Comets
A home movie of us making love. The bedroom back on Mercer Avenue. The bedroom was painted pale green back then and the headlights of passing traffic from the bay window, a strip of glass above the curtain rod, and the headlights bore into the mirror on the opposite wall like comets, shedding a swarm of glitter, until the car turned the corner and the light fizzed out and shot back through with the next car.
But it’s not that dark yet. Not at the beginning of the movie. Nobody has their headlights on. It’s early afternoon. It looks like spring from the light. Maybe early spring, when it’s still cold.
It happens though, it gets darker during the lovemaking, that’s how long it goes on. It gets darker in the room, the corner of the bureau becomes soft in the shadows. The mound of laundry. There’s a blink or glitch and the camera adjusts to how dark it’s getting.
There’s no sound.
I say, Turn it up. You hit the button, but there’s no sound.
We look so young. Our bodies are beautiful. I mean, both of us. So beautiful it’s a shock. I feel acute sadness. But also, I’m horny for us as we were then. Or horny because we’re watching them as we are now, or who knows why.
It’s easy to slip and think that we are still them. They look so familiar. I remember what they smelled like, what they felt. How turbulent. How everything mattered, the smallest slight, the tiniest kind of a gift. How slick and wet it all is. What we want. Always wanting.
It’s easy to think they are us.
They are us.
I can’t believe how beautiful we are.
We forget about the camera. First, we know about the camera. We are aware, hyperaware of the camera, but we don’t look at it. We’re acting. A very stiff, pretend-there’s-no-camera kind of acting.
Very serious, Bergman serious. As if quite often, in everyday life, we find ourselves walking toward the bed, one at a time, naked, la la la, and lying down on the bed and waiting to be joined by the other, and not looking at the camera. As if we were up to that kind of thing all the time.
That bedroom was always cold. Sometimes you could see your breath. Like, in the fall we had a space heater that put out a roiling heat as you could see little collapsing waves that made a patch of the room look Vaseline smeared. But only in a narrow space of about two feet in front of the heater. You’d have to be standing right in front of the metal grill, and then only your shins would be hot. If you were wearing pants it felt like they’d catch fire. The space heater was old and loud.
The bedsheets were the cheapest Walmart had, some polyester blend, it caused shivers it was so unnatural. Yellow roses and they were faded and there’s even a hole, you can see it in the home movie, with a ladder of threads and you can see the mattress through it. The mattress was new. We had a new mattress and we’d saved for it. It was the most expensive thing we ever bought. It was more expensive than the car we bought, which didn’t go for very long, and cost everything we had. We were always spending everything we had, and we never noticed it was gone. We’d go to the bank machine and there’d be zero, or minus a thousand. Or we had lots.
We had to get the bus out there to Walmart, I did, it was somebody else’s day to have the car, to get those sheets and then standing at the bus stop in the weather, waiting for the bus, trying to get back before the kids were finished daycare. Arriving late when your kids were the only ones left. The teachers already in their coats and softly clapping their mitted hands, once, twice, like, Okay then, let’s go.
Once you got six extension cords and joined them all together because you’d bought an electric muscle massager at a garage sale and I was out there in the lawn chair at the edge of the field and you crept up behind me and told me shhh and turned that thing on and put it on the lycra crotch of my bathing suit, made me come almost instantly. So fast and hard. All the leaves flickering their silver undersides.
Once in the canoe, the lake was still but the ripples went out when I came, I mean they shattered the reflection of the side of the red canoe and the rocks at the edge of the lake and the trees, shattered into a pieces all quivering and they floated back together, and I came again. Then you put a knee on either side of me and the thing rocked and we nearly tipped over. We stayed still for a minute and then, as you fucked me the canoe jut-jutted forward, ploughing the water apart and smashing the reflections of all the trees again.
On the honeymoon, that guy we met who kept following us around because he was afraid he’d be mugged in the market, him banging on our hotel room door, banging, and saying, Are we going to the restaurant now? Me, hopping around, trying to get my sock on and make my voice normal, like I wasn’t just fucking my brains out, and you telling me not to answer him, not to answer, Don’t fucking, don’t answer, and me saying, Yes, just a minute. Because, I hissed at you, It’d be rude not to answer him and you jacking off before I could get the door open.
