Acts of Service

by Lillian Fishman

Why was it that women had always been afraid of my body, as though it might catch us both off guard? In some way we had been brought up to be wary toward all women’s bodies.

How can a body ever be safe when it’s only a body? How can we expect that no stranger will be tempted to torch an empty house?

Anytime you want, you can forsake this dinner party and jump into real life!

I love that phrase, I said. Sex masterpieces. How we should recognize them for the creative adventures they are, she said, with a reluctant smile. Our love scenes. The only chance we’ll ever get to touch the face of heaven.

When I raised my wineglass I felt at the first touch of the glass to my mouth the awareness that this warm, strict body was the reality of glass—this was what glass was, and I was perceiving it—and I felt viscerally around me the sofa and the side table, the cotton of the shirt I had shrugged on, the embossed doors and ceramic lamps and the cabs hustling by in the dark and the new slush beneath their wheels, the glass of the windshields, the grass in the park. I felt that I knew exactly what constituted every material and characterized the life inside it, and I was madly humbled by the vastness and the wonder of my certainty, a blunted version of which I had felt two decades earlier while sitting beside my father in a church pew. I could see it all from above, like a pearly, singing map.

What better way could there be to live? To be in constant motion toward something perfect, a motion that would carry you to the end of your life?