The Scent of Your Breath

Twenty-five

As we watch a comedy film that doesn’t make us laugh, Thomas tells me a dream he has had.

We are sitting at a sumptuously laid table with a brilliant white tablecloth, and the courses have been arranged in an elegant and orderly fashion. Pouring some red wine into a glass, I clumsily knock it over, making a purple stain that spreads across the white cloth. Then I start crying, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He kisses me and tells me it’s nothing, that it could just as easily have happened to him. He demonstrates that he’s equally capable of spilling his wine on the tablecloth and making a stain. But I go on crying, saying it’s all my fault. His stain covers mine and he says, “You see? No one will notice, the whole tablecloth’s dirty now.”

He falls silent and looks at me without speaking.

I know he’s afraid. I know he knows that I’m afraid. We both know that this bloody fear will kill us. I’m too weak to kill him because, in the end, I like fear. But I like the desire to go on loving him even more.

Today, once again, he left without saying good-bye. And yesterday he came home without a surprise present: no ice cream (he used to bring me an ice cream almost every evening, with loads and loads of cherries), no film from the video shop, not even a kiss.

Yesterday as he was brushing his teeth, I came into the bathroom without knocking, and I saw him kneeling on the floor peering into the toilet bowl.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

Embarrassed, he drew himself upright and replied, “Nothing…”

I immediately understood the cause of his unease and, at the same time, his curiosity.

“I flushed it away,” I said. “There’s nothing to see.”

“I know, I’m not crazy like you,” he said cruelly, slaying me with his eyes.

As in the first months of our affair, we aren’t making love. Back then, abstaining before immersing ourselves in each other was a wonderful erotic game, though. Now it’s a source of unbearable pain, but I know it would be much more unbearable if we actually did make love. It’s as though his awareness of my sexuality has shrunk and is starting to crumble. I no longer want to fall in love with him, to be inside him.

His body was like a musical instrument. He was a marvelous grand piano, studded all over with white and black keys, and my fingers started playing it fearlessly, and yet they moved clumsily. I had no score, but his sighs and the light in his eyes told me that my melody bewitched him.

His body was a perfect contrast, his thick, burgeoning eyebrows spread out like a patch of hair allowed to grow at will. And his penis was a perfect fusion of angelic candor and devastating demonic power.

“You don’t love me anymore.”

“Is that a question?”

“No,” I answered.

“You’re the one who’s stopped loving me,” he said. “What’s destroying us?” I asked him.

“We are,” he replied.

“Go if you’re going,” I said.