Break It Down Read Free Page B

you get in bed you can’t help it, it’s a real performance, it all pours out, but slowly, you go easy until you can’t anymore, or you hold back the whole time, you hold back and touch the edges of everything, you edge around until you have to plunge in and finish it off, and when you’re finished, you’re too weak to stand but after a while you have to go to the bathroom and you stand, your legs are trembling, you hold on to the door frames, there’s a little light coming in through the window, you can see your way in and out, but you can’t really see the bed.
    So it’s not really $100 a shot because it goes on all day, from the start when you wake up and feel her body next to you, and you don’t miss a thing, not a thing of
what’s next to you, her arm, her leg, her shoulder, her face, that good skin, I have felt other good skin, but this skin is just the edge of something else, and you’re going to start going, and no matter how much you crawl all over each other it won’t be enough, and when your hunger dies down a little then you think how much you love her and that starts you off again, and her face, you look over at her face and can’t believe how you got there and how lucky and it’s still all a surprise and it never stops, even after it’s over, it never stops being a surprise.
    It’s more like you have a good sixteen or eighteen hours a day of this going on, even when you’re not with her it’s going on, it’s good to be away because it’s going to be so good to go back to her, so it’s still here, and you can’t go off and look at some old street or some old painting without still feeling it in your body and a few things that happened the day before that don’t mean much by themselves or wouldn’t mean much if you weren’t having this thing together, but you can’t forget and it’s all inside you all the time, so that’s more like, say, sixteen into a hundred would be $6 an hour, which isn’t too much.
    And then it really keeps going on while you’re asleep, though you’re probably dreaming about something else, a building, maybe, I kept dreaming, every night, almost, about this building, because I would spend a lot of every morning in this old stone building and when I closed my eyes I would see these cool spaces and have this
peace inside me, I would see the bricks of the floor and the stone arches and the space, the emptiness between, like a kind of dark frame around what I could see beyond, a garden, and this space was like stone too because of the coolness of it and the gray shadow, that kind of luminous shade, that was glowing with the light of the sun falling beyond the arches, and there was also the great height of the ceiling, all this was in my mind all the time though I didn’t know it until I closed my eyes, I’m asleep and I’m not dreaming about her but she’s lying next to me and I wake up enough times in the night to remember she’s there, and notice, say, once she was lying on her back but now she’s curled around me, I look at her closed eyes, I want to kiss her eyelids, I want to feel that soft skin under my lips, but I don’t want to disturb her, I don’t want to see her frown as though in her sleep she has forgotten who I am and feels just that something is bothering her and so I just look at her and hold on to it all, these times when I’m watching over her sleep and she’s next to me and isn’t away from me the way she will be later, I want to stay awake all night just to go on feeling that, but I can’t, I fall asleep again, though I’m sleeping lightly, still trying to hold on to it.
    But it isn’t over when it ends, it goes on after it’s all over, she’s still inside you like a sweet liquor, you are filled with her, everything about her has kind of bled into you, her smell, her voice, the way her body