“Oh, it’s fine,” she said, the corner of her mouth twitching. “I’ll bet they have crepes for people like you.”
* * *
The last time he was in Portland, a year ago, he interviewed Marina Abramović onstage in front of three thousand people, and ended up spending more time with her than with Betsy, who he only saw once for coffee. But now here he was again.
Betsy had bought her cute little shotgun house in Northeast Portland with her first husband in 2001 before the real estate market went rabid. Her front yard was chaos: huge planters, some half-shattered, and raised beds colonized by weeds, an old white fence collapsing in on itself. The empty chicken coop was still out front. Pilar snapped a cell-phone shot of a rusted bicycle claimed by tentacles of ivy that stood nobly beside the house, waiting optimistically.
The doorbell sent a loud, abrasive buzz into the house. No turning back now. Pilar took a deep breath, almost visibly shaking. Her entire impression of him was based on what he’d done with her, or what he’d told her about himself. He heard Betsy stomping toward them across her hardwood floors. The door was flung open, and there she was, in a stained apron, sweat gleaming on her high forehead, an inch of gray roots showing, and he grabbed her in a hug.
“Hey, fucker, how are you?” she whispered tenderly as he squeezed her a bit too hard.
“Fine, fine,” he said and pulled away. “This is Pilar, my…” he said and then hesitated before saying, “girlfriend.” They interacted with so few adults, and almost none outside of the kink community.
Pilar held the orange juice and champagne awkwardly in the crook of her left arm as she shook Betsy’s hand, and then they were inside, the house redolent of bacon, weaving between stalagmites of magazines and unopened mail growing between her threadbare furniture. Nothing changed here, other than a gradual accrual of ephemera.
Betsy and Pilar bustled into the kitchen and opened the champagne and were very quickly making strata. Betsy put Gavin in charge of hacking up the stale baguette, while Pilar put herself on egg duty.
“Sorry my place is a shithole,” Betsy muttered as Pilar tossed the third eggshell into the paper grocery bag on the floor and Gavin took a long drink of coffee. “But I did remove the cat carcasses from the living room.”
“I’m sorry about our last-minute invasion. We could have just gone to Tasty n Daughters, or something,” Gavin said.
“Nah, eleven on a Sunday? Dude. Mick Jagger would still have to wait two hours.” She inhaled, grimacing.
Both Betsy and Pilar were wearing all black—Pilar in a maxi-skirt and sweater, Betsy in yoga pants and a black hoodie—and they wore their dark hair at the same length, both pulled back into a rough ponytail. They were also roughly the same height. It had sort of occurred to him before, their resemblance, but it was a bit weird in the flesh. They were discussing tattoos: his cousin had a colorful floral tattoo peekabooing out from her neckline, hinting at a larger picture below.
Pilar’s face and shoulders relaxed, as if merely meeting Betsy confirmed that Gavin existed, that others also knew him and loved him. It felt comfortable, too. And he realized with relief that this was what he’d wanted: for Betsy to see him, him and Pilar, and to accept them despite his very serious moral failings. And for Pilar to see him and his cousin, and see that he could love someone well, for a lifetime.
After a pause, Betsy said, “What brings you two to town?”
“I just—I was hoping to just…” he said. Even during the affair, he’d preferred to engineer omissions rather than generate lies. She laughed, gave him her look.
“Ack,” he said. He’d planned a lie, but he was blushing so deeply he might faint. “Fuck—it’s embarrassing.”
“Oh, maybe you’re in town for KinkFest?” Betsy ventured.
He barked a laugh and shook his head, then pointed the remaining half baguette at her accusingly and said, “How do you know about that kind of thing?”
“I know things,” she said. “I’m your older cousin. It’s my job. Was it fun?”
“Sort of.” He shrugged, still blushing, focusing on cutting the bread. “Really—how did you know?”
She was dicing a stack of ham slices into tidy little squares. “I guessed.” She was also an inexpert liar. Oriana’s Facebook post. He knew with thudding clarity.
“Did you see him on Fet?” Pilar asked, and then he wanted to die, but also wanted to stay alive long enough to flee.
“What’s Fet?” Betsy said, and he couldn’t tell if she was feigning innocence or attempting to draw out more information.
