by Lee Durkee
The nondenoms were breathing as a group now, as one hugely attentive beast.
“Getting back to what you said earlier—”
“What I said earlier, in the sanctity of our marriage bed”—here Lily smiled at Cecilia—“was that the only way to approach that particular story as anything but ghastly is to assume Abraham to be deranged. Mentally ill. Hearing voices, seeing visions, probably a manic-depressive. And that this illness or demon or whatever you want to call it infected him to the point where he heard a very dark voice from nowhere but inside his own sick psyche—if I may use such a word here—command him to slaughter his baby. Which he promptly set about to do. Jack Nicholson would make a fine Abraham here. But then, at the least last second, not even God could endure this atrocity, and so She sent an angel of mercy to intervene.”
“She?”
“Acting as protector of children? Of course She.”
Kevin wanted them all to feel free to argue. He urged, “I think what Lil is saying is that there are stories, and then there are interpretations of stories.”
“She said God was a woman,” the offensive lineman objected.
“Yes, it appears she did say that.”
Lily sipped her wine. After a moment she stated, “God can be either a man, a woman, a burning bush, or a serpent, or nothing at all, but I’m concerned with Abraham here.”
“Abraham,” Kevin concurred.
“Yes. Let’s face it, every time that man hit his knees, it must have terrified his family and servants. Like the time, after another so-called vision, when he lined up all his servants and kinsmen, every male in his very large household, and went down the line one-two-three with a razor mutilating their genitals.”
“Circumcising them.”
“That’s a nice scientific word. I doubt such a nice word would occur to any of you boys here if Kevin came back from the kitchen with a big steak knife and started lining you up against the wall.”
“Interesting,” Kevin said.
“Yes, psychotic behavior often is. Interesting.”
“Are we finished now?”
“We are very close to being finished. One last item, though. Whenever Abraham’s clan went traveling through another kingdom, Abraham had a funny little trick he liked to play. He’d tell the neighboring king that his wife Sara—who was exceedingly beautiful—was not his wife but his sister. The king would then confiscate Sara as a concubine, and in return the king would shower Abraham with gifts. Abraham does this twice, at least, or so the Bible tells us. The term cowardly wife-pimper does come to mind.”
Kevin’s grin remained intact, but there was a frozen quality to it. “Wow,” he said. “Again, all very interesting. Hey, can anyone else think of a Bible story that might stand up to more than one interpretation?”
But no one could. The beast of nondenoms straightened the laps of its dresses, fingered the knots of its ties, quelled burps, or passed gas silently until finally Lily said, “Let’s roundhouse Sodom.”
“Sodom. I think perhaps Sodom might wait for another occasion, yes?”
“No. You started it. Now I want to roundhouse Sodom.”
“Then proceed with caution. Sodom being very dangerous territory. A wicked city. With a very high unemployment rate. The people there practicing very little in the way of discretion.”
“Sodom. To begin, if you’ll recall, some angels of God come down to earth to have dinner with Lot—Abraham’s best friend and kinsman. Two angels, Lot, the wife, the kiddies. Little dinner, little wine . . . but meanwhile outside, all is not well. The men of Sodom—evidently a high-strung crew—have surrounded Lot’s house. Why? It’s interesting, you’ll agree. Turns out, the crowd wants Lot to send out his guests so that the angels of God can be sodomized. And what does Lot do? It’s quite the dilemma, one with few precedents—”
“Timewise, I’m afraid we’re going to have to leave Lot and the angels inside the house—”
“Surrounded by Sodomites. Shall we read that passage aloud, Kevin?”
“I think we shall not.”
“A shame. And you read so beautifully. Oh well, no need, I can summarize. Our friend Lot, being a resourceful fellow, and having two virgin daughters—who in the end turn out to be equally resourceful—suddenly Lot hits on a solution. He decides that instead of sending out the angels, he’ll send out his two virgin daughters to be gang-raped by the mob. Here, you can start to understand why Lot and Abraham are such close friends.”
