by Ron Carlson
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“That principle is cooperation. These things are all designed to facilitate sexual intercourse, but without the element of cooperation, it won’t work the way it is intended. The results will be all wrong. Cooperation is the most complex concept about sex. You’re going to hear a lot about love and responsibility in the next few years. Just remember they are simply part of this idea of cooperation.” He stood up. “This isn’t a great talk, but it’s ten times what any of your pals are going to get from their dads. You’ll be all right. There’s no hurry.”
Ryan McBride had another approach. He was still a virgin too, but when he heard that Cheryl Lockwood was meeting me at the party, he became all wisdom. “You want something to happen, right?” he told me on the way to the party graduation night. I was floating in a new freedom, still seeing myself cross the podium an hour before to pick up my diploma. I marched down the aisle, where my father stepped out and put his arm around me. He was stuffing his paper and pencil into his jacket pocket, for he had designed yet another thing—a more efficient way of distributing the diplomas without losing the sense of ceremony. His arm still around my shoulder, we walked outside the gym, where my mother in a pretty blue silk dress was waiting under the leafy campus sycamores. He and Mom were going out to dinner, and Mom smiled and said, “Welcome to the real world, where tomorrow morning bright and early we’re going to weed the garden. So don’t stay out too late.” She kissed me on the cheek and added, “Congratulations.”
Then I was in the Oldsmobile with Ryan, both of us jerking around changing clothes as he drove around the west side, picking up the big boxes of hot dogs, the bags of buns, the eight cases of soda, and the three cases of Coors from his uncle’s garage, and then striking out on the old highway toward the lake. It was like rocket travel, our ship breaking clear of civilization, and slipping further and further into the wasteland void, carrying enough hot dogs for the rest of our lives. The sun had set and it was June: the earth glowed beneath us. Ryan was hollering theory. “If,” Ryan pounded his right hand into the seat between us, “you want something to happen tonight with Cheryl, then you need to be realistic about how it would happen, and you know,” he was growing gradually louder, beating the seat with each phrase, “that you are not going to do anything. Do you hear me? You know and I know that you are not going to do anything. You are not going to make one move. So. Listen to me. The secret is: let things get out of control!” I reached over and righted the steering wheel so we moved back onto the paved roadway. “So listen. Just do this. Horse around.” He saw my face and said, “That’s right, just horse around. Dance, bump, push, shove, touch, touch, touch. Horse around until you can let her know … that you’re aroused. That’s all it takes.” Ryan had stopped pounding now and he had both hands on the wheel, but he was emphasizing his theme by turning to me after every sentence and squinting. “Once a girl feels she has aroused you, she’s obligated. Girls are responsible people. They’re not like guys. If they feel they’ve caused something, they take care of it.” I squinted back at him and nodded, but I was full of questions, wondering if what he said was true and wondering—if push actually came to shove that night with Cheryl—what I would do.
In the middle of the next dance, Clare and I turn so I can see our table through the other dancers and I see something odd. Yvonne is talking to a pretty dark-haired woman whom I recognize as Katie. My wife is sitting with Yvonne and they are talking like classmates, and then Yvonne points at us and Katie looks, catches my eye, and waves. Clare and I are still slow-dancing, ignoring the rock beat of “Jambalaya,” locked together in a pelvic clinch that has me up under the waistband of my undershorts, pain and pleasure, while she bumps and clings, her pubic bone like a blade cutting a new road in the wilderness as she breathes short and sharp against my neck. Around us the dancers are twisting and hopping, and we must look oddly stationary to my wife. I smile and nod at Katie, lift my hand from Clare’s back and waggle a short wave, but as I do I feel Clare grip me as if I was going to drop her out a window and I hear air in her teeth once, twice, and she rises against me softly now and falls, and then the grip is gone and she is floating loosely in my arms. She relaxes and pulls back and when I look in her face she is contorting and rolling her eyes, clearing them the way people do who wear contact lenses, her forehead corrugating. Finally she sees me watching her. “What?” she says, averting her face. “So, what do you do with pandas.”