The red tiled shower, the young woman who brought us back to her house for breakfast when we were going back and forth to different cities a night’s sleep apart on the Eurail pass, because we couldn’t afford the hostels and slept on the trains, cities a night’s sleep apart, back to her house and she wondered, Are you together? If we were together, did we want to get in the shower together? The big clouds of steam and the kissing sound, when I unpeeled my back from the red tiles, legs wrapped around you and the squeak of your palm on the tiles near my head, shampoo running all over us into our eyes. The hot water and the table set with silver platters of meats and cheeses and breads and fruit, and her looking into my eyes, the woman, my face flushed, every part of me blushing, a drip of water running from a strand of my hair down my neck, and she touched me. She caught the drip of water with the back of her hand, this woman we met on the train, and she lifted her hand, put her mouth over the drip, all the while looking into my eyes then rubbed her lips together as if tasting me, something I whispered to you later, grinding against each other in the dark on the floor of the train, roaring toward Vienna.
People on the bus from Walmart, sinking deep into their puffy winter coats, half asleep, eyelids drooping, the snow flying, erasing all the buildings, and the other cars zooming past, their headlights splintering up in the dark, snakey red taillights, bright as fresh blood on the black wet asphalt ahead, reflections of faces in the windows floating over the box stores Canadian Tire, Home Depot, Staples, Dominion, Old Navy, Mark’s Work Warehouse, the kids all getting their coats on in the daycare porch, waiting for me, the bus driver getting out and disappearing around the corner for a smoke, the bedsheets in the plastic bag that I held on my lap.
I had a book, Raymond Carver, or Midnight’s Children or Crime and Punishment and Sons and Lovers, Turgenev with that whip, wasn’t there a woman on horseback with a whip, doesn’t she strike someone across the cheek? DH Lawrence and The Fox and the man shooting at it as it disappeared in the long grass with its white tail up exposing its asshole, this would be the only time I’d have to sink into a book, to let it take hold, the engine of the bus thrumming through me, sometimes on the bus, Lawrence could make me horny, make me come even, any fiction could. Knowing the house would be noisy, homework, bath time, combing the tangles, tears, math, and I came on the bus, the plastic bag with the sheets scrunched in my fists, laundry and the phone, somebody’s tears over having to eat carrots and hating carrots, hating them, hating them, the glass of water tumbling, shattering, There, now, that’s broken. Are you happy now?
Somebody crying about somebody else deciding what DVD and the bloody fire truck, kicking the toy fire truck down the hall with the lights and sirens. This all made me horny and it was nothing to lock the door to the laundry room and climb up on the dryer and slide down on top of your cock with my jeans hanging off one leg and one boot still on and somebody yelling and yelling I’m wanted on the phone, and your hand over my mouth and coming like that with the vibrations of the dryer and spilled fabric softener on one cheeks of my ass, blue and viscous.
There’s mostly just the bed in the frame but there are also clothes on the floor. Not just the clothes we were wearing. A pile of laundry and toys, one of those chunky Fisher Price plastic kitchens for little kids with thick plastic frying pans hanging from hooks. And a xylophone that looked like a snake slithering on wheels as you pulled the string, the tongue darting out. The pony on a metal stand and rusted springs that had been in the garden but our youngest wanted it inside since we wouldn’t have real pets, and sometime if I came, the head and neck with its wild pale mane nodded at me, lascivious, the white of the eye, and the springs creaked and the rust from the springs dropped off in a fine curtain of dust, the painted eye would catch the light and give me the creeps with its faux gaiety and depth.
From behind.
Gripping the bar of the metal headboard. Your hand on the small of my back, the other gripping my hip, sticking my bum up to you, come on, come on. Do it.
Outdoors at sunset in the snowstorm, the pinging of the snow on your nylon snowsuit, the quilted fluorescent orange padding inside, I can taste the colour orange, the shiny rub of it, enough to make me come or the smell of gas or engine oil or blue exhaust from the broken down snowmobile, and put it in my mouth, come on, come on. Hit the back of my hot orange throat.
There were hundreds of hours of home videos, I don’t know how you found this one of us making love. Mixed in with the one of parties and people smoking who don’t smoke any more, gave up smoking years ago, Look, Marie smoking, just look, look at her. There’s that guy came from Australia with his big broad chest and he stayed, and someone broke his heart, then he left for good and nobody ever heard tell of him again, then we don’t say anything because the camera is lingering on someone who is dead now, has died, but is singing a ballad, belting it out. Though there’s no sound.
It must have been near Halloween, no it wasn’t spring it’s midafternoon, it’s the fall, because there were those chocolate gold coins, one of the kids had dropped them all over the floor from trick or treating. The car headlights hitting the coins and you unwrapped the gold foil and pressed the chocolate coins between the cheeks of my ass and licked them. Didn’t you get the job around then? We went right out and bought the new mattress. Suck my nipple, suck my nipple, can you? Hard. Put your tongue. Finger me. Finger me now. Touch my ass. Can you just. Oh. Oh.