“FetLife dot com,” Pilar answered, very matter-of-factly. He almost felt frightened on her behalf. There she was, collar and cuff glinting in the midmorning light. Nothing to hide. They had agreed not to overshare about their lifestyle, but they hadn’t anticipated Betsy’s line of questioning.
“And that’s a—” Betsy began, and then said, “Well, sort of self-explanatory.”
Pilar cracked the sixth and final egg, and Gavin said, “Oriana also—” but then he stopped himself. A few agonizing seconds later, he went on, “Oriana posted an accusation about me on Facebook, but…”
“Yeah,” Betsy said and drew a deep breath, chopping the zucchini with focus. “I told her to take it down.”
“You did?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” He almost teared up thinking of his cousin defending him. “Thank you.” No one spoke for a while. All the more now, he actually wanted to just have out with it. After all these years. Maybe they could just clear the air?
But then the strata slid into the oven, and they were finishing the champagne at the kitchen table. Sitting there looking at them both, he realized he never wanted to leave. Pilar and Betsy were ribbing him for being too “fancy” and shallow—name-dropping some artist, or scoffing at something for being obvious—both in that same big-sister way that really meant love. Something he hadn’t realized he’d missed with Oriana, until now.
He joined in, describing to their laughter abstruse essays he’d read about surface and depth in contemporary art, and the deep value of “shallow” art. How he bantered at donor’s mansions cocktail parties, before the host dragged everyone outside to view his new helicopter pad on the south lawn, and everyone guffawed merrily at the big pink heart at the center of the pad—so subversive!
The alarm on Betsy’s phone rang and she pulled the strata from the oven, dusted it in nutmeg. It looked amazing, smelled better. What the hell was he doing in Seattle? Career, yes, but he should be here, with people he loved. “Let’s give it five minutes to think about what it’s done, and then we’ll eat,” she said. “We need more champagne!”
Betsy poured, and Pilar said, apropos of nothing, “Neither of you had kids.”
After a brief silence, Gavin said, “The bloodline dies with us!”
But Betsy didn’t laugh. Staring at Pilar, she said, “Do you know why we didn’t have kids? He’s a pretty good liar, you know.”
Pilar winced. “No, he’s a terrible liar. Do you have the same reason? I guess it’s the reason for many people—like, you know, their parents were so awful that the whole thing is poisoned.”
“My mom, Gavin’s aunt, wasn’t so bad,” Betsy pointed out. “Despite being wasted on vodka for a couple decades. And then she died, go figure.” She had that hard, cold note in her voice, and Gavin hoped that Pilar heard it, too, knew to back off. “Gavin has shown you all of the skeletons. Right?”
Pilar hesitated, then said, “He’s honest with me. Are you surprised?”
Betsy looked at her for a while, not answering, only appraising her—and it occurred to him that Betsy might think he’d told her their secret, the one so sacred they didn’t even say it to each other. But then Betsy pivoted, and said, “How are you adjusting to being with this guy who has a million friends?”
“I’ve never met any of them,” Pilar admitted, still impressively relaxed, like she didn’t even notice Betsy’s rising blood pressure. Surely
she saw. “Anyone who has that many friends,” Pilar mused, probably feeling the champagne, “maybe they don’t have any real friends. You know? I have my, like, five or six friends, who I see pretty often, who I text with regularly, and whatever. But that’s it.”
It was true. No wonder Pilar didn’t need armor; she never went into battle. Betsy was like that, too: ten to fifteen real friends, and she barely spoke to anyone else apart from the patrons of the municipal swimming pool she managed.
“You design gravestones?” Betsy said, surely in a bid to change the subject again. “That must be fulfilling. I’m serious. When our dad died, the planning was…” She just stopped and shook her head.
Pilar gazed absently at the cuff on her left wrist. “None of the people who come through ever send me a card to thank me. They never call or follow up. Honestly, I don’t mind, but I think it’s telling: they all want to forget the whole thing. I’m making a memorial, something to help them remember, and they just want to forget, because the memory hurts them.”
“Maybe they just have nothing to gain from you anymore,” Gavin said.
“Nah,” Pilar said, and rubbed her cuff. “They’re in their own well of grief. Meanwhile, Gavin is lost in a lake of people who want some kind of professional connection, but nothing more. And yet he’s the only person who has devoted himself to me in, well, I…” But she didn’t finish, thank God.