At the table Yvonne stands and says to Katie, “This is my sister, Clare.” Katie shakes her hand and we all sit down.
“We’ve been dancing,” I say. “You missed the torch dancers.” The waitress appears and busily clears the table, deftly setting a glass of wine in front of Katie. I see the other women aren’t having any more. As I settle in my chair my rash flares.
“We’ve had a nice talk,” Yvonne says to me.
“How long have you been married?” Clare asks.
“Fourteen years.”
“That’s wonderful,” Clare says. She smiles at me. She’s being sincere. “That is really wonderful.” When she stands, she seems very tall. She goes on, “Well, Vonnie, I don’t know about you, but this farm girl is up too late.”
The sisters depart, each giving me a handshake out of a business manual, Yvonne clasping my hand in both of hers and saying, “You’ve been so kind.”
For a moment I consider beginning an explanation, but it would start, “Their husbands …” and I let it go. I feel a simple relief at being alive and I just smile at Katie.
We aren’t fully out of the lift when I take Katie in my arms and we kiss. “This is great,” she says, as we amble down the carpeted hall in a four-legged embrace, turning, and pressing into each other. “This is hungry kissing, do you know that? Remember?” She’s up against me again, her arms cinch. “Hungry kissing?”
We undress before we remember to close the door, I’m not kidding, and then in the bed, she rolls a naked leg onto me and I tell her the story of the day, not telling her about Dr. Morris and his shots. The whole time I’m telling the tale, we’re moving with each other and from time to time she reaches down and checks the progress of this erection, the twelfth kind, and when she does that our moving rechecks itself and changes gear. This is what storytelling should be, this is the kind of attention narrative desires.
I bring the day right up to the torch dance and stop. Katie pulls me over onto her now and says, “You know, I’ve never seen you dance before. I’ve never seen you dance with another woman.”
Now this next part, the bodies roll, their design made manifest, and there is achieved a radical connection. I’m not talking about souls. Who can tell about this stuff? Not me. You’re there, you are both in something, something carnal and vaporish at once. Your mouths cock half a turn and you sense the total lock. You’re transferring brains here; your spine glows. You go to heaven and right through, there’s no stopping. What do you call it? Fucking? Not quite right here, this original touch, the firmament. My credo: you enter and she takes you in. This is personal. This is cooperation. Who can live to tell about it? You cooperate until you’re married cell to cell, until all words flash away in the dark.
We roll apart, seizing onto our pillows as if they were life preservers. After a moment, Katie places the backs of her fingers on my cheek. She says, “I’ve got to go to sleep.” She smiles and her eyes close. “Don’t worry about the column. You don’t need it. You’re a writer. There are a million things to do.”
Mornings, many early mornings, the boys will climb onto our bed—how many times have I been bounced awake?—and either sit on my head and talk to Katie or fish from the foot, casting my robe sash into the icy waters beneath us. They have phenomenal luck always, hoisting dozens of large fish, reptiles, and other treasures from the sea and immediately offering them to us to eat. I lie there as Ricky wedges a piece of graham cracker in my mouth, saying, “Have some fish, Dad. Really. These are good.” Katie is sanguine about all
this as she sits in the pillows and asks Ricky for a little lemon with her fish and Ricky pantomimes the lemon. Harry keeps a lookout on the prow, his inverted binoculars showing the doorway out there somewhere on the edge of the lost world.
If I don’t eat my fish right away, Katie says to me, “Hey, Dad, get with the program. These guys are fishermen. Come on. It’s better than being nomadic wanderers.” What can I say? It is one of mankind’s oldest struggles: life on a boat. Two guys want to fish in the open air. One guy wants to feel his wife’s bare thigh under the warm covers and fish later.
Now in our bed in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, I can feel my wife descending in sleep. I can almost feel her falling away into night. She goes deeper with every breath. But I am full of allergy medicine and mai tais. I swing my legs out of bed and go to the window. Things are quiet all along the shore.