You must have already got the job. We were okay. We were going to be okay. We put the old mattress out on the sidewalk.
But mostly it’s just the bed with the bedsheet in this video. No blankets. You must have pulled all the blankets off for the home movie. Set design.
Once in a new house and there were the boxes, still packed up, everything, and you had come back from the supermarket with a package of chicken breasts and I was making myself come in the only armchair with the streetlight coming in through the crack in the curtains, still in that astrakhan coat with the high collar, and the bone buttons and all that flaming satin on the inside, you dropped the package of chicken on the floor and your mouth on me, your tongue and me all slippery and stick it in me, okay? Can you? Fuck, yeah.
At the beginning the bed takes up most of the movie’s frame.
Once coming back from the bar and I had that taffeta dress the colour of bubble gum I’d bought second hand and you tore it open from the neck to the hem and the sound of tearing fabric made me come or it was your tongue, or I couldn’t get you in me fast enough and I just came and kept coming and the dress was also – you’d spilled a glass of red wine all over me.
I come around the corner and I’m naked and get on the bed. That was when I was running. Look at me. And you were running. God we really had nice bodies. Must have been the 90s. Big hair, jackets with rhinestone buttons and skirts with six flounces. Heart of glass, girls wanting to have fun. The time I climbed up on the table top in the fake leopard skin mini-skirt and in the alley you came on it. All over my good fake two-dollar, sale bin, raggedy-hemmed leopard skin mini-skirt.
We had to be so fast back then. We had to go to the laundry room. Or in the bathroom. Or out on the back deck when we had the tarp up so nobody could see down on us from the balconies next door and the rain hitting the tarp. The side of it came loose and the water sloshed down with a big noise, very close, we nearly jumped out of our skin. Or in the tub and the water walloping out every time you thrust me up, waves slapping the linoleum. The water weeping through the plaster ceiling of the porch, making a chunk fall off.
This was elaborate, setting up a camera on a tripod. This must have taken precious time. Where did we get the time to screw the camera down onto the threaded bolt that sticks up out of the metal base on the top of the tripod, the camera jerking around 360, and the whole room whir-jerk, whir-jerk, the pixels discombobulating with each twist and following in a tail of pixelated diamond dust, like a snow globe of our lives back then. How did we have the time for that? To adjust the focus. Get it sharp. The image, the bed, your chest, your cock in the black curly glistening hair it’s all so sharp.
I let my hand drop over the side of the canoe and stirred up the water and the trees and the stones, broke them apart flicking my fingers and I honestly can’t come again, I really can’t, okay, okay, yes, okay. Yes, on my face. Come on my face.
Sometimes the kids would be gone for an hour. Maybe half an hour and we dropped everything. The ladle splatting back into the pot of spaghetti sauce, droplets all over the counter, the wall. That’s how urgent to get up over the stairs and strip down and get in the bed and fuck.
We both had shift work. Different shifts. We had to coordinate our schedules, whoever got home first made dinner. If the other one was late getting home, it was a fight. If the other one went out for a beer with people from work. There was a raging fight and tears, doors slamming. Voices raised. Or it was we’d give each other a break.
You go out, go out with your friends.
No, you go on.
Go on, you go.
Or brought people home. We had sex fast. Really fast. As fast as two people could have sex and still both come and sometimes come more than once. Or only one of us came. Before someone called out they were hungry, or there’s someone at the door, or I hurt my knee, or she pushed me.
Lots of times I came lots of times, even though it was really fast, or didn’t come, and we were only half undressed and my bra not undone, but wrenched up around my chin, and someone knocking on the bathroom door, and saying, What are you doing in there? I need to go.
Because we could get started and someone would be through in the front door calling up the stairs, Anybody home?
Then we forget about the camera. Because when you are fucking there comes a time when that’s all you are or can do or feel or think or be.
We watch the home movie together because you say: I found this, and I want to know if you want me to erase it?
Have you looked at it?
Some of it.
How much of it?
Some, you know. The first bit.
I can’t remember doing it, I don’t know what will happen next in the film. I have no recollection because I was in it. Am in it. I am the co-star. Starring in. The fitted bedsheet with the faded yellow roses that slip off the corner of the bed nearest the camera and inches up over the mattress. His toes, the ball of his foot finding purchase on the icy blue, bare cold corner of the mattress but we’re not cold now. Not cold. His foot, the ball of his foot pressing so hard into the mattress, driving all of this into me, and it doesn’t look – it looks slow is what it looks.
It looks like there’s no movement at all. It’s almost still.
It’s duration. It’s an extended unending fucking that can’t ever stop because everything else stopped around it.
