A Warm Hand

N. West Moss

Word Count 530

When I was eighteen years old, I moved to St. Croix for a year, filled with nothing more than the desire to experience the world. I worked at a restaurant in Christiansted called Rumors where the waitresses had to wear sarongs, and you know, at eighteen, you look the best you’re ever going to look, sarong or no sarong, so if sex was what you wanted, it was easy to find. I was far from home and could do what I felt like doing, and no one at home ever had to know. 

The libido of an 18-year old is a restless and unfaithful thing. I didn’t much care about anyone. It was all about how I looked, how I felt, what I wanted. At the end of a shift, the bartenders, waitresses, and cooks would steal a bottle of whatever liquor wouldn’t be missed (peppermint schnapps, one memorable evening) and we’d head to the beach with just the moonlight to show us the path. We’d pass the bottle around, build a fire maybe, kiss people we wanted to kiss, sleep with people if we felt like it. Some nights there’d be weed. Some nights there’d be coke. We’d wake up soaked in morning dew, wretchedly hungover, the glare of the morning sun blinding us. We’d pluck our shoes from the sand and scurry off homeward to wash up, drink some carrot juice or strong coffee, and face another day. 

I had friends then who were in college, friends starting careers, but other than my libido, I was aimless. My drive was for intimacy, for the holiness of being wrapped up in bed with another human, of whispering together into the dark, of savoring the animal smell of another human’s neck. How fascinating it all was, how out of bounds.

I have no regrets about that era. It was heaven, and I learned important lessons along the way, including not breaking people’s hearts and never ever to drink peppermint schnapps.

I’m old now, almost 59, and intimacy is a whole other kettle of fish. It’s not about flowers and sex, although flowers and sex are still nice. It’s more about sharing a life, being able to say to my husband after my mother died, “Remember when she ….?” and having him nod over the newspaper at me. It’s about warming up the bed together on cold nights, and saying, as we drift off to sleep, “Oh, I forgot to tell you something.” It’s not sexy, maybe, or maybe it is, this web of closeness made up of the accumulation of the shared minutiae of life. Paying the mortgage together for 18 years, agonizing about having a new furnace installed, mourning our own aging bodies, these are intimate acts too, and ones that my teenage self couldn’t foresee. 

It’s not the intimacy of sex, but it has its own fragile beauty. This particular marriage, with its imperfections, worries, and heartbreak, has a web of quiet familiarity made up of the day in and day out of things. For us, anyway, this is what libido has turned into – a warm hand to grasp onto as the Titanic slowly begins to sink.

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N. West has had her work published in The New York Times, Salon, McSweeney’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere. She has published a memoir (Flesh and Blood: Reflections on Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life, from Algonquin), a short story collection (The Subway Stops at Bryant Park, from Leapfrog), and a novel called Birdy forthcoming from Little, Brown. She can be reached on Instagram and Facebook.