Free Nine Island by Jane Alison Page B

Devil.
    Well, this is an excellent time for words to stay silent inside my head, not be sent by treacherous thumbs to the Devil.

F IRST THE CLUSTER of young men last night, and this morning: by the pool lay two men on lounge chairs who I know don’t live here. Obviously guilty, they’d snuck in. Which you can do. You can slink by the basketball/tennis courts over where the fence comes closest to the building but leaves just enough room, slither through to the dock, and then casually spiral up the staircase like any civilian resident, because the lock has been broken for years. Virgil shakes his head and sighs at it. These men were the breed who make women invisible, but this made them easy to watch. I was swimming, and each time I clutched the rim to gasp, I let my invisible binocular eyes stray over to spy. Between laps one of the men got up lazily and disappeared into the men’s spa while the other smoked, looking up now and then toward the door to the spa; the first one came out and strolled back to his friend. They said something, and the other got up and walked to the spa. I swam three laps and was in the deep end clutching the rim and panting when he came out. He looked altered, loose in the hips.
    Lots going on in the spa, he said to his friend, who looked at him, grinned, shook his head, got up, and went back in. The other one lay down, lifted a knee, lit a cigarette, let his free hand drop.
    Nasty , part of me thought, winging and frogging fast to the shallow end. Hmm, thought another part. What if I could go into the spa after swimming, all wet, with my blood warm and rushing, and maybe not turn on the light but glide over the tiles in the dark and rise up the altar steps to the hot tub, and maybe it’s already bubbling and dreamy, and once I’ve stepped in the warm water and wiggled down and am getting steamy and expansive I discover, oh! another body in there with me?
    I leaned on the cracked lip of the pool trying to decide: man or woman in the tub? Usually it would be a man at this point in the fantasy, but this was the women’s spa, and the idea of a woman with wet slippery breasts seemed good.
    Plunged on.
    Yes yes yes, a warm, wet body is in the bubbling water behind me, and hands suddenly find my hips and pull them to him, okay, sorry, it’s a him, and his legs come up on either side so warm and strong, and he pulls me to him and then has more hands and they each rise over my belly and just under my breasts and linger, as I lean forward to get my breasts to touch them, and then the hands understand and decide to tease and hold themselves out just in front of my nipples in the warm bubbling water and then glide by . . .

S O HERE’S A new question: do I have a choice, at this point?
    Not counting, of course, the Devil.
    Floating and floating in the hourglass pool . . .
    Lotion and sunblock and skin cells of me, seeping into the water, sinking through the pool’s deep belly, dripping down into the cave.
    Another etiology, Hesiod again: he puts Desire in the world at the very start, created only moments after primal Void.
    Aloneness did not have a chance.

J UST AS I GOT to the part of a story where a beautiful boy who wants nothing (Narcissus: a.k.a. you , Sir Gold) dissolves into his quicksilver self, water splashed my balcony table. Not even in the corner where it had drizzled last time, where I’d set the corn plant I found in the trash room and rescued, a corn plant that still had a single live leaf so was not yet completely dead and thus deserved, like many deadbeats, my love.
    I slapped shut the laptop, glared at the balcony above, went inside, stalked through my apartment and down the hall, took the stairs two at a time, and knocked on the door of that lady: silence. Went back downstairs, wrote a note, ran back up, and slid it under her door, panicking that she’d swing open the door just then and charge me with cowardice. As I hustled back down the hall, N