Anticipated Results

by Dennis E. Bolen

  One of the Winters

  It was yet another stab at getting Paul to stop drinking.

  “We were talking to him, trying to hide things in barely concealed double-entendres the entire time.” Simon sat on my couch. “Jeannie and I are too close these days. He knows I’m a pothead. He can’t stand her pretension. And he was half-cut by the time we started. The whole thing was a doomed project from the first. I mean, he’s always had a thing for her. ”

  “Man …” I knew what to say. “You couldn’t have been less successful than me and Bill and Nick the day he damn near got stomped to death by that psycho, Gus.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Did he go bolt upright and run out to his car?”

  “Didn’t get the chance.”

  “Go on.”

  “We browbeat him like a school kid, told him he was missing out on life. Pointed out his unfulfilled promise. Not to mention the chronic impaired driving. He seemed to listen. Jeannie talked about their relationship. Nearly cried. We did a thorough job. You should have seen us.”

  I could picture them sitting around Paul’s place. The stereo playing something like Miles Davis or Frank Zappa or one of the Winter brothers. It being midday Sunday, I could see the tumbler full of vodka and grapefruit Paul would be drinking. How he would cradle it near his crotch, half-lying on the couch with his feet on the coffee table. I could also see how Jeannie might distract things, perched beside him, skirt hiked to where you couldn’t ignore.

  “I hope she didn’t pre-empt things like she usually does.”

  “She did take over. Eventually.”

  “Oh?”

  “It went like this. We finished talking and Paul said fine and then we excused ourselves as planned and left him alone in a dramatic, you-could-hear-an-emotional-pin-drop sort of way. Gave him a cell number if he needed us. I thought it was effective. We went downstairs to her place. I knew she lived in the same building but I didn’t realize it was directly below his.”

  “It’s even the same configuration.”

  “Spooky, eh?”

  “Was his music loud?”

  “No. But enough to hear.”

  “Did she make tea?”

  “She tried. I don’t think that woman can boil water.”

  “I got tea from her one time.”

  “Well.” Simon stopped. “Did you know she studied su-pap?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s weird. It’s like I said. She took over. She knows how to do it. I knew right away what she was doing, and the hook was, I once had this lascivious West Indian co-worker who explained it to me. He pronounced it with the accent like Bob Marley. At first I thought he was talking about food; soup-app.”

  “Which means?”

  “Literally, in the patois, it’s a mangling of the French adjective superbe, which generally means what it means in English; good, superlative, like that. In the sense he was using it, however, it refers oddly to the quality of a valve. For which the French word is soupape. Workmen refer to their plumbing jobs as su-pap when things are perfectly snug.”

  “This is quite an education.”

  “That’s our Jeannie. She knew the term when I told it to her. I guess in Jamaica that one time …”

  “I think I remember.”

  “Anyway. The other usage has to do with the reason some guys will throw it all away. Leave wife and family and destroy themselves for a so-called su-pap mistress. It’s on the level of voodoo almost. Su-pap. It’s mostly more experienced women, not too old but certainly not the beginners. And generally ones who would not have had children. She practices timing and develops the right muscle-tone in the right places and at the perfect moment she constricts.”

  “And it …?”

  “Well it drives a guy … out of his mind. A wild blasting cumload. The crack cocaine of male orgasms. Jeannie knew all about this. The complete performance involves the meeting of eyes, chanting …”

  “So …” I looked Simon up and down. “Jeannie, huh?”

  “Yeah. I must admit. Despite her encroaching heft.”

  “There is that.”

  He sighed. “We could hear above us.” Looked into his glass. “His moving around.”

  “I’m proud you didn’t let that bother you.”

  “Naw.”

  “Were you quiet?”

  “When she tightened, I tried.”

  “Were you quiet?”

  Simon smiled. “Enough for Paul?”

  “Were you quiet?”

  “I hope so. I might not be sure.”

  “Well. He heard, then.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Remember, this guy hears a paperclip in his glovebox. A leaky tappet in a V8. He’s heard the rustle of my grocery bags half a block away and met me at the door. Like an owl, this guy.”

  “Then he heard. For sure.”

  “Hmm. Bad judgment on your part.”

  “Granted.”

  “But …”

  “But, but, but.”

  “Panties?”

  “Panties!”

  “Huh. Well. When it’s there, it’s there. Nobody resists panties when they hit the floor.”

  “And I grabbed it. Yeah.”

  “Good man. Although I’m not sure I’d have done the same, even aside from the venue, which couldn’t have been more precarious. But I admit, you take panty where you get panty.”

  “Amen.”

  “I’m approaching an age where the complications bother me just enough.”

  “Me too, someday, I guess.”

  I drank more wine. “I’ll tell you one good thing. Booze might at least be considered a final answer to the sex-vulnerability question. After the third glass, no matter how hot the situation, I’m not going to measure … into the breach. Su-pap or no su-pap.”

  “All the time, for sure?”

