It was a warm midsummer night and getting dark now as Emily and a group of close friends sat on the grass of the courtyard, drinking beer and talking about orgasms—how it wasn’t always easy for women to have them. They had gathered to say goodbye to Emily, who had spent the last year in Switzerland and was flying back to the States the next day. The group was a mix of Americans, a Chilean, and a few Swiss. As they talked, switching between English and German, they laughed in a kind of gleeful collusion. The one man Emily saw in the circle, Nina’s longtime boyfriend, raised his beer and said jokingly, No comment, which was the last word they heard from him on the subject. His presence hardly prevented the women from sharing their different strategies: squeezing their thighs or flexing their butts. I’ve got to be on top, Nina said. I can control things better that way.
Sarah talked about having her first one rocking on the piano bench while playing Chopin as a girl. I didn’t know what was happening to me or what I was doing. I thought it was the music. I practiced a lot after that.
Perhaps it was the two beers Emily had drunk or the summer night that allowed her to disclose the fact that she hadn’t had an orgasm for a long time. And since her friends already knew about her last few difficult years and that she was on medication, she explained that it was the antidepressant she took. She often lacked the drive, it seemed. She wanted to want to, but . . . This brought on a second wave of enthusiastic suggestions: the use of lubricants and vibrators. If you don’t masturbate, Simone said, half whispering, you really should. Nina mentioned that reading Anaïs Nin’s Little Birds worked for her, detailing a scene in the gardens at Versailles where two dukes and a duchess, naked save for costume masks, took their pleasure beneath a canopy of pear trees.
Emily was relieved to talk and joke about the subject. Her deficiency in this area had taken on a weight but now felt light and funny and seemed to lift into the night and disappear.
They stayed on the topic for a while before breaking off into separate conversations, after which her friends gradually stood, hugging Emily or giving her the three Swiss bises, promising to stay in touch. She noticed then that Walter was there, sitting on the grass and just a little behind her and off to one side, as if he’d been hiding. In her first months in Switzerland, they’d met at a German seminar at the university and then weekly in cafés for a German-English exchange. They’d read Rilke together and portions of Thomas Mann, which they’d agreed could be a slog, and she’d tried to explain how someone as vile and mindless as the current American president could be elected. But just as they were becoming friends, he’d disappeared.
I heard you were leaving, he said now. I wanted to say goodbye.
When did you get here? she asked. And then, because she felt suddenly embarrassed, Did you hear any of that talk about . . . ?
He smiled and said, Maybe a little of it.
She shook her head. I’m sure that was more than you wanted to know.
Or maybe it’s something I should know, he said, smiling.
Where did you go? she asked then, almost irritated with him for having disappeared, though she hadn’t known him well enough—not quite—to feel slighted.
That, he said, might be more than you want to know. But then he explained that he also struggled with depression and that about eight months ago he had fallen into the worst bout he’d ever experienced. He lost pretty much everything—his girlfriend, his job, his fellowship at the university, his room in a student boardinghouse. He moved back home and crawled into bed and stayed there for six months.
My God, Emily said. That’s my story. And she told him how about two years ago, back in the States, she’d had to move in with her parents, unable to keep her job or to study. But she’d be starting back at university this fall.
I guess we’re both feeling better, he said.
Emily noticed that he looked good—in fact, healthier than she’d ever seen him. When they first met, he’d been thin and pale and always smoking. I finally kicked that habit, he said now. He was almost swarthy, his shoulders and arms substantial beneath his shirt. His long amber hair fell nearly to his shoulders, and occasionally he tucked strands of it behind an ear. There was a vitality and interest in his eyes, which kept meeting hers with a startling directness that wasn’t very Swiss. The Swiss tended to avoid eye contact. And if it happened by accident, they’d look down or away in a kind of apology, as if they’d just bumped into or stepped on you.
She and Walter sat on the grass and talked for some time though everyone else had left. My God, he said, your Swiss German is excellent. It’s fluent now. This was good to hear from someone who’d helped her learn the language so many months before.
He wanted to know what Emily would miss most and least about Switzerland. Speaking the language every day, she said, and escaping American politics. On the other hand, she found the Swiss self-contained, impenetrable. When she’d first arrived, she was struck by the quiet, impassive passengers on trams and in trains, where almost no one talked above a whisper. And, of course, the absolute lack of eye contact.
