by Lydia Netzer
“OK, I’ll do it,” Sally’s voice was low and determined. And then Sally’s mouth was on her breast, and the heat of it charged through her, and arced down to her crotch, and with a rush he was inside her, and as long as that mouth was attached to her, it was good. She felt him surge and pull away, and surge again, and his hand came down beside her head, and his other hand grabbed her thigh and pushed it up. The pressure on her breast and the electricity running between Sally’s mouth and Ray’s cock in her was excruciating and the tears rolled.
“Mmmm,” Sally’s mouth against her skin was vibrating. And Bernice felt her mouth buzzing and realized she was saying, “Mmm hmmm!” She let her hand stroke Sally’s hair. Ran her fingers down over Sally’s back. Now Ray had grabbed her by the hips and was going faster, and Sally pulled away to murmur, “I think I’m going to do the other one.”
Her breast, wet, was cold, and then Sally laid her own against it to put her teeth around the other, and then Ray was pressing suddenly very deep, and he said “Oh, god, yeah” because having sex with a virgin isn’t just fun because of the idea of it, or the way you enforce your will onto another person. It’s fun because that extra ring of skin feels really good. And then she was tearing, and hurting a little bit, and she thought to herself, “I really was a virgin, how funny.” But Ray had blown his wad deep inside her. And he was panting as he pulled himself away.
“You guys turned out to be hot,” he said.
Before Bernice was able to feel chilly, Sally was pulling her shirt back on. As she tossed Bernice her cardigan, she gave her a thumbs-up, like good job. Big smile. All the crooked teeth.
“Now you want a cigarette and a beer,” she said to Ray. “You can find both at Frankie’s. You should go there. And if you say a fucking word about this, I’ll tell your entire lacrosse team your dick erect is the size of a kalamata olive. And I wouldn’t even be lying too much.”
When Sally had shown him out, she came back to the room where Bernice was still lying on the fainting couch, having remembered and turned the other way around to elevate her hips.
“You did awesome,” said Sally in the doorway. “I am so proud of you. I’m sorry he was so dumb, but you know, a smart guy after that kinda lay would never let you go.”
Bernice smiled. “Never let us go,” she said.
“Ha!” Sally barked out a laugh. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
Bernice slept on the fainting couch that night, doing her best to keep her hips higher than her head. Sally slept in Bernice’s bed. There were no lucid dreams.
*
Sally and Bernice moved in together, to the cottage in the swamp.
Sally was blond. Blue eyes. Wide face with pink cheeks, tiny gold cross around her neck, just for style. Sally wore faded jeans and industrial-strength sandals and beads and was beautiful. She had long arms and used them for hugging people in sweet, clinical hugs, like other people shake hands. Not gushy or cloying. She was a big smiler and had a big smile with lots of teeth. She liked to eat candy.
Bernice was pale, small, pointy. She had an army jacket that she wore for intimidation purposes, but it was too clean to have much of the desired effect. She was not a candle burner or a picture hanger, but she did keep cards in her file of pictures she might have hung or people she might have thought about dangling over a candle flame. She was a keeper of mementos, and a little bit furtive.
She was closed, to Sally’s open. Dark to Sally’s light. Lingering resentment to Sally’s effusive forgiveness. Bitter truth to Sally’s grand statement. Smirk to Sally’s horse laugh. Fuck to Sally’s kiss. Love to Sally’s love.
Had they found love? Can anyone ever find it? You may say that it’s worse now, but in 1984, it was already pretty bad. Religion had crashed, science was on fire, and the ideologies of governments around the world wore thin and tattered, turned old in one day. No monolithic monologues, no true truths, no classic classics. And the hardest of these to fall, the towering construct that cratered out bigger than god, democracy, and penicillin, was true love.
What an idiotic notion.