Thunder rattled the house. Kevin, his face pursed, inspected the ceiling a moment before conceding, “Well, certainly a great deal to think about there. Maybe too much for one night, eh? Especially on an empty stomach. Perhaps we could make more sense of Sodom over Christmas cookies!”
Beast that they were, the nondenoms cheered, applauded, and rubbed their bellies while Kevin returned from the kitchen dragging a card table loaded with quarts of soda, with stacks of Dixie cups, and with paper plates filled with tree- and snowman- and elf-shaped cookies.
•••
“The snowmen are the best,” Cecilia informed Noel. “I made them.”
They were standing near the fireplace, the rest of the nondenoms having scattered between the den and kitchen. Noel topped an extra snowman onto his plate, nibbled it, and told her it was real good. She nodded, as if that were an understatement, then she leaned closer to whisper that she hoped the group hadn’t made a bad impression on him tonight. Usually their meetings weren’t like this at all. She brushed a strand of brown hair from her mouth, studied it, then insisted, “Usually she won’t say a word. She just sits there drinking too much.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?” She glared toward the carport. “They’re out there having another argument right now.” Cecilia lifted a snowman off Noel’s plate, then she asked if he wanted to see something really scary. “We’ll have to hurry, though.” She took his wrist and led him down a hallway through a cluttered bedroom into yet another hallway, this one dead-ending into a closed door with a green handbag hanging from its knob. They stopped there long enough for Cecilia to confess that Stacy had found it first, but it had scared her so badly she hadn’t said a word to anyone for almost a month. “Besides, I didn’t believe her until I saw it for myself. We’re the only ones who know—me, her, and now you.”
Cecilia opened the door just wide enough to insert her thin arm inside and fan it against the wall until a light flicked on. A sickly sweet odor, akin to sawdust and marijuana, escaped from the room. “Hold your breath,” she warned as they stepped inside. They stood in a small room painted off-white. Cecilia quickly directed his attention to the window opposite them, where a makeshift altar of some complexity had been assembled atop a round table covered by a red silk tapestry. Twelve small crystal bowls filled with water circled the table edge like the numbers of a clock. Behind the bowls, and appearing magnified through them, were a scattering of incense cones and an inner cycle of statuettes—elephant-headed men, flared cobras, insect-armed demons—and at the center of this conglomeration presided a three-foot-tall statue of a naked black woman dancing upon a corpse. Her long red tongue was stretched down past her collarbone. She wore a necklace of human skulls and a skirt of dismembered hands. Snakes crawled between her heavy breasts and between her six arms, one of which was holding forth, by the hair, a man’s decapitated head. Covering the window behind this statue was another tapestry, this one black and red and containing a garish mandala of vampires copulating in every imaginable position.
Before Noel could even begin to digest all of this, Cecilia plucked him from the room and led him back into the den, where they fit themselves into a corner and soon Cecilia began to narrate, with a hushed voice and a very inconsistent sympathy, the saga of Kev and Lil and how two years ago their baby girl had died mysteriously one night in her crib.
�
�Nobody knows how exactly, except that she suffocated to death. That used to be the nursery, where we just were. Lil, I heard she used to be real sweet. Before. Ever since, she’s been crazier and crazier. That’s why they’re firing her—did you know that?—her saying all that weird stuff, like she did tonight. Poor Kev, he takes care of her no matter what she does. Everybody tells him he should divorce her. Nobody would blame him if he did—I think he should—don’t you? For his own good. But he won’t. He’s a saint. Who else but a saint could sleep next to her every night and be as sweet as he is?”
“Who’s that staring at us over there?” Noel asked.
Another girl, large-jowled and a bit desperate-eyed, was glowering at them across the den.
“Oh, that’s Stacy. She’s just mad at me for showing you the room.”
“That statue back there . . . what do you figure that was?”