It’s as if they’re terrified of each other, she said. And the formality of everything: Everyone is Herr and Frau so-and-so.
We are, I think, afraid, Walter said. It’s intimacy that scares us. We’re scared of it because we know there are consequences. If you show interest, ask questions, share yourself, this is a signal that you want to become friends. Friendship lasts a lifetime here. It comes with obligations. You will see friends through marriage, the birth of children, divorce, illness, death. But Americans aren’t like this, are they? They ask strangers about their job, their hobbies, their personal lives, their beliefs and passions. For an American, this is merely being polite. An American may ask about all this and then never speak to you again.
You may be right, Herr Wassermann, Emily said.
Exactly! Walter said, laughing. Now you’re behaving like a real Swiss.
In fact, Emily was struck by how little she knew about him—she hadn’t heard he had a girlfriend, for instance—even though they’d met and talked together weekly. Of course, he was Swiss, and they’d conversed mostly about literature, ideas, and politics. He seemed less Swiss now, his sharp features soft and glowing in the dim light. And perhaps her face appeared the same to him because he—or maybe it was she—moved in, though she didn’t know who did what first, who was kissing whom. She knew only that they were kissing, that his hand was touching her cheek, then her neck, that this sent a frisson of warmth that spread and opened in her torso and between her legs, where she’d felt nothing for many months now.
We could go. . . . he began to say, smiling and shaking his head before she added—because the darkness seemed to allow it—to your place?
They both laughed, in the wake of which he said, If you’d like.
I don’t know, she said in an affirmative tone that kept the possibility open. You are Swiss. Isn’t there the danger of intimacy? Of marriage, divorce, death?
He smiled. Death comes with or without intimacy. Often, marriage does too. And you are getting on a plane tomorrow.
I don’t know, she said again, though, in fact, she was considering it or seemed to be considering it. A one-night stand, if that’s what it would be, was not something she’d done or wanted to do before. Perhaps it was the language; when she spoke German, she was not entirely herself, at least not the self she was in English, a young woman whose mother was a strict Catholic—how disapproving she would be of the frank conversation Emily was having now—and whose Swiss father was so distant and stolid that she didn’t know him well enough to be sure what he would think; or perhaps it was that she and Walter had known the same darkness, that they’d both had their lives swallowed by it so recently.
How about tea at my place? I live just over there, he said, gesturing toward the large apartment building across the courtyard, which was just opposite her building and was a kind of mirror image of it. And we can say, for now, that it will be tea and nothing more.
She told him that tea would be nice, and they rose and walked in the shallow dark. When they got to the entrance, she said, Look. This doesn’t mean we’ll do anything.
It’s just tea, he said again.
He entered the code, the door buzzed, and they walked up two flights. His apartment, she saw once he flipped on the lights, had the same layout as hers: one bedroom, a bathroom, and a small dining area that all orbited the kitchen. It was as if she were returning to her apartment in a dream and discovering that the foundations of her life were there, in place, but that someone else was occupying it. This made her feel at once less alone and oddly unknown to herself. He filled the kettle while she sat on a stool at the same high linoleum counter that was in her apartment. He scooped loose leaves into a sachet, and the tea gave off an earthy, floral bouquet that filled the small room. A few minutes later, she held a steaming cup that gave off the smells of a forest after a rainstorm. The tea was very hot but also easy to drink, and so infused with wet grasses and flowers and bark that she seemed to be walking through that forest, stepping over a damp log and then over a burbling stream, which made her feel again as if she were in a dream. But, of course, she was just sitting in a kitchen drinking tea.
She noticed something then that she couldn’t put out of mind or ignore: that his hair, falling nearly to his shoulders, and his trim beard made him resemble someone famous that at first she couldn’t identify. But in the next instant, she knew who it was and laughed out loud.
What? he asked.
That beard is new, isn’t it?
He nodded. She smiled, looking more closely at him before laughing and saying what she couldn’t stop thinking: You look like Jesus.
He shrugged. I don’t go to church.
You’re not a carpenter?
