Beautiful Soon Enough

Contract

Contract The contract they made when it began had this for content: When or if we do not love as we do now—we can stop the engine. That’s it. We’ve said it. All I have is you. And they signed it, their fingertips dipped first in a hundred-dollar bottle of red wine and then in each one’s perfume. The ink they used to sign the page stained their hands like henna tattoos. They did not wash for a week. 168 berdeshevsky The white and shiny car was found. The husband who outlived her did as they’d promised. Tasted her ashes before he gave the wind its portion. The problem was that he did not die quickly afterwards, as predicted, that predictions are unreliable, that there were a thousand more places to make love. More. That he lived, and continued to count. A man with eyelashes longer than hers. It began with the husband. —Let’s not have children, love. Let’s be only “us.” Like this. Forever. Like this, was traveling. Like this, was fingers and tongues and thirst and thrusting and riding, in a hundred places in a year; they would count. Between the Bombay garden shadows. Past-midnight low light, in a town square in Tuscany. He laughed, —Right here in front of God and everyone? —Yes, she said, leading. A rooftop in the East Village under fireworks and then, sleet. In the Plaza Hotel elevator, one hand on the red Stop button, one demanding to be inside her, quickly. At the Montauk tide line, a stiffened winter deer washed up on the same sand. In a Denver road stop. In a hotel flame. With no curtains. With hunger. With steak. In a train station at dawn in Iowa. On the lake raft fronting a house they never owned. They wanted to have made love in a thousand places before they died. They were dying; nothing to cry about, so was everybody. The wife stopped it. My heart can burst now, she wrote on the hotel mirror in Barcelona, using nail polish the same color as the fuchsia orchids on their breakfast table. Then she drove the white shiny car until it burst. Nothing in their contract said that. ...