Cornelius Sky

by Timothy Brandoff

  He liked to delay penetration, and he enjoyed kissing, and the use of his hands, and sixty-nine-ing he found quite gratifying as well, plus he could eat a woman's ass for an hour if it be her pleasure. He enjoyed all this and more, and it filled him with a white-hot shame.

  He kissed and licked Susan's nipples which sat in front of his face. It was good stuff, and Susan for her part had a difficult time sitting still on his lap. He liked her agitation and periodically kissed her deeply. He alternated from nipples to mouth, and it seemed to be working out okay. He made a jumping-type move out of the chair, to quickly position his hand between her legs. The softness of skin inside her thigh: tender is the flesh. The smell of her made him hard as a rock. She started to moan and groan. He reached for her vagina, grabbed it with audacity, her box his possession to do with what he wished for, let's say, the next six minutes if they were both lucky.

  "I can't wait to get the taste of your sweet pussy in my mouth, if it's all right to say so," Connie said.

  She got up and went to the bed and scooched her body against the wall, to make room for Connie. They pressed together. To feel a connection, to be close to one another, their legs intertwined, her wetness, how wrong is that?

  Sometimes he feared his lovemaking technique was a little by-the-book. Usually he liked to kiss for a while, before he started in on the nipples, combined with deep tongue kissing. Then, after a time, cunnilingus would go down.

  "Would you hold it open for me?" Connie said, and Susan spread the lips of her vagina, otherwise known as the labia, he believed. He admired her fleshy drapery, took in a deep whiff of its delicious pungency, started to ever so gently kiss and lick. He snorted and made a physical adjustment to his body on the bed and said, "I need to orientate myself."

  Susan chuckled and said, "Would you like a compass?" and they both laughed, and it was good laughter, it made the sex relaxed and easy and fun. "A sextant?" she said, more to herself, a husk in her voice. "My clit is true north," she said, and with helpful instruction which Connie gratefully accepted, she came without too much fanfare. Her body tensed and shook, and she pushed Connie's mouth away from her, grabbed him by the wrist to stop his hand.

  Connie looked confused, his face red and sweating. "Is it all right?" he said. She pulled him toward her, wrapped her arms around him. She reached for his dick, gave it a confident pump. He liked the way she held it. He had a five-point-two-five-inch erection, super firm, the tip of it swollen like a small bruised plum. She brought her other hand to her mouth, gave her palm a thorough lick, and with this wet hand cupped his balls. She went down on him, started to suck his dick with wonderful delight and eagerness, and what a singular pleasure to have a woman suck your dick who really, you could tell, wanted to.

  "Careful, careful," Connie said, "don't forget I want to fuck you," as if mentioning one more item on their to-do list.

  "Lie back," she said, and Connie obeyed, and never letting go of him, she straddled and slid down onto him. She rose up, getting into a position of maximum fuckability, gripping the wall behind Connie's head.

  "Fuck me," he said, and Susan started to do so. He watched her face, older now in the moonlight, and from this angle of body and light he knew she had had a baby from the faint trace of stretch marks around her breasts and belly, knew also this baby-having was part of the tragic sorrow she carried in her heart and somehow informed her presence in the rooming house, and he reached to kiss her, and Susan rose up again and Connie stayed stock-still and let her gain greater purchase.

  "Give me your cock," she said over and over, louder, and she started to scream, and she crescendoed, went and came full out, and Connie came too, came with her, but it was nothing compared to how she came, Susan gone altogether, crying out with abandonment. Her juices flowed from her, flooding Connie's genitalia, his balls flooding wet and warm. She collapsed onto him, her cries of pleasure transforming into tears. She wept, and Connie held her, her body rocking and sobbing, her belly jiggling against his.

  "Ow," she said, and shook out a cramping leg. She pushed away to look at him, smiled, and held his head. Connie brushed the hair from her face, kissed her eyebrows. She scooted down, rested herself against him, and together they fell asleep for fifteen minutes.

  * * *

  "How old were you?"

