Touch-Me-Not
“All of me wants all of you,” Martin told me. I let myself believe him; even blind spots can be beautiful.
His public age was off by a decade. He called himself an “artist,” yet the giant copper vessel he’d sculpted and boasted about to strangers sat solo in his backyard, a sad, patinated green. I realized only later that the biggest lies he told were to himself. That tired red house in Kerhonkson, half covered in tarp, the once-white van slumped in the driveway, the rusted axes that littered the yard, the broken sundial—he’d called this place his “paradise” over the phone.
He was Dutch and could be brutally direct. “Why do you always hang up the phone so quickly?” he asked me one day. “I think you’re just trying not to feel rejected.” I looked at the broken old chair next to us that his dad had built. He hated his father for running off when Martin was only seven, just as he hated his mother for smothering him with her sick version of love.
That summer, we’d sit out back with his friends. All around us, touch-me-nots bloomed, bright orange seed pods so profligate, so desperate to explode between two fingers. I’d pretend not to notice the empty wine bottles that lay on the ground by the end of each evening.
Fall came, and the disappointment settled in like rot, coming on so slowly I couldn’t tell that I was covered in it. I typed on my laptop out on the deck, wasps landing on the backs of my hands, his black T-shirt in my periphery, his boots thudding along the roof.
Martin’s sweetness could surprise me at times. He would do things like polish my boots or replace my old duvet, unrequested. I was letting myself love him, letting him love me. It was messy, maybe reckless.
All winter, he chopped wood—piles and piles of it that burned in the stove while I wrote. Martin had his own fire, an old rage that had been burning for years, one that consumed every piece of tinder it could find. One comment from me, one side glance, and he’d ignite, his fury scorching the air.
That spring he built me a garden, but I didn’t wait for it to grow. I was tired of fermenting inside that house. I wrote him a letter and pictured him reading it, my words detonating in sparks, leaving him to smolder on the page.