by Sharon
Her mother wasn't here yet.
The Cougar Club was crowded, smoky, and festive, nearing the end of the second show. Jenny sat in the shadow of a pillar, alone with her agony. Bloodless and inanimate, deaf to the ecstatic screams around her that were urging her lover to uncover his stunning body, she watched Philip strip.
He was dancing to a Sister Sledge song, the athletic grace of his body released in a sensuous flood that arrived dead-center inside each beat. His shining, light-rinsed hair moved and swirled with him. She knew intimately the precise relationship that body had with rhythm. She had learned its accuracy in love. She could feel it still, against her own.
He didn't see her, and that was probably merciful for both of them. Several times he almost seemed to look right at her, but closer study warned her that it was only a well-conceived illusion. He made no direct eye contact while he danced, or while he kissed, or while neat fingers tucked folded dollars into his G-string.
It was, finally, the kisses that were the real exercise in masochism. Visually they made a beautiful, arousing picture, the women in a series coming into Philip's arms, their clothes bright as butterflies against his golden flesh. She saw what she had missed on her first night here—how stylized these kisses were, how shorn of emotion. He smiled like an actor, the muscles accurately aligned, the eyes polite, the soul absent. Knowing that helped nothing. This was her lover, her lover's mouth, and every glamorous ritualistic kiss struck at her until she felt ill, violated, boiling in ugly inner emotion.
I must have been insane to come. Why am I here?
She jumped when firm fingers gripped her arm, and like an angry echo of her thoughts, she heard someone say,
"What are you doing here?"
She glanced up into Darrell's dark liquid eyes. For once he was without his glasses. Knowing it was childish, not caring, she snapped, "It's a free country."
"The last thing he needs is to see you sitting here with that look on your face."
She wondered indifferently what look was on her face. Stubborn in her trauma, she said, "I've paid fifteen dollars to see the show and I'm going to watch it to the end."
Darrell whirled and left her, returning soon with a handful of bills, cramming them into her purse. "Okay. I've refunded your damned fifteen dollars. Go home, Jenny."
"Sorry. I want to see the man's body."
"The man'll drop his pants for you any time of the day or night and you know it."
"For me and everyone else in the whole world with fifteen bucks."
"Keep your voice down, will you? This is a public place and I can evict anyone creating a disturbance."
"There isn't any disturbance."
"No," he said grimly, "but there will be if he sees you here with your face full of tears."
She hadn't realized, and wiped them savagely away as he pulled her through the crowd, past the bold curious stares, out a door behind the bar into a bleak quiet hallway painted a strange pastel color.
"Is this your bed of nails?" he asked, his voice quite gentle. "Go home."
"I have to talk to Philip."
"Tomorrow."
"Tonight. Now. I mean, whenever he's finished."
"Look, he wouldn't want you to see him like this. Do yourself and him a favor: go home. If you do, I'll tell him to call you the minute he gets backstage, all right?"
She detected an extra inflection in his voice. "What do you mean, see him like this?"
"He's been drinking," Darrell said tightly. "It's been hard for him to work since last weekend, and you know damn well why."
She grew colder and colder, her blood receding to her extremities in the same way it had when she was wandering aimlessly, freezing, the process slow and violent.
Acknowledging defeat with an exasperated breath, Darrell opened a door for her and motioned her inside. She saw two chairs, a table, a shower, Philip's clothes—the ones she'd seen leave his body when they made love in the library—a half empty bottle of Jim Beam beside a glass. On one wall was a poster of the earth, the picture taken from a satellite, a majestic deep-blue planet, cloud-hung and delicate, frighteningly reduced by distance.
A moment or two passed. Then Darrell said,
"Just remember that whatever you say tonight, you're going to have to live with in the morning."
He left. Jenny heard his footsteps stop in the hall, and his voice, speaking to someone she couldn't see.
"Sorry, man," Darrell said.
