If I Told You Once: A Novel by Judy Budnitz Page B

across the ocean, the golden gates, the wide avenues and long warm days and the machines that swept and polished the streets of gold every day.
    His eyebrows jumped. He laughed and said, yes, those are good stories, I love those stories.
    They’re not just stories, I said. Are they?
    He said nothing.
    It is possible to go there, isn’t it?
    Oh, yes, he said. I’m going there myself. My sister and I. We are going quite soon, in fact, and we will find work there and set up a home and send for our parents as soon as we can.
    My heart leaped up, though I could not say why.
    Where are you sailing from? he asked, and then spoke of a port city I had never heard of.
    Yes, I’ll leave from there too, I said.
    Have you booked a passage yet? he asked curiously.
    No.
    Do you have money?
    Oh yes, I said.
    Do you have papers? he said.
    Papers?
    Identification papers, he said, you can’t go without them.
    I’ll get some, I said vaguely.
    He opened his mouth, but said no more, and we rocked together with the motion of the wagon, it was like waves on a stormy sea.
    Night after night, in town after town, I watched the play. Night after night I waited in dread, gasping and then sighing as he died and came back to life. After each performance it was a relief to see his smile, his crooked teeth, touch his warm skin and feel the blood thrumming through him.
    Every night he rubbed his thumbs under my eyes, wiping away tears.
    He could not understand it.
    He said: How can this frighten you? This show is child’s play compared to all the things you’ve seen.
    How could I explain.
    We slept in side by side, or back to back as I had with Ari long ago. Until the night when he laid his head on my chest and tentatively slipped his hand under my skirt. Then I laughed so hard his head rode up and down on my breast, because I knew I was wearing such a multitude of clothing, so many layers of skirts and petticoats and underclothes that it was a maze down there and he would never find his way.
    I pushed his head away and stood up, and he thought I was angry but I only wanted to help him. I began to strip it all off, as I had one time before but this time there was no shame in it and I could not do it fast enough. He stared amazed as the rough woolen clothes began to pile up on the floor. The mound rose as high as the bed and still I was struggling with buttons and clasps.
    Finally I was free of it all, I could feel my hair brushing against my back and legs, and I felt wondrously light. Air touched me everywhere like a bath. Goose bumps raised up all over my skin but I was not cold, simply alert at every pore. I knelt beside him again and took his hand.
    My God but you’re a tiny thing, he said. I would have never guessed. You must carry your own weight in clothing.
    I was cold, I said.
    He undressed then, and I saw that his body was as finely made and tightly strung as his violin; when I touched him in one place he vibrated elsewhere. I fingered the bones of his back, one by one, and as he pressed hard against me I looked into his ear as if I had never seen one before and it was perfect, whorled and many-chambered like some sea creature.
    That night I felt something I had never felt before, a pulsing warmth that began low but soon swelled and swelled until it filled me entirely and crowded out all other feeling, and finally when it could not swell anymore it popped like a bubble and died back down and I felt again his hands on my back.
    I thought then about the people I had seen, men and women both, and the strange things that women had driven men to do, and that men had driven women to do, all in the name of desire, and for the first time I began to understand it a bit.
    Afterward when he lay beside me breathing slow and even (his eyes were closed, so I could not bear to look at him) I glanced down and saw that I was sprinkled with hair. Dark curly hairs from his chest that had stuck to my chest and belly. They looked as if they had taken root there,