Alicia lay awake on the bed in the dark, touching the bone basket of her ribs, the bone bird of her hipbones. Although she was wrapped in blankets, she felt cold. The room she shared with Peter was really a sunporch. All summer they had looked out at the plum tree and honey-suckle and felt the sun through the glass. But now it was autumn and raining. The tree in the yard was a skeleton like the one Alicia's father used in his anatomy class..
Alicia's stomach made noises like a cat as she curled up under the blankets. She did not shut her eyes. She did not want to see what was there in her head - the naked body, all bones and whiteness, crouched in a marble box. But she could not escape the voice that easily.
I will not eat cakes or cookies or food. I will be thin thin pure. I will be pure and empty.
That morning the psychiatrist had asked, "Why are you starving yourself?" and she had known all the right answers. Escaping the responsibilities of growing up, having control over something at least, being beautiful, perfect, for once, making people pay attention, love her. She smiled to herself that she could know all this and still skip dinner, still jog five miles in the rain. She had not told the psychiatrist about Peter.
During her first months away from home, she had wandered the on the campus looking into the faces of the men. Then, at a party, she had seen Peter wearing a white shirt and drinking gin. He looked like the pictures of her father when he had first met her mom - long legs, narrow chest, a shyness of eyelashes.
He walked her to the dorm, and the air smelled rich and sooty after the rain, like flowers could grow in it.
"You look like a poet," she said when he told her what was in the notebook with the torn binding.
"It frustrates me. It's all this pretentious self-centered angst. I want it to change things."
He kissed her good night and held her for a moment, she was surprised how cool his skin felt, except for the heat in the hollow of his back. The memory of that heat through his thin shirt stayed in her palms all night. When she touched herself in her dorm bed, she said his name out loud in the dark. She wanted to tell him that he had already changed something.
A few nights later, they went to a cafe in the city with sawdust floors and steamy windows. Peter talked about the Beats who used to hang there, reciting their poetry.
A skinhead with a swastika tattoo walked by the window, screaming, "Kill the Jews!"
Alicia's knuckles whitened around the edges of the table.
"I don't think violence is ever justified," Peter said, pouring Alicia more bright gold wine from the glass decanter.
She wanted to make the swastika bleed. But to Peter she just said, "Never?"
He must have heard the tightness of her voice. He looked out across Broadway at the nipples of a neon sex goddess flashing on and off. "I know, I know. Maybe," he said.
He bit his lip. It was full and soft in contrast to his narrow face. Alicia felt her thighs weaken, like the muscles were sponges soaking up wine.
That night in his tiny dorm bed, the heat she had discovered in Peter's back pulsed through her whole body. She looked into his eyes and found herself trapped in the irises.
After that, they were inseparable, always holding hands, always touching, almost bound together. Like two bodies wrapped up as one mummy, Alicia thought. They felt as if nothing else, no one else mattered. Most weekends they would take BART to the cafe and pretend to be different people.
"What do you think of the way Vermeer used light?" she asked him. She was playing the older-woman artist. The woman with the bay-windowed house full of flowering cactus plants that you had to water very gently by pouring drops just into the center of the spiny green leaves. The frankinsense-and-myrrh-scented woman with the huge hoop earrings and turquoise rings, and lines carved around her eyes.
"You'll have to take me to some museums," he said. He was being the young man on the road, following the sun because gray weather made him suicidal, writing his poetry on the walls of gas station men's rooms across the country. "But I did see a show of - I think his name was Hopper - once. And I like his light. It was kind of lonely or something."
Or, "'The world's a mess, it's in my kiss,' like John and Exene said," he mumbled. They were being punks on acid with skunk striped hair and steel-toed boots.
"Fuck, yes. Let's go to Mexico, shave our heads, get drugs, wear beads and silver."
Once, he pretended to be a professor teaching her about William Carlos Williams. He came up behind her, so quiet, while she was reading, and put his hands inside her shirt. "The eroticism is very subtle here."
"If I were a boy I'd be you," Alicia said.
"You'd be wilder."
She cut her hair and wore his shirts. The shirts smelled musky, like sweat and sandalwood soap, like him or like them, she wasn't sure. Sometimes she put eyeliner on him and he looked prettier than she did. Men in the Castro stared. Leather-chapped chaps and pale, pierced boys with blue hair.
Then Alicia gained a few pounds from all the Sunday croissants that left buttery stains on the napkins, the Kahlua-and-milks, and from the birth control pills she had started to take. She dug her nails into the unfamiliar flesh - the breasts, the hips. It was like they belonged to some other girl. Peter stayed so thin.
Once, near the end of the semester, she broke an empty gin bottle - threw it to the floor and felt it shatter as if it were a part of her, as the bones in her wrist were glass splintering. Peter held her, hunching his shoulders to shield, and she choked on her tears, squeezing her belly, disgusted with the extra pounds that had lumped themselves there.
Alicia and Peter moved in together a few weeks after that. It was June. They shared the tiny glass cube at the end of the house, filling it with things they had collected - old Velvet Underground, Chopin, Hendrix, X, and T. Rex on vinyl, books of Frank O'Hara, John Donne and Emily Dickinson, posters of Klimt and Picasso's Blue Period, a wine bottle filled with dried flowers, a plastic dove from the bins of a five-and-dime store.
Alicia went off the pill and started to lose weight.