  "Me? Fifteen. Yeah. Me and my wife. Fifteen both." Connie shuffled the cards. "But you don't have to worry about that stuff."

  "Huh?"

  "I'm saying you got time for all that. No rush."

  "Already been laid," John said.

  "Already been laid?"

  "Like, last year."

  "Last year. You're thirteen. Last year you were twelve."

  "So?" John laughed.

  "Hell you getting laid at twelve years old for?"

  "What am I supposed to do, Con? They throw themselves at me." They laughed. "I know. Because of my name. Mostly. Probably."

  "No. Not just your name. You're a good-looking kid with a good personality. All right," Connie said. "Now let me tell you something. And this is all I have to say on the subject. You know what an aphrodisiac is?"

  "Makes you more horny."

  "Correct. Even more horny, imagine that, if such a thing were possible. And do you know what the greatest aphrodisiac is?"

  "The greatest?"

  "The greatest aphrodisiac . . . is when you really like somebody. To be really fond of somebody. You want to have great sex? Find somebody you totally dig. I mean, from the ground up. Somebody you just like talking to, you know. Trust me—the main ingredient. And that's all I have to say on the matter."

  "I hear you, Con."

  In his attempt to say something helpful and paternal, Connie, given his own track record in the realm of sex and love, felt like a hypocrite, yet he also believed what he said to be true.

  * * *

  He looked out onto 22nd Street, his body shrouded in a Zen-like, after-lovemaking calm. And yet. A strangeness remained, a vague dread persisted. He smoked and drank and his future whispered vexations. The stillness of the night and his mind clamored. Ever so. His heart a discordant murmur all the days of his life. An achy muscle or two from the time with Susan, and yesterday's pursuit of the Frisbee, the pain not a bad pain, serving to ground him.

  After they awoke and Susan invited him to leave, he took himself and the bottle back to his room. He studied the front parlor of a brownstone across the street, unsure if he heard a ringing telephone, when a soft knock came.

  "I saw your light on," David said.

  "I didn't see you coming."

  "The light beneath your door. I was upstairs."

  "Want a drink?"

  "No thank you—I have a job interview tomorrow."

  "For what?"

  "Acting teacher."

  "Is that right, acting teacher? I can see that," Connie said.

  David sat on the bed and watched him take a swallow of bourbon. "Forgive me," David said. He smiled and rubbed his face. "But you might not know . . . given your recent arrival."

  "Spit it out."

  "These walls," David said, "are like tissue," and let himself expel laughter.

  "I'm not sure it happened, if that makes any sense."

  "Oh, it happened," David said, "it happened."

  They walked the midnight streets at David's suggestion, theirs a quick and trustworthy connection. David expounded on the mythology of his life, his rise and fall. The pressure-cooker expectations cast upon him by his parents. His talent for all things musical and mathematical. The bullying from the Irish boys in Sunnyside, running to and from his building, hugging his violin. His boredom at elementary school, these American children so entirely slow. He picked up the English language like a glass of water and watched himself soar. He studied and nailed the entrance exam to Stuyvesant High School. He flourished there, found himself popular, a boy taller than most and, would you believe it, he could dance. Precocious, bespectacled, and funny, and the girls ate it up.

 
They headed east, passing Madison Square Park, which had been commandeered as a base by drug addicts and the homeless. Connie let him talk. From eleven on he waited tables, David and his sister, alongside their mother and father, the family waiting tables, a Romanian joint on 46th Street, the children cracking the books in a back booth when it got slow. Working, studying, playing the violin in the All-City band, the final concert performed at Carnegie Hall a brief eight years after the jet wheels touched American soil.

  "Not a solo performance," Connie ribbed.

  "First chair—have you played Carnegie Hall?"

  They made a left onto Third Avenue. David told of the moment he learned what he wanted to do with his life, a subtle epiphany in an acting class at the Playhouse, and the subsequent breaking of his parents' hearts, though maybe his father's heart broke slightly less, with the announcement of his plans to become a—

  "What? What did he say?" his mother said.

