Husbands & Lovers

by Beatriz Williams

He opened the door for me, and for an instant we made eye contact. Sun blind.

You could make a case that we have the same kind of hair, the same type of pretty. But Lennox is the shiny version of me, like somebody ran me through a few Photoshop filters until I came out perfect. Which somehow makes it worse. I’m the rough draft; she’s the finished copy.

I have the feeling he’s studying me, looking me in the eyes, even though I’m only pretending to look into his. I mean, how could I look right into his eyes, the way he’s looking at me? I would scorch to a crisp.

“I can’t bring you back to life, Hannah,” he said. “You can choose to live again, or not. But I can make you remember what it was like to be alive.”

I think we needed to hurt a little, date the wrong people, just so we know when it’s right.”

I suppose, when your parents fail you, you either go to pieces or you become the grown-up you require. Or maybe our Monk is just that kind of extraordinary boy who would’ve thrived wherever you planted him.

I remember thinking how strange it was to feel sad in the middle of so much happiness, how you couldn’t just experience joy all by itself without feeling as if you had somehow stolen it from somewhere else. That there was only so much joy in the world.

I recognized the number as the same one he had fourteen years ago, which astounded me. All this time, he was just a single drunk text away.

“This summer with you, Mallory. The way you love me, the way you see me, the way you show me how to see myself? It’s like finally I know for sure, for dead certain, what I was put on this earth for. And I’m just supposed to walk away from that?”

Alistair was an experienced, graceful dancer. Sometimes Hannah wondered how a man could dance so beautifully and yet fuck you like a marionette.

Lennox—Lee, I remind myself, and for some reason this is a difficult mental transition—lounges on her stomach in a Barbie-pink bikini the size of a Kleenex and flips through her phone.

I want to surround people with art. I want people to touch my designs, to sleep with them, to sit on them, to eat off them. That’s how art began, to make everyday things beautiful, to make meaning out of use. I don’t know where we got this idea that art should be worshipped.

“It’s important to know where you came from,” she says. “It’s a part of you. But it doesn’t have to define you. They give you the paper and ink, but you write the story yourself.”

he thinks with raw, sudden shame of the other hands that have touched his body, the other bodies he has touched with his hands. The guilt of it drenches him. He can’t stand it, her faith.