I sell wholesale dentistry equipment. He pointed to the chair next to her, where a cardboard box sat with one flap open so that she could see a bright metallic mass of the sharp tools dentists used to scrape and poke at teeth and gums.
How did you get into that? she asked.
When I started to dig my way out of my black pit a few months ago, I needed a job. I know somebody who does it. So. . . . He gestured at the box. I like it for now.
He wanted to know why she was leaving and why, for that matter, she’d come in the first place, and she explained that it was, more or less, the same thing that had gotten him into dentistry equipment. After several months of depression, she’d started to feel half-normal again but was no longer a student, had no job, nothing to do, which was why she’d come. And now she needed to return to her life. She’d been raised in America but her father was Swiss and her mother was English. It was strange, she said, having European parents and growing up in the States. Emily’s friends had always found her parents odd. Their accents were a curiosity, as were their old-world ways. They didn’t understand Halloween or Thanksgiving and didn’t open their house up as readily to the neighbor kids, who would sometimes enter without knocking, and always without taking their shoes off, and called her parents by their first names rather than Mr. and Mrs. Hoffmann. Rude, her mother always said. Very American. In this country it’s always about me—me, me, me.
In fact, Emily didn’t understand her parents that well either. They had grown up in different cultures. They were private and reserved. They didn’t talk about personal things, didn’t talk about money or sex or their dreams and ambitions. That me her mother complained about in this adopted country was, it seemed, buried in them. It was there, Emily sensed, but they held it like a secret that they kept even from their children. And Emily’s father spoke a different language, though never at home and never with Emily, which she regretted now that she’d had to work so hard to learn it. Occasionally, she’d heard him speaking to his sister or brother on the phone, and in an instant he’d become another person, someone she knew very little about, and it made her almost jealous—who was this man and why didn’t he let her know him? Of course, she heard his language almost every summer when they traveled to Switzerland and stayed with her Swiss cousins, her aunt and uncle, and her grandmother. But they all remained a mystery. She couldn’t understand a word they said, and she had often spent the time reading or daydreaming or just feeling lonely.
She remembered one experience in particular that made her determined to learn her father’s language. She’d been having lunch with her grandmother; Emily’s father hadn’t been around to translate when the old woman began saying something in her rapid Swiss German. Emily shook her head but her grandmother kept repeating the same sentences with urgency. Emily had been a young teenager then, and her grandmother was strange and intimidating to her. The woman always dressed in black because her husband, whom Emily had never met, was long dead. The old people back in America often wore bright colors, pinks, blues, violets, and white tennis shoes, whereas Emily’s grandmother wore woolen dresses as dark as midnight that fell down to her thick ankles, and scuffed leather shoes with soles as hard and weathered as little hooves. Her attire was like the opposite of a wedding dress—a sign that her life was finished because her husband’s was. She was tough, sturdy, her wrinkled skin pale gray, not softened by makeup. She didn’t seem afraid to live with almost nothing to look forward to. Warmth never came to her face or eyes, even when she smiled, which wasn’t often. She’d been born and would die in the same village, with streets and houses and walls and squares made of the stone from the surrounding mountains. Whatever the woman was trying to tell Emily that day seemed to be coming from this world of mountains, black dresses, and hard, expressionless eyes. Emily had wanted to understand it. It was as if the secrets of her father’s life were being spoken from across the table. Sitting above her large bowl of soup, she listened carefully as the old woman’s gaze became glassy and intense and as she barked out the same sentences again. She thought the old woman might start yelling or crying or both. Finally, she stopped, sat back in her chair, and was silent. A blankness came over her face. She had given up.
Of course, her grandmother might have been saying nothing important. Perhaps she’d wanted to know what Emily thought of the soup or she wanted to tell her that she’d been using too much hot water or had made a mess in the shower. But Emily had suspected that it was more, some urgent and necessary matter. Years later she half yelled at her father, asking him why he never talked about his home or family, why he hadn’t spoken German with her so that she could understand her cousins and grandmother, why he had shared so little about his culture and his family.
He’d turned to her and shouted back in his hard, flat Swiss accent, We were poor. Like dirt. We had nothing. We lived nowhere—in a mountain village. We never left. People gave us clothes and sometimes food. I drank from my mother’s breast until I was five because milk was too expensive. I remember doing this. I remember that she despised me for that and that I despised her for it too. Okay? You understand?
