He Stayed
A summer that used up every last drop of water in the world (‘story from my secret life’ series)
And then the light shifted, and shadow darkened the water. Ragged clouds were swelling in the grey sky, which had gone metallic. The storm broke all at once, curtains of dark rain began to streak the air and struck the surface with a deafening clatter. Him, a small black dot in the black water studded with points of brightness, swimming towards the shore. From a distance he looked caught in molten steel. Watching him climb up onto the rocks, I had felt myself filled with a gratitude out of all proportion, certain that some power beyond nature had heard me. It was then, while he was still hauling himself over the low wall, it was then that I did the mad thing. I rushed at him without thinking, and while he threw me a look of surprise, something close to fright, I took hold of his arm with a strength that unsettled me and kissed him as I have never since kissed anyone.
I remember the weed-smell of his hair, and the smell of the rain that seemed to work its way down into the deepest part of our bones, the water of the first and last storm of the summer. I had the feeling I was the rain. And the grass, and the whole of the lake. Never again have I felt I belonged to the world as I did in that instant, when his mouth opened against mine and my heart, surfacing from somewhere deep, beat right up against his, suckered to the soaked cotton of my T-shirt. Then he had pulled away from me. Behind him I could feel the lake swelling, like a lung, or some enormous heart.
He did not run. That is what comes back to me first. Before the hands. Before the skin and all the rest of it. He could have gone. He stayed.
The rain was falling straight down now, without a breath of wind, as though the sky had decided to nail us there against the low wall, one to the other, until every last drop of water in the world was used up. I saw his lashes, heavy with it. And I could see he was shaking, though I was in no state to work out whether it was the cold or me that made him shake like that.
Then his hand came to rest in the small of my back, against the soaked cotton, and I felt each of his fingers separately, the same way a small child feels the keys of a piano too big for his hand. He drew me in. A slowness that was almost imperceptible, a graciousness that overturned me far more than any roughness would have, and this in a man still shivering against me. His mouth set off back down towards mine and stopped along the way, at my cheek, then lower, at that tender place beneath the ear where he laid down words the storm swallowed whole, words I spent years afterwards trying to piece back together, and never once managed to decipher.
I think that is where it all tipped over, where I stopped being the one who had done the daring and became the one it was being done to.
The cloth no longer kept anything apart. The water had done away with the ordinary border between the inside and the outside of bodies, between his palm and my hip, between the lake behind him and the blood under my skin. His mouth came back at last. It tasted of salt, of the storm, of something old and vegetal and strange, something I have not found in any other mouth since. His fingers travelled back up my spine, under the T-shirt that clung like a second flesh badly sewn on, and I felt my own hands, which I no longer controlled, catch at his streaming shoulders, then the back of his neck, the weed-strung strands of his hair. There was something grave in that slowness, something almost frightening. As if we both knew already, without having said it to one another, that you do not make gestures of this kind and go unpunished, that there is a price, and that the two of us were in the act of agreeing to pay it.
A flash of lightning. The low wall, his skin, my hands as well whitened for a second and went out.
I no longer remember the exact order of things after that. His mouth at the base of my neck. The cold of the stone against my back, and him, burning, with nothing left in him of the exhausted swimmer, the heat climbing up from our two bellies pressed together as though our bodies had decided, on their own, against the rain, to manufacture what little summer was left. My hand slid under the cloth stuck to his side. He gave a breath, just one, that was not a word, and the lake, behind him, went on swelling.
Tamara Arden — T;A
Not a tip jar. A ledger for what you underlined in your mind.
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Extraordinary how precisely the syntax mimics the drowning it describes, clauses that refuse to end cleanly, commas doing the work of held breath, so the reader's own body paces the scene before the mind catches up.
Storms in literature usually function as pathetic fallacy, weather borrowing the characters' emotion. You invert it, the rain doesn't reflect the feeling, it “authors” it, dissolving the boundary between bodies the way it dissolves the boundary between sky and lake. Weather is accomplice.
I am in love with your stories, Tamara. Fabulous!
Your story earns its intensity through discipline, the storm becomes syntax and setting. What impresses the most is your control, sentences lengthen and coil exactly as the tension builds, then snap short ("He stayed") for maximum weight. That's a rare technical discipline, most writers over-narrate this kind of scene. Your prose trusts silence and rhythm to carry meaning. Incredible skilled pacing, Tamara.