by Susan Choi
“Don’t you want to go down in the yard?”
“With the rest of them? No. No.” He dropped the packet of Drum and pulled her by the wrist to sit beside him. “No,” he whispered hotly. “I want to stay here with you.” When he jammed his tongue into her ear she gasped with repulsion as much as surprise, and twisted her head to take his tongue in her mouth, a less embarrassing arrangement that was even less pleasurable. She tasted the bitterness of her own earwax and bore down harder against him, in the hopes of erasing the flavor. It was a baffling struggle to accommodate his wildly poking, flicking tongue; no matter what they did, her tongue and his seemed to be at violent cross-purposes, each trying to poke the other out of the way. With an agonized groan Liam twisted their intertwined torsos until he’d crushed her to the mattress’s uneven surface, and then her air went out of her all at once as Liam, wildly struggling to take off his jacket, let his full weight drop onto her chest. He finally wrenched the jacket off with the vehemence of a madman escaping his straitjacket, and at the same time she gasped in such a desperate effort to refill her lungs she made a noise like a squeak or a shriek—hearing her, Liam raised himself above her on the balls of his hands and grinned frankly into her face, for he’d taken her gasp as a sign of excitement.
And she was, in a strange way, excited. All the physical signs of Liam’s ardor abashed and shocked her. He flailed; his dead white hairy limbs appeared impaled on the stem of his unaccountably wrinkly erection which he took in his fist and seemed to squirt redly at her, for he’d yanked back the covering skin. Sarah had never seen or even imagined an uncircumcised penis; she must have gaped at it, delighting him further. But along with these dismaying physical extrusions came verbal ones which made her shudder with astonishment. He talked constantly, mostly incomprehensibly, but what of his babble she grasped was unstintingly filthy. His voice rose and fell as he jabbered at her, like the voice of a gleefully mischievous boy who’s found a pornographic novel and is reading it aloud. And the words he used! So much filthier for being nursery words a mincing mother might use as she wiped a fat baby. He called it his willy—“Oh my willy’s going in!—it’s going in!—so squashy wet my willy’s in your squashy wet tight squashy hot—” Nothing could have been less suave—he didn’t touch her so much as he yanked, poked, jabbed, squeezed as if her body were some sort of toy—and yet she heard herself, a rising note of protest or a siren of warning, “Noooo, noooo, noooo.” And the horrible pleasure, pushing outward from her like a flower of flesh with great muscular petals like tongues, in its enormous agonizing opening so overpowered her she could not even feel his “willy” or any other part of him anywhere in or near her, as if he’d shrunk to a speck and been swept out to sea on the flood of her unwanted pleasure.
Returning from this she found herself suffocated beneath a weight of damp flesh. Her bra, T-shirt, and jean jacket were shoved to her armpits, exposing her breasts; her jeans and panties were shoved to her ankles; her knees were splayed open; she was still wearing her black pointy boots. Her bottom, coldly soaking wet, felt glued to a puddle of slime. Over Liam’s shoulder she saw the door of the room which was not even closed, and shoved him away with such force he fell off the end of the bed into foothills of trash.
“Didn’t you like it?” he exclaimed.
“The door’s open!”
Ah, she wasn’t displeased, only charmingly shy! Agreeably he sprang across the room to close the door despite it hardly mattering now—and so was the window still open, through which, only minutes before, she had heard David’s voice. What had the night heard of her, she wondered as she frantically tugged her clothes back into place, dodging his spidery efforts to re-entwine her, his slobbering kisses and praise. “God you’re so lovely,” he marveled again and again, like an actual idiot. She wished he would put on his clothes, cover his pale washboard chest and its brightly pink nipples. But he seemed perfectly at ease, sitting cross-legged on the heap of fouled sheets, his spent penis flopped between his legs like a stricken worm.
“Don’t you think we should go downstairs?” she begged him.
“If you’d fancy a drinkie I can pop down and get us some beers.”
“It’s just—what if someone comes up?” That the door had been open—the unthinkable humiliation of exposure grew more narrowly evaded in retrospect, as if, with enough dawdling, the past might be rewritten and the awful thing take place after all. How often was she going to do this, fuck someone in public? If he’d only get dressed!
“But Jim isn’t here. Did you think he was here? He’s at the opera, he and Tim. They’ll be gone hours.”
“He and Tim aren’t home?”
“No!” Liam laughed.
“But do they know we’re here?”
“We’re their guests! We’re allowed to be here.” At last he was pulling his clothes on, growing handsome again as his flesh disappeared. Halfway into his shirt, he pulled her against him and again pushed his pointy avid tongue down her throat. “D’you know I’ve been mad for you?” he asked huskily. “Wanking day and night, thinking about you. Almost drove poor Martin out of his mind.”
