Maybe less out of sheer decency and more out of sexual survival, of keeping the images to themselves, I shouted, Ahhhhh! and opened the door, stiff-armed the besparkled chest of the queen of qui tacit consentire standing outside my booth, his bleached Levi’s cut so tight and thigh-high that even as he was falling backward, I could see the outline of his boot like a map of Italia, and hustled past another royal queen awaiting escort on the carriage, ran out the door into the lot, the moaning ghosts hot on my tail, freed at last to feed on the virginal world.
I ran through the already dark lot and hit the alleyway practically skidding. A little lamp of light at the end of the lane. The moon, sitting in its own gray wash. Two Korean chefs in butcher aprons were smoking on the back step of their restaurant. They could see and understood immediately from where I came, or didn’t come, and smiled, laughing as I neared. One reached into his pocket and pulled a cigarette from it, holding the unlit snipe out as I sprinted by them, right through their smoke.
I heard, “Need break, boss? Very tired?”
I remember thinking that each step over the sliding gravel and jumping rocks was like a cleaning of the conscience, an erasing of the past, a strike of six-o’clock weekday amnesia. As if my sprint would expunge the evidence of ever having been there in the alleyway.
I sped home under a blue-black sky dark as the inside of the booth, thinking on Sharon’s goods, my greed. She was sloped like the silver line bisecting a Coke can, skin blown-glass smooth to the touch, men all across the city of San Jo wanted a piece of her delicates. She was beautiful. So many regions of Western Europe were in her face: Swedish down-turned pouty mouth, Irish sea-blue eyes, lightly freckled French button of a nose, prominent German forehead. A beautiful American mutt! Sweet as a teaspoon of sugar, salty as an oyster, everything ripe on her body for seed. And I was blowing it in my greedy head, or in my sticky hand, searching for whatever impetus out there I didn’t have.
I decided right there that I’d no longer share myself with the channel-eighteen lesbians. They never existed. I would take it further than that. I would avoid the town of Mountain View for the rest of my life. Never drive through there again. A meaningless map dot removed from my head.
Mountain View is gone, my son, gone!
One purist sweep of the 48,000-population Silicon Valley suburb from my head.
And then all visual stimulation, the “body art” of Playboy, must also be erased. Showtime and HBO canceled, cable canceled—perhaps the television removed altogether. Out the door, signed off for donation at the Goodwill. No more Miller Light girls and Howard Stern whores. Walking the streets with Sharon, I would be a horse with blinders. And when Susan came to visit, or Sharon’s mother, or any woman, it would be a cordial Hello, how are you, nice to see you. Retreat into the bedroom to read the poetry of Father Hopkins, SJ, keep it clean.
I’d read more selectively. All things promoting the mind to stretch, dulling the instinct to fuck, must go. They were the enemy of potency. Anytime I felt the urge for art, I’d drive down to the Carmelites and admire the architecture of the saints. And if it got really bad, I’d slip into a sin booth and try and confess through the screen. All for the consummation later with Sharon. That sweet whirling violence down below, the old gut flame of virility. I wanted to possess and be possessed. Sharon of Paul, Paul of Sharon. Body, mind, but especially mind.
At the apartment complex, I stopped at the fountain and put my hands out to catch the spray of the water crashing. Like it was holy water, blessed H2O. I took a deep breath, prepared for a life of sanctity. Anticipating the baptismal romp with my girl. Just walk right in and claim my territory.
I got to the leaning wooden fence of our porch, unlatched the patio gate, and saw that the light was out, the blinds of the sliding glass door shut. I’d beaten her home, big-time lucky. Now I could prepare for her arrival. Light some candles, burn some incense, prepare the tub. Swoop her up when she walked into the studio, her arms loaded down with groceries, or, even better, dried with the salt of a thorough workout at the gym.
Right then a rhapsodic moan escaped through the cracks of the door.
