Robert Flanagan

"Take me as I am," she says.

I have many times, and enjoyed it. I am tempted to try it now. I want to believe we could gloss over in our mixed sweat the differences like cage bars between us.

She is kneeling before me, facing away: nakedness gives her the appearance of vulnerability. Her bowed head lets her long black hair fall forward to hide her face like a mourning veil. Her small shoulders give way to a widening, fat-rippled back and overflowing hips and buttocks. She is a promise of softness.

"Take me as I am."

But in the hand mirror she is holding I can see her eyes like bullet holes in the glass. I can tell she doesn't mean it that way this time. It's the other way, the bars between us. She thinks I am trying to change her.

"Hold still."
"Did I hide in the dark until we were married?"
"We've been all through that."
"Were you blind?"
"Hold still. If you move, I'll cut you."
"I know how you mean it. I know what you'd like to do.
"More than I do, I suppose." "Yes."

There is no getting around her when she is like this. I take up the razor and bring it down across the broad flat plane of her shoulder. It leaves a path of creamless, hairless greyish-blue skin so clean I lean forward to kiss it. Her back shudders as if I had touched a high-strung horse.

"You're sick," she says.
"I am a normal man, a normal husband. I love you."

I wipe flecks of shaving cream from the fringes of my mustache which was her insistent idea. We all make compromises. Why won't she see that?

I drag the razor against her skin, rinse it, do it again. The left shoulder is nearly cleared, making the right one, like her lower back and hips, clouded by curling dark hair, look all the worse.

"You're making me sick."
"Don't be melodramatic."
"I mean it," she says. "My stomach's turning."
"A bargain's a bargain."
"Don't remind me."
"I will. I am. You wanted to go camping, didn't you? Didn't you? Answer me."

She says something, her voice a hiss, which sounds like 'slave'. That theme again!

"You're not a slave," I tell her, "You are a free adult. You want to go back on your word?"
"I said 'shave'," she says.

I do. My mind glitters with her clean-shaven image, the way she would let me make her when we were first married. Before her stiffening of intent. Why has she become so suspicious? Would she accuse a surgeon relieving her of a tumor of projecting an ideal upon her at the cost of her identity?

"Hold still."

Afterwards, she wraps herself in a beige orion-pile robe - I will not allow her to own furs - and sulks in the living room. The fire she has built in the grate cannot ease the shadow of her frown. The log flares and pops in the gloom of the house as if it were a handful of twigs burning in deep night woods.

"It's beautiful out here," she said.

It was cold and dark, empty of human company. I had agreed to go only because I could no longer stand her complaints. I had thought it would satisfy her and give me peace, but I knew as soon as I saw the look in her eyes the mistake I had made. Whenever we went berry-picking or camping she became animated and I would think it was to spark a change, but back home she again became distracted, morose, spent entire evenings pacing the living room or staring out a window.

The time before this, I had told her I could no longer
bear it and her abrupt laughter shocked me it was so
savage. I decided then that there would be no more picnics or camping. She would have to learn to live in the real world.

But then she stopped shaving. I took it as long as I could. Nights, I would wake in our bed in the dark and hear breathing and reach for her. That she slept naked had struck me in the first weeks of our marriage as romantic. How quickly reflection overturns first impressions. To touch fur in the dark, my heart jerking like a snared rabbit!

Finally, a rational compromise was reached. We
would vacation that fall in the mountains: She would
resume shaving.

The trouble with reason is that it is one-dimensional; like an aerial photograph it hides the depths of caves which show up as flat black spaces, easily crossed. Experience teaches a man reason's limits, though by that time the fall may have broken both his legs.

"I don't think so," I'd said.
"What?"
"That it's beautiful out here. It's isolated."
"Is that how you feel?" she'd asked.
"You know how I feel."
"I know what you think."
"Oh, don't start. That Noble Savage fantasy ended for me the same year my acne cleared up." I pushed out of my camp chair and lay another split log on the stone-
circled fire. "Why don't you grow up?"

