Lycanthropia

It is late and we should not be talking. Instead we should be drifting in separate carriages toward the edge of sleep: I ought to be solving in my dreams Newtonian gravitational equations and considering the moon’s effect on human tides, and she should be drifting into astronomical declinations, rearranging in her own precise way the order of the universe. But it isn’t happening. Instead, the sound of her voice in my head is addictive, and I feed it with questions and propositions to keep the fix coming.

Outside, storms pound eastern Tennessee. Occasional lightning strobes the room, leaving the afterimage of Gothic shadows on my retinas. Her face is a stroboscopic memory; her hand rests on my shoulder, starting now and then when thunder does not merely grumble but crashes nearby. She talks of weighty, essential matters, and I listen like a cat awaiting the slightest rustle of his quarry.

But it is late, and I glance at the clock.

“Don’t tell me what time it is,” she warns.

“No,” I say. “But it is very late.”

“But you keep saying things that make me curious,” she says. “Things we have to discuss.”

“Because your voice is like waves on the ocean,” I say absent-mindedly. “It delights me beyond telling.”

“But you must tell,” she insists. “You must.”

Must is an edict I completely understand: She will not relent until I have delivered my soul. Yes, indeed, I can and will be the Medusa to her nudibranch. What becomes of the lover’s self when consumed by his beloved? How do I tell of her voice?

“When I was a child,” I begin.

“I love stories that begin, ‘When I was a child,’” she whispers.

“When I was a child,” I repeat, “my most favorite thing was sitting in my mother’s lap and having her read to me from my collection of Little Golden Books. I felt engulfed by her, completely safe from the world. And her voice! Her voice was soothing and sure, carefully modulated to make even the dullest story worthwhile. I am certain my love of language and books begins and ends with the sound of my mother reading an endless succession of stories as I snuggled against her. The sound of your voice certainly contains this element.”

I can feel her frown in the darkness, “Are you telling me I remind you of your mother?” she asks. “Doesn’t that make what we’re doing incestuous?”

My involuntary grin is captured in the moment by a flash of lightning. “No,” I say. “I am simply telling you that your voice is as soothing to me as my mother’s was.”

“Not good enough,” she says. “No reward for you.”

“Let me try again,” I tell her. “Some years ago, in a strange city after a terrible car crash, I lay bruised and battered on the sofa of my apartment, my broken jaw wired shut, reeling under a dose of Demerol that made me loopy but didn’t touch my pain.”

“Poor baby,” she says, stroking the line of my beard with the back of her fingers. She brushes her lips against mine.

Rather than play on her sympathy (a ruse I know will fail), I forge ahead: “At the time I lived next door to a lovely woman I knew only in passing who, nevertheless, when she heard of my predicament, came visiting with chicken broth and a bottle of good rum. After I had swallowed a sufficient portion of the soup and she had drunk several fingers of the rum, she sat so I could rest my head on her exquisite thigh and she crooned songs until I fell asleep. It was as if her voice reached down through my pain and touched something essential in me: A sublime act of kindness.”

I lay silently a moment, recalling the event. Finally I say, “Your voice is the song of a stranger: A sublime act of kindness. Better?”

She smiles and whispers next to my ear, “Better. But still no Kewpie doll.”

So I am lost in the sound of her voice, its ecstatic rhythms, its stunning articulation, and I draw from the realm of myth. Nothing else is left. I glance at her face and am paralyzed by the fear that I will never get it right. In the moment, I must get it right.

“Centuries ago,” I begin, “when everything was still wild and humans did not yet speak in complete sentences, your distant ancestor raised her head and sang a prayer of thanksgiving to the moon.”

“Mmm,” she says. “I like this one.”

“Hush,” I admonish. “Don’t interrupt.”

The story continues of its own accord: “The drowsy moon spent three days so enchanted by the music of your ancestor’s voice that it would not complete its orbit, but hung on the edge of the horizon, keeping a benevolent eye on your ancestor and waiting for the approach of a wolf pack. When the wolves— sniffing, panting and howling in that way wolves have — arrived after a long, nourishing hunt in a distant land, the moon bent down and whispered a message into the ear of an alpha male. The ancient wolf — remember nothing was tame then — turned away from the rest of the pack and trotted off in the direction of your ancestor. Weeks later, his lupine form honed to sharp diligence by hunger and purpose, the wolf found her and repeated the moon’s message into her ear. A single adverb from the moon’s dissertation dripped off the wolf’s tongue and fell onto the right heel of your ancestor’s foot, so that from that day forward wherever she stepped, she left a luminous, milk-white imprint to mark her path. She was so grateful for the response of the moon to her prayer that she kissed the wolf on his forehead and snout and shared her meager dinner with him. The wolf was touched in his heart, and adopted her into his pack. From then on, because of the wolf and the light she left wherever she wandered, her tribe gave your ancestor wide berth, fearing she was a great sorceress. So, in her exile, she carried on conversations with the wolf, and he taught her nouns and verbs, pronouns and adjectives. Together they created punctuation and articulated compound complex sentence structures. While it was not the birth of language, it was certainly great cause for celebration.”

“Do you make these things up right out of your head?” my beloved asks. But I know the story has moved her, as she is teaching my hand with her own the swell of her breasts and the plane of her stomach. It is an education for which schoolboys pray to God. I shut my eyes and am suddenly nothing but hand; I compose odes to her skin.

Suddenly, the education ceases.

“Hey,” she says, “are you sleeping? What has your story to do with my speech patterns?”

“Hmm?” I respond. “Oh. Your voice. I was thinking of your ancestor’s wanderings and how they might be plotted on a musical scale using the imprints of her heel as a marker. The music would be composed of lupine moon notes as charted by your ancestor, and the result would be the sound of your voice in my ear. Its melody. Its lilt. Its distinct charm. Ah! Talk to me.”

“Silly boy,” she says. “Silly, silly boy.”

But the education has begun anew, my hand the pupil and her hand the teacher discovering the terrain of her inner thigh. Vasco de Balboa, in the height of his Pacific Ocean-sighting career, never had it so good.

“But even that isn’t good enough,” I tell her. “There should be a simpler, more sexual metaphor.”

I think about it for a moment. Finally I say, “Your voice is a leopard, driven by your remarkable intellect, and I am its helpless prey. I want it to devour me.”

She turns toward me and whispers carefully, “Let me teach you to parse the verb devour.”

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