All the love stories had their clothes yanked off. Penelope: a trollop, feverishly quilting her chaste little heart out, waiting for her man. Wouldn’t that be just the thing you’d want in an absent wife. Abelard lost his balls; they were hacked off right before his lover joined a convent. Is this what you meant by beautiful? Tristan and Isolt died before even making it into the sack, poor fools, and Guinevere was an old hag before Lancelot ever got up the sack to bed her. Is it really even a pity? Alexandra ate her young while Nicholas watched, aghast. Think of any story people bring up to illustrate great love through the ages. Invented stories, morality plays, or subversive texts, scribed by manipulators to trap you into this or that tenet or belief. Every author was just trying to make a point. What is your love story? Is it so epic?
Romantic love in its heavenly attire and all the light and beauty around the concept—a creation of the government and the church, to stop young people from falling into bed with whomever they pleased. Love in a teddy, in a titty bar, in a G-string, passionate love—a symbol of sexual defiance against the church and government, “amor” and “Roma” being orthographically and theoretically opposite. Which proved it! There were wheels within wheels. Nothing was as it seemed. You think you’re going to run into that special someone just by chance, walking around in the same space you are, looking for a special someone, too? What exactly are you smoking?
Imagine Sally and Bernice sitting under a tree in the yard in the night, with the tattered remains of love falling around them like leaves. They don’t want to be duped. They don’t want to be stupid. If falling in love is something ridiculous that only morons do because they don’t know any better, then it isn’t for them.
At the same time, who can truly despair of love? Who can look at herself and deny she is a creature made for it? It is hard, like growing up a born-again Christian, threatened by the fires of hell and promised the golden streets of heaven, and then reading Karl Marx. Your brain says, “I no longer believe.” But you still look at every cloud break like it is the rapture, and you still find yourself wondering, “Will I go to hell?” Prayer is almost a guilty pleasure. So it was with thoughts of romance for Sally and Bernice.
They knew what they were supposed to think. And they knew what they wanted to believe. So the scheme to make their babies fall in love was born of this compromise: Make love from science. Plan for happenstance. And ultimately, believe. Faith has to be taken on faith. You have to have it before you can take it. Likewise love. It seems stupid unless you’re in it. But do you really want to be so cool and mature that you turn your back on love, when you might have found it just next week, perfect, beautiful love like you’d never even imagined could exist? What would have happened if Sally and Bernice had had a love story of their own?
16
Toledo comes alive at night. It really does. While the city sleeps and dreams and dies a thousand deaths, the young and intelligent people come out to play, like constellations bursting out in the darkness of the black sky.
Irene remembered being a teenager, sneaking out of her house, and meeting up with kids from her school in the city. Toledo was like a university town on steroids, where tourists had animated conversations about quasars and tall hotels filled up with guests hoping to hear a lecture from an aging astronomy superstar or visiting mathematician. Tourists flocked the marina at Summit Street to do a night cruise of the Maumee River and Lake Erie. Restaurants overflowed with stargazers smoking long cigarettes and eating dumplings. Toledo isn’t big, but it can hold everyone interesting in the world of astronomy at the same time. It is a gathering place for people who want to know what’s out there. It’s a home for rocket scientists and numerologists. For people who see a face on Mars and people who want to analyze Martian soil with an alpha proton X-ray spectrometer. All those people, together, make Toledo great.
The river cruise was popular because at certain points on the map there we
re nighttime blackout laws in effect to protect the institute’s stargazers from the distractions of ambient light. The boats would head south through the lights and sounds of the city and the harbor, and then suddenly the banks and the boats would both go dark, sending travelers slipping up the river to loop around the Audubon Islands State Nature Preserve and loop back. Irene could remember sliding by the murmuring darkness outside town and then stepping back out of the yacht at the Summit Street Marina, back into the lights and noise of the city. The feeling of urgency from the tourists, the excitement of being downtown with honking car horns and radios leaking out of buildings, the chance of spotting a higher-up at NASA or one of the program directors from the launch facility in Dayton. The endless SETI@home frequency-time-power graph on an LED billboard on Madison and Superior. She hadn’t realized she missed it, but being there brought back memories that weren’t entirely terrible.