He knew then that he would ask her to move in, on the drive back. The board and the rest of his art community would learn to love or at least accept this goth mom, or they wouldn’t, but if loving Pilar somehow ruined his shot at Gertrude’s job, then maybe that was for the best.
* * *
“Iggy can have my office,” he said, eyes on the road as they left Portland.
She grinned. “You’re too drunk to drive, let alone ask me to live with you.” Actually, the champagne had worn off, leaving him with a fuzzy headache. We need to think about it first,” she said.
“I’ve been thinking about it. I told Betsy last week that I was thinking about it.”
“So I’ll be your little sex slave?”
He laughed. “Basically.”
“Deal.” Full of champagne and strata, she laid her head against the car door and dozed, her legs spread slightly.
Along that stretch of I-5, the car was buffeted by strong winds, and Gavin had to work harder to steer straight. Keeping his eyes on the road, he worried the radio for a station that wasn’t country-western or Christian testimonials, a part of his mind still circling the secret that had almost come tumbling out over breakfast.
In part, he’d never told Pilar what happened with Betsy because he’d never told anyone about the unusually hot summer he spent with her and her mom in Eugene. He was ten and she thirteen. Late afternoon, heat bearing down on her south-facing bedroom, he was in his boxers and T-shirt, drawing on her floor, when he looked up to find her asleep, but she’d tossed the cover off and parted her legs. Dark pubic hair bulged in her orange sherbet underwear. His own mom was in jail, and his dad was nowhere to be found. Her own dad was dead, and her mother was out screwing the deputy mayor. So they were alone all summer. Of course Betsy wasn’t asleep, but she wanted them both to act as if she were asleep. So he approached slowly, and when he touched her she pretended to stir, and then she lifted her hip slightly so he could pull her underwear down without “waking” her. He’d never seen a woman’s genitalia up close. Listening to her heavy, fast breathing, feeling his blood surge through his arteries, he stared, and his rigid penis ached with longing for something about this, but he didn’t even know what it was he wanted.
After that, they’d do this—her “asleep” and him “exploring”—maybe a dozen times that summer. Although unspoken, the boundaries of what happened between them were strict: he looked, he touched anything he wanted, and he put his fingers inside of her. Once, he tried to put his tongue on her, but she suddenly stirred, signaling disapproval, so he didn’t try that again. When he was back the next summer, it was more of the same. It stopped the third summer, by which point he was entering puberty and she was fifteen. That third summer she’d turn away when he entered, or sit up and ask how he was doing. He understood she was telling him it was over.
But the pleasure sensors in his mind had been so aggressively stimulated that they wouldn’t reset. He’d always be like this, with hungry hands and cock and heart, greedy for more, wanting to find someone who would hold him as tightly as he grasped them.
He was glad they’d done it, but never again had any desire to see her naked. He continued fantasizing about sleeping women, tied-up women, and he thought about releasing hot jets of cum into their pussies. And he jerked off at least three times a day from then on—even now he rarely made it through a day without coming two to four times.
His sexual appetite had astonished Pilar, but almost four years into their relationship she still wanted to give a backseat blow job, to receive the midafternoon quickie, hiking up her skirt and pulling down her underwear. Every other woman he’d dated, including Oriana, eventually asked him to cool it, but Pilar still wanted it all. If he was going to jerk off, she asked that he at least push the head of his cock into her mouth or her pussy at the last minute so it didn’t go to waste.
Those hours Gavin had spent buried under the covers when he was on one side of puberty and Betsy was on the other had been the most intimate and joyous part of his life during those awful years. Yes, he would have to tell Pilar, maybe when she was tied up, belly down, facing away from him.
* * *
At a gas station in Centralia, he peed and bought a big bottle of Smartwater. From inside he gazed at Pilar, awake again, leaning against the car, wearing her “Nasty Woman” T-shirt.
Her son, Iggy, was only a year away from graduating high school. Gavin’s place was in the same school zone as hers, so when they moved in Iggy wouldn’t have to switch schools in his senior year. The soundproofing was better in his apartment than hers, too, so Iggy could turn the volume on his guitar up a couple extra notches. They’d get used to this—get used to each other.