“Oh my God.” She laughed hollowly, twisting away. He tried to pull her hand into his just-buttoned pants but playing the coquette she escaped him, and rushed out the door and down the flight of stairs into the second-floor hall. A murmur of voices and music reached her from the opposite end of the house. As she pursued it Liam caught up, wearing the gaze of devoted assurance she longed for from David.
“I adore you,” Liam whispered as they emerged, pungent and nest-haired and obvious, into the kitchen.
There stood Joelle and Theodosia and Lilly and Rafe and a handful of the popular Juniors, whom Sarah had never known Joelle to spend time with, sharing a joint. Joelle gazed at Sarah as if from the deck of a ship that was moving away from the dock toward a glorious distant horizon; and Sarah saw herself, in Joelle’s steady gaze, marooned on the dock, shrinking down to a pinprick, vanishing.
“My my my,” Rafe said to Liam, “where’ve you been, Master Candide? Learning your lessons?”
“I’ve been alphabetizing the porno. There’s ever so much of it.”
“Oh my God,” Rafe said, blurting out smoke. “D’you all know about the porno? No end of it. Martin told us he’d thought he was putting on 8½ by Fellini and what came on was gents shoving their fists in each other’s a-holes.”
“Noooooo!” shrieked the popular Juniors, covering their faces, their mouths, or their ears.
“Martin’s such a bloody liar, he knew exactly what tape he was playing,” Lilly said to laughter.
“Do I hear my own revered name?” Martin said, appearing in the doorway that led from the yard with his dingy hair even more scrumbled than Liam’s. “Did you miss me, my darlings?”
“We’re just talking about what a pervert you are.”
“Be good now, be good. For fuck’s sake take the joint back outside.”
Karen wasn’t with Martin, or anywhere Sarah could see. Unobtrusively Sarah tried to peer through the darkness seeking Karen or David as she passed outside into the yard. Her palm was wet and cold from the bottle of beer she was clutching. The small of her back squirmed beneath Liam’s palm where he kept it attached as if with adhesive. She craved escape from his touch at the same time as feeling wild gratitude for the obstacle he made, like a shield, between her and Joelle, between her and the prospect of David. No sooner did this occur to her than she became afraid he’d change his mind and in her fear grabbed his hand, and felt him gratefully squeeze in return. Then they were smoking in the gazebo with Simon and Erin O’Leary, who clung to each other with the stunned despair of lovers so overcome by their lust they cannot take the first step toward solving it; they could have walked indoors and fucked in any of several unoccupied rooms as Sarah had just done without meaning to, but the simplicity of this solution escaped them. Their mutual grip was white-knuckled. Also in the gazebo were Colin and Cora, Cora who had been housed with Pammi
e and had thrown her over and moved in with Karen. Sarah wanted to ask Cora where Karen was, but Colin and Cora, unlike Simon and Erin, were noisily necking, grinding and groping, indifferent to their audience. And Rafe was there, bantering filthily with Liam, his arm slung around Katrina from Dance. Every one of the visiting English had paired off soon after arriving, none of these couplings was news, there had even been time for breakups and betrayals—only the grown-ups, Liam and Martin, had remained outside the dance, bemused by it, exempt; “horny little fuckers,” Martin had said. But now Liam had chosen Sarah—she could feel this information emanating through the darkness, altering her status, though in what way she couldn’t yet gauge. And Martin? “We’re just hanging out,” Karen had sneered. Sarah remembered sitting in this gazebo with Julietta and Pammie and Greg Veltin, those three linked in a circle of joy to which Sarah could not stay attached though they’d reached out their hands to keep her. Theirs was a love she had rejected by reflex because of its very simplicity, its undiverted, untranslated eruption from the heart or the guts or wherever such feelings came from. Sarah didn’t have such feelings anymore. Here she sat in the octopus arms of a man whose attractiveness she had to keep scolding herself to perceive and for whom she felt nothing but, now, an uneasy responsibility, as he slobbered and groaned his undiminished longing into her ear.
Rafe and Katrina and Simon and Erin and Cora and Colin no longer bothered to banter or smoke but only strove with mouths and tongues to swallow each other, and ground their crotches together, and collided their limbs with the gazebo’s unyielding walls. When Sarah flinched from Liam’s kiss he fell agreeably onto her neck and fed there like a starved, toothless dog. Apart from feeling wet, and as a consequence cold, Sarah’s body was devoid of sensation. Staring into the darkness beyond the gazebo as Liam whimpered and gummed the tendons of her neck she saw David’s profile float past, moving away, as if though mere feet of air stood between them they were no longer of the same world. Ever since arriving she’d been straining her powers of intuition to make some kind of contact with David and now he was passing so near she might have reached out and seized him. Her jaws opened but no sound came out. Yet David turned, and his gaze fell on her where she sat on the floor of the gazebo with Liam’s mouth latched onto her neck and Liam’s hand twiddling her unfeeling breast. David’s gaze swept her mercilessly and then he’d passed out of sight, toward the house. Sarah wrenched herself upright. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, and escaped.
