The Moment after the Moment It Would Have Mattered

The Moment after the Moment It Would Have Mattered Amy Benson I was, as always, conscious ofmy body. Bronzed Europeans sat around me on a beach on Crete, many of the women in bikinis, the top folded or flung to the towel beneath them. The women in one-piece suits had popped the straps off their shoulders and roUed the suits down past their beUies. Some of the breasts hung to the side, slightly deflated. I could see Greek men on the periphery, falsely deferential, cool and leering. These men and I had something in common. We watched—the men shrugging and smiling , me with my straps firmly in place. They felt the air on their breasts, these women. And those who swam? The salty Mediterranean dripped from their nipples and down into their bikini bottoms. It dried in sparkly streaks across their myopic breasts. I saw it aU behind my sunglasses. Didn't they know themselves interesting, watchable—maybe vulnerable in their skins? I would be hard-pressed to find one picture of myself in which I did not look as if a teacup would crumble to chalk in my hands. I am that cautious, tense and poised. And I am not alone. Isn't every American under surveiUance, on audition, stalked? The faces of these women are different. They are not always about to be discovered. But the sun set low, as suns do, and the women covered their bereft nipples , gathered books, blankets, baskets, and families, and left through hüls of azaleas. Even the Greek men packed up their drink stands, and towels, and trinkets, their need, scorn, and boredom, and went home. I was alone with my blue-veined breasts and the poised tension of my hands. No audience. In every landscape there is a focal point, and after the women left, the point was a rock rising up like a fiery forehead, cooled, just breaking the surface of the stiU Mediterranean. People had been jumping from this rock all afternoon. They looked like they were having fun. Now that they were gone, I paddled out to this rock. To my left the sun was bleeding into the water, but I could stiU see, on the other side ofthe rock, the side people had 75 76Fourth Genre been jumping and diving into all day more rocks under the surface, more dark places where briny creatures could curl. I was simultaneously afraid of diving into this unknown under the darkening sky and of not diving and the subsequent withering of my life. This was a test, a precipice. If I could not bare my breasts or dive from this rock, I could no longer be an authentic person, a person who acts without thinking of a present or future audience . So I swayed on the rough pumice rock for a long time, watching my life shutter closed in the water below. FinaUy, I reached up and pushed a strap off one shoulder, then another, then my cotton suit feU below my navel. I glanced quickly over my shoulder, but the beach was empty and the sea in front of me was one unbroken skin to mainland Greece. I dove in. I felt the velvet water palm my breasts and stomach, and the rest of my suit fluttered against my thighs. I told myself I was saved, new in my skin. But as I paddled back to shore, pulling my straps back up, the empty beach bespoke the emptiness ofgestures. I knew I was long past the moment when any of this would have counted for bravery, for soul, even for nonchalance. Life is fuU of such precipices. Just now, for example, I am standing at the edge of honesty, afraid to keep talking for what I might say. I have a story to teU, and, though I write and write about the sparkling-eyed boy, I haven't told it yet. To imagine doing so makes me feel naked, naked like a foot, like the red, wrinkled sole of a foot. And if I keep talking, FU teU you things I never intended, which may, for just that very reason, seem like the truth. Once, as...