The Dark Space (14 page)

If I told him I liked his scarf, he might tell me his mom made it, and I could ask him where he’s from, and then . . .

I never asked, though.

The stools were gone now. The room had been emptied of all but the counter, the shelving, furniture, and fixtures removed, the flooring stripped up for some reason I couldn’t fathom.

Beth was the one who thought of it. She worked part-time at a florist shop whose owner also owned this place before it went under, and she got permission for us to do the shoot there.

It’ll be cool, right?
she’d said.
Because Lazy Daze was an institution when we were first-years and now it’s all fucked-up, so I figured it’s symbolic or something . . . like our ideals are fractured, but we’re naked in this space of adulthood, and I was thinking about this quote from Sartre . . .

I’d tuned out at “Sartre,” because I find philosophy difficult to suffer, and also because my opinion hadn’t been required to keep that conversation afloat. Sarah and Finn had waxed enthusiastic about the aesthetics and how they could soften the ugliest details of the exposed industrial architecture with people and color, fabrics and textures.

An apocalyptic
Grande Odalisque, Finn had called it.

“—dark, depressing shithole—,” Cal’s voice labeled it, audible from across the room even as another song started up — this one a ballad, a tender woman’s voice grieving with restraint over a simple piano line — and then cut off right when it was getting to the part I liked.

I don’t want to take off my clothes in an apocalyptic odalisque painting
, I thought.

But nobody had asked me to. They just assumed I would. I was one of them, and this was what we were doing, because we were seniors, and at our college this is what seniors do.

The Book
, people mostly call it.

The Sex Book
, sometimes, or
The Naked Book
.

The Porn
, if you aren’t in favor.

I met Sarah’s eyes from across the room. Her annoyance and fear rolled over me in a bright green wave. She held a sturdy camera in one hand, but there was nothing in the room to shoot.

Just hands shoved deep into pockets.

Just hunched posture, tense shoulders, tight and jittering conversation that exploded here and there into the relief of laughter.

Just Cal and Beth, performing their confidence for the rest of us.

It was seven in the morning, and most of us had bed head or wet hair. Our eyes were barely open. We’d come early to take advantage of the natural light through the plate-glass front of the shop, but the shoot was supposed to go on all day. Sarah wasn’t the only photographer; they’d rotate in on shifts, and everyone in the senior class had been invited personally.

Drop in anytime. Do whatever you’re comfortable with. We just want to get everyone on film.

I’d said it myself, ringing doorbells at some of the off-campus houses to deliver my message.
It’ll be fun.

But I felt as though we were missing something, some key ingredient that would have made it possible for us to pull this off. I yearned for the robes, the dark room, the glow-paint-dipped hands of Contact Improv.

The dark space and all of its light.

The music started again.

The tinny wah-wah windup was so unmistakable, I knew what would happen even before I turned toward Cal, spotted his mischievous smile, watched him hop onto the counter. Watched him grab Beth’s hand to urge her up next to him.

Marvin Gaye. “Let’s Get It On.”

Because Cal is nothing if not subtle, right?

But god.
God
, it was the exact right thing for him to give us. The exact right thing to watch them up there — skinny Cal in his electric-blue pants with his new, tall hair, and Beth still a good head taller, probably seventy pounds heavier, the two of them lip-synching and dance-stalking one another up and down the counter above us.

Cal ground against Beth’s ass, claiming he wasn’t gonna push.

Beth framed her crotch in both hands, urging him to stop beating round the bush.

There was no way not to smile at them. Just no way.

No way not to laugh when Cal twirled her, when Jason hopped up to join them and Beth’s shimmy made him rear back with his eyes wide, delighted, as though her breasts were attacking and it would be the best possible way to die.

No way, when Sarah carefully set her camera on the ground and sprinted across the room to jump up, too, for me to fail to remember that the most important thing I’d learned how to do this year was play.

When Sarah started dancing with Beth, I walked over to where she’d left the camera, flipped it on, and took a few experimental shots. Glanced at them on the screen.

They looked good.

Looked great, actually.

When Sarah stopped dancing, held Beth’s face in her hands, exhaled with their foreheads touching and then kissed her, tenderly, slowly — there was no way I could have missed remembering how sacred play can be.

I shot a hundred pictures of Sarah kissing Beth and Beth kissing Sarah, hungry mouths and practiced hands, the two of them lit from one side, surrounded by dancing bodies, smiling friends.

I framed and reframed. I crouched down low, walked the length of the room, zoomed in and panned out.

Click. Click. Click.

Play would keep the magic alive. That’s what I remembered that morning — the last morning, in spirit, of my four years of college. The first morning, in my heart, in my memory, of my life that came after.

I recorded it.

That’s what we were there to do, after all — to create a record for ourselves, for our future selves, of what we looked like at play.

Because play is where the magic comes from.

Cal taught me that.

Magic comes from freedom, from openness, from
willingness
. Play burbles up from the
yes
that lives in the dark space, the
now
, the
gimme
, the yearning urge to be and belong and become.

Our joy lives in the dizzying impulse we all learn to stifle as we grow — the voice of
yes
that tells us to close our eyes on the swings so we can feel the earth fall away beneath us, to lie in the grass with the sun warming our faces until we’re certain that it’s spinning, it’s really spinning, and we’re all spinning with it.

I told Cal that the dark space is light, and it is, but it is also play. To be at play is to release the light.

Cal squatted down right in the middle of the madness to crank up the volume, his blue ass framed at the center of my view, his shiny dark head bent, that furrow of concentration between his eyebrows the still point in the middle of my world.

