The young man is thinking about your father's lips brushing the light soft hairs at the nape of the neck of your mother, maybe grazing that little nub of bone with his teeth or even doing something weird and a little unsexy but totally intimate like if he licked up from the nape into the thicket of her hair and just buried his face there and breathed deeply and held it, and them both naked and standing by the glass doors that look out onto the enclosed yard where the dog shits or browses and she feels the genius of sunshine warming her nakedness and thinks how if she stood there long enough she might tan fully for once, but she doesn't because the moment passes and he turns her around to face him—and whatever honesty or subversion passes noticed or unnoticed in the tractor beam of their locked gazes as he digs his hands into her behind and draws her closer to rub and mingle and she thinks how now if she stood there long enough her ass would have his handprints baked into them, imagines what they would look like (she thinks of henna tattoos, inverted) if he was (is he?) the kind of man that might take pictures of her ass and they could lay in bed some day and look at the pictures, she thinks about this as they sort of waltz, tango, or wrestle their way toward the couch which is just beige enough to absorb this sort of occasional indiscretion without staining, much, and they fall into the bulk and folds of the soft material as they would and do into the nuance and depth of one another.
And he, the young man, is not one of those apocalyptic youths, hystericized and enlivened by some righteous belief in the age when sex ends, so he can picture the action, but it would be up to you, you who has seen the family albums and watched the effects of the tolling years, to imagine them back to their initial stages, original ages on meeting, another way of saying your age right now, and anyway it's you who must provide those phantasmatic people a renewal like Christ's obliteration of infirmities, the small but irreducible gut of your father become reducible and lo even reduced, his stomach re-tautening (hers now or then as ever a speckled washboard, beauty marks like dots of vanilla bean in a scoop) and the hair on his head darkening and thickening and maybe even growing out some past his ears while his baseball cap, de rigueur of late, is now become unnecessary and so nowhere to be seen as the house melts around them back into the wallpapers and furniture of decades past and as she arches her back, along the way having lain him flat and topped him, you can see the muscles in her upper arms and admire that sinew and, as her elbows approach one another behind her, the breasts of your mother, lifted and firmed by the force of your inductive re-creation so that they become again as they must have been whenever your father first ogled them through whatever loose cotton dress she was wearing on the day he first approached her, and having come this far you can maybe admit that those breasts look an awful lot like your breasts, even the slope of her abdomen demanding reckoning against your own, and you have to imagine these things graphically because only after passing through the instructive and suffocating depths of utter refusal-not-to-see will you find yourself, rebuked by the fragility and abandon of these two people, at least one of whom in her youth would have been practically indistinct in her nakedness and passion from you in yours, their commitment in one single moment to travel, together, across a gulf of bottomless time to the only certain destiny, and see yourself as your mother's daughter so to see the frenzied bloom of her trust as analogous to your father's bloom of wet heat inside her, and her allowance thereof, this one-time stranger ripe and rife with potentials and obvious permanent flaws and resonant unknowns, and in the sweaty swish of her mop of hair back over her shoulders and the tautness in her neck or loins you might see your own reflection (or in her eyes if they were not shut tight) and then you'll do the thing you have not done lo these late days of perdition, which is return the young man's calls.
Anyway, that's what he's thinking. So, if, in the mean time of your absence, he leaves filthy messages on your machine, it's not that he means them, only that he's trying and failing to say something perfect like just imagine what we could have.
