No Next Move Left

“Whatever had been holding her up all evening — the dining room, the threshold, the road, the ringing — ran out somewhere between the second shove and the third.” Her face, her throat, a sound she does not recognize. “Not the way she had in the car under the blue window, where she could wipe away the mascara and drive off. Not the way she had in the office, where the tears stopped on cue. She was crying the way people cry when they have no next move left — loudly, unbeautifully, with her mouth open.” She falls face first into his jacket, the fabric “that smelled of beer and someone else’s blood,” and holds on “with her fingers, because there was nothing else left to hold on to.” Craig stands there. “He didn’t raise his hands… He didn’t step back and he didn’t hold her. He just stood under the yellow light of the corner store… and let her cry into him the way a lamppost lets you lean on it.”

Twice the codex has examined her tears as an instrument (“Tears by Permission”); these are the first that do nothing. All evening she had a next move: to call, to hold on, to arrange, to send a word under the tablecloth. Now there are no moves, and with them ends what she wore “in place of skin.” This is not remorse and not yet realization — it is a collapse, from which remorse sometimes begins and sometimes does not. Note whom she leans against: the man she considered an instrument and had just called an idiot — because he is the only one left on this street. And note how he stands: not holding her, not stepping back, “the way a lamppost lets you lean on it.” Two people, each of whom used the other, find themselves for the first time simply a support for one another — not out of closeness, but because there is nothing else left. For Priscilla this is the most honest place in the whole book. For Craig, perhaps, too.