  “The jury’s still slightly out. I haven’t told you about Jennica.”

  “Who’s Jennica?”

  “This short, sharp, nasty involvement during my last months at the old job.”

  “How young?”

  “So young that she pronounces her name valley-girl. Something like Jenna-Ka with a question mark after it. Accent heavy on the second syllable. Sounded like a soft drink.”

  “I’m getting a hard-on.”

  “That’s what I mean. Even half-soused I was ready-aye-ready. But we had an experience that imparted sudden and enduring flaccidity, and it evolved not just from booze but from violence too.”

  “Not sure where this is getting us in the present discussion, but let fly.”

  “She had peculiarities. You had to start out with latex all around. If there was such a thing as a full body condom she’d want you to wear one. As it was, I went through hundreds of dollars worth. Fair enough.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “But it was the rote aspect. She liked the full-on charge. Lots of linear bang action. I once tried to thrill her by fluttering around, tickling her in places she didn’t get with the square drive. But she disabled me plenty quick on that. She wanted it on a narrow rut; straight in, straight out. A control thing, I later gathered, no surprises.

  “So after the first blastoff of an average session—she was tight, it would only take a few minutes—for our second and third go-round I’d be ramming her relentless and straight as possible. But with a hot rubber on, she’d get dryish and this burning-tire smell would start to rise up. Fill the whole room. It would get to the point of discomfort and we’d have to quit. I’d go soft. The thing would ooze off.

  “Then it got weird. She liked to get up after that and walk around and wave her bottom in front of me. I’d thus be encouraged to slam in bareback from behind with her leaning against a wall or over a table or wherever I caught her. We’d surge, her taking it like a paid professional. I’d blow standing up, easily finishing with all that latex gone. In her hallway or kitchen or wherever. Careful to pull out and spray to the side or downward, often onto our fe
et. I remember one splooge quite clearly. A full white pencil-line from the end of my stiff-staring truncheon all the unbroken way down to her ankle.

  “She saw it too. And something about it made her angry. She never said why. She ended up peevish like a wet cat. The pattern tended to repeat. The arguments would start.”

  “About what?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So we broke up and got back together and broke up again and stopped seeing each other and then resumed back and forth a bunch of times in a relatively short time. Instability the rule.”

  “That’s always a drag.”

  “But she could raise up these immense hard-ons …”

  “A terrible factor.”

  “Agreed. So, predictably, the night she finally did go full-on florid it was the bitter absolute end. Utter deterrence. I mean we’ve never seen each other since.”

  “An epic split.”

  “Grandiose. It’s an amazing story.”

  “Which you will now tell.”

  “Most certainly.” I drank the rest of my glass and leaned for the bottle. “We’d been apart for a few weeks. She asked if I’d had sex in the interim. Normally, of course, I would lie about a thing like that. But having lived, as you know, in deceit for so many years, I was sick of not being myself. In fact at that point I was damn proud to be at least a month clean and sober from all forms of untruth. It took a hell of an effort and I wasn’t about to break the chain. So I handed her an honest answer.

  “Her face was turned away at the precise moment, so I didn’t see any contortions or anything. But I did sense something red rising up. Still. The first punch I thought was just joking. She didn’t say anything. Started throwing combinations. I had to duck. Then she started using her feet.

  “For some reason, though appalled, I’d been nearly premonitory about the thing. Prepared, so to speak. I cannot explain this, but I was. At the same time I understood that words were irrelevant. She was demonstrating this herself. Not a word spoken. Just pure action. Very male, by the way. It felt weird. So anyway, without a word, fending off blows, I carefully gathered my clothes, made for the hallway, picked up my shoes. All the while with her hailing punches down and kicking my lower body. I held my stuff with one arm and fended with the other. I got the apartment door open—it was about two in the morning so I knew I had a reasonable chance to be naked in the hallway with nobody knowing—and I knew she’d slam it loud behind me. So I damped it with one hand and an unprotected butt-cheek. It eased quietly shut.”

  “That was a nice touch. If you have to be thrown naked out of a woman’s apartment in the middle of the night …”

  “And we all do sooner or later.”

  “I suppose. Then at least make sure nobody gets woken up by it.”

  “Thanks for that. Anyway, ever since. I’ve been slowing down.”

  “Epiphany?”

  “Maybe not all that way. But I had a moment, slipping my duds on in that cold hallway, not looking up for fear of seeing somebody seeing me. I had a moment. I understood right then with dead certainty that we’re not going to be doing this forever.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I have to admit, though, I hadn’t taken a full breath for, like, two minutes. My heart was going one-sixty. My mind was crystalline. My arms and legs were limber, the places she’d hit me positively glowing.”

  “In other words you …”

  “Never felt more alive.”

  “Hah! The old combat-adrenaline syndrome.”

  “Whatever. I’m certainly glad it happened.”

  “You had yourself a memorable event.”

  “There’s something about being pummelled by a nude woman.”

  “You don’t have to be into anything even slightly odd to appreciate the tableau.”