"What for?" Philip's voice reached her, his words absent and distracted, and then he appeared in the doorway, wiping his face with a towel, clad only in zipped but unsnapped jeans, one thin gold chain glittering around his neck, another draped around his ankle. Seeing her made him halt there, the towel poised at his temple where his champagne-colored hair curled damply. His blue eyes seemed to burn like lasers. Beyond that, his high-boned face was stark, expressionless. It altered, beginning to fill with emotion, and he came toward her, tossing away the towel.
He hadn't stopped to question her presence. He simply rejoiced in it. After the many numb years he was in love, a love that felt like an open wound when his mouth met with any other lips than hers. There were many raw places all over the inside of him, and in this strained and vulnerable state, her body promised sanctuary. Hazy with need, unthinking, he just tried to take her in his arms.
"Jenny?" he asked, pulling her to him.
Another time his emotion would have sliced straight to her heart. Tonight he was shellacked in perspiration that made the sinews of his muscles glisten with erotic decadence. The pure fresh fragrance she associated with his body was gone, and the heavy scents of tobacco and a hundred different perfumes clung to his skin, touching her before he did. His lips were soft and swollen, love-bitten, graphically moist. The fallen angel... When his mouth sought hers, her hands resisted him, her head twisting sharply away, the gesture reflexive, a creation of instinct.
Her revulsion entered his brain as though it had been injected there. There was a moment of clement inner quiet, his emotions flattening to a perfect blank, the even pitch of a radio station testing an emergency frequency. His arms slid from her shoulders.
A warm liquid sensation trickled onto his hip bone. Looking down, he found a thin red slice in his skin that had begun to bleed. Vaguely grateful for the opportunity for movement, he wet a washcloth in the shower and pressed it over the scratch.
"Another paper cut. Brand new dollar bills are fierce," he said, filling the frozen pause with empty words. Like a breath of electricity from a distant thunderhead, he felt the whispering advent of the coming pain from her rejection before it actually struck. And then it arrived, rising along his nerves like hoarfrost. Welts seemed to lift on his psyche, and he had to concentrate all his effort inward, trying to stem the glutted spill of self-hatred. He began to back away from her, registering her in his heart—the short tidy hair, her clean fingernails, the long immaculate eyelashes, each separate and satiny... fragile mouth, fragile eyes. Neat, bright, fastidious you, he thought; soiled me.
He sat down and listened in a remote way to the clatter of the Jim Beam bottle against the glass as he splashed it full of whiskey and swallowed it rapidly. Jenny was watching him with something akin to horror. Thankfully, the liquor seemed to compose him.
"I knew this was going to happen," he said. "But I thought it would take at least a couple of months. That's one of the things about you that I've always marveled at—I could never anticipate your timetable." He held up the empty glass. "Want to get drunk with me?"
Bruises seemed to darken behind her eyes from the pain of holding back her tears. "Philip, my mother's coming to the show tonight."
Three seconds of the perfect blank again. Then he began to laugh. It was a horrible angry sound and he stopped it as quickly as he was able to. "I'll have to pull out all the stops then. Don't worry. It's going to be wonderful. I'll make it my personal responsibility to make sure every female in the house has a fifteen-dollar climax."
&
nbsp; "Look—" Her voice broke. "I tried to tell you this wasn't going to work. I'm too insecure. I'll drive us both insane."
"So. In the end it comes back to shame."
"Do you think this is something I feel by choice? Tell me what to do with it then."
He shot out of the chair, his hand gripping her upper arm, and turned her to face his wall poster.
"Look at it, Jenny. Do you recognize it? It's the fragile, finite Spaceship Earth. Our home. The only home well ever have, this lovely tiny ball hurtling through space. We can't leave it. But every year we exhaust more of our natural resources. We dump more poison into the air and water. We bury more land under concrete. Creatures that have existed on earth for millennia are dying. The delicate, elaborate ecosystem is being depleted. The earth can't feel its own future; and I can't save it. I can't save it, Jenny. Please. Please. Let me save just one little piece!"