Now, back on the road north, the wind still shoving at them in gusts, he almost told Pilar about Betsy and those summer afternoons. But this secret was a tender, special thing, starting to burn now that it was the only one left between the two of them. The secret wouldn’t last long, he knew, but he’d hold it tenderly until he finally set it free.
Mirror, Mirror
by Vanessa Clark
“I think I’d die if I don’t find my destiny soon” were some of the first words he said. It was an afternoon in-call, and the boyish shyness of his voice betrayed that this was his first time.
“Okay… so, have you ever dated an escort before?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“Um, Upper West Side.”
Most of the men who used my phone service were a type: chasers, size queens for women with well-hung, functional cocks, like mine. Usually, my size was a kink in and of itself—these men didn’t seek light domination, restraining, teasing, verbal abuse, and choking; not even me fucking and plowing them to death was the be-all and end-all. There was some of that, and how they’d love that, of course, but the service they sought was rarely the full thing. The fantasy that they craved, needed, obsessed over, was just to see it—they hardly needed to touch, or feel. Just seeing it would get them off. Sometimes, their basking in my beauty was enough to thrill us both.
As I kicked back in my office chair from my Village apartment, I caught some breeze from my loud window fan. I applied my dark hibiscus-red lipstick to pursed lips, already feeling myself and my freshly sculpted beat. Nancy Wilson’s “Time Out For Love” played from my radio.
“I’d like to kiss you in front of a mirror,” the stranger said in a newly husky tone.
“And?” I asked, as in, Get to the fucking point, I don’t have all day.
“And, um, I’d like to go down on you�
�”
“So you’re into size?” I asked.
He chuckled. “Yeah… I do have experience with that, I’ll tell you that, but I think I’m ready to take more, and bigger, like you… Um, I’d like to make you come, I’d like to make you come.”
“Mmm, so you’d say that you’re a cocksucker?”
I almost thought he’d hung up on me—he was that quiet—but through the silence I heard him breathe so softly before his slow, simple declaration: “I am a cocksucker…” In that moment, I imagined him floating through the air on a cloud of the silence that followed.
“You’ve never called an ad before, correct?” I asked him, point-blank, I couldn’t help myself. I laughed sweetly as I caressed my chest.
“You’ve guessed right, ma’am…” With a smile, I nodded. I ordered him to describe himself to me. “Well, I’m thirty. I’m single. I’m about five ten, one hundred eighty-five pounds. I haven’t been intimate with someone in a long time. I’m tired of dreaming about it and masturbating in my sleep. I work all day and too much.” He paused here, as if to take stock of the person he’d just described. “I think I deserve some fun time. Wall Street is stressful sometimes, ya know?”
“Uh-huh,” I replied.
“Um, I might need a little bit of help and encouragement, though. It’s been a while, but I want to get off to you, Teena, so bad. I’d like to get together with you now if it’s not too late, or too early… I can make it in half an hour.”
“Okay, I gotchu, but my afternoon schedule is full, I’m afraid. But I have a spot open for tonight?” I gave him the time and place. “Will that be all right with you?”
“That’s fine with me. I’m familiar with that area, and that joint.”
“Great. Can you spend one hundred fifty dollars?”
I crossed my legs, and he gently confirmed: “Yes, I can.”
* * *
The moon was high and full, the sky cloudless. The city was muggy as balls that night, thick with the New York funk. I passed by the strip clubs and porno shops, pimps and hustlers, trade and drug dealers, that littered Times Square back in the 1990s. From the distance, I knew it was him, waiting for me in front of Sally’s II, a drag transsexual nightclub. Sally’s looked swanky from the outside, with its glitzy marble structure and lit-up marquee. The lobby of the twenty-four-story Carter Hotel was conveniently connected from the inside by way of a catwalk, its huge, red neon sign clear as forever in the dark. As I got closer, I had to stop and blink—was he for real? I couldn’t believe it—ha! He was dressed as if it were 1980 and we were going to the prom. Whatever planet he was on, well, I didn’t mind it. The nostalgia made me kind of horny. But—thirty my ass; he had to be north of forty, and no taller than five two. I wouldn’t put it past him to be married, actually, with a wife and kids somewhere. They usually were. They’d promise they were single, but there was usually a picture of their wife and kids in their wallets.
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