He’ll remind me.

That’s what I thought that morning, and I wasn’t wrong.

Always, always, he reminds me.

By the time he spun to face me, there were four or five people on the bar. In the husky voice of the party-ravaged, a vocalist assured me he was feeling all right over a funky drumbeat that lifted the energy in the room and sent it spinning toward the ceiling.

Cal spun with it, hands in the air, beckoning me close. I took his picture, but he wasn’t having it.

“Put the camera down,” he told me. “Dance with me, Winnie-girl.”

So I did. Of course I did.

I knew the dance by heart.

I’m smiling up at her while she smiles down at me, her face incandescent. This is the only word I can even think of, looking at her, feeling her —
incandescent
.

“You’re sure?” I ask her, and she says, “Of course.” Like this is a foregone conclusion — I’ll take her virginity in front of everybody we know, and Sarah will snap pictures to publish in
The Book
, and honest to god only Winnie could make it sound normal.

Except, fuck me, it feels normal.

It feels like a foregone conclusion, actually, as if we were heading here all along. And it feels like here is a beautiful place.

Here is gilded in the yellow light off her skin and the purple glow of her hair, the bright pink shine of her heart and her smile, her teeth, my Winnie, everything.

“I love you,” I tell her, and she dips her head, drops her palms to my chest and hinges at the elbows to kiss me.

The room is hushed. I can’t hear the music anymore. I can’t hear anything but the sound of Winnie’s skin singing, the whir of the camera, the rush of breath in and out of my lungs.

I smell latex and cold, but she’s warm over me, sliding up and down the length of my prick, teasing me like she’s been teasing me all semester.

By which I mean, actually, she’s not teasing me at all.

She’s moving. Chasing her pleasure, drawing mine out.

She’s beautiful, and our being here, doing this now — it doesn’t change who we are. It doesn’t make us a performance or transform this moment into a stunt.

We get to decide what this moment is, what it means, and we are who we’ve always been.

Together, we’re what we’ll always be.

Me and Winnie, our bodies, our breath, our hearts, naked.

I’m gripping her hips while she takes me inside of her, and she is glowing. I think I’m glowing, too.

I think our glow is big enough to illuminate this stage we’re on, this platform one of the theater guys built that Finn draped in purple velvet stolen from the prop room. I think Winnie pulses brighter than any floodlight when she bites her lip and closes her eyes, sinking down and rising up, again, again, until I’m buried inside her to the root and her forehead’s furrowed, her fingernails digging crescent marks into my chest.

I could be wrong, though. I’m somewhat distracted by the mind-blowing ocean of pleasure that is the clasp of Winnie’s swollen pink cunt around my dick.

I mean, Jesus God. Cut me some slack, here, in the retelling.

She settles herself a little deeper on me. I gasp, and watch her lip turn white, and I say, “Baby?”

I have to, because even though she’s glowing, undiminished, so perfect, my gorgeous girl, I have to be sure.

“Wow,” she says.

“Yeah?”

Her eyes open. “Yeah. Holy fuck. Yeah.” She picks up my hand and puts my thumb over her clit. “Right there,” she says.

“Like this?” I press, testing the pressure she usually likes, and she sucks in a breath. Her nipples are tight, gleaming from my mouth, the flesh around them swollen and rosy.

I wonder if the light we’re making will show up in the pictures.

I hope so. I hope everyone in the whole world will look at these pictures and see everything.

“I hope I end up looking at these pictures fifty years from now,” I say. “And I hope I see them and think,
We were like a thousand fucking candles together.
”

“A thousand candles, or a thousand
fucking
candles?” she asks.

“I’m not sure. What do fucking candles look like?”

She laughs, and her laugh tastes like it always does. Her skin.

“Melty,” she whispers when I kiss over her collarbone.

“Melty what?”

“Melty is what fucking candles look like.”

I think that’s the picture that ended up in the book. Not any of the shots that came afterward, not how gorgeous she looked when she came on my cock with my hand between her legs, not the golden halo around her at orgasm, the soft shape of her mouth, the line of her neck thrown back.

Not me, either, flipping her over, pulling her knee up over my hip, sinking inside her rough and fast because I’d waited so long for that moment, the best kind of waiting where every stage of anticipation is better than the one before and there’s no such thing as a letdown. Just climax after climax after climax until I was finally inside Winnie Frederickson and I figured out there wasn’t going to be a downside to this mountain.

That we were going to keep going, peaking, glowing, loving each other forever.

I wonder what my face looked like then.

But I’m glad that in the picture in the book, we’re both laughing. Because, you know. Fucking and laughing, naked and glowing — that’s a great way to begin a life.

The very best way, if you ask me.

Our small liberal arts campus doesn’t have a graduation ceremony so much as it has a graduation
happening
.

The graduates line up down the center seam of the quad, where it is bracketed by trees that were planted sometime after the Civil War, and under every tree is one of the faculty, in full academic regalia, every color imaginable, velvets and satins.

Some of the faculty have drums, big medieval-looking ones, and all of them have buckets of those little paper twists filled with powder that snap and explode when they’re thrown against the ground. Those that play instruments bring them and play — improvising around familiar pop songs.

Then, as the graduates grin and laugh and hug, the faculty throw the noisemakers at their feet, and beat drums, and play music, and they yell
huzzah!huzzah!huzzah!
which would never sound right at any other time, but in that moment, inside of all that impossible noise and revelry, it is exactly right.

Huzzah!