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grass with their dark eyes cuffed—like loving someone who just has to tip over one thing, and everything’s on fire.
    The boy lives on the water, the opposite coast. School is in the center of the state, so it’s a long drive for him. We’ve been out a few times. I’ve only been drunk once. We’d gone to the Night Train,when I still worked there. The manager had seen me at the bar. “We’re short tonight,” he said. “We need you.” So I drove the boy back to school, and we had sex in my car in the English Department parking lot. I went to work; he’d gone home.
    The boy wants to cook for me, something with curry. I’ve never had a boyfriend who could cook. He lives with his mother and father, sister. There is going to be a big family wedding reception at a hotel. All his family there, all his friends. I can’t remember who is getting married. I want to take you there and show them how beautiful you are , he says. The boy stirs at the stove. My vanilla yellow boots are roomy below the knee, as if for some cowboy fabric, the burr and heft of the range.
    When pain receptors in your body start to burn from the heat of curry, they release endorphins to comfort you, the one they love most. So some people get addicted, wanting it hotter and hotter. Pain coming from the Latin for fine, penalty. There’s pain of the nerves, blood vessels, visceral pain from the body’s organs, phantom pain, pain of the skin cut open, and extreme sadness in the torso. Receptors at the surface bob free, a path for fast pain and slow. With slow pain, there’s a horn to pass, your dorsal, the fish we came from finned inside us, and upward travel. Pain has a gate to get through before your body makes its own opium, endorphins sounding like something that swims.
    I don’t like curry, but I eat the meal, lit up sitting with the boy. At the wedding party, in the hall where the reception is held, there are bottles. A bowl of alcohol. I drink glass after glass, until I have to lean against the wall. I slide down to the floor. The boy looks concerned, wonders if I’m ill. Why was I falling as if I’d forgotten what the body is for, how it works?
    The singer in the band dances with me, looks surprised when his hat floats away on my head. I tell the boy I’m going to the bathroom. But when I drift out the door unafraid, someone saysthere is a party somewhere, and I find it. In the room is a big bed, and the blanket scratches slightly, though who is in the bed, the room—it is all unclear. I only remember the bubble of noise around me, someone touching me so that I’m not alone, someone choosing me. And then the darkness of the door opening—all the doors the boy must have tried to find me, a hotel of doors.
    Later, alone with him, I say, Baby . He does love me again before the night is out—a few hours of mercy—before he faces his friends, his family, sister who names me The Dancing Girl. We were back at his house, everyone asleep. I was twisting alone on the couch until I couldn’t stand being away from him any longer. Regardless of the noise, the risk of waking his parents, I climb the stairs to his bed. His eyes are open and sharp in a long way, as if even the shape of his eyes has changed. He rises, guides me to the garage, and the darkness of the car. It is the only private place, the only place we can be unheard. Stick shift between us like a planchette for a Ouija board, as if it can answer his questions. He keeps asking, What were you doing ? I try to tell him about the extreme sadness in my torso. All I can talk about is Tommy. There are men whose hands I can’t remember, the touch of their bodies, no physical memory of sex. But when I tell the boy, whose name is Tom, when I tell him about my son, he weeps. He holds me against his body as if he is inside me. And that holding on stays with me, like the painted works of mercy.

The Last Time I Saw Her
    There is a last even of last times.
    — SAMUEL BECKETT
    By the summer of