  "An actor," David said.

  "Is he crazy?" his mother said to his father.

  "I have found my calling," David said, standing before them like Edwin Booth on the kitchen's cracked linoleum. "Be happy for me, why don't you?"

  David's father reached for David's throat. His mother gripped the back of a chair lest she collapse.

  "The tables we have waited on," she wailed.

  "I've waited on tables too," David cried.

  He had rejected a full musical scholarship to Julliard, in order to attend the Neighborhood Playhouse.

  "Where you will have to pay!" his mother said. "Are you stupid? Are you trying to drive us crazy? All right, if not music, do business like your sister. But to put paint on your face, some hyena, for people to laugh at you? Please, David. Please. Consider us," she beseeched in Romanian. "I beg you, consider us." It sounded like Latin, but with strong Jewish roots accenting the more desperate syllables.

  David led Connie into a place called the Starlit Diner on 36th and Third. A waiter shook David's hand and sat them at a rather large table in the back.

  David remained steadfast in his desire, and henceforth his parents withheld their love, the mother more so, their words clipped with disappointment, a frugality of tone. The passive-aggressive silences on the overseas phone calls to this day. He had broken the family contract and got branded a blood traitor, the emotional abbreviation from his parents for years on end taking a toll. But such was the power of his calling to the stage. He wanted to act, period, cost what it may—even family. David's sister earned an MBA and JD from Penn State, followed by enormous real estate success, and the family returned to Romania.

  "They left me here," David said.

  "God almighty," Connie said. "Can you pass the syrup?"

  Connie ordered what the menu called a Farmer's Boy Special, two breakfasts rolled into one: pancakes and eggs, toast and butter, bacon and sausage. The waiter kept the coffee coming.

  David cited the names of Playhouse alumni to his parents, which to his mother meant nothing, but David caught the spark in his father's eye at the mention of certain names, this same father who had taken David as a child to all the old cinema houses of Bucharest, and later Greenwich Village.

  "Father, please," David said, "explain it to Mother."

  The movies were their special time, father and son. David's sister, mother-bound, did not attend these outings.

  "You know, Father, why I need to pursue this. You know. Please. I know you know."

  They would walk together hand in hand, discussing the just-seen pictures, David a precocious six-year-old, asking so many questions of his father on their way home. The father carrying figs for them in a small brown bag in the pocket of his long black overcoat.

  The father torn between wife and son. He looked from one to the other, David's future hanging in the balance, not to mention the love of the parents for each other, and their love for David himself. The look in his mother's eyes.

  You should right now spit in my face, because that's what you've done. That stupid 7 train, seven days a week, that lousy restaurant, in a language that sounded like the voice of God.

  David ordered a black-and-white milkshake and Connie told the waiter to put it on his ticket. One forty-five a.m. on a nothing weeknight and the Starlit was jumping. The city's mentally ill spilled out into the mix, and Connie spotted one such man heading straight to the bathroom, a scuffed briefcase in hand, the man attempting to look industrious, Connie realizing the man was jobless and homeless, the thread of his life having snapped a good ways back.

  "And then I met the woman who was to become my wife, my first class at the Playhouse, summer of '61," David said.

  "The one from theater royalty?"

  "Turns out she couldn't act, not a lick, so she bowed out with grace, and at the moment she's interning at Lenox Hill in geriatrics. So beautiful, if you saw her."

  David wrapped up his life's story: the start of his career, some early soap-opera work, his marriage, a string of B movies he refused to divulge the names of due to a previous run of obesity, his divorce.

  After some quiet, when Connie had cleaned his plate, he sat back, lit a cigarette, and said, "I don't get it. There's a gap in your story."

  Fourteen people stormed into the rear of the diner, laughing, addressing David, slapping him on the back, fourteen men and women haranguing him about his whereabouts.

  "Who spoke?" David asked.

  "Guy named Louie from Pax," somebody said.

  "Powerful," another said. "Powerful qualification."

