We stood on the roof of my building looking out at the city. We didn’t talk much. The moon shone down on us, just over half full, amidst the constellations and man-made satellites.
“She’s waning,” I said to Brandy. “Finishing the third quarter of her life.”
“How do you know so much about the moon?” she said, looking out over the city.
“Astronomy. Easy science credit in college.”
Brandy leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I turned to look in her eyes. Her black eyebrows arched upwards, the outer corners of her eyes curved downwards. It was the look she gave me when she wanted something. Her breath was coming out in short bursts of steam.
I leaned forward to place my lips on hers. She thrust her head upwards, forcing our lips to make contact. She wore no lipstick. My tongue danced across her lips, tasting the soft flesh. She opened her mouth, flicked her tongue against mine. Our tongues mingled, feeling the heat of our mouths. Her tongue pulled back as her lips closed. I pulled back and looked into her eyes. Red circles spread across her cheeks. I pulled her chin to me and kissed her again. My hand slid down the front of her long-sleeved shirt. I grabbed a breast, soft and plush, yet firm. She gasped as my thumb slid across the front of her breast, grazing her small, hard nipple.
I could feel the blood rushing past my eardrums. My face grew warm and felt out of place in the cold night air. Her hands rubbed my shoulder blades, pulled me closer to her. I shifted my feet and put my other hand on her back. We stopped kissing occasionally to take breaths of our own air. We continued to kiss, to put our lips together, to probe each other with our tongues as the moon trolled across the night sky.
Eventually, my hands changed position, one moving under her shirt, the other sliding down her back. Sweat broke out on my forehead. I felt her hand – right or left, I couldn’t tell in the moment – slide off my back and down to the front of my pants. I pulled my head back and looked at her. She was smiling broadly, her lids drooping, brown irises staring into mine. Her hands rubbed against my pants. I grabbed her arms and led her inside to my apartment.
* * *
Five days later, we went for a walk in the park in the late afternoon. The sky was grey, darkening by a shade every hour. The streetlights came on early, as the sun found itself unable to push through the cloud cover. The rain began to fall slowly as we made our way down the sidewalk back to my apartment. We walked faster as the rain dampened our hair, then began to run as the droplets got bigger and fell faster. We burst into the lobby of my building soaking wet and out of breath. I shook my hair as we walked down the hall to my apartment, a two-room, one-bathroom living space in the back of the building. It was the smallest unit in the building. It was cramped, but there were trees outside my bedroom window. We walked in; she toweled her hair lightly, then laid down on the green blanket covering the green sheets of my bed. I put a Miles Davis CD on and lay down next to her.
I looked into her bone-china face, my hand in her hair, playing with her curls. They were still wet, but slowly drying on my pillow. She looked into my eyes as her hands played across the front of my shirt. The mournful sound of Miles Davis’s trumpet hung in the air over us. It was the sound of someone who’s seen a life I had only glimpsed. It was the sound of someone who knows things I have only thought about. I don’t cry when I think about my father, but that trumpet alone could break me down. Brandy closed her eyes.
I leaned forward. Our lips met, tongues sliding over each other. I pulled her closer to me, held her tighter. I pressed my lips tighter to hers as Miles’s trumpet rose to the climax of the song. I shut my eyes as he pushed all of that pain through the brass of his horn. As the instrument faded I opened my eyes and pulled my mouth away from Brandy’s. Her eyes were brown slits, her mouth a red curve. She kissed me softly on the lips, then rested her head on my chest.
We lay silent, letting song after song wash over us, humming along with the parts we knew. My nose rested in her perfect, clean hair. Her hair was always clean. Even when I spent all night with her, that hair would smell like she had just gotten out of the shower.
The sound of rain coming in through my open window increased. The soft staccato splashes of the droplets gave a nice counterpoint to the fluidity of the jazz. And at the same time it is a soothing, almost melancholy addition to the music. Mother Nature improvising with the Miles Davis Quintet. I let out a deep breath.
“Did you ever notice,” Brandy said, “That people who are about to die always seem to find God?”
I tried to look down into her face to find out if she was serious, but all I saw was the top of her head. In my silence, she continued.
“I mean, even the atheist will say, ‘Please God, no’ if you put a knife to his throat.” She turned slightly in my arms to look straight up. Her eyes were serious, as though she was concentrating on one of the various little peaks of the landscape of my ceiling. Her nose twitched slightly. “Even some people who are followers of some religion that doesn’t believe in God will beg to a Judeo-Christian God for their salvation.”
“That’s from a movie, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yeah, but it’s true.”
“Well, ‘God’ has become another exclamation, like ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’.”
“I think it goes deeper than that. I think that in the moment of death, people see the truth. I think Christianity might be the one true religion.”
“Oh, dear God, I hope not,” I said. We laughed. Miles continued to cry through his trumpet, the rain continued to fall outside.
“What do you do?” I asked her.
“What, for a living?” she said, sliding back to shine her green concrete eyes into mine. I nodded. “I’m a phlebotomist.”
“Really,” I said.
“I suck people’s blood, and then run all kinds of tests on it. You’ve probably met lots of us in your time, you just never knew it.”
“So basically you suck for a living.” She nodded. “Are you good at it?” I said.
“Well, I haven’t received any complaints yet.”
The trumpet trilled, the saxophone rose up, the drumbeat increased. Miles sounded angry, like he was lashing out at all of the misfortunes in his life. Or maybe at himself, as most of his troubles were self-imposed. He was addicted to drugs. That was his fault. He lost favor with the critics when he tried to write music that would be commercially successful rather than personally fulfilling. And he lost fans when he took five years off because he needed rest from too much performing and too many drugs. Those all resulted from choices he made. Of course, he made all of those choices about fifteen years after he wrote and recorded the album we were listening to that night.
I looked at Brandy and wondered at the choices I had made in my life. Some were fairly intelligent, and some were fairly dumb. I was still alive, and for the first time I was happy, so I guessed I had made some good choices. I kissed Brandy on the lips. She had been a good choice. The saxophone died down, laying down a rhythm for the sad trumpet blowing two sad notes over and over.
The next song started with a quiet, tinkling piano intro. We got under the sheets and shut the light off. The trumpet and alto sax picked up the piano intro, altered it, transformed it, and brought it back to the original.
To be concluded...
(Read more about this short story here.)
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