Silence vibrated between them.
"What do I say?" Jenny's heart thumped jarringly with stress. "You're trying to save vanishing wildlife habitats. That's important. I'm trying to close off your most viable source of income so I'm small and petty and vain. Where does that leave the two of us?"
"Jenny—" The anguish inside was becoming evident in his voice. "Jenny. Love. What am I but a collection of bones and tissue, and if people want to pay money to look at that, what does it matter?"
Tears brimmed. She slashed at them with her hand. "Would you mind if I slept with another man?"
He swore softly.
She pursued it with distressed insistence. "How would it make you feel if I slept with another man?"
A pause. "Not good."
"Why? I'm just a collection of bones and tissue, and if someone else wants to make love to that, what does it matter?"
He set the glass on the table more heavily than he had intended. Jenny jumped.
"Well," he said. "That impaled me, didn't it? Hoist by my own petard. What the hell is a petard anyway?" He took a hard breath. "I'm not sure you can compare making love with nude dancing."
Looking at him became too painful. She turned, staring at the wall. "How convenient it must be, not being sure. It lets you skip off toward the blue horizon, leaving me alone with the guilt."
His hands sought her shoulders. "Jennifer, listen to me. I opened my life to you." Each word arrived with individual urgency. "It's been years since I've done that for a woman."
She began to shake. "Philip, I love you. But it hurts too much."
He tried to turn her, but she stood rigidly, not allowing it. In the end, he gave up.
"Don't love me then," he said. "You want me, you desire me, then use me. If you've started to love me and it hurts too much, then stop loving me and use me instead. Let me worry about the love. Whatever you do, stay in my life!"
"Philip..." Overwhelmed by what was happening between them, terrified by it, she tried to think, but her brain was an icy sphere, working sluggishly. A sharp involuntary movement clenched in her muscles, and his hands left her shoulders as though he interpreted it as a rejection.
"Get rid of your guilt and use me." His voice came to her from farther away. "Use me. I understand it. It's been happening all my life. Do you know how old I was when I had my first experience with a woman? Thirteen. Not a sophisticated thirteen either. I was a very sheltered kid. For God's sake, at thirteen I was still carrying frogs around in my pockets. One of my mother's friends seduced me in the hayloft of her stables and I learned everything I ever needed to know about having someone make love to you as if you were an object. Lately, of course, they want me to do a private striptease first...."
Nausea slammed him in the stomach. That was about the last thing he had intended to say to her. The last thing... He wondered if he was drunk. His body tolerated alcohol poorly, and he drank rarely. She should not be here, not now. This time when he turned her around, she permitted it and he discovered that she was weeping soundlessly. He fought down the urge to take her in his arms, because in his current state of mind, he wasn't sure what he might do if she pushed him away again. Instead he took her coat from her arm, slid it on her, and buttoned it, arranging the muffler he had given her carefully around her neck.
"Keep warm," he said. There was another inner struggle as the tenderness and anxious love within him begged to hold and stroke and cherish her. Then he whispered, "I genuflect to your purity, Jenny. It's just too late for me to catch up. Go on home. I won't strip in front of your mother."
She began to walk toward the door, because she didn't know what else to do. She was halfway down the hall before she heard him say, "So long. It's been swell."
Jenny walked in the front door of her apartment and found her mother sitting on the couch, wearing the green velour bathrobe that Jenny had given her for Christmas two years ago.
"Jenny!"
There she was, in the fifteen extra motherly pounds she'd never bothered to lose; the funny whimsical face, breezy brown hair and Betty Boop eyes of the woman who had kept and raised a baby girl born out of wedlock in a time and place where it had been an act of outstanding courage to do so; the woman who had worked nights to go to college and graduate school; and gone on to become an economics professor and now a speech-writer for the governor. Jenny fell into her mother's arms and felt the warmth of green velour enclose her.
"I know I'm trespassing," said her mother, rocking her back and forth, "but I told the manager I was your mother and he let me in. I had the girls drop me off here because I couldn't wait another day to see you. When you get to be my age—"
"Your age! Forty-one!"