Teenage Irene would sneak out just to sneak out, not to drink or party or rebel, but just to be away. And did it really even count as sneaking, if her mother was passed out in her bed with her arm crooked over her eyes, saying she had a sinus headache, falling asleep in the middle of the sentence?
“I have a sinus.” And that was the end.
Irene could sneak out the front door, clomping along in her roughshod boots, hitching a backpack full of booze on her shoulder for everyone else to drink. Bernice’s supply would intoxicate the world, and Irene knew all the hiding places, all the secrets of the stash. If a few were missing, would Bernice even care? And what would she say, if she figured it out? “I’m sorry, but have you seen several pints of gin that I don’t drink and wasn’t hiding in the brick cavity behind the laundry room garbage bin?”
No, they never talked about the drinking. And they never talked about the fire. Everything else in the world was OK to talk about but never seemed as interesting as those two things, or as deadly. If something’s not likely to kill you, why mention it at all?
*
By the time Irene and George arrived at the nightclub, it was two o’clock in the morning.
“It’s here? Where should we park?” she asked him. “On the street?”
“Valet, baby,” said George.
Irene pulled up to the curb in front of the door, and a man in a black jumpsuit vaulted over the car’s hood and opened the door for her. She put the keys into his hand. The valet gave her a hand out, and she stood up into the street. Looking down at herself, she realized she was wearing her black jeans and a button-down shirt, work boots. The man in the black jumpsuit drove away with her car after handing her a plastic ticket, which she stuck into her backpack.
“Come on,” George called. He was looking at her as if she were a knife. Or a sandwich. Or a knife about to cut open a sandwich. She liked the way he was looking at her. He motioned for her to follow him, and she said, “Am I dressed for this? When you said, ‘nightclub for astronomers’ I thought you were kidding. I thought it was some back room at the institute.”
“Why?” said George.
“Because it sounds like something that wouldn’t be real!” Irene said. She smoothed her shirt and kicked the dirt off her boots.
Then she was standing on the sidewalk, and there was George, big and tall, with a questioning look on his face, like what the hell is wrong with you, lady? And then he was shaking his head. He said, “Are you kidding? You are perfect. Just like you are.”
George’s hand wrapped around her arm and she was pulled out of the street. The astronomers’ club had no name on the front. They stepped through an iris door into an airlock, and the door closed behind them. There was a hiss of silence and frozen air, and cold steam surrounded them. Quiet.
“Couldn’t they give it a name? Like The Comet or The Milky Way or…”
“Or The Black Hole?”
“Yeah.”
The cold steam hissed again. She could barely see George. She shivered. The silence, after the noise on the street, was weird.
“That’s what the gay secret astronomers’ club is called.”
Irene said nothing.
“Because of the gayness,” George explained.
“I get it,” said Irene.
“I bet people kiss in here sometimes,” said George.
Then his hand was on her shoulder, and she felt his thumb hard against her collar bone. What strange energy was in his hands, she did not know, but it made her feel as if he was leaving fingerprints on her, marking her, turning little parts of her alive at a time, wherever he touched. She heard his breath in the cold steam.
“You bet or you know?” said Irene.
Then he was kissing her again, and she felt herself rising up off the floor to meet him, like she was inhaling through his face, one long breath in. He put his hands in her ponytail and tugged the scarf away that was holding it, shook out her hair behind her head, pulled two handfuls of it up beside her face, grinning.
“Now you look more like a scientist,” he said.
“George, that thing doesn’t actually work where the boy pulls the girl’s hair out of a ponytail and she shakes it out and she’s magically transformed into hotness.”
“Actually it’s pretty reliable,” said George. “You were hot before, but you should see yourself now.”
