Nude. Naeem Murr

      “Youth,” he repeated, louder.

      Propping her reading glasses on her nose, she surveyed the board while he surveyed her. Though she was black Irish, most had taken her for Italian in her youth, a mass of dark curls (now iron gray) around a face of coarse features that had no business being so lovely. Her eyes, the green of weathered copper, seemed never to blink. She had lived two doors down; they were close friends as children, entering their teenage years during the war. One night an air raid shattered all the windows in his house as he and his family huddled beneath the kitchen table. The next morning Queenie fetched him out. She led him around roadblocks and up to the third floor of a half-collapsed building, motioning for him to look out the window. On a pile of rubble lay a sapper beside an unexploded bomb, touching it so tenderly it might have been a lover. “Bloody hell!” Eugene flung himself into the room and tried to get out, but she jerked him back. “Why are you always so scared?” She released him, but he stayed. As the sapper breathlessly drew the fuse from that naked bomb, he glanced at Queenie: she looked as if she had found (and it horrified her) her vocation; found and lost it at once.

      They fell back into the room. He began to cry, at which she couldn't stop herself laughing. She kissed him (out of pity, she would admit years later), keeping her eyes open so he had to close his. In that room he discovered himself in her body, slender and so sensitive. It was as if the souls of each were the bodies of the other, she a boy struggling to reclaim her own nakedness from him, he a girl struggling to reclaim his from her.

      She was engaged to William even then. A childish promise, she told Eugene, given in the heat of his leaving, the nearest she could get, until her brother joined up a year later, to having some part of herself at the front. On the same day that William's mother told her he'd been sent to a mental hospital in Belgium, her family received a telegram informing them that her brother had been killed at Anzio. She buzz-cut her hair, put on her brother's overalls, and tried to enlist, causing a frightful scene. William returned a shell-shocked wreck; under pressure of her guilt and that English decency that seemed to be what everyone had suffered and died for, she married him.

      The groom was trembling too much in the church to put the ring on her finger, though not half as much as Eugene, who sat in a pew at the back quietly tearing pages out of the hymn book.

      She'd wanted to sacrifice herself to the war. Now, in an empty and unconsummated marriage, she had. Eugene had hated her at first, but she had what was his, and he what was hers. Everyone knew. Eugene, who didn't have a place of his own, often went to Queenie's house, and they would make love downstairs as William lay upstairs, embalmed in Mahler like an insect in amber. In those years she had his nakedness still, and he hers, but it had become a sadder, more labored nakedness, like a beautiful clockwork machine that created the illusion of nakedness in its motion, but was now, slowly, running down.

      In the supermarket, Queenie took off her glasses and turned back to him. “You should try the notice board at Harrods,” she said. “Tesco's a bit down-market for something like Youth.”

      He smiled. How little, really, she'd changed.

      “There's ballroom dancing at the Center tomorrow, Euge.”

      “I'll join the danse macabre only when I have no choice, Queenie.”

      Smiling wanly, she took his hand. “I heard you fainted in the post office.”

      “Men don't faint, we're felled like great trees in—”

      “For God's sake.” She tightened her hold, those green eyes anxious and questioning. She was going to say something else but contained herself.

      “Come to the Center tomorrow,” she said finally. Discarding his hand along with that useless fragment of language, she left.

      Steam clouded the mirror above his sink. He felt shaky, at the edge of tears again, fearful, that rogue cargo of memory loose in his hold. He looked up to see the water sputtering from the showerhead and remembered why he was here. He stood and stepped into the shower, tugging back the plastic curtain. Still consumed by his thoughts of Queenie, it took a few moments for him to feel uncomfortable. What have I forgotten? He looked down to see the cuffs of his trousers, soaked and clinging to his sopping shoes.

      TWO

      Eugene hurried through the park, worried they might close Richmond Gate. The air was thick with the brackish odor of the ferns. The trees sponged in what little light remained, turning the few people he came upon into Seurat's grainy shades. Pushing down his trilby and pulling up the collar of his mackintosh against the chill, he tried not to think about the skin of soaking clothes he'd left on the bathroom floor.

      The restlessness in the breeze of the trees beside the path made Eugene think of something his wife had once told him about how it felt, when she was on night duty during the war, to walk through hospital wards of wounded soldiers sleeping. Where was Catherine tonight? Had she forgiven him for what had happened all those years ago with Lisa, his student? Lisa, whose pale skin would flush so she looked scalded if he so much as glanced at her in class. He caught sight of Lisa in the street sometimes, walking as if through an endless gauntlet of jeering men. He wanted to tell her there was power in her body, but it wasn't his place.

      That he should have lost his job, his wife. His life.

      Once through the gate, he made his way down to the Thames and sat on a bench near Richmond Bridge. Jimmy would pass here on his way to the Duke. He just wanted someone to talk to, though he knew Jimmy would shy from talk that even flirted with intimacy. But Jimmy was one of the most sensitive and thoughtful men Eugene had ever known. If there were anyone in Eugene's acquaintance who might have achieved greatness, it was Jimmy. His acclaimed doctoral thesis on the human body of Christ had been followed, during his first year of seminary in Dublin, by a book of poems that many had compared to the work of Hopkins. How had he allowed himself to become just an old man obsessed with his bowels? Ever since he'd left the Jesuits and come to England, just after the war, he'd led a dissolute life. He spent most nights in the Duke, and when he was younger worked his way, as if he didn't much care for the job but needed the overtime, through one woman after another. Women drawn, no doubt, to his gentle and unavailable soul.

      It was dark before Eugene saw him coming down the towpath, that massive, shambling frame. He looked like an old bare-knuckle fighter, now ruined and brooding.

      “Euge,” Jimmy called out, his voice still carrying a faint Dublin lilt, “you're looking very metaphysical tonight.”

      “Am I?”

      “You are, indeed.” Jimmy cut over and sat himself beside Eugene. “You should try to get a grant from the city council for sitting here and looking profound. They could make you a tourist attraction. Sure, the Americans will pay for anything.”

      “Why not?” Eugene was overwhelmed, as always, by Jimmy's jokey chatter.

      “Hey, you should come to the Duke tonight,” Jimmy continued. “Gary's in town. All the old gang will be there.”

      “Yes, I might.”

      “God, it's been years since I've seen you in the Duke. You're becoming a bit of a recluse.”

      Jimmy lit a cigarette. It was Eugene's opportunity to speak, but he didn't want to banter. He wanted to tell Jimmy he'd just got into the shower with all his clothes on. He didn't care if Jimmy made a joke of it; Jimmy would understand he was afraid. But he couldn't just say it straight out like that, and Jimmy's discomfort at the silence, his fidgeting and checking of his watch compounded Eugene's reluctance, until, to relieve the tension, Eugene blurted, “So how's your stomach?”