  A guy looked at Connie and said, "What do you got here, a wet one?" and Connie laughed, embarrassed and confused. There were too many of them, they talked all at once and their eyes shone funny, this gang of fourteen bombing their way into the back of the Starlit. They surrounded Connie and David at the table, the crowd running the gamut from old-man-banker-in-a-suit to young-slut-in-a-minidress, the group as a whole defying strata altogether, there in the back of the Starlit.

  They had come from a midnight AA meeting at the Moravian Church on 30th Street and Lexington Avenue. Some sober for days, some others, decades. Some ordered big, some just coffee. They talked all at once, telling pope jokes and rabbi jokes, jokes about all kinds of animals, about people, places, and things walking into bars.

  A fountain pen walks into a bar.

  Half of a horse's ass walks into a bar.

  Down the table Connie heard, "I wanted to drink so bad I thought my face was going to explode." He exchanged looks with David through the din.

  "What's up?" Connie said.

  "Nothing. I know them."

  "Yeah, I put that much together."

  "Fuck a higher power," somebody said, "I just don't want to wet the bed anymore."

  Connie grabbed his head as if his foxhole had taken a direct mortar hit.

  "Sexually," another guy said, "I don't know if I'm coming or going," and the guy across from him said, "You're in the right place," and this brought more laughter.

  Next to Connie a guy with thick eyeglasses whose leg would not stop bouncing beneath the table said, "How many days you got?"

  Connie snatched at his check, sprang from his chair.

  * * *

  He felt disembodied on his way back to the rooming house, moving through the streets under some inarticulate threat. Two nuns a priest and a rabbi walk into a bar. Connie didn't like them telling bar jokes. A mother-in-law walks into a bar with a hunk of Swiss cheese tied around her neck.

  He'd been wetting the bed for years. It probably had as much to do with Maureen changing the lock as his infidelity.

  He smoked and walked west and thought of a moment, circa '57, fifteen years old, up on Maureen's roof, waiting for her to come up and make out with him. They had come back around to each other, having known each other forever, Connie taken anew by the sight of her at a table with the girls at the previous November's Parish Night. Those were the days. Simple appointments, simple agendas. There you were, kissing so sweet, a summer's afternoon. An ocean lin
er glided slowly between buildings down the Hudson. In his hand, that first cold beer of the day. The blueness of sky, the raw smell of life up his nose, the slow glide of the ocean liner, the taste of that beer. He worked as a helper for a trucking company called REA Express, so he had a little money. But the thought that stuck, the thought he never shook from that moment up on Maureen's roof: I cannot picture life without it. It meaning not love, or sex, or Maureen, or kissing, or a blue sky, or ocean liners, or money, or health—but alcohol. Can't imagine life without it. A drink, a beer, something. Wrapped up tight already, fifteen years old. In his gut, he knew. Otherwise, went the premonition, I just won't make it.

  And who the hell is this David anyway?

  Back in his room the bourbon tasted like someone had watered the bottle down. He wondered where the kick had gone, the sting at the back of the throat.

  The Starlit Diner as a destination contained an element of surprise Connie did not care for. "Why didn't you let me know, David?" Connie whispered to himself. "What kind of sneak-attack nonsense is that?" He sat in the dark, whispering, smoking, drinking.

  He went to the closet, reached up to a shelf, and produced by its handle a tiny portable television. A thirteen-inch screen, the weight of a man's bowling ball. He pushed the hot plate back out of the way, unraveled the TV's cord. After the tubes warmed he sat transfixed by the muted black-and-white images of a Combat! rerun. Connie would not have been surprised if a guy like Vic Morrow enjoyed a drink. Again came a respectful knock.

  "Yes?" Connie said, going for an official tone.

  "You took off abruptly. Are you all right?" David said, popping his head into the room.

  "Why would I be anything other than all right?" Connie said. "Come in if you're coming in."

  David sat down and said, "You seemed to leave all of a sudden, that's all."

  "You knew they were coming."