It used to be that whenever I lit a cigarette, this man I was sleeping with would smoke half of it without it ever leaving my fingers.  He would take hold of my wrist and bring the cigarette up to his parted lips like a child taking a big sip from a straw that led into a cup his mother was holding.  At parties, people thought this was something to talk about, how the man I slept with didn’t like to hold his own cigarettes.  A woman I didn’t know remarked, “What happens when your girlfriend is away?  I mean, how do you smoke when she’s not around?”  She had tits like neat glistening scoops of pudding and hair like a stern mid-western teacher.  I found it to be a useless combination.  But later, when she lit a smoke, I saw that the man I was sleeping with was carefully studying her.  I took him by the arm and suggested that we go, and he said, yes, that he thought it would be best if we did.

One evening some months later, he and I were sitting at my kitchen table with a newspaper, a jar of pickles and a bottle of red that was so red it was purple, and the man I was sleeping with mistakenly guided the burning end of my cigarette right into his mouth. He flung away my hand in such a manner that it sort of free fell horizontally, my arm serving as a bungee.  He yelled, “Shit!  Motherfucker!  Cocksucker!”  Not at me, just in general.  He was a decent enough man, but I knew right then that I would never sleep with him again.  As he spit into his hand several times, I heard my neighbor, an old widow, clicking around in her apartment.  I thought of this one instance, in the bedroom, when the man had spit artlessly into his hand, then drizzled and polished his saliva between my legs.  A weird grin had come onto his face and a mad light into his eyes—a light that I’ve seen on the faces of small children just before committing acts of violence.  I fantasized that I was the woman from the party, the woman with the awful haircut.  It was simpler than arguing.  I arched my back.  Relaxed my pelvis.  I suddenly felt almost too hot to bear, like that first sweep of sand at a beach, scalding, sun-soaked.

I put together a baggy full of ice and the man sat for a while, pressing it into the burn. It occurred to me that we had lost the cigarette.  It had flown from my hand into some unknowable crevice of the kitchen.  I looked everywhere because I was worried that it might be smoldering.  “Don’t,” said the man, “it probably went out on the inside of my mouth.”  I could hear my neighbor walking back and forth right at our adjoining wall.  Once, on the stairs, she had looked at me and said, “If the world does end tomorrow, a lot of people’s horoscopes will be wrong.”  It was a completely psychotic thing to say, and yet, not at all untrue.  To be safe, I poured a large cup of water behind the stove and under the fridge, then spent several minutes cleaning the tide of dusty gray liquid that rushed everywhere.  The man shook his head disapprovingly.  He opened up a book that earlier he had said wasn’t so good, and he began to read.