Jutting her eyebrows, Cecilia replied, “You heard about that forest fire, didn’t you? Everybody’s saying the police found all sorts of satanic stuff in the woods, things like bloody robes and those real long curvy knives.” She leaned in closer to Noel until their foreheads were almost touching. Then, using a voice hardly even a whisper, she asked, “Noel, what does sodomize mean?”
After cookies they sang hymns. Everybody sang except Noel, who moved his lips, and Lily, who guarded the kitchen doorway sipping coffee. The first few hymns were standards, but then they sang a few hymns Noel had never heard before. In one of these, while the boys sang we’re so happy we found Jesus, the girls latched their thumbs under their chins, framing their faces with their hands, and piped happy!-happy!-happy! Halfway through this hymn, Cecilia’s head dropped straight back. Her folding chair tottered and then out of her small mouth gurgled an obscene-sounding stream of O’s and B’s. Her shoulders began to bob and weave, her head to wobble. Her eyes spun white. The rest of the nondenoms began singing faster, as if purposely fueling the spell. The hymn took Stacy next. Sitting two down from Cecilia, she suffered a similar spasm that rendered her on her back on the carpet. Then the redheaded girl crashed to her knees and tilted the O of her mouth upward in a wolfish yowl. The hymn circled once more then veered in on the football player, who suddenly drooped forward, boneless, and his acoustic groans joined the ranks of girls baying and gurgling as the hymn continued its rounds, taking this student, sparing another.
•••
Later, Lily carpooled them home through the storm in a station wagon with fake wood paneling. Noel was crammed in the first back seat next to Cecilia, who was chatting away. When she asked if Noel was coming back next week, he reminded her that next week was Christmas break. Maybe next semester, he hinted. This lie made her happy out of all proportion. In fact, everything he said seemed to increase her opinion of him. All in all, just as with Lily at the amphitheater, Cecilia seemed a trifle too attentive, too charmed, and Noel found himself wondering if it was all part of some larger scheme to save his soul. Still, he did take the opportunity to ask her out to a movie next semester. She said that would be fun. Using a black flair pen, she wrote her phone number on his left palm, the one without the map on it.
As the rain got harder, Lily kept leaning in closer to the windshield. Nobody had spoken to her at all. First she dropped off the girls, who ran shrieking into the rain; next she stopped at Myerson Hall, where the other three guys lived. At this point she invited Noel into the front seat. They were halfway to Huff when the storm got so bad she had to pull over. They parked near the stadium, Lily pointing to the roof and shrugging. She turned off the key, bit her bottom lip. “Well,” she said, turning her face to Noel. “Tell me all about tonight. What did you think of our little halftime show?”
Noel whistled and said, “I’ve heard about that stuff, but I’d never seen it before tonight. I got cousins who do that.”
Lily performed a quick spastic mime and banged her elbow on the steering wheel. “Ow!” she complained. While nursing her elbow, she resolved they might as well get comfortable. Saying this, she reached under the seat and inclined it backward.
“Does that happen every week?” he wanted to know.
“Like clockwork. The little sluts. They’re faking, of course. But God knows it’ll be good practice for them.”
“Faking?”
“Of course faking. And it was for your benefit, at least partially. Tonight’s the only night Cecilia’s ever been the first to go belly-up. Usually it starts with fat Stacy. You should have seen Stacy’s expression when Cecilia stole her thunder.”
Noel whistled again and said that he’d never seen anything like it.
“Really? Not anything? Are you sure? Or are you just being a gentleman?”
A sound like an airplane passing overhead made it impossible to speak. When the sound had faded and the station wagon had quit trembling, Noel said, “That was a funnel cloud.”
“Yes,” Lily said. “Really, though—you’ve never heard anything like that before? Nothing?”
Noel shook his head.
“I guess I’ll have to give you a hint, then. Do you like hints, Noel? Because this is quite a good one.”
“What kinda hint?”
