We decided to watch Crazy, Stupid, Love, figured out how to ge | Lemix

We decided to watch Crazy, Stupid, Love, figured out how to get the Roku to get us there, and soon were watching a scene of Ryan Gosling’s character trying to give Steve Carell’s the best pickup tricks.

“God, I feel for you girls now,” Allison said. “We didn’t have to play all these games.”

I looked over at her. She pressed pause and turned to me.

“I just loved William and fucked him all the time,” she said. William was her dead husband. “It was sex! It wasn’t so complicated.”

I didn’t know what to say. It did seem that complicated to me. Sex required games, diffusion, performance. I picked up my phone, pretended I needed to send a text.

(How many hours, I wonder now, did I miss with her because of my phone, because of needing to send a text?)

She pressed play. And then, I reached for a cookie from the bag we had brought in and placed at the foot of the bed, and lost my balance, and grabbed on to her arm, lightly, for stability. But instead of letting go, I gave her a squeeze, the briefest rub, just to acknowledge the touch, to finish it delicately instead of abruptly.

“That feels so good,” she said.

I forced myself to pause. To open my palm, to lay it against her arm. The tightness inside me unwound again, just one more millimeter. She shifted, sitting up so that her entire upper back was pulled away from the wall. She was wearing a gray cashmere cardigan and I tentatively touched her upper back. I felt her soften under my touch, felt her settle in to what felt for her like an easy intimacy—something I had never experienced. I hadn’t been held much as a child, hadn’t automatically learned to hug and squeeze and pat and touch, and so Allison’s ease with touch, with responding to touch, with asking for it, was new to me.

“Oh, that’s so nice,” she said as I moved my hand across her shoulders, as I flattened my hand and spread my fingers and made even more space for contact. The comfort she felt with herself and her own body, even as her body was racked with a pain she could barely describe even in poetry, was as foreign to me as the London hotel room in which I’d been in bed with Matt.

As I touched her body I felt how acutely I had lost any sense of mine. I could not have known if something felt good. I lived in my body knowing that it was the vessel for my mind, but beyond that it was irrelevant. And so Allison’s desire for touch confused me, required a certain level of purposeful accommodation, of almost tangible effort. And yet the way in which she invited me to touch her was also a way of her touching me. This was not one-way, not a pat or a stroke of the arm, not the forced hugs I’d seen her experience at the end of the meetings. My hand was touching her, but her back was touching me. We were in this together.

When I think about Allison now, I feel the softness of her cashmere sweater under my hand, can sense the vastness of its gray color everywhere in my perception field. Years after we watched the movie, and weeks before she died, as I was trying to tell her who she had been to me, the words that came to mind were “second mother,” but she wasn’t that—our relationship wasn’t maternal. So I came to think of her as a midwife, a doula, because what I felt her do with her body under my palms and fingers so keenly aware of the tender fibers of her cashmere hoodies was to lift me from one part of my life and gently, so gently, hold me as I moved myself to another.

“You carried me,” I said to her once, in the moments we had after we knew her mind would go, and before it started to leave.

“Well, that’s not exactly it,” she said. “I feel more that I just held you while you changed.”

And it was that that was so surprising and so magic. I had never been touched or held with a kind of pure and untrammeled love before, a love that wasn’t clouded by anxieties, or by sexual desire, or by the awkwardness of being in a young body that doesn’t know how to touch, or that—most important—didn’t request anything of me.

#книги