wrote back that he had now identified her true nature as a "siren whatsit" and began a harangue about his ill health. His military disability -- ears destroyed by gunfire. He never told her which war -- WWI or II, Vietnam? Could be Korea. Could be the friggin Civil War for all she knew.

She told him that she took offense to his nickname or whatever it was. "So, what's a whatsit?" she asked. "Do I understand correctly, you are pleased to have a limited auditory grasp of my song?"

"I could not give back in kind," he wrote, "poem for poem, so I made a joke. Since I presented myself to you as a pig, I feel obliged to act like one as well."

He wrote back a few months later to thank her for a critique and added, "I betcher a fine teacher. I taught in a little half-assed itinerant college in the Alaskan bush. Arrived with two suitcases of books, sox, skivvies, and good intentions." She asked him if he would like to co-write a story of love and survival set in Alaska. He wrote, "Nope. Don't know much about either."

"If you think I'm too much of a chore," he wrote, "you're not alone." She wrote back to ask if he would send her a picture. "Nope," he replied, but went on to give her a description. "Six foot, 215 pounds. Heavy through the chest, shoulders, arms. Getting a paunch. Once had weight lifter's legs, before a bout with diabetic myotrophy shrunk my butt."

He fleshed out his description a bit in later months, "Called 'Silvertop' in the Navy. Hair close-cropped, beard the same. I do in fact resemble Ernest Hemingway, except for the drooping eye, pulled down by Bell's Palsy. Hence, the rakish eye patch I wear from time to time. Some folks say, in the right light, I look like a character actor in a monster movie, however young between the ears."

She wrote back, "Mostly like Virginia Woolf, with blue eyes -- long straight nose and high forehead. Long, once blonde hair, usually in a French braid. 115 pounds. A bit of the look of George Sand thrown in, with suit jacket, boots, bolo ties, so as not to be confused with a librarian. Never mistaken for her when I unbraid my hair."

She realized over time things between them would never change, so she lay down on the page and squirmed under the gentle pressure of his fingers re-arranging phrases. She sighed under the weight of his lectures. Sometimes his words pinned her down. Sometimes they released her. Sometimes he gave her the soft touch of praise, sometimes the admonition of using an unreliable narrator, when no one could be more unreliable than he. He would say, "... a writer of your skill, so in control, could not be so blind, bla, bla, bla. What advanced degree did you say you have, from what school?"

Then he would turn around in the next breath and say, "I have felt love for a handful of friends, my parents, wife, three children, and love has ups and downs. When the love was down, when the wrong word was spoken, or the person up and died before we had a chance to do whatever we should have done, when things turned sour or boring or I discovered I had given my heart to a stranger, then there was true emotion. Most of the time I felt guilt. I shudda done this, I shudda done that. When I look back at all of my stories, together, I see that my male characters have for the most part been bozos and my female characters have been undeservedly hurt."

The next day he wrote back, "We're all bozos on this bus, but a writer with your skills has the schedule."

          She began pacing the house in the middle of the night and on one such occasion, posted this note: "And so you've told me about the droopy eye and the diabetes, and about youth stolen by disease. I hear you are deaf in part, and blinded by a patch when the eye does not take its rightful place in the socket. Is this shell feeling cramped, while the spirit reaches to sing the high notes? Clearly, I don't care what ugliness gives shape to a beautiful song. Once upon a time I too was beautiful. You don't remember since we've never met, and yet you know without seeing. No different for me."

He wrote back, "Yes, I'm a bitter and angry sonuvabitch because I am betrayed by my body. In 1956 on the Cote d'Azur, I wore a black bikini and strutted. The French girls were independent, the whores in Italy were desperate, and in the Eastern Med, in Greece and Turkey, Lebanon, Crete, I fell in love with each -- an hour, a day, two weeks. In two years I was sated, and never looked back, until now. I don't know how to flirt, so I will tell you whatever lies seem right at the moment. You too, right?"

She might wake in a blush to remember her fantasies of the night before. How she had expressed the love of one for another as she crawled up her husband's body on the bed and rubbed her breasts against him. Imagining those fingers she would never know, their gentle admonishment, followed by the sweet stroke of forgiveness -- you are good enough. You are good enough. You are so good.

Some mornings, she would take the fire in her fingertips and release it into the computer keys and write and write and write, that he might identify the shape of each story even as his touch gently bruised the flesh of each error.

"If I stirred that old heart to beat a bit faster," she wrote, "and you don't feel you can pass that fire back to me, pass it on to the one who bore your children and to the children themselves who grew up under the flog of that perfectionism. Call them and remind them of the letters they promised to write."

In the fall she wrote, "The leaves of the Aspens no longer clap. Instead, they lay as orange and brown disks, blurring into the first snow."

Before the end of the year, still unable to sleep, she wrote the following, but clicked, "don't save." Backed out of the words once written. "Can I wrap my arms around your chest and shoulders? Don't use those strong arms to hold me away. I will kiss your wrists and the inside of your elbows if you let me. You can kiss me on the neck, and on the shoulders if you want, and I won't talk anymore if you move lower and I won't beg you to stop. If I press my lips against yours, will you perhaps kiss other parts, other places? Oh, baby, I may die tomorrow, but today the touch of your fingers and of your words is enough to keep me breathing, keep me wanting, keep me vulnerable to the possibilities of tomorrow."

She knew she wouldn't write him again. Or at least not post the letters. She would change her screen name, change lists, leave the improbability of her feelings behind as there was nowhere in the real world for them.

"And then there's garbage and politics and taxes," she wrote to no one, "and little league and arthritis, and I can't remember how my husband looked when I loved him the first time. When we met in college, when we made love in the barn at the picnic. Or later, when we lost our middle boy to pneumonia and bought the statue of the cherub that stands in the garden. His young and hopeful figure reminds us of the privilege we share in growing up. Somewhere, between there and here, I lost the man as well a the boy. So, I will go and sit in the garden, and write about how I found love in the arms of a man who never believed my love was true. And how I found that love is mine to give. I wrote this story with it, because he wouldn't let me touch his body."

Julien Ryner grew up in Washington, DC, and migrated to New Mexico in the early seventies. She received a BA and MA from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque where she has spent the last ten years teaching technical and creative writing.

The mother of two boys, she says it is they who have most influenced both the subject matter of her work and the brevity of its form.

CREDITS:  Most recently, she has published short stories in Short Fiction by Women and Prime Time.