Sixty-one

Ben was sixty-one in September the year the towers were brought down, a mess of smoke and rubble too tragic to serve as metaphor to his own aging. When his wife woke him that morning there was something new in her voice, she was saying “good morning” and “happy birthday” and other greetings he only half-heard, a menagerie of dull sounds marking the morning. He opened his eyes to see his wife’s smile, blurry until he reached for his glasses on the side table. Her face was old. It was essentially the same, but still different with the passing of time, with lines carved into her like rings in a tree.

They had been afraid of growing old from what they had seen of it. It was hard to imagine each other being gray, hunched over with the weight of years, carrying pill cases with the days of the week written on the top. They discussed these fears together in the early years of marriage, as if they could stop time. They learned that fear postponed nothing.

After wishing him a happy birthday she said, “There’s been an attack.”

The news says “terrorism”, the news says thousands dead and shows people jumping from buildings with the wild hope they might sprout wings and keep going until they brush the ground gently, having saved themselves.

Terrorism is a new and strange word to Ben’s tongue, like the taste of a girl the first time he kisses her: like the taste of Emily in the darkness where the shadows of their houses met. When he kissed her the first time he was newly fourteen but she looked older, taking out a pack of her mother's Parliaments and hitting the top against her palm. She offered him one with her own cigarette burning in the center of her lips. He declined.

That summer, the summer he loved her first, was bright and filled with adventures had by boys anticipating the strife of adulthood, sealing the story of their childhood with scraped knees from climbing the big oak on the edge of the wood. Bridging his boyhood with his manhood was the body of a woman, and that summer Emily whispered into his neck that she didn't believe in God anymore, and every night he prayed for her.

After the disclosure of her godlessness, he did not speak to her but in dreams, and these dreams were always the same. He is in church beside his mother, and she is singing the hymn and then Emily is there in place of her, but she is wearing nothing but beads of sweat down her back. Her breasts hang heavy and her pink nipples are pointed and she touches herself, her mouth is wide and Ben cannot reach for her, his mouth spills hymns but he wants to touch her. Ben wakes, ashamed, and prays for himself.

Longing and denial proved to be routine for a month, and on his fifteenth birthday she came to him. Sticky with the taste of oranges, her lips apologized to his lips, apologized to his skin, her hands apologized to places they shouldn't have until he stopped her short of truly making amends. Fall came, and he noticed the cross that hung in the secret divide between her breasts, and then he noticed the divide more than the cross.

He could count the bruises, blossoming swollen on the backs of her thighs, he could read them like Braille but never knew what they said. Her father slept on the sofa like a giant hulking monster and she learned to climb out windows and down the drainpipe with a deft kind of shimmy. In the half-light of the moon he kissed where her skin was dark and sore, where her lips were rough and tasted like copper and blood.

Some nights he saw her silhouette on the window shade, watched her engulfed by a different darkness, a shadow that knew her skin the way he did and he finished all over his hand, sweat running down and stinging his eyes.

"Oh God," he prayed over and over into the softness of his pillow, the darkness of his room. "Oh God, oh God, oh God."

He took her to the courthouse three Octobers after. In bed, her smile shook and her eyes swam in water like two sinking boats, her gaze sailing elsewhere. He traced freckles to burns to bruises and she moaned in a Morse code that matched the shape of her scars.

They had four children, all boys with strong arms and legs, except for the youngest who was lanky and angular, the geometry of his body awkward and incorrect. The older three called him Runt in the way only brothers could, threatening other boys with all kinds of childish defamation should they use the nickname.

Runt loved a girl who smoked on her back porch with her skirt hiked up around her thighs because of the heat.

Runt loved a girl who died the summer he made love to her, the doctors a solemn chorus of "we did all we could" and they brought a tuna casserole to the wake. Runt stayed in her bedroom, a cathedral filled with the ghosts of first love, and breathed in the scent of her dresses, picking up her hairbrush, her scarf, one holy artifact after another. He cut some of her bed sheets with the scissors she used in school and sewed it into his jacket.