It was Sharon. I knew the tone of her pleasure. I hadn’t heard that voluminous pitch from her in almost a year. It picked up, like a car alarm. Or a booth back at the bookstore. Jesus, God. I stared down at the ground, Sharon’s moan filling the little vacuum of hearing space on our patio. It was getting louder and I peeked over the fence into the neighbor’s patio. All the lights were off. Bob, Jim, John, whatever his name was, probably had the bottom of a glass pressed to his ear, the shared wall between the two studios thin enough to rub one off in the darkness.
But I found a ray of hope in my image of our neighbor. Maybe Sharon was engaged in some self-manipulation of her own. Maybe the whole world was a private booth of self-indulgence. Maybe everyone, when finally alone, has a straying palm or a probing finger, and maybe the darkness was universal. Maybe Sharon had the lights dimmed, a silk sheet drawn to her belly, a glass of champagne in her right hand, the bottle in her left. Maybe Sharon’s moans were uttered in the ecstatic vanity of solitude, a thorough celebration of self.
The moan came again, sustained, almost mournful.
So I’d been in the gutter for half a year, but Sharon was in the gutter too, or at least familiar with it, and that made for an even slate between the two of us. Rehab needed on both our parts, not just mine.
Then I heard something else. I looked behind me, held my breath. It was not true. It will vanish, just like the booth back in that nameless town in my deleted past. It will be gone, gone, gone.
But the new sound rose from under the door again, stronger. Then the exchange. A choral succession of lust. Pronounced in intervals by a tenor “Yes!” Definitely Sharon. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” A quickening of the pace and then the chaos of simultaneous guttural sounds. Each moan compounded by the other, two seals feeding on the pier.
I put the key softly into the lock and closed my eyes.
On the futon, their heads were deep in each other’s midsection. I shut the door and Sharon looked up, still gyrating at the naked hip, moist lips pursed, the squint of pleasure in her Irish eyes widening to fright.
I sat down on a chair near the sliding glass door, eyes on Sharon. Candles were burning by the phone. Sharon was reading my face, looking for a sign. The whole time Susan, on her stomach on Sharon, neither looked up nor stopped. Mad with lust. She was as shapely as I’d imagined, and her breasts pressed against Sharon’s belly were like little half-filled water balloons. She had a ruby-red-lips tattoo on her alabaster-skinned ass, and all along the surface in no discernible pattern were Sharon’s handprints in fading blush. I was so close to the futon I could hear the wetness. I gritted my teeth, stood, and looked down on it all.
I said, “Get out.”
Susan craned her neck back, eyes glazed as if in a dream, and said, “Shit.”
“Get out.”
She pushed herself up from Sharon and the futon. Proudly stood in front of me, muscular and naked, panting. She reached down and grabbed her clothes from the coffee table, stepped into her panties, looked up at me as she slid them up her legs, stepped into faded painter pants, wiggled them tight, buttoned up, and said, “Sorry, Paulie.”
“Shut your mouth,” I said. “Get the fuck out of here.”
Susan snapped on her sports bra. “Will you be all right, hon?”
Sharon sat up. “Of course.”
“Get out of here, bitch.”
She was fully dressed. “All right. Glad to see you’re in charge again. Leaving.”
Susan brushed by me and I felt something uncontrollable respond and I turned and tried to drive the image of their coupling out of my treacherous head with a thrust. I heard from the futon, “Don’t!” Susan crashed down to her knees from the shove and I stomped toward her. My hand reared back to strike the dyke hard and fast but Sharon’s hands clutched me at the arm from behind and then slipped down to the waist.
&
nbsp; Susan stood and turned with dignity. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”
“Yes.”
“Get the fuck out of here!”
“Just leave, Susie.”
Susan opened the door, “Don’t worry, hon. I will be back.”
She left the studio, the door wide open.