We’re arching into it, we’re both arching into it. A clench that builds, fusing, sends shivers. Fingers pressing so hard on my ass, his fingers go white. Holding the cheeks on my ass. Gripping me.
First there’s just the bed and a jerk to the side while the camera was screwed onto the tripod. Then he must have adjusted the aperture a few times because the empty mattress goes dark and darker; then it lightens up. Is blasted with light so it disappears in a white blaze and back to the print of the bedsheet, to ordinary daylight. All these adjustments, but it’s surprisingly artless. Unfabricated, once we get into it.
I walk into the frame completely naked and he does the same. We are self-conscious about it, but we pretend we aren’t. And then we aren’t self-conscious. We aren’t pretending. You can see the pretending slide away from our skin like taking off his shirt, like my skirt falling off. Except we aren’t wearing clothes when we walk into the frame, we’re already naked, we don’t disrobe, there’s nothing cheesy like that. But we walk into the frame and our awareness falls off like some flimsy fabric thing. We are unaware. We were pretending but then we are just fucking there. Because however elaborate the pretending is, it cannot be maintained. It falls away.
Like we were always there back then. We are still here. We are always in a clench so hard and fast and muscle riven, coated with slipperiness, bone, claws, need, never awkward or anything other than just: what it is. What is it? Give it to me.
This is: Do you want me to erase it? Because who is it for?
Once a postman at the front door and you came into the kitchen with a package and you say, This is for you. What is it? It’s a package. But what is it? Don’t you know? How could I know? You can’t guess? No, I can’t guess. Look at the size of it. I don’t know what it is. Here, shake it. Okay, I still don’t know. Open it.
All the Styrofoam peanuts, swishing my hand through, and it’s a purple dildo. It’s a dildo. I’d never seen one before. Never held one in my hand. Hefty. It’s fat. Long. Smiley face at the tip. Jokey. More lilac than purple. There are Styrofoam peanuts on the underside of my arm, from static electricity and they tickle, the tickling of those peanuts is almost unbearable, everything tingling, like just before lightning, and I want to swipe them off but they just cling with a film of electricity between the underside of my arm and the peanuts and then they drop by themselves and I turn the dial and the dildo revs and we just go up to the bed, and holy. Holy.
Once I was reading on the couch in front of the woodstove and the ice cream machine going in the kitchen, the heat from the stove stultifying. It was dark except for the fire in the woodstove and the headlamp for reading. You come out in the dark, hold out a spoon and you put it in my mouth, feed me it, a spoonful of ice cream, to see if it needed anything, extra sugar? creamy, so creamy.
Did it need anything? I pulled down my jeans and you went back into the kitchen and got another spoonful, and this was with my headlamp focused downward, ice cream edged off the spoon with your thumb onto my clit, Lick it off, lick it off, please, please, it’s so cold. Please. Please? How hot your tongue was, little sticky darts of your tongue, all the cream dripping.
Once after a terrible storm we went off on the skidoo and the throb of that between my thighs, the bogs frozen over so we went places we’d never been before between valleys and the sun setting and we fucked there right out in the open in the freezing cold. I saw the eyes of something flash green in the forest behind black branches.
So, we watch it, and I think it was actually winter when this thing was shot. The light I realize now, yes, it’s winter. We can’t keep our hands off each other while we watch the home movie because it is so fucking sexy and then we are kissing, but turning slightly from the kiss to keep watching, both of us, pawing each other, watching ourselves.
And without being aware of it, we are doing what they are doing, you are on top of me and I must have said, Wait, wait, because I reach out and touch the screen, and the tips of my fingers go through the glass, and I am stroking your hard cock on the new mattress shiny and icy blue and silver, silver like the underside of leaves, the mattress, on the other side of the screen and I am just running the back of my index finger over your cock, tracing a vein, and now my whole hand is in, up to my wrist and then my arm, I am passing through the screen, brittle, thin like ice over a puddle shattering us into the other side, shattering the us making out while we watch and I tug you through with me. I grip you by the cock as hard as I can as I come and tug you through.
Then we are both coming, and we can’t watch and come at the same time, so we miss some, we miss some, we are missing it, but we keep watching after that and we both come in the home movie and then we come with them, in them, are them.
The thing is, they were completely naked. More naked than I remember. I am only seeing now how naked they were, and they didn’t know it.
I wanted to touch them, I wanted to put my wet fingers through the plasma screen and touch them. I sucked two of my fingers, making them good and wet and drove them into the puckering tight screen and it clenched around my fingers over and over and I stirred the pixels into chaos, a glitchy static hissing and before the pixels could swarm back into the solid shape of our bodies back then, we got deep inside them.