As soon as it’s over, the hard boundaries of the world rush back in, moving at light speed, from some distant, unseen horizon until in an instant they have settled in place, taking shape again as the walls, fixtures and furnishings of her bedroom, and then, more slowly, they release into the room all the misplaced thoughts they found along the way.  Beyond these walls wait hungry wolves.

Rose scoots her body towards me, resting her head on the fleshy place where my chest meets my shoulder.  We breathe deeply together, as the recovered thoughts start to unfurl and stretch in my mind.  Where was it?  It must have been Oslo?

We were in Olso.  It was the summer after we graduated from college.  Elle wanted to see Europe.  I wanted to go to Montana, spend the summer outdoors, working with my hands, sweating and burning in the heat, spitting out the taste of pure dusty Earth.  But, Europe was fine too.  It was nothing like Alabama, and for both of us, that was the goal.  The damp, barely lit bars, with sticky black floors and shot glasses filled neon green fluids, were replaced by impossibly quaint cafés, with antique lamps and Vienna coffee.  They were tourists traps, sure, but we were tourists.  It was wonderful.  Better than Montana, I told her, as we wandered around Saint-Germain-des-Prés late one dreary wet afternoon, digesting Croque Madame and chasing after the ghosts of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

But it was not in Paris, it was in Olso, towards the end of the summer.  We were in a museum, examining the woodcut prints of Edvard Munch. Along one wall, there was a series of prints of the same woodcut.  The image was that of a couple, their backs turned to the viewer, standing in front of a forest.  The woman leaning against the man, her head against his, her hand on his back.  The man, wide and dark, with his head bowed, his arm wrapping around her back, cradling her.  On some of the prints, the woman appeared to be wearing a long dress that dragged on the ground behind her.  On others, the dress was hardly visible, revealing instead the contours of her bare legs, and the curves of her buttocks.  One print was so black that the forest and the sky and the ground were all nothing but a single sheet of black against which only the woman’s white body and the faintest pencil-thin outline of the man’s silhouette could be seen. But most of the prints were vibrant and textured with colors– the sky rich shades of blue, the ground yellow or gold or olive, the woman’s long hair black or orange or red, the forest dark green, its trees separated by fine bright lines of pink or magenta.

Elle was captivated by the colors.  “It all feels so electric,” she said, pointing to a print in which a thick streak of pink swept across the slate green forest, and shot up and down the lengths of tree trunks. But I could not take my eyes off the couple at the center of the image. They were frozen in dread, tied to each other by some combination of love and necessity. There were unanswered questions hanging in the space above and around them: Why did they need to enter the forest?  What were they afraid of finding there?  The answer came to me: wolves. There are hungry wolves in this image, I thought, obscured by the greens and blacks of the forest, or lurking just beyond the frame, waiting.

Rose sits up, pulls herself out of bed and scampers into the bathroom.  The loose strands of post-coital consciousness now spin themselves into a new thought, this time in the form of Nirvana lyrics: We don’t have to breed.  The words repeat, and continue, against the ghostly grinding of electric guitar:

We don’t have to breed
We could plant a house
We could build a tree
I don’t even care
We could have all three

I look at my phone, on the bedside table.  Five missed calls, the most recent from Dee.  I need to get moving.

Rose, however, is in no hurry.  She walks out of the bathroom, and wanders around the room naked, her body, slight and black, weaving in and out of the mid-day shadows that slice through the room. She saunters over to her closet and pulls out a purple blouse, and then puts it back, and retrieves a gauzy green one instead. Won’t someone notice she has changed clothes?  Does she not care about this? I start to realize that I have not truly considered her perspective; I’ve only made assumptions about it.  I had assumed she too had some regret, some guilt, some shame.  But now that I watch her and sense her complete ease I realize there has never been any visible trace of guilt or regret or shame.  She seems at times to want to keep it a secret, but mostly for convenience, and even then mostly for my convenience.

If I am escaping into Rose, then what is Rose escaping from?  What wolves await her, on the other side of my body, on the outside of this room?  Her ex-husband is a hotel manager and small-time politician of some sort in Clayton County.  Their divorce seems amicable, relatively speaking.  Beyond that, I know very little about her and her motivations, but perhaps she knows just as little about me and mine.  Perhaps I am every bit the object to her that she is to me.  Or perhaps that is wishful thinking.

I reach for my pants and start to dress, more deliberately than Rose, who now poses in front of the mirror, clothed only from the waist up, fidgeting with the wide floppy collar of her green blouse.  We finish dressing and leave together.  We share a long, mournful kiss in her driveway, and then we each drive back to our respective offices.

When I get to the office, Sarah greets me at the reception desk. “How was lunch?” she asks, smiling.  Why is she smiling? I wonder.  Perhaps she knows.

“Good,” I tell her.  “Kale and quinoa…  Need to stay in fighting shape!”

She laughs and then says, “Your sister called again.”