I looked down on Sharon. Both arms were wrapped about me as if she were riding hitch on a motorcycle. She looked up, nude in the middle of the studio floor, eyebrows lifted in unprecedented subservience. She wanted something. But I separated from her, and pushed her onto the futon. She fell back, crying, her knees curled into her chest, the dirty-blond mane sticky with sex, sweat dotting the inside thigh, brow moist. Fully blushed and passionate. I took a step forward and some life came to her eyes. “You dare put your hands on me?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t made love to me in six months, you bastard! Fake purist bastard!”
“We did last month.”
“You fucked someone else!” Sharon pointed at my eyes. “I know you’ve got a hundred harlots up there in your head! I know it!”
“Get out.”
“You’d probably fuck Susie if I didn’t! Wouldn’t you? You sly bastard! Always on the sneak!”
“I said get out.”
I reached down and grabbed Sharon by the elbow. She dropped to her knees and put all her weight in her ass and said, “What the hell are you doing, Paul?”
I dragged her across the rug of our studio amidst the cries: “God! Don’t do it! Liar! Don’t!” She felt remarkably light, probably from her carnal romps with Susan. Who knew how long it had gone on?
The door had creaked halfway shut and I slammed it open into its door catch, leaned against it for leverage, and tossed Sharon onto the porch like a UPS package. She fell and rolled, but lay there for only a second, glistening white in the moonlit shine, her wet lips shivering.
I piously shut the door, then locked it. Walked over to the candles and blew them out. The studio was black. I went back to the door, focusing on silence. I needed to calm down or she might hear my excitement.
I held my breath, my ear to the wood. The wind cut in and out the cracks. I looked into the peephole. Susan was kissing away the tears, wrapping Sharon up in a flannel. I unzipped my fly, gripped the engine. It reached for my belly button, filled with blood. Then suddenly, like a dying butterfly, the engine began to flutter: I discovered: whether I opened the door again or not, I was finally alone in the dark commodious booth of my head.
So I didn’t see Sharon again, but within the month I was back in a booth, watching Janine Lindemulder take on a shiny hairless brotha named Lexington Steele. Not regularly now, no ritual for me, but casually, because there was no one like Sharon around to betray. This time without plan or consequences or even caution and usually out of boredom, I’d go in the front door while traffic on El Camino Real whizzed by, even after being honked at once by young high-schoolers, mostly girls, it’s like drinking in a dive whose patronage you disdain and to which you’d put a swinging wrecking ball with all of them, including yourself, in its dead center. Just when you’re taking the shot of absinthe, fumes of dead wormwood singeing the hair of the nostrils and climbing upward through the nasal passage to drill holes in the walls of soft tissue—Powwww!—a big black ball of Lexington Steele right through the brain.
14
Today We Break from Custom
TODAY WE BREAK from custom.
Like the dutiful dog that I am, I’ve been pacing the garage for an hour in the late noon when La Dulce pulls in, says, “You just a lonely horny little thing, ain’tcha? Get in.”
“What about the garage?”
“What?”
“Our daily tryst. In the garage.”
“No.”
“No?”
“We gonna go meet you some fellow artistes.”
“Do you have to say it like a Frenchwoman?”
“I’m a Haitian, fool. Figure out the history.”
“I don’t like your artistes.”
“You wanna keep your room?”
“What bait,” I say, walking around the car.
We drive to Downtown San Jo in silence. I get the sense that she wants me to get all wide-eyed with hope. I mostly sleep, thinking about her beautiful backside bouncing around on my tip by the boxes and brooms in the garage.
We’re entering the urban campus of the Silicon University of the Valley and I say, “Nah. Forget it. I ain’t going back to school for you, for no one.”
“You gotta keep your mind open for opportunity. You need some credentials.”
“I’m kicking it with you. What more do I need?”
“I’m your last hope on the education front.”
“You wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Start with money,” she says. “Just like everyone else.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Don’t embarrass me. These my folks. Without me, they got no program.”
“You just go to these things to clean yourself up and act like a big shot. If they ever heard how you really talk, they’d ban you from the campus.”
“Listen. Get your appetite on tonight. This MFA graduation party is your dinner.”