When Peter was at work, she lay in the garden sun, letting the warmth burn into her. She waited for Peter to come home; there was no one else she thought of spending time with. On weekends, they took drives in the country, jogged in the hills, went to museums, read poetry in cafes, took photographs of each other. There was a slowness about them. They didn't stay up late anymore, sawdust whispers over wine, beat-love-poetry all night.
By the end of the summer something was changing. Peter seemed preoccupied, distant, staring into his coffee or his book. After they made love, they slept apart. The single bed seemed too small for the first time. Alicia would turn away and fill her lungs with air. Peter ground his teeth in his sleep.
When they went out, Alicia noticed all the women, wishing they were tall like that, blond like that. Her eyes darted from the women to Peter.
She was not getting her period, so she went to the doctor for a pregnancy test.
"You're not pregnant," the doctor said. "Have you been eating?"
She told Peter that night, "I think I'm really sick."
He didn't say anything, just looked at her with glazed eyes. She wanted him to say, "Oh baby, it'll be okay. We'll take care of it. It was what her father would have said. She wanted him to take her out to dinner and order brown rice and vegetables and white wine.
That night she lay in the darkness and she shivered; her stomach growled.
"Peter," she whispered
He sighed, "What's wrong?"
"I can't sleep. I feel weak."
"You should eat something, then," he said.
He turned his back to her. Alicia curled up, her head under the covers, wondering what she wanted from him.
She heard the grind of molars next to her in the bed.
Now, Alicia heard Peter hesitating outside her door before he came in. He put on the light. It burned her eyes like a chemical. The rain had darkened his hair, pressed it against his skull, and his eyelashes were starred with wet. He held roses in his nervous hands.
Alicia hated roses. She hated the pink wet roses he was holding. The flowers reminded her of the morning she woke up to a quilt covered with flowers he had stolen from the neighborhood. The way they had made love, crushing petals until the whole room smelled of pollen and sex. They reminded her of his wounded looking mouth as he read his poems.
Peter handed her the roses and took off his jacket. The water had gone through his shirt so that it stuck to his thin shoulders and chest. He was the same white as his shirt.
"Thank you for the flowers, Peter," Alicia said in the voice she knew he hated. She sounded perfectly controlled. She put the roses down beside her, trying to keep in mind exactly what she was going to tell him.
"I have to talk to you," she said.
Peter sat on the narrow bed beside her. She could smell the rain that had soaked into him and she could see how blue his eyes were. She tried not to think of how she kissed those eyes, how the eyelids trembled when he came.
"I'm going home. I dropped out of school today. My mom and dad are coming to get me tomorrow. I'm sorry I didn't tell you first but i realized that I've got to get out of here. I need to be with my dad now."
She had not told the psychiatrist about Peter. She had not told the psychiatrist about her father. He had been diagnosed with cancer just before she went away to school. They had treated him, and now there was more. But he was going to come get her, anyway. He was going to get in the car with her mother, even though it hurt him to sit for too long, and drive up and bring her home. On the phone last night he had waited until she stopped crying and said, "There's only one condition. We're going to stop for Foster's Freeze ice cream on the way. And you know I hate eating dessert alone."
The night she first made love with Peter she had started crying while he was still inside her. She had wanted to ask him if he could feel the crying inside himself, then.
"My dad has cancer," she had said.
And he had just held her, not saying anything, until she fell asleep. A few nights later he told her that his mom had died from it, too. After going through chemo and losing her hair and a lot of weight. He couldn't remember her very well, though. He had a stepmother who has raised him like her own kid. He had shown Alicia her picture. The health shown out of her, aggressive and bright, like her bleached hair.
After that, neither of them talked about Peter's real mother or Alicia's father.
Peter just looked at Alicia now. Then he bit his lower lip and turned his head away. He made a soft, nervous sound, almost like a laugh.
"Well ... how do you feel? You never say anything anymore."
Peter breathed hard through his nose. She saw his shoulders heave. After all this time together it was as if she could see the emotion in him - locked between his scapulae and in his sternum. He looked at her, narrowing his eyes, breathing hard.
"I love you. I just have to leave. I'm a mess. And my dad is sick." She was almost screaming. "Can't you say anything?"
"Just ... let ... me," Peter sounded strangled. There was a long silence of rain and breath. Alicia started to sob into her hands. He watched the sobs shaking her narrow torso. The roses were lying next to her on the bed. Some of the rainwater had soaked into the quilt.
He did not turn but stood facing the door, his hands forming fists, his shoulders stopped but rigid. Alicia wanted him to hold her, to take care of her, to make the pain about her dad dissolve away. She knew this was part of what had ruined everything, but she wanted it once more, anyway. There weren't many men like her father - that kind, that strong. Maybe there weren't any. She rubbed her hands along the backs of her thighs to warm them. Then crossed her arms on her chest and grasped her shoulders. They felt like the skulls of birds.
Finally, Peter turned. She reached up and he took her hands, warming them with his own. Then he knelt and pressed her hands under his armpits. The heat of his body made her hands ache, then tingle.
They did not make love. They had not made love for a while. They had hardly touched for a week. But that night they slept close again, Peter's hands solid heat on her abdomen.
Alicia dreamed her body was all light and shadows and yards of white lace. She was standing beside Peter at the end of a corridor and he turned to her, lifting the veil that hid her face. He leaned to kiss her. She parted red lips, revealing fang-like teeth.
The next morning, Peter kissed her eyes. He took the small plastic dove off the shelf and put it in her hand. Then he left.
Alicia lay on the bed waiting for her parents to come for her.