Inside the house the kitchen counters were covered in bottles and bags, the sound system had been left spattering between radio stations, shelves of smoke hung in the air performing slow disintegrations where they had been deposited by unknown persons passing through. Every room Sarah saw was empty. Yet she was certain the house wasn’t empty. Her body had come back to life, emotion pumping from her like a tide that touched all surfaces and lifted even the slightest piece of evidence, floating it into the light. Passing down the first-floor hallway to its very end Sarah flattened her hand on a door that was slightly ajar, pushed it open, and there were Martin and David, hunched in noiseless contortions of mirth. Their puckered faces were red. At her entrance they unbent, with effort and gasping.
“Oh my God,” said David, “get that thing away from me.”
The room in which she’d found them was a bedroom, vast and dim, holding a great bed lavishly made up in purple satin so dark as to look almost black. The bed stuck out from its wall like a tongue, was tumbled with pillows of all different sizes but all made of the same black-purple satin, like a crop of eggplants. The glow from two enormous lamps under zebra-striped shades would have barely outshone a candle. The far side of the room disappeared into drapery.
“Look who’s here! Catch,” Martin said and as she reached toward him in dumb obedience an object landed in her hands. David smacked it away.
“Jesus! Don’t make her touch it.”
“I’m sure it’s perfectly clean. I’m sure they boil them after each use.” Shaking with laughter, Martin dropped onto the bed and started rifling through a drawer in the near bedside table. “Maybe Sarah would prefer a different color? A tad longer or fatter? More pointy?”
“What is it?” she asked David as Martin pelted David with another of the objects.
“You’re fucking sick!” David was trying to talk down to Martin, but his very desire to talk down to Martin guaranteed he could not. David wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t touch the thing, whatever it was, but dodged it like a squeamish little boy, so that Sarah, inflamed, snatched it up from the carpet.
“You really want to put that down!” cried David.
“Oh, shame,” Liam said, peering around the doorframe. “Martin’s got in the toy chest again.”
“Do you want to know what it is?” Martin asked her, with sudden seriousness. “My, David, you needn’t man the battle stations, you’re quite safe with me. Did you really fancy him?” This was to Sarah, for David had sprung from the room, he’d escaped her again. “I’d like to know his secret. He must emit some chemical. Lilly’s mad for him, she says she’s not going to come back to England, she’s staying here to shag David the rest of her life. But you, sweetest Sarah, you’re far too mature for Liam, let alone a wet-eared wanker like David. Come sit beside me. You too, Liam. Gather round, children,” and in a trance Sarah sat down beside him on the eggplant-colored bed, seeing nothing but David and Lilly, David’s blunt-fingered hands and Lilly’s sallow, pointy face and her grim, willing mouth. Liam bounced onto the bed and pulled her onto his lap so that her legs dangled just short of the floor. “I feel like Prospero blessing Miranda and Ferdinand,” Martin said, digging into the drawer. “Trade me the one you’ve got, Sarah. Give it here.”
“Tell me what it is first,” Sarah said, twisting out of Martin’s reach.
“Naughty minx!” Martin said.
How well she could suddenly do it—act a complete part, while concealing, completely, a true self that did her no good. Saucy and sharp, she baited Martin, tossed and caught the rubber thing just beyond Martin’s reach, felt Liam’s insistent erection questing into her ass as he gripped her ever tighter to his lap. And all the while she was really with David, with his fumbled efforts over Lilly which he made to evade her, Sarah, and which wouldn’t succeed. Indifferent to the stupid men for whom she played the role, indifferent to the prick pressing into her ass, indifferent to the thing dropping into her hand, indifferent to the room, she homed in on David. It won’t work, she told him calmly.
“Sarah,” came Mr. Kingsley’s voice into the newly quiet room. “Please give that to me and go home.” Beneath her Liam stood up and she slid off his lap onto her feet. Mr. Kingsley was standing before her, his hand extended, and she put the thing into it, staring into his face and at the same time past his shoulder into his husband Tim’s face, which hung in the doorframe like Mr. Kingsley’s pale shadow.
“Lucky you! That must be the shortest Das Rheingold in history,” Martin brayed, as if by sheer volume he could transport them all out of the room.
“Tim was feeling unwell,” said Mr. Kingsley, while pointing at Sarah a look that spoke words as if straight to her mind. You of all people should have known better.