The second door of the airlock swooshed open, and George and Irene spilled into the room. It was cavernous and dark, with a blues band taking up the stage. A singer in white was bathed in a spotlight, crooning at the microphone. Tables and chairs were scattered around the place, and there was a dance floor, where several couples were standing.
“I look too much like a scientist,” said Irene.
George waved at people who were calling to him from the bar. There were astronomers of both genders draped around the place, locked in conversation, moving to the slow jam, or showing off big smiles.
“Let’s get a drink,” said George.
“I don’t drink,” said Irene.
“You’ll drink this,” said George.
He led her to the bar and motioned to the bartender, who turned around and started mixing.
“Uh oh, I think our favorite Daughter of Babylon is here,” George said into her ear. The proximity of his mouth to her ear made her body tighten up into a spiral. When he said, “Over there,” his lips brushed against her earlobe and a passing group of guys pushed her into him. His rib cage was broad and strong, his shoulders wide. He caught her up and held onto her. She raised her face to him, wanting just to kiss him and not to think about it, but he was pointing.
Sam Beth wore a long white dress, flowing and puddling on the floor. Her pigtails were drawn up fiercely into two buns, one on each side of her head, her arms were wrapped with gold bracelets, and under each eye the three dots glowed a bright white. It seemed like there were stripes in her hair. She approached them sedately.
“Princess Leia,” said Irene.
“Nice boots,” said Sam Beth.
“Thanks, Patrice,” said Irene pointedly.
“Are you here together?” asked Sam Beth, motioning to George.
“Have you been drinking?”
“The Daughters of Babylon do not drink alcohol,” said Sam Beth, but she took a crystal atomizer from the bar and gave herself a brisk shot in the face. Her eyes widened.
“What is that stuff?”
“What is that stuff?” Sam Beth imitated her.
With a rustle of fabric and a slow nod, she moved on through the club, and then the bartender was ready with the drinks and George was leaning over the bar. His shirt came untucked. She saw the waistband of his khakis and underneath the waistband of his underwear, heather gray. What was it about this man that made her feel so possessive, as if she should reach out and tug that shirt down into place or slide her hand under it. He turned and smiled at her, holding a blue drink in a tall glass. Inside the drink was a flutter of white blobs, floating between the surface and the bottom and then back again, like a lava lamp.
“I said I don’t drink,�
�� said Irene.
“This isn’t alcoholic,” said George.
Irene took the drink out of his hand. It felt cool in the glass, but there were no condensation droplets around it.
“What’s in it?”
George rolled his eyes. “Do you want a recipe? I can have someone print one out for you. Or you could just drink it. It’s pretty good. If you don’t like it, I’ll get you something else.”
“It’s not alcoholic, really? I don’t drink alcohol, like ever at all.”
“Why?” asked George. “Why no drinking?” A simple question, asked in innocence. One she had never answered.
“My mother was an alcoholic,” she said suddenly. She reached out for him and grabbed his hand. The air went whooshing out of her. She couldn’t believe she had told him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Well, I would never give you alcohol without telling you.”
“I feel like you wouldn’t,” she said. “I believe you.”
“But it’s hard for you,” George said. “I get it.”
Irene took a deep breath and a little drink of the blue liquid. It tasted like raspberries and cucumbers. Very fresh. She let one of the white bubbles into her mouth and it burst with a little fizziness against the roof of her mouth. She felt a tickle in the back of her throat, and then she seemed more able to breathe than she had been before. The band finished their song and set down their instruments to take a break. New music came through the speakers, some kind of strange world house music or something. It thumped in the bar. She looked up to see that George was watching her. She had told him about her mother. And nothing bad had happened.
“You look beautiful,” he said. “Will you marry me?”
“I’ve only known you for three days,” said Irene. “I’m not going to marry you.”
“You will,” said George.
“Whatever,” said Irene.
“Tell me everything about yourself. Favorite color, favorite food, what you want from life, what you want from me.”
“Black, don’t have one, some sort of publication like everyone else, and—” Irene stopped.