Thinner than Skin. Uzma Aslam Khan
under our sheets. I curled into her back and she turned, presenting me with the same gift as on our first night of love: she slipped her finger in my navel. Mocking my “proper Convent-boy English,” she whispered, “I’m going to have a listen.” She put her ear to the hollow, exhaling her sweet hot breath over my cold skin till it thawed.
“What do you hear?” Her hair was spread in a fan across the pit of my stomach.
“Shh!”
As her lips enclosed me, I thought, Bliss! I will not have to make up with her in the morning, she is making up with me! And I heard it again. The rush of wings, the moon diving in the Kunhar. Shreet! An ascending—higher, higher, through a smooth, silvery sky—a falling—deeper, deeper, down a silky, slippery skein.
I walked briskly to Baker Beach in joyous agitation. Descending from the parking lot, I pulled off my shoes, expecting to see a girl of Farhana’s description—“look for a long braid, the longest on the beach, black, of course”—waiting at the edge of the sea, as per her instructions, her back to me (showing off the braid), with Golden Gate Bridge looming to her right. Instead, I wound up in a volleyball game, with all the players entirely in the nude.
Was she among them? Damn, how was I to know?
There was a player with a dark braid, though she had two, neither as long as I’d been led to believe. Leaping for the ball, she made a full-frontal turn, and my God, how astonishingly she was built! I gawked at the hair between her legs, wondering if this were a cruel joke. (Granted, not entirely cruel.) Matthew must have arranged it, getting “Farhana” to lure me here. He was probably watching, laughing till he hurt. Nice little Pakistani girl. Funny, Matthew, funny. I stared at the volleyball player one last time—no, that couldn’t be Farhana, please let it not be Farhana! Please let it be Farhana!—and turned to my right to scan the bathers on the shore.
Almost all naked, mostly men. Obscenely overdressed, I jogged in mild panic toward a cluster of rocks on the far side of a thick cypress grove. Along the way, I tried to hunt discreetly for a long braid slithering down a shapely back, but many figures lay on their backs, some on their hair. I could see the rocks now. She wasn’t there. Two naked men were, one walking out to the water, hand on hip. Long cock, wide grin. I waded into the sea, my back safely to him, but the water was too cold for my taste. After a few minutes, I trundled closer to the boulders, trying to look-not-look.
She was sitting there, smiling. Her braid was pulled to the side, draping her left shoulder, and she waved it at me like a flag.
“We must have just missed each other!”
“I thought you told me to wait on the beach?”
“I’m sorry. It got late.”
I was on the verge of asking how she got all the way here without my noticing when I saw how her eyes sparkled. It wasn’t Matthew who’d been watching me but Farhana. I clambered up without another word, crossing a series of tide pools and a snug sandy enclosure between the boulders that sprawled in a V. I crouched down beside her and looked to her right: there loomed Golden Gate Bridge.
“Did you think you’d recognize me better with clothes on?” she giggled.
“Your clothes are on.”
“Are you disappointed?”
“I’m relieved.”
“How disappointing.”
So I learned this immediately about my Farhana. She was one of those people who liked to receive a reaction, and she didn’t like to wait very long for it. That day she must have been pleased enough with what I gave, because we met almost every day afterward. And what did I give? Embarrassment. Curiosity. I know she caught me wondering how much she was going to reveal, and she knew that I knew that beneath her T-shirt, she wore no bra. For weeks, that was all I’d see. Nice little Pakistani girl.
“Why do you keep looking up at the bridge?” she asked, about an hour into our rendezvous on the rocks.
I said nothing about the photograph. I never did. But as the sun set, I took several shots of the bridge. In the foreground, there was no surf and no sand, only a line of jagged rocks—without Farhana. She wouldn’t let me photograph her that day.
When we finally stood up to leave, I realized how tall she was. And how boyish.
She knew. “I would have gone topless if I had breasts.” Again, she required a reaction.
I am not an eloquent man and am usually tongue-tied around directness, but directness attracts me. I looked at Farhana and took all of her in, all that she’d spent the afternoon telling me: her work with glaciers, her father in Berkeley, her mother’s death, leaving Pakistan as a young child, her life in this city where she grew up. I took that in while absorbing her height, her leanness, the paleness of her skin, and the way her braid now wrapped around her in a diagonal curve that extended from left shoulder to right hip. I realized I was maybe three-quarters besotted, perhaps halfway in love. I said she looked more like a calla lily than any woman I’d ever met.
“Not just any calla lily,” I added. “Jeffrey Conley’s calla lily. Have you seen it?”
She bowed her head, suddenly self-conscious. Turning her back to me, she took off her T-shirt. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
“When?”
“Same time.”
How hard it was to pull away!
Scrambling off the rocks, I glanced up a final time before turning toward my apartment. She’d twisted to one side so her long, deep spine was now perfectly aligned with the braid and both encircled her like an embrace.
The next day, I began courting Farhana. At first empty-handed, and wherever she chose, but by the second month, at her home, and with a gift. I courted her with calla lilies. Nothing delighted me more than descending the hill into the Mission District where she lived, a potted plant in my arms. I knew the flower shops with the widest varieties, from white to mauve to yellow, some with funnels as long and slender as her wrists, slanting in the same way her braid embraced her spine that first time we met, and still embraced her each night as she torqued her body to undress. I longed to photograph that spine but she wouldn’t let me. So instead, with my naked eye, I watched her fingers undo the knots of her braid. I’d learned not to interfere with this lengthy ritual, during which her strokes grew increasingly harsh and her face wore a million different permutations of annoyance. The comb always came away with a wad of black wool that she tossed in the dustbin before climbing into bed, beaming. I loved seeing that smile approach me every night. This morning in Kaghan, it was I who beamed, as I watched her sleep. I tasted her breath with the roof of my mouth. Pine and glacier steam. I traced the fleshiness of her lips with the tip of my nose. Her mouth was a pale beige tinted with the softest pink, the delicate rim so subtle in its arch. She seldom wore lipstick, for which I was thankful, because her naked mouth blended beautifully with the rest of her. When worried, her tongue would dig the subtle indent at that luscious lower lip, and sometimes the thumb would cooperate, picking at plumpness, drawing blood. I learned this gesture in the days after we first met. I learned it especially on the bus to Kaghan Valley. But this morning, she slept peacefully; the tongue was still and so was the thumb. I tasted her again. More steam than pine. Farhana’s morning breath was never her worst feature, though she’d cringe at that, demanding, What’s worse?
Our cabin was old. Perhaps its walls were the source of the pinewood scent enveloping our bed. The doorframe was a medley of pale and dark wood. I imagined the hand that must have reached for blond walnut when the dark cedar was gone, reached for red polish when the brown was upturned. Perhaps the man attached to the hand had been unable to walk to wherever the red was kept. Perhaps he’d been older than the cabin was now. Perhaps he didn’t belong to this land but had come from a windier, sandier world.
I lay on my back, rolling the word Kaghan around my tongue the way last night I’d played with Kunhar. Did the word come from Kagan, a woman who’d arrived in this valley long ago? On a previous trip, I’d heard stories, fragments that never extended far