On Black Rock Beach twenty years ago I thought I was going to blunder across one if not all of the sexual frontiers. The scene was set, and I was ready. Night came on like the first night on earth, the sunset blistering the surface of the Great Salt Lake with the same wincing flash that it spread across the west desert sky, a flare that took our eyes and then chilled in a minute, replaced by the charcoal shadow of the planet.
Ryan lit the gas-soaked pile of lumber with a paper rolled in a ribbon which he told everyone was his diploma, and our little fire ripped into the dark. We had four sawhorse tables of food and drinks, and some guys had set up two large speakers in the back of a pickup and the flat sandy wilderness rang with Bobby Vee, the Four Seasons, Del Shannon, the Beatles, Dick and DeeDee, Roy Orbison, the Coasters, Johnny Mathis, the Boxtops, Richie Valens, the Shirelles, Andy Williams, Dion, and occasionally some wise guy would slip in Gene Autry or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Ryan kept the beer in the open trunk of his Olds. I remember how beautiful and illicit it looked in there, a tub of gold cans in silver ice. I thought: This is it, we’re going to drink beer. I’d had a few, most of them with my father on the days when we’d poured the patio or leveled the yard, but this was different, this was a tub of gold cans on silver ice at the edge of the known world.
It was a hundred teenagers goofing around and dancing in the perimeter of a small fire by the wide margin of a big lake. And though we had miles of open space, no one wandered far from the fire. A couple might go for a walk, but there was something about knowing that there was nothing down that beach, nothing along the five hundred miles of coastline, not a thing, that sent them back quickly to the circle of light.
For the first hour, I manned the barbecue, blackening the hot dogs just right and then stacking them to one side of the grill. This was the real world, I remembered. Hot dogs were a hard sell. I saw Cheryl Lockwood as soon as she arrived with three other girls. Many of the girls, including Cheryl, wore their white graduation dresses and they stood in the firelight like princesses, their beauty heightened by the raw, malodorous kingdom. When they danced, and I watched Cheryl dance with a series of my friends, it was confounding that such untouchable womanhood could surf, pony, jerk. One by one they retreated to cars and changed into bermudas or Levi’s and returned as the girls we knew, and the dancing became even more animated, even in the sand, as “Runaround Sue” beat into the night.
Not long after she returned in a pair of cutoff Levi’s and a red football jersey, Cheryl came over to the grill. I saw she had a beer in her hand. She poked at the black papery skin of the hot dogs, finally pinching one and picking it up and examining it. “Do I dare? Who’s the cook around here?”
I looked at her: “Dare.”
“Dare you. You gonna cook all night?”
“No, Ryan’ll be here in a minute.”
“Good,” she said and she leaned over and kissed me lightly. “Good. Then what you gonna do?” She smiled and walked back to the dancers.
I could see my old friends Georgia Morris and Paula Swinton. Paula leaned against the handsome Jeff Wild with whom she was supposedly “doing it,” and Georgia had been going with an older guy for two years. He was twenty-five or something. Those girls didn’t even know who I was anymore.
Ryan finally emerged from the tangle of parked cars where he had been goofing off with most of the baseball team. They were into the beer real good, and he brought me a can.
“You’re a good guy,” he said, trading it for the spatula. “Good luck.”
I took my beer and walked off a little ways and then I walked way out, down the beach four hundred yards. No one was out there. I wanted to see it all for a moment, the party. I cracked the beer and took a sip. The firelight in everybody’s hair and off the corners of the cars made it look like a little village in a big dark void. The dimensions were all vast. I seemed real small. I always seemed real small. I started to walk back. In a world so indifferent and illimitable, it was time to horse around with Cheryl Lockwood.