  “That’s exactly what it was. I turned back and caught a full picture of her just as she lunged at the door, her face a rage, her body hard and working. Feral. Timeless. A perfect human sculpture. I’ve got a feeling it might be the most profound moment of observation I ever have.”

  “Be glad it’s there.”

  “Oh, it’s there. Forever.”

  “Good man.”

  “Makes for terrific narrative, doesn’t it?”

  “Anger in motion always does.”

  We sat drinking.

  “But more to the point, and this is what I essentially wanted to convey, all the reference manuals say it’s best and most likely that you meet your true love through friends.”

  “From adventure to romance. Good segue, nicely done. That’s what I like about you.”

  “I can’t just tell you a lascivious one without filling you in on my more honorable exploits. It’s what’s firing my motor these days. It’s the payoff, I like to think, for all this obnoxious honesty I’m trying to practice.”

  “You’re talking about your new girl. Liza.”

  “I am.”

  “Well do tell. This might be even more instructive than your last anecdote.”

  “Quite possibly.”

  “Please proceed.”

  “I will but where was I? Oh yes. You meet the best people through friends. Well. That had never worked for me. But this time she was a friend of a friend you don’t know who claimed we had met years before, though I could not remember. We stood talking at a party we might have both missed, oblivious to everybody else. All I knew for sure was my intoxication on first vision, our imperative to conversation, an irrepressible hand-to-waist kinesis, the sense that we were supposed to meet, and the complication of her marriage.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yes indeed. When I heard about her status it threw me. I declined an invitation to go with her and some friends to a club, I preferred the solitude of the party to reflect on my interior clamour. Hours later there was a strategy meeting of the sober components of my mind. Days later I went to her shop at opening time and offered to get coffee. Several times this happened. We kissed outside a restaurant three weeks later and then it was months of us trying to avoid togetherness, her disentangling, me serving alone-time.”

  “I remember the period.”

  “It was un-fun. Especially since I still had residual girlfriends passing through who needed handling. But whatever, that’s another story. And then she was mine.”

  “Lovely.”

  “Then the car fire happened.”

  “Whoa.”

  “She’d half-sold, half-loaned this decrepit Escort she was driving to her friend Triece—who you once met, I believe—and it spontaneously combusted outside a McDonald’s in Chilliwack. The firefighters said they thought it started near the battery. Liza was aghast. She had loved that car and wanted it to go to a good home. And then there was the question of insurance, there being, of course, none. In her circle of artsy friends, incomes sparse if at all—most hold on with welfare and part-timing in fast food outlets—the extra few dozen dollars is dear. No one thinks of buying specified perils to cover fire and theft. Triece had taken the car on the agreement that she would slowly raise five hundred dollars and dribble it Liza’s way. Now there was no car and she could not commute to her new job and fate was kicking people around and there was tension in the air where the money had gasified.

  “So Liza and I went shopping. We rode a bus to the used car lots on the East Side, want-ad clippings in our pockets. It was the first major outing of our lives together and she was dressed in glorious Salvation Army chic: Strappy shoes, slinky mid-length skirt with cowgirls on it, sock-monkey T-shirt, brilliant-red overcoat, bright bandanna. A drunk along Hastings Street laughed our way and said, ‘Hey pretty lady, what you doin’ with the square?’

  “And it was true. I looked like a Mormon beside her. She just laughed and we persevered, holding hands all the way. But eventually we had to give up. Lots and lots of sketchy vehicles, a few too many greasy salespeople, too many sit-downs in cheap offices, lists of costs with arbitrary sums, too much paint-over-rust.r />
  “We wandered downtown for dinner at that Indian place on the inexpensive part of Robson. Tandoori cauliflower, rice, Kingfisher lager. I remember it all. Then a movie at Cinémathèque, part of a Czechoslovakian festival with somber faces and laughable subtitles. After that we strolled and heard tunes coming from the Marine Club. We paid the cover, drank three-dollar shots until last call, and danced.

  “Liza told me she used to sing there. I told her something noble like ‘You will sing here again, my dear.’

  “It was two-thirty and we were taking a cab home. Liza sat close. She kissed my cheek and then she seemed to know to lift herself when I ran hands on her thighs and under the skirt and all the way up. She let me slip her panties all the way off and over her sweet little shoes and into a pocket of my tweed sports jacket. All this without a word spoken.”

  “Impressive.”

  “I’ll say. It was later I realized we did it silent. That’s when I knew we were going to last past next season, past inevitable routine, past disagreement and fuss, past crisis and pain, all the way to acceptance and comfort, subtle joy and the absence of want.”

  “Damn you can be poetic when you want to be.”

  “That’s what it does to you, boy.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And we realized we didn’t need a car.”

  “Because of course you agreed to share the van.”

  “You have it precisely.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  We sat.

  •

  I remembered something. “Did you know it’s rumoured Paul has the longest member anybody has ever seen?”

  “Jeannie mentioned it several times.”