"When you get to be my age," her mother repeated firmly, "you'd rather see your one and only child than the handsomest man in the world. Besides, if I went to see these young Cougars, Bill might get jealous." Bill was her boyfriend. "He said, why go out for steak when you can have hamburger at home? And I said, especially when all they do is bring it out, let you have a whiff of it and take it back to the kitchen! So here I am. Now. Are you going to tell me what's wrong or am I going to have to beat it out of you?"
So Jenny began to talk, and went on talking through two cups of rosehips tea and one-third of a small Kleenex box. When she was finished there was a long, long silence, before her mother spoke.
"The outer beauty we can discount, since we both know that's fun but hollow stuff. Philip Brooks sounds like he's beautiful where it really counts."
Jennifer threw a handful of tissue roses into the waste basket, rubbed her pink nose, and said thickly, "And I've been thinking too, where am I ever going to find another man with an owl?"
"Or a chicken? I take it you're going out again tonight?"
Jennifer stood up and smiled.
The forest was a quiltwork pattern of silver and slate, fragrant with the damp essence of thawing ice. Water dripped in hidden thickets. Black crystal grass rose in bent fingers from the syrupy slush under Jenny's boots.
She found Philip alone in the raccoon clearing. He was sitting on the heavy limb of a gnarled oak about eight feet off the ground. One knee was pulled up, his arm resting there, his head tipped elegantly back as he gazed upward at a sky full of gauzy clouds and bright stars.
She stood beneath the limb, shoved her hands into her pockets, and said, "It's a small bomb or firecracker."
Not a muscle twitched in his lean lengthy frame, but she felt his entire awareness homing toward her like a rocket.
"What?"
Patiently, she said, "A petard. It's a small bomb. They were used in the Middle Ages to blow holes in castles. The guy who took care of the petard was the petardeer. So I assume that someone who was 'hoist by his own petard' was blown up with his own gunpowder, or something." He had continued to sit absolutely still, almost as though he were afraid that any sudden motion of his would startle her into flight. "I went home and looked it up. I didn't want you to go through life not knowing."
"Well." There was an uncertain pause. His caution tore at her heart. "It's nice to know." He leaned d
own to look at her face. Then, in a confidential tone, he said, "This is a two-passenger limb."
"You think I could get up there?" she asked doubtfully.
"Leave it to my expert fingers."
She did. No sooner was she beside him, tottering uncertainly, the cold moist bark pressing into her, than she was seized in his arms and kissed with the ruthlessness and abandon she associated with historical novels that had pirates in them. Blood rushed to every place in her body that he had taught to feel pleasure. At last he withdrew enough from her so that he could look into her eyes. He was gazing at her as if he couldn't believe she was really in his arms. His gloves came on either side of her face, stroking her cheeks, molding to the curves. His eyes were radiant with love, and she found it dizzying to gaze into them.
"I figure it this way," she said. "You can't save the whole world, and I can't save the whole world, but maybe together we can save twice as much of it."
"Is that what you want to do, Jenny? Save the world with me?"
"It's one of the things I want to do with you."
His thumb slowly followed the outer ridge of her lips. "What are the others?"
She put her hands on his throat and mock-choked him, nearly spilling them both off the limb. "That!"
Lovingly steadying her, he said, "What was that for?"
"The 'it's been swell'!"
He laughed and pulled her close again. "It has been swell." He nibbled at the soft skin below her earlobe, his breath sending a warm lift of pleasure down her back. "Can you forgive me for the crazy way I talked tonight? I don't want to change the woman I fell in love with because she doesn't want me to strip."
"I don't want to change the man who hand-feeds wild birds and grows parsley in a clay pot on his kitchen window ledge." She closed her eyes and pressed her lips to his thumb. "I love you."
"I love you too." His mouth replaced his thumb on her lips. Softly withdrawing, he said, "I quit my job."