I found her sitting on the hood of a car, and we danced ten dances in a row, fast and slow. She was looking at me every time I looked at her. During the slow dances I bumped her when I could and tried to let her know that I dared. It was when we went back behind the cars to grab another beer that we started kissing. She guided me around and onto the trunk of someone’s Thunderbird and we grappled there for half an hour or so, until we’d exhausted the possibilities of such a place. I had her bra undone, a loose holster in her shirt, and she had both hands in my back pockets.
It was then that she whispered, “Let’s go swimming.” When we stood, I was kind of dizzy, but we wended among all the cars and then we sprinted down the beach faster than I’d ever run before. Half a mile from the party, we stopped and kissed again, starting right in all over, but she pulled away and simply took off her clothing. I could barely hear “The Duke of Earl” across the sand, and then I stripped and headed out for the water hand in hand with Cheryl. It was an extraordinarily shallow lake and it took us a long time to get knee deep. When we did, she came against my naked body and I felt the contours of a naked woman for the first time. Behind her I could see the supine form of Antelope Island lying like an alligator five miles away. Then she turned and pulled me deeper in the water, saying something odd, something I’ve never forgotten. “Lewis,” she said, her voice naked too, “I’m giving you the big green light.”
And that was what I was thinking of—that this is really it: we were going all the way—when the water rose up my thighs and in a sudden dip, the warm water washed over my genitals and we were in up to our waists. Cheryl let go of my hand and sat backward in the sea, bobbing back up, arms, breasts, knees, and thighs. It was quite a vision.
It took about three seconds for me to realize what was happening and I felt it first as an odd spasm of chill up my back and then as a flash of heat across my forehead and sweat and then the final thing, the real thing, as the salt bit into my crotch like acid. There was no air. The pain rose way over my head like smoke. My jock rash was almost ninety square inches of raw skin counting both legs and my scrotum. The pain was like no pain. It was a quick unrelenting pressure on my temples, and I went out.
I lost the next five minutes, but whatever happened I give a lot of credit to a naked seventeen-year-old virgin named Cheryl Lockwood, who floated me back to the shallows where I woke looking into her face. I can still summon a brief glimpse of the outline of her breasts in the starlight as I spat salt water and tried to recover. So she saved my life, but I further credit her with saving the last slivers of my ego by not commenting on what had happened. She could so easily have said a dozen things about what this guy did when confronted with the big green light. When I sat up, the pain had become a real thing, a flaring heartbeat in my balls, that had me breathing through my teeth all the way back to the party. Our wet hair and damp clothing were huge hits at the bonfire, but because it was late and there had been worse behavior by others, it was bearable. Later, much later, when everyone was gone and Ryan and I threw the larger bits of debris into his trunk, I told him the truth: I’d failed.
“It means nothing,”
he told me and then he went on in a way that reminded me of why he was my best friend. “You went out after dark and passed out in the Great Salt Lake. Come on, who can do that?”
It’s much later into the night and I’m in the beautiful men’s room off the lobby of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel washing my hands and singing Roy Orbison’s “Crying” at about six on the ten scale and it sounds pretty good. The walls are black marble in which you can see your shadow and they polish the song so that it reverberates mournfully. This is, without doubt, the best song I’ve ever heard.
Although Katie has parachuted into sleep, the day won’t abandon me, and I have toured the grounds, walked up to the Outrigger for a drink, and returned to the hotel for a nightcap before coming in here. It is just a minute after two A.M.
That I’d been cry-i-ing
O-ver you …”
A big Hawaiian guy comes in and stands at the urinal, but I can’t stop myself. I’m drying my hands and I must finish the song: the killer rhyme of understand and touch of your hand before all the “cry-ings”. The guy stands at the sink and I recognize him as the torch dancer, my hero. He washes his hands with gusto and does the last few “cry-ings” with me. When we stop, I am as sad as I’ve been in ten years. All animals are sad after sex. This is a magnificent men’s room. Our reflections stand ten feet deep in the marble like two sad visitors from the dead. The man points at me fraternally and says with great conviction: “Roy Orbison was a giant.” He leaves.