That was the last time I asked him anything about his family, she told Walter.
Have you asked your grandmother about that moment, now that you can understand each other?
She died years ago, Emily said, which makes whatever she was trying to say seem even more urgent and necessary, a kind of secret code, the answer to everything, because, of course, I can’t know it now.
He nodded and they were both quiet for a moment. She shook her head, closed her eyes, and opened them again because she kept noticing in him that silly resemblance: the hair, the beard, the gentle radiance in his blue eyes, where the suggestion of something—serenity, grace—resided.
What is it? he asked.
You really do look like him.
He smiled, not appearing any less Christlike. I’d guess that has more to do with you than me.
In fact, it has to do with my mother. She’s extremely Catholic and would hate that I could even imagine sleeping with someone who reminds me of . . . She stopped then because she couldn’t quite say it. And, of course, I like that she’d hate that.
So if you slept with me, he asked, you’d do it to score points against your mother?
I don’t know, she said, wondering if they were flirting now, playing or being serious. We do fight a lot, she admitted. And then she added, Tell me about your mother? Do you get along?
His face lit up. She’s wonderful, both as a mother and a person. Her only problem is that she does too much for me. I have to give her a good shove and tell her to think about herself. He explained then that his father had died when he was a boy. He barely remembered him: suits, leather shoes, cuff links on the dresser, the smell of aftershave and tennis balls, black socks and silk ties, the newspaper folded up on a side table in the sitting room. That’s what remained of this man to Walter. But his mother loomed large. When the only other person in their lives was suddenly gone, they were each other’s world. She never tried to find another man. It was always just Walter and his mother. He remembered that when his depression hit, she appeared at the door of his student hovel, a place by the train station that was never clean, with his clothes and the clothes of his roommates strewn over the furniture, in piles on the floor, dishes always clogging the sink, jars and food left out, the counters dirty. She didn’t even like to enter that place and wouldn’t have were it not for the imperative of saving her son.
She took me home and tucked me into my bed. She put fresh flowers on the bedside table every day. Those flowers, he said now, thinking for a moment. In the worst days and weeks of that darkness, I turned to them and thought of gardens and shaded paths, the sky, the sun, the soil where they’d grown. Every evening, she closed the curtains and the window. In the morning, she opened them to let the light and air in. She fed me. She sat with me when I could barely talk, when I just lay there and shook. She made doctor and therapist appointments. She’s a secretary at a language school. She loves her job, even though it’s simple. Education is very important to her. She’s like a midwife, delivering it to all the students, scheduling their classes, registering them, taking their payments, making sure the teachers have all their supplies, coffee, and a comfortable lounge. She attends French and Italian courses free of charge in the evening—and courses for adults at the university on philosophy, Hegel and Marx.
Of course, it’s a burden to be so much at the center of someone’s universe. And she absolutely refuses to be taken care of by anyone, most of all by me. A few years ago, she had breast cancer. But she didn’t tell me about it until her treatment was finished and she was declared cancer free. When I asked her why, she told me that she didn’t want to worry me. Now I’m afraid that she’ll die alone, in secret, hiding an illness from everyone who loves her because she hates to cause trouble. I’ll find out that she’s dead before I can give her any comfort. He sighed, seeming to consider the weight of this. She didn’t want me to move out, but it’s been good for both of us. She’s taking a course now in theology. Not that she’s religious. But she’s interested in that discourse, as she calls it, in ideas of God. The last time we ate dinner together, she was talking excitedly about negative theology.
Which is? Emily asked.
The idea that we can only understand the divine through what it is not. Our apprehension of God is always just beyond what we can know. He’s what we don’t know or sense or intuit.
We know him by not knowing him? Emily asked.
For example, Walter said, gesturing at himself, among many other things, we can say that God is not a distributor of wholesale dentistry equipment or a young man slowly recovering his life from the pit of depression. There are many other things he’s not, but that’s one place to begin.
Emily thought of his mother then, her love for her son and her enthusiasm for learning. Why hadn’t she found another man?
Intimacy is dangerous, Walter said. She loved my father very much. And because I barely remember him, she’s alone with that. I can’t share it.
