e

That kind of Irish that is black haired. The eyes blue and deep set, the skin pale. You look at her the first time and tell yourself stories that all pretty much end the same way: if you touch her, your life will change.

Rainbows move away so that you never can prove they don’t end in pots of gold, but everybody breaks down up close. The question is not how many lovers you’ve had but why you’ve had them. The question is whether or not the serial fucker is less culpable than the man who is reputedly trying to run down an illusion.

And as for you, you’ve only loved women you fucked—before that, you are capable merely of want—and this is enough to make you believe that you don’t really know how you feel about a woman until after the fucking.

And as for e, we’re fucking in a nearly empty apartment, a place into which I’m about to fully move, as if my life in this new place will be better than my life in the place I’m leaving. There are only a few boxes and the carpet is new and we don’t turn on any lights, such is our guilt, or perhaps our sense of the fragility of the long moment. e is on the floor with her knees by her shoulders.

She is her face; it is extraordinary. She’s been staring at me, frank and curious. From the distance of her admiration, she is the one. Picture her smiling at a Bed Breakfast early morning table. Imagine her in the seat beside you as you drive through some night. She’s cultivating the lines on your face, listening to the ways you nightmare, laughing out loud when you do something silly. She’s holding the hand of your son. She will mourn you when you die. She’s been watching me, and I see her, and I know what she means by it, and all of this is possible.

Up close, when you know her, she’s a mess. She drinks too much, has her second DUI, there are problems with her parents, there have been problems with her men, she is headed for some kind of crash, a series of them.

By the time we meet with intention, I look at her and get a general sense of disaster. The idea of a slow path of destruction.

Before the fucking, I cannot know the love that is broader than want, but that a woman and I don’t have that potential for love, of that I can sometimes feel certain, sometimes even before the first kiss. I look at her and see liability.

This habit of seduction that outlasts the potential on which seduction aught be based.

There are checker boards and checkers, and we play. (You tell yourself, if you sit back and let her come at you, you’re not responsible). Later, we stand in a grocery store, a loaf of bread, a jar of almonds, a post drink late night picnic.

She’s very lovely, nude on the floor of the apartment that will be mine but at the time feels like what it is: an empty and strange place that I will have to learn to inhabit. She’s flexible, little, her breasts are quaking mounds, and she never in that near dark seems to close her eyes. She tells you with them the first time she looks at you that she wants to fuck you, or maybe it is a more general want and this is just where it leads, but now, what her stare means, you don’t know with certainty. In retrospect, it is as if she is trying to make you aware that she is fully conscious, that she knows who she is, who you are, what you are doing, that she wants you to see her seeing you.

Her blue eyes no color at all in the shadow, just open and with the white around them, and her mouth, her pretty lips, later she’ll put them around your x, and later yet, she’ll say about it, I never go down on a guy.

(Later: drunk phone calls, night after night, accusations, declarations, promises, pleading).

She’s brought me a framed picture, something she bought in Czechoslovakia. We’ve been fucking, on the floor, and then with her leaning on the bar, her ass overly thin and disappointing, insubstantial, her face forward, eyes maybe open then too, black hair falling across her pale shoulder blades. While she dresses, I hang the picture, close to where we’ve been.

I like her voice. She is smart and sometimes she talks about things and in such a way that makes even my brain go quiet and reallyreally listen. But you get close and you see the cracks, the problems, the liabilities. There is, after it all, a sense of doom to her, an easy prophecy of a sort of chunk by chunk loss of her, from this world into the next, or into a simple darkness, a beauty that will be broken down, that is on that path all ready. What she is really looking for, staring at, who knows? A savior. A witness. A second opinion.