At the edge of the light she had sat on a log, arms wrapped about her knees, pressing them to her chest. She stared out at the surrounding woods, her eyes twin fires. I followed her look. A blank black wall rose up around us like a tidal wave.

I told her I loved her. I did. I was frightened of her too, but would not tell her. I barely allowed myself to guess it.

In the tent in our double bag she had wanted me in her. She squirmed beneath me, grunting as if in pain. Later, she looped an arm under my head and held me to her breast, her free hand stroking my hair or lightly touching my mustache.

Who was trying to change whom?

"I'm having a drink," I say. "Do you want one?"

She pulls her robe more tightly about her, as if my words were a draft in the room. "You didn't adopt me."

"Do you want one?" I teeter on the brink of the room. I want a domestic scene; brandy in stemmed glasses, Mozart on the stereo, a discussion of recent political developments in Washington, her head on my arm, fine blond hair fanning out.

"No one made you my guardian."

But she refuses to cooperate in the slightest way. She wants to draw me into an argument, to go over and over the same old matters as if she were licking a wound.

"Or keeper."
"Why do you want to say things like that? To deliberately hurt me? Why can't you --"
"Show some gratitude?"
"I never said that." I turn back to face her.
"Because you're so charitable." She aims her words like an expert knife-thrower, bracketing the shape she
has chosen for me.
"It has nothing to do with charity."
"Oh yes. To take in the poor girl who
"I didn't take you in. I married you."
"A poor widow."
"Goddamn it! You are not a widow!" She's won. Here we go.

At first the story was only another folk tale to me. A bear took a girl from the village. The men searched for her with no success, and the family performed the mourning rites. Three years later, the girl came to the family's hogan. She was black with dirt and fur. The mother was afraid at first, but the girl cried that she was her daughter. The mother took her in and scrubbed off the dirt and scraped some of the fur from her face and arms. That night the bear prowled the edge of the village, bawling. Some men killed him. The girl stayed on with her family, shunned by the others.
I had gone to the village to research primitive myths. But she was real. I watched, fascinated, as she moved about the hogan, silent and dark. The father would shake his head and look at his feet.

I encouraged the mother to regularly scrub and shave
her daughter. I began helping the girl to remember the
English she had learned before being carried off. We
sat together for hours over school books, her eyes bright with intelligence, her voice softened by the pain of her experience.

During my stay, I took notes for a paper on the
factual basis of animal-mate folktale. But when I left,
she left with me, and I threw away my notes.

When we first started to talk to each other and she asked me if I hunted, I nearly lied. I wanted her respect and I knew the men of her village were hunters. But I told the truth: I had never seen any reason to hunt.

Even as I spoke, I was thinking of how to make her see my behavior in the proper context. The world I lived in was different than hers. Was it my courage she questioned? It took more courage to tell the truth, I thought, than to kill an animal. I was even prepared to tell her I was a vegetarian.

But my confession did not offend her. As I was about to speak further, she touched me for the first time. Despite its stubble, her hand on my wrist seemed to possess a feminine tenderness.

Now that I know her I realize the question that lay
behind the question. But by now the only way I can leave her is to crawl. I would rather fight it out on my own ground. I can and will be firm.

"Do you hear me? You are not a widow."
She stares at the log smoldering in the grate.
"Answer me!"
She nods her head. "I know."
"We have to live in the real world." She is silent. It seems settled. Perhaps this time for good. There will be no more wilderness camping. If we want a vacation, we can rent a cottage at the Cape. Or drive down to New Orleans. "I'll get you a drink."

I awake in the dark and think I am in a tent. The glow of the electric blanket switch anchors me. Her side of the bed is empty.

I surprised her the last night of the trip. I am stronger than I look. When I missed her, got out of the sleeping bag and discovered her at the edge of the clearing, I carried her back to camp. Perhaps she only half-struggled. It comforts me to think so. Still, I felt strong enough to bring her back no matter what she did.

The lights are out in the kitchen. She is looking out the window. I come up behind her. She is eating blueberries with her fingers from a pint box.