They were quiet for a moment, during which they looked at each other. He started smiling, which made her smile too, and finally she said, Okay.
Okay what? he said.
Maybe we could try it now. I mean, if you want to. But I haven’t done this—or even tried to—in more than a year. And I wouldn’t have to have a . . . a . . .
No, you wouldn’t have to, he said, nodding. And it’s been a long time for me too.
Good. She didn’t know if she thought or said this word, which seemed at once too much and too little to say. In any case, they both stood from the counter and began walking down the short hall toward his bedroom, which was exactly where her bedroom was in her apartment, of the same proportions and with the same windows, and again she had that sense of looking down on her life and finding it both familiar and unrecognizable. The bed was broad and white and tall and seemed to glow a little in the dark, both alluring and suggestive of danger. It was like the bed in a fairy tale. They stood side by side in front of it for a moment, and it seemed to grow so large that Emily had the impression they would have to scale it to reach its vast white surface. But in fact Emily sat down on it easily enough while Walter bent, took hold of something in the corner, after which strings of Christmas lights illuminated the room. That was nice. He sat next to her, and Emily thought of how she would somehow have to take her clothes off and lie down and open her legs for him, touch him and allow him to touch her until . . . It seemed impossible.
She was about to shake her head and say, This feels weird. Let’s go back to the kitchen. Let’s just talk about each other’s mothers and drink tea. Intimacy is dangerous. But then he put his hand on her cheek, lifted her face to his and started kissing her, a gesture that, it seemed, she could respond to swiftly and in kind, touching his cheek and kissing him. It felt like a fluency, a kind of language, an enormous, unknowable structure of meaning that returned to her all at once. She plunged forward and into him, kissing him more deeply and rapidly, feeling a warm, shimmering pulse in that secret place, where the darkness had fisted up and stayed longer than anywhere else in her body. She wanted to grasp his hand and put it there. But something about him, a calmness, a patience, made her slow down as they lay over the bed, as her sandals fell off, as they helped each other out of their clothes, laughing when first her and then his pants caught in a bunch around their ankles, from which they helped liberate each other, standing up, hopping, pulling and cinching and loosening, after which they fell back into the bed and he started kissing her again, her neck and arms and then her breasts and said, Is this okay?
Yes, she said, perhaps too impatiently because he still wasn’t touching her there, though all their clothes were off. A breeze blew over them, and the white curtain at the half-opened window lifted slightly just above Emily and allowed the sweet scent of some flower into the room, the suddenly animate cloth and the fragrance seeming the effect of an unlikely cause: that he finally lowered his hand and touched her and, in this way, stirred the elements outside, which made her think of God, of Jesus again, whom she shouldn’t be thinking of, not now that Walter was touching her like this. At least, she no longer believed, though God had been very real to her as a girl, even as a teenager. She’d prayed every day. And he was still very real to Emily’s mother, who volunteered five mornings a week as the secretary of their small parish and who revered the priest, Father Keenan, though he wasn’t an intelligent or nice man. He had a large pie face and gave off a vague, encompassing body odor and reminded his parishioners every Sunday that we are sinners, all of us, and that we would do well to remember that Jesus died and defeated death for us.
It was only a few years ago that Emily had come home from a college course on theology and feminism and told her mother that Jesus had been many things—a radical, a revolutionary, and, most likely, given the company he kept, gay. But he wasn’t God. He was merely historical. His resurrection was just a metaphor.
Nonsense, her mother said in her sharp English accent. You don’t know everything, Emily.
She told her mother other things, too, in the heat of their argument—that her body was her body, that she could choose to do with it as she liked, that she was on birth control and was even having sex with her boyfriend, and that should they make a mistake, she would get an abortion. She’d wanted to make her mother angry, to hear her say, as Emily knew she would, that her body was not hers, that we are not our own, that we belong to the God who made us. So old world, her mother, though that hadn’t stopped Emily from asking her if she’d ever had one herself.
One what? her mother asked, her face red because she knew what Emily meant.
An orgasm, Emily said, and her mother half laughed before she snapped back, You don’t have to have that—this was as close to the actual word as her mother got—to enjoy it, you know?