“The very blatant kind, I’m afraid,” she told him. And she hated it—absolutely hated it—that she had to give this hint so quickly, but, on the other hand, she didn’t know how much longer she could sustain the storm.
She took Noel’s left hand and opened the fist.
“What’s this? Oh my gosh, it’s Cecilia’s phone number, isn’t it? Noel, you cad. How could you?”
She spit into his palm and began smearing the number with her thumb. Then, staring at him with those sad and aloof eyes, she lowered his hand onto his lap, pushing it against Noel’s initial resistance, and began to scrub the number off against the bulge in his jeans. At first Noel felt acutely embarrassed, as if he should not be getting aroused by his own hand, but soon he began to feel less embarrassed. Finally Lily picked up his hand again, inspected it, then she lowered the hand into her own lap and began to massage the tops of his fingers and to push their coupled hands down between her thighs. Soon Noel could feel a texture beneath the skirt, then a wetness, then an emptiness his fingers began to groove in and out of. As he did this, Lily slid lower into the seat and began to pull up her long black skirt until Noel’s hand had found its way beneath her panties. Soon she began to make a short thrusting noise, the same noise she’d made bumping her elbow. The thrusting noise became a gasp, then a series of gasps, and two of her fingers slipped in between Noel’s fingers and then her mouth remained opened and she began to pant ha ha ha ha, like a sneeze that would never arrive, and she turned her head toward Noel and stared with those awful green eyes into his brown eyes and inside her eyes Noel saw nothing but sadness green and bottomless and by the time her breath had begun to slow, Noel had fallen in love again.
She lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed the palm before returning it to his lap. She left her hand there a minute as if to steady herself and then she leaned over and undid his belt and asked if he was ready for the next hint. . . . Soon her mouth had found him and almost instantly Noel began to cum. He kept cumming and cumming it seemed like for years or maybe lifetimes, and finally it blinded him or rather he must have shut his eyes, and he left them closed a long time—for hours, it seemed—until he heard her say, “Ecclesiastes.”
He opened his eyes one at a time, very slowly. The rain had lightened, as if on command, and now the stadium began to emerge around them.
“That’s what I thought of while you were cumming. And cumming, and cumming. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. Isn’t it odd that I thought of that? And what were you thinking, Noel, while you were cumming, and cumming, and cumming?”
“Nothing,” he replied after a moment and then began to pull up his jeans.
Watching him do this, Lily sighed and
said, almost in singsong, “Gloss-oh-lalia.”
Noel hesitated. The word sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it. He suspected it might be French for eating pussy, and he wondered if she wanted him to do that now.
“Do you know what that means, Noel?”
“Sure,” he said.
“It’s one of the many things women do better than men.”
“It is?”
“Very much so. By the way, were you by any chance pretending that I was Cecilia just then?”
He said no. She asked if he was sure, and he said yeah.
“Well, I was,” she admitted.
“Was what?”
“Pretending. That I was Cecilia. That I was the little hot-to-trot virgin about to suck my first hard cock. And that I’d go straight to hell for sucking it, but I didn’t care, I was going to suck it anyway. It made it all quite spectacular. You can’t beat hellfire for an aphrodisiac.”
“You were pretending you were Cecilia?”
“What? Did you think I was going to pretend you were Cecilia? Cecilia with a big wet hard-on? Oops. Sorry. I’ve shocked you. Have I shocked you? Oh, Noel, how I long to shock you.”
He refastened his belt and considered a boycott of the conversation.
“Well, now at least you’ve seen the real McCoy. Not that I really blame them for faking. Faking is how we girls learn. Especially when it comes to orgasms.”
He crossed his arms, cupping an elbow in each hand, then gazed up through the windshield’s blue tint and was about to make some comment about the rain slowing when she asked, “Does it bother you when I say orgasm?”
“It’s slowing down some,” he noticed.
“Orgasm. Orgasm, orgasm, orgasm.”
“You know what they reminded me of tonight, falling off them chairs and all?”