The barbecue announces itself: there’s a banner the size of a football field tied between the English Department building and the gymnasium. I can barely read the first few words without shaking my head: “WELCOME TO THE PRIZE WINNERS OF TOMORROW....”
This special brand of artistes looks about the same as past gatherings. You’ve got your standard preponderance of berets and turtle-necks and all kinds of curious cross-dressing. You’ve got your bad dancing, bad acoustics. Today it’s a lady whiter than her sea-shells doing a belly dance to a Ravi Shankar tune, the sitar played by a bearded prophet with one name, one letter: Z. La Dulce whispers this fact into my ear as if it were holy scripture. At a picnic table, a group of writers is playing Trivial Pursuit 2005, a game that has no data on its quiz cards before 2000. The Sphinx, St. Peter’s, the Constitution? Not worth keeping in the long-term memory box.
I walk on, trying my best to feign non-judgment on my face, find another prize-winner-to-be perched in the branches of a small tree pontificating to the crowd of poets below about the essence of staying true blue to yourself and threaten to jump and (of course) not do it.
“Can you die from a sprained ankle?” I ask La Dulce.
“Shush.”
“Shush? More like shove. Someone give the poor guy a hand.”
“That’s Swartie. He depressed.”
“Better,” I say, “than oppressed.”
“He got his three-hundredth rejection letter this week. Carries them around in his backpack.”
“Like a novel manuscript?”
“Have some sensitivity for once in your life. You only here because of me.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Help me out a little here, baby.”
“Okay,” I say, “no worries.” I take the bed of dead grass by the wall of the gym. It’s shadowed by an unoccupied magnolia, the most ego-free area of this celebration.
La Dulce walks off to chat and I watch and listen to it all. Some bearded cat in a swabbie pullover is introducing himself to new recruits as Colonel Bobby Jameson. The Alpha Graduate. He has the entitled attitude of election. He’s talking loud so that everyone, even me, can hear his loving elaboration on the creative value of oxygen bars in Berkeley. He starts up a debate with Swartie in the tree about whether it’s better to write by candlelight or moonlight.
I hear from above, “I prefer to compose by Bud Light.”
The colonel responds, “I prefer my bud lit.”
And so on with the impromptu quips.
I hear tales of paper cuts told in weighty tones of limb severance, and this seems to me to be something of a story in itself, a bad vaudeville, where the characters are all by choice forcing themselves on one another. Everyone in great pain, everyone
trying to be clever. The vibe of these people makes me worry about the arts.
Because it always happens like this, La Dulce interrupts my thoughts. “Baby, stand up and meet someone.”
I do, wishing when I take his hand that I hadn’t. It’s palms down. I’m supposed to kneel and kiss it.
“This the colonel, baby.”
“What’s happening?” I say.
Arrogance all over the guy’s face, like he wrote every poem that ever mattered. He traces with a manicured thumb the rim of his beer—a Bud Light—and watches himself do it, as if the act were deep as an oil drill, says, “I hear you’re a poet?”
La Dulce says, “Paulie’s got the chops, colonel.”
“Is that so?”
“He working on a book.”
“We are all working on a book, Beatrice,” he says, bowing and softly patting her shoulder.
“He won the LeRoi Jones Hookup for Off-the-Hook Artistic Achievement fellowship.”
“I see. I’m sure Gabby will offer him a scholarship before the night’s over. Or a parking space. Whichever comes first.”
“What about an office?” La Dulce says.
“So our poet is published?”
“No,” I say. I’ve grown tired of hearing myself spoken about in third person. “But he almost killed someone once. Does that count?”
I smile full on, wide as I can, knowing not to look over at La Dulce’s tortured face.
“Good to meet you,” he says, nodding at me, bowing at La Dulce, ducking and spinning on his heels like an English gentleman. Less than half a minute passes before he’s at the base of the magnolia, his head in the lower leaves, no doubt whispering to Swartie about my felonious history.
I look at La Dulce: Why would you sponsor any of these people?
What We Are Page 12