Osvaldo Rubén Giménez

You have been Matthew for two minutes, and already his body is the problem. It is the middle of a San Francisco afternoon. Light lies across the studio floor and your calves are warm from the warm-up you did not ask for. You rise onto the balls of his feet and the whole machine answers, hazel eyes, the nose that was broken once, a spine that sings. And you stand there with your arms hanging, wanting nothing it can give. A dancer cannot be handed the thing you want. You do not say it, even to yourself. You only know the wheel is already open in your mind, turning, and that you are paying again.

Then the floor is marble, and the light is the blue of a street at the end of the day.

Your hands are on a desk. There are keys under the right one, spread like a dropped hand of cards, and the left is flat on a stack of paper. You are halfway through a motion and the motion is wrong. Your fingers have set the ring down crooked, and now they lift it and set it again, slowly, correctly. Then the next thing, the log, the pen, the edge of the page squared. Each one comes out checked, as if checking were a faith.

The leg is bouncing. Your right knee jogs under the desk, a small tireless pulse you cannot stop and do not try to.

The shirt first. The collar is stiff against his neck, and a sleeve cuff cuts the upper arm, and you are in his hands at some dark morning's start: buttoning the pocket flap, thumb on the plastic button, a hush in a small apartment so as not to wake the woman asleep. Her name rises, Marta, warm and sleepy, and under it the old pull toward a different name, an earlier woman, a ring he never bought. He feels both and answers neither.

The keys. The metal is cold and each one has its own bite. You get a night, a long one, the lobby empty and the glass wall black, a bottle in the bottom drawer and the clean burn of it going down, the way he counts the hours by what is left in it. Under the burn is shame, and under that, a rosary in his pocket, his mother's, worn smooth. He is Catholic the way a man is tired.

Then the boots, the left one laced tight over a sock. Under the trouser cuff there is a face on his calf, a man in a tie in black and gray, and when your attention touches it you get a funeral, a hand gripping his shoulder, a father he drew into his own skin so as to carry him. It is the only thing he owns that cost him anything.

Money is thin: a rent paid late, an envelope, the tight arithmetic of a man with under five thousand to his name. His back aches from the long standing. His jaw is smooth from a morning razor and his hair is dyed flat brown over the gray, and the afro grown out at the roots makes you almost laugh, his small vanity, so carefully kept.

Outside, a café terrace, empty chairs on the tiles, the bare trees going dark.

You lift your hands. The brown backs, the veins, the watch loose on the wrist, hands that know every task and have never been seen. You turn them over. You look up into the glass and meet the face with its mole, high on the cheek.

"Bueno," you say, in his low voice. "Vamos a ver."

How long, you wonder. You feel the wanting already, a small cold seed, and the leg keeps bouncing under the desk.