That year he trained for the army but went into investment banking instead. His small stature and constant fear when he thought too deeply kept him from war, but he watched the news night after night in his small apartment and dreamed of enemies and snipers and M16's and all the things young boys dream when they play pretend with green plastic army men.

"Ben?" Emily asked of the soft brightness of morning that fell onto her face along with the TV's harsh blue light. He let the words move through his head and he knew they were bred of sadness though the emotion sounded awkward in her voice, like a child in the arms of someone else's mother.

The news reports were dominated by smoke and unpronounceable names and every attempt at a body count dug itself deeper into Ben because every empty number, every anonymous limp body on the TV screen was Runt, over and over again: Runt being carried from the buildings, Runt being pulled from the rubble, Runt jumping from the highest windows.

Ben remembered touching Emily in the relative quiet of a home with three young boys, nervous and imagining he could hear the soft breathing of sons in other rooms and when he became distracted Emily's mouth and hands brought him back to bed. That night Emily said she wanted another baby, kneading her stomach made soft from three babies before, and Ben laid his head on her chest and heard the sounds her heart made as it kept her alive and thought, How strange, so small and steady a sound, so far away and dull, and it keeps us moving, it keeps me beside her and keeps her warm.

He made love to her, her orgasm a silent shudder, a work of self-censorship, the way it always had been, as his wife and as the shadow in the window across the way.

Emily did not cry, though she was accustomed to tears. The older boys came home and stayed silent to disguise the lumps in their throats because their mother was hiding her own tears and strong boys do not cry. If they learned one thing from their father it was that men did not cry. And they saw that men did not cry, for their father never cried, not at the burial of the kitten they rescued the summer before the twins entered middle school, the cat they watched die and all three boys sobbed and even though they were nearly twelve they bent over their father's lap and received a belt-smack to the ass.

"Men do not cry," Ben reprimanded to his swollen-eyed boys, who nodded and went to cry into their pillows instead. But Runt never cried; he stroked the fur of the stiff, dead cat as they moved its body into the pillowcase it was buried in.

A foreign-voiced man answered the phone to confirm the cancellation of dinner, and Ben hated him. He held the phone in a tense fist and wished his youngest had joined the army and learned to hate as easily as his father did, standing in the kitchen and hating the voice of a stranger.

Though dinner was cancelled, there was still a cake, with brightly colored candles, but both candles were towers and he only imagined Runt's face in the flames, the floor a mess of blood because the logic of imagination is like the logic of dreams, and he saw Runt's face half-melted, arms reaching out for an eye or a bit of nose as he escaped the flame, teeth falling from his mouth so dark with blood that it seemed he was throwing up shadows on the soaked carpet.

"Blow out the candles, Dad," his oldest began with a little smile in the drafty kitchen when evening swooped down on the skyline and he looked at his wife across the table and noticed her smudged lipstick creeping into the wrinkles around her mouth and staining her skin, noticed the fear of God gone from her eyes, the cross gone from her neck.

He cried, and in that moment knew he was not a man, he was a child, fists striking the table, fists backed with the power of all his hatred, the force of his loss. He knew the sore feeling of the beginnings of bruises all along the sides of his hands, and he cried for sixty-one years of tears he had not cried, for every skinned knee and every time Emily snuck into his window and he could not make love to her, she would not let him make love to her, he could not, for the love of his God, of Jesus Christ his personal Lord and Savior—he could not touch her. He cried for every burn that still scarred the insides of Emily’s thighs, for every war lost and every fear he learned to be afraid of in time.

He cried for Emily and his family, the mistakes they make as humans, as failed soldiers and as bankers, as victims and as men.

Emily took the cake up with a quickness that extinguished the candles, and Ben cried at the table for every year he had loved her and never helped her, for the lives of his boys who loved each other, for the lives of the people on TV who cried for their children.

He cried for his children.