All Your Money

Have you ever wanted to give someone
all your money?
-Norman Dubie

I.
The image is of faces pressed against windowpanes on a frosty night; breath, condensation painting ghosts of eyes, nose, mouth on the glass. Is that what you meant? That image stays a moment, maybe two, and then evaporates like invisible ink.

Once, maybe last week, at a bar, I was standing and you were sitting and you looked up at me. My feet lifted off the ground, just for a second. I thought I knew then what the other little girls did at slumber parties, incantations and two fingers stretched towards a lifeless body to make it rise. I thought, Now? But you blinked.

You said this never happened to you. You said, “Can you feel me on this?” You said, “The crowd never parted for me, revealing a beautiful girl with a daffodil mouth in a red dress waiting patiently.”

You said you were a fan of Bach (“You think he cares?” asked the woman next to you. “He’s dead”). And you explained - what enunciation, like you kissed every word - the foresight of Johann Sebastian, early rock and roller, the old 1-4-5 chord progression and a whole symphony to get there.

I forgot my knees. I moved to the other side, away from the woman, next to you, down, and bought you a bourbon with my husband’s last three dollars. I pulled the cotton from my pockets to show you Just How Empty.

With your lover’s credit card, you bought the almost good stuff - Knob Creek and Makers Mark, and we walked back towards your apartment, on the other side of town from where my husband slept.

It was far too cold, talk bubbles of breath in the dark. We passed a cornfield. You said, “Let’s go in.” I said, “No.” But you were gone already, running in circles, chasing your tail made of whisky and wind. You ripped the ears from their stalks and I yelled, “It won’t be any good.” You said, “It will.”

“You remind me of an old brown dog with floppy ears,” you said, appearing from the field with your bouquet of unripe maize, your white shirt stained. “Floppy years, one small fleck of white on its chest like a crucifix.” You made my feet rise, made a symphony of the stalks. Then you insisted that we taste the stuff, green kernels. “It’s bad,” I said. And you said, “Yes.” You said, “It wasn’t ready yet.”

I thought that would be the end, but you are still here, fading in and out like frost on the windowpane.
I have this idea - you know what it is, I tell you every day, though I haven’t seen you since. It takes an army to calm the thing. I kill it every night, fool myself that its sister will not grow tomorrow. It incubates in my sock drawer, grows in a jar like sourdough starter, reborn again, red and wailing. I cannot decide yet if I am ready to toss out a life like that, even if it is not mine to discard.

II.
The man’s arms were full of women, and his eyes, his head, everything women, everywhere. His wife said, I was surprised to find how often grown men think about fucking. He nodded. All the time. All the fucking time.

They went together to pick her out. It took a long time, more than the one night they had counted on. There was more research involved, hygiene and discretion and that hard-to-detect-psycho-vibe, all the nitty-gritty the man had never imagined. Details were the woman’s job. The first one seemed too confident, and the next too shy and the man got drunk and screamed, Where the fuck is Goldilocks?

The wife thought, Jewish. Anyone with Gold in the last name, and lox. There was one, it was the third night, and her hair was curly, she had braces on her bottom teeth, she was the right age, the ripe age of 28. She was not from New York City.

His wife waited in the bedroom. She was old-fashioned, she wore a negligee. He scooped up the Jewess, she was heavier than his wife, but so much smaller, and carried her into their bedroom.

At that moment, when he saw the fear and displeasure, earnestness and hope all struggling to erupt on his wife’s plain and handsome face, he loved her so much he almost dropped the girl.

But he didn’t. He paid her the sum, the stash, the little nest egg, and sent Goldilocks home, returned to bed to kiss the priceless trinity of freckles on his wife’s miraculous back.