“We had a bit of a misunderstanding,” Martin blared on. This wasn’t obliviousness, Sarah saw, but a hostile rejection of circumstance. Apart from Martin’s voice the house was perfectly silent. Even the faint static from the untuned radio in the living room at some recent moment had ceased. “My lot came around looking for me,” Martin shouted, “then their pals turned up looking for them. Inseparable they’ve all become.”
“Sarah,” Mr. Kingsley repeated, “please go home.” As she rushed from the room Tim seized hold of her hand.
“Do you have a ride, sweetie?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she said, or perhaps she nodded, or perhaps she said nothing; she wrenched her hand from his and ran down the hall out the door. Every car was gone from the curb. Every trace of the
party was gone like a zipper drawn closed, leaving only her sharp breaths and the clicking of her boots as she ran down the street. She feared nothing more than Mr. Kingsley’s Mercedes pulling up to display his disgusted but unsurprised gaze, but she must have longed for it, also, so vividly did the vision pursue her. No one, not Mr. Kingsley nor Martin and Liam nor Karen nor David nor anyone else whose body was, as it seemed bodies always should be, encased in a car appeared out of the darkness to enfold Sarah’s seemingly naked, certainly lost, unprecedentedly vulnerable body into the proper housing and accustomed rate of progress of a car. Sarah ran, as she had never previously run, down streets unaccommodating of pedestrian activity, streets without sidewalks and where the signs were far apart or entirely absent. Mr. Kingsley’s neighborhood was a sinuous maze and she was lost almost as soon as she’d gotten his house out of view. Soon she was too winded, and too self-conscious of the noise her boots made, to keep running but her walk was swift and frightened. In this city only the very poor and criminals who had made some sort of mistake while committing a crime ever walked. Sarah thought of her mother’s shabby little car, so intimately familiar, with longing and rage. She would do anything to obtain her own car. She would prostitute herself or rob or kill if it meant she could have her own car. Since starting all over with saving her bakery wages she hadn’t bought a single thing and if she could just get to twelve hundred dollars she was sure she’d have her pick of good cars; she read the Auto Trader every week with obsessive attention. She had long since ranked her dreams in order: Bug, MG, Alfa Romeo, in every case convertible. There were always beautiful little foreign convertibles for sale for around twelve hundred dollars in the Auto Trader “because those little cars are a big pain to keep running, they’re worthless,” said Sarah’s broken and cynical mother, who for all her superior experience of life knew nothing about how to live.
And then suddenly Sarah had returned to the wide, loud, brightly lit boulevard and could see the sign for Mama’s Big Boy glowing in the distance. It was a distance a car would travel in the blink of an eye but it took Sarah, walking quickly, what felt like ten minutes. She walked at the edges of the parking lots, not on the curbside bands of crabgrass, so as to look like someone walking to her car, not someone walking down the street, but even so, a few cars sounded their horns as they passed as if striping her with a paintbrush of noise. Were they warning or mocking? She didn’t know, but she tried to walk even more quickly, as fast as she could without seeming to run. In the entrance vestibule of Mama’s Big Boy she spilled her coin purse all over the floor trying to get her fingers around change for the phone. Her useless fingers, like so many hot dogs stuck onto her hands. Once she had finally managed to call David’s car phone she was afraid that the ringing would stop. David was certainly parked somewhere with English Lilly grinding away on his lap, the curtain of Lilly’s blond hair slapping them both in the face, Lilly’s left knee like an ungreased piston squeaking against the edge of David’s seat and with each squeak nearly knocking the phone from its cradle. At any moment David and Lilly’s labored fucking in the front of his car would inadvertently answer the phone and then Sarah would hear what she already saw and heard all too clearly—but instead she heard a default outgoing message that David had apparently never bothered to personalize. She hung up. It wasn’t even eleven. Mama’s Big Boy was approaching its busiest hours, when people who had already been somewhere and people who were still going somewhere converged. There wasn’t a single booth open so she sat at the counter, staring down at the enormous laminated sheets of the menu. “You again?” said her waiter of three hours before as he sailed past with pots of coffee aloft in both hands. Thankfully he wasn’t working the counter, he wouldn’t speak to her again, wouldn’t say, “Where are those boys with the accents?” She had only enough for an order of fries and a coffee and when they came their two contrasting tastes, dull-grease-potato and acrid, equally filled her mouth with the warning saliva that comes just before vomiting. She couldn’t sit on the stool at the counter for more than an hour, they had a rule against loitering, but she might not even make it that long. Some time later she went to the bathroom to rinse and stare at her unrecognizable face and when she returned the untouched fries and coffee were gone and someone new was on the stool, poring over the menu, and when she caught the counterman’s eye he waved a hand dismissively and turned away.