Nonetheless, a few days later, Emily got her a book. It’s an instruction manual, she said. It will show you where everything is and tell you what to do with it.
I don’t need this, her mother snapped. Why would you give me this? And while their back-and-forth turned quickly into an argument, her mother didn’t give the book back. That was something.
Finally, however, her mother seemed to have the last word, because when Emily’s depression struck her down only a few months later, she’d felt very much that her body was not her own. It was a trap: the arms and legs, the torso, the head, the face that used to contain something that Emily would call herself, a thinking, feeling person, were all at once a dull mass that she couldn’t escape and that she experienced as something that had to be taken care of or it would start to smell and look awful. But the cleaning and wiping and washing took more initiative than she had. She tried to pray, wanting again to be the girl who believed, who felt the light of God and Jesus inside her. But he was just a metaphor. When he’d been whipped, cut, pierced by thorns, and crucified, it was an idea and not a body that rose up afterward. And though all she’d wanted was to get up herself, brush her teeth, shower, and go to class, which she hadn’t done in days and would continue not to do for weeks and months, nobody, nothing heard her prayer.
And yet now, more than a year later, she was lying over a bed in a dim room with this man beside her and then on top of her. And he was finally touching her where she’d wanted to be touched and asking again, Is this okay?
Yes, she whispered. She wanted to tell him that he didn’t need to ask anymore. He could just do to her what he was going to do. And yet she liked the sound of his voice, the way, with each question, she was ceding control. And now he asked her if he could enter her and she said yes and he did. And he asked her if that was okay, and she said yes again, wondering how many times she would say this word even as she enjoyed saying it, the soft, open vowel that dissolved in breathy sibilance and seemed, with each articulation, to open her up still more. Yes, yes, yes . . . And she felt a warm, sure light fill her body, starting at that place between her legs and rushing out from there, through her limbs, into her arms and fingers, rising through her torso to that tender place at the back of her neck, from where it spread and lifted into her head and face so that her eyes, she felt certain, were glowing. So much light. At the same time, she pictured—this was silly and not really what she’d expected—Walter’s mother. How easy she was to see, in her bright kitchen with evening sunlight reflecting on the counters and table as she meticulously prepared his dinner, some potatoes, a piece of meat, a green vegetable. He was asleep in his room, still so broken and sad that he could do nothing for himself, couldn’t be out in the world that his mother loved because there was so much to know about it. She had a class that night that would show her still more about the inscrutability of God or Hegel. She had to leave him and this worried her and was the reason she prepared his food so carefully. She was pretty in her knee-length skirt and pastel blouse, though not so pretty as to intentionally attract anyone. Intimacy is dangerous. She left a note on the kitchen table telling Walter that his dinner was in the fridge, that he should heat it up, that she would be home very soon, and that she loved him.
Emily understood then, even as Walter arched above her, that you would not—of course, not—want this woman to keep her suffering a secret or to die alone. Emily grasped his shoulders, then his torso, then his buttocks, pushing him into her and feeling still more light—and of such a radiance—enter her and fill her up. She closed her eyes, perhaps to contain this light and perhaps to contain her thoughts, too, which were fluid and which she wanted to notice as she thought them. She thought: Carpenter of Nazareth. Emmanuel. Son of God. She thought: She would never tell her mother about this. She thought: Or maybe she would. She thought: Me, me, me. She thought: But he is merely historical, a distributor of dental equipment. She thought: He will be with his mother—of course he will—when she dies. She thought: My grandmother, wrapped in black dresses, wed to a dead man, never felt anything like this. She thought: What was the old woman trying to tell me? Maybe it is better to wonder than to know. She thought: My mother reveres a smelly priest, but she kept that book. She thought: God is everything that we don’t know or sense or intuit. He is precisely that. She thought: Your body is not your own. It was so dark. It was nothing but darkness. Please, God, never let that happen again. She thought: But now I am full of light.
John Fulton is the author of four books of fiction, most recently The Flounder and Other Stories (Blackwater Press, 2023). His work has been awarded a 2024 NEA Fellowship in fiction and a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Ploughshares, Missouri Review, The Sun, and Zoetrope, among other venues.
Elsewhere on the site: read more about Issue 21.2, and peruse a special folio on writing about sex.
